Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang, Essays on Mind and Matter

[Bacchus]

(isn't the answer to 'why?' just, 'we observe that physics affects everything/most things/many things, we don't observe that anything affects physics [I think], so we assume that nothing affects anything other than physics'?

Do we really observe that though? Let's take something simple as an example, a classic of physics secondary education -- a spring. What we observe when playing around with springs is not particle physics, is it? We observe it's spring-like behavior. We start thinking about that behavior and conceptualizing it -- it seems that springs can somehow 'store' an 'effort' applied to them. Well, we can say that what goes on is energy transfer and storage. So now we postulate that spring is made of particles, we better come up with a way how these particles, or arrangements of them, are able to store and release energy. If somebody postulates particles that can't do so, he is blatantly wrong in light of experience, and we won't accept his physics. The particles we eventually come up with will of course be able to describe spring behavior, that's what we came up with them for. So you would find cases of when macroscopic phenomena invalidate lower-order physics. What you won't ever find is a case of a particle-based prediction successfully invalidating a macroscopically observed phenomenon. So what's affecting what?

I would argue that the former is equally true (and maybe the point of contention is that T-hawk doesn't [?]), just less complete/detailed, but surely they're the same concept.

As far as I understand, T-Hawk does say that "heart" is nothing but a trick of the mind, whereas the particles and their coordinates have objective existence. Your point about 'completeness' is an interesting one, though. So, let's say you go about enumerating particles that constitute a heart -- where do you stop? Particles don't come labelled 'heart' and 'not-heart', what tells you want to include in that roster and what to exclude? I would argue that actually, for some purposes, 'heart' is the more complete and detailed concept, whilst the enumeration of particles a) can only be carried out once we know what a heart is, b) will be a rather sad, case-specific list of particular molecules that just happened to constitute this particular heart. You know, the amount of fat will differ from heart to heart, the precise shapes will differ but, within some scope, precisely the scope of what a working heart is, these differences don't actually convey biologically relevant information. So the particle list will be more 'complete' in the physical sense, quite appropriately, but not in a biological sense. If you are given that particle list and asked -- "well, what does this do?" or "does this work?", you'd probably be at a complete loss. You could respond with "give me a time from now, and I will tell you where each of those particles will be at that time", but who does that really help? I will write more on this in my response to T-Hawk's computational simulation question.

Surely they are just concepts that describe particles (i.e., including particle behaviour), not 'real' ~objects 'composed', as it were, of something other than the material.

I think even in writing this you got a sense of the difficulty of the matter, no? How can we say "they are concepts" but "they are not real objects"? You start to have to put quotation marks around 'real' because surely if something exists it's real in some sense. So ok, relationships are concepts. What's the mode of existence of these concepts? It's not a particle-based mode, as you note, but what is it then? And if it's not particle-based, then physics doesn't describe it, but if physics doesn't describe concepts, then physics doesn't describe everything, does it?

One way out, which T-Hawk I think adopts, is to say that concepts don't "really" exist or exist only in the mind. That is to say that no relationships objectively exist, if relationships are concepts. That would of course mean that physics exists only in the mind, which is self-defeating, as ipecac has been rather brusquely stating. Still, it's an answer.

But I would say it's more difficult that that. Let's say relationships are concepts, but what are they concepts of? They are not concepts of particles, or any individual qualities of particles, they are concepts of, well, arrangements of particles let's say. It seems that if you arrange particles in a certain way, that has real-world consequences for their behavior, quite aside from how that arrangement is conceptualized. Is then an arrangement some kind of a fact about the world? And if it, isn't it to say that the arrangement exists? Mind, exists specifically as an arrangement, not as the specific collection of things that happen to conform to this arrangement in any particular case. Let's take a concrete example — a buckyball of carbon atoms. Now, a buckyball is a concept, and it's expressed mathematically, or geometrically, however you wish to put it. But buckyballs also behave in a particular way, specific to this structure. Does that mean that our conceptualization grasps something of a structure that really exists in the world? And how would it exist? Does it mean that mathematical or geometric relationships are somehow inherent in physical reality? How?

Or are you saying that 'relationship' is a non-abstraction, in some sense concrete, and has some sort of supraphysical basis?

Who knows? Modern particle physics relies on a highly abstract mathematical apparatus to detail its interactions. To accept it as a valid description of reality however, is to accept that real, concrete, physical stuff somehow enacts these relationships in a concrete, non-abstract way. The relationships manifest themselves, which suggests that they must have some sort of reality to them. What could that reality be? I genuinely don't have an answer, but it's pretty clear that it can't be a particle based one. (As I said above, I used to be an instrumentalist, I used to think of all this stuff simply as abstractions, which was an easy enough solution. My agreement with T-Hawk was 99% complete, it's only that I thought particles to be quite the abstraction too, whereas he claims there objective existence. But that brings with itself all these problems along, to the extent that you believe particles to behave in accordance to mathematically expressed laws.)

[TheHumanHydra]

Thanks for your answers, they are helpful. Could I summarize your argument in these two posts as, 'particles behave* according to laws that are not particles'?

(That sounds like an SMAC tech-selection summary.)

* Including 'are arranged'.

[ipecac]

You wouldn't say that a heart develops just like a volcano flows, that's nonsense

Sure I would.  They're each chemical processes that progress from a starting state according to deterministic causal rules.  There's no difference.  That's not nonsense.

There's nothing special about genes.  They're merely a chemical pattern whose progression happens to result in reproducing copies of itself.  What we call a heart just happens as an emergent phenomenon during that process for some sets of genes.  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.

Your approach also means there's nothing special about life or genes, as you say they are abstractions that have "no physical meaning", they are tricks of the mind.

Which means that Yang's first principles are meaningless tricks of the mind too ("life is chemical processes and nothing more", "life's only purpose is life itself").

[ipecac]

One way out, which T-Hawk I think adopts, is to say that concepts don't "really" exist or exist only in the mind. That is to say that no relationships objectively exist, if relationships are concepts. That would of course mean that physics exists only in the mind, which is self-defeating, as ipecac has been rather brusquely stating. Still, it's an answer.

T-Hawk's idea is self-defeating, self-contradictory. It's simply wrong and bad, and there's no reason to beat around the bush about it.

[ipecac]

If you have the view that the laws of physics drive or govern all behaviour, then there you go, you have something non-physical that affects the physical world.

One very common approach against the idea that there exist minds that have free will is people asking 'how is that will enacted? How does the immaterial affect the material?' This is declared not possible to explain, and so the idea of minds and free will is quickly dismissed.

However, one of their most fundamental beliefs is in the physical laws of science, something immaterial that affect all that is material. Thus we see that these people trying to have it both ways.

[Bacchus]

THH, that's a reasonable summary, albeit it doesn't quite point out what the problem is. Whilst we consider physics just an abstract model, it's fine for it to rely on similarly abstract mathematics. Once we want to say that the particles of physics really exist, now your summary points to a problem. That actually makes for a fun introduction to philosophy excercise -- assume physical particles are real, what are the possible options for reality of physical relationships and what are the problems of each of them?

[T-hawk]

Was busy yesterday, getting back to this thread now.  (By the way, I respect you a lot in this debate Bacchus, you're giving well-reasoned points.)

Do you think there is scientific evidence for evolution by natural selection? Could what people refer to as 'free will' actually be something like evolution — an aggregate (within your ontology) phenomenon that can be meaningfully investigated macroscopically, and that can be usefully assigned causal power? Would you say the phrase "dolphins and sharks share phenotypical characteristics despite very divergent genotypes because of convergent evolution" is in some way justified, meaningful or correct?

I would say that last is so, within the scope of most human perception.  It may be drastically incorrect otherwise: like from the perceptions of the prey that the sharks eat but the dolphins don't.  And even from some human perception, maybe you're somehow allergic to shark meat but not dolphin meat.

Any similarity only exists as a perception and abstraction, since the particles are always different, by the definition of Pauli exclusion if nothing else.  Human perception finds it useful to describe the phenomenon and extrapolate future behavior.  From another perspective, the phenomenon may mean nothing: like if the sun expands to engulf the earth, it makes no difference to the sun which forms of life lived in the water.  (Well, it does still make a difference at the particle level, the positions will always be slightly different; but in your terms there would be no higher-order phenomena.)

Couldn't the phrase "I'm typing this because of free will" have the same kind of meaning — the kind that does not preclude your ontology?

What is the difference between you typing that phrase and a computer program going 10 PRINT "I'm printing this because of free will" ?

Evolution by natural selection happens, or at least a process that we perceive and define with those terms happens.  But what is the difference between that process and any other?  Any process will expand more where the interaction between it and its environment is favorable to do so.  Would you call a fire expanding in the direction of more fuel natural selection for that process?

How about a computer virus/worm whose code includes self-mutation, so that it has the possibility of adapting itself to exploit remote-code-execution vulnerabilities and replicate itself into more computers?  Would you call that process evolution by natural selection?  What if it replicated itself onto hardware with enough robotic controls that it could start building more computers to make copies of itself onto? What if it mutated so much that it was capable of outputting statements like "I have free will" and responding to stimuli indistinguishably from how a human would?  (Serious question, I don't know where you'd stand on any of that.)

You seem very hung up on the proposition that the existence of free will would necessarily prove your ontology wrong.

It's more like, I deliberately define the ontology so that the existence of free will proves it wrong.  I suppose that's what you were meaning about setting a trap?  I didn't see it that way because that's exactly what I acknowledge as the counterargument.

If evolution can be 'just particles' in the final analysis and at the same time a valid scientific concept, why can't free will?

Because then it's not free, if the particles are acting deterministically.

I think you have gotten your point across, let me try to restate it, since you've been able to correctly restate mine.  From your position of top-down determinism, one could say that the Big Bang singularity caused all phenomena at all levels, including a consciousness that defines the particle movements rather than being defined by them.

That position is valid and self-consistent and does not require dualism.  But I think it still loses by Occam's razor compared to mine.  This position has to answer questions like on exactly what level does consciousness manifest (on what complexity scale between bacteria and humans?  where in human fetal development?  can an electronic system do so?) so that its will rather than physical behavior becomes capable of directing particles, while it's all the same to bottom-up determinism.

[T-hawk]

(Or, in other words: why does thinking you can think make you better at making more humans?)

One answer: it gives rise to ideologies and a desire to propagate them by making more humans.  Catholicism succeeded compared to other religions in part because it encourages reproduction of more Catholics.

Another answer: Thinking we can think isn't necessarily relevant.  It just came along for the ride as an accidental result of the ability to think about fashioning tools and cultivating crops.  Correlation but not causation. Indeed Yang says we don't need the ability and with the Genejacks removes it.

our approach also means there's nothing special about life or genes, as you say they are abstractions that have "no physical meaning", they are tricks of the mind.

Which means that Yang's first principles are meaningless tricks of the mind too ("life is chemical processes and nothing more", "life's only purpose is life itself").

Sure, and Yang himself would say so.  That's no argument against the position.  Calling something stupid doesn't refute it.

I found this article pretty interesting.

Unless I'm missing something, that's not offering or citing any evidence or measurability, just repeating philosophical speculation.

[ipecac]

Sure, and Yang himself would say so.  That's no argument against the position.  Calling something stupid doesn't refute it.

You started off this thread by extolling Yang's principles, now you have to admit that they're completely meaningless.

Nihilism, ladies and gentlemen: never a good path to go down.

[ipecac]

Thanks for your answers, they are helpful. Could I summarize your argument in these two posts as, 'particles behave* according to laws that are not particles'?

(That sounds like an SMAC tech-selection summary.)

* Including 'are arranged'.

I'd like to digress a bit on what these 'laws' are.

Properly, what we observe is that matter and energy behave in certain regular ways. We are able to describe these past observations in the form of mathematical equations, and these relations are also observed to predict future behaviour. So what we see is regular behaviour, that we can predict with good accuracy with some fundamental equations of physics.

On the other hand, 'law' adds something to this. 'Law' implies that something is actually governing the behaviour of the particles, and constraining them to behave in certain ways, and in no other. Those who believe in such laws would say that human investigation into physics aims to find these laws, that over time our theories and equations become more accurate and more precisely mirror the actual laws. One example is gravity, how Newton gave a good description, Einstein gave a better one and no doubt there'll be further improvements in the future.

To use 'law' is to therefore go beyond mere description of regular behaviour. This has been done for various reasons. Some theists would say that a Designer created laws to regulate the creation, while others have argued that such laws must prevent the supernatural from affecting the physical world.

Lots of atheists take the latter approach, which however has a consequence: it involves assuming the real existence of such iron laws that prevent any deviation whatsoever. So the real existence of non-physical laws is required, which is a massive problem for the atheists who also believe in that only the physical exists. Indeed, it is a contradiction between two important beliefs, which means their worldview is incoherent.