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gjm comments on Exclude the supernatural? My worldview is up for grabs. - Less Wrong Discussion
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Sure, you can just say that consciousness is fundamental. That's exactly the same sort of question-begging as just saying that consciousness arises from souls. Assuming something as fundamental reduces the merit of your theory just as much as failing to explain it (since assuming it as fundamental does, in fact, fail to explain it) so once again there's no explanatory advantage to the non-materialist position here.
(Also, if you take consciousness as fundamental then the intricate relationships between consciousness and matter are highly mysterious. If consciousness arises from what the brain does, it's at least unsurprising in general terms that what you're conscious of relates to what your brain's doing, that interfering with the brain can interfere with your consciousness, etc. If it's some magical independent thing, how does that happen?)
Is it question begging to say <something physical> is fundamental?
Are they?If you take (eg) matter and space as both fundamental, are you then unable to explain the complex relationships between them?
It could be. For instance, imagine someone (years ago) wondering why and how things burn. Let's suppose that this was before there was a really good scientific account of burning. Then they might say "Conventional science has failed; we should therefore adopt my theory instead. My theory says that there is a fundamental property of things, called their flammability; things burn readily when their flammability is high. Burning consists of turning things with high flammability into things with low flammability." That would be question-begging, in relation to explaining burning, in roughly the same way as taking consciousness as fundamental is question-begging in relation to explaining consciousness.
I suppose it could in principle turn out that consciousness is fundamental. (Being question-begging is a defect in an argumentative move; the proposition(s) one asserts in the process might still be correct.) But the fact that we don't have anything close to a complete physical explanation of consciousness cannot be a good reason for thinking that consciousness is fundamental; there would have to be other reasons, if someone were to be rationally convinced that consciousness is fundamental.
(A sufficiently complete and sustained failure to find physical explanations for consciousness might be sufficient reason for provisionally taking consciousness as fundamental. But as I've already said elsewhere in this thread, that isn't in fact the epistemic situation we find ourselves in.)
They seem to be; at any rate I've never heard any sort of explanation, starting with "consciousness as fundamental" premises, that gives any inkling of how those relationships might come about.
As for matter and space: in order to do justice to the relationships between them, physicists don't exactly take them as separate fundamental things. But that's a quibble, indeed, a sufficiently detailed theory about what consciousness does and how it relates to the other things known to science might in principle explain those intricate relationships. But it turns out that people wanting to take consciousness as fundamental never actually have such detailed theories, or proposals for how such theories might be found, or any sign of being interested in finding such theories. This is getting into territory I've already commented on elsewhere in the thread, though, so I'll leave it there.
Question beggingness is an inherent property of arguments: it shouldn;t depend on external factors.
There have been bad explanations (NB explanations aren't arguments) of the form "X is fundamental", some physicalist, some not. There have also been good ones. They can't all be bad because they are question begging: if one is question-begging, all are, but not all are bad. What makes them bad or good is other, complex factors
Again: would that apply to all "X is fundamental" arguments?
That is a matter of judgment.
Those would be the factors that make the posit that consciousness is fundamental (part of) a good explanation. We don't have a good dualist explanation; many think we don;t have a good physicalist explanation either.
But the point remains that dualist (or, as I prefer, intrinsicist) explanations can't written off apriori. The devil's oin the details.
Don't they? What's the space-time- matter energy unification theory?
It's an intrinsic property of arguments in contexts. Specifically, whether something is question-begging depends on what one's trying to prove.
Indeed explanations aren't arguments. The arguments we're talking about are ones of the form "Theory X is better than theory Y because it explains alleged facts F better". Merely saying "Consciousness (or whatever) is fundamental" is of course not question-begging. But if the existence, or some property, of consciousness is one of the alleged facts F, and if theory X simply postulates whatever property it is of consciousness, then a question is being begged.
I don't claim to be able to contemplate all imaginable arguments that say things are fundamental. But, in general, claiming that something's fundamental and just happens to have the properties it's known to have is a pretty weak move; and saying "Look, I've now given an explanation of whatever-it-is, so I'm doing better than you stupid people who are still looking for more complicated explanations" is invalid.
I'm afraid I don't understand. Would you care to say a little more.
"Matter" isn't a first-class citizen in modern physics. There are a bunch of quantum fields, and things that happen to those fields produce the effects we call matter. (And other things that happen to those fields produce actually-quite-similar effects that we generally don't call matter, such as physical forces.) "Space" isn't quite a first-class citizen either; spacetime is; its geometry is determined by the matter-and-similar-stuff in it. I wouldn't say that space and matter (or spacetime and mass/energy) are exactly unified; my rather noncommital language ("don't exactly take them as separate fundamental things") was deliberate.
A formal argument will include a conclusion. If that is the same as one of its premises, a question is being begged.
I don't see that that is the case. The rather informal argument you gave mentions facts being explained better. Simply positing things is better than not explaining them at all, but not as good explaining them parsimoniously, without additional posits.
Yes--in general. But it is not invariably invalid, as formal question-begging is.
A novel ontological posit can be part of a good expanation. Examples tend to be complicated.
Neither would I.
Ontological fundamentals are going to be rather useless if they don't relate to each other at all...and they are not going to be fundamentals. plural, if they relate too closely. So that is to be expected.
Sure, but most arguments -- including in particular many of the sort this discussion was originally about -- are not formalized. Specifically, theistic or supernaturalist arguments based on consciousness, morality and free will generally leave most of their premises unstated and most of their steps implicit. Accordingly, the appropriate notion of question-begging needs to be generalized slightly. I suppose you might prefer to use some other term for the logical flaw I'm complaining about: what's being assumed is not necessarily exactly what they set out to prove, but some other thing that stands in about as much need of proof, and for much the same reasons, as what they're purporting to prove.
See, here's where we disagree. I think simply positing things is worse than just leaving them unexplained, unless either (1) there's some actual reason to think they need simply positing, or (2) they're posited in a way that actually leads to useful predictions (and those predictions don't get refuted).
In epistemology, positing that there's an external world with which our experience is somewhat correlated is useful because of #1; if you don't make such an assumption then you simply can't get started.
In physics, positing electrons (or the quantum field from which they arise, or whatever) is useful because of #2; what you're positing has precisely defined behaviour which lets you deduce all kinds of true things.
But how does positing consciousness as fundamental help you in either respect? And, if it doesn't, how does it help at all? It seems to me that it just serves to discourage you for looking for better explanations.
Well, there's an interesting rhetorical move. I say "X is a pretty weak move, and Y is invalid". You quote only the first half and say "But it's not invariably invalid". Bah.
Of course. Perhaps it wasn't clear what I was asking. You said "Those would be the factors that ..." but I can't tell what things you were referring to; you said "a good explanation" but I can't tell what good explanation. (And I'm not sure whether when you said "make" you actually meant "hypothetically might make" or "actually do make". The latter seems like the obvious meaning but then surely you owe us some more information about this alleged good explanation.)
I don't see the problem. I was trying to emphasise that question begging is not the right diagnosis of the problem.
Yep. As above.
You're not distingusihing the cases where the posit is part of a theory and where it isn't. Where we have a theory, we can test it. We don't have a satisfactory dualist or physicalistic theory. So what is going on at this stage is not really theorisation,. but speculation about the form a theory should take.
As I indicated, that is difficult to answer succintly. I think the posit of colour charge works within QCD, but saying what is good about QCD is like summarising Proust.
I think we're failing to communicate, because that distinction is an important part of what I'm getting at. The proponents of consciousness-as-fundamental show no sign of having any interest in making consciousness into part of a theory that's any use, and that's part of what I think is wrong with what they're saying.
You seem not to be willing to try to answer at all. You won't say what you meant, you won't say whether you think there's a useful theory that includes consciousness as a fundamental phenomenon, you hint vaguely that there might be such a theory and it might have some explanatory power but you won't say what it might look like or how it might do its explaining. You say "those would be the factors that do X" and then refuse to say just what "those" are or anything about how they do X.
How is it possible to have a meaningful discussion on these terms?
As I pointed out, physicalists don't have a solution to the Hard Problem either. You say they are trying and dualists aren't, but you offer no evidence.
That is because it is difficult. As I said.
I'm sorry, but I'm just not saying the things you think I am saying. What I said was:
"what is going on at this stage is not really theorisation,. but speculation about the form a theory should take"
ETA
The point is not that dualism is true and physicalism false. The point was only ever that dualism is not as obviously false as sometimes made out.