but I'll also insist on pointing out that we are a ways from showing such reductions empirically, — Banno
such as anomalous monism - that "perhaps (we) can't derive society behaviour from atom behaviour — Banno
I could see a connectionism running alongside a folk account of intentionality — Banno
I'm not sufficiently familiar with the argument. I could see a connectionism running alongside a folk account of intentionality, but again it is difficult to see how there could be causal links between them. — Banno
Well, yes, it is; hence the "monism"... But I would flip this and say that if monism must be true, then the only possibility is anomalous monism, hence preserving folk psychology.Then it would seem anomalous monism, as you've construed it, is consistent with physicalism. — fdrake
From what I've understood, I'm not in disagreement with Ratcliffe here. If the theory of intention is that intentions are somehow coded into neural networks, I very much doubt it. I don't think it likely that an MRI will one day identify the neural network for "Banno believes tea should be black".He rejects that theory of intention. — fdrake
If I've understood this, I'm not sure i'd count such things as casual - wouldn't they be closer to a neural version of "correlation does not imply causation"?You could get causal links without expressing a bridge law maybe — fdrake
Uh, even the Neo-Russelians admit that they have a major problem with how much scientists appeal to cause: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1093/bjps/axl027?journalCode=bjps — Count Timothy von Icarus
I agree—I tend to see 'mind' as a verb not a noun, and I see mental functions as one kind of physical function. The tricky part is that the physical aspects of mental functions are well-hidden from us; we don't so easily feel the physical aspects of mental functions as we might, for example, with digestion. We don't feel our brains, I mean that's why they can be operated on without anaesthetic. — Janus
The words ‘causality’ and 'cause’ are commonly and widely used by physicists in their most recent work.
There is scarcely an issue of Physical Review that does not contain at least one article using either ‘cause’ or ‘causality’ in its title. A typical sort of title is that of a recent volume edited by the distinguished physicist, E. P. Wigner, ‘Dispersion relations and their connection with causality’ (1964). Another good example is the recent
article by E. C. Zeeman (1964) ‘Causality implies the Lorentz group.’ The first point I want to establish, then, is that discussions of causality are now very much a
part contemporary physics. (Suppes 1970, pp. 5–6)
Since Suppes wrote this almost forty years ago, I conducted a quick and unsystematic internet search of the Physical Review journals (a series of 9) from 2000 to 2003 and found 76 articles with ‘cause’, ‘causes’, ‘causality’, or some similar term in the title. Here are the first three examples listed: "Tree Networks with Causal Structure’ (Bialas et al. 2003), Specific-Heat Anomaly Caused by Ferroelectric Nanoregions in Pb(Mg[sub
1/3]Nb)O and Pb(MgTa)O Relax-ors’ (Moriya et al. 2003) 'Observables’ in causal set cosmology’ (Brightwell et al. 2003)
So Suppes’ observation remains true in 2003.
From what I've understood, I'm not in disagreement with Ratcliffe here. If the theory of intention is that intentions are somehow coded into neural networks, I very much doubt it. I don't think it likely that an MRI will one day identify the neural network for "Banno believes tea should be black". — Banno
If I've understood this, I'm not sure i'd count such things as casual - wouldn't they be closer to a neural version of "correlation does not imply causation"? — Banno
If you are a physicalist, what convinced you? Or is it just the grounding of your thinking? — frank
I see what you mean. But what I’m wanting to differentiate is the sensory from the intellectual. Numbers and the like can only be apprehended by a rational intelligence that is capable of counting. It is that faculty which I claim that physicalism cannot meaningfully account for. — Wayfarer
The statement that "only physical statements are true" is not a statement in physical terms. It is neither falsifiable nor demonstrable.
I don't think this got the attention it deserves:
The statement that "only physical statements are true" is not a statement in physical terms. It is neither falsifiable nor demonstrable.
— Banno — Banno
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
Maybe.
I think a supervenience relationship of A upon B is a bit weaker than being able to talk about some A phenomenon/property in terms of some distinct set of B phenomenon/properties. All you need to say that A supervenes upon B is that there can be no A difference without a B difference - you don't need to know a correspondence between A and B, just provide an existential guarantee.
How you flesh out the "cannot" in "There cannot be an A difference without a B difference" is also very important. Since, say, if cannot means "physically impossible", it could still be logically possible that there can be an A difference without a B difference. So an established supervenience relationship in terms of physical possibility could still allow a failure of supervenience relationship in terms of logical possibility between the same A and B to fail. — fdrake
Now, the history, this history since I am born and molded to the point of being able to conceive mathematical objects in their ideality and objectivity cannot be described in terms of physics. It is like founding epistemology from quantum physics. That doesn't make any sense. — JuanZu
I would posit myself as a physicalist emergentist. What type is still up in the air since that's a realm depending on yet unproven scientific theories. — Christoffer
So a key premise of Russell's argument, is simply not true. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Of course these results are tentative. — Banno
For me supervenience is an epistemic tool I typically use in what I'll call a visuo-intuitive sort of way, without seeing a need for a logically rigorous definition. It is more an essential perspective in the high accuracy measurment instrument design that I do, that involves cognitively zooming in and out between a closer to fundamental physics perspective and higher level design concept perspective. — wonderer1
But then we do know, from the inside, what a brain is "like" by having experience, given that experience must arise from this organ. The issue is, what parts of it are we experiencing? That's very hard to know at this stage. — Manuel
It is difficult to disentangle from scientism, the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning to the exclusion or marginalization of any other perspective. — Wayfarer
The Royal Society's motto 'Nullius in verba' is taken to mean 'take nobody's word for it'. It is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.
https://royalsociety.org/about-us/history/
Authority doesn't really have anything to do with it. — wonderer1
science, which in turn is arguably the best way for humans to form conclusions about anything. — Christoffer
Newton 'stands on the shoulders of giants'. That constitutes authority... — Wayfarer
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