Strawson on problems for physicalism

[Yazata]

What I will say is that I am yet to see a compelling argument in favour of the idea that it's not possible for matter to be phenomenally rich enough to manifest consciousness.

Why does 'phenomenally rich' mean? What is 'consciousness'?

The reason why I ask those questions is because the phenomenological arguments typically seem to revolve around a conceptual vocabulary whose meaning is just assumed to be intuitive. My own suspicion is that the reason why the philosophy of mind seems to be at an impasse is because philosophers aren't conceptualizing issues in the best way.

That's certainly not a criticism of you, it's an observation about the current situation in philosophy.

 

[Magical Realist]

With the above in mind, trying to reduce consciousness to the properties of the constituent elements of a brain is essentially no different from trying to reduce the behaviour of a star to the constituent elements of a ball of plasma. In other words, and as I pointed out earlier, it's already clear on other fronts that physical systems can exhibit emergent behaviour, so if we assume that matter does in fact have the correct essential ingredients, in what sense must consciousness be any different.

IMO saying consciousness can emerge from nonconscious matter is several orders of magnitude different from the mere physical emergence of say how atoms can give rise to a complex system such as a star. With a star we at least have some atomic logic running from the bottom to the top. There's a fusion process going on in which hydrogen turns into helium and other elements as well. There's also other higher level forces and phenomena that emerge such as gravity, magnetism, and pressures from heat expansion, etc. There's also probably some emergent properties that inhere to superheated plasma too that come into play.

But thru all of this we never truly arrive at something as extraordinary as a subjective state being. There is, iow, no state of what it's like to be a star (that we know of.). With the brain see we also have a purely physical hierarchy of units structuring itself in accord to higher level emergent properties. Electromagnetic fields, neural nets, biomagnetism, hormones, memory, and higher level symbolic systems such as logic and language and conceptual categories. But all these emergent phenomena are STILL purely physical objective phenomena.

The really unique thing about consciousness is how there can arise a state of what it's like to be a brain. How iow can a subjective experience of qualia and feelings and ideas and sensations and memories emerge from purely objective nonexeriencing components? A brain in itself, its purely objective and physical operation, may indeed have emergent properties that cannot be reduced to its units much as a star's behavior cannot totally be reduced to its own atoms. But with the generation of a conscious subjective state of being from the brain--an ONTIC emergence and not just a phenomenal emergence-- we encounter a mystery that seems fundamentally different. It would be like saying that in addition to a star emerging from the behavior of self-heating molecules a state of "star consciousness" also emerges that is not only phenomenally distinctive but ontologically distinctive from being just an aggregate of matter.

I think this is alot to task the phenomenon of emergence with. I'm not saying it isn't possible. Just saying that in the case of conscious matter we are positing a new kind of emergence that doesn't seem to exist anywhere else. Are we justified in doing this given there doesn't yet seem to be any empirical grounds for doing so?

 

[Magical Realist]

Chalmers on a naturalistic dualism:


"Although a remarkable number of phenomena have turned out to be explicable wholly in terms of entities simpler than themselves, this is not universal. In physics, it occasionally happens that an entity has to be taken as fundamental. Fundamental entities are not explained in terms of anything simpler. Instead, one takes them as basic, and gives a theory of how they relate to everything else in the world. For example, in the nineteenth century it turned out that electromagnetic processes could not be explained in terms of the wholly mechanical processes that previous physical theories appealed to, so Maxwell and others introduced electromagnetic charge and electromagnetic forces as new fundamental components of a physical theory. To explain electromagnetism, the ontology of physics had to be expanded. New basic properties and basic laws were needed to give a satisfactory account of the phenomena.

Other features that physical theory takes as fundamental include mass and space-time. No attempt is made to explain these features in terms of anything simpler. But this does not rule out the possibility of a theory of mass or of space-time. There is an intricate theory of how these features interrelate, and of the basic laws they enter into. These basic principles are used to explain many familiar phenomena concerning mass, space, and time at a higher level.

I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental. We know that a theory of consciousness requires the addition of something fundamental to our ontology, as everything in physical theory is compatible with the absence of consciousness. We might add some entirely new nonphysical feature, from which experience can be derived, but it is hard to see what such a feature would be like. More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience.

Where there is a fundamental property, there are fundamental laws. A nonreductive theory of experience will add new principles to the furniture of the basic laws of nature. These basic principles will ultimately carry the explanatory burden in a theory of consciousness. Just as we explain familiar high-level phenomena involving mass in terms of more basic principles involving mass and other entities, we might explain familiar phenomena involving experience in terms of more basic principles involving experience and other entities.

In particular, a nonreductive theory of experience will specify basic principles telling us how experience depends on physical features of the world. These psychophysical principles will not interfere with physical laws, as it seems that physical laws already form a closed system. Rather, they will be a supplement to a physical theory. A physical theory gives a theory of physical processes, and a psychophysical theory tells us how those processes give rise to experience. We know that experience depends on physical processes, but we also know that this dependence cannot be derived from physical laws alone. The new basic principles postulated by a nonreductive theory give us the extra ingredient that we need to build an explanatory bridge.

Of course, by taking experience as fundamental, there is a sense in which this approach does not tell us why there is experience in the first place. But this is the same for any fundamental theory. Nothing in physics tells us why there is matter in the first place, but we do not count this against theories of matter. Certain features of the world need to be taken as fundamental by any scientific theory. A theory of matter can still explain all sorts of facts about matter, by showing how they are consequences of the basic laws. The same goes for a theory of experience.

This position qualifies as a variety of dualism, as it postulates basic properties over and above the properties invoked by physics. But it is an innocent version of dualism, entirely compatible with the scientific view of the world. Nothing in this approach contradicts anything in physical theory; we simply need to add further bridging principles to explain how experience arises from physical processes. There is nothing particularly spiritual or mystical about this theory - its overall shape is like that of a physical theory, with a few fundamental entities connected by fundamental laws. It expands the ontology slightly, to be sure, but Maxwell did the same thing. Indeed, the overall structure of this position is entirely naturalistic, allowing that ultimately the universe comes down to a network of basic entities obeying simple laws, and allowing that there may ultimately be a theory of consciousness cast in terms of such laws. If the position is to have a name, a good choice might be naturalistic dualism."--http://consc.net/papers/facing.html

 

[C C]

Chalmers on a naturalistic dualism:
". . . In particular, a nonreductive theory of experience will specify basic principles telling us how experience depends on physical features of the world. These psychophysical principles will not interfere with physical laws, as it seems that physical laws already form a closed system. Rather, they will be a supplement to a physical theory. A physical theory gives a theory of physical processes, and a psychophysical theory tells us how those processes give rise to experience. We know that experience depends on physical processes, but we also know that this dependence cannot be derived from physical laws alone. The new basic principles postulated by a nonreductive theory give us the extra ingredient that we need to build an explanatory bridge."

Non-interference would seem to make these bridging "principles" an epiphenomenal nomological system that would accordingly become regarded as superfluous over time. Just as conventional epiphenomenalism (concerning experience itself, mental states) is now deemed such. That is, what has either no return effect or has "no consequences upon physical science resulting from its absence" can be evaluated as unnecessary / excess baggage brutely appended to this "closed system" of natural governance. In the sense of not following from or falling out of its conditions -- submitted simply to accommodate the traditional human conviction that there are manifested, qualitative events / content associated with the various biological processes classed as perceptual or sensory.

What surely irritates the majority of contemporary philosophers is that the small clique which entertains eliminative materialism or phenomenal nihilism (whatever one wants to call it) may indeed be the proper companion of physicalism, or compatible "solution" for the hard problem. The popular judgement is that this view "is insane" [reminiscent of similar grounds for dismissing solipsism]. But that such a response has to be resorted to perhaps indicates that there are obstinate or perverse areas in physicalism, and its most useful features should be preserved in an entirely new ontological doctrine; while ditching any former tenets / characteristics that lead to outputting or favoring conclusions like phenomenal nihilism. Rather than trying to overhaul this late 20th century's incarnation or reinvention of materialism, whose very nature either resists the attempt to overhaul it or would eventually spring back to its roots to rebel against ad hoc or makeshift modifications imposed upon it (like expressed in the first paragraph above).

Teed Rockwell: Feyerabend [...] pointed out that if the connection between material facts and mental facts is an identity, it has to be expressed as a biconditional. This biconditional "not only implies , as it is intended to imply, that mental events have physical features; it also seems to imply (if read from the right to the left) that some physical events, viz. central {brain} processes, have non-physical features" [i.e., the physical then deteriorates into a corrupted hybrid] .... Thanks to historical work done by Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Laudan it became clear that progress in science does not usually result in bridge laws. Most scientific progress comes from what Kuhn called 'Normal Science', which rarely, if ever, introduces new terms into scientific discourse, and thus does not need bridge laws. Scientific discourse usually adopts new concepts to refer to newly posited or discovered entities during what Kuhn called scientific revolutions. The thing that makes the introduction of these new concepts revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, is that there aren't anything like bridge laws to relate new theories to old ones. Instead the old theory is often eliminated, and replaced with a better theory that rejects or ignores the ontological assumptions of the old theory. For example, there are no identity relationships between the alchemical essences and the chemical elements, because we now claim that there are no alchemical essences.

Rorty and Feyerabend thus concluded that if scientific progress was the model for the relationship between brain states and mental states, then there is no need to establish identities between the two. Once we have a sufficiently sophisticated neuroscience, we may be able to simply say that there are no mental states. This effectively disposes of the problems raised by Shaffer and Feyerabend mentioned above. The differences between identity and causal correlation were no longer of significance, because we were now talking about only one entity --the brain state-- the mental state having been consigned to the ontological trash heap. --Eliminativism; "Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind" entry [original version of website, 2004]

 

[Rav]

The really unique thing about consciousness is how there can arise a state of what it's like to be a brain. How iow can a subjective experience of qualia and feelings and ideas and sensations and memories emerge from purely objective nonexeriencing components? A brain in itself, its purely objective and physical operation, may indeed have emergent properties that cannot be reduced to its units much as a star's behavior cannot totally be reduced to its own atoms. But with the generation of a conscious subjective state of being from the brain--an ONTIC emergence and not just a phenomenal emergence-- we encounter a mystery that seems fundamentally different. It would be like saying that in addition to a star emerging from the behavior of self-heating molecules a state of "star consciousness" also emerges that is not only phenomenally distinctive but ontologically distinctive from being just an aggregate of matter.

Again, I agree, and my recognition of that fact is exactly what prompts me, and others like me, to conclude something that not all physicalists necessarily agree with: that the seeds of consciousness are a part of what matter is. This is what I was referencing when I said "assuming matter has the correct essential ingredients". But what does it mean to say that matter contains the seeds of consciousness? Well, if you think of consciousness as something that has substance to it then matter, in addition to being that which stars are made of, is also that which consciousness is made of. So what I am driving at is a sort of neutral monism I guess, but without the implication that matter is in some sense a fundamentally mental substance since mental characteristics have only been shown to emerge from particular sorts of highly complex architectures. It would be inappropriate for example to pick up a rock and say "this is a part of the universe that is having the experience of being a rock". However you could say that it is made from the same basic "stuff" that can, as Nick Lane would put it, be fashioned into the majesty of mind.

In other words, the view is that what you think is missing from matter is actually there, just without the anthropomorphism.

 

[Rav]

Why does 'phenomenally rich' mean? What is 'consciousness'?

The reason why I ask those questions is because the phenomenological arguments typically seem to revolve around a conceptual vocabulary whose meaning is just assumed to be intuitive. My own suspicion is that the reason why the philosophy of mind seems to be at an impasse is because philosophers aren't conceptualizing issues in the best way.

That's certainly not a criticism of you, it's an observation about the current situation in philosophy.

Sure, it's a very good point.

The proper definition of consciousness, if there even is one, is beyond me. It's just too much of a mind-numbingly self-referential linguistic nightmare. I had originally typed "for our purposes here I guess we could just think of it as..." but it was followed by a bunch of complete nonsense so I deleted it.

As for "phenomenally rich" sometimes I'm just taking terms out for a spin and I guess they don't always work out. But what I was getting at is "phenomenal" as in pertaining to phenomena and "richness" as in densely packed with, or abounding in, features or qualities.

 

[Fork]

Chalmers on a naturalistic dualism:

We know that experience depends on physical processes, but we also know that this dependence cannot be derived from physical laws alone.

Of course it can. Yes.