Materialism claims that all of reality is physical, and that given exhaustive scientific knowledge we would know absolutely everything about reality.
Materialism doesn't strictly say anything about science. You could speculate that if exhaustive scientific knowledge was possible then it would be possible to know everything about reality, but that's another issue.
Wait who is claiming this? This sounds very humble. So why then such a hard unyielding stance on how all phenomena must be physical? Why so humble with one, but so dogmatic with the other?
It's just what science does. You may have heard dogma about the physical, but it's really a matter of presentation and semantics.
Fundamentally, all science needs are observables - things that can be observed or measured. If something can be detected/observed/measured, i.e. has some interaction with the world, then it falls within the scope of science. However, the world that can be scientifically detected/observed/measured is generally called the 'physical' world and interactions with the physical world are physical interactions. Something that has a physical influence is deemed to be physical. So the result is that all observables are deemed to be physical; i.e. the result of physical influences
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Some people (both believers and non-believers) like to make a song and dance about how science specifically excludes the supernatural, the spiritual, or the non-physical, but that's hyperbole and/or misunderstanding if it has a detectable/measurable/observable influence on the world, it doesn't really matter how you label or categorise it, it's within the purview of science.
All science is dependent on the evidence of the senses to objectively explain how matter & energy behaves. I’m fine with that part, but it’s very common for people to go further and claim that only physical phenomena has a monopoly on all reality…and if this doesn’t describe you then I’m confused about what we’ve been going back & forth over lol.
If pushed, I'd call myself a physicalist (materialism has some historical baggage in substance monism to do with matter being all there is, which is a little ambiguous these days. Physicalism, while monist, acknowledges that there's more to the world than matter, i.e. particles, alone).
I would question exactly what is meant by non-physical phenomena being real, and what does 'real' mean in this context. For me, something is real if it has an influence on the world that is, in principle, detectable/measurable/observable (i.e. it is physical), and
possibly real if it can reasonably be extrapolated or predicted from our models of what is detectable/measurable/observable. I see non-physical phenomena in terms of ideas about phenomena that are not real - because, being non-physical, they don't have physical (detectable/measurable/observable) influence on the world. That's not to say that
ideas of non-physical phenomena can't have influence on the world via human action, they clearly do.
So, let’s say that at a quantum level scientists are baffled that a particle is just vanishing and then immediately reappearing in a different location. THAT the particle goes from point A to point B is intelligible, however the process of how it happens is currently unintelligible. I totally get you that future progress can move us from the unintelligible to intelligible if we figure out how the process works. But here’s where a different form of unintelligibly comes into play with mental phenomena…as our buddy Thomas Nagel likes to point out, with mental phenomena it’s very difficult to imagine what an explanation would even look like!!
Sure, subjective experience is, by it's nature and definition, inherently inaccessible to objective enquiry. As I said before, none of us has access to anyone else's subjective experience except through two levels of indirection & translation via metaphor, simile, and appeal to common objective experience. But while this is 'special' in as much as it is our personal experience that is involved, the problem of unintelligibility and/or inaccessibility in general is not unique - parts of quantum mechanics are unintelligible, and various things are inacessible, e.g. isolated quarks, the inside of black holes, etc.
Science does the best it can, taking the available evidence, making new observations, making and testing hypotheses and models. There may be multiple hypotheses and/or models that are consistent with the data, and these can be ranked according to their quality and utility as explanations via abductive criteria - the criteria for arguing to the best explanation.
... it is hard to imagine what an explanation could even look like for someone to come along and claim that they now have a theory that explains that the particle usually thinks that it’s fun to disappear & reappear, but on some other occasions the particle is annoyed by it, and on even other occasions the particle feels stressed out about it.
Well, yes - this is one reason why I find panpsychism unconvincing - there is no evidence whatsoever for it, no good reason to suppose it exists, it's untestable, makes no predictions, has minimal explanatory power, etc. This is not the case for human subjective experience; we have direct personal evidence and indirect objective evidence (ignoring philosophical zombies).
Phenomena such as being annoyed by something is just a different framework of reality that can’t be encapsulated by physical ontology.
So you say, but I suggest that they are different descriptions of the same phenomena, i.e. different meanings for the same referent. The 'internal' meaning is subjective experience, the 'external' meaning is brain processes. The internal viewpoint attributing meaning is
as the system under consideration, the external viewpoint attributing meaning is
of the system under consideration. IOW there is only an internal viewpoint for the system under consideration.
Well I didn’t assume it up front, I was lead to that belief. Your last post even agreed with me in a couple of spots about the inaccessible aspect of private mental phenomena BESIDES the person having the experiences. Mental phenomena is an objectively inaccessible subjective quality of existence, and the objective domain of existence is the domain of scientific explanation.
The words “Objective” and “Subjective” should really be the only clue that anyone needs to get what I have been trying to point out. Science is glued to the hip with the word objective, and mind is glued to the hip with the word subjective.
Sure, but being inaccessible to objective description doesn't make them non-physical. That's just an assertion, perhaps an intuition.
I agreed with all of this except saying that our subjective experiences are information processing. We know as a matter of fact that there is information processing that has no mind.
Mind is information processing, but I didn't say all information processing is mind. I've explicitly said that it is a particular kind of information processing, a particular set of processes, a particular mode of brain function.
That's the same kind of error the Integrated Information theorists make. Integrated information is necessary but not sufficient.
As far as I’m concerned (as a Dualist) opening up the hood of someone’s neurological system and monkeying around with it should naturally yank mental experiences around with it in a comparable way that drugs alter your chemicals around and therefore alter your mental experiences.
Why should that be if mind is not neurological? What is your preferred model?
There’s nothing at all in the quarks model that is being asked to account for mental ontology. So it can’t be used as a comparison for my complaint with a theory that just adds on mental phenomena as a brute fact and just lets it come along for the ride.
Of course the quark analogy doesn't account for mental ontology, it's an
analogy - in this case, to point out that in both situations we have no direct objective evidence for the phenomena, but lots of indirect evidence.
I agree with the correlation. Think about it this way, Biological actions are unpredictable at the lower levels of physics and chemistry (emergence occurs), but after the biological emergence occurs you could still give a physics & chemistry description of the matter in motion that is performing the emergent activity. Not so for the phenomena of mental emergence. The mind is emergent, however mental properties are physically irreducible. So the mind shares the unpredictable (at lower levels) emergent aspect with the biology emergence example, however it differs with it in that you can’t use any of the lower level factors that lead to the emergent mind to then turn around and describe the mind.
The claim that mental properties are physically irreducible is another unjustified assertion; objectively, we have no direct evidence of mental properties, so there is effectively nothing reducible. Subjectively, it is quite reasonable to suggest that mental properties are reducible to brain activity, as it's undeniable that what directly affects the brain directly affects the mind.
In other words look at an emergent property like DNA replication, even though physics & chemistry couldn’t predict it you could still describe the matter involved in DNA replication all the way down to physics…and every single part of that description are “Properties” of the DNA replication. Likewise the mind’s emergence was also contributed to by physics & chemistry (it’s Formal Cause), however after it emerged you can’t then “Describe the physics & chemistry parts of mental properties.” What something is is to talk about that something’s properties.
I think the problem here is that you're reifying 'mind', making it a kind of 'thing' made of 'stuff'. But it's just an abstraction we use to describe the sum of the
processes that contribute to cognition.
Mental properties are at odds with physical properties. Minds think. Thinking must always be about something, but matter is never about anything. It actually takes a mind for the concept of “Aboutness” to even exist.
Philosophically, it's called 'intentionality'. It's a description of reference, e.g. reference to something, and linked references embody meaning. We already know that this is done by the brain. The simplest example is of sense data that enters the brain as a stream of neural spikes, waves of membrane depolarisation. As these enter the sensory processing centres, they generate specific and characteristic patterns of activity that eventually (in a very crude simplification) configure relevant parts of the brain as in a Hebbian network ('neurons that fire together wire together').
IOW, a characteristic pattern of neural connections is stimulated and this strengthens the relevant pathways and (depending on the strength and salience of the stimulation) may trigger new connections. This effectively provides a representation mapping that input stimulus. This is the 'aboutness' or reference to elements of the sensed world. Subsequent stimuli that are similar will reinforce that mapping. When different stimuli activate pathways common to the mappings of other stimuli, those pathways are reinforced, linking those mappings and effectively associating the stimuli they represent.
This is (crudely) how meaning can be represented - when a stimulus activates a set of pathways that in turn activate other mappings (representations or references), those associations constitute its meaning. These associations are 'learned' by being strengthened by repeated activation.
Thoughts can be true or false, there’s nothing true or false about matter.
Given the pattern generation & matching described above, the active association pathways for a particular referent can be compared with those for a different referent via logical operations involving expectations (it's a bit complicated) and flagged as corresponding or conflicting, causing activation of the relevant pathways for concepts of right & wrong, true or false, like or unlike, etc., depending on the context. IOW, concepts like true and false can (roughly) be evaluated by comparing patterns of activation of various referents, and represented by patterns of activation with their own associations.
IOW what is 'in the mind' is ongoing patterns of activations representing external (and internal) referents and their associations.
Is it more reasonable to conclude that the lists of mental properties that all the people gave you proves that they are all woefully ignorant of science, or is it more reasonable that it shows that the mind is a different kind of thing altogether than what the physical brain is?
As I already said, the mind
is a different kind of thing than the brain - it's a set of processes, i.e. it's brain
activity.