I will try to get across what I mean by calling states of consciousness “intrinsic”, “objectively existing”, and so forth; by describing what it would mean for them to not have these attributes.
It would mean that you only exist by convention or by definition. It would mean that there is no definite fact about whether your life is part of reality. It wouldn’t just be that some models of reality acknowledge your existence and others don’t; it would mean that you are nothing more than a fuzzy heuristic concept in someone else’s model, and that if they switched models, you would no longer exist even in that limited sense.
I would like to think that you personally have a robust enough sense of your own reality to decisively reject such propositions. But by now, nothing would surprise me, coming from a materialist. It’s been amply demonstrated that people can be willing to profess disbelief in anything and everything, if they think that’s the price of believing in science. So I won’t presume that you believe that you exist, I’ll just hope that you do, because if you don’t, it will be hard to have a sensible conversation about these topics.
But… if you do agree that you definitely exist, independently of any “model” that actual or hypothetical observers have, then it’s a short step to saying that you must also have some of your properties intrinsically, rather than through model-dependent attribution. The alternative would be to say that you exist, you’re a “thing”, but not any particular thing; which is the sort of untenable objective vagueness that I was talking about.
The concept of an intrinsic property is arising somewhat differently here, than it does in your discussion of squares and rectangles. The idealized geometrical figures have their intrinsic properties by definition, or by logical implication from the definition. But I can say that you have intrinsic properties, not by definition (or not just by definition), but because you exist, and to be is to be something. (Also known as the “law of identity”.) It would make no sense to say that you are real, but otherwise devoid of ontological definiteness.
For exactly the same reason, it would make no sense to have a fundamentally vague “physical theory of you”. Here I want to define “you” as narrowly as possible—this you, in this world, even just in this moment if necessary. I don’t want the identity issues of a broadly defined “you” to interfere. I hope we have agreed that you-here-now exist, that you exist objectively, that you must have some identifying or individuating properties which are also held objectively and intrinsically; the properties which make you what you are.
If we are going to be ontological materialists about you-here-now, and we are also going to acknowledge you-here-now as completely and independently real, then there also can’t be any vagueness or arbitrariness about which physical object is you-here-now. For every particle—if we have particles in our physical ontology—either it is definitely a part of you-here-now, or it definitely isn’t.
At this point I’m already departing radically from the standard materialist account of personhood, which would say that we can be vague about whether a few atoms are a part of you or not. The reason we can’t do that, is precisely the objectivity of your existence. If you are an objectively existing entity, I can’t at the same time say that you are an entity whose boundaries aren’t objectively defined. For some broader notion, like “your body”, sure, we can be vague about where its boundaries are. But there has to be a core notion of what you are that is correct, exact, fully objective; and the partially objective definitions of “you” come from watering down this core notion by adding inessential extra properties.
Now let’s contrast this situation with the piece of lumber that is close to being a square but isn’t a perfect square. My arguments against fundamental vagueness are not about insisting that the piece of lumber is a perfect square. I am merely insisting that it is what it is, and whatever it is, it is that, exactly and definitely.
The main difference between “you-here-now” and the piece of lumber, is that we don’t have the same reason to think that the lumber has a hard ontological core. It’s an aggregate of atoms, electrons will be streaming off it, and there will be some arbitrariness about when such an electron stops being “part of the lumber”. To find indisputably objective physical facts in this situation, you probably need to talk in terms of immediate relations between elementary particles.
The evidence for a hard core in you-here-now is primarily phenomenological and secondarily logical. The phenomenological evidence is what we call the unity of experience: what’s happening to you in any moment is a gestalt; it’s one thing happening to one person. Your experience of the world may have fuzzy edges to it, but it’s still a whole and hence objectively a unity. The logical “evidence” is just the incoherence of supposing there can be a phenomenological unity without there being an ontological unity at any level. This experiential whole may have parts, but you can’t use the existence of the parts to then turn around and deny the existence of the whole.
The evidence for an ontological hard core to you-here-now does not come from physics. Physically the brain looks like it should be just like the piece of lumber, an aggregate of very many very small things. This presumption is obviously why materialists often end up regarding their own existence as something less than objective, or why the search for a microphysically exact theory of the self sounds like a mistake. Instead we are to be content with the approximations of functionalism, because that’s the most you could hope to do with such an entity.
I hope it’s now very clear where I’m coming from. The phenomenological and ontological arguments for a “hard core” to the self are enough to override any counterargument from physics. They tell us that a mesoscopic theory of what’s going on, like functionalism, is at best incomplete; it cannot be the final word. The task is to understand the conscious brain as a biophysical system, in terms of a physical ontology that can contain “real selves”. And fortunately, it’s no longer the 19th century, we have quantum mechanics and the ingredients for something more sophisticated than classic atomism.
I’m going back and forth on whether to tap out here. On the one hand I feel like I’m making progress in understanding your perspective. On the other hand the progress is clarifying that it would take a large amount of time and energy to derive a vocabulary to converse in a mutually transparent way about material truth claims in this area. It had not occurred to me that pulling on the word “intrinsic” would flip the conversation into a solipsistic zone by way of Cartesian skepticism. Ooof.
Perhaps we could schedule a few hours of IM or IRC to try a bit of very low latency mutual vocabulary development, and then maybe post the logs back here for posterity (raw or edited) if that seems worthwhile to us. (See private message for logistics.) If you want to stick to public essays I recommend taking things up with Tyrrell; he’s a more careful thinker than I am and I generally agree with what he says. He noticed and extended a more generous and more interesting parsing of your claims than I did when I thought you were trying to make a pigeonhole argument in favor of magical entities, and he seems to be interested. Either public essays with Tyrrell, IM with me, or both, or neither… as you like :-)
(And/or Steve of course, but he generally requires a lot of unpacking, and I frequently only really understand why his concepts were better starting places than my own between 6 and 18 months after talking with him.)
It wouldn’t just be that some models of reality acknowledge your existence and others don’t; it would mean that you are nothing more than a fuzzy heuristic concept in someone else’s model, and that if they switched models, you would no longer exist even in that limited sense.
Or in a cascade of your own successive models, including of the cascade.
Or an incentive to keep using that model rather than to switch to another one. The models are made up, but the incentives are real. (To whatever extent the thing subject to the incentives is.)
Not that I’m agreeing, but some clever ways to formulate almost your objection could be built around the wording “The mind is in the mind, not in reality”.
At this point I’m already departing radically from the standard materialist account of personhood, which would say that we can be vague about whether a few atoms are a part of you or not. The reason we can’t do that, is precisely the objectivity of your existence. If you are an objectively existing entity, I can’t at the same time say that you are an entity whose boundaries aren’t objectively defined.
I have some sympathy for the view that my-here-now qualia are determinant and objective. But I don’t see why that implies that there must be a determinant objective unique collection of particles that is experiencing the qualia. Why not say that there are various different boundaries that I could draw, but, no matter which of these boundaries I draw, the qualia being experienced by the contained system of particles would be the same? For example, adding or removing the table in front of me doesn’t change the qualia experienced by the system.
(Here I am supposing that I can map the relevant physical systems to qualia in the manner that I describe in this comment.)
I will try to get across what I mean by calling states of consciousness “intrinsic”, “objectively existing”, and so forth; by describing what it would mean for them to not have these attributes.
It would mean that you only exist by convention or by definition. It would mean that there is no definite fact about whether your life is part of reality. It wouldn’t just be that some models of reality acknowledge your existence and others don’t; it would mean that you are nothing more than a fuzzy heuristic concept in someone else’s model, and that if they switched models, you would no longer exist even in that limited sense.
I would like to think that you personally have a robust enough sense of your own reality to decisively reject such propositions. But by now, nothing would surprise me, coming from a materialist. It’s been amply demonstrated that people can be willing to profess disbelief in anything and everything, if they think that’s the price of believing in science. So I won’t presume that you believe that you exist, I’ll just hope that you do, because if you don’t, it will be hard to have a sensible conversation about these topics.
But… if you do agree that you definitely exist, independently of any “model” that actual or hypothetical observers have, then it’s a short step to saying that you must also have some of your properties intrinsically, rather than through model-dependent attribution. The alternative would be to say that you exist, you’re a “thing”, but not any particular thing; which is the sort of untenable objective vagueness that I was talking about.
The concept of an intrinsic property is arising somewhat differently here, than it does in your discussion of squares and rectangles. The idealized geometrical figures have their intrinsic properties by definition, or by logical implication from the definition. But I can say that you have intrinsic properties, not by definition (or not just by definition), but because you exist, and to be is to be something. (Also known as the “law of identity”.) It would make no sense to say that you are real, but otherwise devoid of ontological definiteness.
For exactly the same reason, it would make no sense to have a fundamentally vague “physical theory of you”. Here I want to define “you” as narrowly as possible—this you, in this world, even just in this moment if necessary. I don’t want the identity issues of a broadly defined “you” to interfere. I hope we have agreed that you-here-now exist, that you exist objectively, that you must have some identifying or individuating properties which are also held objectively and intrinsically; the properties which make you what you are.
If we are going to be ontological materialists about you-here-now, and we are also going to acknowledge you-here-now as completely and independently real, then there also can’t be any vagueness or arbitrariness about which physical object is you-here-now. For every particle—if we have particles in our physical ontology—either it is definitely a part of you-here-now, or it definitely isn’t.
At this point I’m already departing radically from the standard materialist account of personhood, which would say that we can be vague about whether a few atoms are a part of you or not. The reason we can’t do that, is precisely the objectivity of your existence. If you are an objectively existing entity, I can’t at the same time say that you are an entity whose boundaries aren’t objectively defined. For some broader notion, like “your body”, sure, we can be vague about where its boundaries are. But there has to be a core notion of what you are that is correct, exact, fully objective; and the partially objective definitions of “you” come from watering down this core notion by adding inessential extra properties.
Now let’s contrast this situation with the piece of lumber that is close to being a square but isn’t a perfect square. My arguments against fundamental vagueness are not about insisting that the piece of lumber is a perfect square. I am merely insisting that it is what it is, and whatever it is, it is that, exactly and definitely.
The main difference between “you-here-now” and the piece of lumber, is that we don’t have the same reason to think that the lumber has a hard ontological core. It’s an aggregate of atoms, electrons will be streaming off it, and there will be some arbitrariness about when such an electron stops being “part of the lumber”. To find indisputably objective physical facts in this situation, you probably need to talk in terms of immediate relations between elementary particles.
The evidence for a hard core in you-here-now is primarily phenomenological and secondarily logical. The phenomenological evidence is what we call the unity of experience: what’s happening to you in any moment is a gestalt; it’s one thing happening to one person. Your experience of the world may have fuzzy edges to it, but it’s still a whole and hence objectively a unity. The logical “evidence” is just the incoherence of supposing there can be a phenomenological unity without there being an ontological unity at any level. This experiential whole may have parts, but you can’t use the existence of the parts to then turn around and deny the existence of the whole.
The evidence for an ontological hard core to you-here-now does not come from physics. Physically the brain looks like it should be just like the piece of lumber, an aggregate of very many very small things. This presumption is obviously why materialists often end up regarding their own existence as something less than objective, or why the search for a microphysically exact theory of the self sounds like a mistake. Instead we are to be content with the approximations of functionalism, because that’s the most you could hope to do with such an entity.
I hope it’s now very clear where I’m coming from. The phenomenological and ontological arguments for a “hard core” to the self are enough to override any counterargument from physics. They tell us that a mesoscopic theory of what’s going on, like functionalism, is at best incomplete; it cannot be the final word. The task is to understand the conscious brain as a biophysical system, in terms of a physical ontology that can contain “real selves”. And fortunately, it’s no longer the 19th century, we have quantum mechanics and the ingredients for something more sophisticated than classic atomism.
I’m going back and forth on whether to tap out here. On the one hand I feel like I’m making progress in understanding your perspective. On the other hand the progress is clarifying that it would take a large amount of time and energy to derive a vocabulary to converse in a mutually transparent way about material truth claims in this area. It had not occurred to me that pulling on the word “intrinsic” would flip the conversation into a solipsistic zone by way of Cartesian skepticism. Ooof.
Perhaps we could schedule a few hours of IM or IRC to try a bit of very low latency mutual vocabulary development, and then maybe post the logs back here for posterity (raw or edited) if that seems worthwhile to us. (See private message for logistics.) If you want to stick to public essays I recommend taking things up with Tyrrell; he’s a more careful thinker than I am and I generally agree with what he says. He noticed and extended a more generous and more interesting parsing of your claims than I did when I thought you were trying to make a pigeonhole argument in favor of magical entities, and he seems to be interested. Either public essays with Tyrrell, IM with me, or both, or neither… as you like :-)
(And/or Steve of course, but he generally requires a lot of unpacking, and I frequently only really understand why his concepts were better starting places than my own between 6 and 18 months after talking with him.)
Or in a cascade of your own successive models, including of the cascade.
Or an incentive to keep using that model rather than to switch to another one. The models are made up, but the incentives are real. (To whatever extent the thing subject to the incentives is.)
Not that I’m agreeing, but some clever ways to formulate almost your objection could be built around the wording “The mind is in the mind, not in reality”.
Crap. I had not thought of quines in reference to simulationist metaphysics before.
I have some sympathy for the view that my-here-now qualia are determinant and objective. But I don’t see why that implies that there must be a determinant objective unique collection of particles that is experiencing the qualia. Why not say that there are various different boundaries that I could draw, but, no matter which of these boundaries I draw, the qualia being experienced by the contained system of particles would be the same? For example, adding or removing the table in front of me doesn’t change the qualia experienced by the system.
(Here I am supposing that I can map the relevant physical systems to qualia in the manner that I describe in this comment.)