Charlatan & Wolly Green's fascinating philosophy fair

[charlatan]

BTW @Ren, a little more history --- I feel like part of the long-ago motivation for thinking these 2 things are totally different is people thought of it more as "animate vs inanimate" than thinking of mind as some kind of natural phenomenon admitting the empirical nature of the physical. From the pov of animate vs inanimate, it seems a lot weirder for animate to just "emerge."

But if you examine panpsychic/protopanpsychic views, as much as it sounds really stupid if you call it "whoooaaa dudddde lyke the whole universe may be conscious," it's a lot less absurd if you go there's probably something different about how something processes the physical world compared to some kind of abstract software. I'd suspect there's something concrete about the physical world, and that experientiality is really just a witness to that concreteness.

Once again, this leaves the question of why there is a concrete world. What it doesn't leave open is given there's a concrete world, whose concreteness we know nothing about apart from it having a go-and-look-component, why oh why would experience be part of it?


The REAL reason I think people wonder why there's experience is that it didn't emerge forever, apparently, until life apparently or whatever....and it seems like there were billions of years that the physical world got on fine without it.

But note this is the empirical side of the story: it's weird that experience and physical are plausibly related because it seems like nobody was around to witness that relation forever. Sure, fine.

But the less empirical more conceptual thing is: despite how long it took us to show up, WE ourselves seem to have little idea of how physical differs from, say, mathematical apart from the special features of experientiality ie the "go out and look" +taste+touch component.

These 2 POV considered, I still think the appropriate response is more "wow, we don't understand the physical world much at all....we can't even imagine why experience just showed up now apparently after life evolved....but we ALSO can't really conceptualize the physical apart from properties that seem intimately experiential....whereas we do have a sense of what mathematical objects are apparently like independent of intimately experiential properties."

Indeed, the fact that for a lot of physics, we can't use our taste/touch and use abstract mathematics to describe it might suggest if anything our limitation, because again, without that taste/touch/lab measurement, we don't seem to know in what sense the physical world is sorta more concrete than the mathematical. It's just that we might have a very limited take on that concreteness/be better at getting at the formal structure.

 

[charlatan]

OK and let me get out of the way one subtle point: what if someone says "well, even with the mathematical, we have no concept of IT apart from our mental thoughts of it, so if you say we have no concept of the physical but our mental experience, that applies to EVERYTHING. The real question, dopie charlie, is why are we here to ask the question ie why there's a mind at all to process the physical."

Aha! But this seemingly makes a subtle mistake. Saying the number 3 has properties we come to know through experience/by thinking about mathematics isn't the same as saying the property itself inherently is about an experiencing subject's interaction with the object. You can say a triangle has 3 sides, and sure, maybe a mind can come to know that. However, the property of 3 sides doesn't itself seem to invoke an experiencing subject.
The property of, say, the taste of garlic or the feeling of rigidity does seem to invoke an experiencing subject in its very definition.

So it should be added to my stuff above that our positive concept of how the physical is, apart from its mathematical properties, really intimately seems to invoke an experiencing subject/the concept of observable properties. It's STILL odd why life emerged, why there seems to be consciousness now, and so on -- but this is odd more in the sense of why is there someone here to ask all these questions? I agree that's an interesting question.

But where I find it harder to sympathize is the idea that the physical would have nothing to do with the mental. In fact, from this pov, the mind-mathematical problem is more interesting -- we have a positive concept of mathematics apart from experiential properties -- mathematical properties CAN be known by experiencing subjects but aren't defined partially in terms of them. But we don't seem to with physical -- you cannot just say "an rock is an object described by so and so quantities -- weight, mass, etc" -- that leaves it indistinguishable from a mathematical object with formal labels we happen to give called 'weight' etc.

Think of it like this: I could see mind's relation to physical kind of like salt's capacity to dissolve in water. That relation is quite intrinsically there in salt whether or not water existed to demonstrate it. Similarly, our concept of physical INHERENTLY seems to involve some mental properties. However, it's true there needn't have BEEN any salt-water interaction to demonstrate/instantiate that dissolving capability. Similarly it's amazing that there is mind to contemplate the physical -- or anything at all, including mathematics. But that's more akin to "why is there a physical even? why is there a mind? why is there anything but numbers" than saying mind-physical seem on diff planets.

BTW, to say OUR positive concept of the physical seems to nonnegotiably involve the experiential does not imply ALL non-mathematical properties of it are experiential. I haven't made that leap -- in fact, whatever the neutral properties are, they may be that, if they existed.
Rather, all I'm saying is WE don't seem to have a way of considering physical objects by a definition that doesn't involve an experiencing subject somehow yet -- that is, we define certain properties by "if an experiencing subject existed, it would feel like blah" even if we don't suppose experiencing subjects exist in actuality.

 

[Ren]

Alright charlie, get ready for a very long piece of postmodernist-style writing, lol. I'm joking, but still I hope this won't infuriate you, because you made a lot of points and I had to extract their essence. Maybe I did so in an arbitrary and incomplete way. For that, I apologise in advance.

First, perhaps less importantly, I can equally say to you there's no good reason to suppose the physical wouldn't have experience. So at best we'd be at a stand-still, and that already gets us to dissolving the idea that mind-body is a mystery. Unless you have some positive reason to think it weird that the physical has an experiential component, there's no mystery. Sure, we may not know the details of it yet, but there's no reason to complain, so to speak on this view.

Then maybe what's left of our disagreement has to do with our diverging and irreducible convictions. I appreciate where you’re coming from, but given all the arguments now laid out in front of us, I still decidedly consider that there is a good reason to suppose the physical doesn’t have intrinsic experiential properties. To say that a paper clip, or a crown made of cardboard, or a piece of toilet roll have experiential properties which are intrinsic to them sounds like nonsense to me (I mean philosophical nonsense, not a jab!). In addition, when I think about a physical object, I do not believe that the thought has any physical property. What I could entertain is that the thought has a neutral property which is shared by the actual physical object that I am thinking about. Based on my understanding of strong emergence, this would rule out strong emergence for nonreductive physicalism.

I have an image in mind. Imagine that in terms of colors, matter is “amber stuff”, mind is “chartreuse stuff”, and neutral is “yellow stuff”. Let’s take neutral to be the basic substrate from which matter and mind emerge. Both have to contain neutral to qualify as strongly emergent, i.e. have the property “yellow”. The extra property that matter displays in emerging is “orange”, producing “amber”. The extra property that mind displays in emerging is “green”, producing “chartreuse”. So in the end you get what seems like a duality of amber versus chartreuse. But just like amber and chartreuse aren’t primary colours, matter and mind (according to the defender of nonreductive neutrality) aren’t primary substances. Neutral is the primary substance from which they emerge – like amber and chartreuse come from yellow, with extra properties (orange and green) that also come from yellow.

And I think there may genuinely be a way to argue that this wouldn’t be a basic replay of dualism in disguise – because from a certain point of view, amber and chartreuse really are less fundamental than yellow, in that they are a mix of yellow with orange / green, the latter which are also less fundamental than yellow, and are the “emergent” color-properties – the ones that “could not have been predicted”. So here matter and mind are not worlds apart: physical and mental are not two irreconcilable sides separated by a Wall of Dualism, because they both share in the fundamental yellow. From a certain perspective they are both shades of yellow – different yet similar phenomena of yellowness. In matter’s orange properties you could have what pertains to matter that seems exclusive to it, while in mind’s green you could have what pertains to mind that seems exclusive to mind.

Of course, the question remains: what is yellow? We know that it is neither mental nor physical, but that (in a sense) it “contains” both as their primary substance. From here we could begin to closely investigate what we consider to be good candidates for mental and physical’s mutually exclusive properties, the “emergent” color-properties of orange and green. Then, once we have identified these properties as exhaustively as possible, we would proceed to strip physical (amber) and mental (chartreuse) of all of their respective orange/green color-properties, until all that’s left in them is what mental and physical share in a primary sense: the “stuff” of the yellow substance – the neutral.

So when I think about a paper clip, the thought doesn’t have the physical properties (amber) of the paper clip, but it has the mental properties (chartreuse) of the paper clip “as a mental representation.” But that mental representation is not purely mental: just like chartreuse comes from yellow, the mental representation emerges from the neutral substance, whose properties it displays. And what links the paper clip as an object to the thought of the paper clip, what allows us to say about both the object and the thought that they are of the paper clip, is their common participation in the neutral substance – that is, in yellowness. And the paper clip “in itself”, so to speak, which would not be directly accessible to experience, would be a certain combination of yellow elements.

In a nutshell, this is my view of how nonreductive neutral monism could work, and offer a viable alternative to nonreductive physicalism. Because what nonreductive physicalism (it seems to me) says is: the physical is the basic yellow substance, while the mental is the emerging amber: it has all the properties of the yellow substance + orange color-properties. But since mental has all the properties of the yellow substance, then it means that given this system, the thought of a paper clip contains the physical properties of a paper clip in a real sense. I reject that, quite simply. Instead I prefer to embrace a species of nonreductive neutral monism, for the reasons listed in the previous paragraphs.

It would be interesting, however, to consider the case of reductive neutral monism in terms of the color metaphor. What do we get? Well, I think what we get first of all is a vivid illustration of another of our possible “misunderstandings” (I’m using inverted commas to de-dramatize the use of the term), just like it seems to me that we may not exactly have the same understanding of strong emergence, though I do appreciate the fact you think we do. So what would be this second “misunderstanding”? I think it has to do with what reductionism would consist of. To my mind, the reduced substance would have to be deducible from the “secondary substances” from which it is reduced, otherwise I don’t quite get how reduction itself works. The color scheme might fail under the “neither view”, because it seems impossible to reduce any secondary color to a primary color that does not contain it. It may work under the “both view”, however: we could think of the reduced neutral substance as white, which (again, in a certain sense) completely contains whatever colors we choose to play the role of mind and matter.

Now to take this further, sure the physical might not have had an empirical component: but if there's one thing we know about the physical that differentiates it from virtually all of our other knowledge, such as mathematical knowledge, it's that the physical's nature is not given to us by deduction from axioms alone. There is SOME concept called "we need to go out and look at the evidence."

But maybe the physical is not given by deduction from axioms alone because its emergent properties, the orange set of properties that make physical what it is from the neutral substrate, are not deducible from axioms alone. I understand and appreciate that this might imply that yellow, the neutral substrate, is where the mathematical properties are located, meaning in turn that thoughts about objects would have to contain mathematical properties. The question is: is this completely absurd, or actually possible to contemplate? I appreciate the fact that somebody could come forward and say: “The idea that thoughts of objects contain the mathematical properties of these objects under nonreductive neutral monism is as nonsensical as the idea that thoughts of objects contain all the physical properties of these objects under nonreductive physicalist monism.” It’s a legitimate debate. But maybe we have cleared the field?

So my basic point is -- sure there could be something called a physical world (maybe we call the number 3 the physical world!) without a concept of observation, but once again remember we're trying to claim there's something weird or mysterious about the physical world having experience in it -- yet do we have any positive concept differentiating it from an abstract mathematical structure besides this "here we need to go out and look" component vs with the mathematics you can just deduce it from axioms?

Maybe this positive concept is just that of the neutral + emergence, as suggested above. I think the issue here might be that under nonreductive neutral monism, ‘physical’ would basically no longer mean the same thing that it does in physicalist monism or dualism. Maybe if you were to interpret ‘physical’ in terms of the nonreductive neutral monist color scheme proposed above, the differentiation would be clarified. At any rate I’m feeling that a semantic clarification could make things easier.

Alright! This was quite the novel. Apologies about that. I’m not at all claiming to have attained anything close to a coherent demonstration, but I think the above summarises my view in the clearest possible way.

 

[charlatan]

@Ren: I'll try to parse your view, but will have to ask some questions en route! A lot of your post seems to be motivating neutral monism/contrasting it with nonreductive physicalism. As you know, I already have possible roles the neutral view can play (like the information-is-reality), and my concern was only if SOME of those roles actually improve on nonreductive physicalism.

But, the specific point of divergence seems to be how absurd you find nonreductive physicalism (any variety that says the physical would involve an experiential component ), whereas I don't see the absurdity (yet), so I think it's important to iron this out before figuring out if the neutral improves on the issue. I get your sense of absurdity from here, just to be sure:

To say that a paper clip, or a crown made of cardboard, or a piece of toilet roll have experiential properties which are intrinsic to them sounds like nonsense to me

My central point was that without some experiential properties, our PRESENT knowledge of the physical seems to basically be mathematics!!! That is, unless I know the quantities in the equations relate to something where I had to touch, pick up, and so on, it seems like they're little different from something abstract I dreamed up (note that a lot of stuff may be stuff we can't empirically notice -- like the wavefunction... but eventually there's a relation to stuff we CAN empirically notice however far away the relation is).

I'm trying to figure out if you already have an issue with this?
Note that subtly, I'm not even requiring that experiential subjects EXIST in the physical world -- merely that it seems natural given our present knowledge to suppose that physical things have experiential properties -- that is, ones an experiential subject could get wind of, were there even an experiencing subject.

Weirdly, this seems actually compatible with some kind of interaction dualism. That is, even if I supposed mind is a separate substance interacting with the physical, and isn't "caused" to exist by physical processes, the physical has some properties given by what an experiencing subject would report about the subject's interactions with the physical.


Now, given what I said seems to not even be ruled out by interaction dualism, I have to ask if what you're really objecting to isn't that the physical has experiential properties, which is what I quoted you as saying, but rather that you object to the idea that the experiencing subject /experiences themselves are PART of the physical.

Reframed that way, you have what I call a pretty reasonable objection, and one that I've considered a lot, and again, it leads me to flirt with dualism personally.
But not framed that way, I have a much harder time understanding why the experience-physical link is so weird -- one really doesn't think it feeling like something to hold a rock is a legitimate property of the rock?

Because what nonreductive physicalism (it seems to me) says is: the physical is the basic yellow substance, while the mental is the emerging amber: it has all the properties of the yellow substance + orange color-properties. But since mental has all the properties of the yellow substance, then it means that given this system, the thought of a paper clip contains the physical properties of a paper clip in a real sense. I reject that, quite simply. Instead I prefer to embrace a species of nonreductive neutral monism, for the reasons listed in the previous paragraphs.

What nonreductive physicalists would probably say is the "brain" is a hybrid of mental properties and mathematical properties. So it's not that mental properties contain the physical, it's that physical properties contain the mental, precisely because there's an empirical component to the physical (even if it's not wholly empirical).

I mean, it sounds like you're worried about qualitative properties containing quantitative i.e. the thought-of-paper-clip containing its physical properties (which include quantitative surely under any view). But the claim isn't this, I think it's just that the physical has both quantitative and qualitative.
This is an important clarification to make, but I doubt it would sell you on physicalism because you find the idea of physical having qualitative properties absurd!

Less important---Regarding strong emergence: I think half the issue is using the term, instead of just spelling out what we mean -- I think there are subtleties, like do we mean you can predict mind's emergence from the neutral but not know the mental properties without experiencing them? Or do we mean you can't EVEN predict THAT the mind would emerge. Etc. I think it's better if we want to use this notion to spell out what's needed in future, but for now, I'm kind of not focused on strong emergence....more on the absurdity claim.

 

[charlatan]

OK so that was the post to really focus on, at least it seems to me pretty strongly, but I would like to do justice to the rest of what you say too.

I do not believe that the thought has any physical property.

I don't think it has quantitative-physical properties itself, intrinsic to it, no. For instance, I personally think emotions or something independent of a brain are coherent. But again, the question is if the physical can have qualitative and quantitative properties. It always seemed to me empirical science is a mix if both (picking up chemicals qualitatively like feeling how it is like to have water on your hands, but also measuring them/modeling with equations).


Anyway, my main comment on your color analogy: I think the way you frame it, which might be intentional, you can't really recast mind or physical fully in terms of neutral, precisely because there are fundamental additions (for instance, ultimately, orange involves red, and green involves blue, even if they are both yellow-ish hues).
Basically, mind and physical are both neutral+something-extra.

There's one (possibly not relevant to you) problem for this, which is: sure you've bridged mind and physical apparently, in that both seem to be yellow+something-extra. However, note that the something-extras have to be different themselves from each other. Now you might say orange and green are both still tinges of yellow. But it seems like each has a fundamental different property (one has reddishness, the other has blueishness) where you can't say either is a special case of the other OR that either is a special case of yellow.

In short, have you introduced the red=body_2 / blue = mind_2 problem? What explains the presence of reddishness and blueishness? It seems to me if these are brute facts, not explicable by the neutral, that's the sort of thing that could lead to considering nonreductive physicalism -- you'd STILL not explain the presence of blue...but that's the whole thing, you don't purport to anyway, you just model it/treat it as a fact such as some brute fact about the Higgs boson.

Now maybe for your purposees, you're happy with the yellow+orange and yellow+green solution because your only goal was to RELATE mind and physical by finding something they have in common (both yellowish)....not to get rid of there being fundamentally irreducible properties to both (redddishness + blueishness)....or even to explain where these fundamentally irreducible properties come from -- it still seems a brute fact that there shouldn't just be purely-yellow things, and that some things should have an added reddish or blueish tinge.
And maybe your point is that there are no purely red or purely blue substances in our world -- all things are related, despite their distinctness.
Though, this would still introduce the issue of apparently unrelated properties: reddishness/blueishness, even if there were no red substance or blue substance.

Still, I see where you're going with this, IF we suppose mind and physical are unrelated to one another in any reasonable way in the nonreductive physicalist view --- but obviously that's what is up for discussion right now.


On another note, in the world of nonreductive physicalism, the analogy seems to be different from your formulation: it's more like the physical = the world of stuff describable by colors, but each of which has to have some yellow involved in it. It could be pure yellow. Or it could be yellow blended with something else. Whenever there's experience accompanying a physical phenomenon, you have yellow blended with something else -- the something else is the mental, so in your color analogy it's the blueishness is the mental aspect, NOT the mental = color given by yellow+blue.

So the real key here is mind here isn't yellow+green/yellow+blue or whatever, it's more like the physical phenomenon of neurons firing is yellow+green, or yellow+blue or whatever you want to call it, but with the blueishness contributed by the mental properties.

 

[charlatan]

BTW @Ren one of my favorite insights I came up with in thinking about the dualism question/why one might flirt with it.... is to think of the mind-physical relation parallel to how we think of the mathematics-physical relation. Many who say the physical has mathematical properties do not suppose MATHEMATICAL OBJECTS are themselves physical.
That is, while spacetime has a mathematical geometrical structure, the structure itself is a plausibly nonphysical, mathematical object we had to relate to the physical world.

Similarly, perhaps there's a feeling/experiential property to my body touching grass. But perhaps that feeling involves relating an object called an experience that is not itself physical (kind of like the abstract mathematical model of spacetime) to the physical world.


This is very related to the question I ask you: is your problem with the idea that there are experiential properties to the physical (it might feel like something experientially to pick up a rock) OR that the experiences themselves are physical?
I don't think I get the intuitive motivation behind the first problem but I do with the second....

 

[Ren]

Sorry about delay @charlatan, I had a few things going on and got engrossed in my new philosophical notebook, lol. Ok, here goes.

A lot of your post seems to be motivating neutral monism/contrasting it with nonreductive physicalism. As you know, I already have possible roles the neutral view can play (like the information-is-reality), and my concern was only if SOME of those roles actually improve on nonreductive physicalism.

It’s true that I so far I have found nonreductive neutral to be more attractive than nonreductive physical, because I find the former to be more or less coherent, and I like the picture it suggests. The latter, however, I find problematic for the ‘absurdities’ which you underlined, which is why I like it less than nonreductive neutral, though I will be clarifying stuff in response to your posts below.

I do know that as far as you’re concerned, the question lies elsewhere, and it’s not about a competition between this or that viewpoint (neither is it for me, really, though I may sometimes speak as if it were the case). Still, by order of attractiveness, I’m under the impression that for you it would currently be something like reductive neutral monism (at least in potential) > dualism > nonreductive physicalism > nonreductive neutral monism.

I have to say that since that exchange we had about the possibility of information being our neutral substrate, I have also become quite attracted to the reductive view, and have had some possible insights of my own. So I think that for me personally, the (relative) ‘hierarchy’ would be something like this: reductive neutral monism > nonreductive neutral monism > dualism > nonreductive physicalism. I’m only referring here to the ‘candidates’ we have been speaking about at length.

Incidentally, I find this illustration quite useful because it shows how small our disagreement in fact is, though it may look bigger than it really is… supposing I did justice to your own hierarchy, of course

My central point was that without some experiential properties, our PRESENT knowledge of the physical seems to basically be mathematics!!! That is, unless I know the quantities in the equations relate to something where I had to touch, pick up, and so on, it seems like they're little different from something abstract I dreamed up (note that a lot of stuff may be stuff we can't empirically notice -- like the wavefunction... but eventually there's a relation to stuff we CAN empirically notice however far away the relation is).

I'm trying to figure out if you already have an issue with this?

My intuitive move here would be to suggest that without experience, our present knowledge of the physical would be nothing at all – not even mathematics. ‘Experiencing’ the physical seems to ‘precede’ our ability to say anything about it, whether quantitative or qualitative.

I think you’re right to say that ‘physical’ in the way we usually speak about it has quantitative and qualitative properties. There is nothing absurd about that, let me be clear. But in my mind I did not mean ‘qualitative’ properties to equate with ‘experiential’ properties – and if I used the terms interchangeably in previous posts, I’m sorry: it was a mistake. To me a qualitative property is just what the term says: hardness, softness, etc. But by experiential property I understood something different: a property such that if a subject interacts with the object possessing the property, the subject will experience the object qualitatively.

What I mean in a nutshell is: a physical object having qualitative properties does not make the object ‘experienceable’. This brings to my mind a stark parallel in the ontological argument for God’s existence:

1) God is a perfect being;
2) A being would be less than perfect if he didn’t have the property of existence;
3) Therefore God has the property of existence;
4) Therefore God exists.

Kant showed that existence was actually not a property in that sense and debunked the argument once and for all. Well, I have a similar feeling about the “properties of experience” or experiential properties of physical objects. “Experience” is not a property like hardness is a property. So to say that a physical object has qualitative properties does not imply that these properties can be experienced by virtue of their qualitative nature. There is a missing link here which nonreductive physicalist monism leaves unbridged.

The reason why I find nonreductive neutral monism more attractive is that it seems to offer that bridge. What it might say (in my view) is: “It’s not physical objects that have both quantitative and qualitative properties. It’s neutral objects as experienced.” This is what I meant in my previous post when I spoke of the need to slightly redefine ‘physical’ in the terms of nonreductive neutral monism, that is, if nonreductive neutral monism is to be genuinely considered. We would then refer to ‘physical’ objects only in a manner of speaking, i.e. as neutral objects experienced as physical.

So under nonreductive neutral monism, physical would only be an aspect of neutral – as it were, neutral experienced from a particular angle; and ‘mental’ would be another aspect of neutral, experienced from another angle. And perhaps experience could be just emergence. So the paper clip I hold in my hands is a bundle of neutral properties which, in emergence, I can touch and feel and at the same time mentally ‘recognise’ as a paper clip. The paper clip as I experience it – as a physical object and/or a mental object – still possesses all the neutral properties, the ‘yellow’ ones.

This just sounds more plausible to me than saying in nonreductive physicalist terms: in experience, mental emerges from the physical, and this emergent mental entity contains physical properties also. I know that you’ve already answered the following:

I mean, it sounds like you're worried about qualitative properties containing quantitative i.e. the thought-of-paper-clip containing its physical properties (which include quantitative surely under any view). But the claim isn't this, I think it's just that the physical has both quantitative and qualitative.

But like I suggested above, the physical having both quantitative and qualitative properties still lacks the ‘path’ to experience, because ‘qualitative’ is not synonymous with ‘experiential’. But if the path taken is to be emergence, then in my understanding of emergence, the emergent entity must contain the properties of the entity of the substrate from which it emerges. But it is not true that mental entities contain physical properties. It is here that I see nonreductive physicalism at a dead end.

You might wonder how under my view of nonreductive neutral monism, emergence-as-experience magically produces the “new” properties of mental on the one hand, and physical on the other, without thereby replaying some kind of dualism. Indeed, this is just what you suggest:

Anyway, my main comment on your color analogy: I think the way you frame it, which might be intentional, you can't really recast mind or physical fully in terms of neutral, precisely because there are fundamental additions (for instance, ultimately, orange involves red, and green involves blue, even if they are both yellow-ish hues). Basically, mind and physical are both neutral+something-extra.

There's one (possibly not relevant to you) problem for this, which is: sure you've bridged mind and physical apparently, in that both seem to be yellow+something-extra. However, note that the something-extras have to be different themselves from each other. Now you might say orange and green are both still tinges of yellow. But it seems like each has a fundamental different property (one has reddishness, the other has blueishness) where you can't say either is a special case of the other OR that either is a special case of yellow.

And you are right, ‘blue’ and ‘red’ are two fundamental additions which cannot be reduced to each other, and neither can they be reduced to yellow. I realised this when I developed my color analogy but figured that I’d leave my doubts aside for a moment just to see what you’d have to say about it. The way I see it is like this: there are three possibilities. Either:

1) We accept this ‘duality of emergence’ and stick to it as a modest contribution of nonreductive neutral monism, not as satisfactory as one would have liked but still better than full-blown substance duality at addressing the mind-body problem;
2) We reject it as just a dualist replay and effectively turn towards straight dualism or a species of reductive neutral monism, such as information-as-neutral;
3) We seek a different analogy than the color scheme, which might have internal weaknesses of its own and might prevent us from seeing that emergence under nonreductive neutral monism need not be dualistic – “it’s only that color analogy which shows it as such.”

I think my choice here would be to kind of embrace all three possibilities. I would agree with 1), but try to pursue the goal laid out in 3), while being aware that the reductive neutral monist programme mentioned in 2) may in fact hold more promise after all.

BTW @Ren one of my favorite insights I came up with in thinking about the dualism question/why one might flirt with it.... is to think of the mind-physical relation parallel to how we think of the mathematics-physical relation. Many who say the physical has mathematical properties do not suppose MATHEMATICAL OBJECTS are themselves physical.
That is, while spacetime has a mathematical geometrical structure, the structure itself is a plausibly nonphysical, mathematical object we had to relate to the physical world.

Similarly, perhaps there's a feeling/experiential property to my body touching grass. But perhaps that feeling involves relating an object called an experience that is not itself physical (kind of like the abstract mathematical model of spacetime) to the physical world.

I really like this. Your analogy between experience and mathematics is really gorgeous!

Did you mean that this would imply dualism or simply ‘flirt’ with it? Because it sounds straightforwardly dualist to me.

 

[charlatan]

I don't think you said qualitative = experiential, but for now I guess I wasn't making a sharp distinction -- after all, the elements of experience, qualia, are probably so-named for a reason.

Let's drill into this then---you want to distinguish qualitative from experiential properties.

I think you’re right to say that ‘physical’ in the way usually speak about it has quantitative and qualitative properties. There is nothing absurd about that, let me be clear. But in my mind I did not mean ‘qualitative’ properties to equate with ‘experiential’ properties – and if used the terms interchangeably in previous posts, I’m sorry: it was a mistake. To me a qualitative property is just what the term says: hardness, softness, etc. But by experiential property I understood something different: a property such that if a subject interacts with the object possessing the property, the subject will experience the object qualitatively.

Two points:

(1) While hardness, heat, etc can certainly be construed as properties of physical objects sans any mention of qualia, you then would need to view them as merely higher order versions of the properties given to us by fundamental physics, no? There would be nothing truly qualitative about them if there were no qualia in the mix....hardness would be this abstract configuration of physical properties, not the familiar feeling of banging my head against the wall!
Hence why I prefer the terminology qualitative to involve genuine experiential aspects/qualia.

You definitely ain't at fault for my associating those two things, but we don't have to use that terminology for now!

(2) I suspect the spirit of my question to you remains unchanged: while, as you say, experiential hardness may not come from the above exclusively language-of-physics version of hardness sans mention of minds independently, I was even granting you interactionist dualism to narrow down what you're really worried about: once you're given an experiencing subject, surely then we can say there's such a thing as the experience of the hardness of a rock given from the interaction between subject and rock?

If that's what is meant by an experiential property, you'd have no problem with it, I hope, or is there still something to say? If no problem, then it would come down to saying you don't think experiences have to exist in the physical world, even if, given an experiencing subject, one can say the purely-physics-language-hardness can be experienced as qualia-hardness.

And then we'd be on the same page.

I really like this. Your analogy between experience and mathematics is really gorgeous!

Did you mean that this would imply dualism or simply ‘flirt’ with it? Because it sounds straightforwardly dualist to me.

Honestly, this analogy seems to me to really hurt the intuitive case for any kind of non-weak-sauce physicalism. I say flirt, because I'm pretty cautious and because what some people say passes for physicalism really is horrendously weak (by contrast to the meat-no-mind views), so I have no idea when I've REALLY ruled out all varieties of it nowadays.

The analogy rests on the idea that the mathematical properties of a physical object involve all the lab measurements we make PLUS the fitting of the abstract mathematics to the physical object......but the abstract mathematical structure had to be contemplated of its own right to get there.

Similarly, it seems our experience of pain is analogous to the abstract mathematical object, whereas the correlate between the neurons firing and the experience of pain seems to be more analogous to what we call the actual quantitative/mathematical property of the physical object.

The reason I love this so much is that even the most insanely reductive physicalists accept the mathematical nature of the world -- indeed, they celebrate it. Yet, mathematical objects are quite widely, even by people like Quine, acknowledged for being quite metaphysically different from standard physical objects. That he felt he had to acknowledge their existence was a big point about his views.

This suggests that just because there's an experiential nature to the physical world doesn't mean the experiences themselves are physical. This intuition + standard dualist arguments can be quite persuasive.


The main thing about mind that I just can't say feels physical is that the seeming vs real distinction seems to evaporate. If it seems I'm in pain, I am in it.
This feels radically different from the physical, and intuitively, it's more akin to mathematical things where you know something is true "by definition".

Lots of nonreductive physicalists acknowledge this, but I don't think they take it to its conclusion/many of their standard motivations for keeping to physicalism seem silly to me (kinda jus smell of a fear to be unconventional or something). One main motive is maintaining the supposed "causal power" of the mind (if the mind is not just an aspect of the physical, how does it 'do' things like raise arms) -- to be completely honest, I think brain-in-vat thought experiments strongly suggest that the mental experiences themselves ain't causing anything physical necessarily at all. They're more the experience of causing something. If you think of a brain-in-a-vat stimulated by machines to produce simulated experiences, you can have an experience of raising your arm that's very real feeling, without it really happening.
This again suggests a quite large independence between the two realms.

Now, if you're worried about how the 2 realms interact, you already seem to have that issue with mathematics, so you might have to deal with it rather than pretend the issue isn't there by proposing all sorts of ways of calling mind physical.


As for my hierarchy, I think if dualism really wins out over nonreductive physicalism, it's possible even nonreductive neutral monism wins over nonreductive physicalism. Right now, what's going on is I'm afraid to rule out nonreductive physicalism (it's so liberal unlike reductive physicalism that I wrestle with when we've really ruled it out a lot), so while that's the case, it remains on closer par to dualism.... however, I suspect the flaws I may find with nonreductive physicalism that lead to dualism won't kill neutral monism of a nonreductive variety, so it might be higher in that case.

Reductive neutral monism would be extraordinarily interesting. That's the sort of thing that could ultimately tell us why the physical world even exists/answer really fundamental questions.

 

[Ren]

I don't think you said qualitative = experiential, but for now I guess I wasn't making a sharp distinction -- after all, the elements of experience, qualia, are probably so-named for a reason.

Of course, but I think that non-controversially, qualia would be taken to refer to qualities as experienced by a subject, rather than experiential properties in themselves. I did go and check a couple of instances of definition just to make sure that I wasn’t unwittingly babbling nonsense, but the definitions I found were compatible with my understanding.

I suspect the spirit of my question to you remains unchanged: while, as you say, experiential hardness may not come from the above exclusively language-of-physics version of hardness sans mention of minds independently, I was even granting you interactionist dualism to narrow down what you're really worried about: once you're given an experiencing subject, surely then we can say there's such a thing as the experience of the hardness of a rock given from the interaction between subject and rock?

Sure, interactionist dualism would work fine here. I guess my only issue with it, for the purposes of this specific conversation, is that it doesn’t really offer an answer to the mind-body problem. However modest, I think the nonreductive neutral monist answer offers slightly more promise on that front. And again, my issue with the nonreductive physicalist variety is not that it has less explanatory power than the nonreductive monist – it would have more if it was plausible, but I do not find it very plausible for reasons that are implicit in what you’re saying there:

If that's what is meant by an experiential property, you'd have no problem with it, I hope, or is there still something to say? If no problem, then it would come down to saying you don't think experiences have to exist in the physical world, even if, given an experiencing subject, one can say the purely-physics-language-hardness can be experienced as qualia-hardness.

Given an experiencing subject – indeed. And no, I do not think experiences have to exist in the physical world, though they could perhaps be shown to exist in the neutral world – ideally within a reductive paradigm, but if not, within a nonreductive paradigm. But of course interactionist dualism is completely fine – it’s just that I suppose it leaves the “question of the mind-body problem as a question not worth addressing”, as wolly would probably say.

So yeah, I think we’ve pretty much on the same page at this point!

Similarly, it seems our experience of pain is analogous to the abstract mathematical object, whereas the correlate between the neurons firing and the experience of pain seems to be more analogous to what we call the actual quantitative/mathematical property of the physical object.

Very interesting. I don’t have much to add, but I’m hooked.

This suggests that just because there's an experiential nature to the physical world doesn't mean the experiences themselves are physical.

Well, this sounds close to the argument I was trying to make about experience, it seems to me

 

[charlatan]

but I think that non-controversially, qualia would be taken to refer to qualities as experienced by a subject, rather than experiential properties in themselves.

Well at this point I think these are basically the same thing as I was using them, at least -- experiential properties as I was thinking ARE the qualities that a subject would experience of the physical world when interacting with it. My point was that sans this, something like "hardness" is not anything more than mathematics to us. Sure we can write down the physical constants and equations and describe hardness as a higher order/level feature of how particles assemble.
But, this notion of qualitative (one without qualia) would be insufficient to distinguish physical from mathematical.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure we're on the same page here.


Either way, it seems to me the only question is whether such a subjective experience is part of the physical world.
I certainly appreciate that just because physical objects have experiential properties does not imply (as my dualist analogy shows) that experiences are physical -- any more than having mathematical properties implies the mathematics itself is physical.
But I'm also not there where I am ready yet to dismiss the idea of them being part of the physical world (in some reasonable sense) on further argument.
Basically, I'm acknowledging the finer point you want to, just that I don't yet have a conclusion on which way to lean, given the finer point.

So let's go over the case.

The reductive physicalists don't even want to say there is such a thing as subjective experience to be talked of over and beyond the equations.
But the nonreductive ones do.
The biggest case for it being part of the physical world would be causal dependence. That is, if there can't be a change in mental states without a change in physical states, it may seem that the physical facts of our universe might entail the mental facts.

The property dualists (at least ones with some strength) say it's coherent to talk of brains without consciousness, and that mental properties of the physical must be added in. That is, that the physical facts do NOT entail the mental facts, although the mental facts are still ones about brains.

Substance dualists say consciousness is a thing of its own right, and mental properties are properties of this thing consciousness.



Now, here's another leaning of mine -- I'm not sure how I feel about property dualism at least of the variety I detailed that actually rejects nonreductive physicalism yet fails to go all the way to substance dualism (there are varieties of nonreductive physicalism that seem to go very close to property dualism that will refuse to equate mental properties with any physical property, yet they will still say the mental properties are ENTAILED by the physical ones.... the analogy to use here is your color one: they'd say if there's green in the world, that entails there's blue-ish-ness but it's impossible to conceive of a green thing without blueishness, so all blueishness is still realized by yellowish=physical things). I've often felt a pull to saying it might be better to just show minds are separate objects, just because I feel the liberal-most nonreductive physicalism varieties offer a considerable challenge to property dualism, at least of the variety that does not hold that the physical facts determine the mental facts.

Notice in my analogy the ONE sticky point to be brought up is: mathematical objects are commonly seen as objects (at least by realists about the existence of mathematical entities). If mental properties don't modify a separate object called mind, you get this weird situation where they're properties of a physical object, and you head closer to property dualism, and I don't think my analogy really helps property dualism, probably more substance dualism.
The one main difference between the two situations is mathematical structures are not in causal dependence on the physical. Sure, the mathematical properties of the physical are, but there's a big difference: you can think of mathematical objects in our world independent of physical vs all mental seem causally dependent.

This supposed causal dependence, if it really is there, is what seems to make for the last major pull to nonreductive physicalism.

But IDK, right now I definitely am hooked on the analogy / dualism.

 

[charlatan]

But of course interactionist dualism is completely fine – it’s just that I suppose it leaves the “question of the mind-body problem as a question not worth addressing”

Just as a note: I still think it's an interesting problem how the two interact. That is, just because traditional ways of treating mind-body as a real problem go to monism to try to find a bridge doesn't mean to me at least there's no work to be done under the interactionist paradigm.

It's still interesting how mathematical objects relate to the physical world -- you'd need to provide some ground for them relating even if you suppose they're metaphysically distinct. I consider taking the dualities seriously the idea that you must relate the two, not that that relation must be in the form of a monist substance that accounts for all.

 

[Ren]

I certainly appreciate that just because physical objects have experiential properties does not imply (as my dualist analogy shows) that experiences are physical -- any more than having mathematical properties implies the mathematics itself is physical.
But I'm also not there where I am ready yet to dismiss the idea of them being part of the physical world (in some reasonable sense) on further argument.
Basically, I'm acknowledging the finer point you want to, just that I don't yet have a conclusion on which way to lean, given the finer point.

I get you, Charlie. I wouldn’t want to dismiss the idea completely either, perhaps simply because in (I hope) true philosophical spirit, I basically will never dismiss anything completely, short of a logical contradiction. I still think this “finer point” you mention is enough to demote physicalism to a relatively low rank in the hierarchy of my ontological priorities, but I am not dismissing the possibility of an argument showing the intrinsic experientiality of the physical.

To be honest, I think we’ll be quicker identifying a reductive neutral substrate, which in any case is something we both agree would be ultimately more satisfying.

The biggest case for it being part of the physical world would be causal dependence. That is, if there can't be a change in mental states without a change in physical states, it may seem that the physical facts of our universe might entail the mental facts.

I get that, but I simply don’t buy the idea that entailment = same substance. Given the other weaknesses of physicalism, I’d still favor entailment = interactionist dualism, to be honest.

Now, here's another leaning of mine -- I'm not sure how I feel about property dualism at least of the variety I detailed that actually rejects nonreductive physicalism yet fails to go all the way to substance dualism (there are varieties of nonreductive physicalism that seem to go very close to property dualism that will refuse to equate mental properties with any physical property, yet they will still say the mental properties are ENTAILED by the physical ones.... the analogy to use here is your color one: they'd say if there's green in the world, that entails there's blue-ish-ness but it's impossible to conceive of a green thing without blueishness, so all blueishness is still realized by yellowish=physical things). I've often felt a pull to saying it might be better to just show minds are separate objects, just because I feel the liberal-most nonreductive physicalism varieties offer a considerable challenge to property dualism, at least of the variety that does not hold that the physical facts determine the mental facts.

In the end property dualism suffers similarly from its taking the experiential properties of physical for granted, doesn’t it? To me this is truly a huge sticking point. I know that you consider it a subtlety, but I consider it a ‘qualitative’ (no pun intended) difference in appreciation between us here. To me this is nothing else than a massive issue.

Just as a note: I still think it's an interesting problem how the two interact. That is, just because traditional ways of treating mind-body as a real problem go to monism to try to find a bridge doesn't mean to me at least there's no work to be done under the interactionist paradigm.

It's still interesting how mathematical objects relate to the physical world -- you'd need to provide some ground for them relating even if you suppose they're metaphysically distinct. I consider taking the dualities seriously the idea that you must relate the two, not that that relation must be in the form of a monist substance that accounts for all.

No I agree – just because a system is dualist doesn’t mean that the interaction should be arbitrary. But in a sense interactionist dualism will only describe the details of the relation rather than discover that there is a bridge. Hence why I find neutral more attractive.

Your mathematical analogy is interesting to me because it promises to bring a genuinely new perspective. I don't have an opinion yet on whether I would subscribe to it (this is a whole other question) on closer inspection, given that it would probably run into Rennyboy's 'experiential objection'. Still, it's exciting to think of you developing this viewpoint. I think I called it "beautiful" precisely because my appreciation for it is partly aesthetic - in the best possible sense of the word.

 

[charlatan]

given that it would probably run into Rennyboy's 'experiential objection'.

Hmm, sorry here I didn't follow -- how does the analogy (which is supposed to suggest experiences ARE separate from the physical) run into your objection -- which I understood to be about cautioning that physical having experiential properties does not imply that experiences are themselves physical?

I get that, but I simply don’t buy the idea that entailment = same substance.

Well there are two things to be said here: first, some people are quite deflationary about the idea of a substance to begin with (ie they're sort of like there's stuff, and we can slice it in different ways, and more or less think of substances as closer to a collection of properties), so for them the important thing is if the physical facts determine the mental facts -- that is, it's impossible to instantiate brains without consciousness, for instance. For them, calling the entailment a kind of physicalism sounds reasonable.... meaning, if we were to similarly adopt such a deflationary view on substances, it seems reasonable we'd sympathize with their calling their view physicalism.

Second, even if we subscribed to substance-physicalism, given entailment, this suggests the mental properties come for free once you instantiate a physical substance. Given that most would be much happier metaphysically (I think) with a physical substance necessarily having mental properties than with a physical substance's existence necessitating a totally different metaphysical category of *substance* existence (ie mental substance), generally the entailment idea does seem to lean to physicalism.
That is, the idea would be once you instantiate the physical substance, you either have to believe you also get all the mental properties or you get the mental SUBSTANCE for free. The latter is generally harder to believe than the former.

So actually I'm wondering/a little confused-- do you really subscribe to the physical stuff implying the mental stuff comes for free?
I just would've expected you to put this in the 'absurd' bucket, sans a neutral reason.


Basically, physicalism needs to maintain that in some reasonable sense, there is nothing over and above the physical. If it's true that once you instantiate all the physical substances in our world, you have everything already, that sounds far from something I'd think one can easily reject as physicalism.

Notice the analogy with mathematics here -- once you instantite the physical, all the mathematical properties of the physical come for free ie the mathematical structure of the physical. Similarly, the 'mental nature' of the physical would come for free in the above views.

To maintain that physicalism is not true for the mathematics case, you'd maybe want to show something like there are mathematical properties of non-physical objects (such as abstract structures). Which of course one plausibly can do -- describing the number 3 for instance.
These are plausibly very independent of the physical, because there's a lot of mathematics isn't the kind showing up in physics. This suggests, if mathematical objects exist at all, that they'd not be physical.

However, the same analogy is harder to pull for the mind case, precisely because it seems like the mental phenomena in our world might all ride on top of physical ones.



Now, there are people who'd probably not care about any of this and simply say experiences ain't ultimately physical -- to say a brain has a taste of garlic is insane, that taste can only be the property of something non-physical, i.e. a self.
There's a part of me that sympathizes with this, too, but I'm unable to say the other ways are truly unreasonable. The reason for this is that ultimately, nonreductive physicalism IS pulling a sooort of neutral view, where it says the nature of the physical isn't just this quantifiable meat stuff, it's subtler than that, which is why it can intrinsically involve mind. What it would maintain is that there IS probably a quantifiable nature too, just that doesn't exhaust the truly intrinsic nature.

 

[Ren]

Hmm, sorry here I didn't follow -- how does the analogy (which is supposed to suggest experiences ARE separate from the physical) run into your objection -- which I understood to be about cautioning that physical having experiential properties does not imply that experiences are themselves physical?

Sorry, I was tired last night when I posted and just got mixed up ^^ Of course your analogy wouldn’t run into the experiential objection, since it analogises physical/experiential with physics/mathematics. For some reason, when I said that it would run into the objection, I was thinking of the physics/mathematics framework alone – the one you’re actually using to build a case for the analogy. So I was speaking as if you were just referring to the physics/mathematics case, not the physical/experiential case you drew as an analogy from the former. A little bit as if you had never come up with the analogy but were instead the father of the physics/mathematics view.

Does that make sense?

So actually I'm wondering/a little confused-- do you really subscribe to the physical stuff implying the mental stuff comes for free? I just would've expected you to put this in the 'absurd' bucket, sans a neutral reason.

Another mea culpa: when I read your post I read “interaction” instead of “entailment”. I would not subscribe to the physical stuff implying the mental stuff comes for free, in the sense that for me there is something missing in the relation of implication. Of course, interaction (rather than entailment) relaxes the physical-mind relation by not making it one of implication, which is why I would consider it more plausible.

You see, this is what your Ne-dom fireworks magic does to me Charlie – it’s hard to keep up with it without an occasional moment of fatigue, because my own ideation doesn’t work like that And since you are in a sense leading the conversation (which I prefer that way, because you master this stuff better than I do) I adapt to your cadence the best I can!

Basically, physicalism needs to maintain that in some reasonable sense, there is nothing over and above the physical. If it's true that once you instantiate all the physical substances in our world, you have everything already, that sounds far from something I'd think one can easily reject as physicalism.

I guess the important thing here might be precisely not to slip into the idea that interaction is the same thing as entailment. (I'm not claiming you are guilty of that). Again, I think entailment runs into the aboutness objection. Let me take an example from literature: Marcel Proust’s madeleine in Swann’s Way, from his great modernist novel In Search of Lost Time.

At some point in the story, you have this scene where the main character is sitting at home in his kitchen and eats a madeleine. There seems nothing special about this particular experience, at first sight anyway. But the tasting of the madeleine triggers in the character a kaleidoscopic sequence of reminiscences about his childhood, because he associates that taste with his childhood. But of course, the memories intertwine, some get bigger, some smaller, and in getting entangled conjure up a whole new world of their own. His reminiscences get him across the whole spectrum of his childhood and the book explores them for literally hundreds of pages – reliving in his mind particular emotions, related tastes, memories of friendships come and gone, metaphysical contemplations on time passing. In Search of Lost Time is a 7-volume novel on this idea of trying to capture the passing of time, and to recapture time past, in experience and re-living past experiences. It digs into the deepest emotional recesses of the self and from those recesses looks up at the hope for a cosmic meaning in it all.

Yes – the madeleine is what triggered the reminiscing. First we have the experiential objection: is the experience of the taste of the madeleine something purely physical, or are we not already leaping over a crevice here? But even supposing that the qualitative properties of the madeleine are enough to account for the tasting of it as an experience (which you know I have an issue with) – what follows the tasting, this reminiscing world of memories criss-crossing each other with infinite complexity and depth, and seemingly developing their own new little universe of unique meaning in the process, their own “aboutness”, that is – is not causally determined by the eating of the madeleine. There is something else at play.

Whether you call it a substance or an “aspect” of the neutral different from the physical aspect, there is something else. At least that’s what I commit to. And I think that in general, the best way to see this is precisely in literature – the realm of the exploration of the aboutness of experience.

Now, there are people who'd probably not care about any of this and simply say experiences ain't ultimately physical -- to say a brain has a taste of garlic is insane, that taste can only be the property of something non-physical, i.e. a self. There's a part of me that sympathizes with this, too, but I'm unable to say the other ways are truly unreasonable.

Yeah, I get that you don’t want to consider physicalism unreasonable. I suppose that in view of what I just tried to illustrate above, I would say that to me, physicalism is the “least reasonable” view that I could see myself endorsing.

The unbridgeable gap is to me evident when the aboutness of experiences is closely examined. But this is something that not a lot of physics/analytic philosophy examine in that way, because it doesn’t really fit into their frameworks to begin with.

 

[charlatan]

@Ren

Alright, I figured you wouldn't actually hold to instantiating physical => you've always got the experiential. I mean, that would precisely have meant that the experiential facts of our world come for free, which definitely didn't sound like you'd be happy.

the idea that interaction is the same thing as entailment

Yeah, I get that you don’t want to consider physicalism unreasonable.

Hmmm so my thought is it's not that I don't want to, I mean in a way I really find something off-putting due to the analogy with mathematics. I want to say that the physical-mathematical properties are at most similar to the physical-experiential properties.

It's just so far I'm not quite able to rule out the physical entails experiential (even after accepting that's not the same as the interaction). I surely get that the minimal thing of having experiential properties doesn't imply this entailment-based physicalism, but the question as to why brains without minds are coherent is basically asking about the nature of causality.
I.e. empirically it LOOKS like brains might cause consciousness, even if it's not really right.
That's the major motivation for people adopting the entailment view.

And here's the tricky thing -- even you entertain the neutral view as an alternative to dualism, right? Well, the problem is nonreductive physicalism could look a lot like neutral. Because effectively it's saying that the nature of the physical isn't exhausted by this quantitative side where you measure in test tubes. It's more like everything might have such a quantifiable side, but the ultimate nature of the physical on this view is not purely quantitative or qualitative.

 

[charlatan]

For me, the crux of the issue is this: if I accept that mental properties are not themselves identical to any physical property, which I do, because I do think at least minds without brains are coherent (not sure about brains without minds), what can I now say?

Can I show that brains without minds are possible too as follows.... by saying that no physical property entails a non-physical property? Is that true even?

Because this is very related to our discussion, and I've been pondering it: the physical property would just be the capacity to be experienced. That is, physical objects do intrinsically have the capacity to be experienced: that's a fact, because we experience them.

But can a physical object produce experience? Is that even coherent?


What are cases of a physical object necessarily having a non-physical property outside of mind, just as sanity check -- if those exist, then you can't make the leap I'm hoping to. Here's one that will NOT work as an example, at least it seems to me: saying quantitative properties of physical objects are non-physical properties isn't going to work precisely because that's closer to the capacity for being experienced than to experience itself. Because basically that's saying physical objects can be described using mathematics. That's like saying physical objects can be described using experience.

It says nothing about if abstract mathematical properties or experiential properties are themselves instantiated in the world, given physical objects are instantiated.

This analogy (even working with just properties, not substances) still makes me want to say there might be a dualism-ish thing going on.
I'm more worried about whether this works than if we did something analogous with substances, obviously.
But I want to make the case using properties just because substance talk is more difficult to establish with certainty/I'll probably keep the options open then, knowing myself.

 

[charlatan]

OK just to ponder out loud, here's what's at stake: in one sense, physical things can clearly have nonphysical properties. Consider the following scenario: say there's a substance, call it substance-X whose experience produces the same experience as that of tasting tomatoes.

Or, the computational properties of two mathematically quantifiable substances, one called substance Y and the other a physical substance.

These are clearly nonphysical properties, since they can be identical between a physical and a nonphysical substance. Notice that what grounds the experiential properties of substance-X may be quite different from that of tasting tomatoes -- for instance, if subscribing to substance dualism, you could say the laws of interaction between mind and substance-X differ from those between minds and tomatoes despite producing identical experiences.


So IDK, it's possible what I'm being led to here:

- very dry barebones, there's no easy a priori defeater to nonphysical properties being entailed by physical ones. That is, a very property-dualism-esque style of nonreductive physicalism which nonetheless maintains you cannot instantiate brains without consciousness coming for free. It does underscore that mental properties are different in nature, however. And my version would allow that mental properties can be instantiated without brains even if not conversely, so it's quite strongly divergent from most types of meat-physicalism/is very subtle.

- however, if one subscribes to substances, I think one is led in the direction of dualism. The existence of mental properties without physical ones would automatically produce a concept of a mental substance, because in a world with ONLY mental properties, the only substance that the properties could modify would be something you could call a Self.
One could then argue that in our world, instantiating the mental properties instantiates that substance, and then appeal that there's no entailment between metaphysically distinct substances, even if it can be so with properties as seen above.
This kinda takes the mathematics analogy to its conclusion.

- even if we subscribe to nonreductive physicalism of the variety I think it's very hard to get rid of completely if one is overly cautious, it's already got hints of neutral monism.

 

[charlatan]

OK let me put it this way lol; I think mental is no 'greater' than physical probably like this --- if physical could give mental for free I see no reason why we could not have Fysical properties that give physical for free. If one thinks physical properties cannot be instantiated riding on top of any other, I suspect same might be true of mental.

 

[Ren]

And here's the tricky thing -- even you entertain the neutral view as an alternative to dualism, right? Well, the problem is nonreductive physicalism could look a lot like neutral. Because effectively it's saying that the nature of the physical isn't exhausted by this quantitative side where you measure in test tubes. It's more like everything might have such a quantifiable side, but the ultimate nature of the physical on this view is not purely quantitative or qualitative.

You’re right, nonreductive physicalism has certain similarities with nonreductive neutral monism and the weaknesses of the former might therefore impair the latter as well. But I’d still say the latter has a better chance, for perhaps two reasons. The first (and I’ll probably repeat myself here, so apologies for that) is that in my understanding of strong emergence as preserving all the properties of the substrate, neutral fares better if we accept that certain experiences do not have physical properties stricto sensu. The second reason is that, well, neutral is in a sense an open field: we are yet to determine what it is, but it could be seen as promising that it is coherent in concept to start with. We might even say this: the ideal result of the search would be a fully reductive version of neutral; but failing this, we may still arrive at a nonreductive version of it.

Physical, by comparison, does not seem like such an open field, in the sense that I don’t know how “the gap” to experience could be bridged without redefining physical in such a way as to legitimately ask whether we might not call it something else than ‘physical’. But of course there might still be, I don’t know, scientific discoveries that may change everything – I’m not excluding that possibility either! It’s just how I see things at the present moment from a purely philosophical viewpoint, controlling for scientific discoveries. But I accept with a certain sense of reverence that science pushes metaphysics at least as much as philosophy these days, though of course both work best in tandem.

Because this is very related to our discussion, and I've been pondering it: the physical property would just be the capacity to be experienced. That is, physical objects do intrinsically have the capacity to be experienced: that's a fact, because we experience them.

But can a physical object produce experience? Is that even coherent?

Yes exactly, in fact when I spoke of ‘experiential properties’ my understanding was more in line with the production of experience than the possibility of experience, though I may not have made it that clear. Exactly like saying God has the property of existence would de facto “produce” his existence for the defenders of the ontological argument. For what would be the point for them of just saying God’s existence is possible? They wouldn’t be happy with just that So here the analogy with experiential properties in physical objects is pretty on point.

What are cases of a physical object necessarily having a non-physical property outside of mind, just as sanity check -- if those exist, then you can't make the leap I'm hoping to. Here's one that will NOT work as an example, at least it seems to me: saying quantitative properties of physical objects are non-physical properties isn't going to work precisely because that's closer to the capacity for being experienced than to experience itself. Because basically that's saying physical objects can be described using mathematics. That's like saying physical objects can be described using experience.

It says nothing about if abstract mathematical properties or experiential properties are themselves instantiated in the world, given physical objects are instantiated.

Precisely. I think we’ve finally locked into complete understanding of each other’s position.

This analogy (even working with just properties, not substances) still makes me want to say there might be a dualism-ish thing going on.

Would you have prima facie objections to the idea of experience being just emergence within a nonreductive neutral monist framework – like I suggested, pondering out loud, in an earlier post? Of course an account of why would be necessary, and I haven’t done that yet (a little bit like an account of reductive neutral would be necessary). But at a purely abstract level, do you think this would be incoherent?

Or perhaps you consider this is just red/blue dualism in green/orange clothing?

Very dry barebones, there's no easy a priori defeater to nonphysical properties being entailed by physical ones. That is, a very property-dualism-esque style of nonreductive physicalism which nonetheless maintains you cannot instantiate brains without consciousness coming for free. It does underscore that mental properties are different in nature, however. And my version would allow that mental properties can be instantiated without brains even if not conversely, so it's quite strongly divergent from most types of meat-physicalism/is very subtle.

I agree that this particular brand of property dualism has no easy defeater. But like you said, its labelling as nonreductive physicalism is very subtle and that is perhaps its weakness too. That being said, its dualism-esque quality might not be more pronounced than the dualism-esque quality of nonreductive neutral monism as spelled out above.

However, if one subscribes to substances, I think one is led in the direction of dualism. The existence of mental properties without physical ones would automatically produce a concept of a mental substance, because in a world with ONLY mental properties, the only substance that the properties could modify would be something you could call a Self.

Is a world “with only mental properties” possible within a nonreductive neutral monist framework, though? I’m not sure, since these would be emergent from the neutral substance. I could think of a world with only neutral properties, the “core yellow” – whatever these are; but not really of a world with only physical or mental properties.

This raises an interesting point though. If we were to consider the barebones universe of nonreductive neutral monism, with ‘only’ the neutral substance at its base – we could ask: would it be possible to have, say, Possible World 1 with only neutral+emergent physical on the one hand; and Possible World 2 with only neutral+emergent mental on the other?

Somehow Possible World 1 appears unintelligible to me. And yet if emergence were just experience, that world should of course be intelligible. But if it were intelligible, it would also have mental properties, and so it wouldn’t be Possible World 1, but already the ‘combination’ of Possible Worlds 1 and 2.

Therefore experience can’t be emergence in nonreductive neutral. I’ve answered my own question, but thank you for your attention anyway Which leads me to agree with you, pending any further insights, about substance thinking leading in the direction of dualism.

 

[charlatan]

Is a world “with only mental properties” possible within a nonreductive neutral monist framework, though?

Well nonreductive physicalism is usually understood to be a claim about our world, and I'd assume similarly with the neutral view -- that is, the point is maybe all minds in *our world* are realized by neutral substances. However, this doesn't prevent minds in other worlds potentially living by themselves. Of course, a strong neutral monism could claim all minds are always realized by the neutral.

However, the one about our world would serve the mind-body problem well in the sense that it explains how to bridge the mental and physical. A world with just mind doesn't really pose much of a mind-body problem -- there aren't two apparently radically different kinds of things in such a world anyway. It would already be monist in the idealist sense.

Possible World 1 with only neutral+emergent physical on the one hand; and Possible World 2 with only neutral+emergent mental on the other?

I've thought of things like this -- I think maybe you could say *some* neutral substances don't give rise to mental, and only to physical. Maybe others give rise only to mental. And others might give rise to both.

The point being, if you wanted your 2 possible worlds, you might want to stick one of each of the kinds of neutral substances detailed above in each world so that one world doesn't have mental/the other doesn't have physical, but there's one of each.

Another way to think of this is -- imagine our world without brains and other things with consciousness associated, just all the other physical substances. That's a coherent world, right?
If neutral monism of your flavor is true, this world would have neutral + emergent physical.
Here, we're not even saying you restrict to only certain neutral substances, it's more like restricting the configurations those substances can have (not the brain-like ones!).

That's already an example of one of your two worlds, and it doesn't seem in principle any reason why there might not be a world with neutral+emergent mental.