So, what do you want to conclude?
Math is a human invention. It is also true that the behavior of nature can be explained mathematically. Math has two main branches, namely applied and pure, in which only the applied part has application in science, most importantly, physics. The domain of math is just so wide that it is not a coincidence that the behavior of nature can be explained mathematically.
Doesn’t this simply mean that humans and other life-forms are not fully determinable in terms of physical laws? And isn’t that an argument against physicalism?
The fact that life is not fully determined by physicals laws doesn’t mean that it operates in isolation from them. Life is obviously physical in some respects, but not so in others. The problem then is, if not physical, then what are the alternatives?
My conclusion is that math is inextricably tied to the universe at a basic level, because if it were not there should be no good reason that math should be applicable for so accurately describing physical reality.
Wigner specifically stated that in many cases applied math started out as pure math, i.e. concepts invented by mathematicians without practical use just because they thought they were cute, to only later be discovered to have fundamental ties to the universe. If math really were only a human invention as opposed to a human discovery, one would expect that mathematical concepts invented solely because of their cuteness would remain pure mathematics.
Do you know how this is done?
I already discussed this. The domain of math is just so wide.
You read my arguments in the reverse of the manner I intended, i.e. I intended to say not that physical laws are not applicable to life, but rather the opposite — that the same physical laws apply to all life, whether human or sea urchin.
My conclusion is that life itself is physical, including consciousness, since there is no way to truly isolate consciousness from the physical, that everything points against the idea of the ‘ghost in the machine’, that everything we know from biology points at the mind being the product of neurons communicating with one another as part of an embodied existence.
What do you mean here? Are you misreading my use of “tied”, as if I were intending on meaning that ‘something does the tying’ (which is not what I intended by that)?
So in essence your argument is “math is so broad that something will ultimately stick, somehow”?
But then, what about mathematical theories such as special relativity, which Richard Hamming argues that Einstein effectively came up with entirely from math, with very little experimental or observational input, and the math ‘just worked’? If this were simply a matter of “some kind of math will stick, no matter what”, this kind of thing simply should be extremely unlikely to work as it did.
But the point at issue is whether organisms can be reduced to, or explained in terms of, physical laws. You do understand that this is called physicalism or physicalist reductionism, right?
(Also humans are not ‘posited to have minds.’ That humans are able to speak and exercise reason while simple inverterbrates cannot is plainly an empirical statement.)
And this is why I will continue to insist that your thinking is characterised by a false dilemma, ‘either physical or mental’. You see the two domains as exhaustive and exclusive. To challenge the proposition that ‘everything is physical’ is to necessarily introduce vitalism or metaphysics. You can only consider it in those terms.
But you’re in an awkward position, because you recognise that mathematics cannot be so reduced. The ‘solution’, then, such as it is, is that we might be living in a game or a simulation, which I can hardly credit as a philosophical argument.
You use “physicalist reductionism” as if it were a dirty word here.
Fundamentally, my view about consciousness is that consciousness is an emergent property arising from complex neural processes with an embodied existence in which they dynamically interact with a physical world. In this view, there is no need to posit a separate metaphysical quantity of a ‘mind’, because the brain with its ongoing electrochemical processes and neural connections as situated in the body is the mind.
I mean, how does nature behave in a certain way that can be formulated mathematically?
How is it done otherwise if there is no entity in charge?
I am saying that math is so broad that it accommodates physical laws.
It is interesting to read this article on mass-energy equivalence, especially the history.
That’s an assertion, or a statement of conviction, not an argument for its truth. You generally state it as if it were obvious and then object if it is questioned.
My argument for it follows from what I stated earlier — there is no reason to believe from a biological standpoint that the human mind is ‘special’, and the fact that the physical directly impacts the inner workings of the mind and vice versa (e.g. they have made brain-computer interfaces where people who are ‘locked-in’ are capable of consciously controlling a computer) makes the position of there being a ‘ghost in the machine’ untenable.
So then, if the brain is purely material, if we reject dualism and forms of idealism where ‘everything is consciousness’, how do we derive consciousness from it? How do we get consciousness from the material? The obvious way to do so is that consciousness is emergent upon the sum of the neurological processes of the brain, as it exists in an embodied fashion (to avoid arguments as to that AI is equivalent to human consciousness despite not being embodied), so as to become more than merely its physical basis.
This is just like how the ability to execute instructions in an instruction set is emergent upon the electronics of a computer, such that the world of instructions and memory addresses is seemingly divorced from underlying electric currents and charges. Similarly, our consciousnesses are divorced from neurons’ physical connections and action potentials, such that we do not consciously think in those terms.
It should be noted that you and I have an inside view of our consciousnesses, as we are our brains, so our own consciousnesses seem ‘special’ to us, which may be part of why philosophers have long been flummoxed by the concept of ‘consciousness’ and have been frequently tempted to privilege it.
But it’s not an argument, it’s a value statement! The human brain is demonstrably the most complex naturally-occuring phenomenon known to science. Nothing you say, think or write would even exist, except by virtue of the abilities that the brain gives you. And the fact that life, in general and human life, in particular, is ‘special’ is attested by the fact of the laws concerning humane treatment of animals and safeguarding the rights of humans, which are recognised as being distinct in every speech-act by the use of personal pronouns. Furthermore, as I’ve observed already, it appears to the best of our knowledge that the Earth is the only life-bearing planet we’ve been able to detect with our vastly powerful instruments. So how can the human mind not be regarded as ‘special’? What are you ignoring about it to make such a statement? It’s the fact that life itself is an anomaly to physicalism, which you are then forced to deny by claiming that it’s no different from matter in motion. But that claim is transparently incorrect.
That it sounds obvious to you is again no argument it’s favour. What, exactly, does ‘emergent’ mean? That a bear emerges from a cave after hibernation can only be because it was asleep there during the winter. ‘Emergence’ is simply another perspective on ‘reduction’, which is the basis of physicalism. ‘You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules’ said Francis Crick, a canonical statement of materialism. But the issue with that is that all of these are value-statements masquerading as so-called ‘scientific facts’. Which is all physicalism can ever be.
I would turn that right around. My argument is that the physical sciences have a blind spot about the nature of consciousness, because it can’t be seen ‘from the outside’. The reality of consciousness is not objective, it appears as the subject to whom the ostensible facts of science appear. This is all laid out in an Aeon essay called The Blind Spot of Science is the Neglect of Human Experience, also subsequently published as a book.
‘Emergent’ refers to a greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts abstraction that supervenes on a substrate.
For instance, the physical universe being based on math involves complex behavior being emergent upon simple mathematics-based laws.
Likewise, human consciousness involves complex behavior being emergent upon the biological substrate of neurons, neural connections, and action potentials.
The difference between reductionism and emergence is that reductionism is the viewpoint downwards towards basic physical laws, whereas emergence is the viewpoint upwards towards layers of abstraction.
Emergence only implies reductionism because it is a way of deriving complex behavior from simple behavior without privileging certain parts of the world.
However, emergent behavior is more than just its substrate, in that you can easily derive complex behavior that is not obvious if you just look at its substrate in isolation.
I would say that physicalist reductionism has a blind spot about the nature of consciousness, but just because ones does not believe in mind-body dualism or everything-is-consciousness idealism does not mean one believes in physicalist reductionism.
For instance, you accuse me of being a physicalist reductionist because I happen to believe that at one layer of reality everything is in terms of physical laws, because I largely reject non-mathematical idealism and dualism outside of potentially some forms of Platonic dualism as I mentioned earlier.
However, I strongly believe in emergent behavior where higher layers of abstraction are greater than the sum of their parts, and where these higher layers cannot necessarily be trivially derived from the layers beneath them.
To me this makes your criticisms less pertinent, because you seem to wield the label of ‘physicalist reductionism’ with a very broad brush, such that you so label things which it is not properly applicable with it.
Or doesn’t compute.
Maybe it’s the computer that’s at fault rather than the intelligent designer.
I didn 't intend it as an accusation, so much as a description of a philosophical attitude, based on statements such as the above. But then, the possibility of other layers of reality is left open, maybe not!
Perhaps because at this point it’s no longer reductionist. So, thanks for spelling that out. However at the end of the day, your view remains monistic, right? That there’s only matter (although nowadays that turns out to be matter-energy as a consequence of the discovery of e=mc2).
This is reasonable, given what I take to be your assumptions. But what does “material” mean ? Why do we trust mathematical models in the first place ?
I’d say because they help predict and control what we can see and hear. The stuff we can see and hear and smell and touch is the “genuinely” physical. The obscure mathematical physicality of philosophers contemplating science is something else.
Two questions leap out for me. What is seeing and hearing and smelling ? What is perception ? Is the ice cream cone in my hand an “internal image” ? If so, then science is meaningless. Because observations are “internal images.” The irony for me is that many “physicalist” theories ( not saying yours) turn out to be the very idealism they oppose. First the “everyday world” becomes “mental stuff” and then the “real world” becomes the “mental stuff” in the “meaning” of the “mathematical physical.”
What is forgotten is the typical experience of two people agreeing that there is a red couch in the room, or that the thermometer says 72 F. The only “physical brain” that I find plausible is the one I expect to see if a human skull is opened. That’s the same seen brain that is supposed to generate itself as a “useful illusion.” A self-creating useful illusion ? And consciousness-as-stuff is a ghost story.
You seem to be deliberately reaching for a different definition of ‘special’ here. Special, in the context of dualism/physicalism discussions, means that humans operate under different laws of physics than everything else in the universe. That’s what is meant by @tabemann finding no reason to believe 'that the human mind is ‘special’.
Surely you must know this, and yet you deliberately detract by replying as if a different definition was meant.
The possibility of a teapot orbiting beyond Jupiter is also left open, but the simpler model seems sufficient.
I have no idea about the relevance of what appears to be a reference to a faulty computer used in a simulation. I brought up simulation because it’s one of the multiverse types, and not one that solves the fine tuning argument.
I don’t think any of them do that. Such theories (unlike idealism) separate phenomena from noumena.
Precisely — that is what I meant by stating that I had no reason to believe that the human mind is ‘special’.
“Special” means “special”! The pernicious consequences of physicalism are precisely that humans and other living beings can be understood in terms of physics. Physicalism is a ‘flat’ ontology which reduces all difference between levels of being to the movements of so-called fundamental entities (which in themselves are hardly to be regarded as physical any more.) Mathematics and logic are instrumental in defining physics, so how is it that they can be seen as a result of physics?
Notice this statement in the original post:
When challenged as to ‘what version of monism’ accomodates the idea that physical reality is mathematical, the response was that perhaps we’re living in a computer simulation. And I say that doesn’t even rise to the level of philosophy.
The geneaology of physicalism is not hard to identify. It treats ‘the laws of physics’ as being like ‘divine law’, the immutable will of God, except now in the absence of God. But if you understand the history of the subject the lineage of the idea is obvious.
About “perhaps we’re living in a computer simulation”, that is something that is possible (in that we cannot rule it out, as we humans ourselves can easily construct our own simulated worlds) but unfalsifiable (as it is trivially possible to have a simulation in which you cannot see that you’re in a simulation). I was simply saying that we have no real way of knowing how far down things truly go, that there may be knowledge about the roots of the world which is simply inaccessible to us humans.
About “the laws of physics” and “divine law”, the matter is that we fundamentally do not know why the most basic laws of physics are the way they are and likely cannot know; the difference between that and ‘divine law’ is that ‘divine law’ is ascribed to the arbitrary will of a God or gods, whereas ‘the laws of physics’ boil down to simply the most basic axioms of our existence, beyond which we cannot dig any deeper.
Of course, the laws of physics that we do know imply deeper, more basic laws, ranging from supersymmetry to string theory, that physicists have been trying very hard to prove one way or another — with no luck so far, as physicists have been unable to get past the Standard Model at the energies within our reach.
That said, such a reductionist approach does not really shed light on the higher levels of existence — e.g. how does one get from the physics of electrical currents and charges to the theories of computability, on which facts like that arbitrary instances of Conway’s Game of Life can be nested within one another can be established?
Yet at the same time, math does apply to these higher levels just as it does to the lower levels of existence — computability theory, e.g., is extremely broadly applicable, not just to computers made out of silicon but to any sort of computation, even computations done by hand with pencil and paper.