What Kind of Metaphysician Are You?

I won't be very active in this thread I am afraid, i am a materialist . Which, to outrun some of you, does not mean I am a heartless, cold person.

 

I am always toying with approaches. But in the end the conclusion is always the same. Anything else is simply to complicated for me .

 

Physicalism?

 

Firstly, in my current thinking, materialism does not preclude any of the other approaches, and for this reason:

I am taking the idea of infinity very seriously indeed, and taken to its natural conclusion this means that every basic form of reality is simultaneously true, albeit perhaps located in different universes. Now, the question then becomes, 'do any of these different realities bleed into our own? And if so how?'

Take this:

1) Suppose that reality is infinitely branching depending on the outcomes of particular events. E.g. If an event has two possible outcomes, reality will branch into two instances, and within each of these a different outcome obtained.

2) Now suppose that these 'branching events' are not confined to, say, [human] 'choices' and the like, but to things like the basic laws of physics and the basic form of reality. In other words, the multiverse has an essential indeterminacy, but within each universe paradoxes are abhorred and a general determinacy persists. This means that there would have been a point at which, in our universe, the strength of gravity had to be decided. This would be a branching event.

Everything is simultaneously true, including finity, which seems like an impossible contradiction.

Shit I'm too tired to think about this now.

 

I am all over the place of course... I have a lot of thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of many of the positions....but here's how it goes for me: either we're extraordinarily-mistaken about the nature of consciousness or it's essentially what we think it is, and if it is what we think it is, I doubt mental properties are physical properties, even if they may be determined by them (think of, for instance, the squareness of a square mat -- I doubt squareness is physical, if it exists it's probably mathematical, and thus more abstract/general than physical, but still, I think the mathematical properties of all concrete things seem to be determined by their physics).
This doesn't rule out any physicalism, because not all such varieties are reductive -- this kind of nonreductive entailment being an example of why not.

The reason for the first dichotomy, though, is I honestly think once you take the sheer evident, subjective apparent feel of consciousness, I really think once we've decided (if so) that's not how it really is, the views that try to pay lip service to it don't make sense to me.

 

Oh and I lean to the second type .. personally I've usually found radical materialism's motivation hard to see -- over time, the physical has only come to seem weirder and weirder, and nobody can make progress on the right interpretation of quantum mechanics without a thousand detractors...I'm very skeptical of the approaches that try to deflate consciousness, as this seems most of their motives. OTOH, I don't tend to think anyone who tries to resolve what is going on with the weirdness yet has an idea.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were some information-processing view that helped tell what kinds of consciousness happen where -- after all, empirically the brain does seem to do a bunch of self-modeling in the states that are related to consciousness, so what may simply be going on is we have a toy mathematical modeling of what that self-modeling really entails, and if we better understood the nature of the physical, it wouldn't be so surprising what's going on.

 

I am full of admiration for all these words I don't understand and for those of you who do.

I thought it was going to be a quiz with pretty pictures that told me how awesome I was.

 

So you believe that reality is irreducible?

 

I agree.

Do you believe that the universe works in a causal way?

 

Yes sir, dats me.

 

'The freedom of the act lies prior to or before the reality of causally conditioned objects. It makes this reality at all "possible"... Causality reigns over the real world of objects and the world of the psychological subject; however, this world would be without any basis if there were not a realm of freedom, through which we had to pass in order to attain it.' - Heinrich Rickert

Here Rickert is describing his concept of the 'pro-physical' realm: a place of conceptual validity that was somehow prior to the physical world. Is this dualism in the guise of Kantian formalism? Like all the Neo-Kantians, Rickert somehow doesn't quite 'prove' his idea, and yet he almost captures something essential. E.g.:

'We must see all the theories that believe they can reject the idea of freedom as being theoretically invalid. The crucial reason for this is that science itself needs freedom even when investigating causal connections. Only a theoretical (transcendental) subject who is not dependent on causality can take a position on the value of truth. Only when we grant the possibility of such a subject can we recognise something as being true and meaningful.'

P.S. I should say that it is possible to have a 'causality of freedom', or an 'indeterminist causality'. In essence, though, its essential properties are probabilistic because choices are always constrained by the conditions of possibility that inhere within the material world.