What could it mean for a ghost to exist but be nonphysical?
I think that what you think are counterexamples to GRTm are a large number of things which, examined carefully, would end up in R3-only, and not in R2.
I furthermore note that you just rejected GRTt, which sounds scarily like concluding that actual non-reductionist things exist, because you didn’t want to accept the conclusion that talk of non-physical ghosts might fail strict qualifications of meaning. How could you possibly get there from here? How could your thoughts about what’s meaningful, entail that the laws of physics must be other than what we’d previously observed them to be? Shouldn’t reaching that conclusion require like a particle accelerator or something?
Alternatively, perhaps your rejection of GRTt isn’t intended to entail that non-reductionist things exist. If so, can you construe a narrower version of GRTt which just says that, y’know, non-reductionist thingies don’t exist? And then would Esar’s argument not go through for this version?
I think Esar’s argument mainly runs into trouble when you want to call R3-statements ‘false’, in which case their negations are colloquially true but in R3-only because there’s no strictly coherent and meaningful (R2) way to describe what doesn’t exist (i.e. non-physical ghosts). If your desire to apply this language demands that you consider these R3-statements meaningful, then you should reject GRTm, I suppose—though not because you disagree with me about what stricter standards entail, but because you want the word “meaningful” to apply to looser standards. However, getting from there to rejecting R1 is a severe problem—though from the description, it’s possible you don’t mean by GRTt what I mean by R1. I am a bit worried that you might want ‘non-physical ghosts don’t exist’ to be true, hence meaningful, hence its negation to also be meaningful, hence a proposition, hence there to be some state of affairs that could correspond to non-physical ghosts existing, hence for the universe to not be shaped like my R1. Which would be a very strange conclusion to reach starting from the premise that it’s ‘true’ that ‘ghosts do not exist’.
you just rejected GRTt, which sounds scarily like concluding that actual non-reductionist things exist
To reject GRTt is to affirm: “Some truths are not expressible in physical-and/or-logical terms.” Does that imply that irreducibly nonphysical things exist? I don’t quite see why. My initial thought is this: I am much more confident that physicalism is true than that nonphysicalism is inexpressible or meaningless. But if this physicalism I have such faith in entails that nonphysicalism is inexpressible, then either I should be vastly more confident that nonphysicalism is meaningless, or vastly less confident that physicalism is true, or else GRTt does not capture the intuitively very plausible heart of physicalism. Maybe GRTt and GRTm are correct; but that would take a lot of careful argumentation to demonstrate, and I don’t want to hold physicalism itself hostage to GRTm. I don’t want a disproof of GRTm to overturn the entire project of reductive physicalism; the project does not hang on so thin a thread. So GRTd is just my new attempt to articulate why our broadly naturalistic, broadly scientific world-view isn’t wholly predicated on our confidence in the meaninglessness of the assertions of the Other Side.
This dispute is over whether, in a physical universe, we can make sense of anyone even being able to talk about anything non-physical. Four issues complicate any quick attempts to affirm GRTm:
1) Meaning itself is presumably nonfundamental. Without a clear understanding of exactly what is neurologically involved when a brain makes what we call ‘representations,’ attempts to weigh in on what can and can’t be meaningful will be somewhat speculative. And since meaning is nonfundamental, truth is also nonfundamental, is really an anthropological and linguistic category more than a metaphysical one; so sacrificing GRTt may not be as devastating as it initially seems.
2) ‘Logical pinpointing’ complicates our theory of reference. Numbers are abstracted from observed regularities, but we never come into causal contact with numbers themselves; yet we seem to be able to talk about them. So if there is some way to abstract away from physicality itself, perhaps ‘ghost’ could be an example of such abstraction (albeit of a less benign form than ‘number’). The possibility doesn’t seem totally crazy to me.
3) It remains very unclear exactly what work is being done by ‘physical’ (and, for that matter, ‘logical’) in our formulations of GRT. This is especially problematic because it doesn’t matter. We can define ‘physical’ however we please, and then it will be much easier to work out whether we can talk about anything nonphysical.
One worry is that if we can’t speak of anything nonphysical, then the term ‘physical’ itself risks falling into meaninglessness. GRTd doesn’t face this problem, and allows us to take the intuitive route of simply asserting the falsehood of anti-physicalisms; it lets us do what we originally wanted with ‘physicalism,’ which was to sift out the excessively Spooky doctrines at the outset. In contrast, it’s not clear what useful work ‘physicalism’ is doing if we follow the GRTm approach. If GRTm’s physicalism is a doctrine at all, it’s a very strange (and perhaps tautologous) one.
4) Traditionally, there’s been a split between positivists who wanted to reduce everything to logical constructs plus first-person experience, and positivists who wanted to reduce everything to logical constructs plus third-person physical science. I personally find the latter approach more plausible, though I understand the post-Cartesian appeal of Russell’s phenomenalist project. But it troubles me to see the two sides insisting, with equal vehemance, that the other side is not only mistaken but speaking gibberish. Even as an eliminative physicalist and an Enemy of Qualia, I find it plausible that we have some (perhaps fundamentally mistaken) concept of a difference between experiences (which are ‘from a vantage point’) and objective events (which lack any ‘point-of-view’ structure). If there’s anything genuinely under dispute between the first-person camp and the third-person camp, then this provides a simple example of why GRTt is false: Simply for grammatical reasons, there are falsehoods (indexicals, perhaps) that cannot be perfectly expressed in physical terms. That doesn’t mean that we can’t physicalistically describe why and how someone came to assert P; it just means we can’t assert P ourselves in our stripped-down fundamental language.
Perhaps this is a more palatable way to put it: We can explain in purely physical and logical terms why every false sentence is false. But there is no one-to-one correspondence between false non-fundamental assertions and false fundamental assertions. Rather, in cases like ‘there are no gods’ and ‘there are no ghosts,’ there is a many-to-one relationship, since all statements of those sorts are made true by the conjunction of all the physical and logical truths (including the totality fact). But it’s implausible to treat this Gigantic Fact as the physical meaning or final analysis of falsehoods like ‘I have experienced redness-qualia.’
there’s no strictly coherent and meaningful (R2) way to describe what doesn’t exist (i.e. non-physical ghosts)
That seems like too strong of a statement. Surely we can express falsehoods (including false existential generalizations) in our finished physical/logical language. We can describe situations and objects that don’t exist. The question is just whether the descriptive elements our sparse language utilizes will be up to the task of constructing every meaningful predicate (and in a way that allows our language to assert the predication, not just to describe the act of someone else asserting it). So far, that seems to me to be more open to doubt than does garden-variety physicalism.
What could it mean for a ghost to exist but be nonphysical?
I think that what you think are counterexamples to GRTm are a large number of things which, examined carefully, would end up in R3-only, and not in R2.
I furthermore note that you just rejected GRTt, which sounds scarily like concluding that actual non-reductionist things exist, because you didn’t want to accept the conclusion that talk of non-physical ghosts might fail strict qualifications of meaning. How could you possibly get there from here? How could your thoughts about what’s meaningful, entail that the laws of physics must be other than what we’d previously observed them to be? Shouldn’t reaching that conclusion require like a particle accelerator or something?
Alternatively, perhaps your rejection of GRTt isn’t intended to entail that non-reductionist things exist. If so, can you construe a narrower version of GRTt which just says that, y’know, non-reductionist thingies don’t exist? And then would Esar’s argument not go through for this version?
I think Esar’s argument mainly runs into trouble when you want to call R3-statements ‘false’, in which case their negations are colloquially true but in R3-only because there’s no strictly coherent and meaningful (R2) way to describe what doesn’t exist (i.e. non-physical ghosts). If your desire to apply this language demands that you consider these R3-statements meaningful, then you should reject GRTm, I suppose—though not because you disagree with me about what stricter standards entail, but because you want the word “meaningful” to apply to looser standards. However, getting from there to rejecting R1 is a severe problem—though from the description, it’s possible you don’t mean by GRTt what I mean by R1. I am a bit worried that you might want ‘non-physical ghosts don’t exist’ to be true, hence meaningful, hence its negation to also be meaningful, hence a proposition, hence there to be some state of affairs that could correspond to non-physical ghosts existing, hence for the universe to not be shaped like my R1. Which would be a very strange conclusion to reach starting from the premise that it’s ‘true’ that ‘ghosts do not exist’.
To reject GRTt is to affirm: “Some truths are not expressible in physical-and/or-logical terms.” Does that imply that irreducibly nonphysical things exist? I don’t quite see why. My initial thought is this: I am much more confident that physicalism is true than that nonphysicalism is inexpressible or meaningless. But if this physicalism I have such faith in entails that nonphysicalism is inexpressible, then either I should be vastly more confident that nonphysicalism is meaningless, or vastly less confident that physicalism is true, or else GRTt does not capture the intuitively very plausible heart of physicalism. Maybe GRTt and GRTm are correct; but that would take a lot of careful argumentation to demonstrate, and I don’t want to hold physicalism itself hostage to GRTm. I don’t want a disproof of GRTm to overturn the entire project of reductive physicalism; the project does not hang on so thin a thread. So GRTd is just my new attempt to articulate why our broadly naturalistic, broadly scientific world-view isn’t wholly predicated on our confidence in the meaninglessness of the assertions of the Other Side.
This dispute is over whether, in a physical universe, we can make sense of anyone even being able to talk about anything non-physical. Four issues complicate any quick attempts to affirm GRTm:
1) Meaning itself is presumably nonfundamental. Without a clear understanding of exactly what is neurologically involved when a brain makes what we call ‘representations,’ attempts to weigh in on what can and can’t be meaningful will be somewhat speculative. And since meaning is nonfundamental, truth is also nonfundamental, is really an anthropological and linguistic category more than a metaphysical one; so sacrificing GRTt may not be as devastating as it initially seems.
2) ‘Logical pinpointing’ complicates our theory of reference. Numbers are abstracted from observed regularities, but we never come into causal contact with numbers themselves; yet we seem to be able to talk about them. So if there is some way to abstract away from physicality itself, perhaps ‘ghost’ could be an example of such abstraction (albeit of a less benign form than ‘number’). The possibility doesn’t seem totally crazy to me.
3) It remains very unclear exactly what work is being done by ‘physical’ (and, for that matter, ‘logical’) in our formulations of GRT. This is especially problematic because it doesn’t matter. We can define ‘physical’ however we please, and then it will be much easier to work out whether we can talk about anything nonphysical.
One worry is that if we can’t speak of anything nonphysical, then the term ‘physical’ itself risks falling into meaninglessness. GRTd doesn’t face this problem, and allows us to take the intuitive route of simply asserting the falsehood of anti-physicalisms; it lets us do what we originally wanted with ‘physicalism,’ which was to sift out the excessively Spooky doctrines at the outset. In contrast, it’s not clear what useful work ‘physicalism’ is doing if we follow the GRTm approach. If GRTm’s physicalism is a doctrine at all, it’s a very strange (and perhaps tautologous) one.
4) Traditionally, there’s been a split between positivists who wanted to reduce everything to logical constructs plus first-person experience, and positivists who wanted to reduce everything to logical constructs plus third-person physical science. I personally find the latter approach more plausible, though I understand the post-Cartesian appeal of Russell’s phenomenalist project. But it troubles me to see the two sides insisting, with equal vehemance, that the other side is not only mistaken but speaking gibberish. Even as an eliminative physicalist and an Enemy of Qualia, I find it plausible that we have some (perhaps fundamentally mistaken) concept of a difference between experiences (which are ‘from a vantage point’) and objective events (which lack any ‘point-of-view’ structure). If there’s anything genuinely under dispute between the first-person camp and the third-person camp, then this provides a simple example of why GRTt is false: Simply for grammatical reasons, there are falsehoods (indexicals, perhaps) that cannot be perfectly expressed in physical terms. That doesn’t mean that we can’t physicalistically describe why and how someone came to assert P; it just means we can’t assert P ourselves in our stripped-down fundamental language.
Perhaps this is a more palatable way to put it: We can explain in purely physical and logical terms why every false sentence is false. But there is no one-to-one correspondence between false non-fundamental assertions and false fundamental assertions. Rather, in cases like ‘there are no gods’ and ‘there are no ghosts,’ there is a many-to-one relationship, since all statements of those sorts are made true by the conjunction of all the physical and logical truths (including the totality fact). But it’s implausible to treat this Gigantic Fact as the physical meaning or final analysis of falsehoods like ‘I have experienced redness-qualia.’
That seems like too strong of a statement. Surely we can express falsehoods (including false existential generalizations) in our finished physical/logical language. We can describe situations and objects that don’t exist. The question is just whether the descriptive elements our sparse language utilizes will be up to the task of constructing every meaningful predicate (and in a way that allows our language to assert the predication, not just to describe the act of someone else asserting it). So far, that seems to me to be more open to doubt than does garden-variety physicalism.