Why the central problem in neuroscience is mirrored in physics

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.

In general, it seems all fundamental physical properties can be described mathematically. Galileo, the father of modern science, famously professed that the great book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Yet mathematics is a language with distinct limitations. It can only describe abstract structures and relations. For example, all we know about numbers is how they relate to the other numbers and other mathematical objects—that is, what they “do,” the rules they follow when added, multiplied, and so on. Similarly, all we know about a geometrical object such as a node in a graph is its relations to other nodes. In the same way, a purely mathematical physics can tell us only about the relations between physical entities or the rules that govern their behavior.

One might wonder how physical particles are, independently of what they do or how they relate to other things. What are physical things like in themselves, or intrinsically? Some have argued that there is nothing more to particles than their relations, but intuition rebels at this claim. For there to be a relation, there must be two things being related. Otherwise, the relation is empty—a show that goes on without performers, or a castle constructed out of thin air. In other words, physical structure must be realized or implemented by some stuff or substance that is itself not purely structural. Otherwise, there would be no clear difference between physical and mere mathematical structure, or between the concrete universe and a mere abstraction. But what could this stuff that realizes or implements physical structure be, and what are the intrinsic, non-structural properties that characterize it? This problem is a close descendant of Kant’s classic problem of knowledge of things-in-themselves. The philosopher Galen Strawson has called it the hard problem of matter.

"The Hard Problem of matter" - that has a good ring to it. I think that perhaps the human mind is as fundamentally incapable of grasping what is the essential or intrinsic or ultimate nature of matter as it is of understanding the ultimate nature of consciousness, and any quest for this sort of understanding in philosophy or physics is a waste of time, a monument to hubris, and doomed to failure. 

Maybe the Deist would still try for an answer but not get anywhere past the bare beginning, by saying that the one and only thing we can know about this is that these things are the "mind stuff" of the Deity and humanly unknowable.

If the Atheist then objects to this, the Deist says - "give me something better". So maybe the Atheist/materialist would come up with something like the following:

Of course, there are other ways of looking at this. The "world is a virtual reality simulation" concept would say that no, at our level of reality matter really is nothing but information, abstract forms, mathematical algorithms - the algorithmic data processing going on in the higher level simulation. The high level design requirements were for a simulated reality with masses, fields, energies and quantum interactions defined by a set of equations with various defined constants - something at least partially realized in the current Standard Model. 

The Atheist/materialist would naturally assume that humans are just part of the simulation. 

Unfortunately, this sort of idea just makes the problem worse. It doesn't really solve the "Hard Problem of matter" mystery - it just kicks the can down the road to this higher layer of reality, maybe to an infinite regress. And it invokes another problem - it ignores the Hard Problem of consciousness. 

Other ideas?

"The Hard Problem of matter" - that has a good ring to it. I think that perhaps the human mind is as fundamentally incapable of grasping what is the essential or intrinsic or ultimate nature of matter as it is of understanding the ultimate nature of consciousness, and any quest for this sort of understanding in philosophy or physics is a waste of time, a monument to hubris, and doomed to failure. 

Maybe the Deist would still try for an answer but not get anywhere past the bare beginning, by saying that the one and only thing we can know about this is that these things are the "mind stuff" of the Deity and humanly unknowable.

If the Atheist then objects to this, the Deist says - "give me something better". So maybe the Atheist/materialist would come up with something like the following:

Of course, there are other ways of looking at this. The "world is a virtual reality simulation" concept would say that no, at our level of reality matter really is nothing but information, abstract forms, mathematical algorithms - the algorithmic data processing going on in the higher level simulation. The high level design requirements were for a simulated reality with masses, fields, energies and quantum interactions defined by a set of equations with various defined constants - something at least partially realized in the current Standard Model. 

The Atheist/materialist would naturally assume that humans are just part of the simulation. 

Unfortunately, this sort of idea just makes the problem worse. It doesn't really solve the "Hard Problem of matter" mystery - it just kicks the can down the road to this higher layer of reality, maybe to an infinite regress. And it invokes another problem - it ignores the Hard Problem of consciousness. 

Other ideas?

An old question, going back to at least 6th century BCE with the Carvakan school that held the world was made from elements that had their "thing in itself" nature as brute fact. Democritus, himself a materialist, then noted the Hard Problem of Consciousness:

Intellect: “Color is by convention, sweet by convention, bitter by convention; in truth there are but atoms and the void.”

Senses: “Wretched mind, from us you are taking the evidence by which you would overthrow us? Your victory is your own fall.”

Millennia later materialists have failed to solve this problem of their own making, though some among them think 200-300 years is long enough to declare parapsychology defunct.

Besides consciousness, and the relata of the relations, part of the thing-in-itself than physics fails to measure besides Consciousness is Causation. My suspicion is we need to switch out Objects for Events, Verbs for Nouns, and instead of continually trying to go from descriptions of the World to descriptions of our Selves we should start with our Selves and use that introspection to try and describe the World.

This is of course not a novel idea, it's a mixing of Whitehead & Bergson, James & Myers, Bohm & F. David Peat...It isn't by necessity Idealism, rather we simply begin from our own sense awareness & causal power and ask how this might explain what physics measures in limited fashion but fails to explain.

An old question, going back to at least 6th century BCE with the Carvakan school that held the world was made from elements that had their "thing in itself" nature as brute fact. Democritus, himself a materialist, then noted the Hard Problem of Consciousness:

Intellect: “Color is by convention, sweet by convention, bitter by convention; in truth there are but atoms and the void.”

Senses: “Wretched mind, from us you are taking the evidence by which you would overthrow us? Your victory is your own fall.”

Millennia later materialists have failed to solve this problem of their own making, though some among them think 200-300 years is long enough to declare parapsychology defunct.

Besides consciousness, and the relata of the relations, part of the thing-in-itself than physics fails to measure besides Consciousness is Causation. My suspicion is we need to switch out Objects for Events, Verbs for Nouns, and instead of continually trying to go from descriptions of the World to descriptions of our Selves we should start with our Selves and use that introspection to try and describe the World.

This is of course not a novel idea, it's a mixing of Whitehead & Bergson, James & Myers, Bohm & F. David Peat...It isn't by necessity Idealism, rather we simply begin from our own sense awareness & causal power and ask how this might explain what physics measures in limited fashion but fails to explain.

At this time, I am troubled by neither problem.  That they exist as paradoxes is a very good sign to me!!

A paradox: is a finding that (in my crazy little mind) calls into play the principle of the TAO.  There is real world structure behind the opposing parameters.

Of course, if physics and materials science are put in a framework with information science, then a working process model emerges.  It's the measuring of the relata of the relations that is an uneasy step forward.  It's seeing the joint conditions of any thing, event or process being evolved and unified both as a material manifestation and a complex of probabilities.  The relata  behind all relations (deeper meaning) measured as math objects, logical sequences, organization, ordered states and new information is what puts the "fire in the equations."

At this time, I am troubled by neither problem.  That they exist as paradoxes is a very good sign to me!!

A paradox: is a finding that (in my crazy little mind) calls into play the principle of the TAO.  There is real world structure behind the opposing parameters.

Of course, if physics and materials science are put in a framework with information science, then a working process model emerges.  It's the measuring of the relata of the relations that is an uneasy step forward.  It's seeing the joint conditions of any thing, event or process being evolved and unified both as a material manifestation and a complex of probabilities.  The relata  behind all relations (deeper meaning) measured as math objects, logical sequences, organization, ordered states and new information is what puts the "fire in the equations."

I can see the potential value of Information Realism, but it seems to me that measurements of relata are just more equations, and thus it's difficult to see where the Hawking's "fire" would be?

Similar issues explored recently by Feser:

Materialism subverts itself

For example, to say that everything has such-and-such a mathematical structure does not by itself rule out the possibility that everything is also a compound of act and potency, or that qualia are also among the properties that everything has.  In other words, it doesn’t rule out the idea that matter is to be understood along Aristotelian lines, or along panpsychist lines.
The reason it does not rule such claims out is that to say that everything has such-and-such a mathematical structure does not entail that the nature of everything that exists is exhausted by a description of its mathematical structure.  It could turn out that everything that exists has the mathematical structure that physics uncovers, but also has further properties, in addition to that, of which physics tells us nothing.  That is what Russell thought, and it is what contemporary writers influenced by Russell (like David Chalmers and Galen Strawson) have also proposed.  Now, if we allow that qualia can be among the intrinsic features of matter, then, as Chalmers notes, we end up with a position that is either panpsychist or property dualist.  And a position that is compatible with panpsychism and property dualism is not the kind of thing one usually thinks of when one thinks of materialism.  But that is what we get when we read the claim that everything is material in light of the modern conception of matter.

The Russellian view is sometimes called epistemic structural realism.  It holds that the description of the world afforded by mathematical physics is true as far as it goes (hence the view is a kind of realism), but that it is not the whole truth.  Physics can know only the mathematical structure of matter (hence the adjective “epistemic”), but there is more to matter than that.  But one could argue instead that there isn’t more to matter than that.  This is a view sometimes called ontic structural realism.  It holds both that the mathematical description afforded by physics is true (hence it is also a kind of realism), and that it is the whole truth.  Matter is to be identified with its mathematical structure.  There is nothing more to its reality than that (hence the adjective “ontic”). 

The way the Neo-Platonist tradition solved this problem of blurring the abstract and the concrete is essentially by conceding to Aristotle the thesis that universals exist only in intellects, and locating the realm of the Forms in an infinite divine intellect.  For Plotinus this intellect is the first emanation from the One, and for Christian Platonists it is God himself.  Now, if you take the world to be a kind of Form or abstract object and add the thesis that such objects exist only in intellects, then you have what amounts to a kind of idealism or even (depending on how the intellect in question is characterized) a kind of pantheism.  Eddington and James Jeans, another twentieth-century physicist, explicitly went in an idealist direction.  Contemporary writers who suggest that the universe might be a kind of computer simulation, and the abstract structure described by physics to be the software underlying the simulation, come pretty close to idealism or pantheism.  The universe qua computer roughly corresponds to the Absolute Spirit of an idealist and pantheist like Hegel, and the computer simulation to the unfolding of this Spirit in history.  Again, not the kind of thing one usually associates with materialism. 

So, if we start with the modern materialist’s conception of matter and start to unpack it, materialism ends up being transformed into one or another of the various views that one would have thought to be at odds with materialism – dualism, panpsychism, Platonism, idealism, or pantheism.

A similarly surprising result follows if we start instead with the materialist’s conception of mind....

I can see the potential value of Information Realism, but it seems to me that measurements of relata are just more equations, and thus it's difficult to see where the Hawking's "fire" would be?

Thanks for the kind poke.  If the "how" of what emblazons scientific structures wasn't well-hidden in plain sight, it would be documented years ago by much better minds than me.

The equations are always just structure.  Units of measure are not active.  However, moving data points (with units of measure) are representative of changing meanings in the activity being observed.  On the physical side - it is energy being expended.  

On the other hand - moving data points as communication of a message can indicate that actual meaningful activity in an informational environment is changing real-world probabilities.

People used to trade in gold and copper.  Now we trade in bits and bytes being transferred digitally.  Same meaning, different environment of activity.  Physical symbols or digital symbols  = same semantic activity.

Getting the "fire" in the process requires mating formal bits and bytes with meaningful activity such as language, just as a physical object is a relata between materials and a state of energy.