Hi Bill,

Louis's comment above is correct.

Re "is" and "ought". Hume and others are right: you cannot invariably establish values on the basis of facts. But sometimes you can: rationalists do that regularly. But rationalism is just one paradigm. Conventionalists, for example, establish values on the basis of custom. If you try to break with custom, you may find that they break your legs (even while you are proclaiming that "rationalism" is the only way!) There are 5 other paradigms for making ethical choices. So, although your explanations make sense, there is a deeper issue revealed by taxonomic investigations (i.e. in THEE).

In all areas of human activity, it is rather easy to see that there are sets of ideologies/paradigms that determine a person's identity and tell the person how that activity should be performed. You are focusing on ethical choice here. However, similar issues occur in regard to action-decision, inquiry approach, use of language, developing identity, modelling etc. In every case, adherents to one of the paradigms may grudgingly accept one or two alternatives, but are intensely antagonistic to others—to the point of seeking to annihilate both the paradigm and its adherents. There is never a superordinate system--the paradigms are incompatible and irreconcilable.

The best a person can do is respect the diversity and learn about the alternatives. Then they should make progress by hard work within the paradigm that suits them (or where they have been socialized/indoctrinated), focussing in areas where that paradigm works best. We must all refrain from futile attacks on competing paradigms and learn peaceful coexistence.

This requires a degree of maturity and self-awareness that is difficult for some.

Whenever mental states reduce down to a physical state for whatever reason, either a mental state is found there or not. If not, then that physical state, although still there, is ordinarily considered to be 'dead,' while the mental state has been considered to have gone off somewhere or no longer to exist anywhere (although, this latter stance would violate the laws of conservation of energy and matter).

What does the word "supervene" means? Does it means that there is a one to one association between mental state and "physical state" of the body? The old mental body parallelism hypothesis. I disagree with this hypothesis for several reason? First it does not appear possible to characterize a living body with a physical state. Physical systems have what is called a configuration space associated with them and many physicists have showned that it is not possible for a living system as a whole. It is possible to model partial aspects of organisms but it does not appear to be possible to model a whole organism. IN order words, the living state of matter does not appear to be machine like. The second objection of the reduction of the experiential domain (consciousness) to a physical state is that the scientific methodology for the reduction is done in the realm of our experience; the whole scientific methodology cannot bring experience within the realm of reduction: third person account. So experience itself is primary and cannot enter of empirical research. Even if one beleive for some reason of personal faith that each of his mental state correspond to a physical state of his body, why that state is experience is a complete mystery. This necessity to make this reductionistic assumption seemed to be rooted in the beleive that everything is mechanism. But that everything is mechanism classical physics paradigm has be rejected in quantum physics for almost a century. The Laplacian deterministic spirit is still predominant in cognitive science and for most engineers and most scientists in the majority of the scientific fields. Even Aristotle conceded that the Soul (what we experience) is always associated with the body experience, it does not imply a parallelism. When the evolution of the physical complexity crossed the living threshold, all the living processes became grossly under constrainted from the basic laws of Nature and most of the further evolution of the living is about the evolution of constraints of the process and there began a realm of irreductible creative behavior. After three and half billion years of living evolution, this irreductible core consciousness in human being is mathematically expressing some aspects of the whole cosmos evolution and is wandering where its experience is coming from.

Technically it is the statement that - "A set of properties A supervenes upon another set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties." The idea being that whatever is in B depends upon A for its basis, or arises out of A. If A is changed in any fashion it will necessarily mean a change for B. One might (crudely) say that B somehow "rides piggyback" upon A for its existence. I am using the term in the sense of speaking of an entity or a mental state supervening upon a physical state.

If an entity or mental state supervenes upon a physical state does that mean that in the final analysis it has no real "isness" ?

I would probably put the question in slightly different terms - you cannot meaningfully discuss physical materiality outside of its associated wavefunctions:

1-It is already proven that mental states impact wave functions

2- Wavefunctions of anything are the be all and end all of that anything: materiality is only an epiphenomenon of wave functions

3- If mental states impact wave functions, then does not it flow from there that, far from leading to the conclusion that thought is at bottom material, it seems to lead to the opposite conclusion, to wit, that materiality is at bottom nothing but thought

4- This hypothesis is falsifiable through experiments

Bill,

I have no problem with the process of theoretical reduction. This is the scientific method and it has been very sucessfull. Theoretical reduction amount to create a mathematical model expressing some relations among measurables into a particular phenomenal domain and to experimentally validate wheter or not the relations expressed in the model effectively correspond between the measurables.

Is the model a representation of reality. Absolutely not. What is represented and validated experimentally are relations among a few measurables. What is reality in no way is exausted or is reduced to the model. Scientific modeling is a reduction of reality. The product of this reduction is a model , this model is a reduction, not a representation. The different sciences created different modeling reductions.

The different phenomenal levels are often related to each others. For examples, chemistry are dealing with macroscopic levels of chemical reaction among substances that are studied by physicists. The physical laws are usefull for the chemists but most of the chemistry laws are not expressed as constructed of physical laws but are expressed as direct chemical models. Some of these models can in principle be reduced to physical models but are not for practical purpose. But some chemical models cannot in principle be reduced. The chemical model reduction sometime capture an aspect of reality that does not seem to reveal itself at the physical level. Even in physics, it is not absolutely certain that the general relativity reduction can be subsumed under the quantum theory reduction.

If scientific theories would not be reduction, but would be representation of reality, then the idea of combining all the models into a general model of reality would appear to be just a question of time to be realized. But scientific theories are reductions and so the integration of the sciences cannot be conceptualized as a big logo construction. Integrating reductive models is epistemologically problematic. Even the very concept of an general reduction of reality is logically very problematic. Although different validated reductive models should not contracdict each other, there are apples and oranges to each other. If ech one remain silent on most of what is going on in its own phenomenal level then why should we expect them to combine as logo block.

Louis this is very interesting, and I am trying to make the application to my own field. I tend to believe that an entity (such as a moral value) can have ontological significance despite the fact that it arises out of, and depends upon the physical world as we know it for its existence. I take it that you would hold that entities which supervene upon physical states may have ontological significance as well. I'm just trying to draw the parallels between our disciplines in my mind. I'm still cogitating...

Bill,

Humans are social beings and there is a parallel between how in history we gradually have created our laws for our living tothether and the way the living world has evolved by creating frozen biological laws. Although like anything in the cosmos obey physical laws, physical laws imposed very little of the orgasations that emerged in the cosmos. At each new level of organisation of the cosmos, new regularities, new laws emerged in the interactions in this level. But is a laws. The old mechanistic vision of a law in a complete set of operative functioning. But maybe Nature operate like society opereate where laws do not specify mode of operations but constraints leaving entity free to operate within these constraints. The life of the city is not governed by the laws of the nation and the city , only constrainted by it. In human history, freedom has been promoted by the enactment of laws. In nature, laws might be gradually emerging so as to promote the emergence of more and more free agents. OUr goal of creating better societal laws might be in toltal harmony with all law creation in the cosmos. The cosmos evolution is not merely about happening under fixed laws but also law creatin process, process which humanity is continuing. Laws are not pre-existing but emerging regularities of reality. The ancient Grecs and Roman had also this idea of a parallel between human law and natural law and they did not see these laws and they did not see a conflict between freedom and laws because laws where not conceived as totally prescriptive: in nature and in society.

Hi Bill, All your questions seem to revolve around a theme.

So I am answering this one but it relates to values and facts, moral values etc.

Every field has to be studied rationally (scientifically in my case, philosophically in yours) in a way that fits the nature of the field. You choose to study that particular field in order to get some better understanding of the field. Whether or not that field rests on (or supervenes on) other fields is a separate issue.

So if you want to understand human functioning, then you have to focus at the level of human functioning and you cannot escape involvement with thinking, communicating, deciding, imagining &c &c.

You cannot understand the fundamentals of such things by studying neurons, anymore than you can understand the fundamentals of neurophysiology by studying quarks.

My work in relation to being human has led to a taxonomy of elements in that field that I call THEE. If you wish, you can check it out at: thee-online.com -- you will have to register to access the actual taxonomy.

For example, I have done a lot of work on values and purpose and this focus provides clarity on many philosophical issues (as scientific work normally does).

As far as "ought" and "is", this is simply a differentiation between scientific inquiry (what is it?) and human action (what ought I do now?). Of course, inquiry is a form of action, but nothing in science determines what a scientist ought to investigate.

The taxonomy I have discovered defines the "what is it?" that exists whenever you consider "what I ought to do"--so it is a systematization of metaphysics that avoids any particular theoretical commitment. Instead it specifies all possible categories of such commitment for you to choose from.

Does this shed any light on your concerns?

Warren

Hello Warren,

When you state, "You cannot understand the fundamentals of such things by studying neurons, anymore than you can understand the fundamentals of neurophysiology by studying quarks." you are voicing that which is my own conviction. Reducing a phenomenon down to the systems, states of affairs, or organisms that give rise to it, especially reducing it down to the "mechanism" of those things, is simply (in my opinion) an unnecessary and ill-advised reductionism.

I will take a look at THEE on Wednesday and let you know my response. You have piqued my curiosity, but I must go back to some work that will not wait for me to "go exploring" elsewhere right now.

What you say about "is" and "ought" is the nature of the case in most of the sciences and in many of the social sciences, but philosophers since Hume and those who followed in his wake are, in many quarters, distrustful and suspicious of any attempt to establish values on the basis of facts. One can point to the sciences and say, "Look they do it all the time, in fact they must do it." but that doesn't change the minds who hold that is an illicit move. I think there are two fears which drive this prohibition: (1) the fear of religion and metaphysics strongly getting "a foot in the door" of ethics, and (2) the fear of science subsuming ethics under its ever burgeoning authority and influence.

Take the theoy of evolution proposed by Darwin. It is a theory whose objective is to explain the mechanism for the evolution of the species. This theory had a major impact on the politic and wars of Europe in the 20th century. Although the theory itself makes no claim for human affairs, for superiority of some human race compare to other, or for human societies or cultures , but it has been instrumentalized by racists including Hitler.

Although science is factual and apparently neutral with regards to morallity, it is absolutely not. Suppose that you want to test the intelligence of children at school and that you group them into cultural group and start comparing these groups based on these intelligence score? If everyone in society would have a scientific culture, such a test would not be problematic because it would be obvious that it would mean nothing general about these cultures. But we do not live in such socieities and such a test would surely be wrongly interpreted.

The scientific reduction method necessarily restrict the scope of science to the revelation of abstract models/mechanisms. This is an epistemological limitation of the method. The first mistake is to assume as the word "model" sudgest is that such reduction is a representation of reality. The popular beleive that such models/mechanisms are representations and the generalization that the whole reality is a big machine has tremendous moral implications. It denies the existence of free will. Such a belief undermine the any possibility of morality. This belief also exclude from the realm of reality all the human values because all of these are epistemologically excluded from the scientific reduction. Scientific reduction is factual and necessariry but seeing it as a representation lead to a completely false representation of the world where human values are searching places in gaps: god of the gaps.

I think that it is not possible to separate the interpretation of science from morality and religion. I am not saying that religion or moral should be used to interpret science. I am not saying that science should be used to interpret moral or religion. What is dangerous is to dogmatically posit that they are separated and to machine-like representation of the universe. This is a robotic religious doctrine which claim to be a logical reading of science and it is not. One has to lay open the dogma of the robotic relition.

Dogma # 1: what cannot be scientifically reduced does not exist.

Dogma #2. What appear to exist but cannot in principle be scientifically reduced is an illusion

Hi Bill,

Louis's comment above is correct.

Re "is" and "ought". Hume and others are right: you cannot invariably establish values on the basis of facts. But sometimes you can: rationalists do that regularly. But rationalism is just one paradigm. Conventionalists, for example, establish values on the basis of custom. If you try to break with custom, you may find that they break your legs (even while you are proclaiming that "rationalism" is the only way!) There are 5 other paradigms for making ethical choices. So, although your explanations make sense, there is a deeper issue revealed by taxonomic investigations (i.e. in THEE).

In all areas of human activity, it is rather easy to see that there are sets of ideologies/paradigms that determine a person's identity and tell the person how that activity should be performed. You are focusing on ethical choice here. However, similar issues occur in regard to action-decision, inquiry approach, use of language, developing identity, modelling etc. In every case, adherents to one of the paradigms may grudgingly accept one or two alternatives, but are intensely antagonistic to others—to the point of seeking to annihilate both the paradigm and its adherents. There is never a superordinate system--the paradigms are incompatible and irreconcilable.

The best a person can do is respect the diversity and learn about the alternatives. Then they should make progress by hard work within the paradigm that suits them (or where they have been socialized/indoctrinated), focussing in areas where that paradigm works best. We must all refrain from futile attacks on competing paradigms and learn peaceful coexistence.

This requires a degree of maturity and self-awareness that is difficult for some.

Let me open a parenthesis on globalisation which is in my opinion the most important driving force on the moral issue.

The most important social phenomena that is shaping history now is the rapid coming together of all the cultures, languages, all economies, nation laws, all the religions. All these identidies forged over millenia of isolation, sparse communications and geographical boundaries are coming together. This has been going on for centuries but it is incredibility accelerating. Global economies, global markets, global rules, global language, global productions, global consumption, global energy crisis, global pollution, global problems and global solutions. A tremendous amount of our cultural heritage, our category of thought forged into local context will have to be updated or they will become obsolete. What cannot be globalized, or at leas madet compatible with globalisation will rapidly disappear. Some of us will not accept that but our lifespan is insignificant and so these individual resistance are not an issue. What is an issue is the updating of our institutions which are the gardian of the collective values all over the world.

I now close the parenthesis. Science from the beginning has been a global ideology and the scientific community has been one of the first international community. Science is a driving force of globalization of the economic welfare of humanity. But scientism or the robotic religion is not a necessary interpretation of science and is a socially negative doctrine in my opinion that threaten to undermine the global human cultural heritage in this age of rapid globalisation.

I agree with Warren that a culture is integral to an individual identify and his making sense ability. Our coming togheter risk destabilizing some aspects of our individual foundations. We have seen how the French revolution had done that. Lets hope that the global transformation we are entering will not destabilize us too rapidly.

Hello Warren,

I tried to register for THEE about 15 times and I gave up.

Louis, I have read and reread your statements above. I am afraid I do not follow the gist of your arguments as regards where you are going with them. Based on the way that you have used the term, I have a different understanding of the meaning of the "God of the gaps" than what you have. I also do not believe that the majority of scientists embrace any sort of a biological determinism of the sort that necessarily negates free will. Some do so without a doubt, but it is not a necessary conclusion from their work, so much as it is an illegitimate reductionistic philosophical move that they have made because they do not understand the limits of the "lens" of their own discipline(s). I agree with you about not making a complete separation between science and religion. I reject Stephen Jay Gould's idea of NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria) but I don't move a huge distance away from what he was saying. With Alister McGrath (and Simon Conway Morris as well I believe) I would espouse POMA (partially overlaping magisteria). I think were we to graph the two disciplines using circles, the two circles would overlap, but not greatly.

Based on the founding of the British Royal Society, I do not believe that science from its beginning has been a global ideology. I think that if Newton, Boyle, Locke, Hooke, and the others who set modern science afoot were involved in an ideology of any sort, it was merely one of exploration. I think they had a hunger to pursue truth and understanding as regards their world. I do believe that they were children of the times following the counter-reformation and all of its bloodshed, from which they probably desired an escape. But the conclusions that they reached regarding the world and the laws by which it ran actually flowed forth from what looks to have been a vibrant faith. In time science has given rise to many ideologies, but the reductionist tendencies of some are still negated and counter-balanced by the same spirit of wonder and exploration as existed in the founders of the Royal Society by others. I believe it is a mistake to speak monlithically of "Science". I do agree with you about globalization, but I do not feel as concerned about the sciences negatively impacting that process as you do.

Hi Bill,

Wow--that's persistence. People register all the time and my team regularly check registration works via most browsers, so I don't know what your particular issue is. I pay a webmaster to help people--you need have no doubt that he will promptly give a helpful response and solve the issue. If you have any remaining patience, I encourage you to make contact ([email protected]). However, to provide further help for others who might find themselves in your situation, I have asked him to put a box on the registration page that says: "Having trouble registering? Email the webmaster for help."--with clicking on the second phrase opening their email client.

Bill,

All what science can know are mechanisms. There is certainly no place for human valules within any mechanisms uncover by science. The gaps are the unexplained phenomena. If the human values have a place in this world then their only home are in these gaps. I disagree with this logic.

Many scientists have tried to create walls for cleanly separating science from humanities and religions starting with Descarte's dualism as if we can remain indifferent to what we learn about the world. Philosophy started with knowing of the world and this led directly to the epicenter of the search: Thyself. Philosophy and its modern expression, science, is intrinsically a spiritual quest, a necessary know thyself. Even cosmologists, those probing the most remote objects in the past end up discussing about human issues. Quantum physics could not avoided involving us. We are not outside the universe and learning anyhing fundamental about this universe is revealing something important about ourself. So I do not believe in the separation of science and spirituallity. Not a bit. It might be convenient for philosophers who want to philosophies without having to understand the world. Lets put a wall there and here in the department of philosophy we will not look outside and concentrate on the important stuff inside wall. In ancient greece the only philosophers where scientists and I cannot conceive a philosopher that is not a scientist of many sciences. I have to admit that I do not use the academic definition of philosophy but use the old one invented by those who invented this word.

I support the general point of view of Louis. Allow me to say the following: the most promising field of investigation today is represented by what is called human enhancement, that is, the science and the technology having the goal to promote human capabilities (length of life, regenerative medicine, development of neural capacities and so on). The substrate of these developments is represented by NBIC (nanotechnology, biology, information, cognition). Now, this represents a huge shift of science, allow me to say, from the exterior to the interior, and this will certainly change the way that we do science for ever. Although most of this research addresses pure biological or material issues, it is also clear the information and cognition play a crucial role. Moreover, in the long time run it will necessarily deal more and more with the high cognitive capabilities of human beings and therefore precisely with those spiritual aspects mentioned by Louis.

I have also a methodological remark. It is clear that science today cannot fully explain what is consciousness or intentionality, so that there are many gaps. This is the reason why many scientists consider these issues will be fully removed by the further progress of the scientific research. This is their personal guess and have the right to formulate it as they like. Nevertheless, this remains a personal guess and it does not matter how authoritative they are. In fact, the greatest scientist of the 20th century, A. Einstein, presumed that quantum mechanics was incomplete. However, he was wrong. So, when many scientists start from here for supporting the view that, since science has shown that many experiences that we make are ungrounded, also consciousness and intentionality or freedom are ungrounded, they desire to go beyond a personal opinion but are simultaneously going outside of the accredited scientific method, because science tells us that we have reasons for assuming that a certain experience is illusionary as far as there are pieces of contrary evidence. But to tell that, for the sole reason that in the past many experiences were shown to be illusionary, we also need to reject any kind of phenomenological experience as illusionary without having other ground apart from the fact that science is unable to currently explain these phenomena, is not only contrary to the spirit of science but even unreasonable.

Gennaro,

The most successfull mind technology ever invented was writing. Just remember the amount of time it was taking twenty years ago in order to access the relevant information on specific topic. If you mention anything in your post, I can google it and quickly access the information. Did you notice that in the last year, H.G. Wells was talking of the world brain in the 1930s and we are there. I think that we are heading in the direction of collective thinking. Language from the beginning was a form of collective thinking but the global integration of knowledge and the instant access of this knowlege is heading in a direction where we will really think together. Any dialogue is already a form of thinking together. We will discover enhanced forms of dialogue, of collaboration. Assume a minute that all what you wrote would be analysed and compared to the entire knowledge of humanity and this comparison made available to you at every moment in easily comprehensible form. This is the kind of mind technology that is coming.

I agree, Louis. In fact, our network here is one of the first experiences of a kind of worldwide society of minds.

Hi Bill,

I would distinguish problems arising from supervenience from problems arising from reducibility. For example, while atomic theory may have reduced chemistry to physics, this didn't create a problem about causation between chemical elements and compounds. But I take it a problem with supervening properties is that they just don't have the ontological status to be causes. So if we understand mental states as supervening on physical states we seem to have to give up on understanding them as having any causal efficacy. This seems in accordance with your very clear definition of supervenience above. But if mental states have this status, then they are merely, as has often been claimed, epiphenomenal.

If these comments seem on track to you, then supervenience may not be the notion you are looking for to illuminate your work in moral theory.

Thank you Ian - very well put. This is indeed the claim. I don't believe that this reduction is warranted however. The truth is that one cannot plausibly claim that the physicalism which such an understanding involves is itself an entailment of the practice of science. The sciences, physics or otherwise, simply cannot indicate that only what is reducible to their terms is real. That is not within their purview. It seems to me that there are hidden metaphysical understandings driving this purportedly anti-metaphysical project.

Bill,

Michael Polanyi in the famous paper :Life's Irreducible Structure

provides a non-reductive emergentist perspective :

http://www.sfu.ca/content/dam/sfu/colloquium/2012readings/Polanyi%201968.pdf

Summary :

Mechanisms, whether man-made or

morphological, are boundary conditions

harnessing the laws of inanimate nature,

being themselves irreducible to those

laws. The pattern of organic bases in

DNA whiclh functions as a genetic code

is a boundary condition irreducible to

physics and chemistry. Further control-

ling principles of life may be represented

as a hierarchy of boundary conditions

extending, in the case of man, to con-

sciousness and responsibility.

Louis,

Thank you for the Polanyi reference, since I think it helps to sharpen the point. There is of course such a thing as non-reductive materialism or non-reductive physicalism. Unfortunately, I am not an expert in this area. But I think Davidson, Armstrong, David Lewis and Kim each has his version of such a view. One seems to have to look to Churchland et. al. for a truly proper reduction of the mental to the physical, which is to say for an "elimination" of the mental.

Polanyi seems to give a descriptive account of different "levels," each lower one putting constraints on what patterns or laws may emerge in those above it. Then at each level these patterns or laws give us a theory or story about why one thing follows another the way it does within that level. And this is a causal story.

But it seems that it has been a difficult problem to apply this analysis to the mind. Regarding mental content we may sometimes be comfortable saying, e.g., this thought caused this emotion, but there seems a classical difficulty in the case of reasoning (and this would include of course moral reasoning). We don't seem comfortable saying our inferences are merely caused, as would seem to happen if the mind were merely another "Polanyi-level." We seem keen to preserve the *normativity* of reason, and nowhere more than in our story of moral judgments.

I don't know whether Polanyi considers himself a non-reductive physicalist, but his view in the paper you reference seems consistent with a version of such a view, at least so far as it does not seem to address this difficulty of causes versus reasons.

I might even go out on a limb here and say that perhaps the threat (under consideration in Bill's whole thread here) is not so much reductive impulses, since many "naturalists" seem to have backed away from severe forms of reduction (or elimination) of the mental. Rather the concern might be cast as, how do we preserve the normativity of the mental in those aspects where it seems crucial?