I think the (very widely held) idea that consciousness is evidence that the world isn’t purely material is founded on a mistake.
So the argument seems to go something like this. “Imagine a mind, or the nearest possible thing to a mind, made up entirely of material stuff. Can you see where its consciousness comes from? No? Why, then, clearly minds must be immaterial, or have immaterial components, or something of the sort.”
But if you actually try to turn this into an argument that would convince someone who didn’t already want to believe in immaterial minds/souls/spirits, you’ll find that there’s a huge gap in it. It purports to show that “minds are entirely material” (call this M) is less plausible than “minds are not entirely material” (not-M) by looking only at consequences of M and not comparing them with consequences of not-M.
If the argument had turned up an actual logical contradiction as a consequence of M, that would be fair enough: if M leads to contradiction then not-M must be better (unless M and not-M are both actually nonsense of some sort). But if M is merely improbable or counterintuitive or currently lacking good explanations, you can’t compare M with not-M until you’ve also looked to see whether not-M has the same problems.
In this instance, it’s quite true that it’s hard to see how material stuff could give rise to the experience of consciousness. Fair enough. Is it any easier to see how immaterial stuff (or immaterial non-stuff) could do it? I don’t think so. -- Other than by begging the question, the theist’s favourite technique. You just say, e.g., that by definition souls give rise to consciousness, and then of course belief in souls “explains” consciousness. But of course this is simply cheating: there’s no actual explanation there, nothing more than a bare baseless assertion. You could just as well say that by definition matter gives rise to consciousness when it’s appropriately organized. Which would be daft, and materialists don’t actually say that, but that’s not a weakness of the materialists’ position. (More often, the theist doesn’t say in so many words “I define souls to be things that give rise to consciousness”. They simply take that for granted, and no one notices because it’s such a familiar move.)
The exact same sort of broken logical structure is found in typical theistic (or supernaturalist) arguments from free will and moral absolutes.
Fair enough. Is it any easier to see how immaterial stuff (or immaterial non-stuff) could do it? I don’t think so. -- Other than by begging the question, the theist’s favourite technique. You just say, e.g., that by definition souls give rise to consciousness
Or you can say that consc.is fundamental and does not arise from anything else. The physicalist takes some
things (eg matter/energy)nas inexplicable fundamentals., The dualist takes one more thing as an inexplicable
fundamental. I am not particualrly selling dualism, but it remains popular becaude it is not as obviously flawed as you make out.
But that comes right back to the question of why consciousness has such a strong relation to the physical state of the brain. If consciousness is is fundamental and doesn’t arise from anything else, why does it behave as if it’s a function of the brain? For positing an additional entity of such complexity, it doesn’t do a very good job explaining our observations.
Contemporary dualists are happy to accept that the Easy Problem aspects of consciousness have neurological explanations. The focus is on the Hard Problem aspect of qualia. Since sensory information is already present in the neurological account , the only gap that needs to be plugged is adding phenomenal feels to the existing information.
Sure, you can just say that consciousness is fundamental. That’s exactly the same sort of question-begging as just saying that consciousness arises from souls. Assuming something as fundamental reduces the merit of your theory just as much as failing to explain it (since assuming it as fundamental does, in fact, fail to explain it) so once again there’s no explanatory advantage to the non-materialist position here.
(Also, if you take consciousness as fundamental then the intricate relationships between consciousness and matter are highly mysterious. If consciousness arises from what the brain does, it’s at least unsurprising in general terms that what you’re conscious of relates to what your brain’s doing, that interfering with the brain can interfere with your consciousness, etc. If it’s some magical independent thing, how does that happen?)
Sure, you can just say that consciousness is fundamental. That’s exactly the same sort of question-begging as just saying that consciousness arises from souls.
Is it question begging to say is fundamental?
if you take consciousness as fundamental then the intricate relationships between consciousness and matter are highly mysterious.
Are they?If you take (eg) matter and space as both fundamental, are you then unable to explain the complex relationships between them?
It could be. For instance, imagine someone (years ago) wondering why and how things burn. Let’s suppose that this was before there was a really good scientific account of burning. Then they might say “Conventional science has failed; we should therefore adopt my theory instead. My theory says that there is a fundamental property of things, called their flammability; things burn readily when their flammability is high. Burning consists of turning things with high flammability into things with low flammability.” That would be question-begging, in relation to explaining burning, in roughly the same way as taking consciousness as fundamental is question-begging in relation to explaining consciousness.
I suppose it could in principle turn out that consciousness is fundamental. (Being question-begging is a defect in an argumentative move; the proposition(s) one asserts in the process might still be correct.) But the fact that we don’t have anything close to a complete physical explanation of consciousness cannot be a good reason for thinking that consciousness is fundamental; there would have to be other reasons, if someone were to be rationally convinced that consciousness is fundamental.
(A sufficiently complete and sustained failure to find physical explanations for consciousness might be sufficient reason for provisionally taking consciousness as fundamental. But as I’ve already said elsewhere in this thread, that isn’t in fact the epistemic situation we find ourselves in.)
Are they?
They seem to be; at any rate I’ve never heard any sort of explanation, starting with “consciousness as fundamental” premises, that gives any inkling of how those relationships might come about.
As for matter and space: in order to do justice to the relationships between them, physicists don’t exactly take them as separate fundamental things. But that’s a quibble, indeed, a sufficiently detailed theory about what consciousness does and how it relates to the other things known to science might in principle explain those intricate relationships. But it turns out that people wanting to take consciousness as fundamental never actually have such detailed theories, or proposals for how such theories might be found, or any sign of being interested in finding such theories. This is getting into territory I’ve already commented on elsewhere in the thread, though, so I’ll leave it there.
Question beggingness is an inherent property of arguments: it shouldn;t depend on external factors.
There have been bad explanations (NB explanations aren’t arguments) of the form “X is fundamental”, some physicalist, some not. There have also been good ones. They can’t all be bad because they are question begging: if one is question-begging, all are, but not all are bad.
What makes them bad or good is other, complex factors
But the fact that we don’t have anything close to a complete physical explanation of consciousness cannot be a good reason for thinking that consciousness is fundamental; there would have to be other reasons, if someone were to be rationally convinced that consciousness is fundamental.
Again: would that apply to all “X is fundamental” arguments?
A sufficiently complete and sustained failure to find physical explanations for consciousness might be sufficient reason for provisionally taking consciousness as fundamental. But as I’ve already said elsewhere in this thread, that isn’t in fact the epistemic situation we find ourselves in.
That is a matter of judgment.
I’ve never heard any sort of explanation, starting with “consciousness as fundamental” premises, that gives any inkling of how those relationships might come about.
Those would be the factors that make the posit that consciousness is fundamental (part of) a good explanation. We
don’t have a good dualist explanation; many think we don;t have a good physicalist explanation either.
But the point remains that dualist (or, as I prefer, intrinsicist) explanations can’t written off apriori. The devil’s oin the details.
As for matter and space: in order to do justice to the relationships between them, physicists don’t exactly take them as separate fundamental things.
Don’t they? What’s the space-time- matter energy unification theory?
Question beggingness is an intrinsic property of arguments: it shouldn’t depend on external factors.
It’s an intrinsic property of arguments in contexts. Specifically, whether something is question-begging depends on what one’s trying to prove.
Indeed explanations aren’t arguments. The arguments we’re talking about are ones of the form “Theory X is better than theory Y because it explains alleged facts F better”. Merely saying “Consciousness (or whatever) is fundamental” is of course not question-begging. But if the existence, or some property, of consciousness is one of the alleged facts F, and if theory X simply postulates whatever property it is of consciousness, then a question is being begged.
Again: would that apply to all “X is fundamental” arguments?
I don’t claim to be able to contemplate all imaginable arguments that say things are fundamental. But, in general, claiming that something’s fundamental and just happens to have the properties it’s known to have is a pretty weak move; and saying “Look, I’ve now given an explanation of whatever-it-is, so I’m doing better than you stupid people who are still looking for more complicated explanations” is invalid.
Those would be the factors that make the posit that consciousness is fundamental (part of) a good explanation.
I’m afraid I don’t understand. Would you care to say a little more.
Don’t they?
“Matter” isn’t a first-class citizen in modern physics. There are a bunch of quantum fields, and things that happen to those fields produce the effects we call matter. (And other things that happen to those fields produce actually-quite-similar effects that we generally don’t call matter, such as physical forces.) “Space” isn’t quite a first-class citizen either; spacetime is; its geometry is determined by the matter-and-similar-stuff in it. I wouldn’t say that space and matter (or spacetime and mass/energy) are exactly unified; my rather noncommital language (“don’t exactly take them as separate fundamental things”) was deliberate.
It’s an intrinsic property of arguments in contexts. Specifically, whether something is question-begging depends on what one’s trying to prove.
A formal argument will include a conclusion. If that is the same as one of its premises, a question is being begged.
Indeed explanations aren’t arguments. The arguments we’re talking about are ones of the form “Theory X is better than theory Y because it explains alleged facts F better”. Merely saying “Consciousness (or whatever) is fundamental” is of course not question-begging. But if the existence, or some property, of consciousness is one of the alleged facts F, and if theory X simply postulates whatever property it is of consciousness, then a question is being begged.
I don’t see that that is the case. The rather informal argument you gave mentions facts being explained better. Simply positing things is better than not explaining them at all, but not as good explaining them parsimoniously, without additional posits.
in general, claiming that something’s fundamental and just happens to have the properties it’s known to have is a pretty weak move;
Yes—in general. But it is not invariably invalid, as formal question-begging is.
Those would be the factors that make the posit that consciousness is fundamental (part of) a good explanation.
I’m afraid I don’t understand. Would you care to say a little more.
A novel ontological posit can be part of a good expanation. Examples tend to be complicated.
en to those fields produce actually-quite-similar effects that we generally don’t call matter, such as physical forces.) “Space” isn’t quite a first-class citizen either; spacetime is; its geometry is determined by the matter-and-similar-stuff in it. I wouldn’t say that space and matter (or spacetime and mass/energy) are exactly unified;
Neither would I.
(“don’t exactly take them as separate fundamental things”)
Ontological fundamentals are going to be rather useless if they don’t relate to each other at all...and they are not going to be fundamentals. plural, if they relate too closely. So that is to be expected.
Sure, but most arguments—including in particular many of the sort this discussion was originally about—are not formalized. Specifically, theistic or supernaturalist arguments based on consciousness, morality and free will generally leave most of their premises unstated and most of their steps implicit. Accordingly, the appropriate notion of question-begging needs to be generalized slightly. I suppose you might prefer to use some other term for the logical flaw I’m complaining about: what’s being assumed is not necessarily exactly what they set out to prove, but some other thing that stands in about as much need of proof, and for much the same reasons, as what they’re purporting to prove.
Simply positing things is better than not explaining them at all
See, here’s where we disagree. I think simply positing things is worse than just leaving them unexplained, unless either (1) there’s some actual reason to think they need simply positing, or (2) they’re posited in a way that actually leads to useful predictions (and those predictions don’t get refuted).
In epistemology, positing that there’s an external world with which our experience is somewhat correlated is useful because of #1; if you don’t make such an assumption then you simply can’t get started.
In physics, positing electrons (or the quantum field from which they arise, or whatever) is useful because of #2; what you’re positing has precisely defined behaviour which lets you deduce all kinds of true things.
But how does positing consciousness as fundamental help you in either respect? And, if it doesn’t, how does it help at all? It seems to me that it just serves to discourage you for looking for better explanations.
But it is not invariably invalid
Well, there’s an interesting rhetorical move. I say “X is a pretty weak move, and Y is invalid”. You quote only the first half and say “But it’s not invariably invalid”. Bah.
A novel ontological posit can be part of a good explanation.
Of course. Perhaps it wasn’t clear what I was asking. You said “Those would be the factors that …” but I can’t tell what things you were referring to; you said “a good explanation” but I can’t tell what good explanation. (And I’m not sure whether when you said “make” you actually meant “hypothetically might make” or “actually do make”. The latter seems like the obvious meaning but then surely you owe us some more information about this alleged good explanation.)
Well, there’s an interesting rhetorical move. I say “X is a pretty weak move, and Y is invalid”. You quote only the first half and say “But it’s not invariably invalid”. Bah.
I don’t see the problem. I was trying to emphasise that question begging is not the right diagnosis of the problem.
I suppose you might prefer to use some other term for the logical flaw I’m complaining about:
Yep. As above.
But how does positing consciousness as fundamental help you in either respect? And, if it doesn’t, how does it help at all? It seems to me that it just serves to discourage you for looking for better explanations.
You’re not distingusihing the cases where the posit is part of a theory and where it isn’t. Where we have a theory,
we can test it. We don’t have a satisfactory dualist or physicalistic theory. So what is going on at this stage
is not really theorisation,. but speculation about the form a theory should take.
Of course. Perhaps it wasn’t clear what I was asking. You said “Those would be the factors that …” but I can’t tell what things you were referring to; you said “a good explanation” but I can’t tell what good explanation
As I indicated, that is difficult to answer succintly. I think the posit of colour charge works within QCD, but saying what is good about QCD is like summarising Proust.
You’re not distinguishing the cases where the posit is part of a theory and where it isn’t.
I think we’re failing to communicate, because that distinction is an important part of what I’m getting at. The proponents of consciousness-as-fundamental show no sign of having any interest in making consciousness into part of a theory that’s any use, and that’s part of what I think is wrong with what they’re saying.
that is difficult to answer succinctly.
You seem not to be willing to try to answer at all. You won’t say what you meant, you won’t say whether you think there’s a useful theory that includes consciousness as a fundamental phenomenon, you hint vaguely that there might be such a theory and it might have some explanatory power but you won’t say what it might look like or how it might do its explaining. You say “those would be the factors that do X” and then refuse to say just what “those” are or anything about how they do X.
How is it possible to have a meaningful discussion on these terms?
I think we’re failing to communicate, because that distinction is an important part of what I’m getting at. The proponents of consciousness-as-fundamental show no sign of having any interest in making consciousness into part of a theory that’s any use, and that’s part of what I think is wrong with what they’re saying
As I pointed out, physicalists don’t have a solution to the Hard Problem either. You say they are trying and dualists aren’t, but you offer no evidence.
that is difficult to answer succinctly.
You seem not to be willing to try to answer at all.
That is because it is difficult. As I said.
you won’t say whether you think there’s a useful theory that includes consciousness as a fundamental phenomenon, you hint vaguely that there might be such a theory a
I’m sorry, but I’m just not saying the things you think I am saying. What I said was:
“what is going on at this stage is not really theorisation,. but speculation about the form a theory should take”
ETA
The point is not that dualism is true and physicalism false. The point was only ever that dualism is not as obviously false as sometimes made out.
Evidence that physicalists have been trying: books like Dennett’s “Consciousness explained” and Edelman’s “Neural Darwinism” and Koch’s “The quest for consciousness” and so forth, all putting forward hypotheses about what physical goings-on give rise to consciousness and how.
Evidence that dualists aren’t trying (more specifically, not trying to do more than just say “Consciousness is fundamental, and that’s all there is to it” or something else that similarly tries to take credit for solving the problem without doing the work): I’m not sure what sort of evidence I could present. All I can say is that I’ve so far not seen any sign that dualists are trying, or have any interest in doing so.
I’m sorry, but I’m just not saying the things you think I am saying.
Well, I do keep asking you to clarify your meaning—and you keep replying by saying things like “That is because it is difficult”. I decline to take the blame for not understanding you if you aren’t prepared to try to be understood.
dualism is not as obviously false as sometimes made out.
I haven’t been claiming that dualism is obviously false. I’ve been claiming that some things offered as evidence for dualism (or for more complicated sets of ideas that involve dualism) are rotten evidence.
I haven’t read Chalmers’s book, but so far as I can tell from reading about it it doesn’t in fact offer the sort of thing I’m complaining dualists aren’t trying to do. Is that wrong? If so, where in the book—I have a copy on my overflowing to-be-read shelves—should I look to find an attempt, or at least some work heading towards an attempt, to offer an actual explanation of why the relationship between consciousness and physical stuff is the way it is? (Note: simply saying “there are bridging laws that make that relationship what it is” is not an explanation, nor anything like one; but if Chalmers has something more substantial to offer then I’m all ears.)
[EDITED a minute or two after posting; I’d forgotten that I do actually have a copy of Chalmers’s book. It’s been sat in my read-this-some-time pile for about the last 10 years, though. Note: “10 years” is literal, not rhetorical. I went to Amazon to see how much it would cost if I wanted to buy it and Amazon kindly put up a note saying “You purchased this in 2001.”]
If you are looking for a completely satisfactory explanation of consc. you are not going to find it the dualist literature or the physicalist literature. I don’t see there is much else I can add. If you want to know what Chalmer’s book says, you have to read it yourself. Alternatively, you could become less inclined to come to strong conclusions about ideas you are not familiar with. EIther way it is up to you. I am not particularly selling dualism myself.
If you want to know what Chalmer’s book says, you have to read it yourself.
That’s one of the very bad things about philosophy. Nobody tells you “if you want to understand general relativity, read Einstein’s papers”—it has been rehashed and cut into parts and explained in various ways and accompanied with exercises and summed up or stretched out and put into a bunch of textbooks. Nobody tells you “if you want to know what Nozick thought about libertarianism, go read his book”—just grab the summary and commentary on ESR or Faré′s websites.
Equally, the OP could read WP articles, amazon reviews, etc. (And Chalmer’s book itself contains summaries of much foregoing mind-body phil.).
The thing is he is claiming that dualists are making no efforts to explain: but they are[*], he is just making no effort to find out what they are saying.
[*] Dualist phils. have no miraculous way of rising through the academic ranks whilst publishing nothing.
[...] an attempt, or at least some work heading towards an attempt, to offer an actual explanation [...]
You:
If you are looking for a completely satisfactory explanation [...]
I do wish you wouldn’t do that.
If you want to know what Chalmers’s book says, you have to read it yourself.
Clearly that’s true for some definitions of “what C’s book says” and false for others. On the other hand, if what I actually want to know is whether C’s book contains a particular sort of thing then it seems obviously reasonable to ask whether you’ve got any suggestions for where in it I should look.
you could become less inclined to come to strong conclusions about ideas you are not familiar with
What particular strong conclusions do you have in mind? And what ideas are they about with which you think I’m unfamiliar?
So I had a look at the first five things linked from the first of those pages.
A dissertation by Aryanosi. Not available online so far as I can tell. Aryanosi does not in fact appear to be a dualist; at least, looking for other work of his the first thing I found was a paper offering an argument for the thesis that the mind is identical with the brain. Excerpt: “This brings me to the argument I would like to put forward, to the conclusion that the doctrine of naturalistic dualism is probabilistically incoherent, and that physicalism, in the form of the identity thesis, is the likeliest candidate for the mental-physical relation.” I did also find a chapter of his dissertation online. It’s concerned with Chalmers’s zombie argument, and argues that it’s unsound.
A paper on gallium arsenide nanowires. It seems unlikely that this has anything to say about dualism. I have no idea what it’s doing on that page.
A paper whose filename is whyiamnotadualist.pdf. Presumably its author is not a dualist.
Looks like another version of the same paper.
Not available online. I can’t tell from the abstract whether the author is a dualist, but it doesn’t appear to be either defending dualism or attempting to construct a theory of how dualism might “work”.
So that seems to be 0 for 5. This doesn’t encourage me to read on and check more. What makes you regard it as “evidence that dualists are trying”? Evidence that some people are writing about dualism, yes, but that’s not the same thing at all. To save me wading through every link there, is there anything there that actually (1) is by a dualist and (2) offers the sort of thing I was complaining dualists don’t do?
The physical world, as an explanation, clearly has more prior probability than the physical world plus fundamental consciousness. (And that seems like a more realistic form of the question. I have yet to see anyone, even those who like to link modern physics with consciousness, actually replace part of the first theory with a new assumption about fundamental consciousness.)
Posterior probability (meaning the amount of belief you should give to each theory after you look at all the evidence, r_claypool) seems trickier. Dualist philosophers might argue that when we fail to logically derive consciousness from the assumption of a physical world, that counts as evidence for dualism. But as gjm suggests, mainstream dualism doesn’t seem to change our expectations about certain matters. In particular, it does not tell us when or in what situations a physical process leads to conscious experience. You’d have to describe those situations in ways a physicalist like me could agree with, and add that to our scientific picture of the world along with whatever assumptions dualism entails. On the face of it we can drop the last part and have a simpler theory.
My rant on taking the description of when consciousness happens as an additional law of reality got too long. Suffice it to say, that also seems wrong to me epistemologically.
Matter/energy are NOT inexplicable fundamentals. We have studied them, and can explain them in terms of photons, quarks, quantum wave functions, etc. These things may yet be ineffable, but Science only has inexplicables AFTER it has tried as hard as it can to explain. They did not START with the axioms “matter, and energy are inexplicable”, even though they once were, and your example of dualists doing that is the exact core of the flawed reasoning of dualism. We cannot explain something, therefore we call it inexplicable, rather than trying to actually explain it.
Quarks are made of matter/energy, not vice versa.
Note that it is not logically impossible to reductively explain everything in terms of nothing.
Science only has inexplicables AFTER it has tried as hard as it can to explain.
How do you know it has reached the point of “having tried as hard as it can”? Science certainly has tried to explain
mind. Physicalists judge that more trying is needed; dualists judge that the “as hard as it can” point
has been reached. Since no one can say in a definite, quantitive way where the point is, it remains a
legitmiately a matter of personal judgment.
Science can never be assumed to have tried as hard as it can; it’s always possible that some new information will come along and explain something that wasn’t explained before. So if you’re thinking scientifically, the appropriate notion isn’t “inexplicable” but “not explained as yet”.
Anyone—dualist or otherwise—who says “OK, we’ve done enough now; time to give up” is engaged in thoroughly unscientific thinking. Since scientific thinking demonstrably works well, that’s probably a bad thing.
(The above leaves some space for a sort of provisional dualism. You could say “So far, no physical explanation of consciousness is apparent. So we might as well treat it as an independent thing until such time as a physical explanation comes along.” That would be fine if we had no information at all about the relationship between consciousness and matter. But in fact we do have some information. We have evidence that particular aspects of consciousness are related to particular bits of the brain and particular things the brain does. We have partial explanations, where some things about consciousness have somewhat-handwavy explanations in physical terms. And we have a long history of trying out non-physicalist hypotheses about things—gods and ghosts and vital spirits and so forth—and finding them, again and again, smashed to bits once knowledge advances far enough for them to come into contact with reality.)
Science can never be assumed to have tried as hard as it can; it’s always possible that some new information will come along and explain something that wasn’t explained before.
So were the cases where, as a matter of fact, science has posited a new property or force (spin, colour charge, etc) illegitimate?
We have evidence that particular aspects of consciousness are related to particular bits of the brain
We have evidence that the N fundamentals of physics nonetheless interrelate.
ETA
And we have a long history of trying out non-physicalist hypotheses about things
Many explanations in terms of “let’s say it is fundamental” have failed, but that does not mean the correct number of fundamentals is 0.
I have no idea why you’re asking me that. That is: I see no reason why what you’re commenting on gives any reason to think I might answer yes to it.
We have evidence that the N fundamentals of physics nonetheless interrelate.
Yup. And the richness of their interrelations is what makes it appropriate to classify them all as part of the same physical reality; and the level of detail in our ideas about those fundamentals is (part of) what makes our thinking about them scientific. So far, every attempt at postulating consciousness as fundamental has entirely failed to specify how consciousness relates to everything else (a cynic might surmise that this is because the people doing it want to be careful to avoid saying anything refutable, since they know they haven’t taken the measures necessary to make it unlikely that they’d then get refuted). If those details were filled in—which is part of what it would take to make sense of the observed relationship between consciousness and brains—then “consciousness”, even if still fundamental, would cease to be properly regarded as non-physical, and would become a fit subject for further scientific investigation. That would be an interesting outcome, but I don’t expect it ever to happen, because I think what people saying “let’s take consciousness as fundamental” want above all else is to keep scientific thinking away from the topic.
that does not mean the correct number of fundamentals is 0.
Of course it doesn’t. (It’s not clear that 0 is even possible.) But any time you propose that some high-level thing—minds, life, etc. -- is fundamental, it’s a reasonable guess that you’re making a mistake; so far every attempt at doing that seems to have been wrong. (Whereas it’s not true that every attempt at postulating anything as fundamental has failed.)
) But any time you propose that some high-level thing—minds, life, etc. -- is fundamental, it’s a reasonable guess that you’re making a mistake; so far every attempt at doing that seems to have been wrong.
That’s a much better version of the anti-intrinsicism argument: it would be strange if you had a few fundamental things at the bottom of the stack,then a whole bunch of reducible things in the middle,and then suddenly another irreducible thing.
I was asking that since it seemed to me that the argument you were making against consc. being fundamental would apply,if it aplies at all, to positing anything else as fundamental.
If those details were filled in—which is part of what it would take to make sense of the observed relationship between consciousness and brains—then “consciousness”, even if still fundamental, would cease to be properly regarded as non-physical, and would become a fit subject for further scientific investigation.
I couldn’t agree more. That is why I prefer the term “intrinsicism” to “dualism”.
There could be any number of things wrong with dualism/intrinsicism aposteriori. I am just saying that
intrinsicism should not be ruled out apriori just for being intrinsicism.
the argument you were making against consciousness being fundamental would apply, if it applies at all, to positing anything else as fundamental.
It would apply to claiming that anything else is fundamental. Not necessarily to taking it, provisionally, as fundamental. My impression of those who talk about making consciousness fundamental is that they are generally not doing so provisionally with the hope that later on something will be found that’s more genuinely fundamental. I think that proposing something as vague and as complicated as consciousness as a fundamental element of reality is such a desperate move that anyone doing it really ought to be hoping for something simpler to be found underlying it.
I think the (very widely held) idea that consciousness is evidence that the world isn’t purely material is founded on a mistake.
So the argument seems to go something like this. “Imagine a mind, or the nearest possible thing to a mind, made up entirely of material stuff. Can you see where its consciousness comes from? No? Why, then, clearly minds must be immaterial, or have immaterial components, or something of the sort.”
But if you actually try to turn this into an argument that would convince someone who didn’t already want to believe in immaterial minds/souls/spirits, you’ll find that there’s a huge gap in it. It purports to show that “minds are entirely material” (call this M) is less plausible than “minds are not entirely material” (not-M) by looking only at consequences of M and not comparing them with consequences of not-M.
If the argument had turned up an actual logical contradiction as a consequence of M, that would be fair enough: if M leads to contradiction then not-M must be better (unless M and not-M are both actually nonsense of some sort). But if M is merely improbable or counterintuitive or currently lacking good explanations, you can’t compare M with not-M until you’ve also looked to see whether not-M has the same problems.
In this instance, it’s quite true that it’s hard to see how material stuff could give rise to the experience of consciousness. Fair enough. Is it any easier to see how immaterial stuff (or immaterial non-stuff) could do it? I don’t think so. -- Other than by begging the question, the theist’s favourite technique. You just say, e.g., that by definition souls give rise to consciousness, and then of course belief in souls “explains” consciousness. But of course this is simply cheating: there’s no actual explanation there, nothing more than a bare baseless assertion. You could just as well say that by definition matter gives rise to consciousness when it’s appropriately organized. Which would be daft, and materialists don’t actually say that, but that’s not a weakness of the materialists’ position. (More often, the theist doesn’t say in so many words “I define souls to be things that give rise to consciousness”. They simply take that for granted, and no one notices because it’s such a familiar move.)
The exact same sort of broken logical structure is found in typical theistic (or supernaturalist) arguments from free will and moral absolutes.
Or you can say that consc.is fundamental and does not arise from anything else. The physicalist takes some things (eg matter/energy)nas inexplicable fundamentals., The dualist takes one more thing as an inexplicable fundamental. I am not particualrly selling dualism, but it remains popular becaude it is not as obviously flawed as you make out.
But that comes right back to the question of why consciousness has such a strong relation to the physical state of the brain. If consciousness is is fundamental and doesn’t arise from anything else, why does it behave as if it’s a function of the brain? For positing an additional entity of such complexity, it doesn’t do a very good job explaining our observations.
Contemporary dualists are happy to accept that the Easy Problem aspects of consciousness have neurological explanations. The focus is on the Hard Problem aspect of qualia. Since sensory information is already present in the neurological account , the only gap that needs to be plugged is adding phenomenal feels to the existing information.
Sure, you can just say that consciousness is fundamental. That’s exactly the same sort of question-begging as just saying that consciousness arises from souls. Assuming something as fundamental reduces the merit of your theory just as much as failing to explain it (since assuming it as fundamental does, in fact, fail to explain it) so once again there’s no explanatory advantage to the non-materialist position here.
(Also, if you take consciousness as fundamental then the intricate relationships between consciousness and matter are highly mysterious. If consciousness arises from what the brain does, it’s at least unsurprising in general terms that what you’re conscious of relates to what your brain’s doing, that interfering with the brain can interfere with your consciousness, etc. If it’s some magical independent thing, how does that happen?)
Is it question begging to say is fundamental?
Are they?If you take (eg) matter and space as both fundamental, are you then unable to explain the complex relationships between them?
It could be. For instance, imagine someone (years ago) wondering why and how things burn. Let’s suppose that this was before there was a really good scientific account of burning. Then they might say “Conventional science has failed; we should therefore adopt my theory instead. My theory says that there is a fundamental property of things, called their flammability; things burn readily when their flammability is high. Burning consists of turning things with high flammability into things with low flammability.” That would be question-begging, in relation to explaining burning, in roughly the same way as taking consciousness as fundamental is question-begging in relation to explaining consciousness.
I suppose it could in principle turn out that consciousness is fundamental. (Being question-begging is a defect in an argumentative move; the proposition(s) one asserts in the process might still be correct.) But the fact that we don’t have anything close to a complete physical explanation of consciousness cannot be a good reason for thinking that consciousness is fundamental; there would have to be other reasons, if someone were to be rationally convinced that consciousness is fundamental.
(A sufficiently complete and sustained failure to find physical explanations for consciousness might be sufficient reason for provisionally taking consciousness as fundamental. But as I’ve already said elsewhere in this thread, that isn’t in fact the epistemic situation we find ourselves in.)
They seem to be; at any rate I’ve never heard any sort of explanation, starting with “consciousness as fundamental” premises, that gives any inkling of how those relationships might come about.
As for matter and space: in order to do justice to the relationships between them, physicists don’t exactly take them as separate fundamental things. But that’s a quibble, indeed, a sufficiently detailed theory about what consciousness does and how it relates to the other things known to science might in principle explain those intricate relationships. But it turns out that people wanting to take consciousness as fundamental never actually have such detailed theories, or proposals for how such theories might be found, or any sign of being interested in finding such theories. This is getting into territory I’ve already commented on elsewhere in the thread, though, so I’ll leave it there.
Question beggingness is an inherent property of arguments: it shouldn;t depend on external factors.
There have been bad explanations (NB explanations aren’t arguments) of the form “X is fundamental”, some physicalist, some not. There have also been good ones. They can’t all be bad because they are question begging: if one is question-begging, all are, but not all are bad. What makes them bad or good is other, complex factors
Again: would that apply to all “X is fundamental” arguments?
That is a matter of judgment.
Those would be the factors that make the posit that consciousness is fundamental (part of) a good explanation. We don’t have a good dualist explanation; many think we don;t have a good physicalist explanation either.
But the point remains that dualist (or, as I prefer, intrinsicist) explanations can’t written off apriori. The devil’s oin the details.
Don’t they? What’s the space-time- matter energy unification theory?
It’s an intrinsic property of arguments in contexts. Specifically, whether something is question-begging depends on what one’s trying to prove.
Indeed explanations aren’t arguments. The arguments we’re talking about are ones of the form “Theory X is better than theory Y because it explains alleged facts F better”. Merely saying “Consciousness (or whatever) is fundamental” is of course not question-begging. But if the existence, or some property, of consciousness is one of the alleged facts F, and if theory X simply postulates whatever property it is of consciousness, then a question is being begged.
I don’t claim to be able to contemplate all imaginable arguments that say things are fundamental. But, in general, claiming that something’s fundamental and just happens to have the properties it’s known to have is a pretty weak move; and saying “Look, I’ve now given an explanation of whatever-it-is, so I’m doing better than you stupid people who are still looking for more complicated explanations” is invalid.
I’m afraid I don’t understand. Would you care to say a little more.
“Matter” isn’t a first-class citizen in modern physics. There are a bunch of quantum fields, and things that happen to those fields produce the effects we call matter. (And other things that happen to those fields produce actually-quite-similar effects that we generally don’t call matter, such as physical forces.) “Space” isn’t quite a first-class citizen either; spacetime is; its geometry is determined by the matter-and-similar-stuff in it. I wouldn’t say that space and matter (or spacetime and mass/energy) are exactly unified; my rather noncommital language (“don’t exactly take them as separate fundamental things”) was deliberate.
A formal argument will include a conclusion. If that is the same as one of its premises, a question is being begged.
I don’t see that that is the case. The rather informal argument you gave mentions facts being explained better. Simply positing things is better than not explaining them at all, but not as good explaining them parsimoniously, without additional posits.
Yes—in general. But it is not invariably invalid, as formal question-begging is.
A novel ontological posit can be part of a good expanation. Examples tend to be complicated.
Neither would I.
Ontological fundamentals are going to be rather useless if they don’t relate to each other at all...and they are not going to be fundamentals. plural, if they relate too closely. So that is to be expected.
Sure, but most arguments—including in particular many of the sort this discussion was originally about—are not formalized. Specifically, theistic or supernaturalist arguments based on consciousness, morality and free will generally leave most of their premises unstated and most of their steps implicit. Accordingly, the appropriate notion of question-begging needs to be generalized slightly. I suppose you might prefer to use some other term for the logical flaw I’m complaining about: what’s being assumed is not necessarily exactly what they set out to prove, but some other thing that stands in about as much need of proof, and for much the same reasons, as what they’re purporting to prove.
See, here’s where we disagree. I think simply positing things is worse than just leaving them unexplained, unless either (1) there’s some actual reason to think they need simply positing, or (2) they’re posited in a way that actually leads to useful predictions (and those predictions don’t get refuted).
In epistemology, positing that there’s an external world with which our experience is somewhat correlated is useful because of #1; if you don’t make such an assumption then you simply can’t get started.
In physics, positing electrons (or the quantum field from which they arise, or whatever) is useful because of #2; what you’re positing has precisely defined behaviour which lets you deduce all kinds of true things.
But how does positing consciousness as fundamental help you in either respect? And, if it doesn’t, how does it help at all? It seems to me that it just serves to discourage you for looking for better explanations.
Well, there’s an interesting rhetorical move. I say “X is a pretty weak move, and Y is invalid”. You quote only the first half and say “But it’s not invariably invalid”. Bah.
Of course. Perhaps it wasn’t clear what I was asking. You said “Those would be the factors that …” but I can’t tell what things you were referring to; you said “a good explanation” but I can’t tell what good explanation. (And I’m not sure whether when you said “make” you actually meant “hypothetically might make” or “actually do make”. The latter seems like the obvious meaning but then surely you owe us some more information about this alleged good explanation.)
I don’t see the problem. I was trying to emphasise that question begging is not the right diagnosis of the problem.
Yep. As above.
You’re not distingusihing the cases where the posit is part of a theory and where it isn’t. Where we have a theory, we can test it. We don’t have a satisfactory dualist or physicalistic theory. So what is going on at this stage is not really theorisation,. but speculation about the form a theory should take.
As I indicated, that is difficult to answer succintly. I think the posit of colour charge works within QCD, but saying what is good about QCD is like summarising Proust.
I think we’re failing to communicate, because that distinction is an important part of what I’m getting at. The proponents of consciousness-as-fundamental show no sign of having any interest in making consciousness into part of a theory that’s any use, and that’s part of what I think is wrong with what they’re saying.
You seem not to be willing to try to answer at all. You won’t say what you meant, you won’t say whether you think there’s a useful theory that includes consciousness as a fundamental phenomenon, you hint vaguely that there might be such a theory and it might have some explanatory power but you won’t say what it might look like or how it might do its explaining. You say “those would be the factors that do X” and then refuse to say just what “those” are or anything about how they do X.
How is it possible to have a meaningful discussion on these terms?
As I pointed out, physicalists don’t have a solution to the Hard Problem either. You say they are trying and dualists aren’t, but you offer no evidence.
That is because it is difficult. As I said.
I’m sorry, but I’m just not saying the things you think I am saying. What I said was:
“what is going on at this stage is not really theorisation,. but speculation about the form a theory should take”
ETA
The point is not that dualism is true and physicalism false. The point was only ever that dualism is not as obviously false as sometimes made out.
Evidence that physicalists have been trying: books like Dennett’s “Consciousness explained” and Edelman’s “Neural Darwinism” and Koch’s “The quest for consciousness” and so forth, all putting forward hypotheses about what physical goings-on give rise to consciousness and how.
Evidence that dualists aren’t trying (more specifically, not trying to do more than just say “Consciousness is fundamental, and that’s all there is to it” or something else that similarly tries to take credit for solving the problem without doing the work): I’m not sure what sort of evidence I could present. All I can say is that I’ve so far not seen any sign that dualists are trying, or have any interest in doing so.
Well, I do keep asking you to clarify your meaning—and you keep replying by saying things like “That is because it is difficult”. I decline to take the blame for not understanding you if you aren’t prepared to try to be understood.
I haven’t been claiming that dualism is obviously false. I’ve been claiming that some things offered as evidence for dualism (or for more complicated sets of ideas that involve dualism) are rotten evidence.
Evidence that dualists are trying...
..not to forget The Conscious Mind (400+ pages)
I haven’t read Chalmers’s book, but so far as I can tell from reading about it it doesn’t in fact offer the sort of thing I’m complaining dualists aren’t trying to do. Is that wrong? If so, where in the book—I have a copy on my overflowing to-be-read shelves—should I look to find an attempt, or at least some work heading towards an attempt, to offer an actual explanation of why the relationship between consciousness and physical stuff is the way it is? (Note: simply saying “there are bridging laws that make that relationship what it is” is not an explanation, nor anything like one; but if Chalmers has something more substantial to offer then I’m all ears.)
[EDITED a minute or two after posting; I’d forgotten that I do actually have a copy of Chalmers’s book. It’s been sat in my read-this-some-time pile for about the last 10 years, though. Note: “10 years” is literal, not rhetorical. I went to Amazon to see how much it would cost if I wanted to buy it and Amazon kindly put up a note saying “You purchased this in 2001.”]
If you are looking for a completely satisfactory explanation of consc. you are not going to find it the dualist literature or the physicalist literature. I don’t see there is much else I can add. If you want to know what Chalmer’s book says, you have to read it yourself. Alternatively, you could become less inclined to come to strong conclusions about ideas you are not familiar with. EIther way it is up to you. I am not particularly selling dualism myself.
That’s one of the very bad things about philosophy. Nobody tells you “if you want to understand general relativity, read Einstein’s papers”—it has been rehashed and cut into parts and explained in various ways and accompanied with exercises and summed up or stretched out and put into a bunch of textbooks. Nobody tells you “if you want to know what Nozick thought about libertarianism, go read his book”—just grab the summary and commentary on ESR or Faré′s websites.
Equally, the OP could read WP articles, amazon reviews, etc. (And Chalmer’s book itself contains summaries of much foregoing mind-body phil.).
The thing is he is claiming that dualists are making no efforts to explain: but they are[*], he is just making no effort to find out what they are saying.
[*] Dualist phils. have no miraculous way of rising through the academic ranks whilst publishing nothing.
Me:
You:
I do wish you wouldn’t do that.
Clearly that’s true for some definitions of “what C’s book says” and false for others. On the other hand, if what I actually want to know is whether C’s book contains a particular sort of thing then it seems obviously reasonable to ask whether you’ve got any suggestions for where in it I should look.
What particular strong conclusions do you have in mind? And what ideas are they about with which you think I’m unfamiliar?
That dualists aren’t interested in explaining consc, for some value of “explaining consc” where by physicalists are interested.
eg. the ones in TCM.
So I had a look at the first five things linked from the first of those pages.
A dissertation by Aryanosi. Not available online so far as I can tell. Aryanosi does not in fact appear to be a dualist; at least, looking for other work of his the first thing I found was a paper offering an argument for the thesis that the mind is identical with the brain. Excerpt: “This brings me to the argument I would like to put forward, to the conclusion that the doctrine of naturalistic dualism is probabilistically incoherent, and that physicalism, in the form of the identity thesis, is the likeliest candidate for the mental-physical relation.” I did also find a chapter of his dissertation online. It’s concerned with Chalmers’s zombie argument, and argues that it’s unsound.
A paper on gallium arsenide nanowires. It seems unlikely that this has anything to say about dualism. I have no idea what it’s doing on that page.
A paper whose filename is whyiamnotadualist.pdf. Presumably its author is not a dualist.
Looks like another version of the same paper.
Not available online. I can’t tell from the abstract whether the author is a dualist, but it doesn’t appear to be either defending dualism or attempting to construct a theory of how dualism might “work”.
So that seems to be 0 for 5. This doesn’t encourage me to read on and check more. What makes you regard it as “evidence that dualists are trying”? Evidence that some people are writing about dualism, yes, but that’s not the same thing at all. To save me wading through every link there, is there anything there that actually (1) is by a dualist and (2) offers the sort of thing I was complaining dualists don’t do?
The physical world, as an explanation, clearly has more prior probability than the physical world plus fundamental consciousness. (And that seems like a more realistic form of the question. I have yet to see anyone, even those who like to link modern physics with consciousness, actually replace part of the first theory with a new assumption about fundamental consciousness.)
Posterior probability (meaning the amount of belief you should give to each theory after you look at all the evidence, r_claypool) seems trickier. Dualist philosophers might argue that when we fail to logically derive consciousness from the assumption of a physical world, that counts as evidence for dualism. But as gjm suggests, mainstream dualism doesn’t seem to change our expectations about certain matters. In particular, it does not tell us when or in what situations a physical process leads to conscious experience. You’d have to describe those situations in ways a physicalist like me could agree with, and add that to our scientific picture of the world along with whatever assumptions dualism entails. On the face of it we can drop the last part and have a simpler theory.
My rant on taking the description of when consciousness happens as an additional law of reality got too long. Suffice it to say, that also seems wrong to me epistemologically.
Matter/energy are NOT inexplicable fundamentals. We have studied them, and can explain them in terms of photons, quarks, quantum wave functions, etc. These things may yet be ineffable, but Science only has inexplicables AFTER it has tried as hard as it can to explain. They did not START with the axioms “matter, and energy are inexplicable”, even though they once were, and your example of dualists doing that is the exact core of the flawed reasoning of dualism. We cannot explain something, therefore we call it inexplicable, rather than trying to actually explain it.
Quarks are made of matter/energy, not vice versa.
Note that it is not logically impossible to reductively explain everything in terms of nothing.
How do you know it has reached the point of “having tried as hard as it can”? Science certainly has tried to explain mind. Physicalists judge that more trying is needed; dualists judge that the “as hard as it can” point has been reached. Since no one can say in a definite, quantitive way where the point is, it remains a legitmiately a matter of personal judgment.
Science can never be assumed to have tried as hard as it can; it’s always possible that some new information will come along and explain something that wasn’t explained before. So if you’re thinking scientifically, the appropriate notion isn’t “inexplicable” but “not explained as yet”.
Anyone—dualist or otherwise—who says “OK, we’ve done enough now; time to give up” is engaged in thoroughly unscientific thinking. Since scientific thinking demonstrably works well, that’s probably a bad thing.
(The above leaves some space for a sort of provisional dualism. You could say “So far, no physical explanation of consciousness is apparent. So we might as well treat it as an independent thing until such time as a physical explanation comes along.” That would be fine if we had no information at all about the relationship between consciousness and matter. But in fact we do have some information. We have evidence that particular aspects of consciousness are related to particular bits of the brain and particular things the brain does. We have partial explanations, where some things about consciousness have somewhat-handwavy explanations in physical terms. And we have a long history of trying out non-physicalist hypotheses about things—gods and ghosts and vital spirits and so forth—and finding them, again and again, smashed to bits once knowledge advances far enough for them to come into contact with reality.)
So were the cases where, as a matter of fact, science has posited a new property or force (spin, colour charge, etc) illegitimate?
We have evidence that the N fundamentals of physics nonetheless interrelate.
ETA
Many explanations in terms of “let’s say it is fundamental” have failed, but that does not mean the correct number of fundamentals is 0.
I have no idea why you’re asking me that. That is: I see no reason why what you’re commenting on gives any reason to think I might answer yes to it.
Yup. And the richness of their interrelations is what makes it appropriate to classify them all as part of the same physical reality; and the level of detail in our ideas about those fundamentals is (part of) what makes our thinking about them scientific. So far, every attempt at postulating consciousness as fundamental has entirely failed to specify how consciousness relates to everything else (a cynic might surmise that this is because the people doing it want to be careful to avoid saying anything refutable, since they know they haven’t taken the measures necessary to make it unlikely that they’d then get refuted). If those details were filled in—which is part of what it would take to make sense of the observed relationship between consciousness and brains—then “consciousness”, even if still fundamental, would cease to be properly regarded as non-physical, and would become a fit subject for further scientific investigation. That would be an interesting outcome, but I don’t expect it ever to happen, because I think what people saying “let’s take consciousness as fundamental” want above all else is to keep scientific thinking away from the topic.
Of course it doesn’t. (It’s not clear that 0 is even possible.) But any time you propose that some high-level thing—minds, life, etc. -- is fundamental, it’s a reasonable guess that you’re making a mistake; so far every attempt at doing that seems to have been wrong. (Whereas it’s not true that every attempt at postulating anything as fundamental has failed.)
That’s a much better version of the anti-intrinsicism argument: it would be strange if you had a few fundamental things at the bottom of the stack,then a whole bunch of reducible things in the middle,and then suddenly another irreducible thing.
I was asking that since it seemed to me that the argument you were making against consc. being fundamental would apply,if it aplies at all, to positing anything else as fundamental.
I couldn’t agree more. That is why I prefer the term “intrinsicism” to “dualism”. There could be any number of things wrong with dualism/intrinsicism aposteriori. I am just saying that intrinsicism should not be ruled out apriori just for being intrinsicism.
It would apply to claiming that anything else is fundamental. Not necessarily to taking it, provisionally, as fundamental. My impression of those who talk about making consciousness fundamental is that they are generally not doing so provisionally with the hope that later on something will be found that’s more genuinely fundamental. I think that proposing something as vague and as complicated as consciousness as a fundamental element of reality is such a desperate move that anyone doing it really ought to be hoping for something simpler to be found underlying it.