Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang, Essays on Mind and Matter

[Bacchus]

Shorter version: I say materialism is our best guess but the door is open to guess otherwise.

I feel like we are talking past each other a little, as you keep saying you argue just for materialism, when my point from the start was not an attempt to "guess otherwise", but to show that your conception entails more than just materialism or, is at least a very specific version of materialism.

It happens to have enough structure that we find it useful to name it and to treat as an abstraction. But there's no underlying physical definition of that abstraction.

I think this starts getting at the root of the problem. The characteristic feature of a heart is not that it has been given a name by humans, it's that it consistently pumps blood. It is exactly because the heart works as a single structure that giving that structure a name and developing an abstract model of its functioning makes sense. The abstraction is not arbitrary, were it arbitrary it wouldn't work (and indeed neither would the heart with any consistency). You do, after all, admit, that the heart has structure, well that structure is the underlying physical definition. Materialism does not call for everything to be defined purely in terms of lowest-order phenomena, particles have no logical causal primacy over macroscopic objects. Which is why I asked the predator question...

The question for you would be this: what has a more prominent causal import — the ability of a predator to pick out prey against a background, or the particular neuronal pathway that happens to enable that differentiation in a particular instance?

I don't know what work "prominent" is doing in that question. I can only interpret it as quantity of matter affected, or maybe as quantity of consciousnesses. Of course that's the former as an aggregation of many instances of the latter, but I don't see what point that makes?

Here is how I think about it: X has causal import for Y to the extent changing X necessarily changes Y in absence of other changes*. The prominence of import refers, informally, to the proximity and strength of the link between X and Y. For example, if X tends to result in Y, and Y results in Z, I would say that Y has more prominent causal import for Z, especially if X is not a necessary condition of Y. For example, when a dead, dessicated tree finally cracks and falls onto a car, breaking a window, because a bird landed on the tree, the tree falling has more prominent causal import for the broken window than the bird landing. Conversely, if a window gets broken in a violent storm, the storm has more prominent causal import than the specific piece of debris that happened to smash into the window. There is a way to formalize prominence, but that's not so important for our purposes.

So going back to the predator, the question is this: do you see characteristic behaviour of a predator as more prominently caused by a higher-order ability of recognizing prey against a background, or a lower-order neuronal infrastructure which enables that ability?

I can rephrase the question to make sure we are well clear of any "consciousness" connotations. The characteristic physical behaviour of a metal chain, for example when it rattles in the wind, with the links adopting specific patterns in response to forces exerted — is that behaviour better described as being caused by the atoms constituting the material the chain happens to be made of, or as being caused by the macroscopic structure that the atoms form, i.e. a chain. Do the particles have more causal prominence, or does their aggregate structure? Does the chain flutter in the wind just so because it's an alloy of carbon and iron, or because it's made of links that interact macroscopically?

Where I'm leading with this should be clear: if structures are in some cases appropriately accorded more prominent causal import, then there is no reason at all why consciousness, being such a structure, should be ruled out from having causal import. Yes, any consciousness has to rest on a specific physical substrate, just as any chain has to be made of something, but you can replace that something, anything that passes for a rigid body will do — copper, steel, rhodium. It's hopeless to try and explain chain behaviour from looking at particles, say at molecular structure — the only fact of interest that could tell you is whether the body will be rigid and how much inertial mass is there, for everything else you need to analyse the chain as a chain. It's similarly hopeless to try understand a heart except as a heart, or a hurricane system except as a system. And why should consciousness be different? We have an overwhelming amount of first-person and third-person evidence that it's conscious deliberation that causally structures human behaviour over the long term, so why not accept it in the first instance?

*Causality is very difficult, even to define. I'd rather not bring it up at all, but unfortunately it seems to be at root of your interpretation of materialism where only the lowest-order phenomena are accorded true causal power, whereas the emergent (I use the word with some protest) ones are seen only as "coming along for the ride". If you don't like my definition of causality, you can substitute a more amenable one, it will probably accommodate an account of prominence of causal import. If it doesn't, we can discuss.

[Fluffball]

Yang never really talks about authoritarianism.  He never says anything about forcibly controlling or suppressing his workers.

Playing a bit more, in a diplomacy talk with Yang he mentioned that servants should never be allowed to question their rulers and I need to institute a police state or something along those lines, because I was running democracy. I should have screenshot it in hindsight. It's not one of the read quotes so I couldn't immediately find it on the wiki.

His vision is not even remotely feasible, there's no way he could even get started without complete dictatorship. I'm only giving the seemingly interesting discussion between you and Bacchus a cursory glance, but even if Yang is 100% right, it's meaningless; no human is going to be able to exist in Yang's world except Yang and his inner circle. Everyone else is either going to rebel or be extremely unhealthy. Well maybe the lobotomized drones in the genejack factories will feel ok. 

[haphazard1]

no human is going to be able to exist in Yang's world except Yang and his inner circle. Everyone else is either going to rebel or be extremely unhealthy. Well maybe the lobotomized drones in the genejack factories will feel ok. 

Does Yang really consider anyone other than himself (and perhaps his inner circle) to actually be human? With the genejacks he has essentially created meat robots to function as an extension of his personal will. Maybe he sees others the same way? I have not yet seen/heard all the applicable Yang quotes, obviously, but that seems to be the sort of direction he is aiming for: a world with one directing mind/will, which is his.

[T-hawk]

Thanks, T-hawk. I find this interesting because it seems to parallel rationales for religion, which are generally maligned by non-religious thinkers. You also seem to have gone from a very strong statement at the outset of your post to a considerably weaker one at the end. I guess I'm just puzzled by the strength of your convictions in the absence of much supporting structure.

Point one: perhaps it only seems weaker since I specifically acknowledged the objections and counterarguments, which religious thinkers seldom do.

Point two: the position's strength needs only one dependency on one principle, that the simplicity of physical materialism makes it a stronger self-justifying first principle than anything else, religious or otherwise.  I acknowledge that rejecting Occam's razor could be a supportable argument, but given only that you don't, I hold that the entirety of physical materialism follows from that.

It's hopeless to try and explain chain behaviour from looking at particles, say at molecular structure

No it's not.  Only the particles define chain behavior at all.  Rattling is collisions between those particles displacing air molecules.  The wind is an aggregation of density and temperature gradients between the air molecules.  ("Aggregate" serves fine here if you don't like "emergent".)  The gradients contain potential energy that is converted into kinetic which is what we perceive as rattling.  That's all there is to it.  Same for a hurricane or anything else.

Maybe it's hopeless to explain it within the scope of human perception, but that's got no relevance.  With sufficient observational and computational power, one can explain anything and everything in terms of its particles.  That's inviolate.  The only limitation on the argument is that perhaps sufficient power can't exist, by Heisenberg observational uncertainty or by something like "to simulate a universe, you need a universe"; but even that is only limiting a potential manifestation and not the underlying principle.

This has come up a few times now: a counterargument attempts to discredit materialism by deconstructing something to what seems like an impossibly absurd extreme... but then yes, that is indeed how materialism views it.

There is no difference between the predator's neuronal pathways and what you're viewing as the higher-order ability.  It's all aggregate behavior from the first principle of particle behavior.  I even overstated it when we were talking about the heart; that structure is also only a perception, there's no physical meaning to some molecules that happen to be attached in ways that act to displace other molecules.  Describing that behavior macroscopically as heart chambers that pump blood is only an abstraction that we perceive.

We have an overwhelming amount of first-person and third-person evidence that it's conscious deliberation that causally structures human behaviour over the long term, so why not accept it in the first instance?

The trivial argument against that is this: that evidence is only being collected by the perceptions of the consciousness in the first place; any demonstration of that evidence can always still be the consciousness fooling itself.

But more realistically and practically, I really do think there's significant observational evidence against free will.  It's always been known that drugs or disease or other neurobiological factors can influence and alter human behavior in ways that the subject will not realize or acknowledge is being altered.  Rabies infection is known to make the subject avoid water.  Toxoplasmosis infection is known to make the subject more attracted to cats.  How is this compatible with free will?  Rather than somehow carving out exceptions, the most logical and straightforward conclusion is that it's all aggregate behavior of the chemicals.

[TheHumanHydra]

Thanks, T-hawk. I find this interesting because it seems to parallel rationales for religion, which are generally maligned by non-religious thinkers. You also seem to have gone from a very strong statement at the outset of your post to a considerably weaker one at the end. I guess I'm just puzzled by the strength of your convictions in the absence of much supporting structure.

Point one: perhaps it only seems weaker since I specifically acknowledged the objections and counterarguments, which religious thinkers seldom do.

Point two: the position's strength needs only one dependency on one principle, that the simplicity of physical materialism makes it a stronger self-justifying first principle than anything else, religious or otherwise.  I acknowledge that rejecting Occam's razor could be a supportable argument, but given only that you don't, I hold that the entirety of physical materialism follows from that.

I think you may have unintentionally sidestepped the observation a little (the second point seems to me to perpetuate the parallel), but anyway .... As to acknowledging counterarguments, thank you! That's intellectually honest. But it still leaves me puzzled as to why you don't, then, lead with the weaker statements. Additionally, I can't let it pass without saying that large numbers of atheists seem to me as guilty of failing to acknowledge the weaknesses of their positions as the religious.

I think you need to account for the origins of matter before you can claim physical materialism to be more self-justifying than other systems -- you may have and just not expressed it here. As for Occam's Razor, I have not thought about it enough to decide whether to accept or reject it -- though, yes, your system is genuinely appealing in that regard!

We have an overwhelming amount of first-person and third-person evidence that it's conscious deliberation that causally structures human behaviour over the long term, so why not accept it in the first instance?

The trivial argument against that is this: that evidence is only being collected by the perceptions of the consciousness in the first place; any demonstration of that evidence can always still be the consciousness fooling itself.

Just to randomly throw a wrench in here, I think this argument may lead to absurdity; as a very free-thinking friend pointed out to me recently, we cannot really be sure all of perception is not illusory (e.g. that we are plugged into a Matrix, etc.). In fact, we can't really trust pure reason, either; what if the idiosyncrasies of the human mind mean our most iron-clad logic is replete with errors we can't perceive? (E.g., you would probably say that, say, a climate-change denier's mind is failing to reason correctly; what if yours is too and it's impossible for you or I to comprehend that?) The point of all this is just to say that leaning too heavily on the unreliability of perception is unhelpful; if we hope to arrive at any conclusions whatsoever, ultimately we have to choose to trust our tools rather than doubt. (Of course, you do, because you made an argument from evidence thereafter that you held to be more realistic, but I thought it would be fun to play out the yarn.)

[Bacchus]

No it's not. Only the particles define chain behavior at all.

Given that this is exactly what we are arguing about, you can't just keep asserting this. I think I gave a fairly clear account of why according all causal power to lower-order phenomena is not necessarily justified. In any case, according such power requires some specific reason which you are not providing. What meaning is there to saying that particles "define" chain behaviour, if chain behaviour will be reproduced by any appropriate collection of "rigid bodies", whichever particles they happen to be constructed of? That's like saying that the electric processes in a CPU "define" the operating system that's being run. That's completely backwards — to be sure, the OS is reliant on SOME infrastructure that could respond to its commands and return appropriate results, but it's not defined by it in any meaningful sense. If anything, what the pattern of electrical impulses in a CPU is at any particular moment is defined by the OS, not the other way around. But I think we've made our positions pretty clear, in any case, especially here:

I even overstated it when we were talking about the heart; that structure is also only a perception, there's no physical meaning to some molecules that happen to be attached in ways that act to displace other molecules.

And to this nice summary I reply:
Molecules are no less or more material than hearts, hearts are molecules, molecules are hearts, that distinction, and not hearts themselves, is a matter of human perspective. We can't theorize our way to a conclusion about the scope at which causally important things happen — we have to find out, we have to find out by giving accounts and testing them, and we can give accounts at different scopes. No scope can be declared derivative, illusory or lacking true meaning a priori, preference between scopes can only arise as a result of active empirical investigation.

To use your turn of phrase, there is nothing special about molecules. They are actually pretty abstract entities, consciousness-produced tools to account for behavior that can't be systematically accounted for through facts observable through natural human perception. There is no inherent privilege to accounts phrased in terms of molecules displacing each other, we certainly have no materialistic grounds for such privileging. What you seem to strive after is some consciousness-independent picture of the world, which is a very understandable yearning. But such a picture, if it exists at all is certainly not accessible to us. We have no option but to choose from consciousness-dependent accounts, relying on abstractions we created, and you have indeed chosen one (the same one Hobbes preferred), and declare it to fulfill your cosmological needs as solely truly descriptive of the world. The problem is that neither is your preferred account of reality particularly consciousness-independent, nor are the accounts that you dismiss as illusions, artifacts of human perception or conveniences particularly consciousness-dependent.

Structures really exist, they really have consequences, sometimes a set of molecules comprising steel will behave almost exactly the same as a set of molecules comprising bronze because both sets are a chain, and sometimes they will behave very differently, because one is a ball, and the other is a sheet. 'Chain', 'ball', 'sheet' are all human-made names, but the structures they name are quite objective. Rigid body physics really is a physics, given how hung up you are on "physical meaning". Not only is it a physics, it is very much a prior physics — the way we theorize particles and how particles make matter is very much informed by 'emergent' rigid body behaviour, because it's what we observe most directly and what we need most directly to account for. Your point that "oh, we can always explain a chain in terms of particles" misses the relationship between scopes entirely: of course we can, because if anyone came up with a particle physics where particles don't amount to rigid body behaviour in aggregate, we would immediately know that his physics is wrong. From the fact that we found/created a particle-based account that is compatible with rigid body behavior there is no logical step to "rigid body behavior is a matter of perception/convenience/an illusion".

[T-hawk]

That's intellectually honest.

http://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/Intellectual_Integrity

But it still leaves me puzzled as to why you don't, then, lead with the weaker statements.

Because people on the internet are lazy with short attention spans and don't make it to the end of a post.  But also because that really is the structure of it: materialism is the starting point from which I answer arguments against it; it's not the case that arguments against it lead up to materialism.

I think you may have unintentionally sidestepped the observation a little (the second point seems to me to perpetuate the parallel)

I'm establishing both the parallel and the difference.  The parallel is factual, that no argument can self-justify its own first principle.  The difference is opinion, that the simplicity of materialism's first principle makes it more compelling and justifiable than a religious or otherwise dualist argument.

I think you need to account for the origins of matter before you can claim physical materialism to be more self-justifying than other systems -- you may have and just not expressed it here.

It's the same principle, the progression of physical processes, that the physical laws of the vacuum before the Big Bang included an eventuality that gave rise to the matter.  I know that's kicking the can down the road, where did those laws come from, but that's no different than "who created God", and still simpler without the need to posit anything nonphysical or otherwise supernatural.  Serious question: are there any hypotheses of the origins of matter that can't ultimately be characterized as either materialism or creationism?  I think anything else like a Matrix hypothesis still has to resolve to one of those recursively.

Just to randomly throw a wrench in here, I think this argument may lead to absurdity

So let it.  I was just saying how so often something that appears to be a reduction to absurdity really is the case for materialism.

No it's not.  Only the particles define chain behavior at all.

Given that this is exactly what we are arguing about, you can't just keep asserting this.

Sure I can.  Materialism really is that simple, "it's only the particles" is the only thing to assert.  I'm asserting it not as proof but proposing it as the argument, and the repeated assertion displays the Occam's-razor simplicity.

What meaning is there to saying that particles "define" chain behaviour, if chain behaviour will be reproduced by any appropriate collection of "rigid bodies", whichever particles they happen to be constructed of? ... Structures really exist, they really have consequences, sometimes a set of molecules comprising steel will behave almost exactly the same as a set of molecules comprising bronze because both sets are a chain

The "almost exactly" in there is the flaw in that argument.  That's defined by perception.  A chain of iron atoms will behave differently than copper or nickel or whatever else.  Each rattling in the wind will result in vibrating air molecules, but differ in aspects such as frequency and amplitude.  Those differences are small only to human perception.  Describing them as macroscopically similar comes only from our perspective.  Suppose you are an organism whose structural integrity dissociates upon experiencing the resonant frequency from iron but not from copper.  Then that's not almost-exactly at all, that's a huge difference.  Like a heart that is almost exactly the same as another except for a blocked artery, or a CPU that is almost exactly the same as another except for one unconnected transistor that happens to be in the instruction-pointer register, suddenly that's a fatal difference in almost-similar behavior.  Suppose that heart belongs to Elon Musk or Captain Garland and as a result humanity never colonizes Mars or Alpha Centauri.  All that causal power still results from the lowest-order phenomena.  Structures exist in that the atoms are physically bonded, but every structure differs to some degree (in position relative to other matter by Pauli exclusion if nothing else), so yes the extent of the difference in aggregate behavior and what you call scope is indeed a matter of perception.

What you seem to strive after is some consciousness-independent picture of the world, which is a very understandable yearning. But such a picture, if it exists at all is certainly not accessible to us.

Sure, of course as consciousnesses we can't experience a world without conscious perception, that's true, but tautological.  I'm saying that picture exists and does so regardless of what we think of it.  It can't be proved logically and perhaps not experimentally, but neither can any other position, and the simplicity and straightforwardness is what distinguishes this one.

[TheHumanHydra]

That's intellectually honest.

http://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/Intellectual_Integrity

Ha! Nice reference, though I wouldn't try and run away with the quote -- we all suffer from psychology.

But it still leaves me puzzled as to why you don't, then, lead with the weaker statements.[/font]

Because people on the internet are lazy with short attention spans and don't make it to the end of a post.   But also because that really is the structure of it: materialism is the starting point from which I answer arguments against it; it's not the case that arguments against it lead up to materialism.[/font]

Naturally, lead with your thesis, though I think to be fully intellectually honest (for your less interested readers) it could do with some softening.

I think you may have unintentionally sidestepped the observation a little (the second point seems to me to perpetuate the parallel)[/font]

I'm establishing both the parallel and the difference.  The parallel is factual, that no argument can self-justify its own first principle.  The difference is opinion, that the simplicity of materialism's first principle makes it more compelling and justifiable than a religious or otherwise dualist argument.[/font]

If I take your meaning, I think we've come to agreement on what I was concerned about: that you subjectively feel that your position is more intellectual satisfying than alternatives despite an absence of irrevocable proof. The religious person of course feels that God is simpler (and more comprehensive). I wanted to say, 'as does Bacchus about his framework,' but maybe it's instead that he feels these are too simple. 

That doesn't mean you're wrong, of course. I just want to introduce human error again.

I think you need to account for the origins of matter before you can claim physical materialism to be more self-justifying than other systems -- you may have and just not expressed it here.[/font]

It's the same principle, the progression of physical processes, that the physical laws of the vacuum before the Big Bang included an eventuality that gave rise to the matter.  I know that's kicking the can down the road, where did those laws come from, but that's no different than "who created God", and still simpler without the need to posit anything nonphysical or otherwise supernatural.  Serious question: are there any hypotheses of the origins of matter that can't ultimately be characterized as either materialism or creationism?  I think anything else like a Matrix hypothesis still has to resolve to one of those recursively.[/font]

I genuinely don't know if materialism is the correct term, since I'm not well versed in philosophy and Bacchus (whom I take to be an atheist) seems to object to that system, but broadly, yeah, I'm not aware of any that can't be. To that ... I think a strength of theism, in contrast to atheistic frameworks, is the willingness to confront ultimate origins. To explain: 'who created God?' is, of course, a question of interest only to atheists. The religious posit that the buck stops there. I think this is realistic (yes, an opinion). Science based on materialism demands a cause to every phenomenon. If we look up from the ground of the immediate origin of our universe, we see that the precursive state must have an origin, which must have origin, to infinity. I've never seen a casual atheist dwell on this ('casual' because I don't read philosophy, or science). The religious, of course, dwell on this all the time, by submitting that God is infinite -- which considerably reduces the complexity of our string of origins. Something, either a string of causes or a supranatural 'mind', is infinite. To the religious, and, evidently, to me, it is simpler (and more comprehensive) to say that that cause-beyond-the-horizon is God. The atheist, of course, will counter that he sees the imprint of God nowhere.

I'm sure someone has already considered this argument and rejected it.  And, naturally, psychology will make the choice: religion tends to have a lot of moral strictures that atheists find to chafe, while religion provides to me a degree of comfort and direction that atheism cannot hope to match. Zakharov was right, but failed to see that he, too, was gripped by psychology in his choice of opinions: his non-moral atheism permitted him to perform the unethical experiments he found most personally satisfying (and allowed him to feel smarter than others, etc.).

Just to randomly throw a wrench in here, I think this argument may lead to absurdity

So let it.  I was just saying how so often something that appears to be a reduction to absurdity really is the case for materialism.

Sorry, I do feel the need to press on this. Of course that was your overall point, but your statement that any of Bacchus's evidence could be construed as 'consciousness fooling itself' really can only serve to dismiss it without consideration -- i.e. arbitrarily. I'm glad it was your 'trivial' argument -- it felt like it was offered more 'for fun' -- and that you went on to address his argument directly.

Thanks for indulging me.

[Bacchus]

I wanted to say, 'as does Bacchus about his framework,' but maybe it's instead that he feels these are too simple. smile

I wasn't actually advocating for a particular framework, I was trying to show that materialism by itself does not entail everything that T-Hawk rests on it, by outlining a framework that is entirely materialist, but at odds with what T-Hawk is saying. There are at least two "subjective preferences" at play here: the question of whether we have one material reality\mode of existence, or also additional ones (spiritual, mental, social, etc) -- which is the question of materialism\dualism, and the question of whether within that one material reality only the lowest-order processes have all the explanatory power (which can be phrased as causal power, constitutive power, definitional power, just to enumerate some of the ways T-Hawk expressed it). Both Hobbes and Dennett are materialists, very strong materialists at that, but Hobbes would agree with T-Hawk, whilst Dennett would not.

For myself, I don't see an urge to take a position on the number of "worlds", I don't really even find the question meaningful, but I do strongly feel that reductionsim to lowest-order processes fails spectacularly. It is properly a matter of faith, though. Some people have faith that the movement of molecules explain everything there is to explain, even when we have no such an explanation on our hands and when particular molecules and their movements are clearly substitutable to different molecules and different movements, resulting in the same higher-order effect. You can't say that they are wrong, the point of view is internally consistent, and can't be disproved by any empirical observation. Same goes for the other sort of people, who like me, have faith that higher-order structures are important in themselves. As far as I know, there is no logical inconsistency, and there is nothing you can show that would unsettle that thesis. The strongest argument for either position is indeed "can't you just see that this is the case?" "Can't you see that a particular molecular implementation of this structure in this case is irrelevant, that this structure just happens in any particular case to come about in some particualr way, but can also come about in multitude of others, so you can't say that the consequences of the structure, which are constant, are reducible to particles, which are not?" "Can't you see that everything is made of particles, and nothing that exists can exist except through a particular behavior of its constituent particles?" And I think all three of us agree on this, so hurray for constructive dialogue.

[Gavagai]

For T-Hawk. You cannot coherently argue against free will. Because if there was, in fact, no free will, then you would have no choice in adopting the belief that there is no free will. All your "arguments" are nothing more than a rationalization of a decision made entirely independently of them. In that case, however, how you can actually trust them? On what grounds can you believe that these arguments are in fact sound and your brain is not deceiving you into falsely believing that they are sound, just like your opponent is deceived by his brain into the belief that free will exists?
In other words, without assuming free will you lose the ability to differentiate between true and false claims because for this distinction to work you need to be able to choose which arguments are good and which arguments are bad. This kind of choice implies the existence of free will.