A criticism of supervenience-based physicalism

[pftest]

I am under the impression that people generally believe supervenience to be a physicalist view on consciousness, whereas i think it is the opposite. In the wikipedia link below, there are 4 criticisms of supervenience-based physicalism. The one I'm talking about here isn't mentioned, so i want to put it up for scrutiny.

Supervenience:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervenience
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/supervenience/


In the wikipedia link, on the right side you can see an image that says:

[CENTER]LEVELS OF EXISTENCE
____________________
social groups
|
living things
|
cells
|
molecules
|
atoms
|
elementary particles
____________________
[SIZE="1"]The upper levels on this chart can be considered to supervene on the lower levels.[/CENTER]

I think this image illustrates where it goes wrong. It starts right at the top where it says "levels of existence". I think this should be "levels of description". The molecule-level is a higher level description than the atom-level. These descriptions are conceptualisations, done by human minds. Physically, there is only one level of existence, the lowest one, and all the other levels can be said to consist of that. Cells consist of molecules, molecules consist of atoms, atoms consist of elementary particles. So they are " = " relationships. A human mind can introduce an arbitrary number of new levels of description, but this has no physical consequence as the elementary particles are still just elementary particles.

When it is said that mind supervenes on brain, it translates to mind = brain, meaning: mind = a group elementary particles, meaning: a group of elementary particles = mind. That means mind has been around as long as those particles have, not to mention the universal nature of the properties of elementary particles. The loophole to avoid this was the view that mind somehow exists at a higher level, but my argument above is that such higher levels are purely conceptual, so they depend on a mind to exist and cannot have come about without mind.

 

[Ferris_bg]

I think your example illustrates emergence. And supervenience does not always entail emergence.

Supervenience condition: Two systems engaged in the same physical activity will produce identical mentality (if they produce any at all).

And, yes, I completely agree that emergence is a psychological property.

Weak emergence is a type of emergence in which the emergent property is reducible to its individual constituents. This is opposed to strong emergence, in which the emergent property is irreducible to its individual constituents.

Emergence: Properties of a complex physical system are emergent just in case they are neither (i) properties had by any parts of the system taken in isolation nor (ii) resultant of a mere summation of properties of parts of the system.

As, stated by Kim:

[Ontological physicalism] All that exists in the spacetime world are the basic particles recognized in physics and their aggregates.

[Property emergence] When aggregates of material particles attain an appropriate level of structural complexity ("relatedness"), genuinely novel properties emerge to characterize these structured systems.

[The irreducibility of the emergents] Emergent properties are irreducible to, and unpredictable from, the lower-level phenomena from which they emerge.

 

[Maui]

[The irreducibility of the emergents] Emergent properties are irreducible to, and unpredictable from, the lower-level phenomena from which they emerge.

An example of strong emergence irreducible to anything is the ability of humans to make predictions(not counting the ridiculous stance that the Big Bang could be an explanation because of determinism/causality)

 

[pftest]

I think your example illustrates emergence. And supervenience does not always entail emergence.

To me they seem like the same thing, just worded differently.

One could say molecules emerge from atoms.
Or that molecules supervene on atoms.

 

[pftest]

An example of strong emergence irreducible to anything is the ability of humans to make predictions(not counting the ridiculous stance that the Big Bang could be an explanation because of determinism/causality)

But we don't know if mind emerged, so that isn't really a valid example. In order to find out if emergence or supervenience are natural explanations of mind, an example of emergence/supervenience occurring in the natural world is required.

 

[Maui]

But we don't know if mind emerged, so that isn't really a valid example. In order to find out if emergence or supervenience are natural explanations of mind, an example of emergence/supervenience occurring in the natural world is required.

I didn't say 'mind' and lots of novel traits and behavior can in principle emerge from purely physical interactions(the brain can act in novel ways even if minds didn't exist).

 

[apeiron]

When it is said that mind supervenes on brain, it translates to mind = brain, meaning: mind = a group elementary particles, meaning: a group of elementary particles = mind. That means mind has been around as long as those particles have, not to mention the universal nature of the properties of elementary particles. The loophole to avoid this was the view that mind somehow exists at a higher level, but my argument above is that such higher levels are purely conceptual, so they depend on a mind to exist and cannot have come about without mind.

What this way of looking at it misses is that these levels of existence are interactions across different spatiotemporal scale. And that makes all the difference to the argument.

So it seems just commonsense that a particular arrangement of brain particles always will yield the exact same higher level mental state. Lower level state B picks out higher level state A.

But the material description picks out a global state of organisation only at that one particular instant of time. And if that global level is "doing its own thing" causally - if it is not just a deterministic clockwork - then state B does not equal state A for more than that fleeting instant.

What you are claiming would only hold true for a supervenient relation plus strong determinism - the first to tie things down in the spatial domain (the realm of "definite existence"), the second as an additional claimed constraint to nail things down in the temporal domain (the realm of global dynamics or the potential for change).

The original meaning of supervenience was an attempt to go beyond simple-minded determinism and talk about holism or organic unity. So the stress was on the asymmetric nature of the relationship. Lower level states could pick out a higher level state at an instant, but not for all time. Higher level states had their own stuff going on that lower level description just could not see. And this higher level stuff - the essence of the global level - was thus multi-realisable. No reason why other lower level states could not pick it out as well.

If you use an example like the living things~social groups one mentioned here, you can see it is a local~global spatiotemporal relationship. Incan society supervenes on Incan individuals. There is some general cultural understanding and framework that develops over many generations that comes to define Incan - not just as an anthopologist's conceptual label but as an actual fact of the world. There is an Incan-making machinery that exists. Humans born at that place and time will be made into Incans with great inevitability (though not, of course, complete deterministic certainty).

And also, all the Inca that exist at some instant in history would seem to equate to "Incan society". All that they are, all that they do, sums back up to the collective whole - at least for that moment. And so you can imagine twin universes with the exact same lower level state (the same collection of individuals in the same environmental circumstances) and the same higher level state (Incan society) would have to exist in both worlds. (But not for all time, as left to their own devices, those two worlds will start to diverge - come back 500 years later and "Incan" would look unpredictably different, no matter how indiscernible the two initial states).

The problem with debates about consciousness is that consciousness is framed by most people in an a-temporal fashion. Consciousness just is a state of awareness at some instant. And so if conciousness is going to have any "higher level stuff going on" - such as downward causality or freewill control - then this has to happen instantaneously as well. Which of course is logically incoherent. And leads immediately to all the difficulties people have.

 

[Q_Goest]

Hi pftest,
I think this is basically a misunderstanding of what supervenience means.

When it is said that mind supervenes on brain, it translates to mind = brain, meaning: mind = a group elementary particles, meaning: a group of elementary particles = mind. That means mind has been around as long as those particles have, not to mention the universal nature of the properties of elementary particles. The loophole to avoid this was the view that mind somehow exists at a higher level, but my argument above is that such higher levels are purely conceptual, so they depend on a mind to exist and cannot have come about without mind.

You say the elementary particles have been around [presumably since some beginning], not to mention the universal nature of those particles, so I believe your argument is that since these particles have been around all that time, minds should have been around all that time and since minds obviously haven't been around all that time, minds can't be physical. Is that correct?

You could say the same for aircraft though, or buildings or anything. The particles that make up those things have been around so buildings and aircraft must have been around all that time.

Here's where I think the confusion is. Note that when we say something is supervenient on something else, we're not talking about it simply existing or being composed of something else. Supervenience is a property relationship. There has to be a property which is a function of its physical basis in order to use the term 'supervenience'. We say that some given property A supervenes on some organization of matter only if a change to that property A requires a change to the organization of the matter of which it's composed. For example, the hardness of a diamond is supervenient on the way the particles are assembled, so to change the hardness of the diamond, you have to change the way the particles are assembled. Supervenience isn't a 'made up of' relationship, it is a relationship that picks out a given property and says that particular property can't change without a change to its base. Given that supervenience picks out property relationships which are a function of something's physical configuration, we can't say there should be a property we call mental states without a physical configuration we call a brain. We have to have the physical configuration first, before we can say the property exists. Then we can say the property supervenes on its physical basis if and only if that property requires a change to that physical basis in order for the property to change.

 

[Pythagorean]

When it is said that mind supervenes on brain, it translates to mind = brain. meaning: mind = a group elementary particles, meaning: a group of elementary particles = mind

Supervenience is not an equivalence statement. Supervenience is a unidirectional statement; one supervenes on the other: mental states supervene on physical states.

In the other direction, several different physical states can map to a single mental state; this is called "degeneracy" and it is exhibited (at least functionally) in neural system. See Eve Marder's work:

Multiple models to capture the variability in biological neurons and networks
Eve Marder & Adam L Taylor
Nature Neuroscience 14, 133–138 (2011) doi:10.1038/nn.2735

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v14/n2/full/nn.2735.html

 

[pftest]

What this way of looking at it misses is that these levels of existence are interactions across different spatiotemporal scale. And that makes all the difference to the argument.

So it seems just commonsense that a particular arrangement of brain particles always will yield the exact same higher level mental state. Lower level state B picks out higher level state A.

But the material description picks out a global state of organisation only at that one particular instant of time. And if that global level is "doing its own thing" causally - if it is not just a deterministic clockwork - then state B does not equal state A for more than that fleeting instant.

What you are claiming would only hold true for a supervenient relation plus strong determinism - the first to tie things down in the spatial domain (the realm of "definite existence"), the second as an additional claimed constraint to nail things down in the temporal domain (the realm of global dynamics or the potential for change).

The original meaning of supervenience was an attempt to go beyond simple-minded determinism and talk about holism or organic unity. So the stress was on the asymmetric nature of the relationship. Lower level states could pick out a higher level state at an instant, but not for all time. Higher level states had their own stuff going on that lower level description just could not see. And this higher level stuff - the essence of the global level - was thus multi-realisable. No reason why other lower level states could not pick it out as well.

If you use an example like the living things~social groups one mentioned here, you can see it is a local~global spatiotemporal relationship. Incan society supervenes on Incan individuals. There is some general cultural understanding and framework that develops over many generations that comes to define Incan - not just as an anthopologist's conceptual label but as an actual fact of the world. There is an Incan-making machinery that exists. Humans born at that place and time will be made into Incans with great inevitability (though not, of course, complete deterministic certainty).

And also, all the Inca that exist at some instant in history would seem to equate to "Incan society". All that they are, all that they do, sums back up to the collective whole - at least for that moment. And so you can imagine twin universes with the exact same lower level state (the same collection of individuals in the same environmental circumstances) and the same higher level state (Incan society) would have to exist in both worlds. (But not for all time, as left to their own devices, those two worlds will start to diverge - come back 500 years later and "Incan" would look unpredictably different, no matter how indiscernible the two initial states).

It would help if there was a clear example of physical supervenience, preferably a very simple system which can be understood quickly. "Incan society" is not really a suited example because it includes conscious beings and so cannot be understood in mere physical terms. What i suspect is going on here, is that the human mind makes an abstraction of the myriad of incan individuals, and then calls this mental abstraction "incan society". So like i said in my first post, it is a higher level description, not a higher level of physical existence.

 

[pftest]

I didn't say 'mind' and lots of novel traits and behavior can in principle emerge from purely physical interactions(the brain can act in novel ways even if minds didn't exist).

Predicting is a mental activity, like dreaming, thinking, doing math, etc. We have no idea if it emerged.

 

[pftest]

Hi pftest,
I think this is basically a misunderstanding of what supervenience means.

You say the elementary particles have been around [presumably since some beginning], not to mention the universal nature of those particles, so I believe your argument is that since these particles have been around all that time, minds should have been around all that time and since minds obviously haven't been around all that time, minds can't be physical. Is that correct?

Actually I am not saying minds haven't been around all that time, I am saying that supervenience entails that they have been.

You could say the same for aircraft though, or buildings or anything. The particles that make up those things have been around so buildings and aircraft must have been around all that time.

Yes, but the thing is that "aircraft" is a higher level description, while physically it is a collection of particles at a spatiotemporal position. We can say that those particles have been around in different spatiotemporal positions. If we want to talk about the immediate postbigbang situation in terms of higher level descriptions, then we might say that "diluted" or "distorted" aircraft were around at that time. In the end "aircraft" is just an arbitrary label. If the aircraft loses one screw, we arbitrarily still call it an aircraft. If its particles are distorted to a postbigbang mess, we arbitrarily might also still call it an aircraft.

Here's where I think the confusion is. Note that when we say something is supervenient on something else, we're not talking about it simply existing or being composed of something else. Supervenience is a property relationship. There has to be a property which is a function of its physical basis in order to use the term 'supervenience'. We say that some given property A supervenes on some organization of matter only if a change to that property A requires a change to the organization of the matter of which it's composed. For example, the hardness of a diamond is supervenient on the way the particles are assembled, so to change the hardness of the diamond, you have to change the way the particles are assembled. Supervenience isn't a 'made up of' relationship, it is a relationship that picks out a given property and says that particular property can't change without a change to its base. Given that supervenience picks out property relationships which are a function of something's physical configuration, we can't say there should be a property we call mental states without a physical configuration we call a brain. We have to have the physical configuration first, before we can say the property exists. Then we can say the property supervenes on its physical basis if and only if that property requires a change to that physical basis in order for the property to change.

Im glad you bring up an exampler. Let's focus on the hardness of a diamond. I believe this to be basically nothing more than an arrangement of particles and forces. To a human hand, a diamond may feel hard, it may feel smooth, other materials may feel squishy, wet, etc., but physically it all boils down to the arrangement of particles and forces. So it is an "=" relationship.

Remember in your previous post to me you mentioned your "pet-rock"? I am still wondering why you mention the pet rock, as opposed to an ordinary rock.

 

[pftest]

Supervenience is not an equivalence statement. Supervenience is a unidirectional statement; one supervenes on the other: mental states supervene on physical states.

In the other direction, several different physical states can map to a single mental state; this is called "degeneracy" and it is exhibited (at least functionally) in neural system. See Eve Marder's work:

Multiple models to capture the variability in biological neurons and networks
Eve Marder & Adam L Taylor
Nature Neuroscience 14, 133–138 (2011) doi:10.1038/nn.2735

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v14/n2/full/nn.2735.html

Im looking for an example of purely physical supervenience, which can demonstrate that supervenience is an actual physical type of relationship. That would demonstrate that "mind supervenes on brain" is a physicalist statement. Both examples of supervenience you give here are examples of mind supervening on brain. So they are disqualified as examples, because it would be begging the question: "mind can physically supervene on brain, because physical supervenience is possible, as is demonstrated by mind supervening on brain".

 

[Ferris_bg]

pftest, no one knows if mind supervene on brain, that's just the physicalist position. So when one attempts to defend it, one assumes this as true and goes on from there. I can say mind supervene on legs then you can say "yeah, but people with no legs still have minds". Then I can say prove it to me. And you can't, because we still don't have a working model about what consciousness is. And while there are plenty of people trying to find a way to study it objectively, there are also plenty of people seeking through logic on what this phenomenon may depend. That's why there are many philosophers who work as part of neuroscience projects and consciousness is the holy grail of science.

 

[Q_Goest]

Hi pftest,

Actually I am not saying minds haven't been around all that time, I am saying that supervenience entails that they have been.

Ok, thanks for clarifying.

Yes, but the thing is that "aircraft" is a higher level description, while physically it is a collection of particles at a spatiotemporal position. We can say that those particles have been around in different spatiotemporal positions. If we want to talk about the immediate postbigbang situation in terms of higher level descriptions, then we might say that "diluted" or "distorted" aircraft were around at that time. In the end "aircraft" is just an arbitrary label. If the aircraft loses one screw, we arbitrarily still call it an aircraft. If its particles are distorted to a postbigbang mess, we arbitrarily might also still call it an aircraft.

Agreed. However, the objectively observable properties that an aircraft might have do not exist in this "diluted" or "distorted" aircraft. That's why I don't like the "Levels of Existence" chart given by Wikipedia. It's confusing. For supervenience, we have to pick out some physical property, not simply the 'level of existence'. The only way to make the Wikipedia chart make sense is to explain it this way:
1. Social groups have properties that are dependent on living individuals such that those properties can't change without a change to the living individuals. (can't think of a good example here)
2. Living individuals have properties that are dependent on cells such that those properties can't change without a change to the cells. (ex: The strength of a muscle is a function of the cells out of which its composed. Not a good example.)
etc...

The chart is poorly thought through and not a very instructive example of supervenience. I've never seen any kind of chart like that nor references to levels of existence as they show in any of the philosophical literature. I'd recommend throwing the chart away and focusing on the definitions of supervenience provided, especially the one provided by Standford EP. I'd be glad to provide other definitions by Kim for example, who goes through it in some detail. Let me know if you'd like to see those.

Im glad you bring up an exampler. Let's focus on the hardness of a diamond. I believe this to be basically nothing more than an arrangement of particles and forces. To a human hand, a diamond may feel hard, it may feel smooth, other materials may feel squishy, wet, etc., but physically it all boils down to the arrangement of particles and forces. So it is an "=" relationship.

Remember in your previous post to me you mentioned your "pet-rock"? I am still wondering why you mention the pet rock, as opposed to an ordinary rock.

The pet rock was a poor example so I'll take that one back. Regarding the diamond, let's say the diamond came from the carbon in the ground which came from the decay of a dinosaur. The carbon in the dinosaur decayed after it died, was covered by miles of rock, compressed and heated so that the carbon atoms rearranged themselves into a diamond, and that diamond was eventually discovered. The carbon atoms existed the entire time, but the property of hardness that we attribute to the diamond didn't come about till it was formed. So here's a property that didn't exist previously. It only came into existence after the right conditions stripped away the bonds of other atoms that made up the dinosaur and stuck the carbon back together under great heat and pressure. Similarly, the particles that are in my brain have been around for a very long time, but they haven't been arranged into the present configuration till very recently, so the properties they have today (both physical and mental) can differ from properties they had before I was born.

It's worth noting that the properties of the diamond are objectively verifiable properties. We can verify the hardness of a diamond through interactions with other physical things such as a hardness testing device. So in the case of the dinosaur, we can verify there was no property of the dinosaur that had the hardness that the diamond has. We can objectively verify there was no measurable property of hardness so we can create a supervenience statement, "The diamond has properties that are dependent on its carbon atoms such that the hardness can't change without a change to the (arrangement of the) carbon atoms."

The same can be said of mental states. Mental states are dependent on the physical states such that the mental states can't change without a change to the physical states.

Note that the 4 arguments against supervenience-based formulations of physicalism given by Wikipedia all hinge on the subjectivity of mental states. These arguments all rely on the fact that there is no objectively observable property. None of the arguments would suggest there are changes to objectively observable physical properties given the changes the authors have proposed.

 

[Maui]

Predicting is a mental activity, like dreaming, thinking, doing math, etc. We have no idea if it emerged.

I am not sure what your point is, but I also find it hard to believe that decoherence creates reality independent of minds.

 

[pftest]

pftest, no one knows if mind supervene on brain, that's just the physicalist position. So when one attempts to defend it, one assumes this as true and goes on from there. I can say mind supervene on legs then you can say "yeah, but people with no legs still have minds". Then I can say prove it to me. And you can't, because we still don't have a working model about what consciousness is. And while there are plenty of people trying to find a way to study it objectively, there are also plenty of people seeking through logic on what this phenomenon may depend. That's why there are many philosophers who work as part of neuroscience projects and consciousness is the holy grail of science.

My point is that it is not a physicalist position at all. Saying that the mind supervenes on the brain is like saying that mind is a dream had by the brain. Both dreaming and supervening are mental activities, so both claims simply translate to "mind is done by mind". Supervenience is meaningless in physical terms.

I know we don't have a working model of consciousness and i know philosophers cannot prove their metaphysical positions, however, supervenience is said to occur even outside of brains and minds, for example in diamonds.

 

[pftest]

The pet rock was a poor example so I'll take that one back. Regarding the diamond, let's say the diamond came from the carbon in the ground which came from the decay of a dinosaur. The carbon in the dinosaur decayed after it died, was covered by miles of rock, compressed and heated so that the carbon atoms rearranged themselves into a diamond, and that diamond was eventually discovered. The carbon atoms existed the entire time, but the property of hardness that we attribute to the diamond didn't come about till it was formed. So here's a property that didn't exist previously. It only came into existence after the right conditions stripped away the bonds of other atoms that made up the dinosaur and stuck the carbon back together under great heat and pressure. Similarly, the particles that are in my brain have been around for a very long time, but they haven't been arranged into the present configuration till very recently, so the properties they have today (both physical and mental) can differ from properties they had before I was born.

It's worth noting that the properties of the diamond are objectively verifiable properties. We can verify the hardness of a diamond through interactions with other physical things such as a hardness testing device. So in the case of the dinosaur, we can verify there was no property of the dinosaur that had the hardness that the diamond has. We can objectively verify there was no measurable property of hardness so we can create a supervenience statement, "The diamond has properties that are dependent on its carbon atoms such that the hardness can't change without a change to the (arrangement of the) carbon atoms."

The same can be said of mental states. Mental states are dependent on the physical states such that the mental states can't change without a change to the physical states.

Note that the 4 arguments against supervenience-based formulations of physicalism given by Wikipedia all hinge on the subjectivity of mental states. These arguments all rely on the fact that there is no objectively observable property. None of the arguments would suggest there are changes to objectively observable physical properties given the changes the authors have proposed.

I have seen the definitions of supervenience and those are not the problem. The problem is that those definitions describe purely conceptual relationships of the type that do not occur anywhere in the physical world. One could give a definition of "dreaming" and people reading it would understand what it means, but dreaming is still a mental activity, so the statement that consciousness is a dream would not be a physicalist statement.

Now on to the hard diamond: you say

The carbon atoms existed the entire time, but the property of hardness that we attribute to the diamond didn't come about till it was formed

I say "hardness = the molecules and the space between them", so it is not a new property that came out. The space between the molecules may increase or decrease. A diamond getting harder is principally equivalent to two cars moving away from each other. There is only a difference in the quantity of spacetime and forces between the two cars/between the diamonds molecules. No hardness or softness comes out as a new property of the two cars as they move away from each other. What a machine tests when it measures hardness is just the spacetime and forces involved.

 

[pftest]

I am not sure what your point is, but I also find it hard to believe that decoherence creates reality independent of minds.

You said strong emergence is possible and gave human predictions as an example. My response was that predicting is a mental activity, so that example of disqualified since it would be begging the question: "mind can emerge from brain, because emergence is possible, as is demonstrated by mind emerging from brain".

To show that mind can emerge from brain, a different example of emergence is required.

 

[Pythagorean]

My point is that it is not a physicalist position at all. Saying that the mind supervenes on the brain is like saying that mind is a dream had by the brain. Both dreaming and supervening are mental activities, so both claims simply translate to "mind is done by mind". Supervenience is meaningless in physical terms.

Let me try to formulate your claim better as premises and a conclusion:

P1: mind supervenes on brain is like mind is a dream by brain
P2: dreaming and supervening are mental activities
C: supervenience is not a physicalist position

The fundamental problem here is that this is not a real argument, it is a non-sequitor. It does not follow that supervenience is not a physicalist position from your premises.

Furthermore, I don't think that P2 is correct if you're using standard accepted definitions and you would have to justify P1. As Q_Goest said, supevenience is a property relationship. Supervenience is not a mental activity or an activity at all. One cannot go around "supervening" in an event-based manner. Abstract objects, called sets, are what supervene. Set theory is a branch of mathematics, but the basic concepts of set theory are relatively simple and available on wikipedia. This is also why A=B is not true:

To the physicalist, the set A (mental events) are contained in the set B (physical matter and interactions) and, in most cases, B is considered to be the universal set.

 

[pftest]

Let me try to formulate your claim better as premises and a conclusion:

P1: mind supervenes on brain is like mind is a dream by brain
P2: dreaming and supervening are mental activities
C: supervenience is not a physicalist position

The fundamental problem here is that this is not a real argument, it is a non-sequitor. It does not follow that supervenience is not a physicalist position from your premises.

It does follow because saying that mind supervenes or mind dreams is equivalent to saying mind does what mind does, "mind = mind". Physicalism is supposed to be "mind = physical".

Furthermore, I don't think that P2 is correct if you're using standard accepted definitions and you would have to justify P1. As Q_Goest said, supevenience is a property relationship. Supervenience is not a mental activity or an activity at all. One cannot go around "supervening" in an event-based manner. Abstract objects, called sets, are what supervene. Set theory is a branch of mathematics, but the basic concepts of set theory are relatively simple and available on wikipedia. This is also why A=B is not true:

To the physicalist, the set A (mental events) are contained in the set B (physical matter and interactions) and, in most cases, B is considered to be the universal set.

Ive bolded the important part: abstract objects. All abstractions are conceptual, existing only in the mind. So yes you are exactly right to say that abstract objects are what supervene.

 

[Maui]

You said strong emergence is possible and gave human predictions as an example. My response was that predicting is a mental activity, so that example of disqualified since it would be begging the question: "mind can emerge from brain, because emergence is possible, as is demonstrated by mind emerging from brain".

It is observed that something that resembles a mind can emerge from brains. Observations count as evidence.

To show that mind can emerge from brain, a different example of emergence is required.

We can only give examples of observed behavior.

 

[Pythagorean]

It does follow because saying that mind supervenes or mind dreams is equivalent to saying mind does what mind does, "mind = mind". Physicalism is supposed to be "mind = physical".

Ive bolded the important part: abstract objects. All abstractions are conceptual, existing only in the mind. So yes you are exactly right to say that abstract objects are what supervene.

Your first paragraph still has some problems with it. You're taking the phrase "what mind does" and using it two different ways but saying they're the same because they share syntax.

To your second paragraph, that is not automatically incompatible with physicalism. You first have to determine to what degree a physicalist position relies on scientific realism. A physicalist may full well know the concepts he's using are a result of how he and his culture have imposed boundaries on observations and still hold a physicalist position.

 

[Maui]

Im looking for an example of purely physical supervenience, which can demonstrate that supervenience is an actual physical type of relationship. That would demonstrate that "mind supervenes on brain" is a physicalist statement.

But this is not valid reasoning. A physicalist believes all that exists is the physical, so it's dubious that a hardcore physicalist would ever use a loaded word like 'mind'. And no, mind is a particular state, not an object, so it cannot be physical in the traditional sense of the word. And yes, i agree, if mind is not physical but is yet supervenient on physical brains, physicalism would be in trouble exlaining the interaction between the physical and the non-physical.

 

[pftest]

Your first paragraph still has some problems with it. You're taking the phrase "what mind does" and using it two different ways but saying they're the same because they share syntax.

Im not sure i follow, but if you mean that i use the word "mind" in different ways, it may be so. This is because i consider mind a container term that encompasses a lot of different abilities: seeing, thinking, abstracting, predicting, emotions, etc. (and I am adding supervenience to the list in this topic) Whenever one of those things is taking place, it implies mind is present. So te position that mind (which includes all of those things) supervenes on brain, is like the position that minds dream.

To your second paragraph, that is not automatically incompatible with physicalism. You first have to determine to what degree a physicalist position relies on scientific realism. A physicalist may full well know the concepts he's using are a result of how he and his culture have imposed boundaries on observations and still hold a physicalist position.

What would such a position be like?

 

[pftest]

It is observed that something that resembles a mind can emerge from brains. Observations count as evidence.

What observation?

All we know is that minds exist in brains. It doesn't follow that it emerged in them. Electrons exist in skyscrapers, but they did not emerge in them.

 

[pftest]

But this is not valid reasoning. A physicalist believes all that exists is the physical, so it's dubious that a hardcore physicalist would ever use a loaded word like 'mind'. And no, mind is a particular state, not an object, so it cannot be physical in the traditional sense of the word. And yes, i agree, if mind is not physical but is yet supervenient on physical brains, physicalism would be in trouble exlaining the interaction between the physical and the non-physical.

In your previous post you said that we can only give examples of observed behaviour, and that is exactly what I am looking for: observed cases of supervenience that occur in physical systems. I don't know any such examples. The same goes for strong emergence. I've looked at the physicalist position for a while, and i haven't found any phenomena in the natural world that behave the way consciousness behaves according to physicalists. Simply put, that makes the physicalist position unnatural by the very definition of that word. That is why such examples are important. If someone can show that supervenience happens in rocks, it makes the idea of supervenience in brains natural.

 

[Pythagorean]

Im not sure i follow, but if you mean that i use the word "mind" in different ways, it may be so. This is because i consider mind a container term that encompasses a lot of different abilities: seeing, thinking, abstracting, predicting, emotions, etc. (and I am adding supervenience to the list in this topic) Whenever one of those things is taking place, it implies mind is present. So te position that mind (which includes all of those things) supervenes on brain, is like the position that minds dream.

Now you appear to be starting your assumption with your conclusion ("I'm adding supervenience to the list"). Supervenience isn't an event "taking place". It's a declaration about how sets relate

What would such a position be like?

Pessimstic induction

 

[Maui]

What observation?

All we know is that minds exist in brains. It doesn't follow that it emerged in them. Electrons exist in skyscrapers, but they did not emerge in them.

The opposite proposition - that brains could have emerged from minds will hardly be tolerated here(unless there is some science behind such a hypothesis, not just valid inferences stemming from inconsistencies of physicalism). From what I've seen so far here and in the literature, most physicists, even the most brilliant ones, will back off defending physicalism past a certain point if you push them too hard. So your doubts aren't completely unwarranted either.

Anyway, there is a very solid connection established scientifically between minds and brains(this is completely the opposite point of view):

Phantoms in the brain by Ramachandran(part 1):

 

[Maui]

In your previous post you said that we can only give examples of observed behaviour, and that is exactly what I am looking for: observed cases of supervenience that occur in physical systems. I don't know any such examples. The same goes for strong emergence. I've looked at the physicalist position for a while, and i haven't found any phenomena in the natural world that behave the way consciousness behaves according to physicalists. Simply put, that makes the physicalist position unnatural by the very definition of that word. That is why such examples are important. If someone can show that supervenience happens in rocks, it makes the idea of supervenience in brains natural.

Actually, everything that you observe and consider physical can be said to be strongly emergent. It has been 80 years of constant attempts by the scientific community to find and establish the physical basis of physical reality. They failed. Instead, they find more evidence of inconsistencies with physicalism. In a sense, everything from an electron detections to atoms and cats and dogs, can be said to be strongly emergent from more basic principles.

 

[pftest]

Now you appear to be starting your assumption with your conclusion ("I'm adding supervenience to the list"). Supervenience isn't an event "taking place". It's a declaration about how to sets relate

Yes that's exactly my point, its a declaration done by human minds. Supervenience is not any kind of physical event or relationship taking place. The sentence "mind supervenes on brain" translates to "a human mind conceptualises that mind supervenes on brain".

The position that supervenience depends on mind is open to rejection. All that is needed is a single example of purely physical supervenience, for example in rocks, diamonds, molecules, etc.

Ill put it in the premise/conclusion format:

P1: supervenience is a conceptual relationship
P2: concepts can only originate and exist in minds
C: a supervenient relationship cannot originate or exist without mind

Pessimstic induction

I never heard of it before so i googled it. A pessimistic inductionist would reject (most of) physics, so i wouldn't consider him a physicalist.

 

[pftest]

Actually, everything that you observe and consider physical can be said to be strongly emergent. It has been 80 years of constant attempts by the scientific community to find and establish the physical basis of physical reality. They failed. Instead, they find more evidence of inconsistencies with physicalism. In a sense, everything from an electron detections to atoms and cats and dogs, can be said to be strongly emergent from more basic principles.

Could you give an example?

 

[pftest]

The opposite proposition - that brains could have emerged from minds will hardly be tolerated here(unless there is some science behind such a hypothesis, not just valid inferences stemming from inconsistencies of physicalism). From what I've seen so far here and in the literature, most physicists, even the most brilliant ones, will back off defending physicalism past a certain point if you push them too hard. So your doubts aren't completely unwarranted either.

Anyway, there is a very solid connection established scientifically between minds and brains(this is completely the opposite point of view):

Phantoms in the brain by Ramachandran(part 1):

Im at work now so i can't watch the video. However, as far as i know about neuroscience, the connection between mind and brain is one of correlation. To illustrate: there is correlation between the distortion of spacetime and the mass of a planet earth. Such a correlation doesn't mean that spacetime originates and is limited to planet earth.

If you look at the example in my previous post (the one with the electrons in the skyscraper) and this spacetime example, you can see that both of them point towards the universality of a phenomenon. Electrons exist beyond skyscrapers. Spacetime exists beyond earth. These are examples of naturally observed phenomena. All such examples make physicalism, the idea that mind originates in and is limited to brains, seem unnatural.

 

[Maui]

However, as far as i know about neuroscience, the connection between mind and brain is one of correlation. To illustrate: there is correlation between the distortion of spacetime and the mass of a planet earth. Such a correlation doesn't mean that spacetime originates and is limited to planet earth.

But it does mean that the curvature of spacetime around Earth is caused by the mass of planet Earth. It originates from the planet Earth, same as with the supposition that minds emerge from brains.

 

[Pythagorean]

P1: supervenience is a conceptual relationship
P2: concepts can only originate and exist in minds
C: a supervenient relationship cannot originate or exist without mind

thank you for using this format! It clears things up.

I think the issue is to what degree one accepts scientific realism, pertaining to your P2. Concepts are symbols for events in the real world. It's not a binary operator whether they fit or not. Some may be a good fit, others not so much. And it's not as if all concepts are lumped together. Some are more formidable than others.

I never heard of it before so i googled it. A pessimistic inductionist would reject (most of) physics, so i wouldn't consider him a physicalist.

That's not true. Pessimism is more a statement about human error and limitation:

"the aim of science is not to open the door to everlasting wisdom, but to set a limit on everlasting error" -Galileo

"Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed."
"Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world." -Einstein

But some actually do reject physics logically, even thought hey contribute to it:

"I learned to distrust all physical concepts as the basis for a theory. Instead one should put one's trust in a mathematical scheme, even if the scheme does not appear at first sight to be connected with physics. One should concentrate on getting interesting mathematics." -Dirac

 

[Maui]

Actually, everything that you observe and consider physical can be said to be strongly emergent. It has been 80 years of constant attempts by the scientific community to find and establish the physical basis of physical reality. They failed. Instead, they find more evidence of inconsistencies with physicalism. In a sense, everything from an electron detections to atoms and cats and dogs, can be said to be strongly emergent from more basic principles.

Could you give an example?

There is an example in my post - 'cats and dogs' decohering(splitting, emerging or whatever the current way of thinking is) from fields of possibilities. The physical basis of physical reality isn't physical in the traditional sense, so in a sense, everything appears emergent. Ask a physicalist how that happens, he will likely back off.

 

[Ferris_bg]

pftest, as I wrote before in this thread, supervenience does not entail emergence, which your examples illustrate. Supervenience is not emergence. They are not the same thing.

[The mind-brain correlation thesis] For each type M of mental event that occurs to an organism o, there exists a brain state of kind B (M's "neural correlate" or "substrate") such that M occurs to o at time t if and only if B occurs to o at t.

According to this thesis, then, each type of mental event that can occur to an organism has a neural correlate that is both necessary and sufficient for its occurrence. So for each organism there is a set of mind-brain correlations covering every kind of mental state it is capable of having. Two points may be noted about these brain-mind correlations:

1. They are taken to be "lawlike": The fact that pain is experienced when certain of your neural fibers (C-fibers and A-delta-fibers) are activated is a matter of lawful regularity, not accidental co-occurrence.

2. Even the smallest change in your mental life cannot occur unless there is some specific (perhaps still unknown) change in your brain state; where there is a difference between two conscious mental states, there must be a difference between the two corresponding neural states.

Another way of putting these points is to say that mentality supervenes on brain states and that this supervenience holds as a matter of law. Remember that this supervenience, if it indeed holds, is something we know from observation and experience, not a priori. Moreover, specific correlations--that is, correlations between specific mental states (say, pain) and specific brain states (say, the activation of certain neural fibers)--are again matters of empirical research and discovery, and we may assume that many of the details about these correlations are still largely unknown. However, it is knowledge of these specific correlations, rough and incomplete though it may be, that ultimately underlies our confidence in the mind-body correlation thesis and mind-body supervenience. If the ancients had been correct (and they might have been correct) about the heart as the engine of mentality, we would have mind-heart supervenience rather than mind-brain supervenience.

 

[Maui]

Ill put it in the premise/conclusion format:

P1: supervenience is a conceptual relationship
P2: concepts can only originate and exist in minds
C: a supervenient relationship cannot originate or exist without mind

I am not sure why supervenience must be a conceptual relationship, why not just a relationship? Anyway, if i were trying to disprove physicalism or the idea of mind-independent reality, i'd use a simple twist of the double slit experiement - if an electron was emitted and there was a detector at only one of the slits and that detector detected nothing, because of complimentarity, we'd know with 100% certainty that the electron went through the other slit. Think about it - we detected nothing, disturbed nothing(no bouncing off a photon off an electron's wavefunction), yet the wavefunction collapsed. The only conclusion is that it collapsed because of our knowledge(and complementarity is preserved). 'Our knowledge' is the other name of mind, so if a physicalist wants to prove that a mind-independent reality ever existed, he has to embrace the relationship between matter/mind in this experiment(knowledge/detections). Most physicalists would either say that the universe could be participatory or that we shouldn't look at scales that small(as if it were somehow irrelevant )

 

[apeiron]

P1: supervenience is a conceptual relationship
P2: concepts can only originate and exist in minds
C: a supervenient relationship cannot originate or exist without mind

Even brains and minds are just concepts - enduring ideas formed by inference that we use organise our ever-shifting impressions.

So your P2 kills any kind of further discussion about anything stone dead. Unless you are going to defend something like "concepts about relationships can only originate and exist in the mind".

 

[pftest]

But it does mean that the curvature of spacetime around Earth is caused by the mass of planet Earth. It originates from the planet Earth, same as with the supposition that minds emerge from brains.

Spacetime didnt emerge in planets, it is distorted by planets. You could say the distortion emerged, but it would be weak emergence because spacetime is always distorted to some degree. And mass affects spacetime, but spacetime affects mass too.

Lets translate that to consciousness in the brain: consciousness didnt emerge in brains, it is distorted by them. It is influenced by and influences the brain.

 

[pftest]

Even brains and minds are just concepts - enduring ideas formed by inference that we use organise our ever-shifting impressions.

So your P2 kills any kind of further discussion about anything stone dead. Unless you are going to defend something like "concepts about relationships can only originate and exist in the mind".

All of physics is conceptual, but it is the physicalist position that there actually exists a physical world out there, that physics is our best bet as to what it is like, and that that bet entails an absence of any mentality in non-brains.

 

[pftest]

There is an example in my post - 'cats and dogs' decohering(splitting, emerging or whatever the current way of thinking is) from fields of possibilities. The physical basis of physical reality isn't physical in the traditional sense, so in a sense, everything appears emergent. Ask a physicalist how that happens, he will likely back off.

That decoherence actually sounds more like the opposite of emergence: first there are multiple possibilities, then some vanish and one is left. An interesting example to ponder on, and i think if it can happen, then the opposite (one possibility turning into multiple) is principally equivalent and should also be possible. Unfortunately I am no QM expert so i am not yet convinced, but it is a challenge i cannot instantly dismiss.

I wonder what a "possibility" physically entails. Often when we say things disappear, they don't actually completely vanish, but they get changed to such a degree that they don't fit our arbitrary definition of the word anymore. In the wikipedia article, the introduction, it says that decoherence can be seen as information loss into the environment. If so, it would mean the "possibilities" don't actually vanish, but they leak away. That would argue against emergence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence

 

[pftest]

thank you for using this format! It clears things up.

I think the issue is to what degree one accepts scientific realism, pertaining to your P2. Concepts are symbols for events in the real world. It's not a binary operator whether they fit or not. Some may be a good fit, others not so much. And it's not as if all concepts are lumped together. Some are more formidable than others.



That's not true. Pessimism is more a statement about human error and limitation:

"the aim of science is not to open the door to everlasting wisdom, but to set a limit on everlasting error" -Galileo

"Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed."
"Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world." -Einstein

But some actually do reject physics logically, even thought hey contribute to it:

"I learned to distrust all physical concepts as the basis for a theory. Instead one should put one's trust in a mathematical scheme, even if the scheme does not appear at first sight to be connected with physics. One should concentrate on getting interesting mathematics." -Dirac

Yes scientific realism seems to be the key here. Do not all physicalists, even when rejecting some or most of current physics (because humans err), think that there does exist a physical world, and that it was devoid of mentality until brains came about? My argument is that supervenience implies the presence of mentality, so a supervenient phenomenon cannot have come out of a situation devoid of mind.

 

[pftest]

pftest, as I wrote before in this thread, supervenience does not entail emergence, which your examples illustrate. Supervenience is not emergence. They are not the same thing.

Ok what i gather from the quote is that supervenience is a lawlike correlation. Saying that mind supervenes on brain doesn't say there is any kind of interaction or which came first, it merely says that there is a correlation between the two. And emergence is different because it says one phenomenon emerged out of the other.

Question: is there a difference between saying "mind supervenes on brain" and "brain supervenes on mind"?

 

[Maui]

Spacetime didnt emerge in planets, it is distorted by planets. You could say the distortion emerged, but it would be weak emergence because spacetime is always distorted to some degree. And mass affects spacetime, but spacetime affects mass too.

I am not sure what you mean by "spacetime affects mass too", as spacetime in the current physics framework is is treated as geometry. Did you mean "different inertial frames(slices of spacetime) affect mass too"?

Lets translate that to consciousness in the brain: consciousness didnt emerge in brains, it is distorted by them. It is influenced by and influences the brain.

This could be, but there is no way to know. I am not sure that a simple logical argument can give any clue if this is so. As i pointed out earlier, that which can be known is the consistency of the model that physicalism proposes. If physicalism is wrong, consciousness would be anybody's guess and we'd have to start from scratch.

 

[pftest]

I am not sure what you mean by "spacetime affects mass too", as spacetime in the current physics framework is is treated as geometry. Did you mean "different inertial frames(slices of spacetime) affect mass too"?

At the very least it influences the way mass moves, and it wouldn't be able to move at all without it.

This could be, but there is no way to know. I am not sure that a simple logical argument can give any clue if this is so. As i pointed out earlier, that which can be known is the consistency of the model that physicalism proposes. If physicalism is wrong, consciousness would be anybody's guess and we'd have to start from scratch.

The reason i mention examples like spacetime and the electrons in a skyscraper, is because they demonstrate how physical phenomena behave in nature. By looking at such examples, one can infer that physicalism is incompatible with physics.

 

[Pythagorean]

Yes scientific realism seems to be the key here. Do not all physicalists, even when rejecting some or most of current physics (because humans err), think that there does exist a physical world, and that it was devoid of mentality until brains came about? My argument is that supervenience implies the presence of mentality, so a supervenient phenomenon cannot have come out of a situation devoid of mind.

I think most empirical physicalists that are also pessimists are going to be closer to the horizon of new physics and new neuroscience because they're optimistic about overturning theories or discovering new ones. Lots of them will probably be right on the fringe, too.

Emergence and new physics/neuroscience are two contendors. Strong emergence would probably be considered a whole new paradigm to physics, but you could also have a reductoinist view of new physics.

On the other hand, weak emergence (a disclaimer: it's my personal stance to check my philosophical baggage) recognizes there are still undiscovered consequences of the fundamental laws of physics as they are; then you're allowing for nearly anything, but still sticking to the tried and true laws that have consistently been shown to hold in all cases that they've been tested in over many thousands of tests and many thousands of predictions.

The stance is that these new emergent properties will not somehow violate reductionist laws of physics and if they do, it's because of some specific exception or augmentation to the reductionist laws of physics that does not generally hold in all the systems it has been shown not to hold in.

But we additionally have the problem of confining our ideas and observations to semantic language and graphical spatial metaphors of data (plots) and contaminating it with purpose and meaning and antrhopomorphism and ahtropocentrism, which makes one more pessimistic. It also becomes more difficult to troubleshoot causality in large complex ensembles: "which ensemble of particles hit the other ensemble of particles first?"

However, the underlying philosophy is that we're still studying a consistent universe with a consistent set of laws: the laws of nature. And no matter how much we mess it up, once we get it right, and if we're able to sustain the information about it, our great great great great grandkids will still be able to demonstrate the observations themselves (if not take direct advantage of it through technology).