🌀 #Panpsychism – #Whitehead’s Influence in the 20th Century

📎 Information: https://philosophies.de/index.php/2022/09/27/metaphysik-des-bewusstseins/

🎥 Interview: https://youtu.be/hoqiI_TElv4

#Zoomposium #GodehardBrüntrup #Metaphysics #Consciousness #PhilosophyOfMind #PhenomenalConsciousness #NearDeathExperience #NDE #NearDeathResearch #SemanticContent #MindBodyProblem #LiberalNaturalism #ProcessPhilosophy #ExplanatoryGap #Neuroskepticism #PhilosophyOfLanguage #Self #Physicalism #CognitiveNeuroscience #AlfredWhitehead

🌀 #Whitehead 's #metaphysics and #quantumphysics – #events instead of #substances ⚛️

What if modern #physics is closer to a philosophical #processmetaphysics than many assume?

In the #Zoomposium with #GodehardBrüntrup, we discuss whether #Whitehead'smetaphysics can provide a philosophical framework for quantum physics.

📎 https://philosophies.de/index.php/2022/09/27/metaphysik-des-bewusstseins/

🎥 https://youtu.be/hoqiI_TElv4

#LiberalNaturalism #ProcessPhilosophy #Physicalism #CognitiveNeuroscience #AlfredWhitehead

The attitude of physicalism

Spurred by conversations a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about physicalism, the stance that everything is physical, that the physical facts fix all the facts. A long popular attack against this view has been to argue that it’s incoherent, since we can’t give a solid definition of what “physical” means. And so physicalism seems to be built on a foundation on shifting sands. This is actually something I’ve struggled with myself.

On the one hand, defining the physical doesn’t seem that hard. Physicists don’t seem to have much trouble knowing what to study. Physics is usually described as the study of matter and related concepts such as energy, forces, fields, and spacetime.

But it’s often pointed out that the earliest proponents of the materialistic philosophy argued that everything was just atoms and void, with our everyday experiences coming from the motions and interactions of those atoms. It was in the 1800s when the existence of the other concepts started to get fleshed out.

It could be argued that those concepts are just the details of accounting for the motions and interactions Democritus was originally talking about. But it feels like more than that, particularly since matter at the most fundamental level currently accessible, quantum fields, seems far less concrete than what Democritus and Epicurus had in mind.

This leads to Hempel’s dilemma (presented by Carl Hempel in 1969), which asks if physicalism is about what physics has currently established. If so, then since everyone understands that current physics is incomplete, physicalism is wrong. Or if physicalism is based on some hypothetical future physics that is complete, then it seems vacuous, since no one know what that ideal physics might be.

Hempel gets at a core fact about all scientific knowledge; that it’s provisional, subject to change on future evidence, something that seems inevitable given the problem of induction that David Hume identified. Although I don’t take Hempel’s dilemma as a defeater of physicalism, but more an insight that the ontology of the view isn’t static, but something that is always changing and shifting. In my view, it should be seen as a strength, not a weakness. Don’t we want our ontologies to update as we learn more?

But it does highlight that the definition is tricky. Daniel Stoljar, in the SEP article on physicalism, covers a number of other strategies in trying to define “physical.” An interesting one is the Via Negativa, which focuses on what the physical is not. The example given is that it’s not anything irreducibly mental.

I like this approach because it gets at the real heart of the matter. If there’s anything that could kill physicalism as an outlook, it would be irrefutable evidence of some aspect of the mental being fundamental. Although Stoljar points out that there are other concepts generally taken to be non-physical, such as the élan vital.

Another approach which resonates with me as a structural realist is to define the physical in terms of structure. My way of describing it is to say that the physical is whatever is part of the structure and regularities of the objective world. That seems to rule out putative platonic objects and non-physical phenomenal structures, but include everything we normally think of as physical. Although I’m sure someone could come up with a concept that would frustrate it.

The one that might be the closest to truth is the idea that physicalism is an attitudinal stance. Stoljar discusses a version of this as taking one’s ontology from what physical theories describe. This is a bit narrow and he points out the obvious issues with it. Among them that it still seems vulnerable to Hempel.

But a better more general one might be an attitude, an expectation, that for whatever phenomena we are faced with, there is, at least in principle, an understandable explanation, one in terms of structure and regularities (laws). We see this stance at work with dark energy and dark matter. There’s no discussion about whether these are supernatural or occult phenomena. They are approached with the expectation that some kind of mechanistic explanation is possible.

A physicalist just applies that attitude to everything. Even if faced with something that might initially seem non-physical, the attitude that there is an understandable explanation underneath will generally exist. This seems to make physicalism similar to methodological naturalism, although the scope is more than just standard scientific investigations.

(There are people who make distinctions between physicalism and naturalism. For instance, David Chalmers consider himself a naturalistic dualist, so he seems to see himself in the naturalist camp but not the physicalist one. However, given that the etymology of “physics” is the Greek word for nature, and the etymology of “nature” the Latin word for physics, it seems like any distinction would be pretty subtle.)

This attitudinal way of looking at it may get at what’s really going on with a lot of these various metaphysical views. Physicalism is the attitude of everything being understandable, while other views like panpsychism and idealism seem more poetic and artistic in nature, more about seeking connection in reality rather than trying to understand and manipulate it.

Which raises the interesting possibility that there may be value in learning to put on “the glasses” of other views, to see the world through each of their filters, even if only for particular purposes, maybe for no other reason than to ensure our metaphysical biases aren’t acting as blinders, cutting us off from other possibilities.

In the end, for me, predictive success remains the best arbiter of reality. But the path to that success often requires unconventional thinking.

What do you think? Am I overlooking some of physicalism’s problems? Or its strengths? Or being too ecumenical in my closing?

Chill about metaphysics

This week I had to block a couple of people on different platforms. Neither seemed able to make their point without lacing in insults. One seemed to be on a mission to make me feel as bad about my outlook as possible. The disagreements were on purely metaphysical grounds, physicalism vs non-physicalism. And seem to be examples of something that appears pervasive in online discussions, the constant sniping between these different metaphysical camps.

Which, when you stop and think about it, is strange, since we’re not talking about something that will affect anyone’s fortunes or livelihood, or overall make any difference in their day to day life, except maybe psychologically. It pays to remember that in the debates between physicalism, property dualism, panpsychism, idealism, neutral and Russellian monism, and their variants, that these outlooks are all empirically identical.

(Interactionist dualism may be the one alternative where this wouldn’t be true. But a century and a half of neurological case studies seem to imply that the interactions would have to be pretty nuanced. Which I think is why most of the academic world has lost enthusiasm for this option, even though it remains popular in general.)

I often remember Karl Popper’s observation that what is metaphysical in one century could become science in a later one. But in the case of these basic viewpoints, they’re all ancient. Which implies that there’s no foreseeable experiment or observation which will conclusively prove or falsify any of them.

People often think quantum mechanics might provide the evidence, but there are many different interpretations of QM. Which ones seem sensible and which hopelessly crazy appear to be driven by your preexisting metaphysical viewpoint. And again, all of these outlooks long predate QM. Idealism was actually more popular during the reign of classical physics than it is today. So even if one of the QM interpretations is eventually shown to be correct, I suspect the various viewpoints will continue.

And when I listen to idealists like Barnardo Kastrup talk, and am able to look past all the provocative language, the world he describes often sounds a lot like the physicalist one, one where the planet and universe are billions of years old, and we’re the result of evolution through natural selection. He just sees the external world as being in the mind of God or Nature. And of course I agree with panpsychists that there’s nothing categorically unique about the physics of the brain.

All of which often makes my inner positivist wonder if there’s really any meaningful distinctions here. Maybe these are all just different ways of thinking about the same world. Or, from a purely empirical standpoint, maybe the best stance is a neutral one. These bouts of extreme empiricism don’t typically last very long, but I think they do stop me from being too strident in my views.

All of which is to say, calm down about your metaphysics. The fact that I can’t prove mine over yours and vice-versa, means that the only way you’re ever going to make your view more prevalent is by persuading people. Calling those with other views idiots, or implying that their view is trivially false, while it may play well with your own partisans, isn’t going to expand your camp.

The best way to do that seems to be the old fashioned way. Try to understand what others are saying, and try to be understood. Let them know the genuine blockers preventing you from taking up their view. Address the concerns others have about yours, and admit it when you can’t. That may not feel as good in the moment, but it often doesn’t lead to the acrimony the other approaches do.

Of course, others will still engage in their bluster. My advice is to ignore it. Or when it gets nasty, do as I did, and block them. Your life will be better off for it.

Unless of course I’m missing something?

#Idealism #Metaphysics #panpsychism #Philosophy #physicalism

Can Words Alter Your Brain? - Tad Brennan on Johnathan Bi

#stoicism #beliefs #physicalism