The Category Error of Scientism

[MindForgedManacle]

Then you should not have included in your definition the phrase “best interests”. Best is a value judgment. Interests refer to goals.

Okay, now you're splitting hairs despite clearly realizing what I mean. Want a better one? Okay: "Objectively promoting the survival and/or propagation of the organism and/or species".

I take it you do not see epiphenomenalism as a problem.

Whether or not I do is irrelevant. It's a potential way to solve the problem, regardless of if I hold to it.

In some sense, you can measure qualitative properties. You could perform a survey of people’s job satisfaction in the office. The soft sciences rely on this kind of data. I contend that this data is not empirical and puts the data of the soft sciences into a different category. You aren’t dealing with features of physical reality, but rather psychological responses to reality.

...The data that you specifically obtained through entirely empirical means (a survey) is not empirical? ...Lol. Anyway, I can?t really see what this has to do with what you were responding to.

The metaphysical naturalist may assume that these psychological responses have an unspecified physical basis. A fully physical basis for qualitative properties would propose that such properties are one of the following: 1) emergent, 2) reductive, 3) illusory, or 4) some combination of these.

Good options.

Main objection to 1): Most proponents of emergence use emergent properties as shorthand descriptions for complex and unpredictable physical interactions. It’s mostly a semantic veneer on a reductionist position. No novel properties or processes actually appear. Which gives you position 2)…

Well, no. Most proponents of emergence use it as a shorthand for complex, unpredictabable, physical interactions... about things that are not found in any of the particular parts, and yet the whole. So you're statement that it's essentially an obfuscated reductionist position is patently false. After all, non-reductive physicalist positions on the mind are emergentist positions, and yet not reductionist (and emphatically so, given the name).

Main objection to 2) Reductionist theories claim that mental processes are identical to physical processes. That is the thrust of this thread. Reduction is a bare assertion. No one has yet supplied a way to translate first-person qualitative experiences into fully quantitative observations without leaving out that which needs to be explained. Which gives you position 3)…

I think reductionists would say that you're actually obfuscating by saying there is something else to explain if they've quantitatively explained something. I'd presume that they'd specifically say that if they explain the how and why of conscious experience, the experience itself has been explained.

Main objection to 3) Position 3 is incoherent . If psychological properties are illusions, just a trick of the brain, then of what are they illusions. This is a case where the “illusion” is the phenomena to be explained. You cannot explain the existence of something by saying that it does not actually exist.

I suppose they would say that aren't illusions 'of' something at all.

Main objection to 4) If none of the above are viable then no combination of them would be either.

While the metaphysical naturalist position has the advantage of parsimony, its aesthetic appeal is about all it has. That’s a very weak hand. Moreover parsimony cuts both ways. You could just as easily say that all physical properties reduce to mental ones. The measurements you take of reality come to you through your subjective experience of them. Perhaps physical reality is the illusion and does not exist apart from observation. If some form of monism is true then you face the dilemma of “no matter, never mind.”

Not really interested in getting into a realist-idealist debate, to be honest. It's really just metaphysical masturbation that Kant sort of prevented from ever climaxing.

I will consider both mental and physical properties to be distinct and real phenomena, which is what they appear to be, until there is some actual evidence or proof to the contrary. At this point, you may suggest that if my dualist position relies entirely on my objections to rival theories then it is an argument from ignorance. Since when is it an argument from ignorance to suppose that things are as they appear until shown otherwise. The burden of proof is always on the side of the counterintuitive theory.

Because to suppose that things are as they appear to be is just pragmatic methodology, but not truth. Color appears to be part of objects, and it's an entirely counter-intuitive truth that in fact it is not. The reasons why it's [dualism] is bollocks is because it's explanatorily vacuous (it doesn't solve the problems dualists instantiate for monist positions) and it is not at all obvious to everyone.

As a matter of fact, my positive claims follow from this fact: everything known to exist, exists as something. Thus every object embodies two principles: 1) a propensity to exist and 2) an informing essence. Thus to know about a thing is to simultaneously recognize both its being and something about it. Now you could say that an identity is something we assignas a way to to parcel up reality. If that were true then the underlying reality is a seamless continuum. Differentiation of that continuum is arbitrary and illusory. Contrasted with this, I believe differentiation occurs at a higher level. Objects retain their identity even in the absence of a particular knowing subject, i.e. if no one sees the tree in the forest, it is still a tree. Or to say it another way, things retain their essential being while undergoing change.

This is I think entirely unfounded. What we parcel up as some objects identity is completely funnelled through our sensory perception and/or our ability to cognize, analyze and perhaps understand it. And yet we know that much of what we receive through the senses is streamlined chunks of sense data, delivered imperfectly and without most of the information possible to obtain (different wavelengths of light, dissapated smells, sounds above a certain frequency, etc.). Even of things we attempt to cognize we don't necessarily do so fully, and certainly not all at once.