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"The mind is material" seems like a funny hypothesis to me, given the massive unknowns in quantum theory --- we don't even know what "material" is fundamentally
by manjushri 9y ago
"The mind is material" seems like a funny hypothesis to me, given the massive unknowns in quantum theory --- we don't even know what "material" is fundamentally.
- hyperpape 9y agoThis is a pretty good question, but there's a standard trick to answer it. You don't define "material" directly, you just say either: 1) Whatever physics studies is material. 2) Whatever makes something material, atoms, quarks, and those other subatomic particles are material. By "material", we just mean whatever the ultimate theory of those things says they have in common. Neither of these responses guarantees that "material" is a meaningful concept. If panpsychism is true[0], then everything is somehow conscious, and you may no longer have a reasonable criterion for materiality. For more context, you might try the Stanford encyclopedia article on physicalism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/. [0] Sadly, there are very talented contemporary philosophers who believe in panpsychism.
- skosch 9y agoWhy sadly?
- Erlangolem 9y agoIt’s always sad when people choose to believe in what they want, rather than what they have evidence for. I want to be loved by a god and live forever, but that doesn’t make me believe in any of that. I find it hard to ignore the pattern of people injecting the same old beliefs with new language into whatever narrowing gaps exist in current theories. No one ever goes and actually finds the teapot, they just try to come up with more esoteric ways of defining it. I think that’s sad too.
- learnstats2 9y agoWhy is that sad though? Are you saddened by it? Are they unhappy via these beliefs? Or are you saddened by your inability to believe things you cannot directly evidence? This last point does seem like a poor way to live - for example, I have never really known how to evidence that the world is round, but I'm happy to take other people's word for it, apply it to what is useful to me, and to not worry about it.
- Erlangolem 9y agoI’m definitely saddened by my inability to believe in what no evidence exists to suggest is real, and I’m not being sarcastic. I’m sure that life would be less stressful if I could contextualize it in terms of spiritual meaning. What I was referring to in my comment is sadness at what I see a waste of talent going down well worn roads of thought, when there are new and exciting horizons in front of us. QM opens the possibility of a universe unlike anything our human expectations and intuition suggest, and produces testable theories. Science has been the most successful method of inquiry and testing in human history, and yet so many want to take only sips from its cup because they don’t like what it has to say about our lives, our significance, and place in the universe. By the way, if you ever want to prove to yourself that the world is round, it’s quite easy. On a clear day, look to the horizon. Now climb the tallest tree or structure near you and look again. You can see further than before! Ergo the earth is spheroid and not flat.
- manjushri 9y ago>Science has been the most successful method of inquiry and testing in human history, and yet so many want to take only sips from its cup because they don’t like what it has to say about our lives, our significance, and place in the universe What does "science" say about our lives and our place in the universe?
- Erlangolem 9y agoIt says we’re a speck among a potentially infinite array of specks.
- 9y ago
- cgmg 9y agoWhat does this have to do with panpsychism? The contents of your comment lead me to suspect you didn't even know what panpsychism was when you wrote it.
- Erlangolem 9y agoWhy do you think that? Is what I said inconsistent with a rejection of the “conscious rock” concept? Even if you did believe that, you’ve phrased your post in such a way that meaningful conversation is impossible, and any refutation would ring hollow. Very, “Did you beat your wife today?”
- skosch 9y agoI agree with all of your posts above, and personally relate to both your sadness of being unable to believe and your sadness of seeing time wasted on fairy-tale nonsense. That being said, the concept of panpsychism has merit insofar as it generalizes the idea that "consciousness may simply be what computation feels like from the inside". This, in my opinion, is an idea worth exploring – you don't need to take "conscious rock" woo-woo literally to wonder about substrate independence, different types of physicalism and emergence, etc. If the apparent absurdity of panpsychism can shock people into questioning our human gatekeeping tendencies around what consciousness is, then perhaps panpsychism is doing it's job fine.
- cgmg 9y ago> Why do you think that? Your comment implies philosophers think panpsychism is true because it brings them "comfort" (i.e. your example "I want to be loved by a god and live forever"), which is a ridiculous claim you haven't provided any evidence for. If you are going to accuse someone, especially a professional philosopher, of basing their views on pure wishful thinking, you better be damn sure you can back that up. Your comment also claims panpsychism is "injecting the same old beliefs (?) with new language (?) into whatever narrowing gaps (?) exist in current theories". What is this even supposed to mean?
- cgmg 9y ago> Sadly, there are very talented contemporary philosophers who believe in panpsychism. What saddens you about this?
- hyperpape 9y agoI think that panpsychism is one of a handful of views in contemporary philosophy that ought to be treated as a reductio, but have truly brilliant proponents who have convinced the profession to giving those positions more time than they are due. To clarify, panpsychism is still a very small minority position.
- cgmg 9y agoWhy do you think panpsychism "ought to be treated as a reductio"? Why do you believe panpsychism deserves less time than it receives?
- hackinthebochs 9y agoI'm not the OP, but I think the problems with panpsychism are that 1. it creates more problems than it solves (the combination problem and its sub-problems), 2. it's anti-parsimonious, 3. it follows a poor track record of philosophers assuming the mysterious thing in question is fundamental (i.e. ontologically basic) and being proven wrong. Don't know why people insist on making that same mistake.
- danielam 9y agoFair point, but historically, there have been metaphysical accounts of matter that continue to exercise their influence on the sciences and scientists (sometimes to their detriment). For example, Descartes defined material objects as extended things that are devoid of properties like color (which, for example, in physics are redefined in terms of things that are considered properties of matter, with what can't be accounted for in those terms relegated to the mind). Few physicists or biologists can explain to you what Cartesian metaphysics proposes, and few if any appeal to it in any explicit sense, but the legacy is insinuated in the modern scientific tradition, though it is not essential to science per se. This is the reason why scientists, perhaps biologists in particular, are uncomfortable or plainly hostile to the idea of teleology (though many of them misunderstand what it is by conflating it with intent). Teleology was in no way disproved historically by philosophers like Descartes, it was merely dismissed or relegated to immaterial minds. Materialism, as I have encountered it as a philosophical position, has been a position that takes Cartesian dualism and drops the immaterial mind from it, leaving us with only the Cartesian account of matter. This position has been shown to be unworkable because now it is impossible to account for all of those things that have been swept under the rug of the immaterial mind. That's why Dennett takes an eliminativist position that simply denies that those things we've been sweeping under the rug exist at all. It's a cop out move because it denies the existence of those things it cannot explain. The sounder move is to revise one's presuppositions. For this reason, I don't think these are really the best books on the subject, esp. for someone interested in getting a lay of the land and a rudimentary understanding of the subject matter. The best introductory book I've come across in this regard is E. Feser's "The Philosophy of Mind"[0]. [0] https://books.google.com/books/about/Philosophy_of_Mind.html?id=5uHbngEACAAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/Philosophy_of_Mind.html...
- edanm 9y agoBy that logic, I can't say "this brick is material" either, because we don't know what "material" is. But really that's just arguing over words and definitions. We know what we mean when we say material (certain properties and behaviors), and as far as I know, we have just as much reason to think that a brick is material as that a mind if material. We don't need to understand literally everything to be able to make predictions about how things behave.
- manjushri 9y agoI can show you a brick. Can you show me a mind?
- johnchristopher 9y agoWill you be showing a compressed piece of clay and straws or some kind of rectangular piece of concrete ?
- manjushri 9y agoCould you point to the difference?
- hatchback176 9y agoWhy is the 'or' exclusive?
- tebugst 9y agoThis is irrelevant. You don't have to show brick every time. We say sugar is sweet. No body experience how sweet is defined by other. Still we all believe it is sweet.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- edanm 9y ago
- nanopeace 9y agoWould you care to elaborate? The mind consists of atoms and molecules. All of the physics relevant to chemistry is known [0]. [0] 10.1021/cr200042e
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cgmg 9y ago> The mind consists of atoms and molecules. This is a type error. It's like saying the number 3 is made of atoms and molecules, or Wednesday is made of atoms and molecules.
- hyperpape 9y agoYou're gonna have to say a lot more to not beg the question here.
- manjushri 9y agoWhat question? It seems pretty clear what they are saying: the concept of mind is a social contruct, metaphorical, a figure of speech rather than a figure of physical reality.
- mr_toad 9y agoThe concept of a mind is not the same as an instance of a particular mind, any more than a algorithm is the same as a running process, or the idea of 3 is the same as a set of logic gates designed to represent a 3 in binary. Mistaking our own internal representation of our own mind (our consciousness) for our actual mind is what Dennit is arguing against.
- roywiggins 9y agoIt means it's material in the same way a computer chip is material, or your spleen is material, and there's nothing "special" happening that can't, in principle, be explained by the same physical laws that govern everything else.
- manjushri 9y ago>there's nothing "special" happening that can't, in principle, be explained by the same physical laws that govern everything else. How about dark matter and social dynamics?
- roywiggins 9y agoEven if our brains run on dark matter, or spooky quantum shenanigans, such explanations are still fundamentally materialistic, because they're still physical interactions that can be interrogated approximately the same way we interrogate how muscle fiber works or whatever. As to social dynamics, well, that's like trying to explain the behavior of bulk matter or ensembles of things generally. The tools we use are quite different from explaining the behavior of atoms, but we're pretty sure that one way or another, the behavior of a rod of steel is determined more or less entirely by the fundamental particles/fields/stuff that make it up. There's nothing spooky about a bar of steel even though it behaves completely differently than the quarks and electrons it's made of. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains it better: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/
- manjushri 9y ago>they're still physical interactions that can be interrogated approximately the same way we interrogate how muscle fiber works or whatever Newtonian physics fail to explain quantum phenomenon.
- cygx 9y agoWhich is probably not relevant for the problem at hand: I would be surprised if brains were able to maintain quantum coherence, which means quantum effects will effectively reduce to classical probabilities...
- szemet 9y agoThis is a known dilemma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempel%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempel%27s_dilemma
- dqpb 9y agoThis is dumb. It completely ignores things like information and computation.
- zerostar07 9y agomaterial is a word Quantum theory has little to do with how neurons behave - they work at different levels. Current evidence would suggest it doesn't play any role other than tiny random fluctuations in computations, just like in any other micro-system.
- dqpb 9y agoI think it's a misnomer to say the mind is material. From my limited understanding of the brain, my concept of the mind is this: - The brain is a computer and the computer is material - The brain executes software, and the software is grown/encoded as neural networks - The state of the running instance(s) of the software is the current action potential of every neuron - Both the software and the state encode information - The information can represent things that are real, unreal, consistent, inconsistent, etc. - The information is abstract and immaterial, but stored in a physical and dynamic system - The flow of information is tolerant of faults and noise in the underlying physical neural network. A failure of a small percentage of connections does not prevent the information from flowing through the system - The information is not dependent on the precise physical network, but rather on the virtual network composed of many redundant connections Therefore, I think the mind is: - information - encoded in a virtual network - built on many redundant physical neural connections - produced and supported by the brain