Neo,
We can always describe things in terms of theories apart from phenomenal consciousness surely? If phenomenal consciousness is causally inefficaceous it surely cannot constitute part of any theory?
It is not causally inefficacious. If it was, your brain wouldn't know it exists, and you wouldn't be talking about it right now.
Even if you argue for some bizarre scenario where both the physical and phenomenal come from some third source, thereby allowing your brain to know about it without it being causally efficacious, it certainly hasn't been demonstrated that this is the case.
Rusty,
If we put phenomental conscoiusness into set B, giving it the property of being an effect but not the property of being a cause, then we certainly can make theories about it. I did so above by asserting that me dropping my rock onto the floor caused a set B occurance.
People have been making such theories since the dawn of time. That is where religion comes from. Maybe Thor really does cause the lighting bolts? Can you prove he doesn't? Maybe all those fancy laws of physics we use to describe lighting are just how he does it, but he is the real ultimate cause?
Unfalsifiable theories are completely and utterly pointless.
Not much time but if something is philisopihcally acausal then it certainly does violate the laws of thermo-dynamics.
If something is philosophically acausal then it doesn't necessitate it's own occurance, hence it would not exist in the very-next smallest slice of time.
It might not. Welcome to the world of QM, where even conservation of mass and energy only happen "on average".
Anyway, I think you should give some thought to the difference between saying that some set of events are acausal, and saying that the existence of something is not necessitated by anything else. Existence is just one property that something can have.
I understand that. My point is that if A is defined to be physical, using that definition, then A must be causally closed. Win's assertion that A is not causally closed with respect to Ur is not compatible with the assertion that A is, in fact, the set of everything that is physical.
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I'm not following this. It seems you are saying that the definition of physical is:
1) A cause
2) An effect
3) only interacts with other things that are both a cause and an effect.
Physical does not mean cause and effect. Something is physical if it has an effect on something else that is physical. You could imagine something that has an effect on other things, but which is not affected by anything. Such a thing would still be physical, for example, atomic decay.
Something which is effected by something physical, but which does not effect anything physical, would not be physical. Of course, we know of no such thing, because such a thing is necessarily not observable.
If I have something that is a cause but not an effect then it has to cause something. So unless it is causing an effect that will have no cause then it must cause something physical.
What I mean is:
Assume that X occurs. X was not an effect (it was not caused) but it does cause Y to occur. Now if Y is an effect but if it does not cause something to occur then it is not physical. But if Y does cause Z then Y is physical, X is not, and Z is undecided at this time.
No, in this case, if Z is physical, then both X and Y are physical. If Z is not physical, then neither X nor Y are physical.
Not all causal relationships have to be physical. We could imagine entire sets of causal relationships that do not have any effect on anything physical. The key issue here is observibility. In order to be a physical system, the system itself must have observable effects.
We can observe something that is an effect with no cause by observing an effect and seeing that there is no cause. I would assert that this is proven by Libertarian free will, but we would disagree.
I would say that it is proven by QM, and that this has nothing to do with free-will.
But these are not physical because they are not both a cause and an effect.
That is not what is meant by physical scientifically, or materialistically. I am sorry if I misunderstood you before, and gave the impression that it is.
I'm not sure what property dualism is. If we "reduce" the properties of B from A and somehow reach the conclusion that B will have no effect then we have somehow proven that B is not physical by definition.
No, just the opposite. What we will have proven is that B is nothing more than another way of describing something in A. For example, when I say that the laws of chemistry are reducible to quantum mechanics, what I am saying is that there are no distinct "laws of chemistry". They are just a specific example of the laws of QM.
We have also proven that we need to rewrite physics. I'm not saying we need to though! I'm not asserting that set B exists. All I'm doing is presenting an argument that set B 'could' exist. So 'could' set A. If they did, then we certainly would need to change physics. This, ultimately, is why I would love to learn about QP. Maybe if I ate your brains...
Not likely to work.
One could say that all quantum events are set C. So what? This has no relevance to consciousness or free-will.
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Really?!! That is what I am trying to understand! Because if set C can exist and the "agent" must be set C then the "agent" could, possibly, maybe exist!
C, as you have defined it, can and does exist. It is simply the set of uncaused effects. Quantum events are such effects. Such effects may or may not be random.
Before you get all excited about the possibility of the agent being non-causal and non-random, though, keep in mind that non-causal determinism is still inconsistent with Libertarian free-will, as you have defined it. A-causal determinism is still a form of fatalism.
Too bad I can't just grok the essence of your brain. Perhaps I ought to just get some calculus and physics books and start learning. They do say that it's never too late!
It is never too late. Go for it. Knowledge is power.
But if set C exists then materialism is rendered false.
Not at all. Materialism does not require that everything be causal, or even deterministic. Some older forms of ontological materialism did, but such naive notions had to be abandoned when General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were discovered.
Please note that if you are endorsing a different type of dualism than Win, then responding to my comments to Win are just going to confuse the issue.
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My apologies, I should have made it clear. I *believe* that I am endorsing a different type of dualism then Win.
I think this is clear. I did not mean to be rude. it is just that in order to have a conversation, everybody involved must agree on the definitions being used. In this particular discussion, I am trying to use the definitions that Win provided. These definitions are different than the ones I was using in our discussion in the other thread. This makes things I say here sound like they mean something other than what I mean, if you interpret them with the other definitions. It also makes it incredibly confusing for me to try to keep all the terminology straight.
Basically, physicalism uses one set of definitions. Win's property dualism uses another. Ian and UCE, who are both idealists, each have their own slightly different definitions. And you have definitions different to Win's. It all becomes very confusing, especially since I am still not entirely clear on what the definitions are in each of these systems. Even if I knew each of these systems inside and out, it would be almost impossible to keep the conversation straight with four different people all using different definitions. Not to mention completely unintelligible to somebody reading it, who is not familiar with the positions or definitions each of these people is using.
This does not logically follow. On the contrary, even if physicalism is true, it is always possible to construct theories which cannot, even in principle, ever be falsified.
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If it is possible to render everything to a state where it can be understood in principle then it logically follows that in principle it is possible to understand everything. It may not be possible, but in principle it is.
This is not the point. The unfalsifiable theories are ones which make reference to hypothetical unobservable entities. If we accept the scientific assumption that everything is observable, then this means that such theories are meaningless, because they refer to things that don't exist.
The point being that even if physicalism is true, somebody who does not believe it is true can always construct an unfalsifiable hypothesis about unobservable things. The physicalist would say that these things don't exist. But he can't prove it. Physicalism cannot be proven true. Like any scientific theory, it can only be demonstrated to be false, either by showing that it is inconsistent, or that it is not consistent with our observations.
What would be an example of something you think we coudl not prove false even if we have rendered everything to a state where it can be understood then proceeded to understand it?
For one thing, the claim that we had not, in fact, rendered everything to a state where it can be understood. The best we can do is say that we know of nothing that has not been rendered to such a state. That does not prove that no such thing exists. That is impossible to prove.
If set B has no effect on set A, then any theory about set B that makes predictions about set A can necessarily be split into two parts.
1) A theory which only makes reference to set A, and makes all the predictions about set A that the theory originally made.
and
2) A theory which makes no predictions about set A, but makes reference to set B.
The first part is falsifiable, but says noting about set B. The second part is unfalsifiable. Furthermore, since this split can be made, falsifying the first part does not falsify the second part.
In other words, if we had such a theory, and it was falsified, we could construct a new theory which makes exactly the same claims about the phenomenal world, but is consistent with our observations in set A.
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If a set B item did occur, then in that smallest slice of time possible it occured. There it is, but in the next smallest slice of time possible it would not be there and would not have changed anything.
I think you are misunderstanding what we are referring to when we talk about sets A and B. We are not talking about objects. We are talking about events and properties. When we talk about something being causal, we are not talking about an object that continues to exist indefinitely. We are talking about an event or property that is caused by, or causes, some other event or property.
For example, The appearance of a particle is an event. So is the disappearance. In QM, such events are acausal. So it is possible for particles to appear and disappear at random. That does not mean that a particle that appears will only be there for one minimal unit of time. On the contrary, there are set of rules that such acausal events seem to obey. These rules are the rules described by Quantum Theory.
So if I assert that X occurs causing Y causing nothing you simply have to prove that Y did cause something, thereby making Y a physical thing.
Saying that Y causes something is not sufficient for Y to be physical. It must cause something physical. And the only way we could ever know it did, is if that physical thing is observable, or in turn has some observable effect on something else that is observable.
This is what the whole KA is about. We put everything A into a book, teach it to Mary, then do X to her and somehow she 'gains' Z.
This problem has been addressed at length in this thread. All that can be put into a book is abstract information. All Mary can learn from the book is abstract information. This in no way contradicts materialism. Materialism says that everything can be described in terms of our observations. Those descriptions are abstract information, and nothing more.
Mary does not gain any new information about red when she sees it. All she gains is the physical memory of having seen red.
Ian,
Then it is not possible to describe it at all, or to know anything about it. Our observations are the only source of information we have.
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Well well well, contradicting yourself yet again!
You asserted earlier in this thread that knowledge involves more than information. You maintained that, in addition, there is the knowledge supplied by actual experience. So when Mary actually experiences redness, she gains new knowledge, but no extra information.
This directly contradicts what you say above when you equate knowledge with information.
Try to stay in context, Ian. If you were actually following this discussion, rather than just looking for apparent contradictions, you would see that this is not a contradiction on two counts.
1) When I said that there was both abstract and empirical knowledge, I made it quite clear that I was referring to physical knowledge. Empirical knowledge is physically represented in the brain, and is solely a result of the physical process of perception. It is, to use your lingo, a result of the physical correlate of the experience, and not the experience itself. In other words, our empirical knowledge (as I have defined it) is not affected by phenomenal consciousness either.
2) I also made it quite clear when I started this train of conversation with Win, that I am talking about what our brains can know. When I say I know something I mean my brain knows it. After all, the point of all this is whether or not a description of phenomenal consciousness can be constructed, and as I already said, it is our brains which must come up with this description.
Nice try though.
One of us clearly is.
Dr. Stupid
Do you agree with me that an entity cannot play a role in any theory if that entity is causally inefficaceous? In which case what would be the purpose of hypothesising an entity which is both causally inefficacious and cannot be observed? This is what we have with phenomenal consciousness it seems to me.
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