Looks like you are active here but relatively new — Mark Nyquist
Bringing in reducibility is shifting the goal posts, and I understand that you don't agree with it, but can you give me a reason to think that your disagreement is not simply a matter of biased intuitions on your part? — wonderer1
Trying to slip spirituality or Zen into physics is like trying to win Chess by presenting a full house. — Banno
"How do you combine a bunch of building blocks and get something completely new that wasn't in the blocks to start with?" Intuitive answer is you simply don't. Same as how you don't get an ought from an is.
I've decided that ontologies are a lot like impressionist paintings. They look better from far way. :rofl: — Count Timothy von Icarus
Here's the problem, because that looks like simple causation to me. — Banno
"How do you combine a bunch of building blocks and get something completely new that wasn't in the blocks to start with?" Intuitive answer is you simply don't. Same as how you don't get an ought from an is. — Count Timothy von Icarus
But this isn't really a challenge to physicalism, since plenty of people who would claim that information is ontologically basic would also go with Landauer's principle, "information is physical." — Count Timothy von Icarus
Is Donald Duck real? No. Is the Walt Disney cartoon character Donald Duck in pictures, cartoons and in costumes made depicting the duck real? Yes, in the pictures and cartoons there is the cartoon character Donald Duck. With a few pence strokes a cartoonist can create the fictional character.The problem with that is, that physicalism is supposed to be true of everything that is real. Even idealism acknowledges that physical objects exist, but physicalism is the idea that everything is reducible to the physical. — Wayfarer
Well, Donald Duck was first drawn by Dick Huemer and Art Babbit and the immature character was developed by Dick Lundy. From there on many cartoonists etc have contributed to the character, like Carl Barks. Hence the physicalist could reduce everything about to basically molecules and atoms and acts what cartoonists and drawers have done.If laws of thought govern all that is physical, then it is irrational to hold that these very laws of thought emerged (via supervenience or otherwise) out of that which is physical. Instead entailing that the physical itself is contingent on the occurrence of laws of thought—with laws of thought being commonly taken to not be in and of themselves physical unless they were to emerge from the physical. — javra
As with causality, it doesn't seem to stand up to close inspection.
It is long. And it provides no insight. Could be wrong, but that seems the case to me. — AmadeusD
I tend towards dismissing your arguments in the same spirit that you trend to dismiss a vast range of philosophical spirituality as ‘religious fantasy’. You strike me as a highly intelligent and articulate atheist with cast-iron convictions. — Wayfarer
Whereas I see philosophy (and in some ways, religion) as being precisely the concern with what Victor Frankl called ‘man’s search for meaning’. But you dismiss it as an infantile search for comfort, as being like thumb-sucking. That’s how it comes across to me. — Wayfarer
And the reason I tend towards being dismissive is because I couldn’t say anything inside what you consider valid terms of reference which could hold any sway. What you’re asking for is a scientific explanation of what is outside the purview of scientific explanations. Whereas I feel you’re saying, if something is outside the purview of science, then how could it be worth considering? — Wayfarer
I think on your very, very long post you went off the rails in your very first paragraph.
A physical object is always going to be primary and it's definition will be secondary. If there is any ambiguity about what the parameters of the physical object are they should be resolved by setting parameters on the physical object.
If the definition of the word you are using doesn't match the physical object.then you are using the wrong word. — Mark Nyquist
The idealists, when held to account, find that they are unable to give a simple account of error, or even of their not being alone. The physicalist uses words like "reduction" or "emergence", waving a hand in the air when asked what such things might actually be. — Banno
The alternative to both is found most explicitly in that grandmother of philosophy, Mary Midgley, but can be seen in other Oxbridge philosophers from the middle of last century. It's simply that we use different types of explanation in different situations, that we need not, indeed ought not, commit to there being a single monolithic explanation of everything.
The world is far too interesting for that. — Banno
Maybe Christoffer can articulate it in a way that I can't see how to at the moment, but I can point to examples. For instance, suppose I have designed a voltmeter. When an instance of such a voltmeter is powered, it has the emergent property of displaying a number corresponding to the voltage applied to the input terminals. That emergent property supervenes on the particular properties of components within that specific instance of the voltmeter design.
Another instance of the same voltmeter design might have a different emergent property due to having different specific components. For example, voltmeter A may be more accurate than voltmeter B. Because the emergent accuracy of voltmeter B supervenes on B's components, changing the emergent accuracy of voltmeter B would require a change in one or more of the specific components of B that the emergent property supervenes on. — wonderer1
"emergence," being any sort of magic wand for difficulties in forming an ontology — Count Timothy von Icarus
"How do you combine a bunch of building blocks and get something completely new that wasn't in the blocks to start with?" — Count Timothy von Icarus
Even if you really really really believe it, it doesn't falsify physicalism. — wonderer1
Yet I think the real question is how fruitful is the assumption of reductionism itself? I view physicalism as one general answer to reductionism. The physicalist is happy to stop somewhere and waive off else in philosophy as near nonsense. Brush everything else off with accusing others of talking about spirits. Or at least something that isn't so important. Has this consequences?
Basically naive reductionism leaves us to ask about the foundations of everything from physicists, as if they somehow would have the cradle of knowledge about everything. Yet the fact is that even if a complex system is a sum of it parts, just looking at those parts individually don't answer much about the operations of the complex system itself. A metallurgist just looking at scraps of metal cannot answer how a jet aircraft flies, just as a microbiologist looking at cells has a hard time to explain our current societies. — ssu
There are countless examples of emergence in nature. Why should we think that particular arrangements and complexities of matter/ energy cannot produce novel qualities? For a start, think about chemistry. How reliable do you believe your intuitions are on this? — Janus
What matters in the case of consciousness is the thing that is conscious, — NOS4A2
The main problem with your argument there is that it introduces elements that does not follow out of the science. — Christoffer
Emergence doesn't mean "anything goes", we don't see a pool of bacteria spontaneously conduct magic because such emergent property "just happened", we still see it as a causal line of events, but engaging in extreme complexity. The emerging property is still dependent on the composition of the underlying systems and parts and limited by their physical composition. Such limitations may also play into the emergent properties. — Christoffer
Briefly, can you sketch out your reasoning for why consciousness emerges from brains and not, say, hearts? Or livers? And why are only some brain functions conscious? Do you think some information processing is required for consciousness to emerge? — RogueAI
I would say that consciousness itself probably resides in the brain, but our identity and personality and emotions rely on all the hormonal balances, chemistry and functions in the rest of the body. — Christoffer
If a complex phenomenon manifests properties that are not present in its components, and could never have been predicted by studying the components, these properties can be described as emergent. But this doesn't explain anything at all. — hypericin
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