Podcast description: Materialism is dead. There are simply too many questions left unanswered after years of studying the brain. Now, people are scrambling for a new way to understand the mind-body relationship. Cartesian dualism has become a whipping boy in philosophy, but it has advantages over the alternatives. Dr. Joshua Farris discusses Cartesianism and philosophy with Dr. Michael Egnor.
materialism is dead
marx btfo
marx failed to consider the opening of the third eye and the 66hz pineal gland frequency
Marx never really considered the mind-body problem in depth.
Engels did and he warned against "vulgar materialism" which seeks to equate consciousness with matter. If anything Engels would be closer to cartesian dualism than the reductive physicalism that dominates mainstream science, and which would definitely fall under "vulgar materialism" IMO.
Not sure what the correct take here is but I really really doubt it's reductive physicalism, it just has too many holes that I don't think it can ever fully plug.
reductive physicalism, it just has too many holes that I don’t think it can ever fully plug
rhetorical question but why
i can see the atoms bro, I can't see the aether
spoiler
all this metaphysical idealism interests me but people into idealism as a whole tend to be fascists or something
“love is only chemicals in the brain therefore it is meaningless” Rick Sanchez larpers are often insufferable neoliberal nihilists
Man even if this is true I don't want to believe just because of how extremely depressing the implications of hard materialist reductionism is so yeah I know what you mean
like they take almost a sadistic glee in reminding people of "uhm acksuhally this is all meaningless"
I think it's okay to do both. Sometimes the logical/analytic side can be just as playful as the creative, whimsical side. I take a lot of pleasure in just observing an animal's behaviors and trying to rationalize them in my head - almost as much as I do from snuggling them.
To convince those people just punch them in the face until they change their mind.
Disclaimer: I an not a philosophical advisor
I might be someone you would consider a reductionist.
“love is only chemicals in the brain therefore it is meaningless”
This rings of someone who's caught a nasty break in life more than it does someone trying to follow a metaphysically monist position to its logical conclusions.
Higher-order concepts and abstractions are absolutely meaningful and real, even if they are reducible to whatever base physical reality, because one can speak meaningfully of two people in love, whereas tracing the millions of chemical reactions that make up that "love" will never be feasible.
I'm a big fan of ontic structural realism in this case.
I’m a big fan of ontic structural realism in this case.
This is the correct take. It might be true that materialism is looking less and less plausible given our best contemporary physical theories, but the idea that "thoughts aren't made out of particles, therefore ghosts did it" is absurd. There's plenty of room left for naturalistic (or even physicalist) explanations. Here's a very rough sketch of a way we might cash out the differences, going from the strongest claim to the weakest claim.
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Materialism (in the philosophy of science sense, which is related to but distinct from the Marxist sense) is the claim that the only things that exist are material bodies (and, perhaps, mereological composites of material bodies). Materialism suggests that the world is constructed out of some sort of universal "building blocks," which are themselves indivisible, spatially localized, impenetrable material bodies. The atomism of Enlightenment thinkers like Galileo, Bruno, and (sometimes) Hobbes is the prototypical materialist theory, but it's still an extremely common intuitive assumption among people who don't know too much about contemporary physics, but who are uncomfortable with supernatural entities, abstract objects, and other immaterial things. I feel quite confident in asserting that materialism has definitively been shown to be false by contemporary science (for reasons outlined below). Very extreme (but somewhat naive) eliminatively-minded people sometimes end up in this position, asserting that all that exists are atoms, quarks, or something like that.
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Physicalism is more permissive than materialism. Physicalism asserts that all that exists are the entities described by fundamental physics (and possibly mereological sums of those entities). Physicalists relax the demand that all these things be material, though, and are willing to admit things like fields, forces, energy, and other stuff that is not spatially localized, not impenetrable (i.e. doesn't exclusively take up space), or otherwise not consistent with materialism. It's very, very hard to see how we can take contemporary physics seriously without at least admitting fields and forces, since these are fundamental objects of many of our best contemporary physical theories. It isn't at all plausible that, for instance, gauge fields might really be material objects at bottom, or that bosons might really occupy space in such a way that they exclude other bosons and fermions. Not all physicalists are strict reductionists (or eliminativists), but many are. Those who aren't usually see "higher level" objects and entities as being "bookkeeping devices," constructed ways to track the operation of the things physics says exists, or convenient fictions that are nonetheless indispensable for doing the kinds of things we want to do. Most of the time, they'll assert that what's really real are the objects of fundamental physics, and that other things are (at the most) second-class citizens of our ontology. Physicalists usually endorse something like Kim's causal drainage argument, and see the real "causal oomf" as being located in the objects of fundamental physics, whatever those may be. Kim is a prototypical physicalist, but so are Alex Rosenberg, the Churchlands, David Albert, Sam Harris (I think), Peter Unger, and many, many other people. It's a very common philosophical position.
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Naturalism is the most permissive of these positions, and probably the hardest to define (in part because it can get really close to physicalism). Non-physicalist naturalists relax the claim that physics is the final arbiter over what does and doesn't exist, but otherwise hold to many of the same ideas that physicalism does. Naturalists endorse causal closure, but (at least sometimes) embrace things like downward causation, genuine metaphysical emergence, holism, and other ideas that put some composite objects on equal ontological footing with the objects of fundamental physics. A naturalist might assert, for instance, that everything that exists or occurs is consistent with the rules of fundamental physics, but that those rules don't exhaustively describe what's real. That is, they might assert that any real system's behavior can be predicted by the laws of fundamental physics, but that there are interesting features of some real systems' behavior which are missed by those laws. While most physicalists believe that the laws of the higher level special sciences are in principle derivable from the laws of fundamental physics, naturalists have room to deny that claim. A position like ontic structural realism--which denies the distinction between abstract and concrete objects, and asserts that only patterns exist--is a prototypical non-physicalist naturalist position. Dan Dennett, James Ladyman, Don Ross, Cliff Hooker, Philip Kitcher, and Sean Carroll are all non-physicalist naturalists (so am I). Ladyman & Ross' book Every Thing Must Go is a great detailed look at a non-physicalist naturalist system (and a spirited defense of that position) This position is actually rather weak, insisting only on some rather mild claims like causal closure, Ladyman's "primacy of physics principle," (which states that real things can't behave in a way that's inconsistent with physics), or similarly general principles. I find naturalism more plausible than physicalism in virtue of many of the advances that have come out of complex systems theory in the last few decades, which I think have given us good reasons to think that strong emergence, downward causation, and similar ideas that seem a little at odds with physicalism are not only real, but can be given precise scientific and mathematical characterizations.
Cartesian dualism is probably incompatible with all three of these positions, but claiming that contemporary science undermines all of these is just wrong: the complexities of our best contemporary physical theories are actually reasons to endorse naturalism, not reject it.
Thanks for laying that all out! I feel validated. Have you read Everything Must Go? I want to but I may need some more prerequisites first.
Also, out of curiosity, what do you think of the mathematical universe hypothesis?
Oh yeah, I've read it a number of times--it's an excellent piece of philosophy, but you're right that it's not the most accessible thing in the world. Don Ross has a paper called "Rainforest Realism: A Dennettian Theory of Existence" that's a bit more approachable, and hits many of the same notes (Dennett's paper "Real Patterns" from the 1990s was responsible for kicking a lot of this off). You'll get the most out of ETMG if you've got at least a little background in contemporary physics, though you don't need all the details. A good undergraduate-level understanding of quantum mechanics and some idea of the major concepts in QFT would be more than sufficient.
I'm pretty sympathetic to Tegmark's work in general, at least in terms of the formalism. The metaphysics of it leans a little closer to Platonism than I tend to like, just because I'm skeptical of the idea that there's a meaningful distinction between illata and abstracta in general. Insofar as it's a fleshing out of a detailed theory that's compatible with OSR that demonstrates how to understand the "it's patterns all the way down" claim in a way that doesn't require any substrate--that is, doesn't require anything for the patterns to "be patterns in"--it's a great contribution to the literature.
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Yep, I think we do. I love that example of a funeral lol.
Funnily and ironically enough (and not really related to the topic at hand), Dennett has a term for these sorts of things: deepities. They hold a dual meaning, one that is true and trivial, and another that is false but very consequential. His example is "love is just a four-letter word". This is true in the sense that the word "love" is a four-letter word, which gets your foot in the door, but that's not exactly groundbreaking, and the implied message (that love is a meaningless concept, just a word people use with no connection to reality) is a strong thing to say, but patently false.
I've found this to be a useful concept over the years.
i can see the atoms bro
Can you though? You see an image in your conscious mind and with the same mind you (or well some scientists) devised a mathematical model that explains those images rather well in most cases.
All you really truly know is your own consciousness and whatever sensory input it contains, the rest is a model (again within your own consciousness). Not sure why you would subvert this first truth you know about the universe (that your own consciousness exists) in favor of this weird dogmatic reductionism that posits that nothing beyond this model can exist, and if it seems as if it does you must be mistaken about it somehow.
rhetorical question but why
For me the killer argument was this: https://web.archive.org/web/20200206121950/https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-cannot-have-evolved-auid-1302
Basically when you try to put reductive physicalism together with the theory of evolution you get a hell of a fine tuning problem if you don't allow consciousness in of itself some kind of agency.
all this metaphysical idealism interests me but people into idealism as a whole tend to be fascists or something
I think it makes sense to separate metaphysical idealism from political idealism. In the political context materialism is still king IMO no matter which metaphysic turns out to be true eventually.
If you're interested in metaphysics I highly recommend other works from Bernardo Kastrup, for example his book "Why Materialism is Baloney" or this video series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDbCTxm6_Ps
Politically he's a lib but I can see growing skepticism of western institutions in his recent rants, he's an alright dude IMO.
All you really truly know is your own consciousness and whatever sensory input it contains
:doubt:
It's the only truth that's immediately and ineffably accessible to you and it was like that since you were born. All the other truths are derived from that first one.
I know that my consciousness exists and that I perceive the world though my senses but I've had enough panic attacks to know that my perception is not at all reliable and cannot form the foundation for Truth. I can alter the world through my actions in the world, and never through imagination or mere imposition of ideas. On the other hand I can eat things that will bend my perception entirely out of shape regardless of my intentions, and then a few hours later I realise that nothing changed and nobody ever noticed anything was ever different.
It's not about blindly believing your every perception to be the ultimate truth, that's clearly not a good idea, it's more about knowing that your consciousness does indeed exist on a base ontological level.
When you properly internalize that then reductive physicalism doesn't really make that much sense anymore.
so you say, no greater deception than the one by yourself for your "self", would lack of consciousness change your action and perception, well through alcohol we know the first ain't true and the second is a byproduct of believing the first, are we all? nothing is less assured or more tenuously within our grasp, also truth and knowledge as such do not exist :chefs-kiss:
That article is a long argument from personal incredulity. Some of my favorite chestnuts:
it, too, must give us some survival advantage, otherwise natural selection wouldn’t have fixed it in our genome
The concept of spandrels describes a situation in which a phenotypic trait isn't the product of direct selection. At the genomic level, a given mutation doesn't have to have a positive effect on fitness to become fixed in the population; random mating in a finite population is enough to get it there. You could argue that something as complex as consciousness isn't governed by the same rules as a single allele, but you're still giving away the game by acknowledging that consciousness emerges somehow from genes. Genetic expression is limited to a set of chemical reactions, governed by physical laws. All genes can do is produce proteins; all proteins can do is chemically interact with the other components of the cell.
One problem with this is that, under the premises of materialism, phenomenal consciousness cannot—by definition—have a function.
I don't think materialists actually believe this. Qualia can be associated with neuronal activity and can lead to observable changes in behavior. Emotion, for example.
But okay, what if we concede that consciousness cannot have evolved? How did it get there, then?
Phenomenal consciousness cannot have evolved. It can only have been there from the beginning as an intrinsic, irreducible fact of nature.
:what:The concept of spandrels describes a situation in which a phenotypic trait isn’t the product of direct selection.
That's one hell of a spandrel we got there then.
What are the odds of this strange "spandrel" appearing to just so correspond so well to our body, why does getting hurt feel bad as opposed to good? The chances of this happening by accident are inconceivably small considering you can imagine countless of ways it could have developed differently, including no consciousness happening at all yet our bodies doing what they do normally.
Phenomenal consciousness cannot have evolved. It can only have been there from the beginning as an intrinsic, irreducible fact of nature.
Why is this such a ridiculous claim but it isn't ridiculous to claim matter has always been there?
That’s one hell of a spandrel we got there then.
Sure would be, but this is just an extension of the "tornado in a junkyard" trope that creationists use all the time. The argument in the article isn't that "consciousness is improbable" or "consciousness may have an origin other than evolution," it's "consciousness cannot have evolved"; both spandrels and selectively neutral mutations are examples of ways that evolution can act without direct selection on a given trait. The argument starts on a flawed understanding of evolutionary biology.
What are the odds of this strange “spandrel” appearing to just so correspond so well to our body, why does getting hurt feel bad as opposed to good?
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, why does a puddle fit perfectly in the depression in which it resides? The fact that consciousness corresponds to our physical experience of reality is, as far as I can tell, an argument in favor of an evolutionary origin of consciousness, not one against. Pain is unpleasant presumably because things that hurt tend to reduce fitness and any organisms that evolved a positive response to pain are probably selected out of the gene pool. Perhaps - we could argue - that consciousness is a spandrel that developed out of selection for organisms that can remember, contextualize, and avoid repetition of fitness-reducing experiences or seek out fitness-increasing experiences. The point here is not that we can definitively state an evolutionary origin for consciousness, merely that the nature of consciousness does not preclude the possibility of an evolutionary explanation.
considering you can imagine countless of ways it could have developed differently, including no consciousness happening at all yet our bodies doing what they do normally.
Endosymbiosis didn't have to happen either, or photosynthesis, or the Krebs cycle, or any of the other myriad prior developments it took to produce people. Improbable does not mean impossible.
Why is this such a ridiculous claim but it isn’t ridiculous to claim matter has always been there?
This is just a rehash of the "well evolution doesn't explain explain the origins of life" red herring. It's not incumbent on evolutionary theory to explain the existence of matter, and evidence suggests that - whatever its origin or lack thereof - the existence of matter predates the existence of life and that matter is capable of existing independently of life. What evidence do we have that consciousness exists independently of the physical matter of the brain? What does it even mean to say that consciousness predates conscious beings? That the brain somehow developed into a sophisticated antenna for tuning into something that we have no physical evidence of and doesn't fit into our existing physical models? That the universe itself is conscious and is teleologically oriented to producing conscious beings? That we're just God dreaming? I don't see how the claim leads to anything that resembles a testable hypothesis or is in any way distinguishable from a god of the gaps argument.
Pain is unpleasant presumably because things that hurt tend to reduce fitness
But by saying that you're implying consciousness has causal efficacy in of itself, meaning it cannot be a spandrel, yet reductionist physicalism claims it doesn't. You're contradicting yourself.
Oh yeah I'm really into Kastrup. IIRC he is the only person ever alive who has sucessfully defended a PhD on this topic, pretty much everyone else gets laughed out of the room. I feel like it's bullshit though, but some of his arguments against hard physicalism are fairly convincing.
spoiler
I think he might be pretty solidly left wing tho, not a communist but he definitely has that bent from what I've seen him post on FB
edit: One of the most insane things I've ever read in a book was Kastrup talking about how there was a tribe in like, the Amazon that had a huge suicide problem because they were so detached from materialism as a metaphysics people had ZERO fear of death and would immediately off themselves when family members died to follow them
If what he's proposing is bullshit I feel like it's way less bullshit than hard physicalism. "Everything is Mind" is a hard pill to swallow but it makes more sense to me than "nothing is Mind".
I think he might be pretty solidly left wing tho, not a communist but he definitely has that bent from what I’ve seen him post on FB
I think he's still a lib but one of the good ones, he seems to be able to sniff out the bullshit that comes out of western media. I can totally see him getting more radical in the coming years.
Dennett is the most ridiculous one of the bunch, philosophically he's a complete charlatan. Just endless sophistry and obscurantism to avoid ever considering what the questions is all about.
I don't quite understand this take, having read a few of his books back in the day. I feel like people get really hung up on the qualia existence thing or something.
Thats cool and all, but can someone make Lovecraft a religion already, so these Cartesian nerds can say something interesting
Yes my eyes are fake, reality is a veil, Azeroths wet dreams are ingredient X for consciousness, now shut up and give me more eyes :angel-biblical-shh:
Materialism is dead. There are simply too many questions left unanswered after years of studying the brain. Now, people are scrambling for a new way to understand the mind-body relationship
I realize hopping into /c/philosophy is bad for my health, but this premise is ridiculous. "We don't fully understand the most complicated and paradoxical thing we could possibly study at this particular point in time, therefore there must be aether, <opposing side> btfo." Like, yes, the piece of meat more complex than the largest supercomputer on the planet and the result of billions of years of evolution into something that is, as far as we are currently aware, a completely unique existence is kinda hard to abstract down to a mathematical model, that doesn't automatically mean it can't be.
More like coordinate systems but yeah, it's from the same dude named Descartes.
He was both a philosopher and a mathematician.
I just looked him up and it turns out he blogs for the Discovery Institute.
:blob-no-thoughts: