Materialism and the inherent ignorance of atomistic knowing

public hermit said:

As a materialist, how do you account for properties that emerge at the complex level, that are not exhibited at the atomic level?

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What does being a materialist have to do with it? Perhaps you could explain with this example,

as not a materialist, how do you account from the emergent properties of bee swarming behavior based on a simple defined rule set (which is what emergent actually means, by the way) . Feel free to emphasize how the non materialist solution differs from the materialist one.

Here's some primers:
This Video of a Shaking Honeybee Swarm Illustrate the "Hive Mind" | Inverse
Swarm behaviour - Wikipedia
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00955949/document

public hermit said:

As I stated in an earlier post, I am not arguing that no instances of emergence are explicable. But, I am inclined to say that the example of swarming bees is not going to be commensurate with the more salient problem of consciousness. Consciousness really is a prime target of the OP and I still hold that the materialist will invariably want to reduce it to a physical process. Until you offer an alternative, I will assume you are a materialist in just that way.

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Right. what a pity you didn't just start a thread about that instead. So, on the topic you actually wanted to discuss, your use of the word "reduce" is inappropriate, because it can be conflated with the concept of reductionism. I constrain consciousness to physical processes a part of which can be explained through, or an explanation for which does include, reductionist methodology.

Personally, I believe you "reduce" (in the sense of "belittle", which is how you are using it) consciousness by tossing in a "here there be God somehow" flag.

'Emergent property' is a weasel term, akin to Idiopathic in medicine. It literally means we don't know how, can't prove it, can't predict it, but assume on a priori grounds it must arise from this somehow - often in the face of contradictory evidence, such as in the emergent property of Consciousness. I fully agree it has no explanatory power, as that is not its aim. The aim of the term is to elide the lack of explanation in order to give the appearance that it is not a glaring problem. It has a similar function to psychosomatic in a biological model; such as in Neurology, to be able to largely ignore the mind-body problem or hard problem of Consciousness in most discussions. In that way it has functionality to stop the discussion from veering into metaphysical or such territory, to keep to the matter at hand if that is not your aim; but seeing it as a placeholder or mathematical X is a good image. Alas, that is not how it is often treated.

public hermit said:

I think so. Pansychism is starting to "emerge" as an alternative for materialists, e.g. Galen Strawson.

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You've probably read it, but the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a seemingly excellent discussion of panpsychism: Panpsychism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

One of the maddening aspects of these sorts of discussions is that people will use terms such as theism, atheism, materialism, panpsychism, etc., and not discover until late in the discussion (if at all) that they meant two very different things by "materialism" and were really talking past each other.

I'm working on a manuscript right now where I use the terms "metaphysical naturalism" and "philosophical materialism." I clearly state up front "This is what I mean by these terms. If you think I'm using them imprecisely, or your understanding differs from mine, for purposes of this manuscript you're just going to have to play along."

It appears to me that panpsychism has a number of permutations and in some varieties is little different from idealism (the position to which I lean). It still strikes me as playing word games to suggest "consciousness is in fact material."

public hermit said:

I may have mentioned this to you before, but I am still a bit enamored with idealism.

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And I may have mentioned this this before, but Bernardo Kastrup's recent The Idea of the World is a fascinating discussion of idealism from a variety of angles. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PGQPV3R/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

I've pretty much adopted his model as my working hypothesis of What It's All About.

AvisG said:

...To suggest that consciousness is a species of matter strikes me as nothing more than trying to preserve materialism through word games....

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Really? If consciousness is a type of matter, that should be testable - in principle anyway. So not a word game.

My sense is that consciousness is something a brain does. Its an activity, not a thing. But thats just my interested layman's intuition. Curious to see what more we discover.

Quid est Veritas? said:

'Emergent property' is a weasel term, akin to Idiopathic in medicine. It literally means we don't know how, can't prove it, can't predict it, but assume on a priori grounds it must arise from this somehow - often in the face of contradictory evidence....

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I think youre overloading the term.

"Emergent property" is not an actual explanation and does not pretend to be one. Its just the term for a category, a type, of explanation.

If you think a particular emergent property explanation is wrong, you should critique it specifically. But dont do that with "consciousness is an emergent property" because thats just a best guess so far, and no one's claiming there's a fully developed explanation for subjective experience yet.

durangodawood said:

Really? If consciousness is a type of matter, that should be testable - in principle anyway. So not a word game.

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Like multiverses, perhaps - another word game to preserve a particular paradigm? Sure "multiverses" and "consciousness as matter" are perhaps testable in principle, but probably not in reality. But I agree: "Go for it, materialist scientists! Let us know when you have something other than thought experiments to talk about." My point was really just that, as of now, the actual evidence (such as that set forth in Kastrup's book) points more in the direction of "matter as consciousness."

zippy2006 said:

I spent a lot of time trying to grasp the intention of words like "supervenience" and "emergent" until I realized I was expecting more from them than what they were intended to give. I now read them as simple place holders like the variable x. Once I realized they had no explanatory content I realized what was up, so to speak.

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I've come to the same conclusion regarding those terms, though folks like @FrumiousBandersnatch inevitably disagree.

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It depends how the terms are being used - I don't recall saying anything specifically about supervenience per se, and my understanding of emergence comes from cellular automata - in particular, Conway's Game of Life.

public hermit said:

I consider words like "emergent" and "supervenience" to be working words that do no work. If you say, "Consciousness emerges from the brain," what have you really said? That they are related? That one somehow depends on the other? Okay, we all knew that. You still haven't explained anything. Words like "emergent" and "supervenience" are simply place holders for we-know-not-what.

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Assuming we can't explain water's properties from our knowledge of hydrogen and oxygen...

The properties of water emerge from ordinary physics and chemistry acting on the materials of hydrogen and oxygen. No 'wetness' needs to be added to make water wet. Water only needs hydrogen and oxygen acting under our usual laws.

Nothing needs to be added to a brain other than the cells and connections that compose it, in order for it to generate conscious experience.

AvisG said:

Like multiverses, perhaps - another word game to preserve a particular paradigm? Sure "multiverses" and "consciousness as matter" are perhaps testable in principle, but probably not in reality. But I agree: "Go for it, materialist scientists! Let us know when you have something other than thought experiments to talk about." My point was really just that, as of now, the actual evidence (such as that set forth in Kastrup's book) points more in the direction of "matter as consciousness."

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With the multiverse proposal we really do bang up against a hard barrier: the theoretical impossibility of observing beyond our own universe. I dont at all see how the notion is a "word game" tho. There's no semantic trickery that I can find. Can you?

With conscious matter, otoh, its at least accessible in principle. I dont find it compelling. But it seems less "crazy" to me after reading a reasoned defense of the idea.

public hermit said:

...We can see where the activity is happening in my brain, but we can't explain how my conscious experience of loving Billie's music "emerges" from that neural process....

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Wow this word is a trouble maker!

public hermit said:

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on pansychism has a section of objections, one of which is titled "The Incredulous Stare" haha.

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Well I began at 97% crazy and some reading cut it down to 88%.

By comparison, the multiverse idea has been holding steady at a mere 31% crazy for a while now.

public hermit said:

Do you have any thoughts about emergence as it relates to consciousness? Or, maybe better, would emergence as it relates to Conway's Game of Life give any insight to how consciousness might emerge? I am not familiar, and will look at the link you provided, so I defer to you.

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I think GoL can potentially give insight into the difficulty of accounting for consciousness as brain activity.

GoL involves a grid of binary cells which can be either 'on' or 'off' or ('alive' or 'dead'). This is usually indicated visually by a cell being black when 'on' and blank/white when 'off'.

The on or off state of each cell depends on the state of the 8 adjacent 'neighbour' cells according to a few simple rules:

1. Any live cell with two or three live neighbors survives.
2. Any dead cell with three live neighbours becomes a live cell.
3. All other live cells die in the next generation. Similarly, all other dead cells stay dead.

The game proceeds by iterating over the grid cell by cell and setting its state according to the above rules. A generation is an iteration of the whole grid. For obvious reasons, a computer is necessary to perform this process for more than trivially simple arrangements and short runs.

The interest in GoL depends on the initial state of the grid cells. When a decent sized grid (say, 100 x 100 or more), with cells set on or off at random, is iterated repeatedly, characteristic patterns of activity appear where live cells are clustered together. These patterns have been given names and can be generated at will by setting an initial cluster of live cells in a given configuration. What's more, although the cells are static, fixed in place on the grid, some of these patterns move across the grid in characteristic ways, and when they meet other cell patterns, they interact with them in characteristic ways. See GoL Demo.

The relevance to emergence is that the patterns and their activity are not predictable from the initial configuration of the cells. You can understand the rules and the binary nature of the individual cells, but unless you apply the rules over several iterations, you don't know what patterns will result from a given starting configuration. IOW, the patterns are emergent.

A whole new language and set of concepts can be used to describe these patterns, their behaviours, and their interactions, completely independent of the language and concepts used to describe the cells and their behaviour in the grid. The cells in the grid have become simply the substrate on which these interacting patterns of activity appear. A reductionist approach won't be informative where those interacting patterns are concerned - not least because what they do doesn't depend on the properties of the grid cells themselves but on their initial state configuration.

If you know the language and how to use it, you can make self-replicating pattern structures, or emulate the GoL itself:

So far so cool and geeky...

The discovery that I thought was particularly relevant to the question of consciousness and the brain, was that the interactions of these patterns can be made to process information - if you set the initial state of the grid appropriately, and decide on your representations of inputs and outputs, you can make the interacting patterns in GoL do anything a computer can do - as in a programmable computer:
in fact, you can emulate a Universal Turing Machine, the fundamental programmable computer:

So the patterns themselves can be arranged to act like a computer processor and can process any inputs you provide according to a set of instructions you provide (as patterns of cells).

Now one can make an (admittedly very crude) analogy between GoL and the brain, between the cells of the automaton and the neurons in the brain. The neurons are complex, of many different types, with many different functional rules, with complex, dynamic connectivity, and organised into many specialised structures, but it's not hard to imagine that interacting patterns of activity between neurons and networks of neurons can represent information processing orders of magnitude more complex and sophisticated than those in GoL - and correspondingly more difficult to elucidate beyond a crude functional analysis of the specialised structures.