Physicalism Redux

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.

I'm not sure it has to be within awareness, though there are good reasons to think this might be the case.

I just don't see any reason to cleave our experience off from whatever "noumena" might be involved with generating what we experience.

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 would agree that any Weird experience, even if it wasn't definitively paranormal, challenges our expectations of what noumena involved with our mundane experiences is like.

Though I don't know if one needs to go beyond just day-to-day experience to doubt the "physical" as something that lacks all experiential qualities ("qualia") as well as possessing no 1st Person PoV yet generates both.

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.

I'd say the noumenal is something more than just my experience, because there has to be something regulating the causal flow that ties together experiences. But it is not wholly separate from my experience and so we can rule out Physicalism.

To the degree Dualism insists on the "physical", we can rule it out as well though there could still be Dualism between Experience and Experiencer.

Idealism *could* be true, but looking at things this way and knowing that experiences need a causal weaving - even for those of us who think all causation is mental causation - it isn't clear that everything is *just* mental even if everything exists in continuity with an irreducible mentality.

Panpsychism seems to try to inject some experiencer + experience into the "physical", but this seems questionable. Perhaps it works better if we think of consciousness as a field, but this seems to again insist that the "physical" is dominant over experience. If we had never made the error of believing in "physical" stuff, would this type of Panpsychism even exist?

Neutral Monism seems to follow similar errors as Panpsychism, in that it posits a substance that becomes the "physical" and mental...but there is no "physical" in reality so Neutral Monism seems to build off historical errors as well.

What we can sense is that there are 3rd Person experiences, 1st Person private experiences, and Experiencers. Our experiences tell us there has to be some structure that not only orders experience but allows us to have an impact on what we experience.

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.

Perhaps I didn't explain it properly... knowledge we learn indirectly from others is still something within experience, thus making it real for us in the sense that we understand that indirect knowledge. I know the Japan exists despite never having been there physically ~ all of the indirect evidence adds up to it being beyond denial.

I'm not sure it has to be within awareness, though there are good reasons to think this might be the case.

I just don't see any reason to cleave our experience off from whatever "noumena" might be involved with generating what we experience.

I was speaking in a practical sense, sorry ~ there exist many a thing that we have not once encountered, but practically for us, there is no knowledge that it exists, so we cannot know what we're not aware of. Experience of qualia can never be separated from the noumena that are its source.

I would agree that any Weird experience, even if it wasn't definitively paranormal, challenges our expectations of what noumena involved with our mundane experiences is like.

Though I don't know if one needs to go beyond just day-to-day experience to doubt the "physical" as something that lacks all experiential qualities ("qualia") as well as possessing no 1st Person PoV yet generates both.

Agreed ~ however the weirder experiences provide extremely striking contrasts that call into question the solidness of the "physical" as conventionally defined by the Physicalist beyond a doubt.

I'd say the noumenal is something more than just my experience, because there has to be something regulating the causal flow that ties together experiences. But it is not wholly separate from my experience and so we can rule out Physicalism.

The point of noumena is that they are logically more than just a single individual's experience ~ they represent the totality of however something can be experienced, even if we only experience our human slice of it.

To the degree Dualism insists on the "physical", we can rule it out as well though there could still be Dualism between Experience and Experiencer.

Agreed.

Idealism *could* be true, but looking at things this way and knowing that experiences need a causal weaving - even for those of us who think all causation is mental causation - it isn't clear that everything is *just* mental even if everything exists in continuity with an irreducible mentality.

Not everything is *just* mental in Idealism ~ all objects and things have their unique, experienced qualities. Everything just arises out of mental stuff, explaining interaction between experientially different stuff. Everything is One at their root, but are nevertheless individualized in their manifestedness.

Panpsychism seems to try to inject some experiencer + experience into the "physical", but this seems questionable. Perhaps it works better if we think of consciousness as a field, but this seems to again insist that the "physical" is dominant over experience. If we had never made the error of believing in "physical" stuff, would this type of Panpsychism even exist?

Who knows... though I can understand consciousness as a virtual "field" that is extended in time and space per identification with a form, feeling spatially connected to that form. My foot is spatially felt to be down there, as it were, so there is some sort of "field", for lack of a better metaphor. We do seem to forget that we're using metaphors sometimes... and then we can mistakenly believe that the metaphor is literal, which just leads to all sorts of confusion.

Neutral Monism seems to follow similar errors as Panpsychism, in that it posits a substance that becomes the "physical" and mental...but there is no "physical" in reality so Neutral Monism seems to build off historical errors as well.

In Neutral Monism, if there is no "physical" in reality, then there is no "mental" in reality, either. But, we experience the "physical" and the "mental" therefore they qualitatively exist, per experience. The spiritual realities may feel realer-than-real, but that's a consequence of how restricted in scope the physical is, and so the mental within the bounds of that sensory range.

What we can sense is that there are 3rd Person experiences, 1st Person private experiences, and Experiencers. Our experiences tell us there has to be some structure that not only orders experience but allows us to have an impact on what we experience.

Precisely, but no model can tell us what that is... models are great, as long as remain aware that the model is only ever a model, an imperfect tool to try and navigate reality. Ultimate reality is something we clearly struggle to explain, because different human experiencers have different sets of experiences, different perceptions, and so even someone having the same set of experiences as another may well have a different mental model to them, just by their individual perspective.

“...in short, we simply cannot see how material events can be transformed into sensation or thought, however many text-books … go on talking nonsense on the subject.”

 -Erwin Schrodinger

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“How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the djinn when Aladdin rubbed his lamp in the story.”

 -Thomas Henry Huxley (Darwin's Bulldog)

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“..we must always divide the world into two parts, the one being the observed system, the other the observer. In the former, we can follow up all the physical processes…arbitrarily precisely. In the latter. this is meaningless. ..that this boundary can be pushed arbitrarily deeply into the interior of the body of the observer is the content of the principle of the psycho-physical parallelism.”
 - Von Neuman

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“When the province of physical theory was extended to encompass microscopic phenomena, through the creation of quantum mechanics, the concept of consciousness came to the fore again: it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness. All that quantum mechanics purports to provide are probability connections between subsequent impressions (also called “apperceptions”) of the consciousness, and even though the dividing line between the observer, whose consciousness is being affected, and the observed physical object can be shifted towards the one or the other to a considerable degree, it cannot be eliminated. It may be premature to believe that the present philosophy of quantum mechanics will remain a permanent feature of future physical theories; it will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the conclusion that the content of the consciousness is an ultimate reality”   - - Wigner, “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question

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“All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.
We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”
― Max Planck

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
― Max Planck

[Laird]

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...

I'm unclear as to what you think is incoherent about the physical. Can you please elaborate?

And from a later post:

I'm not sure it has to be within awareness, though there are good reasons to think this might be the case.

Alas. All of those arguments against idealism that I've shared with you, gone to waste. Sigh @ Sci.

I just don't see any reason to cleave our experience off from whatever "noumena" might be involved with generating what we experience.

What exactly do you mean by "cleaving off"?

What we can sense is that there are 3rd Person experiences, 1st Person private experiences, and Experiencers. Our experiences tell us there has to be some structure that not only orders experience but allows us to have an impact on what we experience.

That's fair enough as a broad statement, but it's unclear what, if any, ontology/metaphysic you're advocating for. It's also not clear to me why you reject dualism.

I'm unclear as to what you think is incoherent about the physical. Can you please elaborate?

The problem is this "physical" stuff is only known within experience, so why would we think there is something completely outside of all experience?

Any time we try to imagine what the "physical" is we are going to add experiential characteristics, as even mathematical character is buttressed by the experience of the underlying proofs being experienced as logically correct.

Alas. All of those arguments against idealism that I've shared with you, gone to waste. Sigh @ Sci.

Wasn't necessarily thinking that "in awareness" has to be Idealist, though I will admit I don't really understand your criticisms outside of the arguments against One True Subject which I agree with.

It seems to me even a Panentheist can believe the One and Many co-exist, but the Many do so within the Universal Body of God?

Honestly I don't know much about the deeper debates for or against Idealism, so I don't want to rule it out as a possibility.

What exactly do you mean by "cleaving off"?

Totally removing the experiential from some part of existence. This just leaves questions of how we can know what is physical, and the answers IMO - parallelism and emergence - are unsatisfying.

That's fair enough as a broad statement, but it's unclear what, if any, ontology/metaphysic you're advocating for. It's also not clear to me why you reject dualism.

Well there is potential Dualism between Experience and Experiencer, just not between "mental" and "physical".

But yeah I'm backing away from making hard metaphysical claims...though I still lean toward Panentheism where the One and Many are both irreducible but the One "grounds" the Many. I use "One" rather than "God" because it seems to me there could be a case where the Many are forever extant and their "overlap" is all the One is.

So a Fundamental Polytheism grounded by a Source. This seems to be what at least some Pagan polytheists believe.

Alternatively, it could be as Plotinus describes the One, an entity from which we all originate but whose contemplation is for It's Self alone. As such this being cannot be appealed to and shouldn't really be worshiped.

OR it could be the One is God, a Person in whom we all "move and have our being". This I think gets very close to Hart's theism, though he believes in Divine Simplicity which I can't help but reject.

[Laird]

The problem is this "physical" stuff is only known within experience, so why would we think there is something completely outside of all experience?

The best way I can think of attacking this rhetorical question is to ask in return: do you think that I am completely in your experience?

I certainly don't think you are completely in my experience.

I don't think either of us are merely existent in virtue of being somebody's (somebody else's, presumably) experience.

I think that that's equally true of bodies as of our selves as a whole, and, of course, bodies are made of physical stuff, so, there's a sketch at an answer for you.

I will admit I don't really understand your criticisms outside of the arguments against One True Subject which I agree with.

My argument against pluralistic idealism isn't a fatal one, but it's still, I think, a strong one: that if consensus reality is (merely) an experience, then some experiencer must be undergoing that experience, and getting from that experiencer having "the" consensus experience to the rest of us also having an experience of consensus reality except from our own perspectives is much harder to explain than that there simply is an objective ("physical") reality out there which we translate from our own perspective via our senses (which of course needn't be a naive one, and could take into account quantum weirdness, etc).

But yeah I'm backing away from making hard metaphysical claims

That's fair enough. I get that. Why commit when we don't know for sure?

it could be the One is God, a Person in whom we all "move and have our being".

To me, this fatally blurs the distinction between mind and body.

The best way I can think of attacking this rhetorical question is to ask in return: do you think that I am completely in your experience?

I certainly don't think you are completely in my experience.

I don't think either of us are merely existent in virtue of being somebody's (somebody else's, presumably) experience.

I think that that's equally true of bodies as of our selves as a whole, and, of course, bodies are made of physical stuff, so, there's a sketch at an answer for you.

To me, this fatally blurs the distinction between mind and body.

Well this is why I would question [whether] there is *just* Experience but I don't think this justifies a "physical" stuff that is outside all experience. 

To me the question is what is the causal continuity that allows Experiencers to have an experience for the "physical" which is outside all experience and has no experiential character. There has to be receptivity possessed by the "physical" to being known via experience yet this receptivity seems, when examined, to ultimately mean that all "physical" stuff has experiential character of some kind.

This leaves Panpsychism, Neutral Monism, Dual-Aspect Monism, Idealism, and varied Theisms on the table. Even Dualism, if one posits a substance duality between Experience and Experiencer, or at least a duality between External Experience vs a Person who has Private Experiences.

My argument against pluralistic idealism isn't a fatal one, but it's still, I think, a strong one: that if consensus reality is (merely) an experience, then some experiencer must be undergoing that experience, and getting from that experiencer having "the" consensus experience to the rest of us also having an experience of consensus reality except from our own perspectives is much harder to explain than that there simply is an objective ("physical") reality out there which we translate from our own perspective via our senses (which of course needn't be a naive one, and could take into account quantum weirdness, etc).

I don't really understand this argument. Why is there a consensus experiencer needed to serve as a bridge to the Many? 

But if the underlying argument is that Idealism also has to have some explanation for Causal Ordering, because even the Ur-Mind's Will would need some causal explanation for how it orders The Dream of the Real...then yeah I can see that being a major issue for Idealists of any kind...

But this question of causal ordering - even if it's pedetic or dispotional ordering - is an issue for every metaphysics?

To me, this fatally blurs the distinction between mind and body.

Not sure I follow?

...in short, we simply cannot see how material events can be transformed into sensation or thought, however many text-books … go on talking nonsense on the subject.”

 -Erwin Schrodinger
...
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
― Max Planck

“...all matter is probably instinct with life, and it is impossible to reduce the unity of consciousness to matter and motion; but materialism is a good weapon against the Church, and must be used till a better one is found”
-- Denis Diderot, one of the authors of the Encyclopédie

(Thanks to Kastrup for this quote, I also quote him last in this post!)

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"It once made sense to exclude the scientist from scientific explanations of the physical world. This warded off superstitious, animistic, or religious explanations. But without endorsing superstition, animism, or religion, today it makes sense to insist that the scientist should not be excluded from a philosophical understanding of the nature of scientific explanation. Why shouldn't such an understanding involve the explainer, as well as the explained?" 
 -- David Mermin, Making Better Sense of Quantum Mechanics

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"...Consciousness is not part of that universe of space and time, of observable and measurable quantities, that is amenable to scientific investigation. For a scientist, it would be a relief to dismiss it as unreal or irrelevant...

Unfortunately for such attitudes, consciousness is not just an epiphenomenon, a strange concomitant of our neural activity that we project onto physical reality. On the contrary, all that we know, including all our science, is in our consciousness. It is part, not of the superstructure, but of the foundations. No consciousness, no science. Perhaps, indeed, no consciousness, no reality -- of which more later...."

 -- George Wald, from his last lecture Life and Mind in the Universe

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An analogy may help make the point clearer: when there are no airplanes up in the sky, there are no dashboard representations; nothing is being measured and displayed on a dashboard. Similarly, when there are no living beings observing reality, there is no ‘physical’ world, for the ‘physical’ world is a set of perceptual representations arising from observation. But none of this means that there is no sky in the absence of airplanes; the clouds are still there; the states of the sky—its air pressure, wind direction, etc.—are all still there, even when not being measured and displayed on a dashboard. Analogously, the reality that would be represented as contents of perception—i.e., as ‘physical’ objects and events—in case someone were observing it exists independently, irrespectively of observation. The thing represented exists independently of representation, but the representation itself obviously doesn’t. 

The ‘physical’ world displayed on the screen of perception is representation, not the thing represented; for we associate physicality with the contents of perception. These contents of perception, in turn, are not the world as it actually is in and of itself, for perception is not a transparent window into reality. Therefore, we have no grounds to extend the notion of physicality beyond perception, towards the thing perceived; not any more than we have grounds to say that the clouds in the sky are ‘dashboardical.’ As such, we cannot say that the real world is physical. In fact, under any recognizable sense of the word physical the real world is not physical, for the very meaning of physicality is anchored in the parameters and scales of the dashboard.

 - Kastrup, Bernardo. Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st century’s only plausible metaphysics (pp. 17-18). Collective Ink. Kindle Edition.

[Laird]

I don't really understand this argument.

Then let's focus there. It seems more productive than for me to respond to other parts of your response.

Do you acknowledge that each experience is unique to its experiencer? That is to say that if you are having an experience, then it would be mistaken to say that somebody else is also having that experience? I'm not talking about the object of the experience, because, obviously, multiple people can simultaneously have their own experience of the same object. I'm talking about the experience itself: that your experience of some object is yours alone, just as somebody else's experience of that same object is theirs alone.

Agreed so far?