Materialism is nonsensical

[3017Metaphysician]

Biological significance does not only relate to physical systems. Agency refers to intentionality, which has a significant effect on health or survival. Material objects don't posses the will or volition to choose life or death.

Leaving aside the obscurity of "biological significance," your last statement there is obviously false. Some material objects do indeed exhibit will and volition, namely, humans and other animals, all of which are material objects and nothing but material objects. No non-material substance ("spirit substance" etc.) is necessary or useful for understanding or explaining their nature, origin, or behavior.

Are you thinking in terms of pantheism or panpsychism where everything has a bit of consciousness? Or quantum observer effects?

As such, and as Davies' alludes, complex systems are systems whose behavior is intrinsically difficult to model due to the dependencies, competitions, relationships, or many other types of interactions between their parts or between a given system and its environment. Systems that are "complex" have distinct properties that arise from these relationships, such as nonlinearity, emergence, spontaneous order, adaptation, and feedback loops, among others.

That's all quite true.

We agree! See, miracle's do happen!

Those systems are both qualitative and quantitative. Materialism is only quantitative.

Any qualitative properties you ascribe to something (at least those I assume you have in mind) are artifacts of consciousness --- the biological mechanisms that generate them are "quantitative."

The problem is that the exclusivity of materialism can't bridge the 'phenomenal' gap from matter to mind, to say the least. Or said another way, materialism can't bridge the gap between quality and quantity of the thing-in-itself. For instance, a genetic blueprint of instructions s all part of that which breath's fire into Hawking's metaphysical equations. Unless of course, you know exactly where material Singularity came from, then you'd have some-thing!

Metaphysics deals with those relationships between mind and matter.

Indeed it does --- in an entirely nonsensical, vapid way.

Sure. Since as Davies alludes, Sciences does not have a clue :

1. The concept of causation is not very well defined in fundamental physics. When it comes down to individual particles, what causes what doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.
2. We don't know how to incorporate mental processes into our scientific descriptions of the world.

I wonder which is more nonsensical, mind or matter?

[Count Lucanor]

That didn't help any. You may want to consider a deductive theory that involves metaphysically abstract numbers, like Newton's quantitative formula of F=ma.

Keep trying!

Hmm well, no, I don't need to consider or try anything else, unless you show it's necessary, but here we are, seeing how you are unable to produce an argument for the existence of the mystical, supernatural, "metaphysical" world that you dream of.

Sure. Your material theory (well, thus far, you haven't really been able to present a theory, just an assertion of some kind) being somewhat elusive, involves the metaphysic's of numbers!

Keep trying CL!

I'm not sure what you think "I'm trying" to do in relation to your posts, which amount to nothing more than loose comments sneering materialism without much rigor. I'm trying to follow you, but by now I don't expect any argument or counterargument from you that will lead to a productive conversation. I thought we were just having fun!

[3017Metaphysician]

That didn't help any. You may want to consider a deductive theory that involves metaphysically abstract numbers, like Newton's quantitative formula of F=ma.

Keep trying!

Hmm well, no, I don't need to consider or try anything else, unless you show it's necessary, but here we are, seeing how you are unable to produce an argument for the existence of the mystical, supernatural, "metaphysical" world that you dream of.

Sure. Your material theory (well, thus far, you haven't really been able to present a theory, just an assertion of some kind) being somewhat elusive, involves the metaphysic's of numbers!

Keep trying CL!

I'm not sure what you think "I'm trying" to do in relation to your posts, which amount to nothing more than loose comments sneering materialism without much rigor. I'm trying to follow you, but by now I don't expect any argument or counterargument from you that will lead to a productive conversation. I thought we were just having fun!

CL!

Indeed, just having fun, can be just as nonsensical as the exclusivity of materialism

As the saying goes: Who has more fun than folk's? Only those that mess with them!

[Count Lucanor]

As the saying goes: Who has more fun than folk's? Only those that mess with them!

Yep, if they can't teach you something, at least they can entertain you!!

[3017Metaphysician]

As the saying goes: Who has more fun than folk's? Only those that mess with them!

Yep, if they can't teach you something, at least they can entertain you!!

Hahaha. So that's why they get all the money!!! Now there's a revelation for you

[Consul]

According to (reductive) materialism, all biological systems are purely physical (physicochemical) systems. Vitalism in biology is as dead as the dodo!

Biological significance does not only relate to physical systems. Agency refers to intentionality, which has a significant effect on health or survival. Material objects don't posses the will or volition to choose life or death. Meaning self-directed propagation does not care about agency. While physical systems themselves do indeed have self-organized/self-directed properties, biological systems that include self-awareness include a nervous system that is a highly complex part of an animal. That system coordinates its actions and sensory information by transmitting signals to and from different parts of its body. And when you add self-awareness, it's a self-organized system of complexity.

As such, and as Davies' alludes, complex systems are systems whose behavior is intrinsically difficult to model due to the dependencies, competitions, relationships, or many other types of interactions between their parts or between a given system and its environment. Systems that are "complex" have distinct properties that arise from these relationships, such as nonlinearity, emergence, spontaneous order, adaptation, and feedback loops, among others. Those systems are both qualitative and quantitative. Materialism is only quantitative.

In the end, Materialism must demonstrate not only the observable location of that set of instructions (both qualitative and quantitative), but must show where material Singularity emerges ex nihilo. Metaphysics deals with those relationships between mind and matter.

As far as I know, there are cosmological models of the Big Bang which don't postulate an initial singularity or an "emergence ex nihilo". It is not an established scientific fact that the Big Bang is the absolute beginning of MEST (Matter, Energy, Space, Time).

A system is (more or less) complex by definition. The adjective "complex" means "consisting of or comprehending various parts united or connected together; formed by combination of different elements; composite, compound. Said of things, ideas, etc. (Opposed to simple)." (Oxford Dictionary of English) – The nouns "system" and "complex" are synonyms.

Reductive materialists do not deny that there are different levels of systemic complexity and organization, and they don't deny either that systems have "holistic" properties which aren't had by any of their parts (components/constituents/elements). What they do deny is that there are ontologically emergent properties of wholes, which are irreducibly different from complex or structural properties consisting of properties of and/or relations between their basic parts.

Complex or structural properties of systems are ontologically reducible. Ontological reductionists deny that (mereologically) nonsimple objects have (mereologically) simple attributes. An ontologically emergent and thus ontologically irreducible attribute of a complex of objects would be both mereologically simple and ontologically fundamental. However, emergent attributes would only be relatively fundamental, because absolute fundamentality requires both mereological simplicity and ontological independence; and mereologically simple emergent properties are not ontologically independent of structural properties of the respective systems from and in which they emerge.

You write that "Material objects don't possess the will or volition to choose life or death," which is true of all those material objects which aren't mental subjects. It is also true of all those mental subjects which lack self-consciousness. But it is not true that there are no material objects at all which "possess the will or volition to choose life or death."
(By "mental subject" I mean any object with mental properties.)

As opposed to panpsychists (who regard even single molecules, atoms, or/and particles as subjects of mentality/experientiality), I am convinced that a very high degree of systemic complexity is necessary for consciousness and especially self-consciousness.

"The human brain contains some 100 billion neurons, which together form a network of Internet-like complexity. Christof Koch, chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, calls the brain 'the most complex object in the known universe'[.]"

Source: https://www.npr.org/2013/06/14/19161436 ... e-universe

You write that "Materialism is only quantitative." Well, we would now have to dig deeper into the ontology of properties and the relationship between qualities and quantities in particular. Antimaterialists often assert that, as opposed to the psychical sphere, the physical sphere abounds with quanta, but is devoid of qualia; but this assertion is contentious and needn't be accepted by materialists. For example, the latter can simply reply that quantities are quantifiable, i.e. measurable, qualities.

Anyway, my point is that materialists needn't claim that all natural/physical properties are purely quantitative. Nor do they have to claim that all of them are purely dispositional (non-categorical) or relational (pure powers or relations). They certainly do have to maintain qua materialists that all (real) kinds of properties are physical ones or reducible to physical ones; but this entails no commitment to any particular ontology of properties.

(For the distinction between categorical and dispositional properties, see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dispositions/)

[GE Morton]

The statement that all entities are physical/no entities are nonphysical is ambiguous between eliminative physicalism and reductive physicalism about the mental: According to the former, there are no mental entities—end of story; and according to the latter, there are mental entities, but they are (identifiable with) complexes of (neuro)physical entities. Reductive physicalists are psychological realists, but they believe that the obtaining of a psychological state of affairs S_psy consists in nothing more than the obtaining of (a plurality of) certain (neuro)physical states of affairs S_phy1 + … + S_phyn, such that S_psy = S_phy1 + … + S_phyn. So the psychophysical relationship is determined by composition rather than (emergent upward) causation.

One problem with the latter analysis ("reductive physicalism"), which I've mentioned before, is that mental phenomena have different properties from the neural entities and processes that generate them, e.g., neurons have mass, thoughts do not; percepts have colors, neurons do not (at least, not the colors of the percept). Hence the former must be "something more" than the latter. Another problem is the time delay between the onset of a neural response to a stimulus and the phenomenal awareness of it. The neural activity precedes by 50-80 msecs the phenomenal experience.

There is no need for "mind talk" to be reducible to "brain talk," or brains identical with minds, in order for brains to be the cause of mental phenomena.

[GE Morton]

When we talk about organic systems, even the simplest are actually large enough to become non-deterministic. Living organisms employ non-stochastic as well as stochastic processes, which makes their interactions not reducible to the mechanic models of causation.

That a process is stochastic does not imply that causation is not occurring. It only means that the system is too complex, the number of variables and the values they can take are so large and can change so quickly, that a casual analysis is not practically possible.

It's more than just the quantity of variables that we are able to analyse, but the states of the systems being open, not closed, making their interrelations so complex that future states of the elements involved in those systems become unpredictable even if theoretically one knew all the factors that make their current state.

That is not so. The unpredictability occurs ONLY because the current state of all the variables cannot be determined in "real time."

Surely we can make inferences from the constant conjunctions of observable patterns in these systems, and talk about causes in a general sense, but the fact is that no one is able to replicate the specific processes involved within these systems, because it is simply impossible to control (and determine) every interaction. We can give booze to a man and predict that he will get drunk, so the cause of inebriation will be alcohol, but that's just a way of speaking that doesn't help us understand what is actually going on.

Of course it helps us understand what is going on. And it is also possible to replicate the specific processes involved in many "mental" phenomena, some of which are not terribly complex. I've mentioned a couple; there are many more --- stimulate a certain sensory neuron with sodium chloride, and the subject experiences "saltiness." "Consciousness" is just a general term for awareness of an ongoing, dynamic complex of phenomenal events. We can specify the causes of many of those events quite precisely.

If we could create it, but we can't. Here you're looking at an organism isolated (as a closed system) from its real conditions of life, which involve a natural environment comprised of a lot of other systems that are open and indeterminable.

I agree that for an AI system to become, and be recognized as, sentient it will have to have "needs" which must be satisfied via interactions with an external world, and have some capacity for satisfying them. But that does not seem an insurmountable problem.

[GE Morton]

As far as I know, there are cosmological models of the Big Bang which don't postulate an initial singularity or an "emergence ex nihilo". It is not an established scientific fact that the Big Bang is the absolute beginning of MEST (Matter, Energy, Space, Time).

Yes. Nor is the Big Bang theory the only overarching cosmological theory. It is only one-half of the "cyclic universe" theory, the other half of which is the "Big Crunch." There is no "beginning" per that theory; the universe is eternal. The singularity, of course, is but a hypothetical state postulated by some versions of the Big Bang theory. It can't bear any "metaphysical" weight.

A system is (more or less) complex by definition. The adjective "complex" means "consisting of or comprehending various parts united or connected together; formed by combination of different elements; composite, compound. Said of things, ideas, etc. (Opposed to simple)." (Oxford Dictionary of English) – The nouns "system" and "complex" are synonyms.

Oh, no. "Complex" usually means more than "composite," or "plural." All systems are indeed constituted of multiple parts, but there are simple systems, whose parts are few enough to be easily visualized and described, e.g., the control system for a furnace or air conditioner. That system is made of up of a thermostat, some wiring, and a switch.

[Sy Borg]

Materialism is one of the several views of what exists. In itself materialism is reasonable. Mind (or waking awareness) for a materialist is a phenomenon that's explained by evolutionary change and depends on physical stuff. Materialism implies that, were all waking awareness to disappear tomorrow, then tomorrow would happen ; the spacious universe as experienced would still happen despite there being no further experience of it.

The other monism that's usually posed opposite materialism is absolute idealism, which poses the material reflection of reality as one reflection of reality among others , all of which depend for their existence on mind.

When mind itself is analysed we find that each mind is a clump of experiences associated together by a coherent i.e. reasoning memory. The physical substrate of memory is not only explained by physical brain and brain's ecology, but also by the nature of absolute being which is either mental or neutral mental/physical. Temporality is repeatedly proved to us by individuals' deaths. That living individuals' experiences ha.ppened and can't be undone is undeniable. The total of individuals' experiences therefore must have happened and cant be undone. We are led to conclude that the material world is one aspect of absolute,eternal, and possibly infinite aspects of experience.

I like your observation that, if all conscious entities became extinct, everything would still happen. We think we are on a journey on a planet in space, supported by a star. In truth, our star - which comprises 99.8% of the mass of the solar system - is on a journey through space and time, and now one of its planets is waking up. We are indeed "cells within cells within cells".

Biocentric solipsism* has us sitting us Earthlings as the metaphysical centre of the solar system, just as we once believed we were physical centre of the solar system. However, This is the Sun's story, not ours. When you are 1.4 million kilometres in radius and about 2 x 10³⁰ kilograms in mass, you won't need the consciousness of biology that we value so much. All you need do is churn through your fuel and radiate, and over time planetary evolution happens around you, which may lead to biological evolution, which may lead to non-biological evolution, which may lead to ...



* To coin a term, putting aside Robert Lanza's "biocentrism", which has a particular meaning.

[Consul]

The statement that all entities are physical/no entities are nonphysical is ambiguous between eliminative physicalism and reductive physicalism about the mental: According to the former, there are no mental entities—end of story; and according to the latter, there are mental entities, but they are (identifiable with) complexes of (neuro)physical entities. Reductive physicalists are psychological realists, but they believe that the obtaining of a psychological state of affairs S_psy consists in nothing more than the obtaining of (a plurality of) certain (neuro)physical states of affairs S_phy1 + … + S_phyn, such that S_psy = S_phy1 + … + S_phyn. So the psychophysical relationship is determined by composition rather than (emergent upward) causation.

One problem with the latter analysis ("reductive physicalism"), which I've mentioned before, is that mental phenomena have different properties from the neural entities and processes that generate them, e.g., neurons have mass, thoughts do not; percepts have colors, neurons do not (at least, not the colors of the percept). Hence the former must be "something more" than the latter.

If percepts are the same as the qualia-bearing mental objects postulated by traditional sense-datum theory, then reductive materialists deny their existence. There aren't any colored percepts—nor are there any (intrinsically) colored neurons; there are only visual sense-impressions/sensations that are experiential properties ("passions") of (animal) organisms, all kinds of which are dynamic structural neural properties of (parts of) their brains that don't involve any neurologically irreducible mental qualities.

Anyway, by saying that "neurons have mass, thoughts do not," you are comparing the wrong things. For neurons are objects (substances) and thoughts qua thinkings are acts or events; and it is certainly a category mistake to ascribe mass to acts or events. What can have a mass is the substantial substrate of an act or event, but not the act or event (as a whole). For instance, the Titanic was a massy object, but its sinking wasn't a massy event. Correspondingly, thinkings as mental acts or events involve massy neurons as their substrates, but they are certainly not massy themselves.

Reductive materialists don't identify thinkings/thoughts with neurons qua objects, but with certain highly complex neural events, whose substrates are neurons. But properties of objects (substances) functioning as substrates of events (or processes, or states, or facts) are not to be confused with properties of events (or processes, or states, or facts)!

QUOTE:
"The very notion of a sense datum, at least as this is conceived by the phenomenalist, is suspect. (So is that of a mental image.) Do we really have sense data? Yes, in the sense that there are certain events that we call the having of sense data. No, in the sense that there is nothing in the world that is had. 'Having a sense datum' refers to an event, but the phrase is misleading."
(p. 115)

"I hold that sense data and mental images are not part of the furniture of the world, though havings of sense data and havings of mental images are."
(p. 115)

"…but the semantics of sense datum talk and mental image talk is not so easy, if we want to avoid an ontology of sense data and mental images, as I do."
(p. 116)

"My main objection to sense data and mental images, if conceived as furniture of the world, is, as I have said, that they do not fit into a scientific picture of humans and higher mammals. Conscious experiences are a mystery unless we are able to identify them with brain processes."
(p. 118)

(Smart, J. J. C. Our Place in the Universe: A Metaphysical Discussion. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.)

"I do not deny that experiences exist. I believe that experiences are brain processes and since brain processes exist so must the relevant experiences. What I deny is that experiences have non-physical properties (qualia)." (p. 158)

"One might talk of a red, white and blue sense datum, but I contend that there are no such things as sense data and mental images. There is only havings of them." (p. 160)

(Smart, J. J. C. "Ockhamist Comments on Strawson." In: Galen Strawson et al., Consciousness and its Place in Nature, edited by Anthony Freeman, 158-162. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2006.)
:QUOTE

There is no need for "mind talk" to be reducible to "brain talk," or brains identical with minds, in order for brains to be the cause of mental phenomena.

The neurological reductionism about mind/consciousness affirmed by reductive materialists is essentially ontological, not semantical or terminological! That is, they needn't claim that all psychological terms or sentences are translatable into and replaceable by neurophysiological ones.

If you mischaracterize the doctrinal content of reductive materialism, it becomes an easy target; but it deserves to be characterized correctly. Erecting and attacking a straw-man version of it makes things much easier for its opponents, but they should deal with the real thing instead!

QUOTE:
"Physicalism may be characterized as a reductionist thesis. However, it is reductionist in an ontological sense, not as a thesis that all statements can be translated into statements about physical particles, and so on."

(Smart, J. J. C. Our Place in the Universe: A Metaphysical Discussion. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. p. 81)

"In taking the identity theory (in its various forms) as a species of physicalism, I should say that this is an ontological, not a translational physicalism. It would be absurd to try to translate sentences containing the word ‘brain’ or the word ‘sensation’ into sentences about electrons, protons and so on. Nor can we so translate sentences containing the word ‘tree’. After all ‘tree’ is largely learned ostensively, and is not even part of botanical classification. If we were small enough a dandelion might count as a tree. Nevertheless a physicalist could say that trees are complicated physical mechanisms."
—J. J. C. Smart: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-identity/
:QUOTE

[Consul]

QUOTE:
"One might talk of a red, white and blue sense datum, but I contend that there are no such things as sense data and mental images. There is only havings of them." (p. 160)

(Smart, J. J. C. "Ockhamist Comments on Strawson." In: Galen Strawson et al., Consciousness and its Place in Nature, edited by Anthony Freeman, 158-162. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2006.)
:QUOTE

Havings of sense-data or mental images are simply sensings or imaginings that don't involve any special mental objects. So-called mental images are unlike physical pictures such as photos, which are objects. Visually imagining a horse is like seeing a horse rather than like seeing a horse-picture.

[Consul]

Visually imagining a horse is like seeing a horse rather than like seeing a horse-picture.

Of course, I can visually imagine a horse-picture (a photo, painting, or drawing of a horse) as well, but there is still a difference between imagining a horse and imagining a horse-picture.

[Consul]

A system is (more or less) complex by definition. The adjective "complex" means "consisting of or comprehending various parts united or connected together; formed by combination of different elements; composite, compound. Said of things, ideas, etc. (Opposed to simple)." (Oxford Dictionary of English) – The nouns "system" and "complex" are synonyms.

Oh, no. "Complex" usually means more than "composite," or "plural." All systems are indeed constituted of multiple parts, but there are simple systems, whose parts are few enough to be easily visualized and described, e.g., the control system for a furnace or air conditioner. That system is made of up of a thermostat, some wiring, and a switch.

It is not the case that any plurality or mere (mereological) sum of things is a system or a complex, because a system/complex is always a whole consisting of things in relations; so only structured or organized pluralities or sums of things are properly called systems/complexes.

Even the simplest system isn't mereologically simple, i.e. partless. Mereologically speaking, a system minimally consists of two simple (non-composite) things standing in one simple (non-composite) relation. It cannot get simpler than that, since one simple thing alone cannot be a system!

[GE Morton]

It is not the case that any plurality or mere (mereological) sum of things is a system or a complex, because a system/complex is always a whole consisting of things in relations; so only structured or organized pluralities or sums of things are properly called systems/complexes.

Even the simplest system isn't mereologically simple, i.e. partless. Mereologically speaking, a system minimally consists of two simple (non-composite) things standing in one simple (non-composite) relation. It cannot get simpler than that, since one simple thing alone cannot be a system!

That's true, but in most contexts "simple" doesn't mean "mereologically simple." It means, "easily accomplished," "easily understood," easily explained," etc. Conversely, a complex system is one difficult to build, understand, explain, etc.