Category: Scientism

Information Realism?

Physicists love to play the philosopher, and when they do the result is often nonsense. A recent example is the so-called information realism of physicist Max Tegmark. Here is the gist of it:

. . . according to information realists, matter arises from information processing, not the other way around. Even mind—psyche, soul—is supposedly a derivative phenomenon of purely abstract information manipulation.

When I read this, I said to myself, "I will have no trouble blowing this nonsense out of the water." Reading on, however, I noted that the author of the Scientific American piece, Bernardo Kastrup, did exactly that. 

We humans naturally philosophize.  But we don't naturally philosophize well.  So when science journalists and scientists try their hands at it they often make a mess of it.  (See my Scientism category for plenty of examples.) This is why there is need of the discipline of philosophy one of whose chief offices is the exposure and debunking of bad philosophy and pseudo-philosophy of the sort exhibited in so many 'scientific' articles.  Although it would be a grave mistake to think that the value of philosophy resides in its social utility, philosophy does earn its social keep in its critical and debunking function.

Schlick’s Scientism: An Antilogism

Remember Moritz Schlick?  He wrote, "All real problems are scientific  questions; there are no others." ("The Future of Philosophy" in The Linguistic Turn, ed. R. Rorty).  The Schlickian dictum sires an antilogism.

1) All real problems are scientific.

2) The problem whether all real problems are scientific is real.

3) The problem whether all real problems are scientific is not scientific.

Each of these propositions is plausible, but they are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  Which member of the trio should we reject?

I reject (1). There are real (genuine) problems that are not scientific  in the way that the natural sciences are scientific.  Scientific problems are amenable in principle to solution by empirical observation and experiment. This is not so for (1). So I must disagree with Schlick the positivist.  

Related: The Death of Moritz Schlick

Exercise for the reader: Is the meaning of the proposition below the method of its verification? If yes, then what method might that be?

Schlick

More Bad Philosophy of Mind by a Scientist

 Christof Koch:

I was raised to believe in God, the Trinity, and particularly the Resurrection. Unfortunately, I now know four words: “No brain, never mind.” That’s bad news. Once my brain dies, unless I can somehow upload it into the Cloud, I die with it. I wish it were otherwise, but I’m not going to believe something if it’s opposed by all the facts.

Isn’t there still the old “mind-body problem?” How do three pounds of goo in the human brain, with its billions of neurons and synapses, generate our thoughts and feelings? There seems to be an unbridgeable gap between the physical world and the mental world.

No, it’s just how you look at it. The philosopher Bertrand Russell had this idea that physics is really just about external relationships—between a proton and electron, between planets and stars. But consciousness is really physics from the inside. Seen from the inside, it’s experience. Seen from the outside, it’s what we know as physics, chemistry, and biology. So there aren’t two substances. Of course, a number of mystics throughout the ages have taken this point of view.

It does look strange if you grew up like me, as a Roman Catholic, believing in a body and a soul. But it’s unclear how the body and the soul should interact. After a while, you realize this entire notion of a special substance that can’t be tracked by science—that I have but animals don’t have, which gets inserted during the developmental process and then leaves my body—sounds like wishful thinking and just doesn’t cohere with what we know about the actual world.

Koch is telling us that there is no body-mind dualism, no dualism of substances, but also, presumably, no dualism of properties either. There is no problem about how brain activity gives rise to consciousness. There is no problem because there is no gap that need to be bridged.  "It's just how you look at it."  We can view consciousness from the inside and from the outside.  From the inside  consciousness is experience; from the outside it is synapses, sodium ions, voltage differentials, neurons: the objective items studied by physics, chemistry, electro-chemistry, biology and all cognate disciplines.

So one 'thing' — consciousness — can be viewed in two very different ways. Hence a monism of subject-matter, but a dualism of perspectives upon that one subject-matter.  The dualism is epistemic, not ontic.  It may seem that what Koch is urging is a neutral monism according to which consciousness is neither mental nor physical but some third thing or stuff.  But I don't think that that is what Koch is saying. He says,"consciousness is really physics from the inside." That's a sloppy way of saying that consciousness is just physical reality as known from the first-person point of view.  What he is saying, then,  is that consciousness is material in nature, and exhaustively understandable in terms of physics, chemistry, etc.  Thus the view from the inside and the view from the outside access the same reality, and that reality is physical, not mental.  There are no mental substances or properties in reality; mental talk is merely a subjective way of talking about what alone is objectively real, namely matter. 

But here is the problem:  the subjective side of experience is entirely unlike the objective, physical side, and it too is real.  If I kick you in the testicles, the pain you feel is undeniably real; it is no illusion, and it is impossible to be mistaken about it.  What's more, the sensation has phenomenological features it would make no sense to ascribe to brain processes and states, and vice versa: the latter have electro-chemical features that it would make no sense to ascribe to pain sensations.  

If at this point you insist that the felt pain is identical to the brain state/process, then you have said something unintelligible that violates the Indiscernibility of Identicals. You have said something 'theological.' Compare: "this man, born in Bethlehem, who died on Calvary, is identical to the immortal creator of the universe.'  You have said something that beggars understanding.

At this point one could take a mysterian line: "Look, it is just true that the felt pain is a brain state; it is true whether we find it intelligible or not."  Alternatively, one could go eliminativist and deny that there is any felt pain.  Of these two approaches, the eliminativist one is surely absurd in that it denies the very datum that gave rise to the problem in the first place. 

But I rather doubt that a scientist would want to go mysterian. The point of science is to eliminate mysteries, not confess them.  The point of science is to demystify the world, to render it intelligible to us, not to pronounce the ignorabimus.

If we are neither eliminativist nor mysterian, then I think intellectual honesty requires us to admit that the so-called 'hard problem' is both a genuine problem and that it is indeed hard, even if we are unwilling to pronounce it insoluble.

So it is not "just how you look at it."  The subjective side of experience is undeniably real and not identifiable with anything  the objectifying sciences study.  Koch is blind to the depth of the problem, and his 'solution' is bogus.

More later on the interaction business.  

Article here.

A Frustrating Discussion with a Non-Philosopher about Stephen Hawking

Ed reports on a recent trip to Africa:

I didn’t run into any philosophers, but there was a chap I met over dinner who was banging on about Stephen Hawking. I have a strict rule never to discuss philosophy with anyone who has no obvious training in the subject, but he was insistent, and I gave way. A brief summary which may appeal to you:

He asked me if I had read any Hawking and I said I hadn’t, as I was not particularly interested in modern physics, and particularly not interested in those with an undoubted aptitude in some scientific or technical subject, but with doubtful philosophical expertise. Philosophers with no training in physics should not write about physics, likewise physicists without training in philosophy should not write about philosophy.

He demurred. Hawking was writing about physics, but then we looked up some chapters of his last work Brief Answers To The Big Questions, one of which was about the existence of God, et habui propositum.

He then said that everyone has a right to their opinion. I agreed, but I also had a right not to read their opinion. Equally I had a right to say anything about astrophysics, without him having the obligation to read it.

He said I should not dismiss Hawking’s work without having read it. I objected that there are hundreds of thousands of books in print, and life is short. This is why we have book reviews. I had read reviews of Hawking’s work by people I respected, suggesting it was not worth reading him, so I didn’t. The principle of taking opinions on trust is a well-established one, and mostly useful, though not infallible.

He got very upset by this point, saying that Hawking was one of the most brilliant men who had ever existed, one had a duty to read him etc. I was about to launch into a discursus on brilliant people throughout the ages, some of whom had considered precisely the arguments that Hawking had put forward as his own (e.g. Hawking argues that there are only three types of matter, and nothing else exists, ergo God does not exist), but Fiona, seeing the glint in my eye and the lust for a kill, wisely said we had to be up early the next morning, and we departed.

Wittgenstein: ‘[the physicist Sir James Jeans] has written a book called The Mysterious Universe and I loathe it and call it misleading. Take the title…I might say that the title The Mysterious Universe includes a kind of idol worship, the idol being Science and the Scientist.’

I may look at the Hawking, notwithstanding.

Have a look, but Hawking's philosophical books are bad.  I offer my opinion here; I quote Tim Maudlin's negative judgment here.

Krauss Canned

Unable to control the fire down below, the outspoken atheist, well-known physicist, and "professional amateur philosopher" (to cop a brilliancy from Ed Feser) Lawrence Krauss has been handed his walking papers by Arizona State University.  Good riddance.

One of the tasks of philosophy is to debunk bad philosophy of the sort purveyed by  Krauss & Co. to turn a buck. Samples of my debunking operations available here.