This seems very Spinozist to me

"Eliminative fingerists" is amusing. I think that particular projection fallacy as pertains to minds is part of a larger tradition, however. Radical behaviorists, for instance, really ought to be included. They feel left out, off on their lonesome, busily declaring that the "mind" is a convenient fiction because it can't be measured.

... and seperately, I might note that I've read through much of your archives and enjoyed it immensely. Keep it up!

I'm confused as to what your purpose is with this series on reductionism. Is there a particular anti-reductionist position you're combating?

Earlier, you wrote,

Reductionism is not a positive belief, but rather, a disbelief that the higher levels of simplified multilevel models are out there in the territory.

Anti-reductionists are opposed to models in general. An an... (read more)

If you want to fight the good fight, edit the section "Limits of Reductionism" in the Wikipedia article on Reductionism. It cites many examples of things that are merely complex, as evidence that reductionism is false.

I can't tell from your parody of positions in the philosophy of mind whether you're criticizing eliminative materialists or critics of eliminative materialism.

Eliezer - "Your inability to imagine something is just a computational fact about what your brain can or can't imagine."

Who ever suggested otherwise? Again, see the 'epistemology' section of my 'Arguing with Eliezer: Part I'. What I take as evidence is not "I have an intuition that P", but simply P itself. You might undermine my argument from P to Q by showing some flaw in the thought process that led me to the premise P, but I don't see that you've done this yet (as opposed to merely explaining why you might expect me to have such a be... (read more)

For one thing, Eliezer misunderstands the meaning of "eliminative." An eliminative materialist is someone (by their own definition) who holds that certain things do not exist, say for example beliefs or choices. Eliezer believes that these things are material things, but at least he believes that they exist, as he said about the rainbow. An eliminative materialist says that the word "belief" and "choice" refer to something that does not exist in reality at all, not that they refer to something material. Of course this position... (read more)

Poke: Criticizing the critics.

Richard: What exactly is the 'P' that you think you're taking as a premise, here?

Also, in "Arguing with Eliezer", you write:

I find this commitment less absurd than denying the manifest reality of first-personal conscious experience (as reductive materialists like Dennett and Eliezer do), or engaging in the metaphysical contortions that non-reductive materialists must (see my 'dualist explanations' post).

If, as you claim, you understood my argument fully and rejected it due to arguments I fail to understand, then wh... (read more)

Richard, also, from your "Dualist Explanations":

Once the brain matter is there, they think that's all there is to consciousness -- there's nothing further to explain. Most of us think there is something still to be explained, and dualism can achieve this by positing bridging laws that cause 'mind' to emerge from 'matter'.

Looks like a clear-cut case of Mind Projection Fallacy to me, or, at the very least, a severe misrepresentation of how a mature reductive materialist sees their own viewpoint. A reductive materialist need not pass from "Brain dynamics entirely and strictly constitute consciousness" to "There's nothing further to explain." There is plenty more to explain, namely, the nature of the identity.

Knowing that != knowing why != knowing how != seeing how.

If you merely know that mind=brain you may have a great deal left to explain. You may still need to find the insights needed to dissolve the apparent impossibility of mind=brain.

The map is not the territory, so you can't jump from

mind=brain

to

(mind=brain)->know('mind=brain')

to

know('mind=brain')->know_how('mind'='brain')

to

~know_how('mind'='brain')->~(mind=brain)

You seem to jump from... (read more)

Eliezer: that last response makes some progress, since this is the first time I have seen you concede that "why is mind the same as the brain in a certain condition?" is a sensible question that needs an answer.

Given this, what makes you think it is possible to answer the question at all? Just because a question makes sense doesn't mean we can give an answer to it. And just because all the questions that you have answered in the past had answers, doesn't mean the the ones you haven't answered have answers. It couldn't have been otherwise: of cour... (read more)

I can't presume to answer for Eliezer, but I don't think he's yet claimed to know how the brain works. He's also paid considerable attention to the nonsensical nature of some attempts to say that we might "already" know how- IE "emergence", "complexity", and other non-explanations. I'd go so far as to say that it follows directly from the fact that we can't make our own brains from first principles that we don't really understand the ones currently in circulation.

That said, it would be a serious defiance of all precedent if br... (read more)

I'm not convinced that we can have real probability distributions over impossible possible worlds. At the very least, a real probability distribution must sum its exhaustive and exclusive possibilities to 1, but in fact it seems to me that the same type of effort that is needed to show that a set of impossible possibilities sums to 1 also changes the degree to which they have been examined, changing their subjective probabilities. It specifically seems to me that pseudo-probability distribution over impossible possible worlds will generally contain non-c... (read more)

As pertains to brains, we have reasonable inferences that the mind is strictly anchored in a physical substance. Among the oldest I'm aware of is Heraclitis' observation that hitting someone in the head causes stupor, confusion, etc, so the mind probably resides there.

Yes and when I hit my radio with a rock it might stop working, change the station, if I rip out transistors it might make the sound distorted, etc. That really doesn't prove that the song is stored inside the radio, does it?

If you are interested in reality instead of just fitting in with cur... (read more)

I agree with some others that Eliezer is here arguing against a fairly naïve form of anti-reductionism, and indeed is explaining rather than refuting it. However, I assume, Eliezer, that the point of your entry is (in keeping with the theme of the blog) to illustrate a certain sort of bias through its effects, rather than to prove to everyone that reductionism is really truly true. So explanation over refutation is entirely appropriate here.

Richard, I'm always amazed at what philosophers think they can see merely by "understanding the terms." Such analysis may well tell us a lot about what we often assume, but I am skeptical that it can tell us as much as philosophers think about what is actually possible vs. only apparently possible.

I would love to see Eliezer defend his claim that the physical world has only one level. Precisely how does he know that? We cannot confirm that our various models of phenomena can be reduced to the most basic physics.

Yes and when I hit my radio with a rock it might stop working, change the station, if I rip out transistors it might make the sound distorted, etc. That really doesn't prove that the song is stored inside the radio, does it?

Well, no. All else being equal, however, and absent evidence for radio waves, the most parsimonious explanation IS that the song is stored in the radio. Absent evidence of immaterial souls, the same applies to brains. Heraclitis could fairly easily have been wrong, since he was just going on the effects of gross trauma. Fortunately, we ... (read more)

Michael:

I'm not convinced that we can have real probability distributions over impossible possible worlds. At the very least, a real probability distribution must sum its exhaustive and exclusive possibilities to 1, but in fact it seems to me that the same type of effort that is needed to show that a set of impossible possibilities sums to 1 also changes the degree to which they have been examined, changing their subjective probabilities. It specifically seems to me that pseudo-probability distribution over impossible possible worlds will generally contain... (read more)

PK: I don't see the ++ in your nice example, it's perfectly valid C... =)

Caledonian, Ian C.: I know of no models of reality that have superior explanatory power than the standard reductionist one-level-to-bind-them-all position (apologies for the pun). So why add more? In a certain way "our maps [are] part of reality too", but not in any fundamental sense. To simulate a microchip doing a FFT, it's quite sufficient to simulate the physical processes in it's logic gates. You need not even know what the chip is actually supposed to do. You just need... (read more)

Robin - 'I'm always amazed at what philosophers think they can see merely by "understanding the terms." Such analysis may well tell us a lot about what we often assume, but I am skeptical that it can tell us as much as philosophers think about what is actually possible vs. only apparently possible.'

What kind of possibility are you talking about? Philosophers will grant that reason/understanding alone can't tell us what's physically possible. That's the domain of science. But logical possibility is simply defined as what can be coherently understo... (read more)

Caledonian: Sure you do. That's why we have biology and chemistry and neuroscience instead of having only one field: physics.

That's just a matter of efficiency (as I have tried to illuminate). There is nothing about those high level descriptions that is not compatible with physics. They are often more convenient and practical, but they do not add one iota of explanatory power.

There is nothing about those high level descriptions that is not compatible with physics.

Since we can't extrapolate our physics that far, we don't know whether they're truly compatible with our understanding of physics or not.

The difference between our views is that he thinks the reduction is logically necessary; that there is no sense to be made of the idea of a 'zombie' world physically identical to ours but lacking consciousness. I think that's plainly false. There's nothing incoherent about the idea of zombies.

Of course there is. If a feature can... (read more)

"Recently, however, scientists have made a stunning discovery: It's not your hand that holds the cup, it's actually your fingers, thumb, and palm."

What, are we in third grade? Are you really dedicating a whole post to the semantics of composition? Is it really that hard to fathom that the hand is composed of the fingers, thumb, and palm?

This just in! Scientists recently discovered that it's not actually people that post pretentious blog articles, but instead a sophisticated arraignment of meat popsicles.

Caledonian: "Since we can't extrapolate our physics that far, we don't know whether they're truly compatible with our understanding of physics or not." For the sake for argument, I'll let that stand (as a conflict of minor importance). Still, why should we go and assume a non-reductionist model? That's multiplying entities beyond necessity.

Caledonian - the addition of p-consciousness has no physical consequences. To infer that it has "absolutely no consequences of any kind" is obviously question-begging against those of us who hold that there are non-physical facts (e.g. what it is like, subjectively, to be in such-and-such a physical state). The zombie world is appreciably different from ours in these other respects.

Incidentally, the principle you depend upon is self-defeating. Consider:

(Scientism): A claim is coherent only if it has scientific implications.

What are the scientific... (read more)

Richard: Yes, there is a reality beyond reality! Sure, it's not real in the sense that it is measurable or measurably interacts with our drab scientific reductionist reality, but it's... real! Really! I can feel it! So speak the Searle-addled...

Caledonian,

Modern chemistry is an extension of physics. The theories that chemists use were literally extrapolated from the physics; they're physically accurate extensions of the physical behavior of the hydrogen atom. (They cut corners but we know how to cut corners; physics is all about simplification.) Modern biology is built on biochemistry (which is just the chemistry of large organic molecules). Neurobiology is biology (and biochemistry and biophysics). Mineralogy is built on chemistry and founds modern geology (along with physics). Astrophysics is obviously physics; cosmology is physics; and so on. Most of the dividing lines are obviously institutional. Which part of all this, exactly, would you object to?

Has anyone yet stopped to consider the fact that we came up with physics in order to predict what we would see, hear, and feel next?

If claims about seeing, hearing, and feeling, are literally statements about brains and atoms, why did we have to come up with physics at all? We should have already known what we were talking about.

Sez Richard:

The difference between our views is that he thinks the reduction is logically necessary; that there is no sense to be made of the idea of a 'zombie' world physically identical to ours but lacking consciousness. I think that's plainly false. There's nothing incoherent about the idea of zombies. So the admitted link between the physical and phenomenal facts is merely contingent (taking the form of a natural law, rather than a reductive analysis).

"Plainly false?" You mean you can imagine a world identical to ours but lacking 'conscio... (read more)

Eliezer, Dan did not describe the difference between bridging laws and the conservation of energy. Read Richard's statement about what he meant by a bridging law.

Richard,

I think your refutation of "scientism" is somewhat disingenuous and suffers from what I like to call the "everything is philosophy fallacy." When a scientist says "philosophy is nonsense" they have obvious scientific grounds: philosophical reasoning isn't a part of the scientific world view. There's no difference between saying "philosophy is nonsense" and saying "religion is nonsense." Criticizing them on the grounds that this isn't good philosophy is ridiculous. One doesn't need to philosophize to communicate.

the addition of p-consciousness has no physical consequences. To infer that it has "absolutely no consequences of any kind" is obviously question-begging

Talking is a physical act. Remembering is a physical act. Thinking is a physical act. If your 'p-consciousness' has no physical consequences, it cannot affect the way people think and remember and talk. None of the philosophers who think and remember and talk about their supposed non-experiential experiences can be causally connected to the thing they're supposedly experiencing.

Again: your position is incoherent. Your conception of 'non-physical facts' is meaningless and without semantic content.

I'm pretty confused by this discussion. People toss out terms like reductionist or anti-reductionist, and I can't even tell what they disagree about.

Here's what I know:

1) There are quarks and electrons, maybe some strings too. Nobody seems to dispute the quarks and electrons, at least. There are also clusters of particles.

2) Everything above that level is an abstraction that only exists in our heads. Yeah, those atoms really are near each other, but the only thing that makes them a "computer" is that we use them for computing. Same applies to bra... (read more)

Although I prefer an even weaker kind of scientism: scientism'': an ontological claim is boring if it has no scientific implications. By boring, I mean, tells us nothing relevant to practical reason. Which is why I'm happy to take Richard's property dualism: I accept scientism'', ergo, it doesn't matter.

"Yes and when I hit my radio with a rock it might stop working, change the station, if I rip out transistors it might make the sound distorted, etc. That really doesn't prove that the song is stored inside the radio, does it?"

Pace Dan, above, it would not be "parsimonious" to assume the song is "stored in the radio." Even assuming complete naivete about how radios work, it would be relatively easy to show that the songs are (in some mysterious way) coming from some outside source. (For example, you could compare the performanc... (read more)

Richard sez:

Note that my fundamental premise is not, "I think the zombie world is coherently conceivable." Nothing of interest follows from the fact that I have an opinion, since the opinion might be baseless (as you've repeatedly pointed out). Instead, my basic premise is that the zombie world is coherently conceivable (i.e. without the sort of finger-hand misunderstanding that might make a scenario seem conceivable when in fact it's incoherent). You haven't said a word that bears on the truth of this premise. All you've said is that ignorance

"Please explain what it means for something to be genuinely conceivable, as opposed to just being conceivable to some particular person."

Conceivable on ideal rational reflection, i.e. without logical error, implicit contradiction, or conceptual ignorance (e.g. failing to realize that hand just means fingers etc.)

"I'm not sure how I'm supposed to react to this paragraph, frankly."

You're supposed to show that my premise is false. We have good reasons for thinking that there are no Martians in my nose. But is there any such reason to think that the zombie scenario is incoherent? Show us the contradiction...

Richard: I'm making a slightly stronger claim, which is that ontological claims with no scientific implications aren't even relevant for philosophical issues of practical reason, so, for example, the question of god's existence has no relevance for ethics (contra, e.g., Kant's second critique). (Of course, to make this fly at all, I'm going to have to say that metaethical positions aren't ontological claims, so I'm probably getting all kinds of commitments I don't want here, and I'll probably have to recant this position upon anything but the slightest scrutiny, but it seems like it's worth considering.)

Caledonian - I addressed all that in my linked posts

That's nice.

The man who came up with the concept you're bandying around has explicitly said that p-zombies behave identically in every way, not just the ways we can easily perceive. He has even granted that p-zombie versions of himself would make precisely the same arguments.

For this, I consider him a fool. You don't haven't even managed to reproduce his errors correctly - what should I consider you?

failing to realize that hand just means fingers etc.

Richard, hand only "just means" fingers etc. in a situation where we understand hands very well, and have chosen to think of hands that way. Had we not understand hands as well as we do, we might well conceive of fingers not being parts of hands and so on. I think you are way too quick to conclude that it is "logically impossible to have the fingers and all without a hand."

Dan - We have different projects; I'm not trying to "fix the counterintuitiveness of consciousness." I'm interested in whether it is in principle susceptible to physical reduction. (We can answer these sorts of questions by understanding alone. I don't need to do science in order to appreciate the conditional that if physical investigation reveals particles that play such-and-such a role, then objects such as hands will be reducible to said arrangements of particles. There is no coherently conceivable 'hand-zombie' world, analogous to the phenome... (read more)

MTraven - They might have a common structural/functional role. It would be plenty interesting if computing a certain algorithm strictly entailed a certain phenomenal quality (or 'feel').

Dan - I assume that science is essentially limited to third-personal investigation of public, measurable phenomena. It follows that we can expect to learn more and more about the public, measurable aspects of neural functioning. But it would be a remarkable surprise if such inquiry sufficed to establish conclusions about first-personal phenomenology. (In this respect, the e... (read more)

We can play "maybe"s all day long, but it doesn't seem very helpful unless you can actually show that a mistake has been made.

Richard, the burden of proof is on you. You are in effect making the claim that a certain problem ("reduce consciousness to physics") is impossible to solve. But why should we believe that? When all is said and done, you appear to be saying, "because it seems that way". This is where Eliezer comes in.

I'm well aware that p-zombies are physically - and hence behaviourally - identical to their conscious counterparts. The dispute is over what conclusions we can draw from this.

The main difference in my own mind between positing zombies and conscious persons is:
1) the greater sympathy I feel with "real" people, imagining the feelings that correspond to their actions, and
2) the fact that I say that they are, rather than are not, conscious.
Does anyone arguing for the possibility or meaningfulness of a p-zombie materially disagree with what goes on in the mind of someone who supposes a p-zombie or a conscious person? Since if there's no disagreement about that, I don't see how there can be any disagreement on what &quo... (read more)

Richard: the claim I'm trying out depends on us not being able to learn that information, for if we could learn it, the claim would have some observable content, and thereby have scientific implications.

Paul: "we are morally obliged to kill everyone we meet" has no scientific implications, but it definitely has moral implications. To speak plainly, your position is false, and obviously so.

Some children (2-4 years of age) assume that other human beings are zombies, because they do not meet their model of a conscious observer, e.g. adults don't go and eat the ice cream in the freezer, even though no one can stop them, and even though any conscious being would of course eat that ice cream, if it were in its power.

This fact actually is one proof tha... (read more)

Unknown: that's not an ontological claim (at least for the dangerous metaethical commitments I mentioned in the caveat above).

This fact actually is one proof that Caledonian and others are talking nonsense in saying that the zombie world is incoherent; everyone involved in this discussion, including Caledonian, knows exactly what the world would be like if it were a zombie world,

The mental gymnastics people will go through to avoid confronting this simple and obvious fact are quite extraordinary.

I suspect it's the same reason why people continu... (read more)

Unknown - I think we need to clear up our definitions of 'incoherent'. Saying that a zombie world is incoherent doesn't mean that one can't visualise that world. It means that a world isomorphic to our own but 'without consciousness' is not different from our own in any measurable way. Hence the assertion that the the zombie world is interesting/useful is incoherent. Saying that the posulated 'difference' is beyond the realm of science is the religionist stance.

From Richard's blog:

There's no denying that the [zombie] world itself is possible, physically ... (read more)

Ben, what do you mean by "measurable"? In the zombie world, Ben Jones posts a comment on this blog, but he never notices what he is posting. In the real world, he knows what he is posting. So the difference is certainly noticeable, even if it isn't measurable. Why isn't "noticeable" enough for the situation to be a useful consideration?

Poke: Are you sure about mineralogy and physics as foundations of modern geology?

Patrick:

I agree that something roughly along the lines of what you are discussing can be done and is unavoidable. I am primarily attempting to refute the proposal that it is or can be corrected to become Bayesian, and hence the proposal that the process that we use to do things like this stands with the same sort of logical foundations as Bayesian reasoning does. It definitely seems to me that strictly speaking, once you remove logical omniscience, unless you replace it wit... (read more)

I was a bit of an ass earlier. I apologize, I'll try to actually address arguments rather than flinging snide remarks at people.

[EDIT - This does not appear to be Caledonian, but someone else posing as him, namely "varkanut@hotmail.com" which is not Caledonian's usual email address. - Eliezer.]

In the zombie world, Ben Jones posts a comment on this blog, but he never notices what he is posting.

Um, no, this is wrong.

I wouldn't expect you to take my word for this, but Chalmers himself has said that's not the case. P-zombies behave exactly the same way as people with consciousness do in all ways, so zombie-Ben-Jones' eyes pick up visual data, his brain contains a representation of what he has done and what he is seeing, and he could provide just as much of a reasoned and intelligent discussion of his positions as you'd otherwise expect.

You are no... (read more)

A non reductionist might talk about X where X is specifically defined as 'stuff that cannot be reduced'. The reductionist hears the term X and starts to argue how it can be reduced. Point is that the non-reductionist is fundamentally talking about something different.

the solution is that one can use a on reductionist framework to consider the issue (with an associated shift in definitions of words etc) and one can use a reductionist framework or one can take a position somwhere in the middle. In my opinion the reductionist one is more useful - but if the ... (read more)

Richard: Conceivable on ideal rational reflection, i.e. without logical error, implicit contradiction, or conceptual ignorance (e.g. failing to realize that hand just means fingers etc.)

Conceptual ignorance? Do you have to show such freedom from contradiction, or do your opponents have to show such a contradiction? Either would require you to state the concepts involved in a perfectly logical and complete form. So, what is the physical, precisely? (If it includes QM and GR then there is probably a contradiction.)

...much later... The thing that puzzles me about this post is that no attention is paid to context.

I had an operation last year to my right index finger. It was carried out by a hand surgeon. I used those terms because it was rather important which finger was operated on, and because the medical specialism relates to any part of the hand indifferently.

A trivial example, of course, but it illustrates the point, which applies also to much more complex issues, that the appropriate choice of "model level" (or other meta-model feature) to best repr... (read more)

For example, you could have a "hand scanner" that showed a "hand" as a dot on a map (like an old-fashioned radar display), and similar scanners for fingers/thumbs/palms; then you would see a cluster of dots around the hand, but you would be able to imagine the hand-dot moving off from the others.

This analogy clarifies my view of conciousness, a lot.

"Sure, the qualia is always associated with brain activity, but qualia can't be brain activity, it's so obviously of a different kind!"