In various threads there have been various discussions about what materialism is, and isn’t, and various definitions have been proposed and cited. In this thread I want to ask a different question, addressed specifically to those who regard “materialism” as a bad thing. William, for instance, has said that “materialism” was “disproven” in the 18th century, yet laments
the spread of an 18th century myth in our public school system and in our culture at large.
So here is my question: if you are against something called “materialism” and see it as a bad thing (for whatever reason), what is your definition of the “materialism” you are against?
Mung: You are obsessed with this idea that materialism entails some sort of moral stand. Its pretty simple: materialism is preferred because it works. It provides useful answers, the supernatural doesn’t. Perhaps you could tell us how to conduct science while appealing to god. Does the scientist prey ? How does it work ?
Again, it depends what you mean by “materialism”.
It seems to me to be a kind of placeholder for “the view that there is no God or morality and evolution proves it”.
Oh and: “if there aren’t multiverses we are stuffed because God must be real after all”.
This is a bit hand-wavy, if not confused, I think. Many, perhaps most, contemporary philosophers are identity theorists of one kind or another. I take it your notion of “category error” comes from Ryle. But what he actually held was that a common conception of mind involved a category mistake. (It’s not actually like a ghost.) It doesn’t follow that what minds actually are are not brains (in some defined sense of identity).
Also what do you mean by “…for a start”? What additional objections do you have in mind (no pun intended)?
Why is the word mind so magic? We say people have beauty or talent or strength, without imputing any disembodied magic. My field is special education. I’ve seen people who did not have minds. When the brain is missing the mind is missing.
The usual statement of “mind-brain identity” theory seems to be that mental states are identical to brain states. I don’t see it as “clearly false”. I’m inclined to the view that “not even wrong” would be a more appropriate comment.
From my perspective, the expression “mental state” is meaningless. Likewise, the expression “brain state” is meaningless. So identity theory equates two meaningless expressions.
I agree. Mind is behavior. Not a state. Brains have configurations. Our state of knowledge does not permit a complete description of how it works.
Does a flame have a state?
Well, if you said that mental states are a direct result of brain states, that might be sort of true, but not really, because that ignores the fact that what really produces mental activity (in my view) is the dynamic interaction between the whole organism and its environment.
But they are also different categories of thing.
And I work in the field of mental health. When the brain behaves oddly, the mind is disrupted.
No, it comes right out of my own mind!
Mind is a capacity the organism possesses – the capacity to think, to imagine, to remember, to intend, to regret, to ruminate, to cogitate….
The state of a brain is, well, it’s the state of one of the organs the organism uses to do those things.
But we do not say that “life” is “the state of the heart”. Sure, it depends on whether the heart is beating or not, but life is not identical to “the state of the heart”.
We don’t impute disembodied magic when we say people have beauty or talent, but we don’t impute identity either. A beautiful or talented person is not beauty itself or talent itself.
The people who did not have minds, their brains were missing too?
The brain is not the mind the same way as the eye is not vision and the ear is not hearing.
Skin feels touch, but skin is not touch. The organ mediates or channels a certain range of perception – we can call it “element” in the medieval sense. Mind is the range of perception that is mediated by the brain, same as other organs mediate their respective “elements”.
This is how it makes sense to me, personally. (Not only me, of course.)
Well life is a state or property or behavior of the body. One can have a lifeless body. One can have a life. The problem arises when you impute an entity.
Yes.people are born without a cortex. Or with catastrophic damage.
Here are some things that I think are real: dollars, political revolutions, reasons, theories, quasars, tornadoes, unemployment rates, molecules, governments, love, consciousness, dancing, and coffee.
Some thing I think aren’t real: cooties, hexes, dragons, angels, demons, unicorns, the Loch Ness monster, the gods of Greek/Norse/etc. mythology, phlogiston, disembodied souls, human-like intelligent life on other planets, and Precambrian rabbits.
I don’t find that categories “material” and “spiritual” helpful for capturing the difference between the things I think are real and that things I think aren’t real. (For one thing, I’m not sure there is any single difference that makes the difference here!) And I certainly don’t see any hope for explaining real things in terms of “matter”, or whatever entities are posited by fundamental physics.
There have been several philosophers defending this view over the years — most notably, I would say, John Dewey — but I think one of the best versions of this position can be found in Teed Rockwell’s Neither Brain Nor Ghost: A Nondualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory. He’s respectful of the relevant science but also a very good philosopher, and he is also — this is worth stressing — a pretty good writer (for an academic).
Rates can be real in the sense of calculated and published without being accurate or useful. Is that a different category? It seems to cover a lot of everyday stuff.
By the way: walto is right about Ryle’s use of the term “category mistake”. Ryle thinks that the Cartesian conception of the mind rests on a conflation of two distinct “logical categories”: the category of occurrences (what actually happens) and the category of dispositions (what can happen).
Ryle’s main line of thought in The Concept of Mind is that the various terms for “mental processes” (sensations, memories, mental images, volitions, thoughts, beliefs, desires) are all kinds of dispositions. One might ask, dispositions of what? And Ryle’s answer is, dispositions of persons (or perhaps, in the majority of cases, dispositions of animals).
However, once we see — with Ryle — that the terms referring to aspects of “mental life” are dispositions of animals (and of persons), it follows that those terms cannot be identified with terms referring to any specific functional part of the animal, such as the brain. In fact, doing so would be a mereological fallacy. (Though I hasten to point out that Dennett has been quite critical of Hacker and Bennett, and I’m not entirely confident of where precisely I want to position myself in that debate.)
If that’s right, then Elizabeth’s use of the term “category error,” though not strictly speaking Ryle’s own use of “category mistake,” does follow from the substance of what Ryle says.
Lizzie says:
And KN comments:
If we take mind as a capacity of some kind or a set of dispositions (or as nothing at all), then minds are not identical to brain states. But identity theorists generally make brain states identical to items like (occurrent) mental events such as “thinking about chimneys” or “hearing Bob’s voice.” If those mental events are items that are actually in the world and are not identical to brain states, then either there are problems with the causal closure of the physical world or there is some kind of parallelism (or occasionalism) going on.
The only sort of “mind” which philosophers are likely to make identical with brain states are sets of occurrent mental states. Otherwise, of course, the identification will make no sense. But the idea that identity theories are committed to such a cuckoo identity of some particular physical event with a capacity or bunch of dispositions is just question-begging against those theories.
Let me put it this way–what identity theorist has ever suggested anything like that?
Yes. I’d add to the things that I think are real: holes; gaps; edges; surfaces; interfaces; waves; shadows; echoes.
BTW, KN, why do you limit yourself to Greek/Norse gods when listing items that don’t actually exist? (Or IOW, what can we put in for your “etc.”?)
BTW2, there’s a large recent philosophical literature on holes, gaps and shadows. I haven’t read much of it myself, but I believe my principal thesis advisor, Jim Van Cleve, has contributed one or two papers to that lit.
I could agree totally if you had said “are imaginary” rather than “aren’t real”. 😉
@ KN
Dewey is Rorty’s John the Baptist.
heh. I seem to be channeling philosophers. This can’t end well….
Just because it’s imaginary doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
It seems obvious to me that holes, etc, are names we give to perceptions.
They are not “things,” and yet they have entailments. Perhaps entailments are better indicators of real than thingness.
Looks like there’s no real [heh] agreement about what “real” means.
Or maybe as to what a Thing is.
Oops, that capitalisation must be been a ‘random error.’ Couldn’t have been the result of intention and free will.
Alan Fox’s ‘real/imaginary’ dichotomy plus KN’s empiricist ‘naturalism’ is about as philosophically deep as the atheists at TSZ can get.
Next up by sophistic Lizzie, a thread called ‘Good Materialism’!
Gregory, you actually read my posts? Or do you just check them for nonconformist capitalisation?
A deep hole is still empty.
It does if you define “imaginary” as “not real”.
Well, what am I missing?
gregory jesus doesnt care about capitalization and punctuation the bible doesnt say anything about it
Philosophy 101 perhaps?
If your imaginings are caused by physical stuff going on inside your brain, why would they be any less real than the other things caused by the stuff going on inside your brain that you take to be real rather than imagined?
You just might be a bad materialist if you have an affinity for Nietzsche.
I am? Where have I made that argument?
I think it’s Elizabeth that’s obsessed by it. She is trying her hardest to get people to define materialism so that she can say – well that’s certainly not me! – without examining what she actually does believe.
“Imaginings” are not what is imagined. Sure the imaginings go on in brains, just as the (veridical) perceivings do. What fail to exist are the unicorns that are imagined, while the horses actually perceived DO exist. The causal series is not the same at all.
That’s philosophy 102, Mung. You’ll get that next year.
Ask someone with schizophrenia.
http://thebrainbank.scienceblog.com/2012/12/24/why-cant-we-tickle-ourselves-but-schizophrenics-can/
This discussion is asking the question posed by .my recent thread on self-awareness. How does a brain distinguish between external stimuli and imagined stimuli.
Tough question, but apparently the ability to imagine in animals such as birds and rats is well developed. It doesn’t require reason or philosophy.
The ability to imagine may not require reason or philosophy, but the ability to discuss the issue sensibly does. The literature on the subject is, naturally, voluminous–and has been for at least a century. Here’s one recent paper:
http://abstracta.oa.hhu.de/index.php/abstracta/article/view/207
Gosh, walto, what was the expected size of the audience intended for that paper? Based on the highly jargonistic esoteric character of the theme, I’d guess it was aimed at less than 30 people around the world. Adverbialism, actually!? 😉 Do you really think that paper is suitable for the low-tech TSZ audience? You and KN as USAmerican ‘philosophers’ (I’ve referred to KN as a ‘philosophist’) make me laugh.
And yet it moves.
Yeah, it’s pretty technical, intended for philosophy grad students or professors. The thing about philosophy is that it kind of SEEMs like anybody’s take is just as
good as anybody else’s.
I don’t have opinions about technical issues in evolutionary theory: I recognize that you have to study those issues for a fairly significant time for your opinion to be worth much. And there is actually a WAY to study it. Not all roads get you to actual knowledge. I like to read what those who have gone through that process say about these matters, even if I don’t always understand everything. And I generally don’t substitute my judgement, unless I see an obvious fallacy somewhere. I treat an economics board I frequent in the same way. I may have views, but I recognize my limitations in the nuts and bolts of the field.
But in philosophy, everybody is an expert. Modal logic in a day. Consciousness? Value theory?–First thought, best thought, etc. It’s bothersome, but, admittedly, the attitude is prevalent not just here, but pretty much everywhere. So people express their thoughts. They may not realize that they’re unlikely to be correct, and that it doesn’t really matter how many others happen to agree with them at places like this. But what the hell. It’s entertaining and there’s no harm done.
walto,
Thank you for sharing that. I’ve downloaded it and hope to get to it soon. I’m still trying to get myself somewhat oriented in philosophy of perception. I bought Coates’s The Metaphysics of Perception and I’ll read it sometime this summer.
I’m fairly sure that I want to be a direct realist, and for quite a while I’ve thought that, far from it being the case that scientific realism undermines direct realism (as Sellars thought, or seems to have thought), scientific realism itself depends on direct realism. Put crudely: if our basic cognitive capacities were not already in direct contact with reality in some way or other, no augmentation of those capacities by mathematics or technology could make them so.
One of the aspects of Sellars’s philosophy I find least plausible is his account of “sensations,” which he ends up vindicating as the causal intermediaries in the perceptual process. It seems utterly absurd to me to think that an expanse of red (sensing red-ly) must be identical with some neurophysiological process by virtue of the fact that particles are colorless. There is so much wrong with that idea I hardly know where to start!
Suffice it to say, for the start, that if one wants to describe color from the perspective of the scientific image , then — leaving aside for a moment the fact that Sellars was quite badly wrong about there being any single, definitive scientific image, the scientific image! — one should start from the realization that colors (indeed, all the common and proper sensibles!) are all relational properties. In the case of colors, we need to take note of at least the following: (a) the frequency of the photons; (b) the molecular structure of the surfaces involved; (c) the molecular structure of the cones in the retina of the perceiving organism; (d) the dynamics of visual cortex and sub- and pre-cortical neural structures.
Whereas Sellars thought that the ontological superiority of the scientific image over the manifest image entailed that the proper and common sensibles had to be relocated from intrinsic properties of physical objects to intrinsic properties of the brain, it seems to me that the ontological superiority of the scientific image over the manifest image entails that the proper and common sensibles should be relocated from intrinsic properties of physical objects to relational properties of the brain-body-environment transaction.
Moreover, Sellars’s own commitment to treating the common and proper sensibles as intrinsic properties of our neurophysiological processes was quickly subjected to Dennett’s criticism that this is but the Myth of the Given in a new guise, and as a result Dennett dispenses entirely with the very distinction between experience and judgment. I find this deeply problematic, and while I think McDowell is on the right track in terms of vindicating the distinction between experience and judgment without committing the Myth of the Given, even there serious problems remain. How we can retain the distinction between experience and judgment without falling afoul of the Myth of the Given remains an interesting problem for contemporary pragmatism.
Aside: when I made that suggestion to a friend of mine two years ago, he pointed out that this move would have turned Sellars into Dewey. I’ve been trying to figure out since then why Sellars doesn’t take that step. Ultimately, I think it’s because he retained too much of C. I. Lewis’s obsession with qualia — an obsession of Lewis’s precisely because he rejects Dewey’s cavalier dismissal of the quest for certainty and was deeply concerned — in a rather un-pragmatist fashion — with the challenge of Humean skepticism.
I would also like to add that, unlike Sellars, I do not think there is any single scientific image (nor any single manifest image); I’m far more persuaded by philosophers of science like Cartwright and Dupre that the unity-of-science thesis is false, and especially that biology is irreducible to physics. For that matter I think that Sellars’s characterization of the manifest image is badly wrong, because it does not take into account the ways in which our lived embodiment structures our perceptual encounters. If he had read more Merleau-Ponty and less Strawson, he would have gotten it right. Whereas Sellars sees the problem of how to fuse the two images — the manifest image and the scientific image — as, basically, the problem of how to reconcile Aristotle and Democritus, I see it as the problem of how to reconcile Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. There is still an ineliminable gap between the two, but it is far smaller than on Sellars’s own understanding.
Well, I definitely have an affinity for Nietzsche, so if that makes me a “bad materialist”, I’m proud to be one.
A pretty good quality of red and blue can be produced by alternating stripes of white and black. This works even if the illumination is monochrome.
Suggesting to me that color perception is pulse coded before it gets to the brain, regardless of the fact that receptors are differentially sensitive to spectral colors.
One can mimic the pulse code without regard to the physical color of the illumination.
Perhaps I am one of those 30, though I only have that abstract to go on.
If you would spend more time laughing and less time posting insults, we would all be better off.
So, why are you recommending it here? Do you think anyone other than KN (or me) fits that profile here?
This is the kind of statement, walto, that reveals the poverty of your disheartening philosophistry, just like KN’s.
Sure, everyone thinks. But not everyone thinks deeply and broadly or seeks wisdom. People need encouragement, not fatalism. You live in a discount society, walto. And there are wisdom traditions that (especially analytic western) philosophers have chosen not to access.
As an atheist like KN, walto, such a statement from you is a sad and telling sign…but all too typical in hyper-capitalist, legalistic pre-atheist USA.
‘Bad materialism’? Lizzie won’t get anything better from her atheist (‘philosophist’) community than that here.
p.s. 8 names dropped in 5 sentences – big accomplishment for clarity, KN!
I think there’s a link to the whole paper there, Neil.
Gregory, my “But in philosophy everybody is an expert.” was sarcasm.
Got to learn how that stuff works at some point.
KN, for what little it’s worth, I don’t like Coates much.