My sympathies for pantheism

[sven]

"Physics does not content itself with being a mere mass of observations about positions, velocities, and charges of various objects at various times; it systematizes these observations and shows how they are consequences of underlying laws, where the underlying laws are as simple and as powerful as possible. The same should hold of a theory of consciousness." - David Chalmers

I read this quote a minute ago that basically captures all of my sympathies for pantheism, although I suppose the line between that and deism more accurately describes where I'd tread if I ever felt compelled to make that leap. Chalmers himself takes the position of "naturalistic dualism," arguing in this book (The Conscious Mind) that "the cornerstone of a theory of consciousness will be a set of psychophysical laws governing the relationship between consciousness and physical systems." Furthermore he says (to my relief), "There need be nothing especially supernatural about these laws. They are part of the basic furniture of nature, just as the laws of physics are. There will be something "brute" about them, it is true. At some level, the laws will have to be taken as true and not further explained. But the same holds in physics: the ultimate laws of nature will always at some point seem arbitrary. It is this that makes them laws of nature rather than laws of logic." (bold mine)

Fascinating shit, at least in my opinion (maybe it's cause I just smoked resin). I don't think he makes the case for dualism sufficiently at all, at least not yet, but I appreciate the way he thinks about the problem and his approach to it. I still have to side with the reductive functionalists when it comes to the mind-brain question.

Everything is fascinating shit when you've just smoked resin. At least if its sativa.
I have to say the part you bolded fails to compute for me. Aren't the 'laws of logic' at least to a great extent based on our observations of nature? I believe that our brains are part of the cosmos (or nature, if you will), and our minds are products of our brains.

[Mudhammam]

Hey,

I don't understand how this quote has anything to do with pantheism, or constitutes an argument for it. Am I missing something?

Well, more the general idea that there are something like fundamental psychophysical laws that somehow work together with fundamental physical laws to give rise to consciousness. At bottom I can see where some might be inclined to view this as some form of the powerful permeating consciousness that people call God, though it is indistinguishable from what others simply call Mother Nature.

I'm not suggesting that Chalmers is arguing or implying pantheism but more simply that I can see why pantheists might find his naturalistic dualism compatible or confirmatory of their intuitions.

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Everything is fascinating shit when you've just smoked resin. At least if its sativa.
I have to say the part you bolded fails to compute for me. Aren't the 'laws of logic' at least to a great extent based on our observations of nature? I believe that our brains are part of the cosmos (or nature, if you will), and our minds are products of our brains.

Yeah but do the laws of logic constrain Nature or merely our brains, that is, the representational content that we perceive and organize through the principles of identity, non-contradiction, etc.?

For example, I've heard it stated that electrons are both everywhere and nowhere. To me that makes no logical sense but unless something drastically different than my understanding of that statement is intended to be conveyed, I just have to assume that there are aspects of reality that human brains simply cannot compute because they did not evolve to do so.

[ShaMan]

(maybe it's cause I just smoked resin).

Say it isn't so...

You know that resin is god, right? RIGHT!?

[sven]

[quote='Alex K' pid='638353' dateline='1396016335']

Yeah but do the laws of logic constrain Nature or merely our brains, that is, the representational content that we perceive and organize through the principles of identity, non-contradiction, etc.?

For example, I've heard it stated that electrons are both everywhere and nowhere. To me that makes no logical sense but unless something drastically different than my understanding of that statement is intended to be conveyed, I just have to assume that there are aspects of reality that human brains simply cannot compute because they did not evolve to do so.

Hm. I thought the 'strangeness' was that electrons can be in two places at the same time, that they are somewhat like waves. A wave can hit two different parts of a beach at the same time. My knowledge of quantum mechanics is sketchy at best, however.
I believe you are right, in a way. But I try not to confuse logic and common sense. Logical conclusions can be very counter-intuitive.

[Mudhammam]

Alex? Lol. He's our resident physicist.

[Alex K]

I don't understand your statement about the laws of physics constraining our brains vs nature yet, but it sounds deep, ill get back to it later...

Concerning the electrons, the strange thing indeed is that they behave like waves as long as you are not trying to measure their position, at which point they suddenly stop behaving like waves. The classical example is the double slit: the many dots on the screen from the individual photons are distributed like a interference pattern, but as soon as you try to find out through which slit they go individually, the interference pattern goes away. If you study the mathematics of quantum mechanics a bit, you learn a language which helps you to organize these thoughts in your head, something that is I think much harder if you lack this tool. I agree that we aren't evolved to understand it, but I don't think it is impossible to grasp at least the important aspects of it, or not more impossible than any complicated physical system. I think today's leading experts on quantum information, entanglement, tests of qm and so on, understand quantum mechanics much better than did its inventors, or even the generation of feynman and co.

[sven]

I don't understand your statement about the laws of physics constraining our brains vs nature yet, but it sounds deep, ill get back to it later...

Concerning the electrons, the strange thing indeed is that they behave like waves as long as you are not trying to measure their position, at which point they suddenly stop behaving like waves.

But how do you know they behave like waves if you can't measure their positions without them ceasing to behave like waves!? Maybe I should search the cloud for more info.
This is some fucked up shit. See what I mean about counter-intuitive?
Really interesting stuff, though.

[Mudhammam]

I don't understand your statement about the laws of physics constraining our brains vs nature yet, but it sounds deep, ill get back to it later...

Not the laws of physics per se, but the principles of logic by which we organize our input of data into a neat, concise, coherent picture. It seems to me, as counterintuitive as it may sound, that our account of natural laws could be limited to our processing capabilities and not necessarily indicative of nature itself. But that is admittedly pure speculation and I don't know if it could be anything else.

[Angrboda]

I don't understand your statement about the laws of physics constraining our brains vs nature yet, but it sounds deep, ill get back to it later...

Concerning the electrons, the strange thing indeed is that they behave like waves as long as you are not trying to measure their position, at which point they suddenly stop behaving like waves.

But how do you know they behave like waves if you can't measure their positions without them ceasing to behave like waves!? Maybe I should search the cloud for more info.

Read the Wikipedia entry for the double slit experiment. (And unrelated but relevant, also read about the photoelectric effect (here).

Other atomic-scale entities such as electrons are found to exhibit the same [wave-like] behavior when fired toward a double slit.

[Alex K]

rasetsu, you seem to know your way around the physics, are you involved with the subject?

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I don't understand your statement about the laws of physics constraining our brains vs nature yet, but it sounds deep, ill get back to it later...

Concerning the electrons, the strange thing indeed is that they behave like waves as long as you are not trying to measure their position, at which point they suddenly stop behaving like waves.

But how do you know they behave like waves if you can't measure their positions without them ceasing to behave like waves!? Maybe I should search the cloud for more info.
This is some fucked up shit. See what I mean about counter-intuitive?
Really interesting stuff, though.

It boils down to repeating the experiment very often. The shape of the wave will emerge, eventhough every single measurement only gets you a localized point on the screen. It is not clear whether the wave is real in any sense, because we can only ever observe it in a statistical way. It boils down to which interpretation of qm you use, my favorite subject