As always :wink:

The inexicability of qualia is not specifically anything to do with physics — Apustimelogist

Need I point out that this is not the Physics Forum?

The most fundamental problem in metaphysics is whether metaphysics exists" — Ludwig V

Well asked. :up:

Yes, I'm aware that you believe the mind is not physical, and therefore not on par with physics and chemistry. But the extent of what you told me you believe about mind is just this negative (supposed) fact: it's not physical. — Relativist

You keep telling me what I'm not grasping, so I'll return the favour. The reason that the mind is not an object like those of physics or chemistry is because it is what we are. Cogito ergo sum, as Descartes correctly observed, is the one indubitable fact of existence. The mind (observer, subject, consciousness) is the one utterly indbuitable fact of existence because it is that to whom all experience occurs. So, of course it's not in the frame, part of the picture, nor a 'mysterious entity' nor 'non-physical thing'. Now the entire phenomenological, idealist, Indian, and most contiental philosophy understands this in a way that Anglo physicalism cannot.

And for you, that's just an inconvenient detail, somethingt that doesn't fit with your otherwise 'best explanation for all the facts'. Whereas, to me, that invalidates the entire point of philosophy, as it excludes the very subject to whom philosophy is meaningful.

Martin Heidegger is a difficult philosopher and one who's books I have not read in full, But he does point to what he calls the 'forgetfulness of Being', saying that this is a deficiency or an absence at the centre of modern philosophy. And that this is not a matter of propostiional knowledge, but an fact about existence (therefore, 'existential'.)

I mostly agree with it — Relativist

(Armstrong quote) Do you know why I would not agree? I’ll recap - because it treats ‘mind’ as being on par with ‘the objects of physics and chemistry’. Do you know why I fault that?

I embrace physicalism (generally, not just as a theory of mind) as an Inference to Best Explanation for all facts. — Relativist

Except for the nature of mind and the felt nature of experience, right? You’ve acknowledged that in various places as I understand it.

You aren't even in position to justifiably disagree, because you don't embrace any particular theory of mind (much less, a metaphysical theory). — Relativist

That is a virtue as far as I’m concerned.

I may not be an idealist, but I've come to terms with 'existence' being an ideal, which is awfully dang close to being an idealist I guess. — noAxioms

Keep coming! You're getting close!

Very different subject matter but a well - regarded book. Out of print, I Iuckily found an online copy - it ought to download properly book-marked, which helps in navigating it.

I think most people don't take that view, even people who think of the world as fundamentally physical. — Apustimelogist

What about the boxed quote above in support of materialist theory of mind. Do you think it is basically correct? Or if not what’s wrong with it?

And, you haven't countered the argument I put to you, only re-stated your conviction that 'whatever exists must be physical'.

For what it's worth, I don't think the language used in the OP is idiosyncatic or the words have been misused in any way. As noted above, I dropped the text into gemini and it had no trouble interpreting it and summarizing it with 100% accuracy.

Actually I'll own up, I didn't watch that whole video, but I briefly reviewed it and also his other materials and I'm sure it's bona fide. (Not that I won't watch it.)

But as for 'super-human knowledge' - this is a delicate question. There are hints in Aristotle and other ancient sources, of the experience of higher states of awareness in which something vital about truth is grasped. You find allusions to it in the writings of St Augustine. It is also encountered in Eastern sources (Hindu and Buddhist) that refer to samadhi states. A lof of ancient metaphysics have these references but they're very difficult to interpret. And also, the subject is prone to a lot of sensationalism by popular writers who are seeking to exploit them.

In today's culture, because these insights are categorised along with religion then they're generally disregarded or deprecated.

Actually now that I think of it, I have a .pdf of a very good, recent textbook on metaphysics. It's not that big of a book, but well worth reading if only the intro section, and the section on Plato. Any questions, please feel free to bring them up here, as it's on-topic.

Thinking Being: An Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition, Eric Perl.

You'll have gathered that it is a contentious question, and that there are people who think metaphysics doesn't exist or is an illusion — Ludwig V

The claim that metaphysics is empty (‘otiose’ was Ayer’s term) is itself a metaphysical claim. That’s basically what sunk the positivists. I think some of the bad rap metaphysics gets is because of its repetition by those who repeat it in slogan form without really grasping it.

Logical reasoning is guided by dispositions (beliefs) about entailments, conjunctions, disjunctions, etc — Relativist

But being disposed to do or say something merely describes what someone ls likely to do. It doesn't describe what they ought to do. And it also reduces logic to psychology.

This comes off as arguments from incredulity. — Relativist

That definitely cuts both ways.

As I've admitted, feelings are not algorithmic- they are the sole, legitimate issue — Relativist

'This dam is a perfectly satisfactory, save for the hole in it.'

Comment on the Armstrong passage above. If you think it's right, what is right about it? If you think not, what is wrong with it?

The fact that language can be interpreted by AI is sufficient to demonstrate that language is consistent with physicalism. — Relativist

Not according to AI https://claude.ai/share/d20fdc96-dfad-44a1-9ef5-cbef895a5819

For clarity’s sake do agree with this depiction of materialism by D M Armstrong?



Might help to understand what is meant by physicalism.

(pressed for time will come back later)

Maths is not about brains, it is about abstract structure inferred in what we see in the world, the rules of math are about that abstract structure; that does not mean that how we use maths and the reason we are able to do math is not instantiated in brains. Logical necessity is not about neural tissue, it is part of abilities to talk about abstract structure we see in the world. But this does not mean that this ability and why it comes about, how it works, is not instantiated by, realized by neural tissue and physical stuff using descriptions which themselves invoke different levels of explanation and abstraction. — Apustimelogist

An instantiation is an instance of something; a rule book is an instantiation of the rules which it describes. A chess game is an instantiation of the game of chess. But that doesn't entail that what is instantiated is material or physical, even if the pieces are. For that matter, chess can be played without any physical pieces (indeed I recall reading in a James Michener book that Arabs used to play mental chess crossing the desert on camels with no board, although I find that ability unfathomable even though I know how to play chess. Chess masters such as Magnus Carlson play simutaneous blindfold games, even more astonishing.)

What you're arguing is, look, we have ideas, we can grasp numbers and logical laws, but the brain is physical, these ideas are 'instantiated' in the physical brain - therefore ideas have a physical basis or cause or dependency. Even if we can't really grasp how neurological activities give rise to ideas because of the brain's complexity, you think this allows you to say that they're still physical in principle. This is 'neural reductionism'.

"Neural Reductionism is the philosophical position that mental states, processes, and events (such as thoughts, feelings, memories, and consciousness) can be fully explained by, or reduced to, physical neural states and processes in the brain. In its simplest form, it posits that the mind is the brain." (Web definition.)

We can have descriptions, explanations of structure at various levels of abstraction about what we see, but they are all instantiated by and inferred by brains which are things in physical space-time. — Apustimelogist

But the living brain is not a physical thing in space and time. Material objects fit that description - balls, bullets, pencils, computer screens, an endless category of things. And I agree that if you were a neuro-anatomist examining an extracted brain, or a neurosurgeon performing an operation on one, then you're legitimately treating a brain as an object in those contexts. But the brain in lived experience - your brain - is not an object. The brain-as-object is something posited from outside the field of experience. Consciousness never encounters its own brain. Rather it is a vital centre of the living, embodied subject of experience, embodied in a biological and cultural network of meaning and symbolic relationships. It in no way can be described in solely physical terms.

The reductionist view basically abstracts the brain as a physical object, tractable to neuroscience, because that is the way that neural reductionism has to see it. That is why it is 'reducing!' It wants to reduce the rich, multi-dimensional reality of lived experience to the equations of physics, which have provided so much mastery over the world of things. But in so doing, it has forgotten or lost the subject for whom it is meaningful.

Furthermore, there's a sound argument for the fact that space and time themselves are manufactured by the brain, as part of the means by which sensory data can be navigated by us. So to say the brain is 'in' space and time, is probably less accurate than to say that space and time are 'in' the brain.

Fair enough. If you could be more specific, I might be able to address your concerns.

A good question — but notice something subtle. The objection is framed from an imagined “view from nowhere,” as if we could somehow step outside all perspectives to compare them. But that very move is itself a construction within our world.

When we speak of a cat’s world or a bunny’s world, we’re not multiplying worlds in any real sense. We’re pointing to the fact that every organism lives in its own Lebenswelt—a lived world structured by its own embodied capacities, needs, and modes of attention. That’s exactly the point enactivism makes: worldhood is always enacted from within a perspective and can never be surveyed from outside.

So the worry about “many worlds” arises only when we tacitly assume an external vantage point ‘outside’ our actual perspective from which to count them—yet that vantage point is itself just another construction in the human life-world. It’s that taken-for-granted constructive activity that the OP is about.

Your burden is to show that some aspect of mental processing cannot possibly be grounded in the physical. In this instance, you were suggesting that logical reasoning cannot be accounted for under physicalism. I was merely explaining why I think it can. If you think this inadequate, then explain what you think I've overlooked. If there's insufficient detail, I can explain a bit more deeply. — Relativist

What you’re overlooking is the distinction between causal explanation and normative explanation.

Physicalism gives you causal accounts of how neurons fire, how circuits activate, how information gets processed. None of that touches the normative structure of logical reasoning—the “oughts” built into validity, soundness, and necessity.

A physical description can tell you why a system outputs a certain conclusion (because certain neurons fired, or certain physical states occurred), but it can’t tell you whether that conclusion is valid, follows, or is logically required. Those are not causal properties; they’re normative relations between propositions.

And the point is that the science of determining causal relations relies on normative judgements.

I was simply giving an example of how meaning is attached to experience, in this case: a sensory experience. In this particular case, pain is clearly linked to intentional behavior: it's an experience to be avoided. — Relativist

I understand that, but it is too simplistic an example to support the contention. The simple association of words with sensations hardly amounts to a model of language.

It seems Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is finally about to materialize. He is forcing them to adopt a ‘peace plan’ that basically capitulates to Russian demands. Zelenskyy is left facing a choice between an unfavorable treaty v an unwinnable war.

Worth doing. You don’t have to drill down to all the details for it to be useful.

Right! The role of epigenetics.

So, each of us cause the world to exist? — Ciceronianus

If you read the OP you will see it says no such thing.


‘Let me address an obvious objection. ‘Surely “the world” is what is there all along, what is there anyway, regardless of whether you perceive it or not! Science has shown that h. sapiens only evolved in the last hundred thousand years or so, and we know Planet Earth is billions of years older than that! So how can you say that the mind ‘‘creates the world”’?’

The original post provides ample justification for basic argument, as does a related On Purpose.

Although I will grant that 'create' carries connotations that are perhaps a bit too strong. 'Mind constructed world' would be nearer the real intent, but it doesn't have the same ring to it.

There is no point here unless you can give an example of where these things are not being realized by physical systems. — Apustimelogist

Well, I could say pure mathematics. That’s the obvious case where what is grasped is not “realised” by a physical system in the way you mean. Nevertheless, we can be wrong about a mathematical result, so there is something to be wrong about. But the reason you don’t see the force of such examples is that materialism doesn’t allow you to see it. If you begin with the axiom that only what is physically instantiated can be real, then of course logical necessity will appear to you as just another contingent pattern — “the way things work,” nothing more.

So when you say the examples I’m giving are “not interesting,” that simply means you’re not seeing the point — and you’re not seeing it because the philosophical framework you’re committed to screens the distinction out in advance. A view that cannot recognise the difference between physical causation and logical necessity will always brush the issue aside, because it has no conceptual space for reason as anything other than physical. So of course anything that doesn’t fit into that particular Procrustean bed is dismissed as “not interesting" (speaking of "patterns"....)

This isn’t my invention. The distinction has deep roots in the history of philosophy. And speaking of pure maths, see for example this Aeon essay: The Patterns of Reality. It makes exactly the point I’m pressing: logical necessity isn’t a physical process. Physical causation is contingent; logical relations hold by necessity. The two belong to different orders — and treating one as the other is precisely the category mistake that materialism cannot see.

Philosophy is in large part learning to look at your spectacles rather than just through them. You’re reasoning about this right now, and reasoning is more than, or other than, a physical process. Of course you need a healthy brain to think logically, but the law of the excluded middle didn’t come into existence when brains evolved, and it doesn’t disappear when a brain dies. Logical necessity doesn’t depend on neural tissue — neural tissue depends on logic to be intelligible.

According to 'Clarendon'.

Thanks, but I choose my sources carefully.

What I mean is - 'what is a "thing?" What does "exist" mean? Does "exist" and "real" have the same meaning? - and so on. These are metaphysical questions, that sound straightforward, but they need a framework in which to be discussed. That is provided by the literature.

1. If <Truth claims are always context dependent> then <Every truth claim, in every context, is context dependent> — Leontiskos

Thomas Nagel's 'The Last Word' is devoted to this topic.

Yes, well, you asked a question, I answered it. Anything else?

No. If I said the meaning of metaphysics was restricted to the meaning in Aristotle's texts, and that it had no other meaning, then it would be. I'm just saying Aristotle is an important starting-point for getting your head around the question, as it's a difficult question. If you look at the way the question it posed in the OP, it is clear that the poster really has no idea what the word means. So, reading at least something about Aristotle's Metaphysics is a good start.

Words change their meaning over time. — Clarendon

It's not 'the etymological fallacy'. Certainly the word 'metaphysics' has acquired many meanings over time but, especially in this case, it's important to have a clear grasp of what it originally meant, as it's a highly complex subject. Which means that a very large percentage of what is written in popular sources about metaphysics is mush.

There's another way into the subject also, which is that certain philosophica and scientific issues raise metaphysical questions. Classics include the interpretation of the wave-function in quantum physics, and whether abstract entities like numbers are real and if so in what sense. But those questions provide a specific focus, which poorly formed 'what is metaphysic?' questions do not.

When you play with little kittens who have never seen a mouse, have never hunted for anything, and never been threatened because they were born in your closet a couple months ago, they have the instincts. — Patterner

When I did a unit in cog sci we were told of an experiment where kittens were brought up in an environment where all the obstacles were vertical. They became adept at navigating them, but when after some period of time horizontal obstacles were introduced they would run into them, until they were able to assimilate the new information. I'm hazy on the details (it was a long time ago) but googling it, it was the Blakemore and Cooper experiments.

Agree. I believe the Joe Sachs edition is highly regarded. (I had a look - the Joe Sachs edition is not the Penguin Classics edition, which is less expensive, and still probably worthwhile.) https://amzn.asia/d/9c4U6ok https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-metaphysics-9780140446197

The key thing to understand is that it starts with Aristotle. One of the later editors of Aristotle's texts applied the term 'metaphysics' meaning 'after' of 'over and above' the Physics, which he had edited previously (although in Aristotle's works there are considerable common threads that appear in each of his separate topics.)

But it's really important to grasp the Aristotelian origin - which is not easy to do as Aristotle is a very big subject. But the reason it's necessary, is because metaphysics is not just anyone's 'theory about what is real' or 'anything which isn't explainable in terms of physics'. It starts out with Aristotle's efforts to define terms and basic concepts rigorously. These were then laid out in a number of books (14 volumes in all!) Not that we can be expected to plough through all this content. But it's important to get some idea of where it started, otherwise talk of metaphysics easily degenates into vacuous phrases.

Maybe check out this lecture or the entries on Aristotle: Metaphysics at the Internet and Stanford Encyclopedias of Philosophy.

isn't talk of our "creating" the world just hyperbole or metaphor? — Ciceronianus

It could also be noted that the derivation of 'world' is from the old Dutch 'werold' meaning 'age or time of man.'

Do the minds of other other organisms "create" the world as well? Is there a human world, and also a cat world and bunny world, and on and on? — Ciceronianus

They create their world - meaning, they enact or bring forth a meaningful environment through their embodied activity. That is a fundamental point of enactivism, 'a theory of cognition that emphasizes the dynamic interaction between an organism and its environment, positing that cognition arises from the organism's actions, not just from internal brain processes. It posits that the mind is not separate from the body but is fundamentally constituted by the brain, body, and environment interacting in dynamic ways, a concept known as the "embodied mind". Instead of passively representing the world, enactivism argues that organisms actively "enact" their world through their sensorimotor activity and that their subjective experience is shaped by these embodied actions.' (definition.)

The linked version of the essay on which the OP is based also mentions the 'lebenswelt' concept derived from phenomenology. Lebenswelt means life-world: the world as it is lived, experienced, and made meaningful by embodied, language-using beings like ourselves. Meaning is not a layer added on top of a neutral, value-free physical world, nor do words function by “corresponding” piece-by-piece to ready-made objects. Rather, meaning arises within the whole fabric of practices, situations, skills, expectations, and shared forms of life that constitute our lived world.

A word has meaning not because it mirrors a thing, but because it plays a role in this life-world — in the ways we perceive, act, communicate, and make sense of what matters to us. That’s why Husserl, and later Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, insist that understanding is rooted in our participation in the life-world, not in some point-for-point mapping between language and “objects out there.”

So, surely there are cat worlds and bunny worlds. This does not mean there are multiple separate physical universes, but that each kind of organism inhabits a differently structured field of significance (also known as a 'salience landscape'), determined by its embodied capacities. But 'if a lion could speak, we wouldn't understand him' (Wittgenstein) and we'll never know what it's like to be a bat (Nagel.)

The point is, the OP wasn't generated by AI, on account of it having been published before AI went live (Nov 19th 2022) - but I felt that the AI review was positive. But, you're right, I'll move it offsite.

The original essay and OP were written prior to the advent of large language models - publication date was 4th November 2022, 15 days prior to the launch of ChatGPT. Just now, I copied it into Google Gemini for feedback, to wit.

Truths are statements that correspond to reality, These "defined rules for how we reason" consist of applying precise definitions to certain words. ....The concept of "true" seems perfectly straightforward - a recognition that a statement corresponds to (say) what is perceived, vs a statement that does not. — Relativist

Please notice what you are glossing over or assuming in saying this. Philosophers have spent millenia puzzling about the relationships between mind, world and meaning, here you present it as if it is all straightforward, that all of this can simply be assumed. Which is naive realism in a nutshell.

"Truth, it is said, consists in the agreement of cognition with its object. In consequence of this mere nominal definition, my cognition, to count as true, is supposed to agree with its object. Now I can compare the object with my cognition, however, only by cognizing it. Hence my cognition is supposed to confirm itself, which is far short of being sufficient for truth. For since the object is outside me, the cognition in me, all I can ever pass judgement on is whether my cognition of the object agrees with my cognition of the object."

Kant, 1801. The Jasche Logic, in Lectures on Logic

"Although it seems ... obvious to say, "Truth is correspondence of thought (belief, proposition) to what is actually the case", such an assertion nevertheless involves a metaphysical assumption - that there is a fact, object, or state of affairs, independent of our knowledge to which our knowledge corresponds. "How, on your principles, could you know you have a true proposition?" ... or ... "How can you use your definition of truth, it being the correspondence between a judgment and its object, as a criterion of truth? How can you know when such correspondence actually holds?" I cannot step outside my mind to compare a thought in it with something outside it."

Hospers, J.; An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, p116.

Mostly, your objections reflect either: a misunderstanding of physicalism (e.g. conflating with science), a lack of imagination (failing to figure out a physicalist account might address your issue), or an attempt to judge it from an incompatible framework (e.g.the way you treat abstractions). When I've addressed these, you do not respond directly, — Relativist

My argument is that physicalist philosophy of mind conflates physical causation with logical necessity. If you don't grasp that argument, you can't pose a counter.

A brain state does not have meaning. I never claimed it did. — Relativist

You said:

That language mirrors the mental processes involved with defining/learning the concept — Relativist

Are these 'mental processes' physical in nature? If they are, they can be described in terms of brain states. If they're not, then they're not physical, and you're no longer defending physicalism.

As for your 'pain' example:

You and I both feel pain when we grab a hot pan. We cognitively relate the word "pain" to this sensation, so it's irrelevant that our respective neural connections aren't physically identical (i.e. the "meaning" is multiply realizeable). — Relativist

It is an extremely basic account which attempts to equate intentional language with physical stimulus and response. A dog will yelp if it stands on a hot coal, but a dog yelp is not a word. And regardless, it fails to come to grips with the point about 'multiple realisability', against which it was made.

Hillary Putnam’s original point about multiple realisability is that a mental state like pain can be realised in many different physical ways. Different types of creatures could all feel pain, even though their nervous systems might be nothing alike; and even within one person, the neural pattern associated with “pain” can vary enormously depending on context, learning, or injury (including even psychosomatic pain). So there is no single physical configuration that corresponds with pain. And because the same mental state can be realised by indefinitely many different physical structures, the mental state cannot be identical with a physical state. (Hilary Putnam, “Psychological Predicates” (1967))

This allegory can be extended. The fact that a single meaning can be encoded in any number of radically different physical forms shows that meaning is not identical with those forms. You can express the same thought as spoken sound waves, as ink marks on paper, as binary code, as Braille dots, or as neural activity — and despite the heterogeniety of the media and symbolic form, the meaning is preserved. If meaning were nothing but its physical instantiation, then changing the physical medium would change the meaning.

'Pain' is also utterly inadequate as an example, because it completely fails to come to terms with the intentional and semantic structure of language.

All you've done is to to reify an abstraction ("logic") and assert that this reification cannot be reduced to "physical forces" — Relativist

The position you are attacking doesn't recognize the distinction you're making. — Apustimelogist

It is based on your not recognising a fundamental distinction going back to David Hume. There is a fundamental philosophical distinction between physical causation and logical necessity. Physical causation is that in which every sequence in a causal chain can be described in physical terms - gravity, energy, combustion, reaction, and so on.

Logical necessity, on the other hand, describes the relationship between statements or propositions, not events in time. It is that in which the conclusion is guaranteed or required to be true if the premises are true, based solely on the rules of logic and the definitions of the terms used. It operates in the realm of thought and abstract structures, not physical interaction. The connection is necessary (non-contingent): it holds true in all possible worlds where the definitions and laws of logic remain consistent.

The philosophical implication is that while physical causes explain physical events and processes, logical necessity defines the rules for how we can reason and establishes unavoidable truths (like 2+2=4 or geometric axioms) that hold regardless of any physical event.

This is not a reification. To reify is to make a concrete thing out of an abstraction. It is not reifying logic to correctly identify it.

That language mirrors the mental processes involved with defining/learning the concept. — Relativist

1. If language mirrors only the contingent physical process rather than the necessary logical content (the final, valid definition), the statement equates the psychological fact of concept acquisition with the logical structure of the concept itself.

2. To treat a brain state as having meaning (as representing a proposition) or logical order (as representing a valid step in an argument) is to already inject a non-physical, intentional, or normative element into the physical description to assign semantic content to to a physical state.

Brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, the motion of water molecules, electrical current, and any other physical phenomenon you can think of, seem clearly devoid of any inherent meaning. By themselves they are simply meaningless patterns of electrochemical activity. Yet our thoughts do have inherent meaning – that’s how they are able to impart it to otherwise meaningless ink marks, sound waves, etc. In that case, though, it seems that our thoughts cannot possibly be identified with any physical processes in the brain. In short: Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes. — Edward Feser, Some Brief Arguments for Dualism 1

It's notable that I countered 100% of your claims — Relativist

Only in your own mind.

Of course I accept science, you'd have to be a fool not to. What I don't accept is the attempt to subject philosophical questions to scientific criteria. Of course, that doesn't imply that one's philosphical principles can contravene those criteria, but that science can't be called on to provide the criteria by which philosophical principles should be assessed.

Here's an example of what I regard as an innappropriate appeal to science.



I think this is plainly wrong, as a matter of principle. Not because there is some mysterious thing called 'mind' which somehow always escapes scientific analysis, but because the mind is never an object of analysis in the same way that the objects of science are. It is, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, not something - but also not nothing. How this eludes so many people continues to surprise me.

I agree that in practice you can’t do neuroscience without maths, models of inference, and all the conceptual tools scientists rely upon. But that’s a point about method, not about ontology (i.e. what are the constituents of the neural systems).

The distinction I’m making is simply this:

Causal processes refer to neural and biochemical reactions

Normative relations refer to what makes causal inferences valid.

They belong to different explanatory levels.

A neuroscientist can model the brain as performing Bayesian updating, but the validity of Bayesian reasoning isn’t something you find by examining neural tissue. The neural story explains how we are able to reason (at least to some extent, although the detail is elusive); the logical story explains whether the reasoning is correct. These are not competing explanations — they are explanations of different kinds.

It’s the same with physics and mathematics. Physics relies on mathematics completely, but the maths isn’t identical to the objects being described. A differential equation can describe a falling apple, but the apple isn’t made of equations. Using inferential models to study the brain doesn’t make inference itself a neural process any more than aircraft wings “do calculus” because their behaviour can be simulated mathematically on a computer. The model and the actual mechanism aren’t the same kind of thing.

So my point isn’t that neuroscience is “unsuccessful,” nor that anyone is trying to derive axiom-systems from fMRI scans. It’s just that the norms scientists rely on to build their models — validity, consistency, justification — don’t themselves show up as physical properties. They’re the standards that are used to interpret the physical data in the first place.

That’s all I mean by saying the two can be separated conceptually. “Irreducible” doesn’t mean “supernatural” — it just means that different kinds of explanation are in play. And it's not a 'caricature', rather, a valid distinction between two kinds or levels of discourse.

On further thought, as you often say that I'm engaging in speculation or unthethered philosophizing uninformed by science, could you point exactly to where I'm doing that?

This distinction doesn't make sense because people use formal models of reasoning to understand what the brain does and then map aspects of that to physical architectur — Apustimelogist

The point is that norms of reasoning and causal processes belong to different explanatory orders. Physical processes unfold according to causes; reasoning unfolds according to grounds—the logical relations that make an inference valid or invalid.

A neuroscientist can (and must) use modus ponens, reductio, probabilistic inference, and mathematical formalism to interpret data. But the validity of those inferences isn’t something that can be read off an fMRI scan. You can’t derive logical necessity from neural activation patterns.

So yes, of course cognitive scientists model reasoning, and of course they look for neural implementation of various inferential capacities. But that research presupposes the very norms it’s trying to naturalise. You can’t turn around and say the norms just are the neural activity that was used to investigate them. This is the vicious circularity that haunts neurological reductionism.

We're going in circles here. Bottom line: logic is not physical nor can be reduced to physical forces and categories, but I'm not going to press the point further. We've been arguing since Nov 5th 2024 - I remember the date, because it was the eve of the US Presidential Election, I see no purpose being served by continuing.