Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang, Essays on Mind and Matter

[shallow_thought]

Dammit you guys need to stop posting. I have half-an-essay in my head but just can't catch up .

Not a quick or easy read, this thread, but never dull.

[T-hawk]

What knowledge does she lack?
Knowledge of what red looks like.

Not to mock by reiterating, but what knowledge is lacking?  Our definition of complete knowledge already included every outcome of particle behavior.  I don't believe there can be any other objective truth here.  What you're trying to define as the experience, what you're expressing as "looks like" and pain "feels like", is a collection of subjective perceptions.  Yang's whole philosophy is to disregard those subjective perceptions and the restraints on behavior imposed by attempting to avert "pain".  You can have subjectivism as a first principle, but as always I think that ontology needs more explanation and justification than the simpler solution of objective determinism.

Or, in other words: let's say I see two pictures of brain functioning -- my own, and somebody else's. And gosh, they are exactly identical. Do I then know what the other person is thinking and feeling? Yes, but not in the same way that I know what I am thinking and feeling! My experiences I know directly, his I can only extrapolate about, based on data and abstractions. All materialism demands is that I assume that the other person has to be thinking and feeling the same, given identical brain-pictures, but it certainly doesn't demand of me to have direct access to their thoughts. Your version of materialism would demand that though, as far as I can see, at least if I had the full knowledge of how particle movements interact to produce consciousness-states.

I would say that, yes you do know what the other person is thinking and feeling.  A clarification: I would say it's independent replication rather than "direct access"; no brain is observing or exerting causal power on another; each will have the same thoughts regardless of the existence of any other.  The perceptions are aggregate behavior of the particles, and identical particles will aggregate to the same perceptions.

This is a falsifiable hypothesis, a scientific question that could be conducted experimentally.  (At least in principle ignoring Heisenberg uncertainty and such.)  Construct identical brains and see if different resulting behavior is ever observed.  This is where you and THH called my position not quite going all the way; I don't adhere to the strongest version of determinism since I allow that it's possible that we misunderstand reality enough that future experimental evidence will show otherwise; even while I also think that current experimental evidence demonstrates a picture complete enough that otherwise will never be shown. Yang (and even Zakharov) also comes in here: conduct the experiment to seek truth, don't be stopped by ethical concerns about creating and manipulating a consciousness.

Dammit you guys need to stop posting.

I have a job that allows perhaps too much downtime.

[Bacchus]

Our definition of complete knowledge already included every outcome of particle behavior. I don't believe there can be any other objective truth here.

And what I'm saying is that belief doesn't end up being so simple or straightforward if you look at it closer. So you want to say that should our blind neuroscientist suddenly receive the ability to see, she wouldn't get any new knowledge about vision or color. She already knew how her particles would move, so actually seeing for the first time doesn't give her new information.

Well, if that statement by itself doesn't strike you as odd, let's look at it closer. Now that she actually sees, there are actual particle changes in her brain that previously weren't there. Her thinking, on a particle basis, has clearly changed, these new particle processes will be interacting with the old ones, and to extent these just do constitute the knowledge it's hard to say how nothing has been added to it. That actually goes for a materialist account of experiences more generally -- a materialist has no choice but to take experiences seriously as a feature of a single, material world. They don't necessarily pose any particular puzzle, but they are certainly not 'illusions' as that would entail believing that some things exist only on some 'illusory' plane. That would entail thinking that you can experience them, you can interact with them, but they are not properly part of the material world -- that's a dualist position.

The 'subjective perception' angle doesn't help much either. Ok, so they are subjective. But is the fact that a particular person at a particular time is perceiving a particular thing and not another -- objective? Sure it is, it has to be under materialism, because a particular person's particles are in a certain state, and not another. Now this guy is in pain, now he isn't, and there are observable particle movements to go along with that.

So here we are. From your own first-person experience you know that there is a particular way pain feels, and it's different from how other things feel. From third-person experiences we know that pain is associated with certain objective biological processes, and in turn 'basic stuff' processes. So now you have to say that even though you have a reliable, stable first-person way of identifying what pain is (just by its painfulness), and even though we can point to an objective, even by your standards, chemical pain process that occurs concurrently with you first-person experience, there is no necessary link between these two. Because if there is a link, then your first-person experience is not an illusion, it really tells you something about pain, and it's something that you have no way of finding out except by experiencing it.


And then I ended up writing a post stating my position instead of sleeping.


So why even hang on this 'there is nothing but basic stuff' statement? Isn't it much simpler to say: look, we have no idea what the basic stuff of reality may be or even if there is such a thing, we can postulate a bunch of ontologies, each of which has a pragmatically appropriate scope of operation and whilst to some extent those ontologies are translatable to one another, any question of fundamentality between them has no real answer. All of these ontologies are attempts at making sense of one world, the world that we have experience of, because that's the only world we can speak of at all.

Our cognitive faculties themselves are as much part of that world as anything else, but they are somewhat special in that we only experience and interpret the world through them, and not in any other way. These faculties are not contradistinct to objects of physics, or chemistry, or biology, but because of their direct role in the creation of ALL other ontologies, including those of physics, chemistry and biology they logically cannot be reducible to any of them. Specifically, it is accordance with experience that remains the ultimate criterion of any postulated empirical theory, which necessitates the view of experience as something fundamental/prior to any postulated ontology in at least in this sense. The fundamentality of experience to our postulated ontologies of course says nothing about fundamentality of experience to the universe as it really is -- the world could exist only as experience, or experienced reality could be a tiny, accidental fraction of something far larger and entirely incomprehensible -- we have no way of knowing and the question is fruitless.

As fruitless is the question of whether our cognitive faculties operate 'freely' in some universal sense -- that question presupposes that we can answer questions about the fundamental ontology of the world, which we probably can't do ever, and it additionally supposes that we can give an unproblematic account of causality, which we can't to date. We can safely say that we have the capacity to differentiate between good and bad reasons and that this capacity is rooted in speech and social deliberation. The extent to which we make use of this capacity is just what freedom in any meaningful sense is. We say that we are not acting freely when we fail to differentiate at all (unconscious behavior) or when we are unable to act upon the differentiation (through a weakness of character or imposed constraint). There is no other freedom to be had in the world, so we have nothing to draw on to judge that capacity as free or unfree, because it itself is the only source of freedom. Again, a God-like being who sees the entirety of the universe for what it really is may have some other conception of freedom, by which our will may be reasonably characterized as free or as unfree -- we know nothing of this. It is worth noting, however, that, to our limited human understanding, even such a God-like being would be exercising freedom in judgement to the extent that it'll be making use of its own capacity to differentiate a good reason to judge our will free or unfree from a bad reason to do so.

To address the inevitable question of "what about a software program that makes use of a capacity to differentiate between good and bad reasons" -- the same applies. There is a perfectly meaningful sense in which AlphaZero was more free to learn and to come up with strategies than Deep Blue. Of course, it still had a single objective function, so a pretty hard cap on that capacity for differentiation. When there'll be a program that's not tied to any one objective function, that can formulate its own objective functions, including second- and higher-order ones, in response to stimuli -- well, that would be as free as anything else. And any argument against the freedom of that program could rest on anything, but the fact that it's running on silicon, so it can't be free, because it's actions are determined by electrical impulses.

[TheHumanHydra]

This thread has been busy since I was here last. Just wanted to pop in to say I know I still owe T-hawk a post but won't get around to it till later in the week.

[Krill]

Bacchus: That's Molyneux's problem, right?.

Note, I'm not reading anything but one post out of 50 in here, but that one I think I've read about before.

[Bacchus]

The way I understand Molyneux's, it's focus is different and a much more psychological than philosophical one. It takes as given that both touch and sight give us knowledge, and asks whether the knowledge newly received through sight would get immediately mapped onto the knowledge previously received through touch. The problem was formulated by British empiricists and these guys were in no position to seriously doubt that experience is a source of knowledge, that was their foundational claim. T-Hawk wants to claim something like that experience doesn't give any knowledge at all, it's at best a method through which we could, ultimately, arrive at formulating knowledge in terms of the basic particles of the universe. Of course, experience doesn't give us direct experience of particles, so it's not knowledge, it's an "illusion" or an "abstraction".

[Huinesoron]

How about the Total Recall scenario of implanted memories?  She constructs a device that modifies her particle patterns mechanically so that they are indistinguishable from those of a brain that received the red input optically.  Now has she seen red?  I would say yes.  An argument otherwise is necessarily something other than materialism, that objective truth is defined by something other than the current state of the particles, such as their history.

... surely it can be? Objectively, either a red-wavelength photon has at some point struck her retina, and the information about this has been transmitted by the appropriate electrochemical pathways to her brain... or it hasn't. One statement is objectively true, the other objectively false, but you can't say which just by looking at her brain.

I suppose the counter to this is that, while her brain may be identical, and thus the history impossible to determine, the brain-modifier device must necessarily be in a different state than if it had never been used. We're in full Laplace's Demon mode at that point, though, which takes us deep into the quantum realm, and is probably much too far off topic. But... if there is any method of destroying information in the universe (are black holes currently information-conservers? I forget), then a statement that objective truth must only be dependent on a particle's current state doesn't seem to hold up.

hS

[ipecac]

Dammit you guys need to stop posting. I have half-an-essay in my head but just can't catch up .

That sounds like a cue to jump back in

Previously I mentioned to THH that one could try an argument from qualia or perception. Bacchus has done it and much better than I could have. I'll add something else instead, showing how T-Hawk's position collapses yet another of his foundations, namely the idea that he has scientific evidence to support his position.

What are the fundamental aspects of the human endeavour of science? Certainly one of them is communication between scientists, about their results, interpretation of results, and further commentary on the results, sometimes agreement, disagreement, and so forth.

So what is communication? Communication transmits meaning through the physical world, through certain arrangements of matter. You write on a piece of paper 'Hello' and thereby deposit ink in certain arrangements on it, and the ink transmits the message. However, although the medium carries the message, the message is distinct from the medium; the message of 'hello' is a different sort of thing from the thing that are ink particles. In short, messages are not physical.

Here's where things fall apart for T-Hawk: he denies the meaningfulness of anything above the level of particles (or whatever the fundamental physical stuff might mean). That means denying the meaning of messages, because messages are not made of physical stuff. But since communication is fundamental to science, he denies the meaningfulness of science, and therefore he cannot claim scientific backing for his position.

(All the above can also be easily rearranged for a simple argument that the non-physical exists: the thing that constitutes communication is non-physical, therefore the non-physical exists).

[ipecac]

You can have subjectivism as a first principle, but as always I think that ontology needs more explanation and justification than the simpler solution of objective determinism.

There's something quite instructive here in this quote: T-Hawk can't help but be inconsistent. To weigh against a competing explanation of reality, he reaches for explanation and justification and simplicity, things that are meaningless in his worldview - this he has to admit when pressed. (As always, these things are meaningless in his view because he says that nothing above or apart from particles has meaning).

At all points he tries to usefully invoke concepts and things that he also admits are meaningless. He talks about how chemicals inhibit free will, but under his view 'chemicals' is meaningless. He talks about how the only meaning is genes reproducing, but under his view 'genes' is meaningless. He talks about Yang's philosophy, but under his view 'philosophy' is meaningless. In his everyday life he'll talk about what's on his mind, some of his conscious experiences, morality and making free choices, but under his view all these are meaningless and non-existent.

Even the concept of a distinct human 'T-Hawk' is meaningless under his view - if one can't speak meaningfully of a heart, one certainly can't say that "those particles over there, yeah those, they are a human known as T-Hawk".

Why does this keep happening? The answer is that reality is multi-layered and multi-faceted, but reductionism of his sort denies that all of it exists, all except for the most 'fundamental' layer. But since despite his denials he lives in this multi-faceted reality, he can't help but affirm many of its layers, as we keep seeing over and over.

Again, though he maintains that there's only one layer to reality, such a reductionist always and simultaneously affirms the multi-faceted nature.

[Bacchus]

I think it's important to keep in mind what T-Hawk's approach answers, though, because it's an interesting problem.

Any statement of fact beyond "the world is just the way it is" requires a selection of scope. Whether you want to talk about planets, humans, cells, or molecules, you have make the universe somehow granular, carve out a piece of it, put a name to it, conceptualize as a separate object and relate it to other objects of your postulated ontology with an appropriate relational space. "The book is on the table", "carbon atoms are linked by sigma bonds in a lattice structure of a diamond", whatever you say, you say about some subsection of the world. Now this is peculiar, this means that each statement of fact has some arbitrariness in it. It's precisely this arbitrariness that T-Hawk picks up, when he calls all higher-order phenomena "abstractions" -- they are statements at a selected scope, at it doesn't appear there is any non-human justification for selecting one scope and not the other.

This seems to present a wholesale challenge to statements of fact, they are all arbitrary, beyond the meaningless "the world as a whole is the way it is". But here is the way out -- what if there was, objectively, a fundamental scope? A level of granularity of the world which objectively exists, real parts to the universal whole? Now there is a way for objective knowledge even at higher-orders -- to the extent facts are facts, they picture some arrangement of granules, even if they don't appear to refer to granules directly. That's what I take T-Hawk to mean that he expects biology eventually to come to discard such concepts as "evolution" as redundant, as an outcome of making their ontology more and more objectively precise, which would mean more and more specific in what set of fundamental granules and their movements they refer to.

This is actually an approach directly out of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, I came to realize! Which is pretty cool. Of course, Wittgenstein had the problem that he couldn't actually make out what these fundamental granules possibly are. "Simple objects" he called them, and described quite well what should hold, if that entire approach holds. He also noted that this approach renders a whole bunch of statements, including philosophical ones unfactual and kind of meaningless. He then came to abandon this whole conception precisely because for its logical streamlinedness it just doesn't work.

But abandoning the conception, which T-Hawk is understandably reluctant to do, seems to mount a massive challenge to any objective knowledge at all. Which is I think why T-Hawk wants to say that his view inextricably unites materialism, determinism, and objectivism. Stepping away from "particles", maybe better called fundamental granules to avoid confusion with current physics, seems to concede arbitrariness of facts. I don't actually think it does, but it's why me and T-Hawk had a big problem understanding each other at start. He kept saying that I step into dualism, or subjectivism, and I didn't quite see why. So I will end my contributions to this thread for a while with a call for everyone to read the Tractatus and comment, I would be so interested to read your views, especially T-Hawk's. It's a very short book, I think this thread is longer than it by now.