Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Philosophy Club

[Sculptor1]

This is not a problem for materialism since we know that all this happens because of the presence of neural matter.
What's your solution? Something immaterial?? I think you might have more problems with that.

Again: neural matter is made of the same atoms etc. as the rest of the universe. So what you are saying is that if we arrange matter in a certain way, something magical happens. If that's not a problem then what is.

Arrange carbon in different ways you get a) Diamond, b) Graphite, c) Lonsdaleite, d) C60 (Buckminsterfullerene or buckyball), e) C540, f) C70, g) Amorphous carbon, and h) single-walled carbon nanotube, or buckytube. An that is just one element. Neural matter is highly a complex collection of organic matter, energized with electrical impulses.

You can either try to understand it, or call it magic. Maybe you think the arrangement of silicone and metal that comprises the computer you are looking at is also magic?

But what YOU seem to be saying is that brains don't work UNLESS you have magic! I prefer materialism.

[Atla]

Arrange carbon in different ways you get a) Diamond, b) Graphite, c) Lonsdaleite, d) C60 (Buckminsterfullerene or buckyball), e) C540, f) C70, g) Amorphous carbon, and h) single-walled carbon nanotube, or buckytube. An that is just one element. Neural matter is highly a complex collection of organic matter, energized with electrical impulses.

You can either try to understand it, or call it magic. Maybe you think the arrangement of silicone and metal that comprises the computer you are looking at is also magic?

But what YOU seem to be saying is that brains don't work UNLESS you have magic! I prefer materialism.

And that is the response of almost all materialists. You may not realize it, but you have just totally switched the topic of discussion.

I asked: why do experiental states at all go with matter? That's the hard problem of consciousness.

You replied: experiental states in our head are shaped in a complex way because neural matter really is that complex.

I know that, of course that is so, but those are the easy questions of consciousness.

The hard question of consciousness is there all the same: why doesn't all that complex neural processing just 'go on in the dark'?

[Tamminen]

As for me, I am not worried about this. I presume that one day the lights will go out of my body and I will then enter some other kind of state.

This state is called death. You will then be a dead body, a corpse.

Ludwig Wittgenstein:

If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in doing so, you did not encounter new images, new linguistic fields.

[Consul]

We can say that the subject is what carries subjective time from moment to moment. It is the present abstracted from its content. It is the eternal reference point of existence. It is Wittgenstein's limit of the world. In this sense it is an abstraction, but its consciousness of the world is concrete and real. This is the transcendental subject, and as you see I have used many metaphorical expressions to describe it so that people can hopefully get an idea of what I mean. So the subject is something that is common to all "animals", as you call them, i.e. all individual subjects. I think memory connects the succesive presents of subjective time so that we can speak of individual subjects, but I have not a clear picture of how those "projects" like Tamminen and Consul are constituted.

"5.632 The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.
5.633 Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found? You will say that this is exactly like the case of the eye and the visual field. But really you do not see the eye. And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye."
—L. Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)

The metaphysical or "transcendental" subject (ego) seems to be a reification of the abstract subjective point of view. But concrete, physical subjects do belong to the world and are located therein somewhere.

But a/the world doesn't necessarily have subjects in it that are conscious of it!

There is only one world, the world, and therefore, as I said, a possible alternate world cannot exist without subjects. This is the crucial point that makes a difference between materialism and the kind of idealism I represent. I have showed this very clearly in several posts during our discussions, but it seems that you and others have missed the point completely. The key in my argument is understanding that although logic is transcendental, it is not transcendent: it cannot be applied to anything that lies outside of its scope of usage, i.e. outside of our world, the world of subjects. To posit the possibility of the world without subjects is to posit an abstraction, not a possible concrete and real world.

You don't have to be a realist about nonactual possible worlds. You may well regard those other worlds as imaginary ones. My argumentation is independent of possible-world realism! For even if other possible worlds, especially ones devoid of subjects, don't exist/aren't real, it doesn't follow that other worlds, especially ones devoid of subjects, are impossible. It is a plain non sequitur to argue that "[t]here is only one world, the world, and therefore, as I said, a possible alternate world cannot exist without subjects." Of course, any imagination of a subjectless world is subject-dependent, but it doesn't follow that the subjectless world imagined would be if it were actual.

[Consul]

There is a radical difference between my view and materialism. Materialists, like Consul, claim that the world without subjects is logically possible. But it is not. Matter is an essential component of the structure of reality, but as we both seem to think, the subject is the key of all existence. The world is the subject's world.

There is no such one thing as the subject. There are many subjects; so if the "the world is the subject's world," then the number of worlds is the same as the number of subjects.

Anyway, what exactly is "the subject's world"?
Do you mean a subject's natural or sociocultural Lebenswelt (life-world/habitat) or Umwelt (surrounding world/environment)?
Do you mean a subject's perceptual field? Well, there's a distinction between my objective perceptual field, which consists of all external, nonmental/physical objects of my perception, and my subjective perceptual field, which consists of all internal, mental/experiential contents of my perception, i.e. of all my sensations (sense-data/-impressions). The latter depends on me, but the former doesn't, because my objective perceptual field doesn't depend for its being on being an object of my perception.
———
"The subjective visual field has to be sharply distinguished from the objective visual field. The former is an intentional presentation of the latter.

The objective visual field is ontologically public and objective, a third-person set of objects and states of affairs that are identified relative to a particular perceiver and his or her point of view. So right now, the objective visual field for me consists of all the objects and states of affairs that I can see under these lighting conditions in my present physiological and psychological state and from this point of view. The subjective visual field is ontologically private, a first-person set of experiences that go on entirely in the head.

In the objective visual field, everything is seen or can be seen; in the subjective visual field, nothing is seen nor can be seen.

My objective visual field is defined as the set of objects and states of affairs that are visible from my point of view under these conditions. My subjective visual field, on the other hand, is ontologically subjective, and it exists entirely in my brain. Thoe most important thing to re-emphasize is that in the subjective visual field, nothing is seen. This is not because the entities in the subjective visual field are invisible, but rather because their existence is the seeing of objects in the objective visual field. One thing you cannot see when you see anything is your seeing of that thing. And this holds whether or not the case is a good case or a bad case, whether it is veridical or hallucinatory, because in the hallucinatory case you do not see anything. And, in particular, you do not see the hallucinatory seeing. To think otherwise, to think that the entities in the subjective visual field are themselves seen, is to commit the Bad Argument. It is, as I have argued earlier, the disaster from which a large number of the disasters of Western philosophy over the past four centuries result.

I actually believe that if this point had been appreciated, not just about vision but about perception in general, from the seventeenth century on, the entire history of Western philosophy would have been different. Many truly appalling mistakes—from Descartes' Representative Theory of Perception all the way through to Kant's Transcendental Idealism and beyond—would have been avoided if everybody understood you cannot see or otherwise perceive anything in the subjective perceptual field."

(Searle, John R. Seeing Things As They Are: A Theory of Perception. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. pp. 106-7)

[Tamminen]

You don't have to be a realist about nonactual possible worlds. You may well regard those other worlds as imaginary ones. My argumentation is independent of possible-world realism! For even if other possible worlds, especially ones devoid of subjects, don't exist/aren't real, it doesn't follow that other worlds, especially ones devoid of subjects, are impossible. It is a plain non sequitur to argue that "[t]here is only one world, the world, and therefore, as I said, a possible alternate world cannot exist without subjects." Of course, any imagination of a subjectless world is subject-dependent, but it doesn't follow that the subjectless world imagined would be if it were actual.

There is a world, and consciousness appears in it, something that is conscious of the world, a subject. You say that this appearing of a conscious subject is not necessary, I say it is. I mean some subject somewhere at some time. The subject's consciousness makes the world what we mean by the world. Without it there is no world, nothing. Consciousness is the essence of the world. Without it the world would be nothing but a paradox, an abstraction, unimaginable to reflective minds. Therefore it is logically impossible, beyond logic. You have not given any arguments against my claim that logic cannot be applied to anything outside of its scope of usage. Here you try to do so. The conclusion is that there cannot be anything lacking its essence, and the essence of the world is consciousness, so the world must contain subjects. The subject is not a secondary phenomenon of being, it is being itself.

As to your last sentence: If the imagined world without subjects were actual, it would not be subject-dependent, but it cannot be actual, for reasons I have given. Now I see that this is more difficult to understand than I ever imagined. But this is also something that makes the difference between materialism and anti-materialism.

The subject is not a reification of anything, it is cleaned from all "thinghood". Your version of 'subject' is some kind of a reification, but I am not sure what kind.

[Tamminen]

There is no such one thing as the subject. There are many subjects; so if the "the world is the subject's world," then the number of worlds is the same as the number of subjects.

There is one world and many subjective perspectives to it, but there would be no world without those perspectives. The subject is what is common to all perspectives, and this leads to some metaphysical scenarios that I have written elsewhere.

Anyway, what exactly is "the subject's world"?

It is the objective world as a whole, the universe as we know it, the universe of cosmologists and other scientists, the world we live in. Without subjects there is no such objective world. Objectivity presupposes subjectivity.

[Sculptor1]

Arrange carbon in different ways you get a) Diamond, b) Graphite, c) Lonsdaleite, d) C60 (Buckminsterfullerene or buckyball), e) C540, f) C70, g) Amorphous carbon, and h) single-walled carbon nanotube, or buckytube. An that is just one element. Neural matter is highly a complex collection of organic matter, energized with electrical impulses.

You can either try to understand it, or call it magic. Maybe you think the arrangement of silicone and metal that comprises the computer you are looking at is also magic?

But what YOU seem to be saying is that brains don't work UNLESS you have magic! I prefer materialism.

And that is the response of almost all materialists. You may not realize it, but you have just totally switched the topic of discussion.

I asked: why do experiental states at all go with matter? That's the hard problem of consciousness.

You replied: experiental states in our head are shaped in a complex way because neural matter really is that complex.

I know that, of course that is so, but those are the easy questions of consciousness.

The hard question of consciousness is there all the same: why doesn't all that complex neural processing just 'go on in the dark'?

Science is about description. There are NO explanations, and I do not see you offering any.
Consider this. How come water and oxygen, both gasses at the same temperature make water which can exist as a solid lighter than its liquid? There is no explanation. But by more and more detailed and knowledgeable description we achieve more understanding of how. Science is making in roads into HOW the brain works.
Materialism is providing more in this way.
What have you got?
Nothing but ghostly spirits!

[Consul]

Objectivity presupposes subjectivity.

The concept of ontological objectivity does not! And the ontological concept of an object is different from and irreducible to the concept of an object-for-a-subject or intentional object (of mental representation: perception or thought).

"[A]n object is not just a property-bearer, but is also not itself capable of being borne or possessed in the sense that properties are. In other words, if we allow there to be, at least in principle, a hierarchy of property-bearing entities of ascending orders, then objects are to be characterized as being those entities that occupy the lowest level of this hierarchy, or as being of order zero. First-order properties are then properties of objects, second-order properties are properties of properties of objects, and so on. This way of conceiving of objects is Aristotelian in spirit, because it represents objects as having at least one hallmark of Aristotelian individual substances. However, not all objects, thus conceived, qualify as Aristotelian individual substances, because the latter are additionally conceived as being, in a certain sense, ontologically independent entities." (p. 72)

Objects are "individual property-bearers of order zero." (p. 85)

(Lowe, E. J. The Four-Category Ontology: A Metaphysical Foundation for Natural Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.)

[Consul]

Objects are "individual property-bearers of order zero." (p. 85)
(Lowe, E. J. The Four-Category Ontology: A Metaphysical Foundation for Natural Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.)

Interestingly, the term "subject" ("subiectum" in Latin as the translation of the Greek "hypokeimenon" as used by Aristotle) was originally used in the same general sense as the ontological term "object" (as defined above), i.e. synonymously with "substratum"/"substrate" or "substantia"/"substance". In this older sense, a subject qua property-bearer (of order zero) needn't have any mental properties; that is, an ontological subject needn't be a psychological subject.

[Tamminen]

The concept of ontological objectivity does not [presuppose subjectivity]!

Here we disagree. We cannot get rid of subjectivity even here. There is a fundamental ontological dependence between objectivity and subjectivity.

On the fundamental role of subjectivity:

I can say "I exist" and "The world exists". These are tautologies, but they make sense, because there is logical space for them. Logical space extends as far as there are subjects, so that anyone else can say these sentences instead of me. We can say many weird things within logical space, like "The Moon is made of cheese", and they make sense. But logical space does not extend beyond subjects. The sentence "The world could as well be without subjects" does not make sense, because it removes the logical space it stands in. Saying it is a logical suicide. Remember that there is only one world. If there were two worlds and I lived in one of them, I could say: "There are perhaps no inhabitants in that other world", and there would be no problem with that.

Only God could make a world with no inhabitants. Then He would be the Subject. If there is no God, the world must be inhabited.

[BigBango]

I certainly agree with Tamminen. There is no world without subjects.

What we all need to come to terms with is that "panpsychism", a subject for every object as in Whitehead, is not the case. If we consider a "galaxy" perceived by us as "subjects" then we must address both the materialistic essence of its black hole centers and the subjects that have escaped their galaxies physical deterministic evolution and or demise.

We are not just "subjects" we are survivors of a materialism that is real and we carry our values forward into an uncertain future.

[Consul]

There is a fundamental ontological dependence between objectivity and subjectivity.

No, there isn't; and there is no sound argument for your assertion.

On the fundamental role of subjectivity:

I can say "I exist" and "The world exists". These are tautologies, but they make sense, because there is logical space for them. Logical space extends as far as there are subjects, so that anyone else can say these sentences instead of me. We can say many weird things within logical space, like "The Moon is made of cheese", and they make sense. But logical space does not extend beyond subjects. The sentence "The world could as well be without subjects" does not make sense, because it removes the logical space it stands in. Saying it is a logical suicide.

I'd like to see your logical proof (reductio ad absurdum)!

Remember that there is only one world. If there were two worlds and I lived in one of them, I could say: "There are perhaps no inhabitants in that other world", and there would be no problem with that. Only God could make a world with no inhabitants. Then He would be the Subject. If there is no God, the world must be inhabited.

No, it need not. Nothing you write explains the alleged "fundamental ontological dependence between objectivity and subjectivity" in a coherent and plausible way, especially as it's definitely not a logical law.

[Karpel Tunnel]

There is a fundamental ontological dependence between objectivity and subjectivity.

No, there isn't; and there is no sound argument for your assertion.

Right off the bat, at the very least, it depends on what he means. But going by the words. Objectivity is dependent on subjectivity, since the only way to reach what get called objective opinions is via subjective observations (for empiricists) or subjective insights (for Rationalists - that is those who believe experience is not necessary to gain knowledge).

Whether objects are dependent on the existence of subjects is a tricky thing to prove or disprove.

But going just by that quote of Tamminens above and the words chosen, I would have to agree on that issue. Actually I am not sure subjectivity is dependent on objectivity. Need to mull.

[Sculptor1]

Actually I am not sure subjectivity is dependent on objectivity. Need to mull.

Since it is subjects that determine what is or is not objective, it seem to me that the dependancy goes in one way.

Cold hard, unobserved reality does in fact exist, though I cannot prove it. When I walk in a forest I can see where trees have, in fact, fallen unwitnessed. However it is an abuse of language to say that the tree fell down objectively, since objectivity is a method used by subjects to mitigate against the idiosyncrasies of personal observance. Objectivity does not exist without the subjects to investigate and apply the method.

Objectivity and subjectivity are nothing if not human conceits, and conception requires (subjective) agents.