Teachable Moment: A math puzzle and the nature of metaphysics

[mordant]

Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof

My own version of a promissory note is that, down the road, a combination of the two aspects of investigation will lead to a comprehension that we currently do not have. This will go beyond materialism as most people currently think of it, but I don't think it will completely invalidate it.

That would fit the general pattern of obtaining new understanding of established science (in the sense of, new understanding relating to a proven scientific theory). Since the scientific method was established in essentially its modern form (basically, since Newton), I am not aware of any proven and accepted scientific theory being invalidated, only refined and extended to new realms. That is why Newtonian physics is still entirely useful for most purposes despite general and special relativity and quantum mechanics being needed to fully account for very small and large scale phenomena and probably more refinements still to come if, say, string theory or multiverse theory becomes accepted and proven. And it is why I would expect materialism to continue to be entirely useful for most purposes despite some new understanding of reality such as you suggest.

[KCfromNC]

Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof

But, I have to wonder: Given what appears to be your current acceptance of materialism, what "better alternative" could you possibly accept?

One which gives better working results than what we have now. You know - produce a model which better explains something than current approaches. That sort of thing.

But typing paragraph after paragraph of philoso-jargon isn't going to do much to convince me there's anything actually wrong. "The promissory note is simply not credible" based on the complete failure of that sort of thing to actually generate real results.

And how would you recognize a better alternative it if you saw it?

Hey, you're the one saying that there's some huge failure in things as they are. If you can't actually produce any actual way to tell the difference between the current failed system and your whiz-bang fix you can't blame me.

Materialism, in its traditional form, fails to acknowledge the deep epistemological problem of how to get subjectively qualitative feelings from objective material facts.

I don't see how this is even an epistemological question in the first place. Probably has to do with the peculiar use of the subjective that seems to be central to whatever it is that's going on here.

The promissory note is simply not credible. The problem is not "matter," as such, but the dependence on objective confirmation for meaning. The concept of objectivity is, itself, arrived at by subjective means. A particular subjective feeling can exist objectively, but knowledge of the objective nature of its existence depends on a bunch of subjective agreements. There is a deep epistemological asymmetry between subjective experience and our conceptions of an objectively-existing world.

Assertions like this are hardly convincing. How about some actual results from your approach?

We do not claim that these subjective feelings are "nothing but" the physical correlates; we acknowledge that they are, first and foremost, subjective feelings.

You're assuming there's some difference.

Is the real concern here that your strawman materialist just doesn't feel that feelings feel as special as you feel they should be?

The physical correlates are the means by which we can objectively study the subjective feelings, but we refuse to conflate the feelings as such with the aspects by which we objectively study them. The primary phenomena, we have to admit, are known at least to some extent subjectively; the physical correlates are the objective signs of the primary phenomena. If there is an epistemological rock-bottom, it rests with the subjective aspect of phenomena, although the objective aspect will be essential for deeper investigations. Once the correlates are known, the objective signs of phenomena may reveal more than the subject themselves knew - or, perhaps, even more than they ever could have known by means of pure introspection. This is because the physical behavioral consequences of psychological states depend, to some degree, on physical aspects of the subjective feelings that are not fully accessible to introspection. In other words, the "true nature" of a subjective feeling is probably deeper than what can be accessed by either introspection alone or objective modeling alone. If I am right, then the fundamental "raw reality" of a subjective feeling is deeper than either introspection or objective investigation can achieve independently, but deeper knowledge of these raw realities my be obtainable by a synergistic combination of introspection and objective model-making.

This is a fairly literal "dual aspect" theory, in which the raw reality of a mental state can be metaphorically compared to, say, a cylinder that can be viewed either edge-on (where it appears to be a rectangle), or end-on (where it appears to be a circle). These perspectives are complimentary: mutually exclusive in some sense, yet both required for a full understanding that emerges only when a synthesis of the independent perspectives is achieved. Right now we have mostly the introspective aspect ("red feels like this"); cognitive science is working to reveal the objective aspects. My own version of a promissory note is that, down the road, a combination of the two aspects of investigation will lead to a comprehension that we currently do not have. This will go beyond materialism as most people currently think of it, but I don't think it will completely invalidate it.

It's strange to me you think that this isn't how materialism-based science is investigating consciousness now. Do you really believe they reject the idea that people feel feelings? Or that they reject first person accounts of them? It is as if you're pretending all of psychology and psychiatry doesn't exist or something. I'm honestly at a loss as to what you think you're adding to normal everyday science here.

[Gaylenwoof]

Originally Posted by KCfromNC

It's strange to me you think that this isn't how materialism-based science is investigating consciousness now. Do you really believe they reject the idea that people feel feelings? Or that they reject first person accounts of them? It is as if you're pretending all of psychology and psychiatry doesn't exist or something. I'm honestly at a loss as to what you think you're adding to normal everyday science here.

Hopefully it is obvious that I am not pretending that all of psychology and psychiatry don't exist. We've already circled this mulberry bush a few times in other threads, but I will give it another shot: The central point of "the hard problem" is that the "higher" sciences take sentience for granted, but physics and chemistry contain no ingredients or mechanisms for explaining the emergence of sentience at higher levels of organization.

The whole point of the term "emergence" is that we don't expect to find sentience, as such, at the level of molecules, any more than we would expect an H2O molecule to be "liquid". But knowing that a critical mass of H2O molecules will, in fact, have properties of liquidity, we can - so to speak - "reverse engineer" the liquidity to see what it is about H2O molecules that explains the emergence of liquidity. And we can go deeper. We can explain a great deal about the properties of H2O molecules in terms of electron orbits. Going even deeper, we can explain the properties of electron shells in terms of the standard model. (Roughly: there are two general types of particles: fermions and bosons. Fermions are the "matter" particles, and fall into two basic categories: quarks and leptons. Bosons mediate the fundamental forces.) The whole point of fundamental physics - what makes it "fundamental" is that it is supposed to provide the basic ingredients and tools to explain (or, at least, give us a rough idea of how to go about explaining) the emergence of all higher-level properties. (Obviously a host of other explanatory tools are needed as well, such as the rules of math, statistics, basic logic, and various basic principles.)

There are giant explanatory gaps, of course. We can't really give a detailed account of every single logical step from fermions and bosons to Global economics, but there is a general consensus that we have the essential tools for this (the fundamental explanatory tools needed to explain the stepwise emergence of the higher-level tools and ingredients, which are needed to explain the even higher-level tools and ingredients, etc.). This is the basic idea of what I am calling "traditional materialism". We basically "have the right stuff" to do the job; we just need to figure out how the stuff goes together to explain the various sorts of progressively complex behaviors that emerge in complex systems. Insofar as sentience just refers to complex behaviors of complicated mechanisms we call "living organisms," there is no "hard problem" in David Chalmers' sense of the phrase. Insofar as human beings are just complex mechanisms, we can get a rough feel for how their complex behaviors could be explained by the theoretical tools supplies by the Standard Model of physics. For any given complex behavior, you could in principle keep analytically dissecting it into smaller, and smaller components - behaviors of neural assemblies from behaviors of neurons from behaviors of molecules from behaviors of atoms from behaviors of fermions and bosons. We can't actually tell a seamless story covering this whole range of behaviors, but we can, in principle, see how a seamless story could be told. Each higher level behavior is what it is because of the properties of the lower-level stuff. We are so confident in the Standard Model that, generally speaking, if there is anything that does not appear to follow from the Standard Model, we tend to suspect that the thing does not exist.

A classic example is the concept of free will (aka "agent causality"). If pushed to the explanatory limits, people generally divide into three camps: those who say free will does not exist, those who say that free will is compatible with determinism, and those who say that free will is not explained by the Standard Model. Compatiblism sounds great at first glance, but ultimately they are not using the term "free will" in the same way as the other two camps, so when all is said and done, they end up denying the existence of free will, so it turns out that there are really only two camps after all.

Essentially the same thing happens with qualia and the hard problem. When all is said and done, people are forced to either deny that qualia exist (and thus there is no hard problem after all), or they conclude that the Standard Model is simply unable to explain the existence of qualia. By way of contrast: In principle, nothing "extra" needs to be added to physics in order for us to understand global economics. The properties of global economics depend, in principle, on the behaviors of people, which depend on the properties of biological systems, which depend on the principles of chemistry which depend on the Standard Model. But the qualitative "feeling" properties of sentience are different. A significant number of scientists (probably a majority, if scientists were all forced into grappling with the logical details) agree that some fundamental "extra ingredient" is needed in order to explain sentience. Complex behaviors emerging from many levels of progressively simpler behaviors is something that we feel like we understand, in principle. But why a complex behavior like, say, the behavior of "stubbing a toe" should qualitatively feel "painful" is beyond the Standard Model (as well as the current alternatives to the SM, such as String Theory, don't help either).

Adhering to a strictly objective/third-person point of view, there are limits to what science can tell us about the qualitative properties of subjective feelings because the feelings, as such, are not just behaviors. Using third-person techniques, we can study the physical correlates of feelings (the behaviors of particles, complex systems of particles, etc.), but a giant metaphysical leap is needed if one wants to claim that feelings are "nothing but" the complex behaviors of complex systems that can, in principle, be reduced level-by-level down to the behaviors of fundamental particles in Standard Model. This is the metaphysical leap of materialism that I am rejecting. The qualitative feelings of sentience do not, even in principle, reduce down to the Standard Model (or to String Theory, or to Twistor Theory, etc.). Something in the nature of feelings is fundamental - meaning "can't be explanatorily broken down any further."

What I'm "adding to normal everyday science" is the idea that the subjective qualitative aspects of feelings are causal. Ultimately "stuff happens" that cannot be explained by the Standard Model because the causal mechanisms of this stuff are not covered by the Standard Model. Physicists don't notice these causal mechanisms at the moment because even the simplest animal behavior is way too complex to be reduced, in practice, to physics. Thus we can simply wave our hands and offer a promissory note: "We can't prove it at the moment, but in principle there is no fundamental new stuff needed to explain animal behavior." I don't accept that note, and I offer an alternative prediction: "If/when we ever get to a point where we can test the reduction, we will find that the reduction fails." At that point, we will need to figure out what the "new fundamental stuff" is, and figure out how to integrate it with the Standard Model (or whatever is the leading objective model at the time). But, of course, what I'm really suggesting is that we don't necessarily have to wait that long in order to move beyond the Standard Model in a direction that can avoid the aforementioned failure of reduction. My suggestion is that we may be able to employ the physical correlates of sentience (once we have catalogued a sufficient number of them) to formulate the new theoretical requirements even before we can fully model the behavior of a complex living organism. I've offer rough sketches of this idea in other threads.

My neo-materialist (dual-aspect monist) metaphysics is currently just one of many plausible metaphysics (bringing us back to the OP: The available empirical evidence underdetermines numerous metaphysical positions). Most metaphysical positions are not testable, in principle, but traditional materialism and my dual-aspect "causal qualia" positions are testable in principle.

My overall assertion is that there are some highly credible alternatives to traditional materialism that are not theism. My "causal qualia" theory, in particular, leaves some potential room for free will and "higher meaning" in ways that traditional materialism cannot. If traditional materialism is correct, our only real options for explaining human behavior boil down to determinism, or randomness, or some mixture of the two. But if I am correct, then there is a genuine potential for agent causality. We did not choose to exist, and we didn't choose our fundamental nature (i.e., there is Existential Absurdity), but given that we exist, and given that we are born with a basic nature, we are not puppets on the causal strings of determinism and/or randomness. Via qualitative causality, there is logical room for genuine agential choice. We are, as Sartre says, "condemned to be free."