Physicalism Redux

[Laird]

But it seems to me that W.Craig's argument is that no Law of Nature can get around the problem of an infinite regress into the past?

It seems so. He seems to argue that it is impossible for the laws of physics, especially of quantum physics, to spontaneously create space-time, because those "laws" are merely descriptive propositions of how space-time does behave, and thus cannot causally precede space-time.

That doesn't prove God but it does - if the argument is sound - strike a body blow to Physicalism?

I'm convinced by the arguments against an infinite past, with one possible "out": the infinite past could be in a sense "virtual" in that beyond a point, no conscious entity or entities were present during it, such that the "virtual" past only actualises if/when a conscious being (re)incarnates into it from a timeless realm or, more likely, a separate timeline. A conscious being could, then, actualise a past time as far back as s/he wanted to, without limit.

But yes, I think that even that would be quite a blow to physicalism, because it would not be anything "physical" that (re)incarnates into the past.

I'm not entirely sure about the argument against the idea that some sort of impersonal "law(s)" could cause a universe with a beginning. I'd have to think on it more.

Can physicalism explain phenomenal consciousness?

Emerson Green

For all the other examples of weak emergence, we have the same category of concepts on either side of the emergent divide: we go from objective description to objective description. But with consciousness, we go from objective description to subjective description. How many objective descriptions does it take to add up to a subjective description? How can we describe behavior in such a way that leads to experience, i.e., how do we go from third-personal description to first-personal description? At the very least, there’s an epistemic problem here.

But why should we think this objective/subjective gap is also an ontic gap? Well, it seems impossible in principle to give an intelligible account of how we go from one to the other.

If subjective reality emerged non-subjectivity, we should be able to give an intelligible account of how that happened. We can give a perfectly intelligible account of how we get from chemistry to biology, from non-tables to tables, from non-liquid molecules to liquidity. But how do we bridge the objective and subjective? How can we start with third-person, objective description and end up at first-person, subjective description? Physicalists need to do more than simply appeal to unrelated examples of successful reduction and cases of weak emergence without explaining why we should think the emergence of experience was also a case of weak emergence.

Look, I don’t need all the details. Just the broad strokes will do!

To quote David Chalmers, “[Reductive physicalists] will have to give us some idea of how the existence of consciousness might be entailed by physical facts. While it is not fair to expect all the details, one at least needs an account of how such an entailment might possibly go.” All I want is an intelligible explanation of how we get from non-experiential reality to experiential reality, just like we have an intelligible explanation of the examples commonly mentioned. In those cases, we have a smooth gradient of gradual change. How could this be true of the emergence of experience, given phenomenal precision?

Can physicalism explain phenomenal consciousness?

Emerson Green

My first reply in forever... but it's something. Turned into a bit of a rant... hopefully everyone's fine with that...

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I find there to be seemingly curious parallels between the Physicalist and Buddhist accounts of mind and consciousness. Both believe mind to be an illusion, a lie, a delusion.

For the Physicalist, mind is emergent from matter, and therefore, has no real existence. For the Buddhist, mind is emergent from the five aggregates, and therefore, has no real existence. In both cases, experiential mind is composed of the non-experiential. The Buddhist five aggregates just... happen, for no reason, and magically conjure up a mind somehow, which then just suffers... for no reason. The Physicalist emergent-from-matter mind also just... happens, after enough matter congregates into just the right special sauce combination, for no cognizable reason.

To the Physicalist, and to the Buddhist, I ask: "if mind is a mere illusion, composed of lesser substances, how can mind even be aware of this?" No illusion has ever demonstrated that it can become magically self-aware, and determine that it is an illusion. So why should mind be some special exception to this profoundly solid rule?

My first reply in forever... but it's something. Turned into a bit of a rant... hopefully everyone's fine with that...

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I find there to be seemingly curious parallels between the Physicalist and Buddhist accounts of mind and consciousness. Both believe mind to be an illusion, a lie, a delusion.

For the Physicalist, mind is emergent from matter, and therefore, has no real existence. For the Buddhist, mind is emergent from the five aggregates, and therefore, has no real existence. In both cases, experiential mind is composed of the non-experiential. 

Good to see you posting.

The problem is that a simple and functionality-based definition for mind is not framed by either viewpoint.

Functionally, the biological action of mind changes real-world-probabilities.  This is viewed as intentional behavior, with the aspect of shaping the information in the environment to line-up with needs.  These changes can be addressed as a reduction in entropy in terms of organizational outcomes. Organisms detect nutrients as affordances.  Ordered behavior is increased in the life of organism.  Hence, the reduction in entropy (or increase in negentropy) manifesting when the organism ingests useful molecules.

Mind - defined as directly acting on real-world information structures - reveals the basic purposeful activity that can be framed as data formed with formal units of measure. These measures contribute data on all organisms using communication tools to maintain homeostasis.  Data representing informational transformations.  Transformations accumulating in both physical and mental environments.  Mind acting according to the facts of biology, logic, information science, linguistics, thermodynamics and psychology.

Realizing I made a mistake, in that I assumed there was something coherent about the term "physical".

But this claim that something outside of all experience exists yet will only ever be known via what is agreed upon as being part of consensus experience...even before we get to the question of how the "physical" can create the "mental" we would need to justify this "outside of all experience" stuff...

Realizing I made a mistake, in that I assumed there was something coherent about the term "physical".

But this claim that something outside of all experience exists yet will only ever be known via what is agreed upon as being part of consensus experience...even before we get to the question of how the "physical" can create the "mental" we would need to justify this "outside of all experience" stuff...

Re-post for relevancy ->

We Know Exactly What Consciousness Is — Don’t Let Anyone Tell You Otherwise

Casper Wilstrup

Perhaps you would proceed to define mass in terms of other physical properties, say energy and velocity, or perhaps force and acceleration. But then, what is force? What is energy?

If you continue this game, you will find that you are inevitably led down a never-ending spiral of definitions and questions. It won’t be long until you are back to the starting point — to mass. Try as you might, you will find yourself entrapped in a circular argument, going round and round ad infinitum. That is, of course, until you bring consciousness into the mix. You see, mass is something that is experienced or sensed by us in certain ways under certain conditions. With this reference to our own consciousness, we find a way to end the infinite loop.

This plants a big flagpole in a crucial point that is strangely often overlooked. Physics was not created to describe some external, objective world. Rather, it was created to explain how something that we label as the ‘objective world’ is experienced by conscious beings such as ourselves...

Re-post for relevancy ->
We Know Exactly What Consciousness Is — Don’t Let Anyone Tell You Otherwise
Casper Wilstrup

Looking into stuff about this "physical", which precedes experience and supposedly generates it...The confidence for this claim seems to be grounded in physics & neuroscience...but this doesn't really make me confident anything wholly divorced from experience exists.

Perhaps the first problem is physics can't even tell us what the "physical" really is ->

"We don't know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties.

Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe - through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence, it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations."
 -physicist Lee Smolin, author of Time Reborn

Additionally it seems all this investigation requires mathematics...but maths is grounded in proofs which are grounded in logic....and logic seems to be grounded on the feeling - or "quale" - of logical correctness?

There's also the mysterious efficacy of maths in scientific work, something the physicist Wigner pointed out.

Then looking at the history of physics, we have the study of the macro-scale resulting in Cosmic Fine Tuning which suggests Design...and looking at the microscale we have the oddities of QM which might possibly involve a fundamental, irreducible consciousness in some way.

As for neuroscience, there seem to be varied issues there too as per this Erik Hoel article @Silence post[ed] awhile back:

Neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic. Consciousness is why

Of course, ever since researchers in the mid-aughts threw a dead salmon into an fMRI machine and got statistically significant results, it’s been well-known that neuroimaging, the working core of modern neuroscience, has all sorts of problems. It’s impossible to walk through every paper, and many are, in their choices of methods and analysis, individually defensible. But when considered collectively, we have very good reasons to be skeptical.
E.g., we now know that reproducible effects in neuroimaging likely have a far higher bar than the one practiced by working neuroscientists. As the title of a 2022 Nature paper bluntly puts it: “Reproducible brain-wide association studies require thousands of individuals.” That’s in comparison to the mere dozens used in the overwhelming majority of papers. Correlating brain states to psychological states (like searching for the neural correlates of depression, or something equivalent) requires sample sizes in the thousands, far to the right on the x-axis below. Yet most neuroscience takes place to the left, in the shadowland of false negatives, false positives, and poor reproducibility.

Does the neuroscientist’s average even have anything to do with what you saw?
Be clever enough with experimental design and you can test this. In 2021 researchers proposed two criteria that, if the brain did care about the averages neuroscientists put in their papers, would have to be true:
(a) that neural responses repeat consistently enough that their averaged response should be theoretically recognizable to downstream regions.
(b) that single-trial responses more like the averaged response should be correlated with the animal doing better on the task (like identifying a visual stimulus).
Lo and behold, they found that neither (a) nor (b) are true.

So not only is "matter" a mystery, how this "physical" stuff relates to consciousness is also questionable.

Thus I remain unconvinced there is anything outside of all experience - yet only known via experience - generating experience...in fact, apparently physics and neuroscience have overlapping issues ->

Is Matter Conscious? - Why the central problem in neuroscience is mirrored in physics.

Hedda Hassel Mørch

But perhaps consciousness is not uniquely troublesome. Going back to Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, philosophers of science have struggled with a lesser known, but equally hard, problem of matter. What is physical matter in and of itself, behind the mathematical structure described by physics? This problem, too, seems to lie beyond the traditional methods of science, because all we can observe is what matter does, not what it is in itself—the “software” of the universe but not its ultimate “hardware.” On the surface, these problems seem entirely separate. But a closer look reveals that they might be deeply connected.

Given that we have no knowledge about anything not within our experience, then those things ergo do not exist for us. Thusly... if something exists, it must exist within an awareness ~ even if on a cosmic scale.

There are many inexplicable things that I could never ever have possibly imagined as being remotely possible before experiencing them and having to come to terms with the new mental boundaries I had to thusly define. Who expects that entities previously thought to be exclusive to myth actually have an existence? Who expects that a soul can have multiple incarnations simultaneously? On that, who expects that there can be multiple parallel realities, each physical and with their own sets of curious rules?

I examine the nature of the forms of my loong and tiger companions, and there's nothing physical about any of them, despite to my senses having reminiscent aspects of "physicality" ~ dimensions, a certain... energetic "mass" to them that is defined by how more or less intricate their forms are. The loong being light and supple, and the tiger being heavy and blazing, despite the loong having commented that they both have the same nature. So energy can be "heavy" by being more defined...

Does that say something about the nature of matter, perhaps? Maybe the mass of matter has nothing at all to do with the Higgs' boson ~ actually, hang on, how does a random particle impart any sort of quality to something larger in scale? Perhaps just more mathematical fudges ~ does the particle even exist, outside of being an artifact of particle accelerators smashing atoms together at massive speeds? If it does, can they actually even know that it does what they want it to do?

How can multiple parallel realities co-exist? Do they exist in the same "space"? Where are they in relation to each other? During one Ayahuasca journey, I ended up taking my tiger companion and one of our parallel life pairs out of both universes... and zooming back respectively into both, one at a time... first mine and my tiger's, then theirs... it was... a bit surreal to zoom further and further in. Though my parallel life self was a bit lost for words other than "wow". Even I was amazed at what was happening, especially when zooming into their universe.

Apparently... universes have boundaries, though they barely seem to exist for the mind? Discrete physical universes are... absolutely gargantuan in every respect, I now understand that much. There's no limit to how large a physical reality can be, or its scale. It's... apparently whatever. Though there are macro-patterns. The initial part of inside their universe began with a very distinct macro-spiral, very different to... mine, this one. My parallel self even commented that there was a feeling they got ~ both universes had a different feeling to them, a different energetic identity that he was suddenly able to pick out, that he'd never been able to distinguish before. His universe he'd known his whole life, so he was never able to notice.

So... what is physical reality exactly? A bunch of energy granted very particular qualities with a very certain nature. Very dense and heavy energy at that, it seems.

Given that we have no knowledge about anything not within our experience, then those things ergo do not exist for us. Thusly... if something exists, it must exist within an awareness ~ even if on a cosmic scale.

There are many inexplicable things that I could never ever have possibly imagined as being remotely possible before experiencing them and having to come to terms with the new mental boundaries I had to thusly define. Who expects that entities previously thought to be exclusive to myth actually have an existence? Who expects that a soul can have multiple incarnations simultaneously? On that, who expects that there can be multiple parallel realities, each physical and with their own sets of curious rules?

I examine the nature of the forms of my loong and tiger companions, and there's nothing physical about any of them, despite to my senses having reminiscent aspects of "physicality" ~ dimensions, a certain... energetic "mass" to them that is defined by how more or less intricate their forms are. The loong being light and supple, and the tiger being heavy and blazing, despite the loong having commented that they both have the same nature. So energy can be "heavy" by being more defined...

Does that say something about the nature of matter, perhaps? Maybe the mass of matter has nothing at all to do with the Higgs' boson ~ actually, hang on, how does a random particle impart any sort of quality to something larger in scale? Perhaps just more mathematical fudges ~ does the particle even exist, outside of being an artifact of particle accelerators smashing atoms together at massive speeds? If it does, can they actually even know that it does what they want it to do?

How can multiple parallel realities co-exist? Do they exist in the same "space"? Where are they in relation to each other? During one Ayahuasca journey, I ended up taking my tiger companion and one of our parallel life pairs out of both universes... and zooming back respectively into both, one at a time... first mine and my tiger's, then theirs... it was... a bit surreal to zoom further and further in. Though my parallel life self was a bit lost for words other than "wow". Even I was amazed at what was happening, especially when zooming into their universe.

Apparently... universes have boundaries, though they barely seem to exist for the mind? Discrete physical universes are... absolutely gargantuan in every respect, I now understand that much. There's no limit to how large a physical reality can be, or its scale. It's... apparently whatever. Though there are macro-patterns. The initial part of inside their universe began with a very distinct macro-spiral, very different to... mine, this one. My parallel self even commented that there was a feeling they got ~ both universes had a different feeling to them, a different energetic identity that he was suddenly able to pick out, that he'd never been able to distinguish before. His universe he'd known his whole life, so he was never able to notice.

So... what is physical reality exactly? A bunch of energy granted very particular qualities with a very certain nature. Very dense and heavy energy at that, it seems.

It seems to me that we can have knowledge about a multitude of, innumerable, things out of our direct experience through various means including predictions and inferences based on logic and/or mathematical scientific principles or laws which in turn are based on the repeated and consistent experiences and observations of other humans. For instance, you can be confident that Australia exists because large numbers of people have been and are traveling there and reporting their own experiences of it, and we can be assured that Pluto exists because many astronomers have directly observed it through telescopes and because a robotic space mission has actually visited it and with telemetry reported many images and other data about it.

Because of the numerousness and  consistency of the reported experiences of other humans we can be very sure of the actual existence of these reported things that we haven't experienced ourselves. This is very sure but not absolutely sure. Technically or hyperskeptically we can say that none of this is absolute proof of the existence of these things that are the direct experiences of other humans - for instance these experiences conceivably or possibly could be illusions created by a demon.

The problem with such hyperskepticism, however, is that that knife also cuts off any certainty of even our own experiences being of a true objective reality. That demon could also have generated even our own seeming direct experiences. So ultimately we can be ultimately, absolutely sure only of one thing - Descartes'  "I think therefore I am" being the only experiential statement that we can be absolutely certain to be the true reality, where that one absolutely certain reality is comprised of the existence of and our experience of our own conscious self awareness.