It means that the "states of the world" cannot be explained in purely physical terms. — tom

Everything obeys the laws of physics. — tom

These two statements seem to contradict one another, or to be, at the very least, inconsistent with one another. If states of the world cannot be explained in purely physical terms then what warrant do you have for saying they obey the laws of physics?

Yes but on this account "to be itself" is not to be anything at all; and so seems somewhat oxymoronic.

They are both abstractions and they are both real. But there is a dependency and a direction of dependency. Mind depends on matter, just as universities depend on buildings. But mind is neither reducible to matter nor something immaterial in addition to matter.

That's my account of the logical landscape here. As you note, that leaves open the question of what mind and matter is. — Andrew M

I would say that how and what we think about the question concerning the dependency and direction of dependency between mind and matter is itself dependent on whether we look at the question from the 'point of view' of either mind or matter.

So, from the point of view of the scientific way in which mind is commonly understood to be supervenient on the brain, and hence on matter, we have mind dependent on matter.

Conversely, from the point of view of perception, insofar as no matter can appear at all except it be to a mind, we have matter dependent on mind.

Taken together we have a codependent arising of mind and matter. Can we be justified in saying that either matter or mind could have pre-existed this co-arising?

These two statements seem to contradict one another, or to be, at the very least, inconsistent with one another. If states of the world cannot be explained in purely physical terms then what warrant do you have for saying they obey the laws of physics? — John

Explain what a chess program does in terms of the Standard Model. Then show how what it does contradicts any law of physics. Then get back to me.

All this example seems to show is that it is a category error to speak of the chess program either obeying or disobeying the laws of physics.

Instead of the chess program, pick literally anything.

The chess program obeys the laws of physics as does everything else.

For parsimony's sake it is better to stick with the example at hand. So, explain to me how the chess program obeys the laws of physics.

One can play chess with no board whatever. (The Arabs used to play chess against each other, riding camels across the desert, with no board. Quite a mental feat, really.) How does that 'obey the laws of physics'? Or is it simply a matter where nowadays 'the laws of physics' have been transposed into the place previously occupied by 'God's word'?

In terms of representation, yes. Which is the issue with the idea with using the thing-in-itself as a measure of how much we know about someone. To say we "can't really tell anything about anything" because we don't have access to the thing-in-itself is incoherent.

The idea knowledge is "tainted" by our perspective is to literally ignore what it means to know something about a state. We have people saying I can't know a red cup is a red cup because I only have access to my representation, as if the thing I experienced was somehow not what I saw because I don't have a representation of the red cup in-itself.

Within anti-realism there is a great irony. The world is meant to be of the perspective (representation), but it is exactly that which it denies. The red cup is, supposedly, only me, with what the "really is" hidden away in the thing-in-itself. Anti-realism literally asserts the oxymoronic idea that things of the world are really outside perspective.

In terms of the thing-in-itself though, it is not oxymoronic at all. This is how the subject defies reduction. No matter what is said about any state it is always more than representation. Itself, rather than merely the experience or representation of someone who is aware of it. And if we are interested in the distinction of the thing-itself from representation, this is exactly what we are trying to say. Otherwise, we are collapsing the-thing-itself and representation into each other or outright saying there is no such discintion.

Yes but on this account "to be itself" is not to be anything at all; and so seems somewhat oxymoronic. — John

More specific to the discussion of metaphysics and the mind and body, this is undoubtedly the reaction of positions like idealism, for they only locate things in representation. For something to be "more" than experience is a contradiction to the idealist-- it would mean things exist without being represented in a mind. The idealist must reject the presence of the "thing-in-itself." It can never exist.

In other words Kant only did half the work. He posed the "thing-in-itself" and "representation" to eschew the idea of things mattering to us outside representation, as if we could have knowledge that wasn't our experience, but in doing so, he placed that which is beyond experience outside the world.

So rather than recognising the thing-in-itself and representation as a distinction between existence and representation in experience, many following misunderstood the "thing-in-itself" as a measure of knowledge, as if we must get outside our perspective to really know what's going on in the world.

Depends, there's a whole school of thought which uses the "noumenon" as an excuse to say we don't reallu know anything, as if our experiences not being the thing-in-itself meant we don't really know the thing. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I'm not sure what school of thought you refer to here. The central point about the noumenon, which is the idea of the 'in itself', is that we cannot know anything about it from our senses, because they give us knowledge only of phenomena. And we "reallu" do know a lot about phenomena; so the thinking of noumenon is no threat to that knowledge.

I would object in the strongest possible terms. It's substance dualism or "magical woo (in a wider sense, I take this to mean: "presence, force, state or action outside the world" )," where our experiences are considered of a seperate realm and having nothing to do with what exists.

It's not substance dualism. Transcendental idealism does not propose a phenomenal substance and a noumenal substance. If you think that then I then you should read up on the subject. The noumenal is not necessarily thought as a "separate realm"; it is merely the attempted thought of 'what would be' or really more accurately 'what would not be' in the total absence of the human mind. So to talk about "realms" and really even to talk about 'would be' or 'would not be' is already to illegitimately introduce thinking that is conditioned by phenomenal experience. So, to try to think the noumenal is to try to place your thought in an unfamiliar space where you should be able to begin to glimpse the scope of the problem.

The distinction means representation or ideas cannot form existence. No state can be dependent on experience because that amounts to reducing an object to its representation.

The lesson that lies in trying to think the noumenal is that it makes no sense to speak of objects existing in some hypothetical absence of human perception and thought.

No matter how accurate a representation (e.g. "Willow is a poster on ThePhilosophyForum"), it's not enough to define existence. Experiences cannot give existence. No matter what is know, it takes more than that idea to form existence.

Yes, this is true, but only in relation to phenomenal existence; phenomenal existence is never exhausted. But it makes no sense to say this of an emptily purported noumenal 'existence', because we have no contentful idea at all of any such thing.

You seem to want to accuse me of making up new terms which have no bearing on arguments of the past. I am not. My point always been focused on the errors of substance dualism. You appear to saying I'm using terms differently, so the positions, such as substance dualism or idealism, cannot be mistaken. As if because what I'm saying isn't really "materialist," it doesn't show that positions opposed to materialism are incoherent.

No, I accused you only of using terms in ways peculiar to you, not of inventing new terms. What exactly would you say are "the errors of substance dualism"? For, me any thinking based on the idea of substance is erroneous. I would also say that all positions are more or less incoherent; it depends on from perspective, that is from the point of view of what presuppositions, you consider them.

To this I say you are not paying attention to what I have argued. My initial was a statement directly opposing substance dualism: minds are states of the world, not something of another realm. You objected this was only an "obvious truism." How can this be so when a major, quite possibly the major if we go by Western philosophical canon, metaphysical postion on mind and body explicitly denies minds are part of the world?

It's not clear what you mean by "state of the world" or "another realm" or "part of the world"; so there is nothing concrete here for me to respond to.

Yes, this is true, but only in relation to phenomenal existence; phenomenal existence is never exhausted. But it makes no sense to say this of an emptily purported noumenal 'existence', because we have no contentful idea at all of any such thing. — John

But that's exactly what my argument is pointing out as incoherent. The thing-in-themselves are part of the phenomenal realm. My computer, itself, exists. My body, itself, exists. My experiences, themselves, exist. Things in themselves exist-- the phenomenal realm is wider than representation. The purported noumenal is in the realm of existence. All subjects within the world are there in terms of themselves. My knowledge of a state is not the existence of that state.

This is why transcendental idealism falls into substance dualism. It would have us believe that the noumenal is outside the world. As if what was beyond our experience (existing states, thing-in-themsleves) were not within our world. Rather than recognising I know a red cup (representation) which is also a state of existence (a thing-in-itself), it claims the world in which I live only contains my experience and that the thing-in-itself lies in a different realm.

Since the idea of the thing-in-itself is precisely the (admittedly empty or apophatic) idea of what is not part of the phenomenal realm, what you say is simply a contradiction.

So, to say that the nounemal is not part of the (phenomenal) world is not (necessarily) to say it is "outside the world" at all. Because to say that would seem to imply that it must be 'located' 'somewhere else' which would be an incoherent positivistic notion.

To the understanding which only considers our knowledge, sure. In the sense you are describing, the thing-in-itself and phenomenal correspond to the realms of know and not knowing respectively. The noumenal is outside the "phenomenal realm" in this sense. It is what our representation can never be, what knowledge cannot be.

The problem is that phenomena are more than knowledge. The red cup I see is not my representation of the red cup. It's it own state. It exists. To say the phenomena of the red cup only involves what I know is outright dishonest. It's not the state of my knowledge. It's a thing I know about.

And for sure this is a positivistic notion, but that's the point. How can we say there is a thing without posing a presence? Something does need to be located. One cannot have a thing-itself-without a thing-itself. An existing phenomena, whether we know about it or not, has presence.

In "Being" a thing has location, not an empirical spacial one per se, but a worldly one. If my experiences exist, then there are things-in-themsleves are present, they are located in world. The noumenal is worldly (but, as per its definition, not representation).

The understanding of "phenomena" most often attributed to Kant is deficient. It only talks about what we know. It fails to consider what exists and how that extends beyond our experiences.

The red cup I see is not my representation of the red cup. It's it own state. It exists. — TheWillowOfDarkness

You see the red cup via your representation of it. The red cup is what appears via your and others' representations of it. It doesn't make sense to say that it exists as a red cup beyond that, except in a kind of empty formal sense. This is just to say that you don't know what the concrete existence of the red cup is beyond our representations of it. Its empty formal existence is precisely its noumenal existence; the 'red cup in itself'; that can actually be nothing positive or concrete for us; and is thus definitely not located in phenomenal space. Nor is it located 'anywhere else' other than indeterminately in a kind of logical space.

By your definition, a mindless facial-recognition-equipped robot would have the "experience" of "seeing" Alice. — tom

I didn't say anything that suggested that. And I don't know what "definition" you're referring to. I didn't give any definitions anywhere.

There's no reason to believe that a robot would have experience, because there's no reason to believe that consciousness isn't a property of the particular matter, structures and processes that comprise brains.

"What would you think it would happen to the pehonomenal experience, to the self and/or to the consciousness when there is no "awareness of consciousness"? Would it stop its existence?"— Babbeus

Yes. It's not some single object that moves around. Consciousness, sense of self, etc. only obtain when particular brain states obtain. That it only obtains sometimes is no different than saying that something like the need to urinate only obtains sometimes. It obtains when your body is in a particular state, and not otherwise. You don't need to posit that you ALWAYS have a need to urinate, just sometimes it's hidden in the background, do you?

Or to take it out of the realm of the body, it would be like needing to say that an arroyo or wash is always flowing with water, just sometimes the water is hidden in some other metaphysical state or something like that. — Terrapin Station

There is a problem with your comparison with "need to urinate":
- need to urinate is a way of feeling of a conscious being in the same way as being bald or having brain/heart is a way of being a living organism, it is a property, not a substance
- there are other kind of possible comparisons, for example consider matter/energy or other stuff that satisfy conservation laws (maybe volume in incompressible fluids), they behave like "substance", not like properties, one wouldn't say that "you don't need to posit that you ALWAYS have the same amount of matter/energy, just sometimes it's hidden in the background", it wouldn't sound reasonable, it would violate intuitive and experimental conservation laws

Why do we have to think that consciousness behaves like a property (appearing and disappearing) and not like a substance (being conserved)? How can we know for sure that "consciousness only obtain when particular brain states obtain" if we never have direct access to the consciousness of anything but ourselves?

need to urinate is a way of feeling of a conscious being in the same way as being bald or having brain/heart is a way of being a living organism, it is a property, not a substance — Babbeus

Figuring that you'd probably read it as a reference to a feeling rather than a requirement to empty one's bladder because it's full, so that the body would automatically evacuate one's urine whether the feeling were present or not, I gave the other analogy (re arroyos/washes). Why did you ignore that other analogy?

Why do we have to think that consciousness behaves like a property — Babbeus

You don't have to think that unless you want to be coherent, I'd say. Everything is a property. Property-free substances do not obtain. That idea is incoherent.

And this isn't anything about certainty. Forget about certainty. It's stupid to worry about in my opinion. It's about reasons we have for believing one thing versus another, or simply why we'd believe one thing versus another.

"need to urinate is a way of feeling of a conscious being in the same way as being bald or having brain/heart is a way of being a living organism, it is a property, not a substance" — Babbeus

Figuring that you'd probably read it as a reference to a feeling rather than a requirement to empty one's bladder because it's full, so that the body would automatically evacuate one's urine whether the feeling were present or not, — Terrapin Station

"Requirements" don't belong to the ontology, they exist in the world of "prescriptions", requirements don't exist in any scientific-reductionist account of the world. At most you could have transmission of information inside the nervous system which is ultimately a change in the shape/configuration of the physical world and therefore is still just a "property" and not a "substance".

And again: why did you ignore the other analogy?

Or to take it out of the realm of the body, it would be like needing to say that an arroyo or wash is always flowing with water, just sometimes the water is hidden in some other metaphysical state or something like that. — Terrapin Station

Water is a substance that can move and sometimes can be inside a wash sometimes can be elsewere. Our theory about how it works doesn't include the possibility that this substance can stop existing and/or start existing, we consider the flowing substance to just change its location or shape within the framework of a "conservation law" (it can't pop up from nothing and/or vanish).
If we want to think about consciousness like water inside a wash it would lead us to think that when it is not inside the "wash" of matter it is elsewere (but where?).

The analogy/question was whether we need to say that an arroyo or wash is always flowing with water, just sometimes the water is hidden (however it is). I wasn't asking you about other ways that you could look at water.

Over the last 200 years, the understanding of the laws of physics has reached a point where we know certain principles that all future laws will respect: unitarity, conservation laws, computational universality, Lorentz invariance ...

When quantum mechanics and general relativity are unified, do you really think that will render the statement "everything obeys the laws of physics" false? — tom

I'm asking for precision here. If you're referring to future laws of physics, then you should say so. If you are referring to them, how can you know what will be in them? If you accept structural realism about future physical understanding, which is what your first para seems to say, then I think you should define physicalism that way and not refer to 'laws'.

Consciousness is very much a mystery, but pretending to solve it by declaring that matter possesses some unyet discovered physics that only manifests itself in the human brain, seems strikingly unscientific. — Tom

Well, panpyschic material is not more nor less undiscovered than your 'unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity'. They're both speculations. I too think panpsychism is unlikely but I think we need to unpack what 'unscientific' would mean. Many people are claiming that first person testimony about consciousness is not susceptible to scientific investigation, and I wonder if this is what lies behind the word 'unscientific'. So-called special sciences use testimony all the time however and make excellent science, if somewhat looked down upon by enthusiasts for physics chemistry and biology.

This is the particular area I'm reading about at the moment in fact - those sciences where a mixture of mental and physical terms are accepted in scientific discourse, like the study of placebo effects where 'mental states' are central, or the neuroscience of prosthetic aids where 'belief' or 'directed will-power' has to be used by people who have implants to 'train' their implants. I am wondering whether a general argument about 'mental' and 'physical' terms can be assembled from such cases or whether we're stuck with interactionist dualism, as this approach looks to be on the surface.

You should be saying that you had a subjective experience of seeing Alice--that's what seeing Alice is, after all, but of course you're also saying that you trust your subjective experience to be an accurate perception of something objective--Alice crossing the street. Alice crossing the street isn't identical to having the experience of seeing Alice cross the street of course. — Terrapin Station

In ordinary use, perceptual terms like "see" have success criteria. Gilbert Ryle called such terms achievement verbs. So to see Alice cross the street entails that Alice crossed the street.

But mind can also act on or have causal influences over matter, in fact, it does this all the time. For instance, in the case of brain injury, the mind is able to re-route its activities so as to repurpose parts of the brain to fulfil its needs. The subjects of 'mind-body medicine', psycho-somatic illnesses, the placebo effect, and neuroplasticity are evidence for such abilities. Whereas if mind was purely a consequence or result of cellular interactions, these couldn't be accounted for, as all of the causation could only act from the physical to the mental. — Wayfarer

Yes, we can certainly treat people's health in psychological terms and that will have physical effects. But this does not imply that there are immaterial substances or properties. I think it is a mistake to think of the mental as a kind of ethereal parallel to the physical. Mental terms and physical terms operate in very different ways.

To press the university analogy, a university is the way in which its buildings are organized. The university (and its character) is not epiphenomenal to the buildings, the buildings have no universityness property, and there will be no university left if you take away the buildings. We can talk meaningfully about universities without supposing they require an immaterial explanation.

Humans are 'rational animals', i.e. able to grasp through abstract thought, language, intuition and imagination, things which animals cannot. In my view, machines are not sentient, being simply assemblies of switches. They can emulate some activities of intelligence, but they are not beings. If we were to create a truly sentient machine, then we would have to endow it with rights, as it would no longer be a machine, but a being... — Wayfarer

I agree.

Conversely, from the point of view of perception, insofar as no matter can appear at all except it be to a mind, we have matter dependent on mind. — John

I don't really follow you here. We can say that the dinosaurs appeared on earth millions of years ago, despite no-one being around to see them. Or, in another sense, that the dinosaurs didn't appear to anyone because no-one was there to see them. But in what sense would dinosaurs be dependent on mind?

A dinosaur is only a dinosaur insofar as it is conceived of as such. The name applies only to something familiar to us as an object, or possible object, of the senses.

I'm guessing you're not a realist. Is an object of the senses different to an object in the world?

'Epistemic idealism', i.e. whatever we can say exists, is in some sense dependent on our knowledge of the nature of existence. So when we say that such-and-such exists, we're still ultimately referring to a mental or cognitive act. But this isn't to assert that whatever exists is solely inside the individual mind, or that the world is 'in the mind' in the sense that, were one to perish, the Universe would cease to exist. It is more like, all of our statements of 'what exists', are made within a conceptual matrix, comprising knowledge, perception, sensation, judgement, and the like, and that we can't see what exists outside of or apart from that. Modern realism is the (I think) naive view that science discloses what is 'there anyway', and that we now can come along and drill down into that and discover its fundamental nature. But this overlooks the constructive role that the mind itself plays in science and knowledge of all kinds (per Kant and Schopenhauer). It is an emotive issue however as most people have a strong attachment to scientific realism.

I think it is a mistake to think of the mental as a kind of ethereal parallel to the physical. Mental terms and physical terms operate in very different ways. — AndrewM

I agree with that too, but it conceals more than it reveals, especially in the way it is used by Ryle and Dennett. In effect, the ghost is declared unreal, and all that is left is the machine.

The analogy/question was whether we need to say that an arroyo or wash is always flowing with water, just sometimes the water is hidden (however it is). I wasn't asking you about other ways that you could look at water. — Terrapin Station

We don't feel the need to say that the water is flowing and hidden when there is no water, but we do feel the need to say that the water is always somewere in some form.

We don't feel the need to say that the water is flowing and hidden when there is no water, — Babbeus

The question is about the arroyo/wash as such, not about the water as such, by the way. But okay, if we don't need to say that the arroyo/wash is in the same state when it seems dry, but that the flow is just hidden or whatever, why do we need to say that in the case of consciousness?