The Two Dogmas of Materialism

Thanks for the response.  I enjoy our back and forth. 

Great question, which I am not qualified to answer with any confidence.

I do think that SI units are the bedrocks of Schrodinger's equation.  Plank's constant is a physical value and is expressed in SI units.


Position and time are covered by SI units and so is the Hamiltonian as the sum of energy values.  Hertz is a derivative SI unit.  Again, maybe in ignorance, I think all values of the four forces in physics are measured in SI units or their derivatives.



Maybe there are others on this forum with professional training, who will weigh in?

Thanks for your kind words.

I'm sure SI units are going to struggle with quantum entanglement/spooky action at a distance, yet they appear to exist. 

So... Are entangled particles "aware" of each other? Depends on your definition of "aware" I guess. Is an atomic nucleus aware of it's electrons. Perhaps awareness (or the appearance of it) really is everywhere, but tricky to measure.

But specifically, do you think the elements when arranged in a certain way, as in an animal, can create something non-elemental?

What is "anti-materialism"? 

http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/

The basic materialist stance, as I understand it and am open to being further educated here, is that consciousness is a purely physical emergent phenomena.

How about not emergent? How about not separate from the conscious and subconscious awareness processes, but the sum of all of them running together?

I should add I don't think it is an unreasonable world view.  I just take issue when folks put it forth as a better or superior world view.  There is simply no basis on which to position it as such.

Agree here. No model is more nuts than one's own.

What is "anti-materialism"?  Seems an incoherent term in this discussion since materialism is just an 'ism' after all.

The OP would be an example. Most of the discussions on the Skeptico forum (as malf pointed out) would be another. It's about the necessity of attacking a dominant and successful idea, because it does not seem to allow room for faith in a set of sacred cows (such as the specialness of humans and their consciousness, some sort of eternity, a sense of purpose, etc.).

The basic materialist stance, as I understand it and am open to being further educated here, is that consciousness is a purely physical emergent phenomena.  This, in spite of, our complete lack of understanding of what consciousness is and how it actually emerges from "star stuff".  It sorta sits right next to all the other 'isms' on this point as its purely faith-based.

From the perspective of the materialist (which I realize is not relevant to this thread), the basic materialist stance (based on watching the history of how Materialism changes in concert with evidence) is that whatever our findings on how consciousness works, or emerges (or however you want to put it), it can probably be absorbed into materialism.* The anti-materialism perspective disallows the absorption of any future findings on its sacred cows into materialism. 

I should add I don't think it is an unreasonable world view.  I just take issue when folks put it forth as a better or superior world view.  There is simply no basis on which to position it as such.

I agree. Putting "wildly successful" aside, the adoption of a worldview is a personal matter. If, however, you are interested in holding views in which validity (in the technical sense) is relevant, then the asymmetry does lean in favour of materialism (if materialism is used as a placeholder for "the findings of methodological naturalism"). But validity shouldn't be regarded as a threat.

Linda

*Arguments among scientists or among science philosophers about materialism seem to be about whether or not it's okay to subsume increasing weirdness (such as quantum mechanics) under an "ism" which originally referred to a simple type of reality (used in the technical sense). Or whether it needs a name change. My use of the word in this post assumes the former is okay.

I should add I don't think it is an unreasonable world view.

Well as Sam Harris - the only New Atheist horseman with a PhD in Neuroscience - notes it doesn't make any sense:

Consciousness—the sheer fact that this universe is illuminated by sentience—is precisely what unconsciousness is not. And I believe that no description of unconscious complexity will fully account for it. It seems to me that just as “something” and “nothing,” however juxtaposed, can do no explanatory work, an analysis of purely physical processes will never yield a picture of consciousness. However, this is not to say that some other thesis about consciousness must be true. Consciousness may very well be the lawful product of unconscious information processing. But I don’t know what that sentence means—and I don’t think anyone else does either.

Beyond that I don't really know what successes materialism as in the philosophical paradigm has had, given a variety of scientists through history who weren't materialists have advanced science including many physicists we call the "Fathers of Quantum Mechanics".

As for why materialism was advanced as a paradigm, and still plays a large role in pseudo-skeptical evangelism, see the B.Russell quote in my signature.

Re: my post above was gonna post an article regarding the removal of consciousness from scientific account as a strategy rather than a paradigm, but Chris already posted it in the Text Resources section of General Consciousness Science along with some other related articles by the same author.

However here's the link for ease of reference:

How to Make the Study of Consciousness Scientifically Tractable

“By [the principle of objectivation] I mean … a certain simplification which we adopt in order to master the infinitely intricate problem of nature. Without being aware of it and without being rigorously systematic about it, we exclude the Subject of Cognizance from the domain of nature that we endeavor to understand. We step with our own person back into the part of an onlooker who does not belong to the world, which by this very procedure becomes an objective world.”

Schrödinger did, however, identify both the problem and the solution. He recognized that “objectivation” is just a simplification that is a temporary step in the progress of science in understanding nature.

He concludes: “Science must be made anew. Care is needed.”

Beyond that I don't really know what successes materialism as in the philosophical paradigm has had, given a variety of scientists through history who weren't materialists have advanced science including many physicists we call the "Fathers of Quantum Mechanics".

Exactly. This is a sign that there are two different materialisms - the one which is actually practiced and relevant to science and scientists (the "wildly successful" part), and the one which only remains in existence with respect to anti-materialism. And other than the skeptics, those here seem to confine themselves to considering the latter. The problem is that if you start to reference the advancement of science, while still talking about anti-materialism, you are talking about two different things. If the "Fathers of Quantum  Mechanics" are perfectly able to advance science without subscribing to the materialism of anti-materialists, this suggests that the materialism which is involved in science is now something quite different from what you and others rail against - it certainly can't involve any of the dogmas which would preclude these contributions a priori.  

As for why materialism was advanced as a paradigm, and still plays a large role in pseudo-skeptical evangelism, see the B.Russell quote in my signature.

Exactly. Materialism was used to combat orthodox dogma. There is no real winner in dogma vs. dogma, and that kind of materialism is long dead. If anybody chooses to call themselves a materialist now (I don't, personally), it has nothing to do with the dogma Russell references. They choose to do so in reference to the findings of methodological naturalism. But there is clearly no longer any sort of prescription about what those findings will look like ("matter"), therefore no reason to exclude consciousness a priori.

And that takes us back to what malf suggested. All materialists are saying is that there isn't yet any particular reason to exclude consciousness from star stuff (and all that goes with it) a priori, including transmission ideas about consciousness. It is only anti-materialists who insist upon its exclusion, based upon sacred cowism.

You are free to go on and on about how materialism is wrong and disproven and certainly no superior to any other idea. Who cares when you only ever reference a materialism which already died over a hundred years ago?

Linda

I my life I have encountered folks that argue consciousness plays an integral role in collapsing the wave function. I'm sure you have too. Many books have supported this. They will oft cite some of the quantum theory scientists of the early 20th century supporting it does. There are some actively attempting to prove it, such as Dean Radin and Julie Bieschel(sp). It is a popular belief among those that find quantum mysticism appealing. So in rebuttal here is an excellent vid by PBS Spacetime explaining why it is not the case.
https://youtu.be/CT7SiRiqK-Q

A companion PBS Spacetime- "How Decoherence Splits the Quantum Multiverse" video. https://youtu.be/GlOwJWJWPUs

P.S. Specifically the idea that the fathers of QM were monolithic for this idea is not true. Some that were changed their minds later in their careers.

Coming to Grips with the Implications of Quantum Mechanics

Bernardo Kastrup, Henry P. Stapp, Menas C. Kafatos

Some claim that the modern notion of “decoherence” rules out consciousness as the agency of measurement. According to this claim, when a quantum system in a superposition state is probed, information about the overlapping possibilities in the superposition “leaks out” and becomes dispersed in the surrounding environment. This allegedly explains in a fairly mechanical manner why the superposition becomes indiscernible after measurement.

The problem, however, is that decoherence cannot explain how the state of the surrounding environment becomes definite to begin with, so it doesn’t solve the measurement problem or rule out the role of consciousness. Indeed, as Wojciech Zurek—one of the fathers of decoherence—admitted,

…an exhaustive answer to [the question of why we perceive a definite world] would undoubtedly have to involve a model of ‘consciousness,’ since what we are really asking concerns our [observers’] impression that ‘we are conscious’ of just one of the alternatives.

As a matter of fact, peculiar statistical characteristics of the behavior of entangled quantum systems (namely, their experimentally confirmed violation of so-called “Bell’s and Leggett’s inequalities”) seem to rule out everything but consciousness as the agency of measurement. Some then claim that entanglement is observed only in microscopic systems and, therefore, its peculiarities are allegedly irrelevant to the world of tables and chairs.

But such a claim is untrue, as several recent studies (e.g. 2009, 2011 and 2015) have demonstrated entanglement for much larger systems. Last year, a paper reported entanglement even for “massive” objects. Moreover, quantum superposition has been observed in systems as varied as small metal paddles and living tissue. Clearly, the laws of QM apply at all scales and substrates.

What preserves a superposition is merely how well the quantum system—whatever its size—is isolated from the world of tables and chairs known to us through direct conscious apprehension. That a superposition does not survive exposure to this world suggests, if anything, a role for consciousness in the emergence of a definite physical reality.

=-=-=

The closer you look, the more the materialist position in physics appears to rest on shaky metaphysical ground

Adam Frank is professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester in New York. He is the author of several books, the latest being Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth (2018).

There is not even a consensus about what the answers should look like. Rather, there are multiple interpretations of quantum theory, each of which corresponds to a very different way of regarding matter and everything made of it – which, of course, means everything. The earliest interpretation to gain force, the Copenhagen interpretation, is associated with Danish physicist Niels Bohr and other founders of quantum theory. In their view, it was meaningless to speak of the properties of atoms in-and-of-themselves. Quantum mechanics was a theory that spoke only to our knowledge of the world. The measurement problem associated with the Schrödinger equation highlighted this barrier between epistemology and ontology by making explicit the role of the observer (that is: us) in gaining knowledge.
Not all researchers were so willing to give up on the ideal of objective access to a perfectly objective world, however. Some pinned their hopes on the discovery of hidden variables – a set of deterministic rules lurking beneath the probabilities of quantum mechanics. Others took a more extreme view. In the many-worlds interpretation espoused by the American physicist Hugh Everett, the authority of the wave function and its governing Schrödinger equation was taken as absolute. Measurements didn’t suspend the equation or collapse the wave function, they merely made the Universe split off into many (perhaps infinite) parallel versions of itself. Thus, for every experimentalist who measures an electron over here, a parallel universe is created in which her parallel copy finds the electron over there. The many-worlds Interpretation is one that many materialists favor, but it comes with a steep price.

Here is an even more important point: as yet there is no way to experimentally distinguish between these widely varying interpretations. Which one you choose is mainly a matter of philosophical temperament. As the American theorist Christopher Fuchs puts it, on one side there are the psi-ontologists who want the wave function to describe the objective world ‘out there’. On the other side, there are the psi-epistemologists who see the wave function as a description of our knowledge and its limits. Right now, there is almost no way to settle the dispute scientifically (although a standard form of hidden variables does seem to have been ruled out).

This arbitrariness of deciding which interpretation to hold completely undermines the strict materialist position. The question here is not if some famous materialist’s choice of the many-worlds interpretation is the correct one, any more than whether the silliness of The Tao of Physics and its quantum Buddhism is correct. The real problem is that, in each case, proponents are free to single out one interpretation over others because … well … they like it. Everyone, on all sides, is in the same boat. There can be no appeal to the authority of ‘what quantum mechanics says’, because quantum mechanics doesn’t say much of anything with regard to its own interpretation.

It is easy to see how we got here. Materialism is an attractive philosophy – at least, it was before quantum mechanics altered our thinking about matter. ‘I refute it thus,’ said the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson kicking a large rock as refutation to arguments against materialism he’d just endured. Johnson’s stony drop-kick is the essence of a hard-headed (and broken-footed) materialist vision of the world. It provides an account of exactly what the world is made of: bits of stuff called matter. And since matter has properties that are independent and external to anything having to do with us, we can use that stuff to build a fully objective account of a fully objective world. This ball-and-stick vision of reality seems to inspire much of materialism’s public confidence about cracking the mystery of the human mind.

Today, though, it is hard to reconcile that confidence with the multiple interpretations of quantum mechanics...

Thanks for your kind words.

I'm sure SI units are going to struggle with quantum entanglement/spooky action at a distance, yet they appear to exist. 

So... Are entangled particles "aware" of each other? Depends on your definition of "aware" I guess. Is an atomic nucleus aware of it's electrons. Perhaps awareness (or the appearance of it) really is everywhere, but tricky to measure.

But specifically, do you think the elements when arranged in a certain way, as in an animal, can create something non-elemental?

In my humble opinion, SI units have been phenomenally successful in delineating quantum outcomes.

Particles "aware of each other" sounds like panpsychism, which is an unproven conjecture.   In the context of information science, entangled particles are no more aware of each other, than meshing gears are to their matching counterparts.  However, there is measurable structure that links them.  In the case of a physical gear - there are SI units to match the tolerances to create the material structuring.

Informational Realism - the idea that information science describes a level of reality as influential as physical events and objects - there are units of measure and active relations describing information structures.  Entangled particles are structured in such a way that natural science predicts their correlated outcomes.

If by non-elemental you mean not empirically testable as matter, yes of course there exists received science that defines objective structure.  The amount of bits, bandwidth or computational ability are all natural dispositions, which can be measured.  I know that the word "consciousness" is understood by some to represent some "magic" state.  Mutual information is a key identifier of informational structure that can increase related activity, useful knowledge, capability and effectiveness in a system.

 In probability theory and information theory, the mutual information (MI) of two random variables is a measure of the mutual dependence between the two variables. ... MI is the expected value of the pointwise mutual information (PMI). Mutual Information is also known as information gain.
en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Mutual_information 

In my humble opinion, SI units have been phenomenally successful in delineating quantum outcomes.

Particles "aware of each other" sounds like panpsychism, which is an unproven conjecture.

I’m working under the assumption that there is no proven conjecture. However, “awareness” is just a word, and if particles appear to be aware of each other, that seems like enough to me. You seem to be aware, and that’s enough too. I feel like I’m aware, but I’m a little too close to judge

In the context of information science, entangled particles are no more aware of each other, than meshing gears are to their matching counterparts.  However, there is measurable structure that links them

We appear to agree that ‘meshing gears’ can give the appearance of awareness.

Informational Realism - the idea that information science describes a level of reality as influential as physical events and objects - there are units of measure and active relations describing information structures.  Entangled particles are structured in such a way that natural science predicts their correlated outcomes.

No problem.

If by non-elemental you mean not empirically testable as matter, yes of course there exists received science that defines objective structure.  The amount of bits, bandwidth or computational ability are all natural dispositions, which can be measured.  I know that the word "consciousness" is understood by some to represent some "magic" state.  Mutual information is a key identifier of informational structure that can increase related activity, useful knowledge, capability and effectiveness in a system.

So you think there is something special about the arrangement of elements in animals? Something beyond nature? Beyond SI units?