Mind-body problem-Chomsky/Nagel

The core of Strawson’s argument is that since the mental cannot possibly emerge from anything non-mental, and because we know that some macroscopic modifications of the world are intrinsically mental, the intrinsic nature of the basic constituents of the material world has to be mental as well. But now it seems that Strawson is confusing here the possibility of the emergence of mind from scientifically described properties like mass, charge, or spin, with the possibility of the emergence of mind from the intrinsic properties that correspond to these scientific properties. It is indeed the case that mind cannot emerge from scientifically described extrinsic properties like mass, charge, and spin, but do we know that mind could not emerge from the intrinsic properties that underlie these scientifically observable properties? It might be argued that since we know absolutely nothing about the intrinsic nature of mass, charge, and spin, we simply cannot tell whether they could be something non-mental and still constitute mentality when organised properly. It might well be that mentality is like liquidity: the intrinsic nature of mass, charge and spin might not be mental itself, just like individual H2O-molecules are not liquid themselves, but could nevertheless constitute mentality when organised properly, just like H2O-molecules can constitute liquidity when organised properly (this would be a variation of neutral monism). In short, the problem is that we just do not know enough about the intrinsic nature of the fundamental level of reality that we could say almost anything about it.

Finally, despite there is no ontological difference between the micro and macro levels of reality either on the intrinsic or extrinsic level, there is still vast difference in complexity. The difference in complexity between human mentality and mentality on the fundamental level is in one-to-one correspondence to the scientific difference in complexity between the brain and the basic particles. Thus, even if the intrinsic nature of electrons and other fundamental particles is in fact mental, this does not mean that it should be anything like human mentality—rather, we can only say that the ontological category their intrinsic nature belongs to is the same as the one our phenomenal realm belongs to. This category in the most general sense is perhaps best titled ‘ideal’.

I thought this was an interesting and pretty neat and easy to understand piece on this topic (I wish I knew who wrote it?), arguing for "mind" as an intrinsic property of matter:

Welcome to Jussi Jylkkä's website
I am a postdoc researcher working mainly on issues in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. My current research focuses on the mind-body problem from a transcendental perspective. Other research interests include history of philosophy, Asian philosophy (zen), experimental philosophy and metaphilosophy.

between panpsychist emergentism and physicalist emergentism, the physicalist version is preferable for reasons of ontological economy

Crucially, the relationship presently envisaged between the phenomenal character of the phenomenally-qualitied ultimates composing him and that of Goff’s o-consciousness ('o' for organism) is quite different. On the present view, the phenomenal characters of the ultimates composing Goff’s brain jointly constitute the phenomenal character of his o-conscious phenomenal field, they do not spawn it as a separate entity. This feature enables us to overcome an objection lurking in Goff’s account concerning the unity of o experience: “The existence of a subject having a unified experience of feeling cold and tired and smelling roast beef does not seem to be a priori entailed by the existence of a subject that feels cold, a subject that feels tired, and a subject that smells roast beef”...In our model the phenomenal elements of cold, tiredness and the smell of roast beef come together closely enough to form a phenomenal unity: they are experienced together as overlapping features of the same phenomenal field. This is thanks to the pooling of the intrinsic natures of the phenomenally-qualitied ultimates, possible due to their subjectless nature.

A central problem in the mind-body debate is the generation problem: how consciousness occurs in a universe understood as primarily non-conscious...I argue that the generation problem stems from a non-critical presupposition about the nature of reality, namely, that the mental is an exception in the universe, a non-fundamental property. I call this presupposition mental specialism...I argue that consciousness emerges from proto-consciousness, the fundamental property that is disposed to give rise to consciousness. Proto-consciousness is not an arbitrarily posited property; following an important contemporary approach in neuroscience (the integrated information account), I understand proto-consciousness as information. The thesis that consciousness emerges from proto-consciousness elicits a fatal problem with panpsychic theories, the combination problem. This problem is how to account for higher order conscious properties emerging from proto-conscious properties. I solve the combination problem by adopting Giuolio Tononi’e Integrated Information theory of Consciousness and demonstrating emerging higher order conscious properties just is a system integrating information. Thus information is the fundamental property that, when integrated in a system such as a human being, is consciousness. Proto-consciousness is thus a natural property and the formulated panpsychic theory based upon information is a naturalized panpsychism.

There are also some points of contact between the notion of integrated information and the approach advocated by relational quantum mechanics (Rovelli, 1996). The relational approach claims that system states exist only in relation to an observer, where an observer is another system (or a part of the same system). By contrast, the IIT says that a system can observe itself, though it can only do so by “measuring” its previous state. More generally, for the IIT, only complexes, and not arbitrary collections of elements, are real observers, whereas physics is usually indifferent to whether information is integrated or not. Other interesting issues concern the relation between the conservation of information and the apparent increase in integrated information, and the finiteness of information (even in terms of qubits, the amount of information available to a physical system is finite). More generally, it seems useful to consider some of the paradoxes of information in physics from the intrinsic perspective, that is, as integrated information, where the observer is one and the same as the observed.

I think Nagel is actually agreeing with you that no matter how far a future science/physics changes, qualia will forever remain subjective. Chomsky, on the other hand, in one paper-“Linguistics and Cognitive Science: Problems and Mysteries” (p. 39) questions Nagel's premise arguing that:

“this argument presupposes some fixed notion of the ‘objective world’ which excludes subjective experience, but it is hard to see why we should pay any more attention to that notion, whatever it may be, than to one that excludes action at a distance or other exotic ideas that were regarded as unintelligible or ridiculous at earlier periods, even by outstanding scientists.”

Elsewhere on that page he argues that there is nothing unique about the mind-body problem:

But from this we do not conclude that there was then (or now) a body-body problem, or a color-body problem, or a life-body problem, or a gas-body problem. Rather, there were just problems, arising from the limits of our understanding

I’m not sure what to make of this? I think Nagel’s position is clear. Nagel is simply arguing that the mind-body problem is different than all these other problems because unlike the others, subjectivity/qualia cannot be reduced to any “material” entity regardless of future revisions of our “physical” theories. Whether Chomsky is arguing that some type of “micropsychism”, is possible I’m not sure but I doubt it? Maybe Chomsky means that we should treat the mental just as "real" as other stuff in science even though unification may be beyond our cognitive limits (I'm thinking McGinn's cognitive closure stuff here)?

Panpsychism is a very interesting position even though it's not taken seriously by many. I really find the "intrinsic" argument as set ou by Russel, Eddington and now Strawson very interesting. One difficulty with panpsychism is that it also "faces a severe problem of understanding how more complex mental states emerge from the mental features of the fundamental features." An interesting paper on this topic is this one by Seager:

http://www.scar.utoronto.ca/~seager/panagg.pdf

One panpsychist physicist is Bohm. In his papers, he argues that his interpretation suggests a proto-mental aspect of matter. He has been called a panprotopsychist. When you look at the guiding wave properties and how it affects the "particle" (trajectory) in Bohm's ontological interpretation of QM, you can't help but notice the analogy between pilot wave/particle and mind/brain. In fact, Bohm argues just that (see quote below). Some interesting properties of Bohm's guiding wave:

1. The quantum potential energy does not behave like an additional energy of classical type. It has no external source, but is some form of internal energy, split off from the kinetic energy. Furthermore, if we look at traditional quantum mechanical problems and examine the quantum potential energy in mathematical detail, we find that it contains information about the experimental environment in which the particle finds itself, hence its possible role as an information potential.

2. In the case of the quantum wave, the amplitude also appears in the denominator. Therefore, increasing the magnitude of the amplitude does not necessarily increase the quantum potential energy. A small amplitude can produce a large quantum effect. The key to the quantum potential energy lies in the second spatial derivative, indicating that the shape or form of the wave is more important than its magnitude.

3. For this reason, a small change in the form of the wave function can produce large effects in the development of the system. The quantum potential produces a law of force that does not necessarily fall off with distance. Therefore, the quantum potential can produce large effects between systems that are separated by large distances. This feature removes one of the difficulties in understanding the non-locality that arises between particles in entangled states, such as those in the EPR-paradox

4. In Bohmian mechanics the wave function acts upon the positions of the particles but, evolving as it does autonomously via Schrödinger's equation, it is not acted upon by the particles...The guiding wave, in the general case, propagates not in ordinary three-space but in a multidimensional-configuration space and is the origin of the notorious ‘nonlocality’ of quantum mechanics.

5. Unlike ordinary force fields such as gravity, which affects all particles within its range, the pilot wave must act only one particle: each particle has a private pilot wave all its own that “senses” the location of every other particle of the universe. Although it extends everywhere and is itself affected by every particle in the universe, the pilot wave affects no other particle bit its own.

Bohm and Hiley have coined the expression “active information” for this sort of influence and suggest that the quantum potential is a source of this kind of information.

"There are many analogies to the notion of active information in our general experience. Thus, consider a ship on automatic pilot guided by radar waves. The ship is not pushed and pulled mechanically by these waves. Rather, the form of the waves is picked up, and with the aid of the whole system, this gives a corresponding shape and form to the movement of the ship under its own power. Similarly, the form of radio waves as broadcast from a station can carry the form of music or speech. The energy of the sound that we hear comes from the relatively unformed energy in the power plug, but its form comes from the activity of the form of the radio wave; a similar process occurs with a computer which is guiding machinery. The 'information' is in the program, but its activity gives shape and form to the movement of the machinery. Likewise, in a living cell, current theories say that the form of the DNA molecule acts to give shape and form to the synthesis of proteins (by being transferred to molecules of RNA).

Our proposal is then to extend this notion of active information to matter at the quantum level. The information in the quantum level is potentially active everywhere, but actually active only where the particle is (as, for example, the radio wave is active where the receiver is). Such a notion suggests, however, that the electron may be much more complex than we thought (having a structure of a complexity that is perhaps comparable, for example, to that of a simple guidance mechanism such as an automatic pilot). This suggestion goes against the whole tradition of physics over the past few centuries which is committed to the assumption that as we analyze matter into smaller and smaller parts, their behaviour grows simpler and simpler. Yet, assumptions of this kind need not always be correct. Thus, for example, large crowds of human beings can often exhibit a much simpler behaviour than that of the individuals who make it up."

http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/...yerou_1986.pdf
http://www.geestkunde.net/uittreksel...indmatter.html
http://www.mindmatter.de/resources/pdf/hileywww.pdf
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/

So, I was lurking on this forum, and reading Bohm's interpretation in regard to the Mind-Body problem brought up some interesting questions for me...Could it at all be possible that this "Mind Wave" is the quantum consideration of your observations?

The Active Information Hypothesis opens up a whole host of questions and issues that are extremely problematic. Consider first the difficulties encountered with particle structure. Quantum particles would require complex internal structures with which the ‘active information’ is processed in order that the particle be directed through space...

The quantum potential is the potential energy function of the wave field. It gives the amount of the wave field’s potential energy that is available to quantum particles. The well-established principle of energy conservation holds in classically-free quantum systems. This is achieved by energy exchanges between the quantum particles and wave field. The quantum potential facilitates these exchanges and provides an explanation of quantum phenomena such as tunnelling from a potential well.