Q_Goest said:
Let’s take the lead you provided from Kim regarding mental states (M) and physical states (P). For the causal closure of the physical, there are physical events P that determine other physical events. The mental events M are supervenient on the physical states but they don’t cause physical states. What causes physical states, assuming the causal closure of the physical, are other physical states. So the hypothetical neuroscientist that knows everything there is to know about our nervous system, can tell you what physical state P2 will follow physical state P1 (or what set of potential physical states will follow P1 if there is some random nature to them). Mental states that are described as phenomenal states are therefore epiphenomenal on the physical state. The mental state doesn’t cause the physical state, the physical states are caused by other physical states.
Epiphenomenal however, means that not only do these mental states not cause physical states, they also don’t influence them. They don’t have any way of influencing or causing a change in a physical state. If mental states were being “measured” by the physical state, they would no longer be epiphenomenal, they would suddenly become part of the causal chain that created the following physical state, so epiphenomenal in this regard means they really have no influence whatsoever over any physical state. So the paradox is, how do we know these states exist? The only reason given is that there is a 1 to 1 relationship between P and M, but that means we aren’t saying that we experience qualia because we actually experience that qualia. It says we are saying we experience something because of the physical states that cause us to utter those words.
OK, so here we have a view of reality that ends up arguing for a paradox. Which is why the intelligent response is to go back to the beginning and work on a different view, not to spend the rest of your life telling everyone you meet, "but this is the truth". That would be the crackpot response, wouldn't it?
Now it seems pretty transparent where the problem lies. If you start out assuming a definite separation between physical states and mental states, then it is no surprise that this is also the conclusion you end up with. And more subtly, you are even presuming something in claiming "states".
So let's start over. First we have to drop the idea of states because that already hardwires in a reductionist perspective. A state is something with spatial extent, but not a temporal extent. It is a term that already precludes change. It is the synchronic view of "everything that is the case at this moment"
A systems view is one that specifically includes time, change, potential, development. So of course if you analyse reality in terms of states, you cannot take a systems view of reality. You have not proved that the systems view fails, just that you did not understand what the systems view was.
The systems view equivalent of the notion of "state" would be an "equilbrium". That is a state where there is change that does not make a change. So you have an extended spatiotemporal view that is completely dynamic, but also at rest in some useful sense.
So your arguments cannot just hinge on a naive notion of a state here. That is the first point.
Second, P "states" are tales of material causality. And yes we expect the tales to be closed. This is a now standard physicalist presumption, and it works very well. So I am happy to take it as my presumption too.
I then, as said, make a distinction between varieties of physicalism.
There is the familiar reductionist physicalism of atomism - reality is constructed bottom-up from a collection of immutable parts. Though as also argued, reductionism does smuggle in global constraints as its immutable physical laws, and other necessary ingredients, such as entropic gradients, a spacetime void, etc.
Let's call this variety of physicalism Pr (because giving things this kind of pseudo-mathematical terminology seem more impressive).
Then there is the second systems model of physicalism - let's call it Ps. This, following Aristotle and many other systems thinkers, recognises holism. Realities are also made of their global constraints which act downwards to shape the identity and properties of their parts (by restricting their local degrees of freedom).
And as said, because even Pr smuggles the notion of global constraints into its simpler ontology, we can say {Ps {Pr}}. Reductionism is formally a subset of holism. It is holism where the top-down contraints have become frozen and unchanging, leaving only the localised play of atoms, or efficient causes.
You personally may disagree that Ps is a valid model of material causality, but you have yet to make any proper argument against it (I don't think you actually even understand it enough).
So on to M states. Again, you have to recognise the extra constraints implied by the very word "state". Consciousness has a rich temporal structure (we know this experimentally, Libet is part of the evidence). So it is not legitimate to hardwire your conclusions into your premises by presuming "M states" as an ontic category.
We must thus step back to the general metaphysical dichotomy of physical and mental (matter~mind). What do the terms properly denote?
We have already agree (I think) that P is a closed tale of material causes. And it can be seen that we are also presuming that it is an "objective" view. It is somehow what "actually exists out there", even though being good philosophers, we have long come to realize the map is not the territory and we are in fact only modelling the world. So it is what Nozick rightly calls the maximally invariant view - the supposed god's eye "view from nowhere".
So physicalism actually embeds further presumptions. It acknowledges its roots in subjectivity and becomes thus an epistemological device. It says this is how we model in a certain way.
The "material world of closed causality" - either Pr or Ps - is not actually the ontological view, just a view of ontology! P implies M. Or {M{P}}. Or indeed {M{Ps{Pr}}}
Now what in turn is properly denoted by "mental". Well it starts as everything that is so far as we are concerned. That is all there is really, as the only way we know anything is through being a mind.
But when used as part of a metaphysical dichotomy, the idea of mental, as opposed to physical, is trying after some more constrained meaning. It is trying to get at something which stands in contrast to our idea of the physical. So what? And what
legitimately?
One of the obvious distinctions is between the observed and the observer, the interpreted and the interpreter, the modeled and the modeller. The very existence of a "done to" implies also the existence of a "doer". So there is a mind acting, and then the physical world it is acting upon.
And clearly a causal relationship is being suggested here, an interaction. I do the modelling and the world gets modeled. But I can also see the world is driving my modelling because of what happens when I wrongly model it.
So the everyday notion of the mental is about this contrast, and one that is still plainly causal. A connection is presumed as quite natural. So far the dichotomy seems natural, legitimate, and not paradoxical.
But then along come the philosophers who want to push the distinction further - to talk about res cogitans and res extensa, about qualia, about Ding an sich.
What were complementary aspects of an equilbrium seeking process (a systems view of the mind as a pragmatic distinction between the observers and the observed) suddenly becomes treated as different fundamental categories of nature. The distinction becomes reified so that there is the P and the M as axiomatically disconnected realms - where now a connection has to be forged as a further step, and not being able to do so becomes treated as a metaphysical paradox.
So yes, P~M has a social history as an idea. And the assumptions made along the way have got buried.
The "mental" properly refers to the fact that reality can become complexly divided into actors and their actions, models and the modeled, the subjective experience that is our everything and the objective stance that is our attempt to imagine an invariant, god's eye, view of "everything" (which is actually a view constructed of general theories - or formalised descriptions of global constraints - and the predictions/measurements that animate these theories, giving them their locally-driven dynamics).
So P here becomes a judgement of the degree of success we feel in modelling reality in terms of fundamental theories - theories describing reality's global constraints. And Ps is a more complete approach to modelling than Pr, but Pr is also the simpler and easier to use.
M is then epiphenomenal in the sense it is all that is not then part of this model - and so it stands for the modeller. It is not epiphenomenal by necessity - everything is actually just subjective experience in the end. But it is epiphenomenal by choice. We put the M outside the P so as to make the P as simple as possible. It is a pragmatic action on our part.
Now Pr quite clearly puts M way outside because it does away with observers, modellers, and other varieties of global constraint (as explicit actors in the dynamics being modeled). So Pr becomes a very poor vehicle for the pragmatic modelling of "mind" - of systems which in particular have non-holonomic constraints and so have active and adaptive top-down control over their moment-to-moment "mental states".
But with Ps, you can start to write formal models of observers and the observed. You can't model "the whole of M" as even Ps remains within M. This is the irreducible part of the deal. Nothing could invert the relationship so far a M is concerned. Yet within M we can have the Ps-based models of observer~observed relationships. And indeed I've referred frequently to the work of Friston (Bayesian brains), Rosen (modelling relations), Pattee (epistemic cut), as examples of such systems-based modelling.
So M - Ps = M'. We can explain away a lot via physicalist modelling, yet there will still be a final residue. But it is not the M that is epiphenomenal to the P. Rather the other way round. The mind does not have to have models based on physicalist notions of closed systems of entailment to exist. It existed already. And it created the P that claims to exist as causally isolated from the subjective wishes, whims and desires of the M.
. Causality would be our general or universal model of why anything happens (why even existence happens), while freewill is just some vanishingly rare, relatively impotent on the cosmic scale, feature of a complex system.
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