Here’s how I understand it. I don’t claim to be certain that this is accurate, however.
Under reductive materialism, thoughts beliefs, feelings, perceptions, etc. can be reduced to neurological processes in the same way that water can be reduced to H2O. That is, just as anything that can be about water is exactly as true as if we say it about H2O. So could simply get rid of the terms “water”, “pain”, “belief”, “will”, etc. and instead replace them with the physical structures and processes that we have identified as comprising them. We can still use the terms “water” or “pain”, but these are just colloquialisms for something material. We don’t need to use those terms at all.
EM takes this a step further and say, unlike the term “water”, the terms we use to describe mental processes are more akin to the belief that living things possessed a “vital spark” that set them apart from non-living things. This belief is now abandoned because we have realized that life is reducible to the physical processes that occur in living things. The eliminativists predict that something similar will happen once we adequately understand how the brain operates. It just seems like a really weird idea at the moment because we are still so far from that understanding.
Suppose you see a cat on a mat, you think about that cat being on the mat, and you write “the cat is on the mat” on a piece of paper. What properties of those ink marks make them about that cat? Given the contingency and arbitrariness in the way we associate meanings with words, the obvious answer is that there is nothing about those ink marks which make them about the cat or anything else, beyond that we have a convention of using that pattern of marks to represent that combination of concepts.
Now if physicalism is true, your thought about that cat on the mat is entirely constituted by something in your brain structure and pattern of neuron activation. But there is nothing relevantly different about your brain structure and the ink marks you wrote on the paper (and here, the option we used for the ink marks, explaining their intentionality as derivative from the intentionality of our thoughts, is not available, on pain of circularity). Nothing about the masses, charges, or quantum probability distributions of the electrons and quarks that make up your brain entail that any part of them are about the cat, even in principle. (*) There is a fundamental conceptual gap that the physicalist needs to bridge.
(*) This is a point of logic - you can never have a valid argument for an “interesting” conclusion when the terms that appear in the conclusion don’t appear in the premises. (And by “interesting”, I mean that the terms in the conclusion that your are interested in aren’t just tacked on in a trivial way, e.g., by disjunction or conditioning on additional hypotheses that are doing all the real work.) The point is that if all you start with are facts about mass and charge and location and motion, that is all you can end up with.
The physicalist can try to bridge that gap by defining intentionality or aboutness in physicalist terms, the way you could conceivably define “solid” or “liquid” or “gas” in terms of dispositions for the motions of atoms, say. But no such reduction has ever been successful, and they face widespread difficulties (e.g., if you want to say that part of your brain structure is about the cat on the mat because it was caused by the cat on the mat in an appropriate way, you have the difficultly of explaining why your thought is about the cat rather than the photons in transit towards your eyeballs, or the light source that illuminated the cat, all of which are also in the causal chain upstream of your brain structure; you also have the difficulty of explaining why it’s you having the thought about the cat, rather than the photons in transit or the ink marks you wrote down, all of which are downstream of the causal chain from the cat).
I could bring in the hard problem of consciousness here and say that even if such a definition were successful, it would only have succeeded in identifying the physical correlate of the mental given that there is one, but that still wouldn’t entail that there actually is anything with the first-person experience of having a thought about a cat on a mat - but you were looking for succinct, so I’ll stop.
(This argument from intentionality is actually slightly different from the one considered in this thread, which is about a more specific kind of intentionality, but it is related.)
Sure… you’ll finally understand the mind. By denying that it exists.
Hmmm, sounds like you think the scientific method is the only way that we can get to understand things. But hey, guess what - scientism is false.
(Referencing Feser yet again, because his refutation of scientism is one of the best that I know of. You can use the “look inside” feature on Amazon to read section 0.2 of his Scholastic Metaphysics, or various posts on his blog.)
But to state things positively, the fact that immaterial aspects of reality are not susceptible to empirical study does not mean that we can gain no understanding of them. E.g., the argument in this thread. We can know Premise 1 is true (via introspective understanding of the meanings of our thoughts). We can know Premise 2 is true (via examination of the properties of physical things, and making a judgement about what those properties can and can’t entail). So we can know the conclusion is true - and that is at least a minimal level of understanding about something immaterial. And there are further arguments that can provide further understanding.
(Even more, we can gain understanding of immaterial aspects of our thought directly, by acquaintance - the meanings of your thoughts are immaterial realities that you have “direct contact” with, so to speak. They don’t have to be made of atoms to be comprehensible. In fact, they are more comprehensible than any physical thing, because they are just are meanings that we can comprehend.)
Yes, the judgement involved in Premise 2 has a non-empirical character, but the reality is that we implicitly use such judgements all the time even in science, e.g., whenever we use inductive or abductive reasoning. Scientism itself involves this kind of philosophical, non-empirical judgement - just a badly unreflective one.
I think he makes it quite clear in the original article on the subject.
What I meant was that panpsychism does not escape the argument, because it accepts the conclusion of the argument (by being a form of dualism, specifically, property dualism). And actually Feser shows that the argument does apply to certain mental properties as well (e.g., mental images). The argument shows that panpsychism can only possibly work if it includes certain kinds of mental properties, namely, intrinsic semantic content.
Well, seems pretty clear to me there is.
Pretty sure I explained this already. Your objection via the interaction problem doesn’t actually do anything to show that the argument is false. So we can in fact know, via the argument, that there is something immaterial about our thoughts (specifically, determinate meanings), and we can know when it affects our physical actions.
Their relationship to physical events in history. The meaning came from what occurred in history. There was a lot of physical interactions that resulted in the association between certain shapes/colors/noises(words, whether as thoughts or as letters written somewhere), and the things that they represent.
Someone had to learn to associate those shapes, noises, and colors with certain other things. Letters and words and sentences with objects and their behavior in space and time. Learning a language is association and interaction, and that is how the meaning comes about. That’s quite literally how we come to understanding the meaning.
I agree that in a world where there are no cats and nobody knows what the word refers to because they’ve never learned about or had any experiences relevant to a cat, thinking or writing the word means nothing to the person having the experience of thinking the word “cat”. But to a person who has learned what a cat is, the word has a meaning because the association has been learned. Thus the meaning comes from learning the association.
There’s nothing about a codon triplet itself that says it means a particular amino acid, except the tRNA molecule and a few other interactions we can leave out. That means the meaning is a product of an interaction. The meaning then comes from that interaction. A thing that happened physically when things interacted.
A codon in mRNA only has “meaning” when there’s a relevant translation system and tRNA molecule. Now the association, the interaction between them, is what gives it a meaning in the form of an amino acid. A physical bridge that brings them together in some interaction.
codon → tRNA → amino acid
Without the tRNA, the codon itself means nothing.
We can substitute in mRNA for particular thoughts, the tRNA molecules for [learning to associate words with things/behaviors], and amino acids for that which the words refers to. The meaning thus comes from learning. Things that happened in history. Interactions between physical objects that occurred in space and time.
So when you use a word like cat and you introspect it’s meaning, you’re recalling an association you learned. That’s where it came from. If we imagine a world in which you never learned this associatio but you nevertheless(we imagine) has the experience of thinking out a sentence that includes the word “cat” you have no understanding of what it means. Thus, to you, it means nothing. Because it actually has no intrinsic meaning at all of course. It’s meaning must be learned. I don’t dream in Swahili and even if I had some aneyrism that made me randomly think a sentence in Swahili I wouldn’t know what it meant, because I haven’t learned the associations. If the meaning was intrinsic to the words themselves one wonders why I can’t simply know the meaning of Swahili out of nowhere.
No, I must hear sounds and they must occur in relation to other sounds I already know the meaning of, because I have learned the associations of those already. Then associations can be piled on to previous associations, and the chain of inteaction can bring meaning from previous associations to new associations, and then I can learn Swahili and the words gain meaning to me from that.
The problem with this analogy is that denying that there is a “vital spark” isn’t the same as denying that life exists; it only offers an alternative explanation for how life works. But eliminative materialism doesn’t just deny one explanation of intentionality and offer an alternative, it denies that intentionality exists at all. And this very denial is itself an instance of intentionality.
And again, the idea that we could ever get closer to that “understanding” is incoherent, because understanding is intentional, and EM denies that intentionality exists.
Since “-ism” generally denotes a viewpoint and not some set of facts, I don’t see the logical point of statements of the form, “XXXism is true/false.” It comes across as a major, unwarranted elision.
Sure. What is the problem there? If the mind does not exist, we are clearly on the wrong track if we insist on believing that it does. I don’t see that anything was lost when we realized that the elan vital did not actually exist.
Hardly. The very fact that I hold out the possibility of an immaterialist version of the scientific method should be sufficient to demonstrate that. My position is simply abductive and based on the demonstrable fact that not a single has actually been answered by using a paradigm in which the immaterial can be considered as part of the explanation for the things we observe in the world. Unless you can think of an example.
So, I’ve been thinking about semantics a bit and it seems that they are an outgrowth of consciousness and intentionality- and so don’t pose any additional problems (which is not to say that those problems are not formidable).
So, we have an idea in our heads - a model (in a broad sense) and we are aware of it, and intend to communicate it by means of language, Feser argues that concepts themselves are a problem, but I believe he is mistaken.
We know that computers are capable of both representing a model and abstraction of a sort. The first is ubiquitous - and the second is becoming more so with the rise of Machine Learning (often called Artificial Intelligence, but it is an outgrowth of work intended to ultimately lead to AI, rather than embodying actual intelligence). If we are capable of developing abstractions in a similar way - and Machine Learning is inspired by neurology - consciousness of the model would seem to be the most important difference.
An active and responsive system is a far better comparison to the brain than the purely static nature of words, so I think these points carry some weight, and more than Feser’s examples.
And, to me, the solution to that problem is trivially simple: My experience is that I am having a thought about a cat because that is how my brain works.
By the same token, our brains work so that the two squares below seem to be of different shades. And our brains do this so persistently and consistently that is it literally impossible for us to see that they are the same shade even when we know that they are.
There have been plenty of such answers, in all sorts of areas. (Theology, philosophy of mind, general metaphysics, ethics, etc.)
Sure, there is disagreement about the answers. But there is also disagreement about about the answers we get from science, as plenty of the threads in this forum show.
@Rumraket - as far as I can tell, most of your reply is just expanding on and agreeing with my point about the meanings of words, i.e., they have no intrinsic features that make them about anything, except that we have conventions of using those patterns to represent different concepts. You try to apply the way that we learn to associate meanings to words as if we also learn to associate meanings to thoughts. But the learning and associating you are talking about already has the intentionality that needs to be explained.
It’s standard usage in philosophy for “-isms” to denote positions in the form of propositions. And propositions can be true or false. (E.g., in this case, scientism is the proposition that the scientific method is the only valid source of knowledge.)
Yes, they don’t have intrinsic meaning. It seems to me it’s you who needs to show that there is such as thing as intrinsic meaning.
If your challenge is that materialism needs to explain how it is that there can be intrinsic meaning of words (that words can somehow mean something all by themselves without them standing in some sort of physical relation to anything else), my response is that I deny there even is such a thing. And it’s not obvious from introspection that the meanings of words is intrinsic, rather than (as I argued) only existing in the sense of being interactions between physical things.
I think my analogy to the genetic code makes it clear in what sense something has meaning, or can be “about” something else, on materialism. By there being some sort of physical interaction between them that systematically associates one physical thing with another.
So some neurological process in my head is “about” a cat(for example) in the sense that at some point during my childhood, the detection of certain shapes and colors by my eye and visual cortex (a drawing of a cat, a picture of a cat, seeing a real cat or whatever) was physically (in space and time) associated with my parents uttering the word cat. So the fact that those two physical things/events (the visual and the auditory) were occurring closely in space and time was somehow deemed significant and stored in the form of some sort of neural pathway that can later be recalled at will.
And sometime later that same sound of the word, recorded in my brain as being physically associated with the picture/real cat, was physically associated (in space and time) to letters such that I could read the word too.
If meaning is physical associations in space and time, as I contend, then those thoughts have meaning in the form of their associations in space and time.
If your problem is that meaning isn’t intrinsic to the word cat, then I agree, but I don’t think I have to explain intrinsic meaning as I don’t see why I should think that even exists. And I don’t think the argument from introspection of my thoughts shows that “cat” has intrinsic meaning.
I think it just shows that I am capable or re-igniting whatever pathway in my brain that first formed when “cat” was associated physically with me seeing a picture of a cat or whatever it was. And that, when we say that we understand what a word means, that is really what we mean. And for a long time we didn’t know that, just like for a long time we used the word water without knowing it referred to H2O.
So that is how I look at it. That we now know that when we say that “we understand what the word cat means”, what we are really saying is that something in our brains that formed when we heard particular sounds and saw particular shapes and colors, is reactivated.
If by intentionality you mean something having intrinsic meaning, I just deny that there is such a thing and challenge you to show it.
I think the problem is you are seeking an explanation for something you have not shown even exists.
So to me the problem is you just have a wrong idea about what it means to say that something has meaning or is “about” something. And you being able to understand your own thoughts by introspection doesn’t show, that I can tell, that the words you are expressing in your inner voice, or you are considering, somehow have meanings intrinsically. I just don’t see how that follows and it’s patently non-obvious why it should.
So I think there’s a disconnect in the argument you have laid out. You have not shown that understanding words by introspection entails that those words have intrinsic meaning. And I believe I have explained how something can be physically about something else, just not intrinsically.
I’m well aware of that. And my point is that standard usage in philosophy is sloppy. In the URL, you’ll see that this is Peaceful Science, not Peaceful Philosophy.
That’s a perfect illustration of that sort of sloppiness. Plenty of people falsely accuse others of adhering to scientism, but you are unlikely to find someone who professes a belief in it. You just accused @Faizal_Ali of holding that belief above.
I think it’s a fairly clear example of a rather basic problem with argumentation of this sort. Complex things can be put into words, with the effect that we tend to treat the word as the thing. We then assume that we can engage in reasoning about the words, and that this reasoning passes through to the things we think we are signifying with those words. But there is simply too much play, too much slop, too much inexactness, and too much of a tendency for our verbally-expressed concepts to correspond to no real entity or phenomenon, for such reason to be useful.
I think that if I thought there were immaterial forces which act upon the brain, I’d try to figure out what type of energy they use, and see how they might be interfered with. Failing a decent hypothesis that proposes a mechanism for the consequent material actions, there’s really nothing to investigate.
To be clear, by “answer” I mean something more than a response that could possibly be true, maybe. I mean an explanation that we know to be true, such as the answers to “Where does the sun go at night?” or “What causes strep throat and how can it be treated?”
I have to say, I find Feser’s response to so-called “scientism” typical of the superficial and evasive manner in which the question is addressed by the theologically inclined. In fact, it verges on a strawman. I have never heard a single person claim that logic and math do not lead to conclusions that can be shown to be true, or that these methods and their propositions must be confirmed by the scientific method. If anything, the chief error committed by those accused of “scientism” is in presuming that their critics are capable of nuanced thinking and will not take statements too literally.
For my part, I endorse a “soft” form of scientism which takes the position that all human knowledge has been obtained by the use of observation, logic and mathematics with the presumption that the world and everything in it are governed by “natural” laws which can be discerned thru this very process and which are never violated. It is that last stipulation in italics that I believe is the sticking point, and which I have never seen addressed by critics of “scientism”. These critics will simply arbitrarily drop that stipulation when they need to relax epistemic standards to accommodate a belief in a creator god, a resurrection, or whatever.
Sure. No one claims that thru science we have, at this moment, answered every question that can possibly be asked. But if those remaining questions cannot or will not be answered by science (as I have defined it), then they never will be answered IMHO.
Just to start another tangent on which we can disagree? I didn’t see any point in providing a specific example.
As Feser specifically addresses this line of response, it looks more to me like your reading of Feser which is superficial.
That’s just tacking the assumption of naturalism onto the kind of scientism that Feser refutes. At which point it would just be begging the question against the claim that we can get knowledge about about non-naturalistic (e.g., immaterial) realities through philosophical arguments.
(It even demonstrates one of the ways that science depends on philosophy, because science (even if you toss math and logic in that bin) can’t give an account of what these laws of nature are, or why they serve as genuine explanations and not just summary descriptions of what we observe. But that’s another tangent.)
I’ll have to come back to respond to other comments in this thread at another time.
