The Category Error of Scientism

[Mudhammam]

So let me get this straight... our linguistic limitations and current lack of a robust theory of consciousness...means God dune it?

[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.

[Odysseus]

I think you're incorrect in that you can correlate which "moral" relationships individuals are prone to using big data, fMRI, and other measuring methods such as biological sensors. This will not help you create a morality in the sense that it will tell you how to behave, but it will tell you the actual "moral" relationships people are in and how they are influenced by circumstance, genetics, and other variables.

[Mister Agenda]

People who are too literal are more prone to category errors. Normal people can understand what is actually meant even if the language gets a little wiggly. The problem isn't with the person who makes a statement that can be interpreted as indicating that a forest has intentionality, the problem is with the person who interprets it that way.

[Neo-Scholastic]

MFM, thank you for your intelligent response. Based on your reply, I offer the following expansions on my summary objections. The extra detail should address you objections.

Part of the difficulty I have with most emergence theories about the mind-body problem is that the properties they claim to have emerged are not truly novel properties, but rather variants of the same physical processes with which they started. For example, you could say that the structural properties of an I-beam are emergent properties that cannot be reduced to those of the steel itself. This is not the case, structural analysis describes how different physical shapes distribute force vectors throughout the steel. An I-beam does not have any novel properties that raw steel does not. Structural properties are shorthand descriptions of the force vector sums

Clearly, an I-beam does not qualify as a truly complex system. Because of its relative simplicity an architect, like me, can predict its behavior. Usually, proponents of emergent properties use examples like weather patterns. All parts of the atmosphere have pressure, direction and particle velocity. A tornado expresses the same physical properties as the general atmosphere: pressure, direction and air pressure. No truly novel properties appear. The inability to predict the behavior of a complex physical system is an epistemological problem, not evidence for a specific ontology.

I grant that system wide structures of the whole do constrain the behaviors of the parts. For example, the movement a clock’s gears and springs are limited by an some pendulum-like part. As a complete and complex system, a clock limits the movements of the parts in specific directions and its structure allows the parts to interact with each other. But as a physical entity, the clock and the parts that compose it share all the same types of physical properties: mass, velocity, etc. Anything else, like functions (governors) or significance (the meaning of the hand positions), both of which are non-physical, must be assigned from the outside by a knowing subject.

The above supports my contention that emergence theories are in actuality reductive. And I believe all reduction theories are based on magic. The philosopher-magician waves a wand of complexity and a rabbit of awareness suddenly appears is a shower of confetti. The dualist position I advocate says that the rabbit was already there, hidden from sight. Thinkers like Dennett and Churchland believe they can divide psychological events into small bits of intentionality until they go POOF and disappear altogether. A very small amount of intentionality is still intentionality. Dualists accept that intentionality is as much a part of reality as matter and energy. They don’t try to make it disappear to with smoke and mirrors.

Suppose for example that a single neuron firing acts similarly (though obviously not exactly) like a digital switch. Whether the switch is open or closed has no significance. An open switch does not in-itself mean “1” or “0”, “yes” or “no”, or even “left” or “right”. This agrees with most reductionist theories. Ganging a bunch of switches together, no matter how complex, does not generate an inherently meaningful display of lights. But the reductionist wants to insert meaning for free without justification.

The display is a particular physical feature, a sign, that has no significance until a knowing subject supplies meaning and significance from outside the system.

Now I am NOT saying that personal identify cannot be deconstructed into smaller psychological sub-systems. I think they can, like understanding the perception of color by combining the sensations of hue, saturation, and tonal value. Or anxiety as fear conjoined with uncertainty about the future.

[MindForgedManacle]

Most of what you said is somewhat confused from not reading the entirety of my post in context. Sure, some emergentist theories of, well, anything are reductionist, but certainly not all of them. As I said earlier, there are in fact non-reductionist physicalist theories of mind in philosophy of mind. Otherwise, even emergentist positions are, again, not inherently or even probably reductionist. Thermodynamics is an emergent system that cannot, for example, be reduced to quantum mechanics. It cannot be found there, yet when one scales up to larger systems it's patently there, an example of a complex system not reducible to its constituents.

However, I can't actually remember if that's true. I might just be wrongly remembering something Steven Weinberg said in the "Moving Naturalism Forward" summit.

[Odysseus]

You're incorrect, in the case of the brain quantum processes in microtubules lead to interference that causes EEG which is completely distinct, novel, and a new level of complexity beyond what any individual neuron could create. Even a long string of neurons chained together would -never- form this pattern.

http://www.elsevier.com/about/press-rele...sciousness

[MindForgedManacle]

I'm sorry, but the article you site is referring to a long-since discredited hypothesis whose opposing evidence is too massive to take it (Orch-OR) seriously.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Even still Ody has a point. Current reduction theories have not moved past 19th century physics. The Penrose Hammer off theory is just the first of many quantum based theories.

[Anomalocaris]

What wooters is trying to say is the measure of science ought to be whether science would humor the whims of one Chad Wooters.

Since science had 100 years in which to humor wooters, but yet wooters has not been humored, therefore it is obvious that science is stagnant and wrong.

Science must be wrong because the alternative - a self-important baffoon like Wooters, WOOTERS, for sooth, could possibly have been a moron for thinking his whim is worth humoring - is impossible, in wooter's infallible opinion.