(February 20, 2021 at 4:46 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(February 20, 2021 at 4:07 pm)Apollo Wrote: The list goes on. Underneath everything some law of physics is at play.
I agree; but at each level of the hierarchy scientists are responsible for more information about the things that precede it, than the previous step in the ladder. In an introductory class to perception we had to begin with the physics of light and lenses, the chemistry inside photoreceptors, the neuroscience of the brain and retina, until we were finally in a position to study the psychology of perception.
Physicists have no need to study biology, consciousness, and behavior to be physicists. I know from sitting in an interdisciplinary classroom with neuroscience students, that even neuroscientists themselves are less familiar with psychology than psychologists are with neuroscience. Likewise neuroscientists are more familiar with biology and chemistry than biologist and chemistry are with neuroscience and psychology. And the gap grows larger the further down you travel.
Sean Carroll is too far down the ladder.
Right. So these (biology, psychology etc) are all emergent disciplines based off of physics— what this means is that while you may have many emergent properties on the way (mind, psychosis, consciousness ) as you move up from basic building blocks (particles, forces), when go in reverse, drilling down, many such emergent properties start disappearing and when you get to the very basic you’re left with fundamental properties of nature (spin, charge, mass).
You go even further and you’re merely left with quantum fields which aren’t even represented by some physical property. So even atom is at some level an emergent phenomenon—Sean is taking the most common denominator emergent level (particle level) that applies to all our reality and basically asking the question, which properties exist at this level that further give rise to all other properties of reality and when we look at those properties we don’t see the biological level properties. We only see the fundamental level (mass, spin, angular momentum, charge, symmetry) properties.
If consciousness was a property that existed at this level then we’d have found it or there was some theory based off of some phenomenon at that level that would have come out of it. But philosophers keep saying consciousness exists universally vis a vis panpsychism but they don’t have any reason to propose such hypothesis based off of the fundamental properties of nature at particles and quantum field levels.
