The Ontology of Subjective Physicalism, by Robert Howell

[noAxioms]

@Moliere

I’m not sure [Chalmers’ conceivability argument] sound, but that it has traction is enough want to address it.

I guess I don’t see the traction. The argument implies that zombies would describe and react to qualia the same as anybody. It takes well trained turning of blind eye to not balk at that.

I found the re-dressed Mary’s Room argument interesting. Given subjective physicalism it makes sense to say Mary does learn something more, even if it isn’t the sort of knowledge we tend to mean.

We all seem to agree that she learns something, even if she’s got perfect ‘exoplasmist’ knowledge. Can I say that? Would a dualist accept that such perfect knowledge would still leave her reft of subjective knowledge? Maybe, to support their position, they’d assert otherwise. It’s safe because such knowledge is safely unknowable, similar to somebody impossibly knowing all the hidden variables of photon X, thus allowing prediction of where it will be detected beyond the slits.

[j_j]

@Moliere

however I render it, all the “stuff” hangs together in a kind of unity: for many even though I feel like such-and-such there is a deep sense that there’s some explanation for that experience which bottoms out in the world we inhabit, be it idealist or materialist.

I feel that, and I’d chalk it up to our performance in the forum as believers responsible to a coherence norm. And it’s economical to unify a patchwork of local theories in a larger theory.

I’m definitely invested in such a project. I just question the presupposition that we can do it with nothing but kinds of stuff in relation.

@Moliere

It seems to me that we can grasp physics – which, for purposes of this paper, serves as the “objective” physicalism (which may include intentionality in it, which is kind of how I read you here when talking about point-of-view), but there are still some physical states of affairs which the objective physicalism leaves out, namely whatever “qualia” tends to refer to.

Fair enough, but my complaint is that “qualia” seems to try to refer to the quality of physical objects.

The de-world-ed object is not bad in itself. I can, as an observer, report only measurements that say nothing about my feeling. I ignore whatever isn’t relevant. So we get a partially de-world-ed object, the object for the average-person with a rule. Or the competent user of this or that measurement device.

Note that “qualia” ( the sensory quality of the object itself) is still acknowledge. The problem, for me, is that the math is taken as “floating above” all observation whatsoever. The measurement is ideally independent of any particular measurer, and this gets misread as independence from measurement altogether. Which leads us in the dualist direction of positing “qualia” against a background of the “mystified” physical object, now floating free of its quality in mathematics that itself becomes de-realized. The “true world” is ( the meaning of ) mathematical expressions.

Very hard to distinguish from idealism, despite its flight therefrom ! But a two-level idealism — sensory-affective quality as a cream on the hard core of pure mathematical meaning stuff that somehow “steers” the eruption of qualia.

@Moliere

I think we can skip this explanation of “objective” and say “however you want to cash out scientific facts, like physics, is what we mean by objective physicalism”: for an idealist the mind of God, for the materialist the inert fact, but either way both can point and share the measurement whereas they cannot share their experience of the measurement.

To me you sketch what any explication should probably account for. We can also soften the notion of “fact.” As in we need not assume “objective truth” and “truthmakers” for a mostly coherent world in which relatively warranted/reliable belief makes sense.

[Jay]

So I’ve begun reading the paper, and have two observations.

First, I’m dismayed that Howell seems satisfied with the term “grasp” to describe an important element in his formulations of inclusive and exclusive physicalism (p. 316). He doesn’t seem aware that, if we only knew what “grasp” meant, we might well know the answers to all the questions he wants to pose! In fairness, he’s probably aware of the vagueness, since a little later he talks about “some epistemic advantage to be gained by entering certain states.” As best I can tell, that’s him threading the needle between “know” and “experience” – perhaps this is what he wants “grasp” to mean. But it would have been helpful to address this directly.

Second, and probably more important, his analysis of the property problem via the presentation problem (321-26) is really well done. It adds weight to his insistence on the importance of separating metaphysical from epistemological considerations here. If a property can at times be explained (or explained away) in terms of perspective rather than extensional identification, we can see how there could be such a thing as a subjective physicalism that doesn’t insist on locating properties every time an observation is made or an experience undergone. Locating genuine properties – that is, as extensionally understood – is the job of science. But science may not be able to locate and describe perspectives, which I think is (part of) where Howell is going with this – we may need to “enter into certain states” in order to do that.

I’m looking forward to seeing how he develops this idea.