davidpearce comments on Arguments against the Orthogonality Thesis - Less Wrong

-7 Post author: JonatasMueller 10 March 2013 02:13AM

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Comment author: davidpearce 11 March 2013 07:10:50AM 5 points [-]

shminux, Strawsonian physicalism may be false; but it is not dualism. Recall the title of Strawson's controversial essay was "Realistic monism - why physicalism entails panpsychism" (Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (10-11):3-31 (2006)) For an astute critique of Strawson, perhaps see William Seager's "The 'intrinsic nature' argument for panpsychism" (Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (10-11):129-145 (2006) http://philpapers.org/rec/SEATIN ) Once again, I'm not asking you to agree here. We just need to be wary of dismissing a philosophical position without understanding the arguments that motivate it.

Comment author: shminux 11 March 2013 04:41:47PM *  2 points [-]

We just need to be wary of dismissing a philosophical position without understanding the arguments that motivate it.

Indeed, that's a common pitfall, and I'm no stranger to it. So I decided to read the Strawson's essay you mentioned. And there I came across this statement:

Real physicalism cannot have anything to do with physicSalism unless it is supposed—obviously falsely—that the terms of physics can fully capture the nature or essence of experience

How is it obvious?

Further on:

As a real physicalist, then, I hold that the mental/experiential is physical, and I am happy to say, along with many other physicalists, that experience is ‘really just neurons firing’, at least in the case of biological organisms like ourselves.

So far so good.

But when I say these words I mean something completely different from what many physicalists have apparently meant by them. I certainly don’t mean that all characteristics of what is going on, in the case of experience, can be described by physics and neurophysiology or any non-revolutionary extensions of them. That idea is crazy. It amounts to radical ‘eliminativism’ with respect to experience, and it is not a form of real physicalism at all. My claim is different. It is that experiential phenomena ‘just are’ physical, so that there is a lot more to neurons than physics and neurophysiology record (or can record). No one who disagrees with this is a real physicalist, in my terms. [emphasis mine]

The claim in bold is what I don't get. Either it's all physics and it can be studied as such, or it's not, and you need something other than physics to describe "experiential phenomena", which is dualism, including panpsychism. Maybe there is another alternative I'm missing here?

Anyway, I concede that I know little about philosophy, but this essay seems like an exercise in futility by a person who'd do well to go through some of the required reading on Luke's list instead. For now, I have lost interest in Strawsonian's confused musings.

Comment author: davidpearce 12 March 2013 08:27:49AM *  3 points [-]

shminux, it is indeed not obvious what is obvious. But most mainstream materialists would acknowledge that we have no idea what "breathes fire into the equations and makes there a world for us to describe." Monistic materialists believe that this "fire" is nonexperiential; monistic idealists / Strawsonian physicalists believe the fire is experiential. Recall that key concepts in theoretical physics, notably a field (superstring, brane, etc), are defined purely mathematically [cf. "Maxwell's theory is Maxwell's equations"] What's in question here is the very nature of the physical.

Now maybe you'd argue instead in favour of some kind of strong emergence; but if so, this puts paid to reductive physicalism and the ontological unity of science.

[ I could go on if you're interested; but I get the impression your mind is made up(?) ]

Comment author: shminux 12 March 2013 04:15:49PM 3 points [-]

but I get the impression your mind is made up

Uh, no, I frequent this site because I enjoy learning new things. I don't mind if my worldview changes in the process. For example, I used to be a naive physical realist before I thought about these issues, and now I'm more of an instrumentalist. Now, is your mind made up? Do you allow for a chance that your epistemology changes as a result of this exchange?

Comment author: davidpearce 12 March 2013 05:23:11PM 3 points [-]

apologies shminux, I hadn't intended to convey the impression I believed I was more open-minded than you in general; I was just gauging your level of interest here before plunging on. Instrumentalism? Well, certainly the price of adopting a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics is extraordinarily high, namely Everett's multiverse. The price of also preserving reductive physicalism is high too. But if we do relax this constraint, then the alternatives seem ghastly. Thus David Chalmers explores, inconclusively, Strawsonian physicalism before opting for some kind of naturalistic dualism. To my mind, dualism is a counsel of despair.

Comment author: shminux 12 March 2013 07:25:04PM 1 point [-]

I believe I lack context for most of your statements here, since none of them seem make sense to me.

As for my version of instrumentalism (not generally accepted on this forum), I do not postulate any kind of external/objective reality, and hence do not consider terms like "exist" very useful. I care about models accurately predicting future data inputs based on the past data inputs, without worrying where these inputs come from. In such a framework all QM interpretations making identical predictions are equivalent. I suspect this sounds "ghastly" to you.

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