Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Wooden shoe]

Hi leo.

Because they have never given it any thought, just assuming that everything is going to be sunshine and roses. However in order to get to that point they would have to undergo a complete mind wipe, no longer having any memory, would not know anyone, have no body so would not know dear old mum. It is damned hard to play that harp without any fingers or anything else.

Regards, John.

[Obvious Leo]

One of the more interesting things we confront as we get older is that more and more of our people around us start dying off, many of whom we've known for a very long time. By and large they manage to get some warning of their impending doom which gives them a bit of a chance to take stock and come to terms with it. Something like this is what I've found that most of them will say.

I could have done it better, Leo, but I didn't know then what I know now, did I? I got a few things right and a few things wrong, but we only get one crack at it and I gave it my best shot at the time. On balance I'm happy enough with the result. The only thing I'm going to miss is my funeral, when everybody gets together to drink my booze and tell each other a lot of **** about what a great bloke I was.

Regards Leo

[Belinda]

Obvious Leo wrote:

Belinda. I use the word physical in the ordinary way that it is used in all sciences. An entity is definable as physically real if it is able to effect change in another entity. Mental activity is physical. Real electrochemical events are taking place in real physical brain structures. If it were otherwise we could still think after death, which I have no doubt many here might subscribe to.

I confess that I have not acted on my inner guilt that I ought to read up on the science that you endorse. This neglect is because I suspect that it is too difficult. What I want to say here is that however good the science is that you talk about, your philosophy is wrong as follows.

That brain (etc.) causes mind is not the same as that mind is identical with brain. Mind effects change in brain (etc) : brain effects changes in mind which is to say you are right that brain and mind are causally linked.*** This fact is, however, not definitive of mind and therefore is insufficient reason to identify mind with brain. (Yes! You wrote " mental activity is physical".)

Regarding 'physical'. The comparative status of physicality interests people who are thinking about theories of existence. Do scientists really not differentiate between mental events and physical events? Don't you think that the subjective feeling of an event is worthy of consideration even although it might be no more than an epiphenomenon of physical brain(etc) ?


*** There is more than statistical corroboration; there is also anatomical evidence. Sorry I cannot quote refererence, but if pushed I am willing to research it.

[Quotidian]

Sorry, I shouldn't have said that Obvious Leo believes Einstein had it wrong.

An entity is definable as physically real if it is able to effect change in another entity. Mental activity is physical.

You make strong reductionist statements without understanding that this is what you're actually saying. The assertion that 'mental activity is physical' is strong physical reductionism; it is materialist theory of mind. You say that 'complex systems theory' is non-reductionist. But it isn't 'non-reductionist', in that might still be based on a purely physicalist view.

There is evidence that suggests that 'mental is physical' is wrong, but I suspect that this will be regarded as another 'red herring' or 'leprechaun', so I won't bother laying any of it out.

We don't have imaginary omnipotent beings to lay out our truths for us in a neat little pre-packaged parcel.

Recognize this quote?

am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God.

[Obvious Leo]

That brain (etc.) causes mind is not the same as that mind is identical with brain

I never said this at any point, Belinda, and I never would. I equate the mind with the self and the self is a a composite whole which includes the body, which is an entire ecosystem. Its governing networks are the nervous system, the immune system and the endocrine system which all operate in concert.

You will find the complexity approach to living systems a lot easier to understand than you might imagine. It is accessible to those with only a limited background in science because of its intuitiveness, although the mathematical formulation of it is not for the faint-hearted. I strongly urge you to hunt out the recent Capra/Luisi book.

Regards Leo

-- Updated August 15th, 2014, 7:44 pm to add the following --

Quotidian. Non reductionist does not mean non-physical.

[Quotidian]

Turning it around the other way: 'reductionism' is nearly always 'physical reductionism', i.e. the contention that matter (nowadays 'matter-energy') is the sole reality, and that everything we see is a manifestation of that, and (in principle) understandable through science.

-- Updated August 15th, 2014, 8:19 pm to add the following --

Furthermore I don't think it is correct to say that the self is a composite, on the grounds that consciousness is unitary. When you bang your toe, you don't receive the signal through intermediaries, you feel it first person. Of course from the viewpoint of physiology we understand ion transfers and nerve pathways and the like, and the human body of course contains billions of cells. But what is complex on one level is simple on another, but the unity of conscious experience is indisputable.

[Obvious Leo]

Reductionism is simply a way of understanding the world, and one which doesn't work, by the way, because it focuses on the parts while ignoring the whole. However reductionism is a very useful tool for predicting the behaviour of the various patterns of self-organisation which our cognition defines as emergent in the dynamic world. The most obvious example in science is physics, which has been spectacularly successful in making such accurate predictions and spectacularly unsuccessful in providing any explanations for them.

To make a sharp distinction, which is not without its overlapping domains, I say that reductionism is a tool of epistemology whereas non-linear dynamic systems theory is a reach for the underpinning ontology.

Regards Leo

-- Updated August 15th, 2014, 8:32 pm to add the following --

In essence reductionism addresses its focus at a world that IS, whereas complexity addresses its focus at a world continuously BEING MADE.

[Quotidian]

That quote, by the way, is from Einstein. The Walter Isaacson bio of Einstein, 'Einstein's Universe', came out about a year after The God Delusion. I don't know if it was intentional, but chapter 17 of the former, Einstein's God, made it abundantly clear that Einstein was not an atheist in any sense, despite the first chapter of The God Delusion being puportedly about Einstein's religious views. Certainly Einstein never joined a religion or went to religious services, and he saw religion as childish, but very much agreed with what he understood as Spinoza's 'intellectual love of God'. He often talked in terms of God as 'the old one' and made frequent references to God, for instance in his celebrated 'God does not play dice' (to which Bohr is said to have retorted 'stop trying to tell God how to run the Universe'.)

That is why I react strongly to your casually dismissive references to 'leprechauns' and the like. In fact many of the founders of modern physics were very religious thinkers, including Max Planck. You are quite entitled to your atheist views, but you tend to make the mistake common amongst atheism that atheism is somehow a common-sense position, which it emphatically is not.

I agree that reductionism is useful. It is the approach of scientists and engineers - reduce a problem or a system to its constituent parts and then understand how they work together. It has been hugely successful in that regard.

But it comes at a cost, which is, what it leaves out in order to concentrate on the measurable and quantifiable. Our whole culture is so embedded in that scientific/technical world-view that we simply assume many of its axioms.

I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.

[Obvious Leo]

Q. I have both read and written much on the subject of Einstein's personal philosophy. He was a complex man and much bound to his traditional Yahweh, who he interpreted in a very Old Testament way. "I am who am" was Einstein's god and he was able to define this personal god very precisely. His god was the universe itself, it was self-causal, and he acknowledged the existence of no entity beyond it. I have no interest in your puerile fascination with the meanings of words and if you wish to define atheism in some other way then go for your life.

I'll remind you that Erwin Schrodinger was the bloke who was convinced that a cat could be both dead and alive at the same time. Although I hold him in high regard as a mathematician you'll pardon me for assigning a somewhat lesser regard to his credentials as a logician.

Regards Leo

P.S. This reminds me of a very corny old physics joke. Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg were driving along in the countryside and got pulled over by the cops. The cops decided to search the car and then said to Erwin " Are you aware that you've got a dead cat in the boot, sir?", to which Erwin replied " I am NOW".

[Belinda]

Quotidian wrote:

Certainly Einstein never joined a religion or went to religious services, and he saw religion as childish, but very much agreed with what he understood as Spinoza's 'intellectual love of God'. He often talked in terms of God as 'the old one' and made frequent references to God, for instance in his celebrated 'God does not play dice' (to which Bohr is said to have retorted 'stop trying to tell God how to run the Universe'.)

Spinoza's son of God is Reason .For Spinoza, Reason is our pathway to approach God-or-Nature. Please excuse my fanciful use of capital letters and "son" , I think that these do spotlight the powerful ontological status that Spinoza attributes to God-or-Nature. This status is markedly different from post modernists who claim we not only can not access ultimate Being but that ultimate being is a false belief. Spinoza therefore is modern, not post modern. The essence of modern as opposed to the age of faith on the one side and post modernism on the other side is that reason is the best and only true guide to truth.

I sympathise with post modernism but it is impossible to live with because all of us have to make decisions based upon something or other , and reason is arguably the best candidate to arise.

Obvious Leo, as I remember, you claim to be an atheist but not a religionist. But the meaning of 'atheist' needs to be defined for philosophical and also for historical purposes. For instance Spinoza, led by reason not to mention his human sympathy, was not atheist if 'atheist' means someone who denies ultimate reality and views existence as totally unrelated to either physical or mental reality but as unceasing circlings of pro tem meanings that keep going because comparatively few of us are terminally depressed persons who have to keep the meanings going because we have to keep the meanings going because we have to keep the meanings going because we--------

[Obvious Leo]

A thoughtful and balanced post, Belinda.

that reason is the best and only true guide to truth.

Perhaps the central plank of the philosophy of the bloody obvious.

But the meaning of 'atheist' needs to be defined for philosophical and also for historical purposes.

My definition of this word is a very utilitarian one which I can comfortably apply to myself. I deny the existence of an external causal agent for the universe and I have clearly defined the universe as everything that exists. Atheism is not a belief system and thus others are free to define it in accordance with their own conceptual convenience.

But the meaning of 'atheist' needs to be defined for philosophical and also for historical purposes.

I disagree with this because I don't regard belief or non-belief as a legitimate question for philosophical enquiry, other than as a psychological or sociological phenomenon.

persons who have to keep the meanings going because we have to keep the meanings going because we have to keep the meanings going because we--------

I'll assume that you will have well understood by now that this is the sort of non-philosophy which makes me puke.

Regards Leo

[Bohm2]

Einstein died a broken man because he became the laughing stock of the physics community for continuing to insist until his dying day that he'd got something badly wrong. Three things made him absolutely certain of this, although there were many other questions which disturbed him profoundly.

1. The inherent randomness implied in QM, which he called the dice-playing god.

2. The unavoidable assumption of reverse causation, the moon that only exists when observed

3. The superluminal travel implied by entanglement, which he called spooky action at distance.

I have taken some courses and written some papers on this topic and from my reading of the material, Einstein was critical of QM because he realized that QM, if complete, not only implied indeterminism but also non-locality ("uses telepathic methods"). Why? Because:

if the outcome of one experiment is not predetermined, if it is a matter of pure and irreducible chance, then how can the distant system "know" how the random choice was made except by telepathy?

And it was mostly the issue of non-locality (not determinism) that bothered Einstein because he could not fathom it. This can be seen in his correspondence letters. Also see Einstein's quote in my previous post on this thread as to why he was opposed to the issue of nonlocality/non-separability.

Bohm, however, showed that a non-local and deterministic model that gets all the QM predictions was possible contrary to von Newman's mathematical "proof". Finally Bell's famous theorem and experiments showing violation of Bell's inequalities (barring some unlikely loopholes) seems to imply non-locality for some physicists. Having said, that there are physicists who believe non-locality is not necessary, if one forgoes "realism". But I think there's a problem with what one means with "realism". A nice, short, philosophical paper on the topic was just published by Tim Maudlin recently (see link below). It's worth reading and non-mathematical, for those who don't have background in math.

What Bell Did
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1408/1408.1826.pdf

[Wooden shoe]

Quotidian, You wrote: Furthermore I don't think it is correct to say that the self is a composite, on the grounds that consciousness is unitary. [end quote]

I see the self as being a construct, influenced by many factors as in the following take from philosophy. com.

The Ecological Self Finally, the third perspective on the self sees it as a process of development which takes place within a specific ecological space. Factors such as gender, sex, race, social status, upbringing, formal education, emotional history all play a role in shaping up a self. Furthermore, most authors in this area agree that the self is dynamic, an entity which is constantly in the making: selfing is a more proper term to express such an entity.

Perhaps you lean more on Kant or Descartes for your view, however I believe that the self can be built up or destroyed by external factors which speaks against the autonomy of the self.

Regards, John.

[Obvious Leo]

John. Your concise description of the self accords perfectly with my own and also with the philosophy of complexity. In non-linear dynamic systems theory the notion of anything fixed and immutable simply doesn't exist, whether it be a physical entity or an abstract construct. This is a straightforward extension of Galilean relativity which simply states that there can be no state of absolute rest in the cosmos. The Minkowski relativity denies this by brute mathematical force when it represents time as a spatial dimension and then uses two different ontologies of time within the same model. This is to represent the universe as "the cadaver on a slab" which I referred to and such a universe can only be held in its frozen state with the use of mathematical constants derived from observation. An observation is just such a snapshot still picture of a frozen moment in time and therefore an observation is not relativistic. In other words Special Relativity contradicts Galilean relativity, a problem which Einstein sought to redress in GR. However he failed to do this because he didn't reject Minkowski's false premise and insisted on keeping time as a spatial dimension. This turned the non-Euclidean GR into a mathematical monstrosity of staggering intricacy which was entirely held together with even more constants. Einstein knew bloody well that this wasn't a model of a physically real world and had no compunction in saying so.

QM is an entirely different paradigm which deals only with the behaviour of particles in the sub-atomic world. It is completely predicated on SR alone and is therefore not relativistic, a problem recognised by physicists from the outset. For almost a hundred years physics has been trying to take QM out of SR and cram it into GR by yet more brute mathematical force and they've now built themselves a house of cards which is finally collapsing around their ears. The Standard Model contains over a hundred constants which are being routinely altered to conform to each new observation, or eliminated or added to as required. QM simply cannot be made to conform with GR in this way because GR has been forced to conform with SR and the two relativity models contradict each other on the questions of co-location and simultaneity. This is a very brief overview of a very complex problem but these same general arguments can be applied to every outstanding paradox in physics, of which there are a vast suite, and they can all be swept aside with a simple re-alignment of the foundational premises. 3D space is put back into the observer's consciousness where it has always belonged throughout history and time can then be interwoven with gravity. The spacetime continuum of extravagant mathematical complexity is replaced by a grav-time continuum of exquisite simplicity. This is quantum gravity.

Bohm2. Thank you very much for your link to Maudlin's paper. I hadn't seen it before but I have now read it, printed it out, and added it to my vast compendium of supportive evidence. Quotidian seems to think I've conjured this entire philosophy up from within a dream state, but after forty years of disciplined scholarship I'll need a forklift to hoist this compendium of supportive literature onto the back of a truck.

Regards Leo

[Quotidian]

I believe that the self can be built up or destroyed by external factors which speaks against the autonomy of the self.

I didn't speak in terms of 'autonomy' but of 'unity'.

Human consciousness usually displays a striking unity. When one experiences a noise and, say, a pain, one is not conscious of the noise and then, separately, of the pain. One is conscious of the noise and pain together, as aspects of a single conscious experience. Since at least the time of Immanuel Kant, this phenomenon has been called the unity of consciousness. More generally, it is consciousness not of A and, separately, of B and, separately, of C, but of A-and-B-and-C together, as the contents of a single conscious state.

(Remainder here.)

The self, in any case, is the subject and is not properly ever an object of cognition. Of course you can say things about the concept of the self, and about the concept of the person, and so on, but the subject, as such, is never amongst them. This is a long-standing conundrum in all philosophy, which is interpreted in various ways by different schools of thought, but in effect modern philosophy tends to ignore it. But I do note - and this is a point that you won't find elsewhere on this forum - that something can be both a multiplicity on one level and a unity on another. The human is like that: on the one hand, from the viewpoint of cellular biology, we are a host of not only billions of cells, but billions of microbes. But on another level of description, we are a simple unity. I think that everything is like that - even the Universe itself (hence, the name!)

Quotidian seems to think I've conjured this entire philosophy up from within a dream state, but after forty years of disciplined scholarship I'll need a forklift to hoist this compendium of supportive literature onto the back of a truck.

I don't think much of it has any bearing on the 'brain-mind' question, which I would have assumed was central to this thread. But every dialogue tends to end up being a debate about the meaning of physics.

This is a very brief overview of a very complex problem but these same general arguments can be applied to every outstanding paradox in physics, of which there are a vast suite, and they can all be swept aside with a simple re-alignment of the foundational premises...

None of us here are qualified to judge whether you really have reached a revolutionary understanding of physics, which those in the profession and the Universities don't have. But I think it is reasonable to suspect that such an outcome would be unlikely. I know that at least some of the sweeping statements that you present as being 'bloody obvious' are highly debatable (for instance, the equation of energy with information, and your reflexive and absolute rejection of anything you deem 'metaphysical'.)

I suspect, with no malice intended, you're suffering from isolation. As you don't appear to be an academic or recognized author it is likely that you feel very frustrated that you have gained this fundamental insight into some of the great philosophical problems of the day, but that nobody's hearing you. Would that be a fair comment?