An Argument for the Existence of the Metaphysical

Discuss any topics related to metaphysics (the philosophical study of the principles of reality) or epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) in this forum.
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LuckyR
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Re: An Argument for the Existence of the Metaphysical

Post by LuckyR »

Pattern-chaser wrote: May 18th, 2021, 11:42 am
LuckyR wrote: May 18th, 2021, 10:24 am
Pattern-chaser wrote: May 18th, 2021, 6:37 am Several posts here refer to "motivation". I wonder about those living things so simple that it is hard to see how they could be "motivated"? 🤔
Good point. Driven is probably closer to the mark than motivated. It's just that the OP used motivated.
Hmm. I wonder if that makes any difference?

I wonder about those living things so simple that it is hard to see how they could be "driven"? 🤔

D'ya see what I mean?
Well different strokes for different folks. If you are human, motivation can be quite complex. If you are a flatworm, successfully staying alive long enough to pass on your genes is about it.
"As usual... it depends."
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Re: An Argument for the Existence of the Metaphysical

Post by Pattern-chaser »

Motivation, and being driven, are active. Not passive and reactive survival. But it isn't significant enough to pursue. Let's put it down to the idiosyncrasies of English.
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Re: An Argument for the Existence of the Metaphysical

Post by Terrapin Station »

So, first, "metaphysical" doesn't actually refer to "beyond physical existence" or "other than physical existence."

The word "metaphysics" arose from a 16th century compilation of Aristotle's works, and it was the name given to the "book" that was placed in sequence after Aristotle's Physics. "Meta" in "metaphysics" thus literally refers to after--it was the book placed after the book named Physics.

The subject matter of metaphysics is traditionally:
(1) First principles (basically logically necessary conditions for things like existence, material identity, part/whole relations, possibilities versus actualities, and so on)
(2) Philosophy of religion
(3) Ontology, aka "philosophy of existence" or "philosophy of being."

Eventually, philosophy of religion was largely siphoned off into its own thing. So then ontology became the bulk of what metaphysics is (and first principles are largely the "logical preconditions" for ontological concerns). Insofar as physical things exist, they're covered by ontology, or they're a topic for metaphysics. If ONLY physical things exist, then physical concerns are ALL of metaphysics. So "metaphysics" does NOT refer to "beyond or other than physical existence." Metaphysics addresses whatever exists, whatever the nature of existing things happens to be.
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Re: An Argument for the Existence of the Metaphysical

Post by Terrapin Station »

As for your argument, let's just start with this:
TopekaVI wrote: May 14th, 2021, 8:44 pm So as we arrive at the brain, it would make logical sense that there is an even higher level of command that is above the brain, closer to the absolute origin for the movement of one’s fingers. If not, how else could the brain have decided to send the command in the first place?
It's what the brain does.

Look at it this way: it has to be what something does, right? Because there is a decision to move fingers, so the decision must exist, and it must be what some existent does.

Well, why can't it be what the brain does? Why isn't the brain a good candidate for this, but some other existent is? And why would the other existent be a good candidate in your view, why wouldn't it require "an even higher level of command," and on and on, ad infinitum?
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Re: An Argument for the Existence of the Metaphysical

Post by TopekaVI »

Terrapin Station wrote: May 18th, 2021, 6:49 pm Well, why can't it be what the brain does? Why isn't the brain a good candidate for this, but some other existent is? And why would the other existent be a good candidate in your view, why wouldn't it require "an even higher level of command," and on and on, ad infinitum?
I dedicated an entire paragraph to explaining why the brain couldn't be the source of motivation. The brain is made of matter, and matter cannot want. The immaterial thing that commands the brain may or may not have something that commands it, we have no way of knowing. The point is that since its immaterial, it's capable of having intrinsic motivation.
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Re: An Argument for the Existence of the Metaphysical

Post by Count Lucanor »

Consul wrote: May 18th, 2021, 10:56 am
Count Lucanor wrote: May 15th, 2021, 11:46 pm
Consul wrote: May 15th, 2021, 11:07 pmI don't believe in the existence of immaterial/spiritual substances, but their structurelessness follows from the very concept of them. So if immaterial/spiritual substances existed, they wouldn't have any structure.
It would be interesting to know how that property is inferred from the very concept of them.
Which property—structurelessness? Well, isn't it obvious that a zero-dimensional object, i.e. a mathematical point, cannot have a structure?
What would be the difference between a spaceless mathematical point and nothingness?
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Re: An Argument for the Existence of the Metaphysical

Post by Terrapin Station »

TopekaVI wrote: May 19th, 2021, 5:34 pm Matter cannot want.
Matter cannot want based on what--your stipulation that it cannot?
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Re: An Argument for the Existence of the Metaphysical

Post by Consul »

Terrapin Station wrote: May 18th, 2021, 6:37 pmSo, first, "metaphysical" doesn't actually refer to "beyond physical existence" or "other than physical existence."
One meaning of "metaphysical" is "supernatural"/"superphysical"/"hyperphysical".
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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Re: An Argument for the Existence of the Metaphysical

Post by Terrapin Station »

Consul wrote: May 20th, 2021, 3:01 pm One meaning of "metaphysical" is "supernatural"/"superphysical"/"hyperphysical".
That's not a meaning of metaphysical in a philosophy context.
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Re: An Argument for the Existence of the Metaphysical

Post by Partinobodycular »

Evolution doesn't give a rat's ass about whether something's motivated or not. Evolution is a test that consists of one question, and one question only...will it survive? And by "it" we're referring to any particular genetic sequence. Evolution is nature's version of God. It's all powerful, deciding who lives and who dies. And it never, ever, ever, makes a mistake.

So if you're motivated...thank evolution.
Great men are forged in fire. It is the privilege of lesser men to light the flame.
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Re: An Argument for the Existence of the Metaphysical

Post by Partinobodycular »

Wow, that's freaky. Over four years since my last post and I just happened to post a response on the exact ten year anniversary of when I joined. Can that possibly be a coincidence?
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Re: An Argument for the Existence of the Metaphysical

Post by The Beast »

A foundationalist may refer to the Universal property of immanence and to a metempsychosis or a palingenesis alluded by Nietzsche and others. It is Schopenhauer referring to a particular palingenesis that stated the term ‘basic fascism.’ (As form a metaphysical rebirth)
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Re: An Argument for the Existence of the Metaphysical

Post by popeye1945 »

Topeka,

Possibilities probabilities are of the nature of ever-changing conditions, at some point, a condition became a thing, a thing is a condition that has a need to propagate to replicate itself, the fulfillment of this need is the substance of the world, the physical world is cause to a reactive organism and is at least half of cognitive function, the fuel upon which cognition occurs. A thing, a multicellular organism must be seen as a community within its own cause and in its own cause, it finds motivation a need to react and consume of cause. In isolation it would not be nor in cognition would there be a world, in a sense organism is the clockwork of the world, though organism through consciousness world comes to know itself. Bear with me, I'll be reading your post more thoroughly trying to meld with some of your ideas.
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Re: An Argument for the Existence of the Metaphysical

Post by Justintruth »

How do you know that your awareness of wanting to survive and your awareness of consequently raising your hand to cause an action that provides a survival advantage, is nothing other than the result of a material causal pathway that is synchronized with the causal pathway that contracts the muscles required to raise your hand and confer the survival advantage.

Here are some of the things I believe:

1) That if by "physical" we mean only what quantum mechanics as described in the standard model, and other physical theories like relativity, and also including the "physical sciences" like chemistry, and mechanistic biology etc, then our awareness, including our awareness of wanting and our awareness of choosing, is not "physical" in that specific sense. This is basically because there are no operators that map the Hilbert phase space vectors into probabilities of conscious awareness describable through phenomenological reflection. While it is true that awareness of the role our brain and its senses play have always been included in physical sciences, for examples a) Galileo's telescope has two ends one for the moons of Jupiter and one for his eye and b) CERN which has the detector collision chamber and the display screens designed for humans to "look" at them using their eyes and brains. But the fact of the experiencing produced, the seeing of the moons of Jupiter, and the seeing of the data on the screens at CERN is not predicted at the physical level explicitly by the theory. We do know a lot about the physics of it. We know the eye, optic nerve, vision centers of the brain are all involved in processing the signal, but conscious result of experiencing occurring not only is known, but cannot be established by a theory that only describes the production of one physical state vector to another and does not mention experiencing as a result.

2) Although awareness and desire are not physical they are caused by the physical as can be demonstrated by anesthesia for example.

Given that there are two groups of physical processes in the brain one that causes awareness of desire and will, and another that causes appropriate signals to the motor neurons, I cannot establish whether the nature of the connection between these two is either physical or non-physical.

Can you? If so perhaps you can provide me a reference to the experiments that have demonstrated this.

If their is an adequate physical connection between those processes that explains the motor neuron output, then our awareness of desire and action are being generated by a composite physical process but there is no evidence that the desire we feel and decisions we make are anything but the result of signals from the physical systems controlling our motor neurons and not physical signals to the system.

The conclusion that consciousness cannot be explained by physics is based on existence of the awareness we have, but it does not further lead to a conclusion that our awareness and will are causing physical events. That must be established by finding a physical process not caused in the usual way.

Established: That consciousness is not physical if by "being physical" we mean "being a consequence of current physical science". Correlates between awareness and the physical may exist, but there are no operators given in the standard model that give conscious awareness as a function of physical state. We know of our consciousness by our awareness directly however. I dismiss the idea that our conscious awareness is an illusion as "being an illusion" itself is a description of a type of experiencing.

Not established: That the consciousness of our desire and will have some effect on our brains that is not explainable by ordinary physics. It is a possibility but it has not yet been established by science.
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Re: An Argument for the Existence of the Metaphysical

Post by Gertie »

Welcome Topeka, interesting post! Some thoughts -

As has been pointed out material brains do not exist in a closed physical causal system, and the suggestion that they initiate physically uncaused actions (like raising a hand) would be surprising and require evidence which we're not in a position to find, as yet. In fact the evidence points the other way - brains receive external physical stimuli, there are internal causal interactions, which then causally interact with the physical motor system.

It's unimaginably complex, and may lead to surprising outcomes sometimes, but that looks like it makes sense, and can fully account for the behaviour of conscious organisms.

However, this physicalist model takes no account of the accompanying phenomological ('what it is like') conscious experience, which exists 'in parallel' and offers a different type of psychological causal account. In fact the physicalist scientific model of the universe, what it's made of and how it works, has no account or place for conscious experience at all. We can note matches between certain physical brain states and conscious experiential states, so there seems to be a correlative relationship of some sort, but we don't know what it is. Until we understand that, the Mind-Body Problem means we can't reach definitive conclusions like yours imo.

The other issue you raise about life being 'motivated' has an evolutionary explanation, but I think you're asking why evolution happens at all? Is there some 'motivation' or teleological underlying source , which 'uses' evolution as a delivery method of sorts? I don't know if science has some account for this, but it's an interesting question.

I'd say all this boils down to one of the key issues in philosophy of mind - is conscious experience a novel emergent property of physical processes, or is it an irreducible fundamental stuff of the universe which somehow interacts with the already identified fundamental particles and forces in some way? Or is something else entirely going on at the most fundamental level? Which we don't know. And currently at least, don't know how to find out.
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