Arguments against materialism - how to refute?

[selfAdjoint]

If sophistry would be all that we had going for us (as humanity), we wouldn't get anywhere.

And indeed, the "hard problem" meme hasn't gotten either science or philosophy anywhere that I can see. Dozens of papers and books, and "Ever more I come out by that same door wherewith I came in."

 

[octelcogopod]

Yet you elegantly ignored my question and the core issue of the problem selfAdjoint..

I don't see how everyone can be so sure there is no hard problem..

 

[alexsok]

octelcogopod
There is a philosophical system espoused by many philosophers, devised by Kant, Schopenhauer and other powerhouses:the world is a representation.

It means that we can never truly know what is behind the "perception of color" in the world and we can't really know what the "true nature" is of anything.

Have you ever thought about this? That science is all we have going for us and anything beyond that is just "bonfire speculations"?

Moreover, science has already looked into this issue (the holographic universe is another way of seeing the "world as a representation") and there were books written on it, but the evidence is nowhere to be found, except in some dedicated experiments which couldn't be replicated anywhere else.

The way I see it, there are two options:
1. Either we acknowledge the existence of a problem, perhaps an insoluble problem (which is the most likely scenario, sorry) and try to run along with what we do have (which we have been doing till now and will continue doing in the future - you think the "singularity" of transhumanits is anything but science taken to the extremes?).

Or

2. We keep babbling about it, refuting the claims of science, refuting everything and anything and be STUCK at where we are now (or if you suggested that earlier, then back at the stone-age).

To regurgitate: YES, WE CAN'T KNOW. And what is YOUR alternative?

 

[nannoh]

Once again, this is not logical.
Just because all neurological sequences are physical, does not make the pain itself physical. There's a step there you are jumping over.
That step has torn billions of people up for centuries also.

What is not logical is to think that pain is not physical. Pain is a sensation that is dependent upon neurology. The logical way to prove pain is not physical is for you to prove that pain exists without a neurological system present. Otherwise, logically, pain is a signal and therefore physical. What you are proposing is like claiming radio waves to be aphysical.

You can interrupt pain-signals with drugs, discipline or surgery but because the pain is not registered by your brain doesn't mean it is absent.

For example, when you interrupt X-rays with a lead apron the X-rays remain a physical event. What isn't happening are the effects of the physical event. And just because you are not aware of an event doesn't automatically classify it as non-physical.

 

[PIT2]

If you had some argument you were trying to prove about a non-physical model, and you proved it, and were able to duplicate the results, than your theory would be adopted to the physical scientific theory. It wouldn't be a non-physical model anymore, because by proving it, you've shown that it's part of our physical existence.

So it then becomes a matter of redefining 'physical', and panpsychism would be called physicalism?

 

[octelcogopod]

nannoh first;

I never said pain wasn't physical, or that there aren't physical components.
What I'm saying is that there is no way to measure what pain FEELS LIKE.
Pain as it is experienced by the organism, is not physical in the sense that the pain itself does not exist physically.

In fact, the whole world, universe, can't be proven to exist, as it were.
Everything we know is 'qualia', and in a sense we can never prove that something exists until we perceive it, or know of it with our senses, thoughts or emotions.

But still, the problem is separate in that we have explained a lot with science, but we still can't comprehend anything subjective, mental or anything related to consciousness.
What science is explaining is our representation of the world.

 

[Pythagorean]

So it then becomes a matter of redefining 'physical', and panpsychism would be called physicalism?

I don't know how philosophy tends to work and how terms dominate thinking in that respect, but you might say something to the effect of panpsychism doesn't conflict with physicalism.

I don't think panpsychism would become physicalism, because papsychism's main point seems to be (simply put) that rocks are sentient, not so much about whether existence is wholly physical or not, that appears (to me) to be a sub-point that could be revised. I see no evidence against the main point of panpsychism. To me, this is equivalent to saying our thought process is a lot like a rock's existence.

I would actually agree with this as a physicalist, but I wouldn't say that rocks are sentient, I'd say we are as willful as rocks. That is... a rock may only respond to a couple simple forces like gravity and electromagnetism, but we only respond to our electrochemical potentials (as well as gravity and electromagnetism). We call this phenomena consciousness when it happens in us, and disregard the rock's (mostly because it's a simpler set of interactions the rock has, compared to the way biological systems operate.) Because we're kind of stuck in the middle of this phenomena we call conscioussness, it's a lot more complex and there's more variables than with the rock. Don't get me wrong, there's much more to a rock then gravity. It has a molecular structure that can interact with light and magnetic field and electric fields in different ways. It has thermodynamic properties like a bioling point, and it has ductile deformation points, it's a very dynamic system, but it's not the whole system.

If instead you locked at the rock as a 'limb' of the Earth, then it would be even easier to believe that the Earth is alive (after all, the Earth as a system is one of the more complex in the universe) but in that case, life is merely a limb of the Earth itself (a sub-system).

You can take this further and say the Earth is a sub-system of the the system called the universe. It's very difficult to observe this universe since we're a system operating within it, we contiously interact with our environment, regardless of our attempts to be safe observers.

Anything you want to measure/test/observe in science has to interact with the physical world somehow or we wouldn't be able to measure/test/observe it. You also interact with the physical world (scientists try to reduce how much they interact with their experiment so that the experiment can just react with them, but they're not always wholly succesful, we're always leaking into our environment and our environment into us, thanks to entropy)

 

[nannoh]

nannoh first;

I never said pain wasn't physical, or that there aren't physical components.
What I'm saying is that there is no way to measure what pain FEELS LIKE.
Pain as it is experienced by the organism, is not physical in the sense that the pain itself does not exist physically.

In fact, the whole world, universe, can't be proven to exist, as it were.
Everything we know is 'qualia', and in a sense we can never prove that something exists until we perceive it, or know of it with our senses, thoughts or emotions.

But still, the problem is separate in that we have explained a lot with science, but we still can't comprehend anything subjective, mental or anything related to consciousness.
What science is explaining is our representation of the world.

This is an old argument.

If you want quantification of the "feeling" of pain you need to go to a neurologist's study on pain. They have a system they use to measure pain so that they know what measures to take to reduce, mask or eliminate pain.

Let's say that I alone cannot prove gravity is physical or even exists. Yet everywhere and everyone that observes the goings on in the universe observes a force at work that "represents" gravity at work.

In fact, 6 billion people on this planet will agree that something is creating a condition where they remain on the ground and water falls down and their body parts slowly sag toward the same ground. As far as humans go, this is universally accepted.

If 6 billion people agree upon the physical attribute of gravity then what is the criteria that sets the standard to make gravity an illusion or non-physical?

Is gravity an illusion because you say it is? Or because you and 20 other's agree that it is an illusion?

Why does majority and minority get left out of the equation when it comes to deciding if the human interpretation of the physical universe is right or wrong? This is where my existence poll would come in handy.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion when it comes to designating "physical" or "non-physical" causes but, when the numbers are stacked against you its a good idea to keep your opinion to yourself.

You'd never convince 5.999 billion inhabitants of the Earth that they are a representation of something non-physical.

It would be idle speculation to do so. Depending upon how hungry and desparate they are, the people might eat you.
Tell them they're not hungry and that they'll survive on visions of cake that they can have and eat too. To the guillotine! Then the non-physical will become more familiar.

This sort of tail chasing is just that. Its a cyclical argument that depends on the presence of a physical neurological system.

Tell me if plants and animals have decided whether they are physical or not. There is no question amongst them. They simply are what they are.

 

[Pythagorean]

What I'm saying is that there is no way to measure what pain FEELS LIKE.
Pain as it is experienced by the organism, is not physical in the sense that the pain itself does not exist physically.

measuring isn't the only way to explain something physically. Measuring is, indeed, a small part of analyzing.

We can analyze what pain feels like if we are willing. The word 'pain' does physically exist.

Think of your interaction with the environment in three parts. These is the brain/nervous system of your body.

1) Input
2) Compute
3) Output

1) and 3) are rather trivial. 1) is where you would admit that pain is physical, the actual process of the sensor detecting an incident on our body and sending a signal to the brain.

2) Is where you're mistaken. In our computation of input, and trying to tie it to output, we also have something called imagination, which indeed helps us to tie inputs to outputs.

In the end, what something feels LIKE can only have three values, just like electricity. It can be + (good), - (bad), or 0 (netural).

Pain is BAD, it's negative. Your brain will process it in such a way that your output will avoid that action in the future. It's one physical process (you) building a repulsion to another physical process (a hot stove).

 

[PIT2]

I would actually agree with this as a physicalist, but I wouldn't say that rocks are sentient, I'd say we are as willful as rocks. That is... a rock may only respond to a couple simple forces like gravity and electromagnetism, but we only respond to our electrochemical potentials (as well as gravity and electromagnetism).

But isn't this reasoning from our ignorance, instead of from our knowledge? We know that humans are conscious, so we if we were to reason from knowlegde, we would say that a rock is conscious as a human. But we do not know whether a rock is conscious, so if we were to reason from ignorance, we would say that a human is conscious as a rock.

Btw i don't think panpsychism says rocks are sentient, because it doesn't say which configurations of matter form a conscious whole. It only says that consciousness is a part of all the physical. This is from wikipedia:

Materialism generally, the view that ultimately there is only matter, is compatible with panpsychism just in case the property of mindedness is attributed to matter.

Because we're kind of stuck in the middle of this phenomena we call conscioussness, it's a lot more complex and there's more variables than with the rock.

I am not sure if consciousness is a complex phenomena. I agree that our mind is very complex, but that it works on a much simpler basis(consciousness). Like electricity is a very basic force, but when u build a computer around it and install all kinds of software on the computer, it results in very complex and specific computations.

Don't get me wrong, there's much more to a rock then gravity. It has a molecular structure that can interact with light and magnetic field and electric fields in different ways. It has thermodynamic properties like a bioling point, and it has ductile deformation points, it's a very dynamic system, but it's not the whole system.

So do u think properties of our mind are present in the rock?

If instead you locked at the rock as a 'limb' of the Earth, then it would be even easier to believe that the Earth is alive (after all, the Earth as a system is one of the more complex in the universe) but in that case, life is merely a limb of the Earth itself (a sub-system).

So what do u think is the proper way of looking at life: life as a subsystem of earth, or Earth as alive? Or something in the middle?

I think the first idea mistakes the size of the object for an indication of its importance: life = small, Earth = big, thus Earth is more important. And the second idea can be too antromorphic.

Anything you want to measure/test/observe in science has to interact with the physical world somehow or we wouldn't be able to measure/test/observe it.

But science isn't the only way to gain knowledge. We can observe and know things that science has never been able to demonstrate to exist at all.

Someone in this topic said "all X's are Y's, but not all Y's are X's".
Here the Y = 'knowlegde through observation' and X = 'knowledge through science'. All science is based on knowledge through observation, but not all knowledge through observation is based on knowledge through science.

In the end, what something feels LIKE can only have three values, just like electricity. It can be + (good), - (bad), or 0 (netural).

What about qubits, which can be both + and - at the same time (or neither + nor -, but something different altogether). Someone can feel pain and it can hurt, but he can still enjoy it, so that's good and bad simultaneously. Experiences can influence each other intersubjectively and form a new 'whole' experience altogether.

 

[Singularis]

All we can do is speculate...

 

[PIT2]

If you want quantification of the "feeling" of pain you need to go to a neurologist's study on pain.

They will ask u (the only person who can experience the pain) how the pain feels. Also, interaction between nervous system and pain only demonstrates interaction, nothing else. Similarly, posting on a forum doenst doesn't prove that ur a website (even though there is interaction between the u and the website).

Everyone is entitled to their opinion when it comes to designating "physical" or "non-physical" causes but, when the numbers are stacked against you its a good idea to keep your opinion to yourself.

Are we living in opposite universes because the majority of humans in mine do not believe they are entirely physical?

2. We keep babbling about it, refuting the claims of science, refuting everything and anything and be STUCK at where we are now (or if you suggested that earlier, then back at the stone-age).

Panpsychism doesn't refute any claims of science, and it accepts any of sciences experimental findings, just like physicalism does. Also, it does not destroy science or get it stuck, it simply opens up new areas of theorizing, and thus might slow down or speed up scientific progress. We may not be in the stone-age right now, but that doesn't mean were not in the physical-age.

 

[nannoh]

They will ask u (the only person who can experience the pain) how the pain feels. Also, interaction between nervous system and pain only demonstrates interaction, nothing else. Similarly, posting on a forum doenst doesn't prove that ur a website (even though there is interaction between the u and the website).
Are we living in opposite universes because the majority of humans in mine do not believe they are entirely physical?

Panpsychism doesn't refute any claims of science, and it accepts any of sciences experimental findings, just like physicalism does. Also, it does not destroy science or get it stuck, it simply opens up new areas of theorizing, and thus might slow down or speed up scientific progress. We may not be in the stone-age right now, but that doesn't mean were not in the physical-age.

Great answers. Basically the decision comes down to the individual and whether or not they perceive and react to their experiences as physical, non-physical or both.

The process of making the decision between experiencing life as a non-physical state or a physical state is cyclical and seems to rely on whether or not the observer has a nervous system. This doesn't necessarily hold true for all organisms with nervous systems.

If the decision relys on the presence of a neurological system wouldn't this prove the existence of a physical universe? Neurology studies the singular and combined firing of neurons. The study literally counts the number of neurons firing when presented stimulus. This is how pain is measured and its how we could measure the actual physical nature of this discussion.

 

[vanesch]

But still, the problem is separate in that we have explained a lot with science, but we still can't comprehend anything subjective, mental or anything related to consciousness.
What science is explaining is our representation of the world.

Amen to that

To give another twist to the "what is pain like" or better, "is there pain", consider the following gedanken experiment. Consider that there is a person, which is experiencing pain. Or at least, it's a normal person, you hit his feet with a hammer, and he tells you that it hurts. You can relate to that, and so it seems to be a reasonable assumption for you to assume that, indeed, he has pain.

Now, cut away more and more pieces of body of that person (its a *gedanken* experiment, all right ? ). Replace all functionally necessary parts of his body with machines. You start by replacing his foot, and you connect, to the nerves ending there, the right stimulus generator for them to be identical to what happens when you hit his foot with a hammer. You can consider him having each time you do that, pain.
In the end, you'll just have a big machine and a piece of brain left.
That brain is "having pain", although there's now for you no way to really know, given that the "person" has no means of expression anymore.
You can now even start to eliminate parts of the brain that are supposed not to have anything to do with feet or pain, and replace them with rudimentary processing power in order to keep the "rest of the brain functionning".
In the end you have a small piece of brain left, the "pain center" or whatever, and a machine around it. Is that small piece of brain tissue now "experiencing pain" ? Imagine you analyse its neurological structure and stimuli, and you find that yes, it is (of course, by construction) still stimulated, and reacting, exactly as it was inside of the brain of the person when he was still a "whole". You can now carefully remove more and more tissue, replacing it with more and more processors. In the end, there's nothing left, but a machine. Is it now the machine which has pain ?
Imagine you can model this on a computer. If you run this simulation program on a computer, does the computer now "have pain" ?
If you write the entire memory dump on a disk, during the entire simulation, is the disk now "having pain" ?

See, we can (in principle) model entirely the physical situation, with all physiology and input/output reactions and so on understand all that, know exactly how things are physically going to react... and you will not have found the slightest clue of what subjective experience has really been experienced - or not.

As I sometimes say, jokingly: how do you know that a stone, when you cut it, doesn't feel pain ?

 

[PIT2]

If the decision relys on the presence of a neurological system wouldn't this prove the existence of a physical universe?

Well the identification of a neurological system depends on the existence of an observer, so no it doesn't prove it. But i think there is a physical universe, only this doesn't explain what 'physical' really is. It isn't defined properly and if it were it would be changed the moment science discovered something new about it. There are now scientific theories which propose that matter is made out of spacetime, so what would this say about the physical?

 

[nannoh]

There are now scientific theories which propose that matter is made out of spacetime, so what would this say about the physical?

It wouldn't seem to matter much what "physical" is made of. The question is how to refute arguments against materialsim.

I would ask the person who argues against materialism

how they know about the material?

Where did they hear about it?

How did they hear about it if they don't have ears and a brain?

Are there mysterious ways to communicate without being material?

What are they?

If you communicate how do you communicate and with whom?

Is it another disembodied, immaterial entity?

If the physical is made of space/time then it would hold that space/time is physical/material.

 

[PIT2]

It wouldn't seem to matter much what "physical" is made of. The question is how to refute arguments against materialsim.

Then what do u mean with materialism here?

How did they hear about it if they don't have ears and a brain?

How would they know they have ears and brains without being conscious first?

Are there mysterious ways to communicate without being material?

We know for a fact that communication takes place in beings that cannot fully be described physically. Does that make humans mysterious, or does it make materialism mysterious?

 

[Castlegate]

If the physical is made of space/time then it would hold that space/time is physical/material.

You are making an assumption of the physical. What if the physical is a possession of the mind. What if all things currently considered physical by us are nothing more than conceptuals. The result is the same, but the distinction is very important indeed. I am extremely doubtful that the color red will be explained by physical means, but conceptually it is doable.