GE
Gertie wrote: ↑August 9th, 2022, 7:29 pm
Interested to see your take. First on how ontological irreducibility can reconcile with substance monism, then it might be clearer how causality could fit in.
As I said above, the problem is not with reducibility (that is fairly easily explained), but with ontology, especially the ontology that postulates a distinction between "physical stuff" and "mental stuff) (mind-body dualism), and the assumption those two categories denote different "realms of reality."
But they don't; they only denote different vocabularies for talking about "reality." But that, of course, obliges me to define "reality." I take there to be 3 categories of "reality" which can be well-defined and have some communicative utility:
I don't think physical and mental denote different realms of reality, like different dimensions or something. Commonly the mind-body dichotomomy is seen in terms of different types of properties or fundamental substances.
1. Phenomenal reality, i.e., that which we directly and immediately experience, including sensory percepts and their qualia, moods, emotional states, thoughts, ideas, memories, and all the other contents of the "mental realm." That is the only "reality" of which we can speak with complete certainty; if I have a headache I cannot doubt that I have it; if I see a tree, while I might be uncertain of what causes that percept, I can't deny that I'm having the percept. Cartesian doubt of the existence of conscious phenomena is not possible.
Right, the independent existence of the tree or what it is can be doubted, but the existence of the experience of seeing the tree is certain.
2. External reality, Kant's noumena, a realm of existence which we postulate to exist independently of us and persists even in the absence of any phenomenal experiences by anyone, the purpose of which is to supply some explanation, some cause, for the phenomena of experience (realm #1 above) --- because, per Kant, we are constitutionally compelled to seek, and insist upon, causes for effects, and can find no causes for our own existence and experiences within those experiences.
Here I don't think I'm with Kant's dichotomy. If we're rigorous about the uncertainty of everything but phenomenal conscious experience, we end up with solipsism. Because the you and everybody else but me in the ''we'' postulating a mind independent reality are part of my postulation. As I am part of yours. So number 1 leaves us with solipsism as the only certainty. Your existence is no less of a postulation than the tree to me.
So I think Kant has drawn his line in the wrong place. And really we each have to draw a line between solipsism (only
my experience certainly exists) and there being a real independantly existing world 'out there'.
Solipsism is a dead end we can quickly discard for practical purposes. Never-the-less I have to postulate the existence of other minded people, the existence of experience besides my own, via the same method I postulate the existence of the tree - via the content of my experience.
Only once I've done that, I can compare notes with other peeps about the content of our experience, and we can begin to create a shared model of our shared world.
At that point, we can begin to assess the reliability of conscious experience itself at describing the world we share, come up with third-person falsifiable tests, theories etc. And we discover together that we are flawed and limited observers and thinkers.
At which point you can say Kant's noumena kicks in. But on the basis that I have already assumed other minded people exist along with the other content of my experience like trees, we've compared notes and realised we are flawed and limited observers and thinkers. And that what we experience as a tree might be a flawed and limited model of the reality.
Where the mind-body issue fits into all this is that our physicalist (third-person falsifiable) shared model of the world doesn't account for mental properties (and doesn't reference mental substance at all).
3. Conceptual reality. That embraces the entire realm of entities, processes, events we conjure up in imagination (subconsciously) and can exchange information about. Some of those entities are constructed involuntarily; they are artifacts produced automatically by neural networks of sufficient size and of the right design; they make up the "phenomenal self-model" and the "phenomenal world model" described by Metzinger. Thus a "tree" is any of many perceptible complexes found in the "world model" which satisfies certain defining criteria. But there are also many constructs consciously created, some tangible (with properties perceptible in the world model), and some intangible, such as laws, moralities, mathematics, theories, and other "abstract" entities.
OK-ish with that, but we distinguish within that that some stuff only exists as experience, while some stuff presumably has mind independent existence. Unless we're idealists.
We may fairly call entities or phenomena in any of those categories "real," as long as we're not confused about to which category they belong.
You're right we should be clear about our ontological frameworks, and people have lots of ideas about how to define the word real. Here we're discussing monist materialism, a recognised category in philosophy of mind. Material brains and phenomenal experience are both considered ontologically real by Searle and property dualists, both exist. I agree, most people do. Idealists dent material substance exists and eliminativists deny conscious experience exists, but they're outliers we don't need to worry about examining property dualists and Searle on their own terms.
Another approach to the mind-body problem might require going beyond our current materialist model, or more fundamentally, to explain the mind-problem, based on our current physicalist model of what the world is made of and how it works doesn't seem to have an in principle handle on how to explain it. But property dualists and Searle say it does. They say we haven't discovered the neural details yet, but ontological irreducibility being a feature of materialism gets us over the hurdle of material brains instantiating radically different characteristics which are apparently irreducible to brains.
I'm saying ontological materialist irreducibility is incoherent.
The "physical" reality is the misguided half of the "mental/physical" dichotomy. Physical reality is simply one of the constructs, a sub-category of, conceptual reality --- it denotes those elements and processes found in the world model which can be described by the laws of physics, another conceptual construct devised to enable us to explain and thus predict the behaviors of those elements. Thus they are not truly "external" to us, or to consciousness. They are explanatory overlays on the world model, not "representations" of the noumena --- but they can "stand in" for the noumena for many practical purposes.
Maybe they are and maybe they aren't representations of a world out there (I think they are), but remember you only exist to me as part of my experiential representational model, like trees and everything else. Similarly me to you. So we have to make some assumptions to have the conversation. That conversation can then include the nature of the representation. So lets do that. Lets see how our physicalist model deals with real experience as presented by Searle's biological naturalism and property dualists. Specifically here, the claims that experience is either caused by or is a property of physical brain processes, but not ontologically reducible to them.
The trouble with ontology is that its theorists imagine their theories speak of what "exists," and that they can know what "really exists." I.e., they imagine they are describing the noumena. But all a useful, coherent ontology can really do is propose a coherent framework for talking about the only thing(s) we know exist, namely, phenomena (category #1). It can propose schemes for categorizing existents, most of which will be conceptual constructs (category #3), and devising terminology for communicating about entitites in each category, many of which will apply only to that category or sub-category.
None of this, of course, solves the "hard problem." There are two transcendental arguments suggesting that problem is unsolvable, and indeed misconceived. First, the terms we use to describe conscious phenomena --- terms for colors, scents, sounds, pains, moods, etc., are primitive, which means they can't be defined using more familiar or more elementary terms. They can only be taught ostensively. (No one can inform Mary as to what she will experience when she leaves the black-and-white room).
Those terms are unanalyzable, and cannot be "reduced" to anything simpler. On the contrary, all other scientific and other descriptive terms reduce to them --- that is the implication of empiricism.
Within the physicalist model we share notes about and have created together, the terms represent an apparent ontologlical irreducibility, not just a linguistic one. Which is why materialist monists have to believe this apparent paradox that experience is ontoligically made of brain stuff but not ontologically reducible to it. Which is what I'm addressing. Property Dualists respond with Emergence, Searle responds with Causation. I'm asking if that makes sense, can experience 'escape' reductionism, what would it mean is going on in terms of brain states in a material monist universe.
Secondly, a conscious system cannot completely model itself, and therefore cannot fully explain itself; it can't model that part of the system doing the modeling. That would require a system larger than the system to be modeled.
I don't see why not, but you don't need a perfect complete model, you need reliable principles or theories you can apply as needed. I'm saying property dualism and biological naturalism have flaws as such theories.
Searle says brain processes cause experience, which isn't how we generally think of the internal properties of a system, we don't say H2O molecules cause liquidity or solidity.
Sure we do. The molecules' state of motion determines whether they form a liquid or solid. If they move faster the solid becomes a liquid. But there is, of course, a further cause, a source of heat, which caused the molecules to move faster.
Yes, the heat change is what causes the molecules to move faster, have different properties, but still be ontologically reducible to H2O molecules (plus heat acting on them).
We think of causation in terms of one thing acting on another thing.
We still have that --- molecules acting upon each other.
Searle says the cause of experience is neurons acting on each other, I say then experience is ontologically reducible to neurons acting on each other, like with H2O molecules. Searle says not, experience caused by brain processes is ontologically irreducible to brain processes.
Searle would not describe conscious experience as a "substance." What is not reducible are the terms we use for denoting those experiences, because those terms are primitive. But we have ample grounds for claiming that neural processes cause experience (which, in my view, is ample grounds for considering consciousness a "physical process").
As I understand it Searle is a monist materialist who believes experience is a natural phenomenon, like digestion. In the particular case of experience, experience isn't some new or different substance being caused to exist, it's just ontologically irreducible to its cause (brain processes).
