There's an element of that, it's hard to think so otherwise, but even taking this to account, I don't see how this expands to objects being "disassociated boundaries", with people you could say that, but I don't see how this entails creates Kastrup's idealism. — Manuel
What aspect(s) are you still trying to understand?
— wonderer1
The whole thing. — frank
It's pretty clear isn't it? Evolutionary biology replaced the Biblical creation mythology, but it also elbowed aside a great deal of philosophy which had become attached to it as part of the cultural milieu. So it seems obvious to anyone here that mind evolves as part of the same overall process through which everything else evolves. And it's then easy to take the step that the human mind is a product of evolutionary processes in just the same way as are claws and teeth. Easy! What could be wrong with that? (That's why I'm an advocate of 'the argument from reason', although it's about as popular on this forum as a parachute in a submarine.) — Wayfarer
It's pretty clear isn't it? Evolutionary biology replaced the Biblical creation mythology, but it also elbowed aside a great deal of philosophy which had become attached to it as part of the cultural milieu. So it seems obvious to anyone here that mind evolves as part of the same overall process through which everything else evolves. And it's then easy to take the step that the human mind is a product of evolutionary processes in just the same way as are claws and teeth. Easy! What could be wrong with that? (That's why I'm an advocate of 'the argument from reason', although it's about as popular on this forum as a parachute in a submarine.) — Wayfarer
But more than an argument it would actually be an operation. The operation would consist of an effective reduction of all the contents of the world objectified by the sciences [biology, economics, psychology, sociology, logic, mathematics, phenomenology, philosophy, etc.] to phenomena, terms, relations, correlations, operations and demonstrations of that specific science that is physics.
For example, a physical theory of supply and demand that reduces it to relationships between, so to speak, their masses and their covalent bonds. A physical theory of the Pythagorean theorem that reduces it to relationships between atoms of some element, etc.
Is that something impossible? If it is impossible then we need another ontology. A more pluralistic ontology that can identify genres and irreducible categories. But also an ontology that identifies how these genres and categories of what exists are related to each other. — JuanZu
t seems to me that supervenience is all about existential dependency — creativesoul
I think that the only possible argument for physicalism has to start from a neutral monist metaphysical position, then argue that emergent psychological properties are real, in a strong sense. So mind is not denied but rather affirmed at the physical level. — Pantagruel
The second thing to notice is that the 'nothing' I am talking about is a mental nothing, not an absolute nothing; it is a mental substrate without substance in the exteriorized sense we use the word 'substance,' not an absence of substrate. As such, I am talking about no-thing, rather than nothing, if we understand for 'things' entities that seem to exist outside mind. My no-thing has an ontological essence (namely, mentality) that exists; it's not an ontic vacuum. This is clear throughout the clip even without its full context, as I constantly speak of a (universal) mind trying to make sense of the fact that it creates everything out of no-thing. My position is thus different from Rovelli's absolute nothing, in which the whole universe is like movement but there is nothing that moves. In my case, there is mind 'moving.'
I don't think it's about dependency. It's just that two things that track together: "There cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference." — frank
I think this is the most popular view today, right? — frank
It seems to me constrained by the burden of the physicalist presupposition though, — Pantagruel
What many physicalists would like to say is that the physical facts underlying any mental facts are more essential, and that the physical in some way causes the mental. — Count Timothy von Icarus
If you abandon the idea of the physical being fundemental and the mental being caused-by/emerging from the physical (and not vice versa) then it appears like the monosubstance from which all things emerge being "physical" doesn't really explain anything. — Count Timothy von Icarus
So maybe physicalism has never been an explanation. — frank
Maybe it represents a certain mindset? A way of problem solving? — frank
It about being able to talk about the same thing at two different levels of abstraction, what is viewed as the emergent level and the pre-emergent level. — wonderer1
True. So maybe physicalism has never been an explanation. Maybe it represents a certain mindset? A way of problem solving?
One of the outcomes is that if a person is struggling emotionally, they're likely to be piled high with medications meant to support them. To the extent that doing that works, that's the argument for physicalism
Maybe. I just don't see how physicalism differentiates itself from the wider umbrella of naturalism... — Count Timothy von Icarus
Maybe. I just don't see how physicalism differentiates itself from the wider umbrella of naturalism...
— Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't see much distinction between physicalism and naturalism, other than in usage. My impression is that "physicalism" is just the word more commonly used in the context of discussing philosophy of mind. For example, the question on the 2020 Philpapers survey is, "Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?". If "physicalism" was replaced with "naturalism" would it make a difference? — wonderer1
"I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn't conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that such being is intrinsically or essentially non-experiential.
Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.
One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism.
Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself. But to think that science can provide us with an absolute description of reality, that is, a description from a view from nowhere; to think that science is the only road to metaphysical truth, and that science simply mirrors the way in which Nature classifies itself, is – according to Putnam – illusory. It is an illusion to think that the notions of “object” or “reality” or “world” have any sense outside of and independently of our conceptual schemes. Putnam is not denying that there are “external facts”; he even thinks that we can say what they are; but as he writes, “what we cannot say – because it makes no sense – is what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices”.
We cannot hold all our current beliefs about the world up against the world and somehow measure the degree of correspondence between the two. It is, in other words, nonsensical to suggest that we should try to peel our perceptions and beliefs off the world, as it were, in order to compare them in some direct way with what they are about. This is not to say that our conceptual schemes create the world, but as Putnam writes, they don't just mirror it either. Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.
Orthodox naturalists divide over the unity of science: physicalists insist that what there is can ultimately be reduced to or supervenes upon physical entities, or that the methods of the “special sciences” are dependent upon or legitimated by an understanding of their physical basis; pluralists recognize the ontological or methodological autonomy of astronomy, chemistry, biology, the neurosciences, and perhaps geology or the environmental sciences.
Rouse’s radical naturalism shares with liberal naturalism “a more pluralistic conception of scientific understanding than is characteristic of orthodox naturalisms, and reject conceptions of nature that would require error-theoretic, reductionist, or non-truth-conducive treatments of conceptual, epistemic, moral/political, or aesthetic normativity. I endorse liberal naturalists’ emphasis upon “anti-supernaturalism” as the most definitive naturalist commitment, and my view has some overlap with the primacy some liberal naturalists (e.g., Price 2004, 2011) accord to understanding human conceptual and epistemic capacities as natural phenomena (“subject naturalism”) over seeking scientific imprimatur for a physicalist or other scientistic metaphysics.”
That's all I mean by "substance," here, that there is an ontologically primitive type of thing that exists, whose interactions produce the apparent variety and change we see around us (with or without strong emergence, but probably without given Kim's arguments), as opposed to flux and process being fundemental. Substance is the "substrate" or "prime matter," a concept that seems necessary to make superveniance or causal closure work, at least in forms I am familiar with. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Why would brains be any less shaped by evolution than other biological organs? So "What could be wrong with that?", aside from your dislike of the idea? — wonderer1
The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned. — Evan Thompson
Evan Thompson writes: — Joshs
Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned. — Joshs
Just checking is this Thompson? I always thought this quote was credited to Dan Zahavi, (2008) Internalism, Externalism, and Transcendental Idealism. Synthese 160:355-374 — Tom Storm
A number of writers make a distinction between physicalism and naturalism on the basis of the inclusion or exclusion of the role of subjective point of view in the determination of the object.
Why would brains be any less shaped by evolution than other biological organs? So "What could be wrong with that?", aside from your dislike of the idea?
— wonderer1
Because evolutionary biology is not philosophy, per se, and never set out to address issues of epistemology and metaphysics. — Wayfarer
Also because of the role that evolutionary biology occupies in culture as a kind of secular religion. — Wayfarer
So, what does our history tell us? Three things. First, if the claim is that all contemporary evolutionism is merely an excuse to promote moral and societal norms, this is simply false. Today's professional evolutionism is no more a secular religion than is industrial chemistry...
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