I’ve often
emphasized that the reason consciousness poses such a persistent problem for
materialism has less to do with consciousness itself than it has to do with the
desiccated conception of matter that we’ve inherited from early modern
philosophy and science. Barry Dainton
makes the same point a couple of times in his book Self. For example, he writes:
Descartes’ conviction that
consciousness could not be physical is rooted in the austere
conception of the basic nature of material things which he and the other scientific revolutionaries endorsed. One of the key advances of the Scientific
Revolution was the adoption of the atomistic and
mechanistic conception of the physical world.
Animating Scholastic forms were excluded from the physical realm as part
of this move, but so too were all the phenomenal properties, the properties we encounter in our ordinary experience.
According to the new scientific worldview, physical things themselves
possess only ‘primary’ properties, such as
mass, motion, charge, shape, and so forth.
Material things don’t possess experiential
properties such as colour, sound, warmth, or pain.
As Descartes was perhaps the first to
appreciate clearly, if the physical world is as the new science says,
experiences and conscious subjects are banished from it. In which case, dualism – in some form – seems
to be unavoidable. (p. 153)
Dainton goes
on to note that while contemporary physics does not attribute to matter exactly
the same list of properties that Descartes and other early moderns did, it
nevertheless still leaves off of its list anything experiential. Hence, contemporary materialism faces the
same difficulty vis-à-vis consciousness that materialists of Descartes’ day
did. Dainton concludes:
So the relationship between the
physical world and consciousness remains deeply puzzling; indeed, it has often
been said that this is the biggest remaining mystery of
them all (though those working at the frontiers of cosmology and particle
physics might want to disagree). (pp. 158-9)
That catches
the eye, or my eye, anyway. Dainton locates
the three biggest mysteries facing science at:
1. The
relationship between the physical world and consciousness
2. The
frontiers of cosmology
3. The
frontiers of particle physics
I’d expand the
list, but let’s stick with Dainton’s for now.
I would say that all three
mysteries are a consequence of the turn from Scholastic Aristotelianism to the
mechanical conception of nature. How so?
The conquest of abundance
The Scholastic
Aristotelian conception of matter is much richer and more pluralistic than that
of the mechanical world picture. And it
is in harmony with common sense, even though it systematizes common sense and adds
to it notions of which the man on the street never dreamed. It takes the natural world to consist in innumerable
distinct physical substances, just as common sense does. It takes qualitative features like color to
exist in those substances, just as common sense does. And it holds that there are irreducibly different
kinds of physical substance, just as
common sense does. In particular, it
takes inanimate objects, non-sentient living things, and sentient living things
to be irreducibly different, even if all of them are material.
To make sense
of all this, Scholastic Aristotelian philosophy deploys notions like actuality
and potentiality, substantial form and prime matter, efficient and final
causality, substance and attributes, essence and proper accidents, immanent versus
transeunt causation, and so on. It
argues that we simply cannot do justice to the actual physical world of
everyday experience, in all its richness and diversity, without recognizing
this conceptual framework as giving the skeletal structure of the natural order.
What the
mechanical world picture did was to drain out all of this richness, flatten out
all the diversity, and replace the organic skeleton with a cold steel frame,
like a taxidermist. It denied the
distinctness and diversity of physical things.
All material objects are, on the mechanical view, really just variations
on the same one kind of thing, viz. colorless, soundless, odorless, tasteless
particles in motion, their nature and interactions to be described in purely mathematical
terms. And their numerical differences
are as superficial or even illusory as their differences in kind. The whole physical world can be seen as a
single vast lump, and the apparently diverse objects in it as modes of this one
substance. Or, alternatively, it is like
a vast sea of particles, with apparently diverse objects like mere waves on its
surface. A stone, a tree, a dog all seem
to common sense to be sharply distinct objects of sharply distinct kinds. For the mechanical world picture, they are
really all just local variations in a single system of a single kind –
different eddies in the same sea of atoms, different geometrical structures in
the same Cartesian coordinate space, or what have you.
Philosopher
of science Paul Feyerabend has
aptly characterized this as modern science’s “conquest of abundance,” its replacement
of the “richness of being” with an “abstraction.” The abstraction is a mathematical framework,
and anything that cannot be fitted into it is re-defined, explained away, or
frankly eliminated. Color, sound, taste,
odor, heat, cold, pain, pleasure are all removed from nature and relocated in
the conscious subject. And if this
subject is in turn identified with something material, the reality of these qualities
is effectively denied, either implicitly (in reductionist versions of
materialism) or explicitly (in eliminativist versions). The abstraction also reduces all change to local
motion, and local motion in turn to a succession of points in an abstract coordinate
space. Real change disappears, and real
time (which, for the Aristotelian, is the measure of change) vanishes along
with it.
New metaphysics, same as the old
metaphysics
Feyerabend
traces the tendency to try to replace the richness of the natural world with a
static abstraction back to Parmenides, and for those with eyes to see,
Parmenides lives today in every physicist who seriously believes that the
natural world can be entirely captured in the notion of a four-dimensional block universe, or in the idea of a universal wave function. Such constructs are no less fantastic and
untrue to actual concrete reality than Parmenides’ monism.
That is not to say that they are untrue full stop. They do
capture reality, but only in the partial
and distorted way that any abstraction does. And that they are not quite as abstract as Parmenides’ own monism is the source of the technological
and predictive successes that give rhetorical
(even if not logical) strength to the
arguments of those who take these abstractions to afford us a complete metaphysical
picture of nature.
Now, back to
Dainton’s list. By “the frontiers of
cosmology,” he means the cutting edge of a science that has in modern times
been defined by general relativity. And by “the frontiers of particle physics,”
he means the cutting edge of a science that has in modern times been defined by
quantum mechanics.
The picture of
nature afforded us by general relativity is, I would suggest, essentially an
approximation to a description of a world that is purely actualized and devoid
of potentiality. It is not quite that, but it is an approximation to
it. It is a highly Parmenidean model of
nature. Meanwhile, the picture of nature
afforded us by quantum mechanics is an approximation to a description of the
world that is purely potential and in no way actualized. It is not quite
that, but it is an approximation to it.
It is a highly Heraclitean model of nature. (Or rather, some interpretations of quantum mechanics are like that. Interpretations like Everett’s “many worlds”
interpretation effectively actualize all the potentiality and transform quantum
mechanics into another riff on Parmenideanism.)
Now, actual
concrete material reality is in fact a mixture of actuality and
potentiality. Hence, if you try to
represent it entirely in terms of actuality and strip it of potentiality, or
entirely in terms of potentiality and strip it of actuality, you are bound to
end up with various puzzles and paradoxes (especially of the sort into which
Parmenidean and Heraclitean views are traditionally led). And a picture of nature which largely
collapses all reality into actuality is naturally going to be very hard to
marry to a picture which largely collapses all reality into potentiality.
This, in my
view, is the deep metaphysical reason why the frontiers of cosmology and
particle physics remain mysterious, as Dainton says, and why relativity and
quantum mechanics remain difficult to reconcile with one another. Were Aristotle to rise from his grave and see
all these neo-Parmenideans and neo-Heracliteans wringing their hands, he’d say:
“Well, duh. What did you expect?”
Stuffing a corpse
It is the
first mystery, the relationship between consciousness and the physical world,
that Dainton focuses on. And he
discusses two possible non-materialist ways of dealing with it that have gotten
increasing attention in recent philosophy: naturalistic
dualism and Russellian monism (named
for Bertrand Russell). Both of these
views accept the mechanical conception of nature but try in different ways to
reincorporate phenomenal or qualitative features like color, sound, etc. into
it. These days, philosophers generally
refer to these features as the “qualia” of conscious experience, so that the
issue is usually framed as the question of how to fit qualia into the material
world.
Naturalistic dualism holds that qualia are non-physical
(that’s the dualism part) but that they are correlated with certain physical
features of the brain by virtue of as yet unknown laws of nature (that’s the
naturalistic part).
Russellian monism holds that physics gives us only a
description of the mathematical structure of nature, but not of the intrinsic nature
of the entities that have that structure (that’s the Russellian part of the
view). It then suggests that the qualia
we know from introspection of our conscious experiences not only give us
knowledge of the intrinsic nature of the matter that makes up our brains, but
also afford a model for the intrinsic nature of all matter (that’s the monism part). Russellian monism is sometimes claimed to
lead to a kind of panpsychism. The
reason is that since qualia are mental, and Russellian monism takes qualia to
be the model for the intrinsic nature of all material entities, it entails that
all material entities have mental properties – that mind is everywhere.
Now, though
both of these views are superior to materialism in frankly acknowledging the reality
and irreducibility of consciousness, they are nevertheless ultimately little
more than further riffs on the same mechanistic error rather than corrections
of it. They merely dress up the corpse
that the mechanical conception makes of nature, rather than restoring it to
life.
Again,
common sense and Scholastic Aristotelianism take matter to be more or less the
way it seems. (Note very carefully that this is not to deny that science reveals that there is more to matter than common sense or Aristotelian philosophy
knows. It is merely to insist that
science does not show that there is less to
matter than common sense and Aristotelian philosophy says there is.)
One implication
of this is that consciousness really is in non-human animals in just the way that
common sense supposes. This is not
because non-human animals have any non-physical properties. They don’t.
It is because non-human animals are simply of a different kind of matter than inanimate things. Not all matter is the same. The mechanical world picture assumes otherwise. That is why Descartes held, notoriously, that
animals are devoid of consciousness.
Since he was committed to the desiccated mechanistic conception of
matter, and took animals to be made of nothing more than that kind of matter,
he concluded – quite reasonably, if you
accept that conception of matter – that they lack consciousness. The only other place for consciousness to be,
on Descartes’ picture of reality, is in the res
cogitans or thinking substance. And
since animals lack intellects, they lack res
cogitans.
This is also
why, in contemporary non-materialist philosophy of mind, it is commonly
supposed that to attribute qualia to non-human animals (like bats, in Thomas
Nagel’s famous example) is to attribute non-physical properties to them. That will seem to follow only for those
operating with an essentially mechanistic model of matter. If instead you think of matter the way common
sense and Aristotelianism do, this won’t seem to follow at all. Non-human animals have qualia and they are
therefore conscious, but this does not entail that there is anything
non-material in them. It simply entails
that matter isn’t as desiccated as the purely quantitative, mathematical
conception of the mechanical philosophy supposes.
But neither
does it give any reason whatsoever to believe (contra Russellian monism) that all matter has qualia. Animal matter does, but the matter that makes
up stones and copper and water does not.
You would only suppose otherwise if you were starting with a mechanistic
conception of matter, come to realize that its deletion of qualia from nature
is a problem, and then start shoving qualia back into matter willy-nilly,
including into places they don’t belong. It’s analogous to killing an animal, gutting
the corpse, and then coming to regret it and sticking the organs back in in
bizarre ways – putting the kidneys in the eye sockets, the intestines in the
throat, the leg muscles where the arm muscles should go, etc. The right approach when what you want is a
properly functioning animal is not to
kill it in the first place. And the
right approach when what you want is a conception of nature that is safe for
qualia and consciousness is not to start
with a mechanistic conception of matter in the first place.
If
Russellian monism is like re-stuffing a corpse, naturalistic dualism is like
strapping the gutted organs onto the outside of the corpse, Ed Gein-style. Naturalistic dualism essentially accepts the
mechanical conception of matter, regrets that it leaves qualia out, and then simply
attaches qualia to this desiccated matter, from outside as it were, rather than
seeing that qualia should never have been taken out in the first place.
The
mechanical conception of matter was simply a mistake, at least as a metaphysics or philosophy of nature. Like other
abstractions, it certainly has its utility a method. But it is merely a methodological abstraction
rather than a true representation of the concrete natural world in all its
richness and diversity. To pretend
otherwise is like mistaking a corpse for a real living thing. And to try to patch it up in the way that
naturalistic dualism and Russellian monism do is an exercise in taxidermy, or
even corpse desecration. The true solution
to the problem of how to relate consciousness to the physical world is to
resurrect the commonsense Aristotelian conception of nature.
Note that I
am only talking here about the kind of consciousness we share with non-human
animals. The intellectual capacities that are distinctive of human animals are a
different story. They are incorporeal. But that’s another
issue for another time. Readers
interested in pursuing the issues discussed in this post in greater depth are urged to consult Aristotle’s
Revenge.
Related
posts:
I was about to come rushing in and ask whether you think panpsychists could reply to Ross' argument for an in corporeal intellect in the same way they explain consciousness- but then read the last paragraph!
ReplyDeleteMuch more on topic, do you see much more grounds for conversation between A-T philosophers and modern analytical ones? People like Goff have been sounding like they quote your work when defending panpsychism by pointing out what conception of matter is typically assumed, next it seems to irreducibility of consciousness is the next area of agreement that seems to be growing.
In Aristotle's revenge theres a part where you speak of the difference between inorganic/vegetative/animal/human life and stress caution on dogmatically holding each must be bridged naturally or by God. Most naturalists probably want to reject that dichotomy by front loading consciousness and rationality into the fundamental level of the world so the question of God's interaction isnt needed.
My speculation on how the dialogue will go in the future anyway
Here is a new and in-depth Aristotelian critique of Darwinism that was just recently published at The Unz Review:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.unz.com/anepigone/alt-wrong-paradigms/
Ah, no offense, but the article is just awful.
DeleteFor me, I find it positively revolting when one tries to pit metaphysics against empirical observation. For me, I feel that this destroys the foundation. But when you write about how "genetic similarity in no way establishes phylogenetic relationship," when it seems to do so in everyday life (e.g. when we have DNA tests). Or when you attach to the HBD position things that aren't proper to it, as if saying that something is a biological reality means assuming some sort of wider metaphysical framework.
The turgid, obtuse language you use also does more to obscure than to illuminate, leading to more confusion and outrage. For example, take the second sentence you wrote of the article:
"While the ideas presented herein have long been contemplated by the author and held by him to be provisionally true, the occasion of them taking shape in the present form was not, I am somewhat aggravated to say, the pure contemplative love of truth as such, nor the magnanimous desire to educate my benighted fellows, nor even the vanity born of holding exclusive possession of a novel and exciting conception which, once articulated, figures largely to gain its original representative a measure of historical notoriety; rather, it was exhausted patience with the endless, uncomprehending, unjustified scorn to which the ideas were subjected when they appeared in their fragmentary form, strung unsystematically throughout innumerable comments delivered over several years."
A masterful writer like Edward Feser would've used far less words to describe the same thing. You could've just said "In this paper, I will attempt to defend comments about HBD that I've made elsewhere in a systematic way."
Finally, your motivations for writing this - "that HBD in itself, from within its own framework, is powerless to generate any feasible political solutions to the problems it identifies…” is something that a lot of HBDers would say IS something unsolvable. This is based on natural ethnocentrism and the observation that "the most intolerant wins." You tried arguing that because race is more than biological, racial differences can be overcome. But you never addressed ethnocentrism ONCE in your entire essay. Instead, you tried using verbal trickery to argue that race relations are entirely a result of social matters.
Purposefully obtuse language, lack of charity towards HBDers, and preposterous word games lead me to believe that you are either incompetent or just trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the readers. Either way, it's a disappointment.
It's pretentious.
DeleteMany thanks for your clear descriptions, and the nice points you made, Edward.
ReplyDeleteI have nothing much to add, except that none of this rules out Cartesian dualism, just the commonest argument for it in modern times.
Common sense says that if science could reorder your brain while keeping you alive, then it would remain you who had a changing brain. You might end up with the brain of a mouse, for example. You would be you, but you would be a mouse. That makes dualist but not Aristotelian sense.
It would be more apt to say that Cartesian Dualism is ruled out if the Cartesian conception of nature is rejected, but Substance Dualism is not. And there I would agree with you. But the Substance Dualism you would argue for wouldn't be like Richard Swinburnes, but like J.P. Morelands and E.J. Lowes.
DeleteDoesn't the common sense judgement that there are real limits to the kinds of changes a brain can go through while still being a brain back up the Aristotelian.
DeleteIn fact, under cartesian dualism, there is no brain. We have just applied a made up concept, 'brain' to a particular configuration of particles, the configuration itself also made up by us.
I'd hesitate using the term “common sense“ too broadly. Of course the individual before and after concussions or brain surgeries is the same. But as a general point we should limit common sense to direct experience.
DeleteSharks feel magnetic fields. That's how they navigate. Humans had to invent compasses and sextants. A smart shark asks a surfer why we invent these instruments when it's better to just feel our way around the planet. The surfer says we cannot. Too bad, it says. You people have an abstract way of doing things. You must be made of inferior material. You're wasting your time trying to explain this stuff with your fancy theories about magnetic fields and properties of cold, desiccated matter. The ocean is alive if only you could feel it. Feeling is all a shark with common sense really needs.
ReplyDeleteAh, says the surfer, so true! But has a shark been to the moon?
Dr. Feser, I remember talking with you about the prospects of panpsychism at a gathering at CUA last year. I find your refutation of this view completely convincing, but continue to wonder why academic philosophers seem to find panpsychism such an enticing option--especially when you consider panpsychism's seemingly ad hoc nature and lack of explanatory simplicity. My sense, from experience with professors in my own department, is that many academic philosophers have been presented a caricature of Aristotelian metaphysics and philosophy of nature in their own training that blinds them to even considering a return to Aristotelianism as a viable solution to the basic problems of mechanical philosophy. I think many academic philosophers mistakenly have something like Bergson's vitalism in mind when they hear of substantial form, which naturally keeps them at arm's length when considering the admission of such a concept in their respective ontologies.
ReplyDelete“their own training that blinds them to even considering a return to Aristotelianism as a viable solution to the basic problems of mechanical philosophy”
DeleteA return to Aristotelianism is not a viable solution because Aristotle made fundamental mistakes in his physics and because Aristotelianism employs a host of incoherent terms.
Perhaps the most serious and debilitating mistake Aristotle made was in concluding that sublunary motion is in an impeding medium such that an object, absent being moved by another, will slow and stop and its motion will be lost.
That fundamental error of Aristotle makes the argument from motion for the necessity of a first unmoved mover unsound. The premise “Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another” (meaning whatever is in motion now is put in motion by another now) is false. Ironically, Aristotle himself understood and expressed in his Physics Book IV that motion in a non-impeding medium continues ad-infinitum.
Since we know now that all motion is in space, and space is a non-impeding medium, and motion is never lost, only transferred or transformed, the argument from motion is unsound, making the unmoved mover unnecessary, hence a return to Aristotelianism cannot be considered viable.
The philosophy of AT suffers further from the use of incoherent terms, such as “existence itself”. What is existing in “existence itself”? Absolutely nothing at all? Then in what sense can absolutely nothing at all be said to exist? Something? Then the existence is not of itself, rather, of something.
It is not “that many academic philosophers have been presented a caricature of Aristotelian metaphysics and philosophy of nature in their own training that blinds them to even considering a return to Aristotelianism”, rather it is the clear understanding of the false premises and invalid logic of AT that inhibits a return to Aristotelianism.
Aquino 77, In my own experience, most people who have invested heavily in these issues are arrogantly self-assured. They are overgrown children and the lure of reductionism is that it grants mastery of everything. "You shall be like gods".
Delete@StardustyPsyche, I don't see how it follows from Aristotle's scientific errors, that we should reject his metaphysics and natural philosophy as well. The relevant metaphysical notions of act, potency, substantial form, final causality and so forth, are all metaphysically prior to any inquiry conducted by the natural sciences, because any genuine scientific inquiry needs presuppose them in order to get off the ground in the first place. If you think any of the foundational metaphysical pillars of Aristotelianism is false, then advance an argument for that claim. Note, also, that were we to consistently apply your logic to the great mechanist philosophers, we would be entitled to reject most of their metaphysics out of hand as well, considering that they made considerable scientific errors of their own. In that case, your line of reason would be self-refuting.
DeleteTo your second point, you note the following:
"The philosophy of AT suffers further from the use of incoherent terms, such as “existence itself”. What is existing in “existence itself”? Absolutely nothing at all? Then in what sense can absolutely nothing at all be said to exist? Something? Then the existence is not of itself, rather, of something."
There is nothing incoherent about the term "existence itself". As the great Frank Sheed notes, you should not conflate something being unimaginable with its being inconceivable. These are two entirely different things. Unless you can show how the term "existence itself" is self-contradictory, then you have no right to label it incoherent. Any proponent of AT would agree that "existence itself" is unimaginable, since it outstrips any genus or species from which to classify it among the things of our experience. If you have a problem with the conclusion of the De Ente for a Being which just is "subsistent existence itself" then challenge one of its premises or show where the reasoning is flawed.
Finally, to ask what exists in "existence itself" subtly begs the question against the proponent of AT natural theology since it assumes that "existence itself" must exist "in" something, and is thus material and spatial. The AT proponent would deny that claim, holding that existence itself must be immaterial.
@Aquino77, Stardust will just argue with you forever. I matters not what you say. Just give up before you start.
Delete“were we to consistently apply your logic to the great mechanist philosophers, we would be entitled to reject most of their metaphysics out of hand as well,”
DeleteVery well, and by all means do so, since I do not ascribe to any school of philosophy, nor do I consider any philosopher or scientist to be an authority. I have no interest in or responsibility to defend any particular philosopher or philosophy, “great mechanist” or otherwise.
“In that case, your line of reason would be self-refuting.”
Not at all, since I did not set out to defend any particular philosopher or school of philosophy your ability to refute them does not entail my position as self-refuting.
“Unless you can show how the term "existence itself" is self-contradictory,”
I just did, in the form of a dichotomy, both of which choices are false, leaving the term “existence itself” as self-contradictory since it is self refuting.
“Finally, to ask what exists in "existence itself" subtly begs the question against the proponent of AT natural theology since it assumes that "existence itself" must exist "in" something,”
Indeed, that half of the dichotomy is logically invalid, as is the other half, hence the term “existence itself” is self-contradictory because in either sense the term is self-refuting.
The term “existence itself” is self contradictory in a manner similar to the statement “I always lie” is self-contradictory because it is self refuting.
You may recall the rather humorous Star Trek (original series) episode wherein Kirk and his cohort succeed in driving the ultra logical alien computer into a self induced circuit meltdown by feeding it one after the other of human conundrums including “I always lie”.
Kirk could just as well have fed that alien computer “existence itself”.
StardustyPsyche, It doesn't matter if you subscribe to mechanistic philosophy or not. I thought the first half of my objection made it clear that the inference from Aristotle's scientific mistakes to the conclusion that his metaphysics are false is a non-sequitur. The fact of the matter is that no scientific blunder that could be pointed to in Aristotle's corpus is going to refute his metaphysics along with it. Nor for that matter would it follow that mechanism could be ruled out as a metaphysical position due to the scientific blunders of its proponents. Neither conclusion follows in either case. You have yet to call any of Aristotle's basic metaphysical or natural philosophical theses into question. For example,that "change is the actualization of potential qua potential" is not the kind of principle that natural science could call into question. Science merely has to presuppose it in its practice. This more basic metaphysical formulation, I would contend,is the basis of the AT principle of causality, and it cannot be vitiated by any claim of science.
DeleteMoreover, since you reject the AT view of motion, which is derived from the notion of the actualization of potential (act and potency being really distinct as opposed to merely formally distinct), then I assume you also reject AT's view of realism about universals and teleology which are both derivable from those two more basic notions. But it is interesting to note that if you reject AT realism, from which follows AT's claims about immanent finality in nature, then you are of necessity, going to be conceptually backed into the narrow corner of theses occupied by platonic realism, nominalism or conceptualism, all of which give rise to some variety of mechanism as well (no immanent finality in nature itself). These are, metaphysically speaking, the only games in town and you are either in the AT teleological realism camp, or the mechanism camp. Your rejection of AT realism commits you to accept some form of mechanism as your basic view of nature, whichever form of it you support. You may not wish to support the views of any one particular mechanist, but it would nevertheless be fallacious to judge mechanism false on account of one of its proponents' scientific mistakes (as you mistakenly conclude in the case of Aristotle's metaphysics). If that way of reasoning WERE valid--which it is not, as I have detailed above--then mechanism, which you subscribe to in virtue of your rejection of AT realism, would be false as well. So, in the first place, the reasoning you advanced to reject Aristotle's metaphysics was fallacious because the inference did not follow from the scientific premise you advanced,but even more than that, even if the criticism were valid, it wouldn't accomplish its objective without tearing down mechanism along with it as well, the likes of which, I would submit, you are committed to given your rejection of AT act and potency.
I must admit in good faith, however, that I should have been more clear in expressing my initial objection. My intent was to show that the logic was flawed in being an instance of non-sequitur reasoning. I see how the last point about self-refuation could come off as confusing, because I did not specify that I was applying the flawed logic to another instance.
SP is a banned troll. Please don't feed him.
DeleteAquino77,
DeleteI appreciate the long and thoughtful response, but it is ultimately non-responsive to the fact that "existence itself" is self contradictory in the manner "I always lie" is self contradictory.
The assertion "change is the actualization of potential qua potential" has the truth of a tautology. It simply means "things only do what things can do" and "things don't do what things can't do". There is nothing profound or having the slightest bit of explanatory value in "change is the actualization of potential qua potential".
"you reject the AT view of motion, which is derived from the notion of the actualization of potential "
You have that back to front. The AT view of motion is derived from a core error of Aristotle about motion, that all sublunary motion is in a medium such that a moving object will slow and stop and its motion (or we might now call kinetic energy) will be lost.
From that fundamental error of Aristotle Aquinas falsely presupposed that motion is the actualization of a potential, and that an object cannot move itself.
Ironically, Aristotle himself showed how Aquinas was wrong in his Physics Book IV, where Aristotle himself did not consider motion in the absence of an impeding medium to be the actualization of a potential. Rather, Aristotle himself reasoned that motion, absent an impeding medium, will continue ad-infinitum, and is thus not the actualization of a potential, as Aquinas erroneously presupposed.
@StardustyPsyche,
DeleteI leave this as my final reply.
a) You contend that the joint term "existence itself" is self-contradictory, which would be to say that the simultaneous affirmation of both terms entails a contradiction. But nothing you have said lends its hand to this assertion at all.
b)There is nothing tautologous about Aristotle's definition of motion at all. As you'll notice at the beginning of the Physics, Aristotle spends a considerable amount of time refuting Parmenides, who denied the possibility of change on account of his belief that change would require being arising from non-being, which is absurd. Central to Aristotle's response to Parmenides, and his student Zeno, is that change does not require a jump from non-being to being because there is another level of being called potency, which while not of the same kind as actuality, is a genuine part of being nonetheless. Admitting the reality of potency is essential to being able to affirm the possibility of change as well. Since to deny change generates scores of paradoxes and contradictions, we have to affirm it, and in order to do so you need the notion not just of actuality all by itself, but rather the reduction of potency to act.
c)You mention the following in your last comment:
"You have that back to front. The AT view of motion is derived from a core error of Aristotle about motion, that all sublunary motion is in a medium such that a moving object will slow and stop and its motion (or we might now call kinetic energy) will be lost.
From that fundamental error of Aristotle Aquinas falsely presupposed that motion is the actualization of a potential, and that an object cannot move itself."
This assertion is patently false. Aristotle arrives at his definition of motion as early on, to my knowledge, as Book 3 Chapter 1 of the Physics where he writes "Since there is a distinction with respect to each kind (genos) between actuality and potentiality, the actualization of what is potentially,insofar as it is such, is movement" (201a8-10 C.D.C. Reeve translation). Aristotle does not even consider sublunary motion until later on in the Physics where he applies this definition of motion to different scenarios.
The point is even more obvious than this, however, when you consider that you don't even need to consider nature proper--the very topic of the Physics-- to know that change is the actualization of potential. The point is ultimately a metaphysical one. A brief consideration about the possibility of rational argumentation shows that Aristotle's view of change must be true if any argument one advances is ever to be valid. As Ed notes in Aristotle's Revenge, dynamic and static monism (respectively, the views that all is in flux (there is only potency and no actuality) and, conversely, that change is impossible (since there is only actuality)) are ultimately incoherent. For one, dynamic monism entails that there could never be a single person who gets through all the steps of an argument for that same thesis, let alone someone who could be convinced of the thesis itself. Moreover, any argument for static monism implicitly confirms the reality of very change which it seeks to deny in the fact that static monists sequentially entertain different premises along the way to their conclusion and thereby change from one step to another in that process. The existence of static monists as Ed puts it, refutes the position of static monism itself (For more on this check out Ed's Aristotle's Revenge from pp. 14-15).
At any rate, I think it would be to your benefit to consider the mistake of confusing science with metaphysics. The latter is certainly more foundational than the former and provides a proper lens through which to understand its results. It would, after all, be a huge mistake to throw out the metaphysical baby with the supposedly erroneous scientific bathwater in the case of Aristotle.
Great responses Aquino77. Well articulated.
DeleteAquino77,
Delete"a) You contend that the joint term "existence itself" is self-contradictory, which would be to say that the simultaneous affirmation of both terms entails a contradiction. But nothing you have said lends its hand to this assertion at all."
Non-responsive. You might just as well have said "nope, you're wrong".
I provided detailed arguments above that clearly show "existence itself" is incoherent as is "I always lie".
You have provided no counter arguments of any kind, thus my arguments stand unrefuted by you here.
Aquino77
Delete"b)As you'll notice at the beginning of the Physics, Aristotle spends a considerable amount of time refuting Parmenides, who denied the possibility of change ... Admitting the reality of potency is essential to being able to affirm the possibility of change as well."
Things do what things can do when things do the things that things can do.
That is the level of profundity in "change is the actualization of a potential". It has both the truth and triviality of a tautology.
Just because Parmenides denied even that most obvious truth does nothing to counter the fact that "change is the actualization of a potential" is a patently obvious and trivial assertion that has a value similar to saying X=X. Yes, just to be complete and formal that's fine, but there is nothing more useful or non-trivial about such a statement.
The reality of change is as certain as cogito ergo sum, since even to say "change is unreal" itself requires real change, so such a statement is self-refuting, requiring no profound argument to counter.
Aquino77
Delete“c)
This assertion is patently false. Aristotle arrives at his definition of motion as early on, to my knowledge, as Book 3 Chapter 1 of the Physics where he writes "Since there is a distinction with respect to each kind (genos) between actuality and potentiality, the actualization of what is potentially,insofar as it is such, is movement"”
You are confusing a textually prior assertion with a logically prior assertion.
The fact that you have made such a pedestrian analytical error calls into question your analytical capabilities more generally.
Don’t you realize that authors commonly place their conclusions in text that is prior to the argument for that conclusion?
This can occur in a single sentence such as “X is true because pqr”. Just because X appears textually prior to pqr in no way means that X is logically prior to pqr. This is, again, pretty elementary in analysis of writing.
Sometimes the author states the conclusion in the title, or in the first paragraph. Don’t you realize that?
Aquino77
Delete“c)you don't even need to consider nature proper--the very topic of the Physics-- to know that change is the actualization of potential.’
Right, one can reach the trivial conclusion, just by thinking about it, that things do different sorts of stuff when they go from as they are to how they can be.
With some more thought you can realize that things don’t and can’t do the sorts of stuff they can’t do and only do the sorts of stuff they can do. Why do you consider these trivial statements to be somehow profound metaphysical revelations?
“The existence of static monists”
Non-responsive.
While I appreciate your long posts they are irrelevant and completely non-responsive, rather, simply a vehicle to deny the clear incoherency of “existence itself” without making any supporting arguments, and to lay down the red herring of static monism, a subject I did not raise and is irrelevant to the failures of Aristotle and Aquinas in their attempts to argue from motion for the necessity of a first mover.
Aristotle and Aquinas failed because they both use the false premise that sublunary motion is in an impeding medium such that a moving object will slow and stop and its motion will be lost. That leads AT to assert the false premise that any object observed to be in motion now is being moved by another now.
Ironically, Aristotle himself in his Physics Book IV concluded that if there were motion that was not in an impeding medium then that motion would continue ad-infinitum unless something else changed its motion!
That is the contrast, because Aristotle wrote arguments for both of these statements:
1.Continuous motion in a lossy medium requires a continuous mover, and is itself an instance of change occurring.
2.Continuous motion in a lossless medium does not require a continuous mover, and is not an instance of change occurring, rather, in a lossless medium a changer is required to alter the motion of an object.
The error of both Aristotle and Aquinas was to conclude that the sublunary world is a case of 1 above.
In truth, there is at base no difference between motion in outer space and motion on Earth. All motion is in space, and space is, for motion, a lossless medium.
Therefore, our universe operates as a case of 2 above. Hence, the First Way fails.
SP, you are dismissing out of hand Aristotle's definition of motion, without even understanding it. Take more care. I recommend reading St. Thomas's commentary on that section of Book 3 of the Physics. (To say nothing of your rejection of "existence itself".)
DeleteTC,
Delete"(To say nothing of your rejection of "existence itself".)"
Indeed, that statement does not say anything about "existence itself".
The term "existence itself" is incoherent in the manner similar to "I always lie". There is no immediate grammatical violation in either case, but upon analysis of the word meanings one finds that the term is actually self-contradictory.
The term "existence itself" must be a reference to a real existence, because that is what the word "existence" is, a state of being.
So what sort of existent state of being is the existence of “existence itself”? Here we have a dichotomy, a choice between just two options, something or nothing.
1.If nothing is existing in “existence itself” the term is incoherent because nothing has no existence at all. Thus, if the existence of “existence itself” is said to be nothing then nothing cannot be coherently stated to have any existence in any sense.
2.If something is existing in “existence itself” then the term is incoherent because the existence, in that case, is self admittedly not of itself, rather, of that something.
TC
Delete“SP, you are dismissing out of hand Aristotle's definition of motion, without even understanding it. Take more care. I recommend reading St. Thomas's commentary on that section of Book 3 of the Physics.”
How do you know what I do or do not understand?
Aristotle defines motion in Book III, and by this he means sublunary motion he took to be in an impeding medium, as the actualization of a potential, a change. That is his error, which, ironically he does not repeat in Book IV in his discussion of motion not in an impeding medium, which he correctly identifies as continuing ad-infinitum, unless something else changes its course.
Unfortunately, Aristotle failed to expand on his great insight that motion absent an impeding medium continues ad-infinitum, and is thus not the actualization of a potential and is not a sort of change and does not require a mover.
Rather, Aristotle followed the consequences of his false premise for sublunary motion, that such motion is in an impeding medium such that an object will slow and stop and its motion will be lost, to its logical conclusion. After all, it only makes sense that if motion is in a lossy impeding medium, yet we observe motion, then clearly there is an external mover continuously moving things, and thus changing all things in motion, else, over time, all things would come to a halt, which obviously they have not.
But all motion is in space. You are in space. Everything is in space. Space, for motion, is a lossless medium. In truth, motion is never lost, only transferred or transformed. Motion, in the aggregate, continues ad-infinitum, just as Aristotle said it would in his book IV absent a lossy impeding medium. Space, for motion, is the functional equivalent of the void suggested by Aristotle’s predecessors, the Greek Atomists.
Thus, Aquinas presents a false premise “Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another” (meaning whatever is in motion now is being moved by another now).
Aquinas flatly, and erroneously, contradicts Aristotle in Book IV by stating, “For motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality.” Aristotle in Book IV states correctly that lacking a lossy impeding medium motion continues “ad-infinitum” “unless something more powerful gets in its way.”
Indeed, those 2 statements, 1 by Aquinas in the First Way regarding observed moving objects, and 1 by Aristotle in his Book IV regarding motion absent a lossy impeding medium, are diametrically opposed to each other.
It turns out that because all motion is in space, and space is for motion a lossless medium, and that at base there are no frictional losses, and that at base all interactions are net lossless, we find we live in a universe of the second sort, where motion continues ad-infinitum, motion per se is not the actualization of a potential and is thus not a change, and thus a first mover is not necessary.
Aristotle states in Book IV correctly, although somewhat obtusely, that in the case of no impeding lossy medium, acceleration is the change, or “unless something more powerful gets in its way” would be the means of change.
Thus, without realizing it apparently, Aristotle in Book IV laid the foundation for Newton and Russell, to show that acceleration is change, and all change is mutual, with the choice of identifying a particular cause and a particular effect only arbitrary and meaningless in a universe where the first mover is unnecessary because motion continues ad-infinitum in the lossless medium of space.
False. You have not explained Aristotle's definition of motion, a sign of which is that you seem not to recognize, and certainly haven't acknowledged, that motion is not merely locomotion. And I can admit Aristotle gets sublunary locomotion wrong without thereby rejecting his definition of motion in general. (I would also point out that Aristotle affirms the eternity of motion, and St. Thomas acknowledges this is philosophically defensible, and yet both of them still think a first, unmoved mover is necessary. This also suggests you don't sufficiently understand them.)
DeleteI do not understand your dichotomy about existence itself. I see no inherent contradiction. I suspect Aquino was right in his assessment of your position, but I would need to understand what you are saying before deciding.
DeleteTC
Delete“False.”
Ok, fair enough, you think I am wrong. But it would be helpful if you could say specifically what you think I am missing.
“You have not explained Aristotle's definition of motion, a sign of which is that you seem not to recognize, and certainly haven't acknowledged, that motion is not merely locomotion.”
Again, fair enough, you think there is a missing element to my understanding. Can you state specifically what that missing element is, in your view?
“And I can admit Aristotle gets sublunary locomotion wrong”
Ok, so we agree to that extent, Aristotle got sublunary motion wrong. That is a beginning of a common understanding between us.
“without thereby rejecting his definition of motion in general.”
If you could state what you think I am missing that would be appreciated.
“(I would also point out that Aristotle affirms the eternity of motion,”
Yes, in Book IV, I can cite the passage if you like, but you already seem to be familiar. But recall, motion that is ad-infinitum, for Aristotle, was motion in the void, and Aristotle concluded that the void was impossible, so he thought that motion ad-infinitum in the void would be the case based on metaphysical philosophical reasoning, but since the void, in his view, is impossible, that metaphysical philosophical possibility could not be the case in our sublunary real existence, our real existence here on Earth.
“and St. Thomas acknowledges this is philosophically defensible, and yet both of them still think a first, unmoved mover is necessary. This also suggests you don't sufficiently understand them.)”
In truth, it is precisely my understanding of them that allows me to point out their errors.
TC
DeleteYes, motion ad-infinitum in the void was philosophically defensible, but the argument for the unmoved mover is not based on such motion, because such motion was thought to be unreal in the sublunary realm, our real existence here on Earth.
The argument for the necessity of the first mover is based on the Aristotelian view of sublunary motion. On that view this First Way statement makes sense “Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another” (meaning whatever is moving now is being moved now by another). That statement does not make sense in the Aristotelian view of ad-infinitum motion, because in that case “no one could say why a thing once set in motion should stop anywhere; for why should it stop here rather than here?” as stated by Aristotle in book IV clearly means that no mover is needed once an object is set in motion, and there is no reason to suppose it would stop at all.
Rather, Aristotle continues, “So that a thing will either be at rest or must be moved ad infinitum, unless something more powerful gets in its way.” Clearly stating that an object moving in the void, an object moving ad-infinitum, will simply keep moving unless it is stopped or diverted by encountering another object.
That is the clear contrast.
1.In the First Way Aquinas describes a moving object as needing to be moved by another, else it will stop moving.
2.In Book IV Aristotle describes a moving object as continuing to move ad-infinitum, with no reason to stop, unless another object gets in its way.
Why this stark contrast? The answer is simple. In Book IV Aristotle is speaking about metaphysics on purely philosophical grounds, since there was no such thing as a void directly available on the surface of the Earth at that time. Aristotle wrote a number of arguments against the possibility of the void, so for Aristotle his treatment of motion ad-infinitum was merely a hypothetical philosophically reasoned case that could not be realized in actual reality here on Earth, in the sublunary realm.
Thus, both Aristotle and Aquinas used as a foundation for their arguments for the necessity of a first mover what they considered to be the reality of motion on Earth, that motion is in an impeding medium such that an object once set in motion will slow and stop and its motion will be lost. On that view the First Way makes sense, however, that view is wrong.
Space, for motion, is the functional equivalent of the void as considered by Aristotle in Book IV. Space, for motion, is a lossless medium where motion continues ad-infinitum.
All motion is in space. You are in space. Everything in our universe is in space.
Thus, while the First Way would be a good argument if reality comported with 1. above. In truth, reality comports with 2. above, so the First Way is based on false premises, and is therefore unsound.
Thomas Nagel complains that Naturalism/Reductionism as a complete explanation is doomed from the start because it simply ignores mind/consciousness. He also says theism is unsatisfactory because it is not really an explanation at all because of its appeal to mystery. However, the A/T categories—actuality, potentiality, hylomorphism, etc.—are explanations. It’s just that they’re not reductive explanations.
ReplyDeleteI’m reminded of Chesterton’s criticism of Joseph McCabe:
“Mr. McCabe thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think Mr. McCabe a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies. . . The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle. . . the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane. The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation. . Materialists and madmen never have doubts.”
Remember that when Nagel thinks of Theism, he has Plantinga and Swinburne in mind. I think David Bentley Hart is quite right that he couldn't stay a naturalist, if he had adequate knowledge of Classical Theism.
DeleteGood point Dominick. Reading Nagal from the A/T perspective, it appears as if he's complaining about reductionism and then demanding it be replaced with reductionism. Zing.
DeleteBTW Dominik, I think David Berlinski has the same blind spot. His book "Devil's Delusion" is quite good in it's critique of scientism, but makes basic errors in regard to theism. (Berlinski's dry humor and sheepish mannerisms are entertaining as well)
DeleteI recently heard Heather MacDonald interviewed and she explained that she is a "secular conservative" because the cosmological proof fails to establish cosmic origin and that Medieval Scholasticism was a nice try, but just amounts to wishful thinking. Common misconceptions.
OP
ReplyDelete“The Scholastic Aristotelian conception of matter is much richer and more pluralistic than that of the mechanical world picture.”
Another sense of “richer and more pluralistic” can be ‘lots of made up stuff that are not realistic’. “Richer” does not necessarily equate with ‘realistic’.
“it is in harmony with common sense,”
Folk science is especially dubious. Aristotelian physics is ancient folk science, and thus gravely mistaken.
“It takes the natural world to consist in innumerable distinct physical substances, just as common sense does.”
How very strange to think that the world consists of “innumerable distinct physical substances”. I don’t know what sort of common sense this amounts to. My common sense tells me that the world consists of a relatively few and finite number of distinct physical substances, the great variety of apparent substances owing to various combinations of these few basic substances. Doesn’t that make a great deal more sense?
“Real change disappears, and real time (which, for the Aristotelian, is the measure of change) vanishes along with it.”
Things were going kind of OK in the description of the materialist view, up to this sentence.
No, change is real on materialism properly formed and expressed. That’s what the expressions of physics abstractly describe, real changes over time. The net amount of material in existence never changes, hence no first sustainer is called for, but real material really interacts with other material over time in a real system of mutual changes of form for which no first unchanged changer is called for.
“New metaphysics, same as the old metaphysics”
Ok, if you are going to paraphrase The Who I am just going to have to thumbs up your post just on general principles of classic cool factor!
“Feyerabend traces the tendency to try to replace the richness of the natural world with a static abstraction”
No “static” abstraction is employed, rather, dynamic abstractions that are well understood to be descriptive, not prescriptive, as well as provisional, approximate, and incomplete.
It's always a great pleasure to read your writings, Dr. Feser. I just wanted to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all that your work has done for me, for giving me a confident basis for living out the Good life, which is a Catholic life. May God ever bless you
ReplyDeleteNaturalistic dualism holds that qualia are non-physical (that’s the dualism part) but that they are correlated with certain physical features of the brain by virtue of as yet unknown laws of nature (that’s the naturalistic part).
ReplyDeleteBest sentence I've read in a philosophy article in a long time.
Hi Ed,
ReplyDeleteAbout this passage:
This, in my view, is the deep metaphysical reason why the frontiers of cosmology and particle physics remain mysterious, as Dainton says, and why relativity and quantum mechanics remain difficult to reconcile with one another.
Do you see any evidence of research in physics that are trying to deploy Aristotelian concepts like Act and Potency to achieve a "Unified Field Theory?"
Physicists often turn their nose up at such statements. I guess my question is whether your approach is getting much traction in that discipline?
Thanks,
Daniel
I should read Aristotle's Revenge. :)
DeleteDaniel,
DeleteBefore life got in the way, I started reading Sabine Hossenfelder’s book "Lost in Math" about the current crisis in particle physics. Her thesis is that there are fundamental flaws in our approach to physics that reduces the problems to math equations with the presumption of “beauty”. What she means by “beauty” is a little difficult to capture, but she more or less is just saying our expectations of what answers will look like is way off. I’m not suggesting that A/T plugs right in, but . . .
You should check out Nigel Cundys “What is Physics?“ as well as his page “The Quantum Thomist“. Plus check out Rob Koons website, he has written extensively on Physics in the past years
DeleteThere are physicists who touch on Aristotelian concepts in the foundations of QM. For example:
Delete- Christian de Ronde
- R. E. Kastner
- Abner Shimony
- Nicholas Gisin
Anon,
DeleteThere's also Wolfgang Smith.
Maybe a better question is what scientific endevour doesn't employ Aristotelian concepts? In what scientific investigation is causality, or potential, or the quest for essence not undertaken?
DeleteAs Nancy Cartwright said: "What is science doing by positing frictionless surfaces and idealized conditions that don't really exist if not looking for the nature of things?"
I suppose as far as natural science goes, the object of scientific enquiry must be the essence, since the nature of a thing is just the essence considered as a principle of its activity.
DeleteOn an unrelated note--in light of the quote from Cartwright, I would say that general relativity and quantum mechanics remain difficult to reconcile because of a lack of experimental setup.
Quantum gravitational effects are extremely weak. It is not easy to find the prototypical quantum-gravitating object, sufficiently isolate it from its environment, probe its nature, and deduce the quantum gravity principles.
Now, the two theories are certainly difficult to reason about because they are at opposite poles of the act-potency spectrum. This makes thought experiments hard to come up with, but I would say that most physicists hold thought experiments as secondary to actual experiments.
T N
Delete"what scientific endevour doesn't employ Aristotelian concepts?"
Modern physics.
" In what scientific investigation is causality..."
Modern physics. In modern physics a cause as distinct from an effect is unknown and absent from the formulations of modern physics.
That is why Russell sought to eliminate the word "causality" altogether, because in the Aristotelian sense of cause and effect that notion of causation is absent from the formulations of modern physics.
In modern physics causality is at base not linear, not hierarchical, and not separated into cause and effect events.
At base there is only the mutual interaction in which the designation of one entity as cause and the other entity as effect is arbitrary and meaningless.
"As Nancy Cartwright said: "What is science doing by positing frictionless surfaces and idealized conditions that don't really exist "
Friction does not exist. Friction is an illusion. That is why Aristotle failed in his physics and his philosophical argument for the necessity of the first mover.
At base all motion is in space such that motion, or put another way, kinetic energy, is never lost, only transferred or transformed.
At base frictional losses do not occur, it is merely that energy is transferred or transformed, never lost.
Objects do not slow and stop absent a mover such that the motion of that object is lost. Aristotle asserted the opposite, that motion is lost in an impeding medium, and thus, in that case he reasoned, there must be a first mover.
Since Aristotle failed in this most basic assertion, and Aquinas repeated that failure, the First Way fails as an argument for the necessity of a present moment first mover to account for the observed fact that objects move.
DeleteStardustyPsyche,
T N
"what scientific endevour doesn't employ Aristotelian concepts?"
Modern physics.
To say modern science use none of the same concepts as Aristotle used is flatly false; all sciences use them. To say modern science uses full-fledged Aristotelian metaphysics is also flatly false.
One Brow,
Delete"To say modern science use none of the same concepts as Aristotle used is flatly false"
That's a good thing then, since that is not what I said, or what any reasonable person would mean by "Aristotelian concepts".
Aristotle used the concept of addition, but that does not make addition an Aristotelian concept.
I described in detail the specific Aristotelian concepts that are absent from modern physics. If you care to read those words for understanding, fine, else your transparent strawman is pointless.
StardustyPsyche,
DeleteThat's a good thing then, since that is not what I said, or what any reasonable person would mean by "Aristotelian concepts".
Any reasonable person would use "Aristotelean concepts" to mean the concepts that distinguish Aristotle's metaphysics from his rough contemporaries.
I described in detail the specific Aristotelian concepts that are absent from modern physics.
I'd disagree the concept of friction is absent from modern fiction, and you described what friction (in part) is modern physics.
While linear causality is gone, causality persists. One of the regular arguments (from physicists) against faster-than-light travel is the causal violations it would create.
One Brow,
Delete"I'd disagree the concept of friction is absent from modern fiction, and you described what friction (in part) is modern physics."
That is not close enough to an intelligible sentence for me to figure out what typos you made.
StardustyPsyche,
DeleteThat is not close enough to an intelligible sentence for me to figure out what typos you made.
Happens. I'm not a particularly good writer.
I'd disagree the concept of friction is absent from modern physics, and you described what friction (in part) is modern in physics.
I see I still reversed two words in my attempt to fix it.
Delete"I see I still reversed two words in my attempt to fix it."
DeleteYes, but I don't know which two, so the message remains largely garbled.
Nonetheless, your key point, apparently, is that friction is not absent from modern physics. That is incorrect when the term "modern physics" is used in its most common sense, which is not to say all aggregate physics models in modern use, rather, the new fundamental physics theories that have been developed in modern times, say, the last 120 years give or take.
Quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, QED, QFT, the standard model.
No, at base there is no such thing as friction. TN cited a statement regarding friction as though it were some obviously real thing, denied only by fools.
The First Way fails because Aristotle failed. Aristotle imagined and wrote that all sublunary motion is in a frictional medium such at a moving object will slow and stop and its motion will be lost.
Aristotle was wrong and therefore Aquinas was wrong.
It kind of amazes me that the above statement is thought to be somehow controversial or even incorrect in the 2020 by anybody at all, much less otherwise intelligent, educated, and thoughtful people.
At base there is no such thing as friction. At base all interactions are net lossless. Thus, the premise that an object observed to be in motion now requires an external mover now is false, therefore Aristotle was wrong, Aquinas was wrong, the First Way is an utter failure. How simple and obvious is that?
I mean, folks, throw me a bone here, OK?
StardustyPsyche,
DeleteNo, at base there is no such thing as friction.
You described friction as a transfer/transformation of energy from one object to another. It may be a different understanding of what friction does that Aristotle understood, but you recognize the basic concept occurs and have a definition for it. It's silly to say "X happens, I know how X works, and X does not exist". Clearer would be "X does not happen in the manner personA thought".
The First Way fails because Aristotle failed.
Sure, for many reasons. There is no need to state plainly false things to show the failures of the First Way, the truth is sufficient.
"There is no need to state plainly false things to show the failures of the First Way, the truth is sufficient."
DeleteThe truth is you don't know what the term "at base" means.
At base there is no such thing as friction. When you learn what "at base" means you will be able to understand the truth of that statement.
Color, sound, taste, odor, heat, cold, pain, pleasure are all removed from nature and relocated in the conscious subject.
ReplyDeleteColor, sound, taste, odor, heat, and cold are all the subjects of physical study on a regular basis. Pleasure and pain are all the subjects of biological study. None of these phenomena require more than a materialistic explanation. For example, the color of an object is the result of the wavelengths of light reflected by the object versus the wavelengths absorbed. No conscious subject needed.
For example, the color of an object is the result of the wavelengths of light reflected by the object versus the wavelengths absorbed. No conscious subject needed.
DeleteEd is talking about the experience of color as perceived by human beings. As common sense understands those features. We don't see wavelengths of light reflected on objected versus the wavelengths absorbed. We see Red or Green, or Blue. Wavelength is a quantitative term, not a qualitative term. I can measure any number of wavelengths, and it will never produce the experience of a color.
If your next move is to relocate color to the brain that perceives a wavelength, you have the same color, because you can take any number of measurements of the brain, and it wont produce one experience of color. The measurement only correlates with the qualitative experience of color.
Unless you are ready to concede the idea that color is really in the object that is reflecting the wavelength. But then you are projecting a subjective quality on an object - something that cannot be explained by mere measurements alone.
Cheers,
Daniel
One Brow,
DeleteThe problem of qualia is a well known and vexing problem in the philosophy of mind for theist and atheist philosophers alike (though Daniel Dennet blissfully unaware). If you think it is easily dismissed, you don’t understand the problem. No offense intended, but Feser isn’t stupid.
If you’re interested in researching the problem further, you could check out Feser’s Philsophy of Mind, or Thomas Nagel’s (atheist) Mind and Cosmos, or John Searle’s Chinese Room argument for starters. There is a large literature on the subject.
I agree with T N,
DeleteThere is a whole section in Ed's book, Aristotle's Revenge that covers a lot of this ground. Its call Primary and secondary qualities and goes into the background history and current status of these questions.
Cheers,
Daniel
Daniel/T N,
DeleteThank you for your explanation. I agree there is no satisfactory material explanation for qualia at this time. Had Dr. Feser limited his point to this, I would not have bothered to post.
However, Dr. Feser also says that, "All material objects are, on the mechanical view, really just variations on the same one kind of thing, viz. colorless, soundless, odorless, tasteless particles in motion, their nature and interactions to be described in purely mathematical terms." I don't know of any philosopher who would deny that reflection of specific wavelengths of light (aka color) is a property of matter. Could you list one?
At the very least, it is is a straw man of some sort that the claim that a "mechanical view" rules out color, sound, etc. from from having a physical existence.
I think you are using “color, sound etc.“ vastly different than Ed does. What is denied is that objects can have things like taste or odor inherent in their nature, like the Aristotelian claims, as opposed to externally added, like a mechanist is committed to.
DeleteHi One Brow,
DeleteEd gets into this discussion here: Aristotle’s Revenge and naïve color realism
Its a much more nuanced discussion of what he is arguing. And it is unclear from the post as to which mechanical view he is characterizing. From the book Aristotle's Revenge, he tends to talk about the Cartesian and Lockean conceptions, where they did take this position.
Anyway, like me know if you want to chat about the other post on color. Its quite interesting and covers a lot of the ground he discusses in the book.
Cheers,
Daniel
Oh, and he is talking about Dainton's characterisation, which was about the Cartesian understanding:
DeleteDainton goes on to note that while contemporary physics does not attribute to matter exactly the same list of properties that Descartes and other early moderns did, it nevertheless still leaves off of its list anything experiential. Hence, contemporary materialism faces the same difficulty vis-à-vis consciousness that materialists of Descartes’ day did.
So he is not strawmaning anyone here, just responding to Dainton's text.
Cheers,
Daniel
One Brow,
DeleteYou said: “I don't know of any philosopher who would deny that reflection of specific wavelengths of light (aka color) is a property of matter. Could you list one?”
George Berkeley.
Locke made distinctions between primary qualities which are mind independent, and secondary qualities which are mind dependent. You are assuming this by distinguishing between “wavelengths of light” and the qualia associated with those waves.
Qualia being subjective perceptions by definition, it’s going to be pretty difficult to come up with a “satisfactory material explanation for qualia” if, as you say, “No conscious subject [is] needed”.
Dominik Kowalski,
DeleteI think you are using “color, sound etc.“ vastly different than Ed does. What is denied is that objects can have things like taste or odor inherent in their nature, like the Aristotelian claims, as opposed to externally added, like a mechanist is committed to.
I admit I don't understand what you are saying. Having an odor is the property of emitting molecules of a particular configuration into the air. What materialist denies this happens?
By contrast, turn this odor into an experienced smell is a qualia, to my understanding.
Are you saying that, for the Aristotelian, the qualia is the same thing as the emitted molecules? That doesn't sound right.
Daniel,
DeleteWould this be the focal point of that article, to you?
(1) Is there good reason to believe that physics does not in fact capture everything there is to red, and that common sense is (contra Locke) after all correct to suppose that there is in red something that resembles RED?
These are two separate questions. To the first, I would absolutely agree that there is much to red that is not reflected in our current physical models, and likely more than will be reflected in any physical model.
Dr. Feser brushes past the color-blind in his response, but do we agree that this is an example where RED does not meet red? By contrast, tetrachromes might see RED1 and RED2 when people with the most common type of vision see RED.
I did not find in his article something that provided a convincing case for red having some of RED in it, but I could easily have missed something. Could you quote a few words from the paragraph you found convincing, please?
T N,
DeleteMy question was imprecise. I apologize, and will try to be more careful. Are there any materialist philosophers who would deny that reflection of specific wavelengths of light (aka color) is a property of matter?
Qualia being subjective perceptions by definition, it’s going to be pretty difficult to come up with a “satisfactory material explanation for qualia” if, as you say, “No conscious subject [is] needed”.
I agree that's true for discussing qualia. At the moment, I'm only questioning the assertion that (loosely speaking) light is colorless in physics.
One Brow,
DeleteI won't argue for it since I think Common sense philosophy is wrong. Further it is not required for Aristotelianism really.
That being said the fundamental point that they are making is that they think the contrary views privilege the quantitative over the qualitative.
You are claiming that color is wavelength of light, and that we get qualitative features by filtering this through our mind. The "common sense" view is to say that color is at least almost always (perhaps necessarily) coexistent with wavelengths independent of a mind. The mind just can see these things as they are. Color blind people just have a deficient-in-this-way mind or optical system.
This view is absolutely not what materialists say. They take that color is wavelength, and that we do mental processing through our material mind and optical systems to get some qualia.
One Brow,
DeleteI’m not seeing what the problem is here. Anonymous above said it pretty clear, I think.
Let me try this: The Aristotelian says that “redness” is in the physical object. The materialist says (as you did) that the object reflects waves that are interpreted in the “mind” as “redness”, but the “redness” isn’t in the object. That’s what the quote from Feser says in your O.P.
Now, Feser’s point is that moving the problem from the physical object to “the mind” doesn’t get us any further to solving the question; it just puts it off or relocates it.
Your point about color-blindness is what is known as the inverted spectrum argument and it doesn’t pose a problem for the commonsense perception of color. You can read why from one of Feser’s books or a Google search.
I’d really suggest you check out Thomas Nagel’s “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False”
I sometimes get lost in my own arguments. Its good sometimes to reorient myself to what the OP was actually getting at.
DeleteSo, the way I see it, Ed is critiquing Cartesian attitudes and ideas about matter that try to empty out the material world to qualia and consciousness. Ideas that, I think, you mistakenly attributed to him.
He starts off with Descartes's idea of matter as res extensa devoid of all qualia and consciousness where these are instead located in res cogitans. He then moves on to criticize conceptions of nature he thinks are just riffs on Cartesian dualism. These are Russellian monism, and Naturalistic Dualism. He criticises all three as providing a desiccated view of nature.
He claims the following:
The true solution to the problem of how to relate consciousness to the physical world is to resurrect the commonsense Aristotelian conception of nature.
The post I linked you to gets into the meat of some of his arguments with regard to color.
I'll come back in a bit to respond to your comment on the blog I linked to. I think there is a lot of good stuff there to discuss.
Cheers!
Daniel
This is a difficult issue--whether or not these secondary qualities somehow inhere in physical objects. And the question stands, why do wavelengths of light mutate into colors under the veil of human perception? Is it an imposed subjective dimension onto a raw noumenonal world? Or is the assumption that color is fundamentally wavelengths a reification fallacy,and that color should be seen in a more holistic light, as having quantitative (wavelengths) and material-formal properties (red, green, blue phenomenon)?
DeleteOne Brow,
DeleteMatter as part of the form of a thing is what enables it to transfer the odor at all. We need to distinguish between the quale we experience and the obkect that transmitts it. And given the mereological nihilism a mechanist must ultimately be committed to, the idea of a particular odor for a particular nature (e.g. the smell of strawberries) is not to be found within the nature of strawberries itself, but must be externally added to it, very much like a Humean who denies intrinsic powers. It should be obvious that the fact that odor gets recognized by particles getting breathed into the nose is irrelevant to the nature of the odor. What the Aristotelian provides is a story as to how Qualia can be at all, by locating the qualia inducing powers into the nature of the substance of which form and matter are both inseperable, but irreducible parts. If all that were, were moving particles of identical sort, bit in different order, as materialism and mechanism affirms, this line of thought is closed to them and Qualia get impossibly mysterious, which leads some, e.g. Daniel Dennett, to deny them wholesale.
(1) Is there good reason to believe that physics does not in fact capture everything there is to red, and that common sense is (contra Locke) after all correct to suppose that there is in red something that resembles RED?
DeleteThese are two separate questions. To the first, I would absolutely agree that there is much to red that is not reflected in our current physical models, and likely more than will be reflected in any physical model.
Great! Ed goes into great length at the beginning of the post on color about what he thinks A/T brings to the discussion. Things like this:
main thesis is that the fundamental notions of Aristotelian philosophy of nature – the reality of change, the theory of actuality and potentiality, hylemorphism, efficient causality, teleology, the intelligibility of nature – cannot be entirely eliminated from a coherent picture of physical reality…Furthermore, physics in any case captures abstract structure rather than concrete content, so that the absence of the key Aristotelian notions from its description of basic physical reality by itself tells us precisely nothing about whether the notions really correspond to anything in basic physical reality.
Dr. Feser brushes past the color-blind in his response, but do we agree that this is an example where RED does not meet red? By contrast, tetrachromes might see RED1 and RED2 when people with the most common type of vision see RED.
I think what Ed is trying to point out in this current post, is that the A/T framework is better equipped to discuss such issues as red and Red because by its very nature, physics only focuses on the measurable. A/T deploys such concepts as:
actuality and potentiality,
substantial form and prime matter,
efficient and final causality,
substance and attributes,
essence and proper accidents,
immanent versus transeunt causation,
and so on.
He argues that these ideas are essential to making sense of t questions such as these.
I did not find in his article something that provided a convincing case for red having some of RED in it, but I could easily have missed something. Could you quote a few words from the paragraph you found convincing, please?
The last four or five paragraphs get directly to Ed’s case.
First he mentions universals. The way I understand him (going beyond what he is saying in the article a bit) is that along Aristotelian lines, the mind perceives first the form of an object with the sense, then there is a composite physical image that is created in the mind, that is further abstracted of its particularity. The intellect focuses on those elements of an individual thing that are the same across all instances of such a thing. It universalizes it by de-particularizing it. (this is what we could call something that is immaterial. This universalized form is mind dependent, but also stems from the particular mind independent instance of the form in the object it initially perceived.
Looking at the mind independent object from an Aristotelian perspective, we could say that it has the potential in it to produce the qualia of RED in the perceiver. This passive potentiality is really part of the object, not just a part of the mind that perceives the object.
Second, he mentions the transcendentals: The idea that being and truth and goodness are convertible. He makes the point that just because truth is perceived by the intellect and goodness by the appetites, does not mean that truth and goodness are produced by these faculties. In the same way, by analogy, RED is not product of the mind, but a real feature of red. One the physics alone cannot express.
The final point he makes is to differentiate A/T essentialism from other kinds of reductionistic essentialism. A/T looks at substances holistically, not reductively.
Anyway, let me know what you think. What do you find unconvincing, and so on.
Cheers,
Daniel
Anonymous,
DeleteYou are claiming that color is wavelength of light, and that we get qualitative features by filtering this through our mind. The "common sense" view is to say that color is at least almost always (perhaps necessarily) coexistent with wavelengths independent of a mind. The mind just can see these things as they are. Color blind people just have a deficient-in-this-way mind or optical system.
This view is absolutely not what materialists say. They take that color is wavelength, and that we do mental processing through our material mind and optical systems to get some qualia.
This just doesn't sound like careful thinking. If the color were the light itself, than an object would have no color when the room is dark. Are there materialist philosophers that say this?
I would say that the color of an object is the ability to reflect certain wavelengths and absorb other certain wavelengths.
I would not use the term "deficient" to describe a color-blind person. Is a person with the most common sort of color vision "deficient" for not being a tetrachrome?
T N,
DeleteLet me try this: The Aristotelian says that “redness” is in the physical object. The materialist says (as you did) that the object reflects waves that are interpreted in the “mind” as “redness”, but the “redness” isn’t in the object. That’s what the quote from Feser says in your O.P.
Now, Feser’s point is that moving the problem from the physical object to “the mind” doesn’t get us any further to solving the question; it just puts it off or relocates it.
Your point about color-blindness is what is known as the inverted spectrum argument and it doesn’t pose a problem for the commonsense perception of color. You can read why from one of Feser’s books or a Google search.
I’d really suggest you check out Thomas Nagel’s “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False”
I thank you for the book recommendation.
I'm a materialist, and I certainly locate redness in the object. The post Daniel linked too used "red" for the surface-reflectant property of the object, and "RED" for the experience in the mind. My question: which materialistic philosphers deny the existence of red, as opposed to RED, as a property of the object? What about the "mechanistic" view denies the existence of red, as opposed to RED, as a property of the object?
If the answers to those two questions are 'no one' and 'nothing', than the characterization that "Color, sound, taste, odor, heat, cold, pain, pleasure are all removed from nature ..." is inaccurate.
Daniel,
DeleteSo, the way I see it, Ed is critiquing Cartesian attitudes and ideas about matter that try to empty out the material world to qualia and consciousness. Ideas that, I think, you mistakenly attributed to him.
It was not my intention to attribute these ideas to Dr. Feser. I will try to be more careful.
RomanJoe,
DeleteThis is a difficult issue--whether or not these secondary qualities somehow inhere in physical objects. And the question stands, why do wavelengths of light mutate into colors under the veil of human perception? Is it an imposed subjective dimension onto a raw noumenonal world? Or is the assumption that color is fundamentally wavelengths a reification fallacy,and that color should be seen in a more holistic light, as having quantitative (wavelengths) and material-formal properties (red, green, blue phenomenon)?
For a serious consideration, we would also need to consider the effects of such light on other animals. If there is a property of "red" in a light, will insects also see that as RED?
Daniel,
DeleteGreat! Ed goes into great length at the beginning of the post on color about what he thinks A/T brings to the discussion. Things like this:
main thesis is that the fundamental notions of Aristotelian philosophy of nature – the reality of change, the theory of actuality and potentiality, hylemorphism, efficient causality, teleology, the intelligibility of nature – cannot be entirely eliminated from a coherent picture of physical reality…Furthermore, physics in any case captures abstract structure rather than concrete content, so that the absence of the key Aristotelian notions from its description of basic physical reality by itself tells us precisely nothing about whether the notions really correspond to anything in basic physical reality.
As I recall from The Last Superstition, Dr. Feser acknowledges that the sciences accept (what he considered partial versions of) the reality of change, efficient causality, and the intelligibility of nature. I would also argue that the notion of teleology is represented in a limited by the notion of predictability of results. So, there is no question of "entirely eliminated".
Also, we should not confused physical models (which are abstract structures) with physics (a discipline rich in concrete content).
However, I don't want to get too much into a detail discussion of all of these topics, so I will drop this part of the conversation here.
The last four or five paragraphs get directly to Ed’s case. ... Anyway, let me know what you think. What do you find unconvincing, and so on.
As Dr. Feser points out, he is arguing analogically in these paragraphs, as opposed to logically. I see why he finds value in the construction, but that doesn't mean there is a physical reality underneath it.
@One Brow,
DeleteWhat the distinction between qualia and matter is supposed to be about is how the physics-quantitative-studiable properties of red are distinct from the properties of red in experience.
You won't find the experienced color-quality of red by studying the wavelengths or physical properties of the photons or anything like that of red. The visual quality of red-as-color doesn't at all enter the picture there.
Now, what mechanism says is basically that the qualities-of-red-known-visually don't actually objectively exist in red since the only things we can measure are wavelengths, photons and other such properties. The color of redness as known through experience is not in red at all, and all that red is is it's particular wavelength and other measurable physics properties.
And if the properties-and-qualities-of-red-known-visually aren't actually anywhere in red physically speaking, then our knowledge of non-measurably-knowable visual-redness becomes mysterious - the color red has nothing to do with what red actually is - and red just is a bunch of measuable non-qualitative properties.
Note, this isn't just saying that there is a distinction between the visual-part-of-redness and the measurable-physical part, and that they are just different aspects and properties of the same thing, but that red just is a particular measurable wavelength, and nothing more. The experienced color is something completely alien to what red actually is.
@OneBrow,
DeleteTo give an analogy, imagine if someone handed you a dollar bill while you closed your eyes. You can then feel the dollar bill with your fingers as a thin and smooth rectangular shape. When you open your eyes, you also see things you couldn't detect with just your fingers - faces, letters, number etc.
Now imagine if someone said that the dollar bill just was a thin rectangular piece of paper - and NOTHING MORE. That what you can sense with your fingers is all there is to a dollar bill. And that the things you could see with your eyes weren't actually really there in the dollar bill - since you can't know it with your fingers alone, and your fingers are the most objective or even only way of finding out the full set of the properties of things. So the aspects you could see with your eyes aren't actually really properties of the dollar bill but are simply how your eyes experience it... somehow.
This is how mechanism views visual-color-qualia. Since physical measurements are supposedly the surest, most objective way to know the nature of physical things, things which aren't captured by it such as the color of red aren't actually there in red light, but are somehow a result of how our visual centers process things.
@OneBrow,
DeleteNow add to the dollar-bill example the idea that all there is to your eyes and vision is what can be felt by the fingers, and the very existence of non-finger-detectable dollar bill qualities in your vision becomes extremely mysterious. In fact, it's basically unresolvable.
This is analogous to how the existence of color-qualia is mysterious for mechanistic materialism. If all there is to matter is what's measurable and nothing more - matter by definition and by nature just is that - and your whole being just is completely material in this sense, then your experience of qualia becomes VERY mysterious indeed.
One Brow,
DeleteYou asked: “What about the "mechanistic" view denies the existence of red, as opposed to RED, as a property of the object?”
Of course materialists affirm that red is a particular wavelength, etc. The issue is that the measurement of red as a physical/mathematical property is not the same as the experience of red by a conscious subject. Experience is not mathematics.
Let me try this: mechanism removes qualia from the physical object and puts it in the brain. That’s not are very accurate way to say it but it may help. Since you have previously acknowledged that qualia is a problem, just think of that same problem within objects rather than the mind.
Joe D did a good job explaining it above IMO.
Search online for an article from Thomas Nagel entitled: “What it’s like to be a Bat”.
One Brow,
DeleteQualia was removed from physical objects and moved to “the mind” so that "red" could be explained with math (wavelengths, whatever). It makes no sense then to say we will someday be able to explain qualia in “the mind” when the whole reason for moving it there is because it isn’t subject to mechanistic explanations.
T N,
DeleteYou asked: “What about the "mechanistic" view denies the existence of red, as opposed to RED, as a property of the object?”
Of course materialists affirm that red is a particular wavelength, etc. The issue is that the measurement of red as a physical/mathematical property is not the same as the experience of red by a conscious subject. Experience is not mathematics.
Technically, the property of absorbing certain wavelengths and reflecting other, but OK.
Qualia was removed from physical objects and moved to “the mind” so that "red" could be explained with math (wavelengths, whatever). It makes no sense then to say we will someday be able to explain qualia in “the mind” when the whole reason for moving it there is because it isn’t subject to mechanistic explanations.
Are you saying qualia are properties of physical objects? Do you believe Dr. Feser is saying that?
Where do you think qualia are located, and why aren't they identical for all observers?
JoeD,
DeleteWhat the distinction between qualia and matter is supposed to be about is how the physics-quantitative-studiable properties of red are distinct from the properties of red in experience.
You won't find the experienced color-quality of red by studying the wavelengths or physical properties of the photons or anything like that of red. The visual quality of red-as-color doesn't at all enter the picture there.
Now, what mechanism says is basically that the qualities-of-red-known-visually don't actually objectively exist in red since the only things we can measure are wavelengths, photons and other such properties. The color of redness as known through experience is not in red at all, and all that red is is it's particular wavelength and other measurable physics properties.
And if the properties-and-qualities-of-red-known-visually aren't actually anywhere in red physically speaking, then our knowledge of non-measurably-knowable visual-redness becomes mysterious - the color red has nothing to do with what red actually is - and red just is a bunch of measuable non-qualitative properties.
We need to be careful about distinguishig several different "reds" here, from what I can tell. There is the measureable part of lights with wavelenghts in the spectrum many people see as red, say mRed. I don't know any scientist would say we know everything about the phenomenon of light, so there are going to be parts of the physcial light itself (pRed) that are not covered in mRed. We can have a theory about pRed (say, tRed) where any part of mRed fits into tRed. This is in addition to the surface reflection property (sRed) and the qualia (qRed).
I am not sure what you mean by "mechanical" here, but for materialism, mRed is a subset of pRed, mRed is also a sub set of tRed, and pRed is probably not identical to tRed, but tRed is the best we have to describe pRed. So, if Dr. Feser is/you are presenting mRed as the scientific version of red, this is wrong. The scientific version of red is tRed.
JoeD,
DeleteNote, this isn't just saying that there is a distinction between the visual-part-of-redness and the measurable-physical part, and that they are just different aspects and properties of the same thing, but that red just is a particular measurable wavelength, and nothing more. The experienced color is something completely alien to what red actually is.
If you mean that "red just is a particular measurable wavelength [of light], and nothing more", that would be pRed.
Now imagine if someone said that the dollar bill just was a thin rectangular piece of paper - and NOTHING MORE.
I don't know any scientific discipline which would say that, though. All of them are deeply interested in structure, predictability, inter-connectivity, etc. It's arguments like this that make me think of you as fighting straw men.
So the aspects you could see with your eyes aren't actually really properties of the dollar bill but are simply how your eyes experience it... somehow.
To make this analogy have any force, you have to identify the property missing from tRed (as opposed to mRed).
I mean, in tRed the physical connections are obvious between pRed and qRed. pRed activates specific cones in the eyes, which transmit messages to the brain in a certain way, and these messages are combined to make qRed. We don't know exactly how the combining process is done (the hard part), but tRed certain combines with biology to make qRed. It's not as if qRed is some random choice any old light source.
This is how mechanism views visual-color-qualia. Since physical measurements are supposedly the surest, most objective way to know the nature of physical things, things which aren't captured by it such as the color of red aren't actually there in red light, but are somehow a result of how our visual centers process things.
So, you’re discussing a non-scientific view put forth by whom?
This is analogous to how the existence of color-qualia is mysterious for mechanistic materialism. If all there is to matter is what's measurable and nothing more - matter by definition and by nature just is that - and your whole being just is completely material in this sense, then your experience of qualia becomes VERY mysterious indeed.
Who are these mechanists that don't recognize scientific theories?
One Brow,
DeleteAs I mentioned, I was just saying it that way as an attempt to use some different form of expression even though it was not accurate to say it that way.
By definition mechanism denied redness is in the object because doing so would allow a purely mathematical description. But doing that just moved the problem elsewhere (i.e. to the mind). It can't be claimed that it will be explained someday when we advance further because that was the whole reason for moving it to the mind in the first place.
Check out an article by Thomas Nagel called "What it's like to be a Bat".
One Brow,
DeleteThis problem is recognized by formidable thinkers in the philosophy of mind (theist and atheist alike), such as Nagel, Kripke, Searle, Feser, at all, but you think it's just a word game or something? You think all these people are just to stupid to see what One Brow sees. Is that it? Surely if you had some small desire to engage the issue in good faith rather than this lengthy, pedantic obfuscation you could see what's going on here. Or maybe not.
@OneBrow,
DeleteSetting aside all of this "science is interested in inter-connectivity, patterns!" language, if what you are saying is that "science" accepts that qRed is a connected to pRed and that pRed doesn't exhaust what red is, then this agrees with Aristotelianism.
Red is both pRed and qRed. If anyone thinks that qRed is also physical, just not the same kind of physical as pRed, then that agrees with Aristotelianism and common sense.
You mention how science doesn't know all the physical properties of red, and this seems to leave open the possibility that qRed really is a part of pRed. This all depends on how you define matter and the p in pRed - if matter just is SOLELY what is physically measurable, mathematically definable and quantifiable, then NO - any method for analysing the physical properties of red is going to be confined to this definition and quantitative methods, so even if there are physical properties of red that we don't know yet, they're not gonna be anything like qRed.
It's like if someone said there are properties of the dollar bill we haven't discovered yet with our fingers (maybe some holes or crevices or hills in the paper), so the faces, numbers and text MUST be finger-sensible and we haven't discovered it yet!
This, as you can see, misses the point.
You also mention some theory that the signals of pRed in the brain are combined somehow to make qRed (which seems to imply that qRed isn't actually in red but is just how our brain perceives the signals when combining them.)
This could work if there is more to matter than pRed - if most scientists accept that red isn't exhausted by what is mathematical-quantitative-measurable, then great! They agree with common sense and Feser!
If they believe that the definition of matter is exhausted by that, such that pRed (including any additional unknown mathematical-quantifiable properties we haven't discovered yet) is ALL there is to the matter of red, then that won't work.
Keep in mind, this assumption is supposed to apply to ALL matter, including our brain - all that there is to our brain is what can be mathematically-quantifiably-measured, and nothing more. IF that is true, then qualia shouldn't exist in our experience.
Now, if you believe qualia is material, just not in the same category as what can be mathematically-quantifiably measured, then that solves the problem easily.
Note: Qualia is clearly and radically distinct from what is mathematical-quantifiable-measurable. You can't collapse qualia into quantity, by definition
Joe D,
DeleteI think we've reached the point where One Brow's lack of understanding is just wilful. I think the root issue there is narcissism rather than philosophy.
In my experience, One Brow is an inveterate sophist, not to mention dishonest.
DeleteT N,
DeleteAs I mentioned, I was just saying it that way as an attempt to use some different form of expression even though it was not accurate to say it that way.
I understand. There are times for loose talk, but sometimes it muck things up instead of clarifying.
By definition mechanism denied redness is in the object because doing so would allow a purely mathematical description. But doing that just moved the problem elsewhere (i.e. to the mind). It can't be claimed that it will be explained someday when we advance further because that was the whole reason for moving it to the mind in the first place.
Check out an article by Thomas Nagel called "What it's like to be a Bat".
Which scientists use this definition of mechanism? Why should I think Feseer is accurately describing the process of science, instead of creating a phantasm for him to rail against?
I've read Nagel's paper, and it is very interesting.
This problem is recognized by formidable thinkers in the philosophy of mind (theist and atheist alike), such as Nagel, Kripke, Searle, Feser, at all, but you think it's just a word game or something? You think all these people are just to stupid to see what One Brow sees. Is that it? Surely if you had some small desire to engage the issue in good faith rather than this lengthy, pedantic obfuscation you could see what's going on here. Or maybe not.
Well, that's a rather quick rush to judgment.
Maybe I did not make my point clear enough at the start. I don't think Feser's description of "mechanism" accurately depicts what scientists do or how they operate. I've never come across one that thought notions like structure, interconnectivity, predictability, etc. were not worth exploring and understanding. My point has been that whoever Feser is talking about with this "mechanistic" picture, it does not seem to be modern science. Science recognizes color, taste, etc.
So, explaining to me repeatedly that there is more to reality mass, charge, etc. isn't answering my questions nor engaging in my argument.
JoeD,
DeleteSetting aside all of this "science is interested in inter-connectivity, patterns!" language, if what you are saying is that "science" accepts that qRed is a connected to pRed and that pRed doesn't exhaust what red is, then this agrees with Aristotelianism.
What I said is that mRed did not exhaust what red is. To be frank, I'm don't have a position on pRed exhausting red. However, if you want to make a claim that qRed is part of pRed, then you have to account for the different qReds that red induces in different being.
No, I am not referring to the color-blind.
Tetrachromats have a different experience of qRed than trichromats (most of us are trichromats). If fact, a trichromat with OPN1MW will have a different experience of red than a trichromat with OPN1MW2. There is also the way cultural aspects impact color perception; you will see red differently if you were raised in Peru than if you were raised in New Jersey. Insects have completely different color experiences. So, there is not just qRed, there are qRed1, qRed2, ..., qRedx.
That said, if you what to take all the qRedi, and wrap them into what pRed, I have no objection to that. Certainly, all the qRedi would be part of an expanded tRed.
Red is both pRed and qRed. If anyone thinks that qRed is also physical, just not the same kind of physical as pRed, then that agrees with Aristotelianism and common sense.
Yes, this has been my point from the first post. "Color, sound, taste, odor, heat, and cold are all the subjects of physical study on a regular basis."
You mention how science doesn't know all the physical properties of red, and this seems to leave open the possibility that qRed really is a part of pRed. This all depends on how you define matter and the p in pRed - if matter just is SOLELY what is physically measurable, mathematically definable and quantifiable, then NO - any method for analysing the physical properties of red is going to be confined to this definition and quantitative methods, so even if there are physical properties of red that we don't know yet, they're not gonna be anything like qRed.
I agree mRed is inadequate. As far as I can tell, so do scientists.
This could work if there is more to matter than pRed - if most scientists accept that red isn't exhausted by what is mathematical-quantitative-measurable, then great! They agree with common sense and Feser!
Hence, my point about Dr. Feser tilting at straw men.
Keep in mind, this assumption is supposed to apply to ALL matter, including our brain - all that there is to our brain is what can be mathematically-quantifiably-measured, and nothing more. IF that is true, then qualia shouldn't exist in our experience.
Whose assumption is "this assumption"? Any actual scientists?
To be clear, none of this is a claim that scientists buy into the entirety of Aristotelian-Thomism metaphysics. I'm just saying that it's wrong to say there is no overlap.
Jeremy Taylor,
DeleteIn my experience, One Brow is an inveterate sophist, not to mention dishonest.
As much fun as it is to bicker with you, I'm trying to have a discussion with grown-ups here. Please take your hurt feelings to another thread.
Hi One Brow,
DeleteMaybe I did not make my point clear enough at the start. I don't think Feser's description of "mechanism" accurately depicts what scientists do or how they operate. I've never come across one that thought notions like structure, interconnectivity, predictability, etc. were not worth exploring and understanding. My point has been that whoever Feser is talking about with this "mechanistic" picture, it does not seem to be modern science. Science recognizes color, taste, etc.
So - Ed is talking about different philosophers who have expressed these opinions and views. Most scientists, as you point out, have not even thought about these questions because they have nothing to do with the things they are studying.
Aristotle believed that there isn't just one method to produce knowledge, but many methods. At the top would be metaphysics which studies being as being. Beneath that, you have methods to study physics, biology, psychology, and so on, each having different rules that govern their disciplines. At most, those scientists would have an unconscious understanding of metaphysics and their metaphysical biases. Very few would have an explicitly worked out position, because it is a big job, and in most cases, totally unnecessary to their performing their jobs!
In some cases, usually when a biologist or physicist waxes poetic, they drift into stating positions that clearly do not follow from their discipline and have crossed over into the real of metaphysics. And they often act as though their conclusions derive from their study of physics and biology, and so on…. Ed typically picks fights with such as these, and it is fun to watch him demolish their arguments.
But if your point is simply to indicate that Ed is unfairly tarring and feathering everyone else who practices science with such broad statements, as those you indicated above, I would say Ed would be the first one to clarify that he does not want to give that impression. And if you start reading some of his books, you will quickly find that to be the case.
Does this address your concern?
Thanks,
Daniel
One Brow,
Deletewhatever
Daniel,
DeleteSo far, the only book of Dr. Feser's I have read is the The Last Superstition. It's been a while, but my memory is quite clear that that it is precisely the methods and goals of science that Dr. Feser is engaging against.
It's certainly possible that, over the years, Dr. Feser has changed his focus. I have not read his latest book, but the title does not seem indicate this change. Still, you can't judge a book by it's cover.
I appreciate your willingness to engage in this discussion. Thank you for your politeness and consideration.
T N,
DeleteI'm sorry our exchange left you with a bad feeling. I have valued our other conversations. I hope we can productive exchanges in the future.
Hi One Brow,
DeleteIf the only book you read was The Last Superstition, then no wonder you came off with that impression. :) It is the most polemic of his books.
I would say, pretty much without exception, every other book he has written has had a far more positive tone. And if you are interested in understanding his arguments, you should probably start with his books in this order:
The Philosophy of Mind: This one really only gets into A/T ideas at the very end, but it sets you up for the ideas introduced in other books.
Aquinas: This gives you the basics in order to understand Aquinas in a variety of ways, not just to prove the existence of God.
Scholastic Metaphysics: Gets much more in depth on Scholastic concepts and brings them into much more dialog with other philosophical systems and with science. After reading this, I went back and re-read Aquinas. It made the arguments presented in Aquinas appear much more convincing to me.
Aristotle's Revenge: A beast of a book that I'm still struggling through. Really good stuff though.
Cheers,
Daniel
Daniel,
DeleteThank you for that advice. I should not judge a person for what they say at their most polemical. I'll do some more reading.
Don't worry, I'm sure that in other threads, the same observations will be made by more and more posters, so long as One Brow is still hanging around, and I will be here to add mine to theirs....
DeleteJeremy Taylor,
DeleteDon't worry, I'm sure that in other threads, the same observations will be made by more and more posters, so long as One Brow is still hanging around, and I will be here to add mine to theirs....
There is always a diversity of opinions about me. There is always a diversity of commentators. Some are interested in a rational exchange, other seem primarily interested in airing their petty grievances. You've been perfectly clear what sort you are.
No, opinion seems to tend in the one direction about you. I count about five or six posters who have come to a similar conclusions to me about you in quite a short time. The other posters just have less experience of you or are more forgiving.
DeleteYou know what you could do, take some responsibility for your own posting behaviour?
Jeremy Taylor,
DeleteSince there are still serious conversation to be had in this thread, I'll forego the pleasure of slapping you around more after this comment, unless you can come with with something meaningful to say.
No, opinion seems to tend in the one direction about you. I count about five or six posters who have come to a similar conclusions to me about you in quite a short time.
Only five or six? I'm disagreeing with the original poster quite strenuously, and only five or six of his fans think I'm a troll? That's a pretty low number for this type of environment. Thanks for the ego-booster.
I mean, when I started posting on JazzFanz, there were probably a hundred people there who thought I was troll. As the years have gone my, their opinion of me has increased.
The other posters just have less experience of you or are more forgiving.
Or, perhaps just more perceptive than you.
You know what you could do, take some responsibility for your own posting behaviour?
In what way have I abandoned responsibility?
You could take responsibility for your own hurt feelings and your obsession in following me from comment to comment, but I don't ask for miracles.
Why am I unsurprised you often get called a troll?
DeleteIf you pay attention, which admittedly is asking a lot from you, I have only chimed in to confirm the suspicions of other posters when they came to the conclusion, to let them know they aren't alone. But I suppose it is too much to hope you might have some self-reflection.
One Brow: my memory is quite clear that that it is precisely the methods and goals of science that Dr. Feser is engaging against.
DeleteYour memory may be clear, but your understanding is not. Feser never argued against science or scientific methods. Modern science is obviously very successful. His point is — and has always been — that it is impossible to understand science (and its success!) without an Aristotelian(esque) perspective. Since you apparently agree with him, I don’t know what all the fuss is about. If you have never come across a philosopher who insists that modern science is completely devoid of Aristotelianisms, or that rocks are all quantity and no quality, or so on, well, lucky you.
Mr. Green,
DeleteI agree that all sorts of philosophers believe all sorts of foolish things.
When Dr. Feser says that science ignores things like structure (a limited version of form) and predictability/function (a limited version of teleology) change which phenomenon occur, he is indeed arguing against the current methods and goals of science. He's also wrong. Just has science has a limited version of efficient cause, it also has a limited version of formal and final cause.
Further, none of this dialogue offers any support to nor discrediting of the ideas behind Aristotelianism/Thomism, from what I can tell.
Mr. Green: Since you apparently agree with [Feser], I don’t know what all the fuss is about.
DeleteOne Brow: When Dr. Feser says that science ignores things like structure
So apparently the fuss is because you think Feser doesn’t agree with Feser, considering that the article above clearly indicates the opposite. I don’t know whether you are just reading Ed uncharitably or not, but you have certainly misunderstood his position.
Mr. Green,
DeleteI may have misunderstood. To me, it seemed above that Dr. Feser said even structure was reduced to lower-level efficient causes by the "mechanists". Did I misunderstand that?
correction: "same color" should be "same problem...."
ReplyDelete"We see Red or Green, or Blue. Wavelength is a quantitative term, not a qualitative term."
ReplyDeleteWhen all the fancy and misleading rhetoric is stripped away, the assertion that red is qualitative rather than quantitative is the very subject under discussion. A 'common sense' understanding of the matter simply assumes the conclusion. You need to prove that the qualitative is inherently different than the quantitative. The materialist can assert that the qualitative is simply another way to describe a biological presentation of the quantitative. Any biological presentation could be said to be 'felt' in some way when it reaches the consciousness -- even if it arrived in the shape of a sine wave. IOW, this is a non-falsifiable position. So there appears to be nothing profound in the qualitative/quantitative distinction.
The point is just that moving qualia from the physical world to "the mind" doesn't answer the problem; it just ignores the problem.
DeleteThe point is that huge metaphysical issues grace the stage when one divorces the qualitative from reality and then tries to eliminate or introduce it back into a reduced reality. The Aristotelian position would be to regard, say, a given organism as one kind of thing and the quantitative view of it as an abstraction from it.
DeleteI'd say moving the 'solution' to a mysterious, totally unknowable 'substance' just ignores the problem. I can't kick its tires. It's the ultimate abstraction. At least we do know we have a mind. Nevertheless, you ignored my point. If we are to believe there is something profound in the qualitative/quantitative distinction, what is it?
DeleteDon,
DeleteThe physical/mathematical description of red is not the same thing as the experience of red.
Check out Thomas Nagel's "what it's like to be a Bat". It's available online and can explain what the issue is.
Don has been perpetually confused around here for over a decade. He's no longer a troll, but his inability to understand philosophy is unlikely to wear off at this point. Just a warning.
DeleteTH, You're still avoiding the question. I know there is a difference between reading about war versus fighting in a war. I read Nagel's "What it's like to be a Bat" several years ago. My question is, "So what?" Why is this seen by Nagel and folks around here as a profound thing? I recall my college days when I was writing a paper on "Alice in Wonderland." At the time (1970s) Freud was still considered profound. One popular psychoanalytic interpretation made a big deal out of the fact that Alice went into a hole. This supposedly had unconscious sexual meaning. But I thought this was nonsense. Alice was going into an alternate reality and, however she got there, it could be interpreted as going into something. This is how the qualitative/quantitative distinction strikes me. No matter how we as beings experience phenomenon, the biology has to find a way of letting us know. There is no other way. There is nothing philosophically or scientifically profound in this subjective experience. It's no more profound than the fact that our own skull protects our own brain and not that bat's brain. Anonymous asserts I'm confused. I assert most philosophers are confused about more than I am.
DeleteIt seems to me that the issue not primarily whether the surface of the red apple has physical properties that make it well conducive to reflecting light at the "red" wavelengths and absorbing light at other wavelengths. The issue is rather this: whether the so-named "surface properties" of the red apple are themselves red in some critical way LIKE TO the red we experience as a quality. That is to say, does the redness inhere in the thing in a way that does not make it a complete equivocation to use the word "red" both of the apple and of my experienced color. If there is something in the surface that is like to the red I experience, enough to make the word not entirely equivocal in both uses, then there is a foundation to referring to qualia as something distinct from the mathematical description of the surface (though not separate from it).
DeleteAs an analogy: we know that objects with mass experience a pull toward each other, which we can express under physics with mathematical formulas. However, we can also feel the pull of a body toward the center of the Earth. This feel is a sensation in us, but we have no problem saying that it is also a phenomenon in the things themselves, so much so that we still, after 300 years, continue to use words that evoke the concept "incline" for the physical reality, even though such words are more properly predicated of agents with awareness. It would be odd, indeed, to insist that what exists in the things themselves isn't a "pull" that is like to what we experience as "pull" or "weight". But if that reality in the things has a real likeness to what we experience of the phenomenon, perhaps redness and hotness do also?
That is a great analogy Tony. It reminds me of this passage:
DeleteSince qualities presuppose quantities, it is not strange that we also measure qualities by reference to quantities. Thus we measure the gravitational force of a heavy object by how far it moves a pointer on a scale, or the brightness of a light by the distance at which it can be seen. In this way natural science as it has developed in modern times, in defining physical objects, tends to replace all the other kinds of properties of things with quantitative measurements in order to be able to reduce them to abstract mathematical terms. Thus from Galileo on, many scientists and philosophers have defined the objective reality of the "secondary" qualities of things as they are impressed on our senses in favour of "primary" quantities that can be easily measured.
The fundamental problem with this application of an abstract mathematics to concrete, changing physical reality is, of course, that an abstract geometrical figure or an abstract arithmetical number leaves out the dynamism and other properties of concrete physical objects.
(Benedict Ashley The Way toward Wisdom)
Cheers,
Daniel
Tony,
DeleteIt seems to me that the issue not primarily whether the surface of the red apple has physical properties that make it well conducive to reflecting light at the "red" wavelengths and absorbing light at other wavelengths. The issue is rather this: whether the so-named "surface properties" of the red apple are themselves red in some critical way LIKE TO the red we experience as a quality.
You weren't in the above exchange between myself and Daniel, but there is one bit of a critical point I want to address. There is "we experience", there is only 'our individual experiences'.
Tetrachromats have a different experience with the same red light than trichromats (most people are trichromats) with OPN1MW, which will be different still from trichromats with OPN1MW2. Our experience with red is also altered based on our cultural biases.
So, any connection between the surface properties and the experienced properties has to account that there is no unique experienced property, but a multitude of experienced properties.
That should have been, 'There is no "we experience", ..."
DeleteHonestly, I get the impression that a lot of the people developing the problem here don't actually have a very firm grip on it. The stuff about light just pushes it back a step.
DeleteI reserve the right to express my opinion and represent the ignorant masses. :) Hopefully those more intelligent that I will come to my rescue when I get in over my head.
DeleteCheers,
Daniel
Materialists' (other than eliminativists') basic claim is that all the properties, states, and so on, of the mind can be identified with the aspects of physical universe (typically, aspects of the brain, nervous system, body, etc.). The non-materialists' claim is that they can't. The problem you're discussing points to first personal properties (i.e. qualia) and asks whether these can really be identified with physical aspects of the universe. Thought experiments like Mary's Room illustrate why not (or, more neutrally, why it seems unlikely).
DeleteThe issue of whether these experiences have some extra-mental correlate, and what that correlate might be, is besides the point.
Omit "the" in "the aspects".
DeleteHey Anonymous
DeleteJust to be clear, you are saying the way we are conducting this discussion is by focusing on the idea that material substances have qualia, and you are saying that is beside the point. The point of such arguments is not to add qualia to substances but to say that qualia cannot be reduced to physical input. It must be a product of something other than a physical substance: for example, something immaterial.
Have I understood your critique?
Thanks,
Daniel
Anonymous,
DeleteThe problem you're discussing points to first personal properties (i.e. qualia) and asks whether these can really be identified with physical aspects of the universe. Thought experiments like Mary's Room illustrate why not (or, more neutrally, why it seems unlikely).
I think Mary's Room illustrates well that there are aspects of the universe that are not measurable. That's very different from being not physical.
Good point One Brow,
DeleteAnd I think Ed would agree with you. See Ed's post, Progressive Dematerialization
He states Suffice it to say that for the A-T philosopher, while this is a strike against materialism it isn’t really an argument for dualism unless one accepts the purely quantitative conception of matter in question -- as Cartesians do but A-T does not. From an A-T point of view, the modern “mathematicized” conception of matter is essentially incomplete. It’s true as far as it goes, but it’s not the whole truth. So, the failure of some feature to be analyzable in material terms as materialists and Cartesians understand “material” does not entail that it is not material full stop. It might still count as material on some more robust conception of matter. And there is a sense in which, for A-T, qualia are indeed material, at least if we use “material” as more or less synonymous with “corporeal.” For A-T philosophers regard qualia as entirely dependent on physiology. Our having the qualia associated with seeing a red object, for example, is entirely dependent on bodily organs like the retina, the optic nerve, the relevant processing centers in the brain, and so forth.
Cheers,
Daniel
Dan is going in the right direction with his reply. You need to nail down what exactly you mean by "material" for your interlocutors.
DeleteDan,
DeleteSorry. I just saw your question. I was using material in a modern, not Aristotelian, way.*
I would, incidentally, be careful about sliding between Thomist and ordinary senses of matter. Thomists' designated matter (materia signata quantitate) is probably closest to the current ordinary usage of matter, but even it is a bit different than what most people probably mean and you're liable to confuse if not careful.
*I didn't have a specific sense in mind since I didn't know what sense One Brow had in mind.), but an example might be something with spatial extent, or something that is energy or has mass, or something like that.
The point of Mary's room is that the experience of qualia is not captured by what can be studied by neuroscience (or presumably any other kind of natural science). Presumably this is what materialists believe - that in theory at least all we experience of colour can be captured by natural science. It's hard to see how one can reject that and still be a materialist (except perhaps an eliminativist one).
DeleteAnonymous,
Delete*I didn't have a specific sense in mind since I didn't know what sense One Brow had in mind.), but an example might be something with spatial extent, or something that is energy or has mass, or something like that.
At the very least, you need to have a conception of matter that recognizes the difference between, for example, the three simple sugars (glucose, fructose, and galactose). They are all C6H12O6, but also chemically distinct. For that, you need more than material, mass, charge, etc.
Jeremy Taylor,
DeleteThe point of Mary's room is that the experience of qualia is not captured by what can be studied by neuroscience (or presumably any other kind of natural science).
Science is not limited to the sorts of measurements proposed in the Mary's Room experiment.
Good point Anonymous. Thanks for clarifying. As this is not my full time job, I learn as I discuss. Fail forward, as it were. :)
DeleteCheers,
Daniel
The point is not primarily about science, but materialism. Materialists do think that our experience of colour and other qualia can be captured, at least in theory, by the kind of quantitative method at the heart of neuroscience. This is because they believe this kind of science captures the true nature of things. All else, including all qualia and the mind itself is reducible to what is studied by physics and neuroscience, etc. Qualitative introspection is not the kind of science that materialists prize as revealing the true and fundamental nature of things. One can expand the definition of materialism, but it then loses meaning. We are all materialists then, even those of us who argue strongly the mind is not reducible to the physical brain.
DeleteJeremy Taylor,
DeleteIt's nice to converse with you on topic. We should do *that* more.
The point is not primarily about science, but materialism. Materialists do think that our experience of colour and other qualia can be captured, at least in theory, by the kind of quantitative method at the heart of neuroscience.
You're wrong in two distinct ways.
1) As a materialist, I don't qualia, nor any other physical phenomenon (whether it involves the brain or not), can be captured by measurements.
2) I read the blogs a fair number of atheist scientists, and none of them say you can understand their field based on knowing what the measurements are.
So, you're wrong about what some materialists believe, and you're wrong about the science.
One can expand the definition of materialism, but it then loses meaning. We are all materialists then, even those of us who argue strongly the mind is not reducible to the physical brain.
This is all-or-nothing thinking. Materialism does not need to be StardustyPsyche-style eliminativism, and it's not meaningless to say there is a material difference between glucose and fructose.
One Brow and Jeremy,
DeleteHere is the original paper the Mary's Room argument is from. Please pay special attention to how he defines "physical" in the first few paragraphs.
More Anon anon. Have a good night!
One Brow,
DeleteI'm happy enough to discuss things as long as I don't despair my interlocutor can discuss them in good faith. We will see.
Maybe things will be clearer if you offer an actual definition of materialism. Obviously no one is saying that science is a matter of only measurement. That wouldn't even make sense, as it would immediately raise the question of what is being measured. There's no pure measurement. As Jackson points in his article, which Anon has helpfully posted, it is a matter, in his terms, of physical information. He notes that there has always been some imprecision in just what this means for materialists, but there are surely limits, and one is the exclusion of real teleology. Again, though, it would be useful for you to tell us what you mean by materialism.
To help guide you in explaining your position, do you accept the existence of mental substances or properties? If so, do you think these can act as causes?
DeleteAnonymous,
DeleteWhat Mary learns in this paper:
She specialises in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like 'red', 'blue', and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wave-length combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence 'The sky is blue'.
What the paper does not describe is someone stimulating the cones in Mary's eyes by some non-photonic means, to kick of the cascade of actions that would cause red to appear in her mind. It speaks of measurements and interactions, but not of experiments. It's a limited form of science.
Just out of curiosity, let's say we add the non-photonic, cone-stimulating encounters to Mary's experience. Then, when she has the photonic experience for the first time, does she learn anything new?
So you can't learn scientific knowledge without doing the experiments involved?
DeleteAnyway, the point is not about science per se, but about materialism and what materialists allow as making up the world.
Jeremy Taylor,
DeleteTo help guide you in explaining your position, do you accept the existence of mental substances or properties? If so, do you think these can act as causes?
I accept mental properties as emergent from physical phenomena. Any mental "substance" would be just the physical substance with an interaction among and between various physical properties. Of course they can act as causes, it happen every minute at your typical stop light, where the lights change based on the way the the mechanical and electrical forces interact inside the switch box. You can't reduce the actions of a stop light switch box to mere mass, charge, etc., because it's doing more than that.
Of course, it's easy for humans to understand a system as simple as stop light switch box. Humans are much more complex, so much so that it's probably beyond our capability to fully understand how we work.
What does it mean to say you accept mental properties as emergent, but mental substances are just physical substances with interaction amongst a d between various physical properties? That seems nearly, or truly, contradictory. Do you think ideas can be caused in their own right?
DeleteThat should have been "causes in their own right".
DeleteJackson writes in his response to Churchland, "The whole thrust of the knowledge argument is that Mary (before her release) does not know everything there is to know about brain states and their properties, because she does not know about certain qualia associated with them. What is complete, according to the argument, is her knowledge of matters physical."
DeleteThis is Jackson's first premise. But it's false. Mary would wonder, since light waves in her room were distributed so evenly, why did she have different receptors for different bands when one type of receptor for the whole bandwidth would work just as well? Was this a historical accident? Was it meant for some environmental quirk long since disappeared? She would know she didn't know.
When Mary emerges into the color world, she's presented with a measurable, physical difference in the environment. The physical phenomenon teaches her what the different receptors are for. If a dualist substance is required to teach her, then that same substance was present in the black and white room. She couldn't experience even the black and white light without it. So why wasn't this substance sufficient in her room to teach the same lesson?
Obviously the dualist substance is the same both inside and outside the room. Her body is the same. The controlled distribution of light is the only difference. Instead of proving dualism is required to teach us fully, Mary could just as legitimately be used as proof it's not relevant at all. Qualia follows changes in environment. It doesn't follow the dualist substance.
Jeremy Taylor,
DeleteThis comment is primarily about how the Mary's room experiment, as described in the paper, is not a robust picture of what materialism is or allows, and therefore not a good argument against materialism. However, I agree that Mary's Room is a good argument against the notion that measurement is sufficient to learn everything about a phenomenon. I didn't what that to be lost in the discussion.
So you can't learn scientific knowledge without doing the experiments involved?
I think performing experiments absolutely enhances the learning of science. That's one reason every high school science class I ever took had science experiments.
Now, "can't learn" is a little trickier. You can learn to multiply (that is, the rules of multiplication) without ever practicing by actually multiplying numbers, but a person who practices multiplication learns better and understands better. It seems to be the same with science. Those who do experiments seem to learn better and understand better.
Anyway, the point is not about science per se, but about materialism and what materialists allow as making up the world.
Do we agree that materialism would allow for (with appropriate technology) the activation of signal in Mary's cones or optic nerves, thus giving her an insight to colors not available from measurements and reading, but also not connected to actual red photons?
As to whether this experience is the distinguishable from being exposed to red light, I have no knowledge, opinion nor position.
Jeremy Taylor,
DeleteWhat does it mean to say you accept mental properties as emergent, but mental substances are just physical substances with interaction amongst a d between various physical properties? That seems nearly, or truly, contradictory. Do you think ideas can be causes in their own right?
It appears to me that you can trace behavior of humans to causes that have no direct, obvious physical connection. There is nothing in a red stop light that causes my foot to apply pressure to a brake, the cause is my understanding of what the red light means. That understanding is not in any individual neuron, but only in the interactions between thousands or millions of neurons.
So yes, mental configurations can lead to phenomenon in the world not explainable by Stripped away physical activity.
This mental activity is still dependent upon and integrated with a physical medium.
No we don't agree. As Jackson points out, the materialist believes physical information - which is necessarily third person, as studied by neuroscience - sums up, at least in theory, what can be known about colour. For the materialist, the first person experience of qualia either supervenes on this third person knowledge or is entirely reducible to it or can be eliminated entirely, so if we know the latter, we automatically know the former (or see that it can be eliminated in the case of Eliminative Materialism).
DeleteIt seems to me you aren't actually a materialist. Let go your worries and embrace dualism.
One Brow and Jeremy,
DeleteNobody is denying that that Mary can be made to hallucinate seeing red if we monkey around with her in certain ways. The question, as Jeremy implies in his last post, is whether the first personal mental properties thereby brought about are reducible to physical properties.
One Brow,
DeleteI wanted to comment on your earlier comment to me about simple sugars earlier, but the conversation got away from me while I was doing other things. I might try again later.
Omit the second earlier.
DeleteJeremy Taylor,
DeleteIt seems to me you aren't actually a materialist. Let go your worries and embrace dualism.
I'm not particularly interested in the label, as long as you don't use one that falsely describes my views. You don't like materialist, feel free to come up with something else. However, I am a monist, not a dualist.
As far as you saying we don't agree, are you saying that sort of manipulation can never be possible? Anonymous does not seem to think so.
Anonymous,
DeleteNobody is denying that that Mary can be made to hallucinate seeing red if we monkey around with her in certain ways. The question, as Jeremy implies in his last post, is whether the first personal mental properties thereby brought about are reducible to physical properties.
I'm not sure what the limit of reducible is here. As you know, I see value in describing properties to a structure that are not possessed by the components. I suppose you could talk as if every single phenomenon is an interaction of quarks, and try to describe all phenomena in terms of these interactions, but it seems to me you would be missing a big part of the picture.
When you have time, I look forward to your comments on the simple sugars.
Anonymous,
DeleteBut does this first person experience depend on a non-physical substance? Mary's room doesn't answer that question. It can't answer that question.
Suppose we were going to test if a match requires oxygen to light. We construct an experiment similar to Mary's Room. Inside the room we remove all oxygen gas. We strike a match. It doesn't light. We go outside into the oxygen rich atmosphere and strike a match. It lights. It's reasonable to conclude oxygen is required to light the match. We have tested two cases where (probably) only one relevant variable has changed -- oxygen content.
But in Jackson's thought experiment no such control over the variable in question is exercised. The only way to test for this dualist substance is to create an environment in which the substance does not exist. In this case Mary would have to be drained of the extra substance while inside her room. She is not. She still experiences qualia. When she exits the room the extra substance is exactly the same. Only the physical environment has changed. So the variable we want to test is not a variable in this test. Jackson has created a bogus test.
Surely most materialists would agree first person experience is a different, and probably superior form of learning. Schoolboys stuck in a classroom are pretty convinced of it. Mary's Room is good at showing it's an interesting question. But that's all it does.
You don't seem a monist to me, but a dualist. You allow for distinct mental substances or properties and mental causation. Unless you are an idealist, it seems to me like you are a dualist.
DeleteI don't know what you mean by manipulation.
Jeremy Taylor,
DeleteYou don't seem a monist to me, but a dualist. You allow for distinct mental substances or properties and mental causation. Unless you are an idealist, it seems to me like you are a dualist.
I don't know what you mean by manipulation.
I do not accept the existence of mental substances. I do accept the existence of mental properties as the properties of a large collections of processes that are not descriptive of the individual, smaller processes. I accept mental causation.
Label that how you will, but please use an accurate label, and "dualist" is not accurate.
Brilliant. I have been trying to organize my thoughts on the problem of consciousness for awhile and this post has definitely helped.
ReplyDeleteI had been for awhile criticizing the pseudo-monism of contemporary materialism--envisioning reality as fundamentally one type of thing and every phenomenon ultimately reducible to the base powers of the 'world-stuff.' Many have abandoned the metaphysical view of wholes or unities in being. A dog isn't reducible to its chemical or atomic components. It's ultimately one thing, a unity, a metaphysical whole. Any attempt to a analyze it within the restricted palette of atomic or chemical powers is to ultimately betray what it is, its quiddity. This is the issue with contemporary solutions to the consciousness problem. They seek to reduce the phenomenon of conscious experience to the limited powers of some feature of reality. But chemical exchanges are qualitatively different than conscious experience. The surging of dopamine from one location to another within the organic wet material we call the brain is categorically different than the private feeling of pleasure.
But, like you say, if we partition being up into its common sense wholes, its unities, we can view matter not as some impoverished and hollow world-stuff, we can see it as a beautifully rich basis of reality. A dog is a different kind of matter than copper or wood. Sure they each are composed of atoms, similar chemicals, etc. But in their unity, their wholeness, they are radically different beings. I betray the compendium of Shakespeare's work by trying to glean its spectacle through analyzing the chemical components of its ink and the microfiber arrangements of its parchment. Sure I will learn some fascinating scientific facts about centuries old manuscripts but I will not come close to understanding its semantics, its grand narratives, etc. This is what we have with the reductionist tendencies of today's solutions to the problem of consciousness.
Just a question for the posters if any are still floating around: I've been cautiously working my way into AT philosophy of nature for awhile now, and while I've seen Ed and David Oderburg defend the AT approach to qualia a lot, I haven't seen any explanation of how the characteristics of an object end up in the mind (how the phenomenology of experiencing color correlates to the accidents/properties of an object, as well as the quantifiable's identified by physics). Has anyone seen that or willing to give a shot at how it might be done?
ReplyDeleteThe way we begin to know, in the Thomistic framework, is by first knowing things. Through the knowledge of things, you begin to have thoughts. Before we can know ourselves, we must first come to know the external world. As Saint Thomas sees it, if there were no things, there would be no knowledge, including self-knowledge.
DeleteThe first thing one understands of external things is that it is a being. Being is what first strikes the intellect. No one questions the quantitative experiences that one has. What is at question is the qualitative experiences, such as smell, color, feel, and so on. But if we are to trust our senses regarding quantitative experience, why not for qualitative experience as well?
The first thing one grasps about oneself is that we creature of a material being, like the other material beings it sees around itself. It is through the act of knowing other things that the intellect comes to know itself in a secondary way, not immediately.
So the question isn't how do external realities appear in the mind. That would be, according to Thomas, a wrong headed way of seeing things. Our intellects are not geared to know ourselves primarily first. It is geared to know the external world first. And our success at Science, I believe, is a testimony to this power we inherently have. We really do grasp the external world, in terms of physics, chemistry, biology, and then only as we gain this knowledge of external reality, that we can start to trust our understanding of internal things relating to ourselves.
Descartes' mistake was to suppose that you could start from the inner realm of thought (cogito ergo sum) and thus prove the existence of reality. The Thomist would say, in opposition, that the first given, is the existence of the external world. And from there, you move towards the inner world of minds, and then from mind to God.
DeleteThomas would absolutely reject Descartes' radical skepticism about the reality of the external world in search of a rationalistic ground of though (the cogito). Instead, what is a given, is the external world. He calls bullshit on Descartes and refuses to play by his rules.
DeleteThe senses grasp singular - sensations. The intellect grasps the universals. But Descartes only allowed us to trust the senses as far as they could be mathematized. As Ed is fond of saying, this is like taking a metal detector, which is really good at finding metal, and claiming it is the only way to find out about anything. By so doing, Descartes has forced us to embrace an abstraction rather than the reality. The shadow, rather than the concrete.
DeleteSo if we analyze a thing from a hylomorphist perspective, we need to look at its material cause, its formal cause, its efficient cause, and its final cause. After Descartes, Formal and Final causes were removed from the picture. But we human beings are fully equipped to detect them. It is because this aspect of reality was removed from the picture, that we have issues with qualia. The flower is red. Red is part of its form. And form is not reducible to efficient causality, but includes all characteristics of the object it is a part of. But what is the final cause of red? It is to attract pollinators or human beings? Whatever it is, the final cause is the source of intentionality or goal orientedness that many materialist philosophies want to explain away.
DeleteBut because formal and final causes have been stripped from any description as illusory, the materialist is left to try to explain all of these in physicalist terms (looking at only efficient and material causes). Anything that appears to be subjective or mind dependent gets removed. As Ed says in the Philosophy of Mind If the materialist conception of explanation entails always stripping away the phenomena to be accounted for anything that smacks of subjectivity, meaning, or mind-dependence, then a materialist “explanation” of the mind itself will naturally seem to strip away the very essence of the phenomenon to be explained. Being at bottom, attempts to explain the mental in terms that are intrinsically non-mental…
So any defense of an Aristotelian conception of qualia and intentionality must in the end rest on the existence of formal and final causality.
Cheers,
Daniel
Daniel,
DeleteBut because formal and final causes have been stripped from any description as illusory, the materialist is left to try to explain all of these in physicalist terms (looking at only efficient and material causes).
Some may have stripped them away, but many materialists recognize structure and function, which would be the non-mystical aspects of formal and final cause, respectively.
Materialism doesn't recognise true final causation or function by definition. What is called function here is thought to cash-out in theory in what has no function. Materialists may use the language of function at times, but they think function is reducible to what is not function. This is a good part of what being a materialist means.
DeleteForm is not the same thing as structure.
Casual Thomist,
DeleteThat's an issue I have as well. It's part of why I think hylemorphism doesn't really succeed in naturalizing consciousness. We can locate qualitative features in formal causes in objects; that's all well and good, but there's still no way we can reduce first person properties to third person properties; the experience of qualia involves a distinct perfection (that of a subject, an experiencing self or spectator) from the "qualia" that is present in objects.
Yeah, I think Ed makes the same point in Philosophy of Mind in his 2006 PostScript chapter:
DeleteOddly enough, though, I have found that while some people are hostile to hylomorphism because its incompatibility with the naturalistic spirit of the times, other in stark contrast, see in it little more than one more version of the most popular of naturalistic philosophies of mind, namely functionalism. The hylomorphist regards the soul as the form of the human body; the functionalist identifies the mind with the organizational structure of the brain. Aren't these mere variations on the same theme? Aren't the similarities more significant than the differences (such as the hylomorphist's emphasis on the entire body rather than just the brain - which is, as it happens, an emphasis even many contemporary functionalists have recently come to adopt)?
In fact the two theories couldn't be more dissimilar. It must be remembered that hylomorphism is part of a broadly Aristotelian metaphysics, which includes a commitment to the reality of formal and final causes as irreducible components of the natural world. This contrasts with the modern tendency to think only in terms of what Aristotle would call material and efficient causes (and even then in senses of these terms somewhat different from the Aristotelian ones.) This is a tendency shared by contemporary functionalism. For functionalists, the "organizational structure" of a thing is essentially just the pattern of efficient-causal relations its components bear to one another. But for the hylomorphist, the ""form" of a thing is something very different., and entails a commitment to realism about universals (Aristotelian if no Platonic) that is no part of functionalism... In particular, a thing's form includes the specific set of properties (not just efficient-causal ones) that make it the thing it is. And in the case of a substantial form - the specific kind of form the hylomorphist identifies with the soul with...
@Daniel, I certainly agree with Ed that substantial form encompasses a lot of irreducible aspects of what it means to be a being that materialism flat misses. Certainly, even they would agree that there are the quantifiable charactaristics, but as Ed noted in Scholastic Metaphysics (quoting Heraclitus, can't remember the page ) our experience of quantifiable characteristics is totally reliant on qualitative ones; we don't see relationships, we see things and posit/come to know relationships and other universals as a result of those experiences provided by the senses.
DeleteHowever, at some point, if only to provide an answer when materialists ask us, we need to have an explanation for how it can be that an object at point B can in some way be subsumed into my intellect, which is a part of my complete substance residing at point A. Obviously this has to happen through the senses, but in what way?
To give the devils their due, one advantage (and its not enough to be a convincing one) that the materialist explanation of qualia/secondary properties has is that it "reduces" the characteristics of matter to those that we can adequately measure as they travel between us and the object in question. Take red, for example. We do have pretty conclusive evidence that whatever the entire explanation of why we can see the color RED, the fact that red wavelength photons are traveling to our eyes is a part of it. The question then becomes, what else constitutes that experience? This is especially important for we Thomists I think as "nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the senses" then our entire theory of knowledge, which I believe blows the problem of intentionality and other issues of rationality right out of the water still has a pretty significant explanatory gap. If RED is not equatable with red, then how does redness enter our intellect via the senses? It certainly doesn't originate within us, since we experience different qualia based on different things we encounter. Do we hold like Locke that what the apple really has is a power to produce a sensation of REDness in our senses/intellect? That would explain why it only gives REDness at certain points. From a hylemorphic perspective, (correct me if I'm wrong), qualia would have to be material. If that's the case, it begs the question: what other characteristics does animal matter need to have to produce such an experience from stimulii?
Casual Thomist,
DeleteIt’s important as a matter of interest, but as a polemical matter between A/T and materialism, I don’t think it’s important. It’s just as easy to say, “someday we’ll understand how qualia works in physical objects” as it is to say “someday we’ll understand how qualia works in the mind”.
If the former were susceptible to physical/mathematical description it would have been done already, and this only shows the latter won’t be either. And we have (yet again) shown that moving the problem elsewhere (i.e. to the mind) is a fruitless endeavor like Feser, Nagel, and so many others have said.
Jeremy Taylor,
DeleteMaterialism doesn't recognise true final causation or function by definition. What is called function here is thought to cash-out in theory in what has no function. Materialists may use the language of function at times, but they think function is reducible to what is not function. This is a good part of what being a materialist means.
Form is not the same thing as structure.
Final cause is more than just function, much as form is more than just structure.
Some materialists don't recognize structure or function, some do. I'm one who recognizes structure and function.
Daniel,
DeleteI hope that the contributions of Atto, Casual Thomist, and Anonymous have made it clear that it's not just me who sees Dr. Feser as saying science is about measuring and claims it is removing structure and function from our toolkit for understanding the world.
Those posters can speak for themselves, but I didn't see any of them saying exactly that.
DeleteI don't know why you keep banging on about structure. Function is a form of final cause, so long as the function isn't an appearance only. Materialists only accept the appearance of objective (mind-independent)function, not its reality. That's basic to materialism. You can expand the term until it has no meaning, if you want, but most won't be interested in that.
Jeremy Taylor,
DeleteYou’re right. Materialism obviously doesn’t accept hylomorphism and its attendant final causality on a doctrinal level. But materialists are more than happy to sneak it in when it suits their purposes; they just have to call it something else: “natural selection”; or “function”; or speak about evolution as if it has some purpose; or argue with their opponents (who are, so they claim, but mere particles) as if there’s some standard that tells them that particle movements can be “wrong”.
T. N.,
DeleteThat is no doubt what has confused One Brow. Materialists often use terms that suggest objective function, and, indeed, as Dr. Feser has pointed out, it is hard to see how such language can be cashed out in terms of language that doesn't imply function.
Jeremy Taylor/T N,
DeleteWhen people come into this forum and tell you what hylomorphism really means, that you don't understand it, etc., do you take such people seriously?
So, I'm sure you'll appreciate that when try to tell me what materialism is (without even specifying what type of materialism you mean), it's hard for me to take seriously.
Function is a form of final cause, so long as the function isn't an appearance only.
That's what I just said. I'm glad we can agree. As I said, I accept the existence of function (what something does), but not of final cause (which, among other things, involves what something is supposed to do).
Materialists only accept the appearance of objective (mind-independent)function, not its reality.
I would say that 'materialists accept that we can see what something does, but do not assume there is a way to know what it should do'.
You’re right. Materialism obviously doesn’t accept hylomorphism and its attendant final causality on a doctrinal level.
Not entirely true. For example, Daniel Fincke over at Camels with Hammers is/was considering a limited form of hylomorphism has merit. Certainly, I think any complete description of the world relies on structure and function.
But materialists are more than happy to sneak it in ...
You don't think putting it that way ("sneak it in") is in anyway unfair? Do you think categorizing the people you disagree with as "sneaks" doesn't prejudice the argument?
I'm not a Thomist. Philosophical terms like materialism have meanings or they don't. They're not indefinitely flexible. Those of us who have some longstanding interest and knowledge of philosophy should have a knowledge of these basic terms.
DeleteIt isn't clear what you mean by differentiating final cause and function. Explain in greater detail. What something does is an unhelpful designation. What something is supposed to do is a little better, though it introduces a moral element that could be put aside here. What you seem to be getting at is the difference between real teleology, an intrinsic goal of a process, and as-if teleology, or what seems to have an end or function because we see it that way. Materialists can, of course, accept the latter, because it isn't true teleology or function, but can't accept the former.
Jeremy Taylor,
DeleteMaterialism is a broad enough term that we have other words to describes more limited varieties, such as physicalism or naturalism.
What you seem to be getting at is the difference between real teleology, an intrinsic goal of a process, and as-if teleology, or what seems to have an end or function because we see it that way. Materialists can, of course, accept the latter, because it isn't true teleology or function, but can't accept the former.
This seems to be a fair description.
Naturalism is a broader term than materialism, though it is usually hard to see what it means that is distinct from materialism, if not just a rejection of theism, idealism, etc. But okay.
DeleteHi Casual Thomist,
DeleteI was taking my time trying to formulate a response to your question, as you seem to have a much firmer grasp on the problem then I do :) Hopefully I can add to the discussion:
From a hylemorphic perspective, (correct me if I'm wrong), qualia would have to be material. If that's the case, it begs the question: what other characteristics does animal matter need to have to produce such an experience from stimulii?
So, from what I understand, the form is not absolutely reducible to physical shape, such as in the example of the human mind. Wouldn't you agree? So we have at least one case were form does note equate to material (at least not in the modern sense of the word).
But what about final causality? This would be rejected by materialists as an illusion. The match has no inherent power to produce a flame. But from a hylemorphic perspective, we would say that yes, the match does have a power to produce a flame. That is a property of the match, in terms of a passive potential (would we call this a passive power?).
Couldn't this power to produce the experience of Red also be something that can be included in the description of a red roses' final causality? So at least in that sense, the red rose has a power (passive potential if not active) to produce the qualia of redness in a human being, and thus in that sense, Red is present in the rose?
I may be going down the wrong path here, so if anyone knows why this proposal is wrong, please let me know!
Cheers,
Daniel
Another way to look at the problem, is as Ed describes in his post, Zombies: A Shopper's Guide where he discusses qualia zombies:
DeleteIt is no accident that the Aristotelian tradition regards sensation and imagination [powers by which we detect qualia] as entirely corporeal and in no way supportive of dualism. What contemporary philosophers call qualia and intentionality (or at least a rudimentary sort of intentionality that involves mere directedness without conceptual content) are, for the Aristotelian, simply ordinary corporeal features of certain kinds of ordinary material substances.
This only sounds odd if you assume that a material substance is “really” “nothing but” something going on at the micro-level -- particles in motion, say. For naturally (the Aristotelian would agree) it is hard to see how the feel of pain, the way red looks, the way heat feels, etc. can be reduced to or explained in terms of particles in motion, the firing of neurons, or the like.
But that is a perverse way of thinking of material substances. To describe a dog in terms of the particles that make up its body or the firing of certain neurons in its nervous system is like describing a painting at the level of the splotches of color scattered about on a canvas.
It is to abstract out from a whole certain parts which are metaphysically less fundamental than the whole is.
So again, this is just another way of saying that the materialist is unjustly privileging an abstraction over the reality. Why assume that the experience of Red really is not a part of a complete description of a red rose?
Cheers,
Daniel
Oh fun! I think I've found a post that confirms my theory about final causality:
DeleteTeleology Revisited
Ironically, it is addressed to One Brow from 11 years ago! I never realized he was such a loyal fan! :)
Anyway, here is the passage in question, relating to coldness.
The core of the A-T “principle of finality” can be illustrated with the simplest sort of cause and effect relation you might care to take. As Aquinas sums it up: “Every agent acts for an end: otherwise one thing would not follow more than another from the action of the agent, unless it were by chance” (Summa Theologiae I.44.4). By “agent” he doesn’t mean only conscious rational actors like ourselves, but anything that serves as an efficient cause. For example, insofar as a chunk of ice floating in the North Atlantic tends, all things being equal, to cause the water surrounding it to grow colder, it is an “agent” in the relevant sense. And what Aquinas is saying is that given that the ice will, unless impeded, cause the surrounding water to grow colder specifically – rather than to boil, to turn into Coca Cola, or to catch fire, and rather than having no effect at all – we have to suppose that there is in the ice a potency, power, or disposition which inherently “points to” the generation of that specific effect. That the ice is an efficient cause of coldness entails that generating coldness is the final cause of ice. And in general, if there is a regular efficient causal connection between a cause A and an effect B, then generating B is the final cause of A.
Here is my parody - which hopefully is not something Ed would disagree with:
The core of the A-T “principle of finality” can be illustrated with the simplest sort of cause and effect relation you might care to take. As Aquinas sums it up: “Every agent acts for an end: otherwise one thing would not follow more than another from the action of the agent, unless it were by chance” (Summa Theologiae I.44.4). By “agent” he doesn’t mean only conscious rational actors like ourselves, but anything that serves as an efficient cause. For example, insofar as a red flower floating in the North Atlantic tends, all things being equal, to cause the human viewers surrounding it to see red, it is an “agent” in the relevant sense. And what Aquinas is saying is that given that the red flower will, unless impeded [for example, it gets dark], cause the surrounding people to see red specifically – rather than to boil, to turn into Coca Cola, or to catch fire, and rather than having no effect at all – we have to suppose that there is in the red flower a potency, power, or disposition which inherently “points to” the generation of that specific effect. That the red flower is an efficient cause of redness entails that generating redness is the final cause of the experience of red. And in general, if there is a regular efficient causal connection between a cause A and an effect B, then generating B is the final cause of A.
Cheers,
Daniel
Jeremy Taylor,
DeleteNaturalism is a broader term than materialism, though it is usually hard to see what it means that is distinct from materialism, if not just a rejection of theism, idealism, etc. But okay.
Making careful distinctions is one of the hallmarks of philosophy, but I was wrong to include naturalism, as it seems to have no good definition.
Following up on my previous posts, I wonder if the law of proportionate causality applies here, such that whatever is in an effect must be in some way in its total cause, either formally, virtually, or eminently. Ed talks about this in Scholastic Metaphysics. I'll give it a read through to refresh my memory and get back with my findings. :)
DeleteCheers,
Daniel
If we are making distinctions, physicalism is simply a species of materialism.* It's that version of materialism that thinks modern physics should define the basic, material building blocks of reality. I'm not denying different varieties of materialism, just trying to suggest that the term has some clear limits, and one of those is that there is no true mind-independent teleology or function.
Delete* I suppose technically one could be a non-materialist physicalism, in that they allow that physics might show the universe is made of a least some non-materialist substances or properties, but that isn't how it is usually used.
Jeremy Taylor,
DeleteI agree that there is not mind-independent function (I'm used to using function as what something does, and will only use teleology for what something is supposed to do, but if you have a preferred term that describes what something does without regard to teleology, I'll be happy to adopt it for this conversation) in materialsim, but that doesn't mean there is no mind-caused behavior.
So given my example above, the generating of the experience of redness in humans is part of the final causality of the flower.
DeleteSo the question then is, does redness, as it is experienced by people, residing in the red flower? The answer is, yes, in the sense that this is part of the final causality of the plant.
What about for a bat who only sees via echo location?
Well, likewise, the red flower in this case would generate the experience of whatever it is a bat experiences when it uses echo location and this generation would also be part of the final causality of the flower.
What about the alien in the movie Predator with Arnold who only sees in infra red? Same thing. Final causality.
So there is the aspect of the flower, which has in its power to be seen. This is part of its repetoir of final causalities. It can be seen in a number of ways, but each one of these ways belongs to the flower as part of its final causality.
The active power of seeing belongs to each creature seeing the flower. The human, the bat, the alien from Predator. Without the flower being there it would not have an experience of the flower or see it in the distinctive way it does.
But does that mean the powers to see in echo location, or in the normal color spectrum, or in infrared are really not a part of the flower.
Clearly these experiences are totally dependent on the sensing aparatus of each of these creatures, such that only by combination with the sensing power of the creature and the final causality of the flower will this particular qualia in the creature be experienced.
With regard to color, we should be clear that even the sensing of black and white constitutes a form of color, and so without that ability, the one who sees would be totally blind. So this discussion of color is a bit of a red herring. What we are really talking about is sight tout court
Should we expect the qualia of the human, the bat, and the predator alien to reside in the flower itself? Yes, in the sense that this is part of the final causality of the flower.
Does the qualia exist in the physical sensing aparatus of the human, the bat, and the predator alien? Yes, in the sense that it appears to be responsible for generating the actual experience of the qualia.
Does this explanation adequatly solve the qualia problem?
DeleteWell, we have resisted the urge to focus only on the measureable quantities of light, although this is part of the total description. It is not the only part.
Have we adequaltly explained how the sensing aparatus of each creature creates the experience of qualia?
Well, I expect that would be partly a job for neuroscience to discover.
Has this solved the third person/first person problem? I think so. Most of the arguments against qualia being physical are targetted against the idea that for them to be physical, they must be quantifiable. There is in a sense, the idea that final causality is not part of a substance's active powers, but its passive powers, such that this power does not come to be actualized until it meets a creature with the requisite perceptual equipment to bring it about.
Daniel,
DeleteNot buying into final cause myself, my opinion on your last two posts probably has little worth, but I can see where locating the final cause of the appearance of the flower as being multi-faceted and various would have value.
As for where the qualia, what do you make of essentially identical qualia that have vastly different causes? For example, you experience the seeing of a specific color from light, or the same color from neural stimulation in perfect darkness. Does that mean, to you, that the same qualia reside in these two different sources?
Hi One Brow,
DeleteThanks for your kind words. I agree with you that my characterization just pushes the problem of qualia to become a subset of the problem of proving final causality. Definitely not something to be taken for granted, but I'll leave that debate for another day. :)
With regards to your question, I don't see why the same qualia as experience from different sources couldn't in principle be identical. As a thought experiment, I would be willing to grant that, such that you could be plugged into the Matrix and not realize you are not experiencing a real physical phenomenon, but only being tricked into believe so.
But I don't believe that accepting the possibility of the Matrix means we should go down the rationalist route and try to ground our knowledge in mind dependent reality. I think, from an A/T perspective, that we have no choice but to ground our knowledge on our experience of the physical world around us. At least as the starting point.
Daniel,
DeleteCheers on the excellent explanation of the qualia problem in terms of Final Causality! Whatever the specifics are, I think you point in the right direction. There are a lot of questions to be asked about the specifics of how the multiple vectored (to steal a term from Ed's Scholastic Metaphysics) causality of qualia, and that neuroscience and our the science of light and reflectiveness are parts of that. It does raise the interesting question though of a philosophy of light and reflectiveness though; obviously in order for the rose to have the power to in part transmit red (as a stand-in) to the visual apparatus of the animal, it has to have certain powers, the stripped down notion of causality discussed by analytic philosophers today. It seems to me that this discussion demonstrates yet another reason to state a rather uncomfortable truth about science: it is not capable even in principle of telling us about everything in the material world. Clearly there is something else in light as well other than its wavelength, energy properties alone that the it is a power of the rose to transmit to our eyes. It seems like the question leaves the realm of philosophy of the mind at this point, and enters the question of essentialism.
Also, Daniel, on the topic of your post immediately above (and One Brow's question), I would argue that the same qualia not only could but must be produced from different sources (or at least able to be in principle) otherwise we wouldn't be able to have any universal concepts of color, etc. at all! Even in the Matrix scenario, I think that you would still have to admit a genuine essential red in somewhere. We have cochlear implants and at least in principle the means to produce replacement sense organs from mechanical (physical too) materials. The Matrix would have to act as a "sense organ" in this case, and therefore would have to have red (or the accidents of whatever physical phenomena we could substitute for it) in it virtually if not physically. You would still need a real red in there somewhere to make it happen that way. The real vexing question is how to explain hallucinations along the same model.
And One Brow, to respond to your other thought above on the function/teleology discussion, I think that as an Aristotelian Thomist (in perspective; I don't claim to have the expertise to defend it in any meaningful way), I would have to say that Aquinas's point and what Ed is trying to indicate is precisely that function as a (physicalist) materialist might describe it (a tendency for a thing to behave in a certain way rather than in another certain way) just IS a form of finality in that it demonstrates that the thing in question has specific powers rather than other specific powers, and therefore when it acts as an efficient cause for something else, it has to do so through the limitations and abilities inherent to its essence. That is what the finality, or teleology are to the Thomist. Since we reject the fact/value distinction, part of the confusion seems to come from the fact that your definitions of function and teleology only differ in making should a mind dependent reality, which we would reject. But, that is a who other discussion!
Hi Casual Thomist,
DeleteThanks for responding! I agree with you about how the problem is multi-vectored. Too many people imagine that Thomism is offering an alternative scientific view of things. It is not. It is providing a better grouding to understand what kinds of answers might be admissible at the level of other sciences or philosopies I think. Whatever the final answer will be about the nature of light and of color and of our mind's perception of it, it will involve at least these basic elements.
That boundary between philosophy of mind and essentialism is what initially drew me to Ed's writings. I think, once a lot of the misconceptions and prejudices are cleared away, there is room for a lot of fruitful discussion.
And good point about universals. Although Ed's other point in his thread about Naive Realism makes me wonder if I'm missing something:
Now, in an analogous way, I would suggest, the something-that-resembles-RED that is in red can both be grounded in mind-independent reality and at the same time depend in part on the mind for its existence. It might really be there in red objects and be irreducible to what physics has to say about red, even if it is only actualized when a perceiver perceives it. (That is not to say that this something-that-resembles-RED that is in red is to be thought of as a universal. I’m not saying that naïve color realism is the same as the Aristotelian realist approach to universals, but merely drawing an analogy between the two.)
I wonder if he meant the color should not be treated as a universal?
Aristotle's Revenge and Naive Color.
Cheers,
Daniel
Casual Thomist,
DeleteThat's a good point. Without final causation, it is hard to know why one thing follows enough except by chance. That is, why is there regular and orderly causation and cause and effect are not loose and separate, as Hume put it. When some civic-minded person throws a brick at window, they expect it to break it, not bounce off, turn into a bunch of flowers, or disappear. With final causation, this expectation seems to have no grounds.
Casual Thomist,
DeleteAnd One Brow, to respond to your other thought above on the function/teleology discussion, I think that as an Aristotelian Thomist (in perspective; I don't claim to have the expertise to defend it in any meaningful way), I would have to say that Aquinas's point and what Ed is trying to indicate is precisely that function as a (physicalist) materialist might describe it (a tendency for a thing to behave in a certain way rather than in another certain way) just IS a form of finality in that it demonstrates that the thing in question has specific powers rather than other specific powers, and therefore when it acts as an efficient cause for something else, it has to do so through the limitations and abilities inherent to its essence.
One of the foundational principles of science is homogeneity; loosely speaking, if you perform two identical experiments, you get identical results. So, that aspect of final cause ("a tendency for a thing to behave in a certain way rather than in another certain way") is certainly a part of science.
That wasn't quite what I meant about function, though. Function is just what the thing does, without adding in the notion of what it is supposed to do. Again, I'm happy to use a different word for this smaller notion if someone has a preference. Science (particularly biology) also recognizes function in its discussion.
One Brow,
DeleteI would say that your comments above gets to the heart of the discussion though, and one of the more interesting parts in my opinion. We as Thomists would say that the two are linked to the point of being difficult to distinguish. The reason is that what a thing does is only ever a product of its nature; even if it receives its causal power from something else (as everything in the natural world does), the only way it can ever manifest those powers is through its inherent nature, or essence. One of the things that got me interested in studying essentialist philosophy was the question of laws of nature. Homogeneity has to exist for any coherent science to be possible at all. The interesting question that really intrigued me about Ed's work is the following: what makes it the case that if you perform two identical (loosely speaking) results? Given your statements about function, it sounds like you would share at least some of the broad strokes of the Thomistic answer: things behave the same way when you do the same thing to them because of the sort of thing they happen to be; it is those characteristics determine what a thing is capable of doing and thus what it does. So for we Thomists, the notion of function is actually the more specific/smaller of the categories, given that it is one particular instance of the wider set which are the thing's powers. I am not criticizing your use of the word function, because I believe that it hones in on the very heart of the debate: is there an undeniable connection between the way things do behave and the way they are supposed to behave? The Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition would answer yes, while the bulk of the moderns would, at least in the abstract, answer no (or so it has seemed from my reading), and seek another explanation for homogeneity.
Interesting post from Ed in Defense of final causality.
DeleteThe return of final causality
He states the following:
Now, that much shows at most only that if you allow immanent final causes at all, you are to that extent committed also to formal causes. But someone could admit this and still deny formal causes at the level of biology. He could say, for example, that there is immanent final causality at the level of fundamental physics -- that basic particles, say, have causal powers and dispositions by virtue of which they are “directed at” or “point to” certain effects and manifestations -- but that there is no such finality at any higher level of physical reality. And in that case, formal causes need be admitted only at the level of physics: Fermions and bosons, say, would have substantial forms, but trees, squirrels, and human beings would not.
But such a position would be plausible only if there were no causal powers at higher levels of physical reality that are irreducible to those described by physics. And that is simply not the case; at the very least, such reductionism is highly controversial. Whether even chemistry is reducible to physics is doubted by most philosophers of chemistry. Reductionism in biology and psychology are notoriously controversial. Chemical systems, organic systems, and psychological systems have causal properties that are simply impossible (or, to put the point less controversially, at least extremely difficult) to reduce to the causal properties of their basic physical parts. And even within the biological realm reductionism is more problematic than is often realized. For example, the traditional Aristotelian view that there is a difference in kind and not degree between sentient life and vegetative life is routinely dismissed as a historical curiosity. Yet even many naturalistic philosophers admit that it is at least extremely difficult to explain qualia in terms of insensate matter -- not realizing that they are thereby implicitly acknowledging that the old Aristotelian distinction has a serious metaphysical basis after all.
I take it from this description that qualia is one of those "causal powers at higher levels of physical reality that are irreducible to those described by physics."
I had a further thought. Assuming that the power to be seen resides in the flower as a potentiality, and assuming the principle that whatever is moved (into actuality) is moved by another (already in actuality), then what moves the flower's power to be seen is the power of the viewer that sees it. The viewer that sees the flower is the efficient cause of the flower's being seen.
DeleteSo also, with regard to proportionate causality, what is in the effect must also be in the cause. ... so what does this imply about human beings (or bats or the predator creature)????.... I have to think about this some more. :)
Cheers,
Daniel
Casual Thomist,
Delete... The interesting question that really intrigued me about Ed's work is the following: what makes it the case that if you perform two identical (loosely speaking) results? Given your statements about function, it sounds like you would share at least some of the broad strokes of the Thomistic answer: things behave the same way when you do the same thing to them because of the sort of thing they happen to be; it is those characteristics determine what a thing is capable of doing and thus what it does. So for we Thomists, the notion of function is actually the more specific/smaller of the categories, given that it is one particular instance of the wider set which are the thing's powers. I am not criticizing your use of the word function, because I believe that it hones in on the very heart of the debate: is there an undeniable connection between the way things do behave and the way they are supposed to behave? The Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition would answer yes, while the bulk of the moderns would, at least in the abstract, answer no (or so it has seemed from my reading), and seek another explanation for homogeneity.
One aspects we would have to balance against homogeneity is its opposite. Is there any reason to think that two identical experiments would produce different results? Which of those two positions, if either, should be considered the default position, which needs to have evidence or arguments against it to be rejected?
I agree there is value to some of the Aristotelian/Thomist perspective on reality.
I have two concerns about assigning what a thing is supposed to do, as opposed to what it does. The manner in which we determine what it is supposed to do seems to be arbitrary, in particular when it comes to declaring a primary function. Also, over time within biological populations, the function of various structures can change. I understand Feser's latest work has a section on Aristotelianism and evolution, and I plan on reading that carefully.
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ReplyDeleteFeser, I hope your book on the soul will feature a chapter on natural theology/the argument from souls to God, since it's one of the most interesting possible consequences that dualism can have for other areas. If we have souls, their origin must be explained, and adequately with PPC, so we get a very powerful theistic argument. I always wanted to see you discuss this more. There's a very important overlap between philosophy of mind and philosophy of religion, and since you're an expert at both, it'd be interesting to see more from you on that topic
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