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.
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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"
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for your insight. I read both Real Patterns and Rainforest Realism a few years ago which is what drew me to this line of thinking. I used to love to read about quantum mechanics but I definitely would not claim an undergraduate's understanding, so maybe I should pick up a textbook or something first. I do have a friend who is a tenured physics professor in that field, so maybe I can throw a question or two his way if I get stuck lol.
I'm willing to endorse that. As an amateur, when I stumbled on that hypothesis, it was hard not to feel the little satisfaction of everything being wrapped up neatly with a bow, but I'm not sure that's always a feeling to trust. A lot of the earth-shattering ideas that have rewired my thinking have landed chaotically in uneven chunks.
You can certainly give it a try and see if you hit a wall. If you felt like you followed the Ross and Dennett papers, and also feel like you grok Tegmark, you'll almost certainly get quite a bit out of the book. This philosophy of complex systems stuff is my specialty, so feel free to give a shout if you have questions, too.
This is a very important insight. I think both amateurs and professionals sometimes over-estimate the value/importance of "beauty" or "parsimony" in determining what's true. Hold on to that skepticism.
I should correct that I didn't actually read Tegmark, but the Ross and Dennett papers were easy enough. I'll let you know if I have questions when I finally do pick it up!
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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.