Gertie!Gertie wrote: ↑June 29th, 2022, 6:31 pm metaNot sure how you're defining ''will'' here?Gertie! You are very well spoken, thanks for your reply.
With respect to apprehending or perceiving reality both subjectively and objectively (something independent of us), Kant taught us that we have a fixed sense of awareness as well as a dynamic sense of awareness ( a priori and a posteriori). Schop is also saying that much like Kant's theory of a priori knowledge (the brain's stuff as a predetermined software operating system/metaphorical rose colored glasses we can't remove), the Will itself, is also fixed to instinctively give us our sense of wonder about things like causes and effects. For example, 'all events must have a cause' emerges for our consciousness primarily a priori as an aspect of intuition. That's pretty 'normal' to assume or feel that. We don't know why we assume or feel that, we just do. But we do know enough about cognitive science to tell us it's coming from our will; our metaphysical will (qualities of consciousness) that are those fixed lenses from which we see reality, and feel reality (our subjectivity).
We do have a functional explanation for the way we experience the world - evolution. This is utility based. If we go back to the table example, we didn't need to evolve to see if a table is mainly space, what we need to know in terms of utility is we injur ourselves if we try to walk through it, and we can rest a mug on it. We also initially come to understand cause and effect via our attuned-for-utility mental toolkit, as how the world seems to work, because that's how it looks to us. We don't need to see wave functions collapsing according to probability, we just need predictability to navigate the world. (Anil Seth describes consciousness in terms of making the world predictable to us - that's only part of it imo, but functionally an important part).
What we we don't understand is the relationship between the evolved brain's physical processes and the correlated phenomenal experience.
Davies, at least, briefly touches on that very import feature of consciousness (quality/Qualia), which is part of the difficulty associated with not only biological emergence (emergent properties), but with extreme or exclusive physicalism too. Neurons, atoms and molecules don't tell us about quality. He knows this. I give him credit there.
Yes I agree. Conscious experience is the source/embodiment of all meaning, value, knowledge, morality - everything that matters. Not just an inconvenient anomaly for physics.
It's difficult tho. We don't have a settled understanding of the ''observer effect'' yet, and we would still have the conundrum of there being something to observe/measure existing before it can be fixed via observation. If we take the history of our planet, the evidence shows sequential changes following physical laws prior to observers coming on the scene. Why would a planet come into existence with the arrival of observers with a backstory which accounts for the existence of the observers? And even if I think about my tomato plants, they grow when I'm not looking. The evidence points to observers emerging from non-experiential stuff of the universe, which like my tomato plants and waves on the seashore, would continue if all experiencing subjects disappeared tomorrow. That's not the sort of world we'd expect if it was observer dependent.Nonetheless, with respect to parsing 'emergence' itself, I agree, Davies can equivocate at times and I've followed him throughout the years (and refer to his book The Mind of God often), as he has admittingly changed some of his views. I suppose that's okay for a theoretical physicist to do... . But, I agree with him that a mind dependent universe only makes sense in a quantum physics world of logically necessary observers/observation. And Philosophically, that leads us back to the subject-object dynamic.
The chicken/egg conundrum might infer panpsychism, or that QM hasn't gotten to the bottom of things. I just don't think we understand enough to make a call yet.
All that said, let's take a quick look at the concept of emergence, since this term gets thrown around quite a bit (he throws it around a lot too). As such, I think too, we should unpack that.
Emergence/self organization: The process of coming into view or becoming exposed after being concealed:the escape of an insect or other invertebrate from an egg, cocoon, or pupal case: the process of coming into being, or of becoming important or prominent:
n philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors which emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole.
Emergence plays a central role in theories of integrative levels and of complex systems. For instance, the phenomenon of life as studied in biology is an emergent property of chemistry.
In philosophy, theories that emphasize emergent properties have been called emergentism.[1]
Without going too far into the weeds for now, I think of emergence in a few ways. Birds swarming automatically during migration season; patterns and laws governing an ordered universe, biological propagation/coded genetics/atoms and molecules, etc..
One might ask, how did the Will emerge as a fixed sense of subjective awareness, or an objective/independent 'consciousness' that breaths fire into the cosmological equations? Before we go further, as it relates to Davie's use of the word emergence, do you think that is the proper question to ask?
I still don't know what you actually mean by ''will''? Can you be explicit?
Re emergence. We know that in the physical world novel properties emerge from complex systems. And they are ontologically reducible to their component parts. I like the example of ice, water and gas having emergent properties of H2O molecules in motion. There's nothing mysterious in principle about emergence in physical systems.
The problem re experience is that we've no idea how the radically different (non-physical) properties of experience could emerge from complex brain interactions. Not even in principle. So in philosophy of mind the explanation of 'emergence' is really a place-holder for an actual explanation, and one which suggests our current understanding of physics is at best incomplete. Searle tries to dodge the ontological reducibility issue by saying experience can be causally reducible brain processes without being ontologically reducible - but that's a different type of reducibility to all the physical examples of emergence we understand, and would be indistinguishable from magic.
Sure, I agree. In like manner, we don't need those things, including the intellectual capacity for understanding an ordered universe (to survive in the jungle). Much like the abstract laws of gravity within universe, they are not necessary to evade falling objects. There is little to no biological survival value in knowing that abstract mathematical order.
And of course, those similar abstract structures of cognition that process information speaks to our quandary about what, when, how, why, consciousness itself can emerge from the universe/inert matter... .
With respect to your question about the will, I'm defining 'Will' as the metaphysical thing that causes human self-awareness. The thing-in-itself—the inner essence of 'everything'—as will: a blind, unconscious, aimless striving devoid of knowledge, outside of space and time, much like Schopenhauer's view.
Relative to consciousness and cognition (ontology), Will can include sentient things like the feelings of wanting, urging, needing, and even feelings of purpose or self-esteem. Those things-in-themselves are relative to one's quality of consciousness otherwise known as Qualia (as physicist Paul Davies pointed out). And, they can't really be quantified, physically. Similarly, and philosophically, in a cosmological way for some reason I believe that metaphysical will is the thing-in-itself that breath's fire into the 'Hawking equations'. Perhaps because I'm treating like cases likely (metaphysical language of math and metaphysical language of cognition). Other than that premise being somewhat synthetic, unfortunately we don't have any empirical method to test the veracity of that kind of judgement. If you wish to refer to 'The World as Will', that would shed a bit more light on that philosophy. But again, more of a philosophy than anything else. Unfortunately, physical science doesn't seem to have a clue.
A reasonable person considers treating like cases likely and different cases differently. I think biology, physics and metaphysics (the first principle of
Being), should somehow uncover what breath's fire into the Hawking equations. As we speak, even Darwinism is now under attack, not only because it excludes 'the first one', but there are gaps in mutations that 'just appear' for no apparent reason. Much like the Multiverse, the information age is generating a re-thinking on many levels of science and humanities: https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... -evolution
Anyway, you asked: "Why would a planet come into existence with the arrival of observers with a backstory which accounts for the existence of the observers? And even if I think about my tomato plants, they grow when I'm not looking."
My answer is, aside from the analogical notion of QM and non-locality, genetically coded propagation has been our conundrum. As such, my answer is: a planet could come into existence in the same manner that the tomato seeds promulgated the tomato plant. That seed has all of the coding necessary for its existence. Unfortunately, logical necessity does not speak the nature of existing things (metaphysics). My question back at you, could be: why is that 'seed' of consciousness existence so illusive? Could it be because it's not 'exclusively physical' in some ways?
With respect to Searle (you mentioned), What I have read from him is just 'okay', nothing really revelatory. He did talk about metaphysics and the definition of 'intentionality', and how I might interpret that as being analogous to the metaphysical Will. But of course we are talking about both cosmology as well as ontology... . To this end, does the Anthropic Principle give us any clues?
