On the purpose of metaphysics, historically and today

[jkop]

@Geoff_Dann

Which position do you think you are defending?

(1) Consciousness is brain activity.
(2) Consciousness arises from brain activity.
(3) Consciousness doesn’t exist.

None of the above.

I don’t think brain-processes are sufficient for consciousness.

Also animals without brains (e.g. sea urchin) are aware of the presence of predators, for instance. The capacity might be correlated with biochemical processes of the simplest or earliest forms of life.

But regardless of how the capacity works in its constituitive sense (e.g. in brains or biochemistry), a conscious experience won’t arise unless it’s satisfied by possible conditions of observation, under which the experience is caused and fixed by objects of experience.

Objects of experience (e.g. objective molecules or subjective headaches) exist outside of the experience. But that doesn’t prevent us from having epistemically objective knowledge of molecules or headaches. Nor of how one or someone else experiences them or what they’re like.

It seems the alleged limit of knowledge is a construct of obsolete or false ideas of naturalism.

[Geoff_Dann]

OK…I have no idea what position you are trying to defend. Are you a physicalist, an idealist, a dualist, a panpsychist, a neutral monist, or something else? Because based on your last post, it really isn’t obvious what you are saying. It looks closest to dualism to me.

You say brains are both necessary and insufficient for consciousness, yes? If so, that is a good start.

[Meta_U]

Thanks for the comprehensive reply. I’ll read your referred article and take some time to get back to you. But here’s a couple points in adavance.

I’m not keen on retro-causality. I look at it as a sort of copout, the solution to the problem can’t be found, so propose something incoherent which creates the illusion of a solution. I prefer a fat present which allows that some types of materials have a present which is prior to others, therefore there is an overlapping of past and future at the present. Your understanding of the past is very strange to me and I’ll have to take some time to understand it.

Also, the dualism I was talking about is not a potential/actual dualism, it is a dualism of two distinct form of actuality. You seem to resolve this by making Phase 0 (the void) actual, but isn’t that a little incoherent itself? The void becomes soul, so it isn’t really a void, but it isn’t really a soul either because its existence as something actual is conditional. I find that difficult to swallow.

[jkop]

Biological naturalism, monism, intentionality and such. My position here is inspired by (but not identical to) John Searle’s philosophy of mind, language, and descriptive metaphysics. Conscious experience is as real and physical as photosynthesis.

[Geoff_Dann]

I understand how strange my view of the past is. But the truth is that, as things stand, neither science nor philosophy has got a good handle on the nature of time. The “now” is entirely missing from physics, QM treats time as completely reversible – it doesn’t matter which direction causality operates in, whereas if you think spacetime is ontologically real then it suggests the past must be fixed..but what about the future?

As for the Void, this too is hard to wrap your head around, but it is a very old idea. For me, it is clearly the least bad of the available alternatives.

[Geoff_Dann]

@jkop

Biological naturalism, monism, intentionality and such.

What kind of monism?

[Mww]

@Geoff_Dann

My position is (….) about consciousness being non-computable, (…) necessarily metaphysical, and untestable…..

@Geoff_Dann

I am proposing that consciousness is causally……

Regardless of relative placement, I wonder how a necessarily metaphysical, untestable entity can be causal. In what sense, then, is consciousness causally upstream of gravity, if that statement implies consciousness causes gravity?

Granting that consciousness, as a given fundamental human condition, is antecedent to the conception of gravity, which is merely an conscious act of understanding, isn’t the same as saying consciousness is causally upstream of gravity, is it?

@Geoff_Dann

All my system requires is that it is possible that consciousness is a non-computable process.

I’m fine with the non-computability, but take exception to consciousness as a process. I don’t hold with the idea consciousness as an active faculty; it is merely a localized repository for all the objects that have met the requirements of cognition, such that the subject then has the capacity to represent the condition of himself, to himself.

Old school metaphysics. Gonna be mighty hard to reconstruct something already untestable.

[jkop]

@Geoff_Dann

What kind of monism?

Non-reductive physicalism or “property monism”, which Searle calls biological naturalism.

Or in his own words:

Why I’m not a property dualist

[Geoff_Dann]

@Mww

Regardless of relative placement, I wonder how a necessarily metaphysical, untestable entity can be causal.

It can be causal by loading the quantum dice, and this requires those non-computable valuations. This is what is described by the equations that Banno doesn’t like because they include non-physical parameters in equations taken from physics.

In what sense, then, is consciousness causally upstream of gravity, if that statement implies consciousness causes gravity?

The search for quantum gravity usually starts with the assumption that spacetime itself must be quantum. People then try to quantise curvature, treat geometry as a field, or imagine space and time emerging from deeper quantum structures. This effort has continued for decades without consensus on what would even count as the correct explanatory target. In 2PC, the reason is simple: the project begins in the wrong category.

Gravity is not a quantum system waiting for its operator form. It belongs to the classical side of Phase 2, which only comes into being once collapse has already occurred. Before collapse there is no space or time, only a superposed set of possibilities. Geometry does not evolve within Phase 1; it appears when Phase 1 is resolved into Phase 2. Trying to quantise gravity is therefore like trying to quantise the page beneath the equations. It mistakes the background created by collapse for a field inside the superposition.

Penrose treated the problem differently and argued that gravity itself drives collapse. In his picture, superpositions of different curvatures strain against each other, and when the tension grows large enough the state reduces. This makes gravity a pre-existing feature of the world that cannot tolerate incompatible geometries. In 2PC, the causal order is reversed. The world begins without geometry. Collapse occurs when a self-referential observer arises whose valuations cannot remain coherent across branches. That act of resolution instantiates a single classical reality, and gravity follows as its structural consequence, not as a force reaching back into Phase 1 to resolve superpositions. Collapse generates geometry; gravity is the name we give to the structure of that instantiated geometry.

I’m fine with the non-computability, but take exception to consciousness as a process. I don’t hold with the idea consciousness as an active faculty…

Well, that is incompatible with the position I’m defending, as you already know. It might be worth explaining how I reached this conclusion though. While I was developing 2PC, I spent a considerable time trying to understand how consciousness and free will are related to each other. Prima facie they are two different things, almost as if one is an input and the other is an output. You seem to be saying there is only an input, which would be standard epiphenomenalism.

Eventually it occurred to me that consciousness is never fully passive. Even in the extreme case of somebody suffering from anaesthesia awareness (so they are aware, but completely paralysed), we are still willing something to happen, even if it is just that the anaesthetic take full effect, or somebody realises what is going on. We are continually modelling the world and evaluating possible futures, and it is impossible to do that without assigning meaning and value to those futures.

I find it strange that anybody would disagree with the idea that consciousness is a process.

[Geoff_Dann]

@Mww

Regardless of relative placement, I wonder how a necessarily metaphysical, untestable entity can be causal

This needed a better answer. The obvious way to test this would be exactly the sort of tests that parapsychology has been running for decades, but the results have always been disputed. There’s actually a clear pattern – small positive results which are strong enough to satisfy the believers, but too weak to convert the skeptics. There also seems to be an “experimenter effect”, whereby the results are better when the people involved believe in PSI, and worse when skeptics are present.

This is wide open to interpretation. Skeptics put it all down to biased research and procedural mistakes, while the believers claim that what we believe about reality actually influences what is possible, so it is a real effect but it is weakened by the presence of non-believers.

I see no reason to expect that stalemate to change any time soon, so that just leaves a direct detection as a test, and I cannot imagine how such a test could actually work.

[PatternChaser]

@Johnnywas

I am pragmatic. I dont require evidence of scientific consensus but I would usually expect a hypothesis that can be held up to examination.

Then it would seem that you are pragmatic with a (strong?) preference for treating problems and issues with a roughly scientific approach. OK.

But doesn’t that make consideration of many/most metaphysical matters difficult, if not impossible? Do they not reduce to nonsense, or to nothing, when treated in such a … limited fashion?

[Johnnywas]

@PatternChaser

Then it would seem that you are pragmatic with a (strong?) preference for treating problems and issues with a roughly scientific approach. OK.

No, I have a preference for evidence that can be shared amd discussed but I do not insist on science.

@PatternChaser

But doesn’t that make consideration of many/most metaphysical matters difficult, if not impossible? Do they not reduce to nonsense, or to nothing, when treated in such a … limited fashion?

Sure, if I treated them in that limited fashion it would but fortunately I don’t.

I get it. I may be more open minded than you think but I’m not an anything goes guy.

[j_j]

@jkop

Or in his own words:

I like this part from the linked paper:

There are not two (or five or seven) fundamental ontological categories, rather the act of categorization itself is always interest relative. For that reason the attempt to answer such questions as, ‘How many fundamental metaphysical categories are there?’, as it stands, is meaningless. We live in exactly one world and there are as many different ways of dividing it as you like. In addition to electromagnetism, consciousness, and gravitational attraction, there are declines in interest rates, points scored in football games, reasons for being suspicious of quantified modal logic, and election results in Florida. Now, quick, were the election results mental or physical? And how about the points scored in a football game? Do they exist only in the mind of the scorekeeper or are they rather ultimately electronic phenomena on the scoreboard? I think these are not interesting, or even meaningful, questions. We live in one world, and it has many different types of features. My view is not ‘pluralism’ if that term suggests that there is a nonarbitrary, noninterest-relative principle of distinguishing the elements of the plurality.

The bolded part is what I happen to mean by “pluralism.” Categories are tentative and pragmatic. The football score is “just as real” as an electron of a horseshoe.

[Mww]

@Geoff_Dann

It mistakes the background created by collapse for a field inside the superposition.

Truly the delicate sound of thunder. I can actually see that in my head. Now all I need is a relevant meaning for it, what can I do with it, what could possibly follow from it.

@Geoff_Dann

This makes gravity a pre-existing feature of the world that cannot tolerate incompatible geometries.

Dunno about geometries, but a certain quantifiable relation between proximal masses has been a feature of existence in general, since t>0. It only became gravity when some human said so.

@Geoff_Dann

The world begins without geometry.

True enough but again, there have always been those certain relations between objects, eventually articulated by human intelligence, in the terms specific to the discipline of geometry. Because some human said so.

@Geoff_Dann

Collapse generates geometry; gravity is the name we give to the structure of that instantiated geometry.

So some mistake has been made with respect to what the background of collapse was, re: “the field within the superposition”, the correction for that mistake, is collapse leaves behind…….geometry? Leaves behind the relations between objects that have always been there and since were given specific terms. Problem is, gravity has nothing to do with the particularly geometric principle that, e.g., no two lines can enclose a space. And Newton 1687, while very specific to gravity, has no geometric variables. The inverse-squares law being merely a spatial qualifier.

@Geoff_Dann

I find it strange that anybody would disagree with the idea that consciousness is a process.

Redness is the relative state of being red; fitness is the relative state of being a fit. You get the picture, I’m sure, which explains why I find it strange anybody would disagree with the notion that consciousness is the relative state of being conscious. The quantitatively greater the content from experience and/or pure thought, the correspondingly greater the diversity thereof, hence the state of all that of which the subject is conscious, reduces to a quality, having nothing to do with the intellectual processes by which the content is attributed.

@Geoff_Dann

@Mww

Regardless of relative placement, I wonder how a necessarily metaphysical, untestable entity can be causal

This needed a better answer.

The better answer, while admirably honest, doesn’t serve the project brought forward on these pages very well. With respect to your thesis, if there really is a way to test it, but there won’t be sufficient acceptance of the results, how it is possible to determine whether the way to test really wasn’t, or, the way was perfect but result is actually quite incomprehensible?

[jkop]

@j_j

The bolded part is what I happen to mean by “pluralism.” Categories are tentative and pragmatic. The football score is “just as real” as an electron of a horseshoe.

There’s room for pluralism in monism!

In Goodman’s pluralism, recall, we’d be making multiple and equally real worlds of different symbol systems. Consciousness would not be a biological phenomenon but a product of the symbol systems. But that’s where I leave Goodman and look elsewhere, e.g. Searle. There can’t be symbol systems before there’s a world with conscious social creatures who can invent and use symbols.

[j_j]

@jkop

In Goodman’s pluralism, recall, we’d be making multiple and equally real worlds of different symbol systems.

I only know a little of Goodman’s work, but his idea of “characters” is some of my favorite philosophy, as you may recall from the topic on signs.

Speaking of those characters — but translating them into the sonic realm of Saussure’s signifiers ( acoustic images) — I might emphasize the differing ways that the same sign “signifies” for different perceivers. I don’t only mean the way that it differently affects behavior but also the “first person experience” of the sign.

Each “conscious” organism is “faced” by the world differently, yet they are all “faced” by the same one world.

Perhaps you mean something more like a plurality of communities. Every tribe has its own “articulation” of the environment shared by all tribes.

I like monism to the degree that — I think — it’s really about holism. The sign system is a sign system. The sign “physical” functions in the same discourse as the sign “mental.” The “meanings” of these words are interdependent, like “North” and “South.” The particular human being, like the particular tribe, has a “unified grasp” on the world via the systematic functioning of their signs ( and of course also through their bodily know-how, and I’d even say that sign use is indeed part of this bodily know-how.)

[j_j]

@jkop

But that’s where I leave Goodman and look elsewhere, e.g. Searle. There can’t be symbol systems before there’s a world with conscious social creatures who can invent and use symbols.

Right. Overall I like Searle, though I have my reservations. I prefer early Heidegger. Despite the reputation of Heidegger, largely based on his later work and his fan base, I find his stuff from the early 1920s to be “hyper-realistic.”

As you say, we need conscious social animals to make sense of sign systems. For me the animal is “conscious” in the simple sense that the other animals and the signs between them are “there” for that animal. The animal is “trained into” the typical use of marks and noises. Signs are “only” a kind of empirical object in the world. “Thought” is “material” in this sense. But I think “material” is best grasped in terms of perceptual “quality.” The “genuine” rubbing alcohol has “that weird smell” and burns when you pour it on a wound, etc.

Science predicts and controls the “quality” of the world, and that’s why we care. The theory of vitamins matters because I don’t want rickets. I don’t want rickets because I expect that having rickets involves “bad” or “unwelcome” quality in the way that the world is there for me.

[Wayfarer]

I’ve looked at the Searle paper Why I am not a Property Dualist that you linked. From p60:

I insist that from everything we know about the brain, consciousness is causally reducible to brain processes; and for that reason I deny that the ontological irreducibility of consciousness implies that consciousness is something ‘over and above’, something distinct from, its neurobiological base. No, causally speaking, there is nothing there, except the neurobiology, which has a higher level feature of consciousness. In a similar way there is nothing in the car engine except molecules, which have such higher level features as the solidity of the cylinder block, the shape of the piston, the firing of the spark plug, etc. ‘Consciousness’ does not name a distinct, separate phenomenon, something over and above its neurobiological base, rather it names a state that the neurobiological system can be in. Just as the shape of the piston and the solidity of the cylinder block are not something over and above the molecular phenomena, but are rather states of the system of molecules, so the consciousness of the brain is not something over and above the neuronal phenomena, but rather a state that the neuronal system is in.

Here is an argument against that from one of my essays, The Mathematics of Idealism, about mathematician Charles Pinter’s book Mind and the Cosmic Order.

Pinter presents a simple illustration comprising three coins on a table:

Pinter asks: are three things here, or are there four? There are three coins, but there’s also a triangle.

As he points out:

“If existence is limited to the material, then you have only three things, because no new material is added when the threesome is formed. However, if reality were limited to what is material, there would be no such things as structure or form, because they neither add to, nor take away from, matter. The threesome of coins is a separate reality for us because it has a separate quality in perception.” (Mind and the Cosmic Order, p. 44, bolds added)

Pinter connects this to biology, with reference to research in evolutionary science showing that even insects respond to forms and shapes. And yet, forms and shapes are generated by cognition and are not innate to the ‘quantum flux’ that reality comprises. Such cognitive units - Pinter calls them ‘gestalts’ - are not reducible to the underlying matter, but are fundamental to cognition.

[Geoff_Dann]

@Mww

The better answer, while admirably honest, doesn’t serve the project brought forward on these pages very well. With respect to your thesis, if there really is a way to test it, but there won’t be sufficient acceptance of the results, how it is possible to determine whether the way to test really wasn’t, or, the way was perfect but result is actually quite incomprehensible?

OK. We need to take a step back. The real test of 2PC is its holistic explanatory power. It is actually a complete and coherent model of reality at the foundational layer of science and metaphysics. As things stand, we do not have a large selection of these to choose from. Rather, we have none at all. What we have is 15 different interpretations of QM, 20 different theories of consciousness, and a cosmological model which can’t supply coherent answers to basic questions, and can’t get its numbers to add up.

The only way this situation can arise is because none of those theories are testable in the way you are demanding. Most of them (especially the quantum interpretations and consciousness theories) are just attempts to solve a sub-set (sometimes only one) of the problems 2PC addresses. LambdaCDM tries to provide a coherent model of the whole of cosmology, but fails miserably, and doesn’t even attempt to integrate consciousness or QM.

2PC is the first theory I am aware of which takes the available empirical data and provides an integrated model of reality where everything adds up, and there are no unresolvable paradoxes or unanswerable questions. You are now asking me how we can test it. But what better test could there be than it actually makes coherent sense of everything, including all the empirical data, when nothing else does? If there were two or more theories like this then we’d need a test to choose between them. But if there is only option on the table, then why are more tests required? It is like finally completing a tricky jigsaw puzzle, without the picture on the box, and then saying “ah…but how do you know there isn’t a different solution?”. Jigsaw puzzles don’t work like that, unless they have been ingeniously designed to have two solutions (which in this situation implies a designer God who intentionally misleads).

The real problem here is what Iain McGilchrist identifies as “left hemisphere thinking”. The left hemisphere breaks things down and tries to understand the components, and prove things in steps, but it never understands anything holistically. It doesn’t do “big pictures” and doesn’t get context. The right hemisphere does this, but cannot make itself be heard when the left is in control. 2PC is a right-hemisphere theory. It gets its explanatory power not by breaking things down and looking for “single kill-shot” proofs, but by actually providing a coherent holistic model which makes sense of all the data. So this involves a completely different idea of what “proof” even means.

[j_j]

@Wayfarer

Such cognitive units - Pinter calls them ‘gestalts’ - are not reducible to the underlying matter, but are fundamental to cognition.

This is approximately how I understand Plato’s unwritten doctrine and Saussure’s “acoustic image.” The world is “formed quality.”