Key concepts must be introduced such as phase states and transitions and dynamic singularities in order to account for the relationship between the contents of the mind, namely intentionality, and the objects intended by consciousness itself.

Dear Michael,

You pinpoint the fundamental problem with 3-rd person reductionism in psychophysics. I shall illustrate it by using a simple example. All measurement is ultimately subjective--it originates in perception and perceptual grouping etc. When applied to the mind (which created it), psychophysical measure does not reveal some higher truth about the mind, but a disparity between subjective judgment and its linearised "objective" product. There are other examples of this. The problem lies in the historical cleaving of the objective reductionist framework and consciousness which precedes and creates it. This generates a number of paradoxes that in my opinion will remain unresolved until we properly address the subjective origins of science and the debt it owes to consciousness.

An approach to the epistemological problem you pose is discussed in a recent publication. See "A Foundation for the Scientific Study of Consciousness" on my RG page.

Thanks a lot for your responses!

I completely agree with you, Aleksander. This paradox you described, namely, "the historical cleaving of the objective reductionist framework and consciousness which precedes and creates it", resonates with a recent book by Thomas Nagel.

Nagel, T. (2012). Mind and cosmos: why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. New York: Oxford University Press.

This idea also makes me think of Thomas Kuhn's Scientific Revolutions in that I am sure we are in need of one, but not exactly sure what that may look like...

Also, your comment with respect to relying on a "linearised "objective" product", I am curious to know what other examples you had in mind. This makes me think of the uncertainty principle within quantum mechanics: once you measure something in space, you loss its temporal information. The same essential paradox within psychology, perhaps. Once you obtain the measurement of/from the person, it is subject to change (i.e., get lost) by the length of time that goes by.

"In short, the paradox is that once conscious states become an object of examination, they become a part of the physical world, thereby losing their subjective attributes and content."

You've got at least two assumptions that you're operating on. First, if conscious states "become a part of the physical world" you're assuming that they weren't part of said physical world to begin with (otherwise they're becoming something they already are, which is a very odd use of language at the very least). 

Second, you've assumed that anything that is part of the physical world "loses subjective attributes and content". 

So yes, if you assume that subjectivity is by definition impossible to reconcile with physicality, and that conscious states are non-physical, then there's a... well I don't know if it's a paradox exactly, but any serious scientific study of consciousness is impossible (at least not without the type of paradigm shift you describe).

But many of us do not accept either of your assumptions, in which case the problem doesn't arise.

Dr. Trehub,

I just read your book chapter you recommend in this thread, and found it very helpful.

I particularly like your description of the problem:

"The problem we face in arriving at a physical explanation of consciousness resides in the relationship between the objective 3rd person experience and the subjective 1st person experience. It is here that I suggest that simple correlation will not suffice" (p.4).

This reminds of David Chalmers distinction between the easy vs. hard problem of consciousness.

I also find your solution to the problem intriguing. By making "... the metaphysical assumption of dual-aspect monism in which private descriptions and public descriptions are separate accounts of a common underlying reality... Moreover, I claim that spatio-temporal patterns of neuronal activation in retinoid space are the proper biophysical analogs of conscious content" (p.16).

One question I have is how close can the analogical representations from brain activity (i.e., the retinoid system) reflect the contents of conscious experiences?

Thanks again,

Michael

.

@Marcus -- I hope the quote above from Dr. Trehub clarifies the problem, which is not one that presupposes mind/body dualism, but rather of being able to achieve objectivity from subjectivity, or the contents of conscious experience.

Michael,

The question of how closely an analogical brain representation can reflect the features of a conscious experience is open for future research. The SMTT experiment that I describe in my paper "Space, self, and the theater of consciousness" (on my RG page) suggests that important features of conscious experience can be successfully predicted from the features of neuronal patterns expected on the basis of the structure and dynamics of the retinoid model of consciousness.

Well if you want you can frame it in terms of a dualism between objectivity and subjectivity, but I don't really see the fundamental difference between that and mind/body dualism. 

Marcus,

I think the difference hinges on an ontological dualism (mind/body ) vs. an epistemological dual-aspect monism (1st-person/3rd-person descriptions).

Dr. Trehub, thanks again. I will read that paper you listed. Sounds like an interesting experiment.

@Marcus,

The main question is about how to methodically examine the nature of consciousness given our currently established framework. It is paradoxical because conscious experience is essentially private (think of the early Wittgenstein), and science relies upon a 3erd person perspective. Leibniz and Spinoza were both monist -- there is only one type of ontological substance, but we are still left to solve the problem of how to present consciousness objectively (of which Dr. Trehub is writing extensively on). Leibniz makes a really good windmill analogy in this respect (see link below):

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-mind/

Below is the text from Leibniz I mentioned in the previous comment, which I always found useful in illustrating this particular problem:

"One is obliged to admit that perception and what depends upon it is inexplicable on mechanical principles, that is, by figures and motions. In imagining that there is a machine whose construction would enable it to think, to sense, and to have perception, one could conceive it enlarged while retaining the same proportions, so that one could enter into it, just like into a windmill. Supposing this, one should, when visiting within it, find only parts pushing one another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine, that one must look for perception." (Monadology, 1714, sec.17).

Leibniz’s Philosophy of Mind (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). (n.d.). Retrieved August 6, 2015, from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-mind/

One standard reply to Leibniz and other Chinese Room style arguments is that intentionality/subjectivity/consciousness/perception/whatever you want to call it is found in the complex interaction between parts of systems, not in the parts themselves. Searle's supposed reductio of this argument is his Chinese Gym, but I fail to see why that's a reductio - the systems thinker would simply say that yes, the gym (or windmill) as a whole system is conscious.

Anyways, I think you're veering back into questions of ontology. Leibniz seems mostly concerned with the actual nature of perception, not what we think about it.

My trouble with the whole Searle/Chalmers/Nagel line of thinking about these matters is contained in my first reply to you, which I still stand by. If you start out by asserting that consciousness/intentionality/perception/whatever cannot be explained by objective 3rd person methods, then it's clearly foolish to attempt to do that. But this is an assertion that, despite the frequency with which it is made, I have never seen any good evidence or arguments for. Note that Leibniz simply takes it as given: "one should [...] never [find] anything by which to explain a perception". He never actually says why this is true. It just seems to be something that a lot of people find perfectly obvious. But I don't.

Clearly we don't currently have a very good 3rd person scientific account of consciousness. But we also don't have a very good 3rd person scientific account of many other things. The human mind is arguably the most complex thing that humans have ever studied, and even if it is possible to study using purely modern scientific methods, we won't understand it for many decades or centuries to come. It seems pointless and frankly arrogant to me to try and place hard limits on the methods and conclusions future researchers will use from the comfort of our armchairs.

• Leibniz: "Thus it is in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine, that one must look for perception." (Monadology, 1714, sec.17)."

The retinoid model of consciousness and perception argues against the claim that perception is the product of  a "simple substance". We must have a conscious experience of the world around us before we can attend to any particular part of our phenomenal world as an act of perception. An explanation of consciousness and perception has already been proposed and tested on the basis of particular kinds of brain mechanisms. What properties of a simple substance could explain our experience of the world and our perception of its features?

I thought the assumption that consciousness is not part of the physical universe was shown to be fallacious reasoning because there is no way to bridge from the physical to something else, or at least this must be identified and has not. The pineal gland was the failed attempt, no? Isn't this question a canard based on confused definitions similar to saying the game of soccer is something non-physical unlike the players, field and ball? Aren't we talking about information, with conscious self awareness as a sense like touch or hearing? If we see humans as gathering and using information to survive and retaining that information in our DNA is seems less mysterious. Most of our mental functioning goes on without any awareness and is unaccessible to it. Or maybe I am missing something. Sorry I did not reference the many authors of these ideas, just had my coffee and my information processor is still booting up.

Stephen Wolfson has his finger on the problem, I think. Consciousness is experienced (in the sense John Dewey articulated) and is formulated and attended to--and as such--calls for explanation. It can be defined out of existence in a way similar to the way time can be defined out of existence: as manifestations of other things not yet understood in isolation.

Michael Hunter's worry about subjective and objectivity may be dealt with by noticing how what counts as objective or subjective flips (Lorrraine Daston's book, Objectivity) back and forth over time. Each concept implies the other. The pragmatic construction of objectivity (for the purpose of grounding inferences) can be achieved using mathematical tools, calibrated instruments, standardized definitions and so on. Other senses of objectivity may be constructed too.

Our experience of consciousness is what needs explaining, and like any symptom, is manifest. Evidence suggests our experience is partly illusion--but that doesn't make the experience less 'had'; and, I would argue my had experience is more objective in the sense of 'absolutely required' for making sense of my self and others than mathematics, which was historically sometimes taken as the paradigm case of objectivity.

If we insist on using dualism like subjective and objective, we tend to get the same or similar problems as the ancients. Better, I think, to investigate the phenomena or had experiences and find out what distinctions might make them more understood with respect to what ever our current goals are.

The salient point which makes sense to me given the neuroscience is the illusory and limited qualities of consciousness. It is behind the stimulus by 500 milliseconds and reconciles data by a structure prioritizing internal consistency versus accuracy. Even our will is illusory as it occurs after decision making. Perhaps consciousness is just another epiphenomenon of little importance yet one we want very much to keep.

I agree completely that there is an inherent problem in presupposing a dualistic ontology (founded in modern philosophy, i.e., Descartes): The issue is that there is no way to reconcile how the 2 substances would interact. And no, the Pineal gland is not a viable answer, and nor is any other single structure in the brain. My point is that this dualistic ontology resides in the conceptualization of psychophysical reductionism. The term “cognitive neuroscience” implies this duality from the onset!

Within this framework, the popular response to the question, “what scientific law accounts for the transition from brain processes to mental/cognitive processes?”, is to eliminate all talk about attributes of the mind altogether and focus on descriptors of the brain provided by neuroscience, which can be studied objectively (i.e., eliminative materialism – starting with the Chruchlands).

If eliminitivists are right, then there is no such thing as mental illness because there is no such thing as anxiety, depression, etc. Similarly, there is no such thing as a learning theory because there is no such thing as “knowing”, “believing” or “opining”. The point here is a simple one: in order to make a diagnosis of “depression”, we would still need to rely upon *subjective* reports from the patients to know that they actually have depression. However, that is not to say that the RDOC proves right and that we can categorize mental illness into the specific DSM categories using brain imaging alone. My point, however, is that the eliminitivists in effect saw off the branch on which they are seated; their clear use of language in making assertions presupposes the applicability of intentionality, knowledge and belief (See Bennett and Hacker, 2005, p.377; Nagel, 2012).

Thus, the primary conceptual failure is elucidated by the fact that when one (i.e., the eliminative materialist) denies the existence of all the attributes that constitute mind, then one also undermines the very utterance that denies it. It is at this point that an element of paradox becomes nascent.

I should note that this argument only pertains to the individuals who adhere to the philosophy from the Churchlands and Dennett, who are the founders of eliminative materialism.

How does the term "cognitive neuroscience" imply dualism? Again, it only does if you assume from the outset that what is cognitive is not physical. If you don't make that assumption, the implication isn't there.

The question "what scientific law accounts for the transition from from brain processes to mental/cognitive processes?" assumes dualism as well, and I've never met a single cognitive scientist who would take such a question seriously. There is no transition. They are the same thing. It's like asking for the scientific law that governs the transition from H20 to water. (That is the entire point of eliminitavism.)

Show me the eliminativist who says there is no such thing as mental illness, anxiety, depression, knowing, believing, opining, etc. Show me the eliminativist who "denies the existence of all the attributes that constitute mind". They might exist, but they are incredibly rare and not at all part of the mainstream.

The whole point of people like the Churchlands is that they deny the assumption you've been making in every single one of your posts on this issue. That is, they deny that there is some intrinsic contradiction between physicality/objectivity and mind/intentionality/subjectivity/consciousness/perception/whatever. 

Unless you can show, clearly, using their actual words, that Dennett/Churchland/whoever actually argues that there is no such thing as mind/consciousness/whatever, you're really just making things up in a rather irresponsible way. (You might actually be able to find something resembling that claim in some of Dennett's work, you certainly wouldn't in either of the Churchland's entire corpuses). 

@Marcus – what is the differences between what one thinks and what is “really” real? Your comment reveals a simple and narrow-focused pattern of thinking.  I say that in the least condescending way because you do not appreciate the century’s worth of work from well-known and influential scholars.

For instance, the issue with the correspondence between reality (Truth with a capital ‘T’) and what we construe it to be, has been articulated by and set forth a whole new branch in the philosophy of science by Thomas Kuhn. Any scientist who is even remotely interested in the history and philosophy of science should read his “Scientific revolutions” (1962/70).

Here is pertinent text regarding Kuhn, which you can read up more here (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/#4).

Kuhn's view depends upon the claim that “the meanings terms are interrelated in such a way that changing the meaning of one term results in changes in the meanings of related terms: ‘To make the transition to Einstein's universe, the whole conceptual web whose strands are space, time, matter, force, and so on, had to be shifted and laid down again on nature whole.’ (1962/1970a, 149). The assumption of meaning holism is a long standing one in Kuhn's work. One source for this is the later philosophy of Wittgenstein. Another not unrelated source is the assumption of holism in the philosophy of science that is consequent upon the positivist conception of theoretical meaning."

I also recommend another resource for you venture into. There is also the epistemological ‘problem of other minds’, which is really the issue the 3erd-person objective observer posed from the onset. I would be interested to garner more about your thought process after you read up on this topic (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/other-minds/).

I've read pretty much all of the authors and works you've mentioned so far. Not summaries online, but the source texts.  I'm not ignorant of this work. I'm just disagreeing with you. I know what Bennett & Hacker, Searle, Chalmers, and Nagel have to say about this. I just think they're wrong. I have more time for Wittgenstein, but he says a lot of rather silly things as well.

I have no idea what you think meaning holism has to do with this problem. I mean, I could guess, but until you state it in a clear way it's rather hard to argue against you.

This has been fun and all but it's very hard to have a discussion unless you're willing to be specific and clear. Who says "P & Q", exactly what is P and what is Q, and why are P and Q contradictory? I think you'll find that an awful lot of what you've been saying about this entire issue pretty much just vanishes if you look at the thinkers you believe yourself to be arguing against. But if you could give one simple example of such a P and such a Q, maybe we could actually start somewhere. 

@Stephen – Unfortunately, based on your responses, I gather that you adhere to eliminative materialism, by which I invite you to respond to my first reply posted today within this thread.

Specifically in regard to your recent comments about consciousness being an illusion, I warn that you are gearing up for circular reasoning, similar to what Descartes was committed to, but in the opposite direction.  However, Descartes’ most important contribution to modern science (aside from being a neuroanatomist and neurophysiologist) was how he was able to convince himself that the only postulate that was indubitable was that there was a thing able to think and doubt in the first place – a bit extreme, but rigorous nonetheless. It is this same rationale that drives our critical thinking in science, constructing experiments, and formulating hypotheses, etc. That is way I think it is *absurd* when people say that science progresses outside this same route of postulation! To say that the will or voluntary action is caused by some other stimulus-response 1/2 second prior to voluntary movement is erroneous on so many levels, again revealing a stimulus-response-like style of learning when reading results and not following up with that line of research (like letting commercials drive what you buy or letting caffeine determine the quality of your writing—it is a fallacious and habitual way of processing information and constructing and digesting knowledge). What you are referring to is the readiness potential, of which the experiment used to assess it is based on a zero-reference framework and has been criticized since its onset in the 60s. That is, the time at which you call time point 0 is arbitrary. I recommend a much more recent study regarding this topic, which identified an already existing (stochastic) background activity that has an influence on the readiness potential.

 Schurger, A., Sitt, J. D., & Dehaene, S. (2012). An accumulator model for spontaneous neural activity prior to self-initiated movement. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(42), E2904–E2913. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1210467109

I should also note that the Churchlands’ eliminative program is NOT the most mainstream position, at least for philosophers these days.  Much more popular, I’d say, are forms of “softer” reductionism: e.g. everything is ‘ultimately’ ontologically reducible to physical law but may not be explanatorally reducible – i.e. we may need new laws at the level of neurons or at the level of computation to actually do the explanatory work.  (For a taxonomy of the current positions you could take a look at Chalmers’ “The Mind and its Place in Nature”). 

@Markus -- I am trying to get you engaged with other text as it relates to this topic, which is why I provided those other references. Going back and forth about the obvious is utterly distracting and unproductive. And lets remind ourselves that this thread has stemmed from a question, so I am not the one posing to know all of the answers, but I do have the decency to explain why I disagree with a particular subject. So, lets take a few steps back...

In the summary section of this thread, I said that "this paradox is achieved by creating the distinction between the subject (expresser) and object (expression), and between substance and content." I am saying that in order to have a cognitive neuroscience these distinctions must be made in order to establish objectivity.

I think this discussion has been focused on the ontological substance, of which we are all monist, making this less interesting. My question is, how can the physical and the phenomenal experience of it be the same?

Place and Smart -- the founders of Identity theory, which is what you adhere to, state simply that conscious experience is identical to a brain process. (here is a quick reference in case you did not read the source material: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-identity/#Con)

Despite all the problem with identity theory (again see reference above for a quick summary), I am interesting in an epistemological aspect: even if one knows the chemical structure of water (i.e., H2O)--or all possible brain processes, can one also (causally) know the experience of it (the qualia of wetness, which is a real thing)--or conscious experience in general? No; in fact one could know the experience of it without knowing the chemical structure of it. So, how can they be measured and be called the same phenomena? Measurement is the key question here. Dr. Trehub is the only person who has provided an actual answer, which was epistemological dual-aspect monism.

I am hoping to get more information regarding the distinction that Frege (the famous mathematician and philosopher) made, regarding the subject (expresser) and object (expression), and between substance and content as it pertains to the necessary conditions by to achieve a science of phenomenal experience.

I appreciate that this is frustrating for you, I can assure you it's mutual. But if you're starting by asserting a contradiction (which the very first sentence in your very first post does) at the heart of a an entire field of study, you should not be surprised to get some push back.

Anyways, it's very hard to make sense of a lot of what you're writing. E.g. you ask "how can the physical and the phenomenal experience of it be the same?". That doesn't make much sense. "The physical" is used as a noun phrase, but what does it denote (hey, I've read Frege too!)? All that is physical (i.e., the universe itself)? Anything that is physical? A particular physical thing? 

None of those options make any sense. Clearly no one is suggesting that anyone experiences the entire universe, or has experiences of physicality in general. And no one thinks that one's experience of a particular physical object is that physical object (my knowledge of a rock is not a rock). So...?

It's really, really hard to make that question mean anything at all, actually. I mean... I guess the other alternative is that "the physical" means "brain state", which is a very weird way of phrasing it, but let's try that. "How could my brain state and my phenomenal experience of it be the same?". Huh? Who claims that they are? To the extent that you can have a phenomenal experience A of brain state B (which is, at best, an extraordinarily indirect and imprecise kind of experience), no one believes that A and B are the same thing.  They might be the same type of thing, and indeed I am arguing that they are: namely, that A is a brain state. But it's not the same brain state as B, it's a different one.

to say that there is a paradox is to misunderstand the way we create knowledge.  when there is a seeming paradox we are sometimes forced to see the prevailing system of thought (empiricism in this case) not as merely incomplete but as fundamentally unable to capture the nature of the phenomena under consideration (consciousness in this case).

there are many reasons why the logic we use to produce knowledge about the physical world would fail when applied to the subject of consciousness. too many reasons to list and explain in a post like this.  but it helps to understand that empiricism always refers back to matter and energy for its proofs and is therefore a circular system of logic (as are all ways of creating knowledge).    we understand the physical aspect of our existence by referring back to physical properties as fundamental explanatory proofs.  

at this time in our intellectual evolution we need to formulate a logical system for creating knowledge about consciousness, which will be by referring to its own fundamental properties as explanatory proofs, which are very different from physical properties.

awareness is inter-relational (is a dynamic occurring between an organism and its environment or an organism and other organisms); perception is creative and interpretive (rather than fixed and objective); sentience ONLY occurs in a subjective format (so a system of knowledge which disqualifies subjectivity from the reality equation is not ever going to be useful in this realm); conscious experience is in the constant now (so linear time is not as useful a conceptual parameter as it is in physics which tracks causation in linear time); authentic in-the-moment conscious experience cannot be repeated in the way physical experiments can (so the concept of repeatable tests is not explanatory in this case); subjective experience is different for every living individual (so the expectation of a standard for comparison is not useful here as it is in the physical sciences); consciousness is an internal experiential phenomenon (the physical sciences only contend with a supposedly objective external universe. 

i could go on but hopefully you are seeing my point.  a seeming paradox arises when a system of logic is applied to a phenomenon for which that system of logic was not designed.   and though empiricism arose as merely a system of thought for understanding and exploring the physical aspects of our existence, it has supplanted religion as a universal belief system regarding reality in toto, which makes it even harder to see the natural flaws and shortcomings of that system of logic.  

consciousness is not a physical phenomenon (though it obviously interfaces with the physical world) so physical proofs will not capture its essence.  consciousness is the most mundane aspect of our existence, and thus a spiritual logic which refers to the divine for proofs will not capture its true nature either.   the goods are right in front of us; its a matter of letting go of formerly ubiquitous systems of logic and formulating something new.   but not entirely from scratch: psychology and sociology already capture some of the non-physical dynamics of consciousness in their descriptions of psychodynamics and social forces.  

unfortunately these fields have had to warp their data to fit empirical standards (if they want funding and tenure) which can warp their ideologies in turn (behaviorism for example).  even academics within those fields will not promote their fields' fundamental ideologies as the better descriptor of consciousness than the physical one.  they cannot afford to rock the boat.  academia has its own form of the inquisition when it comes to heretics so it is a dangerous game to even purport to be formulating a system of logic to deal with the explanatory gaps in our understanding of consciousness.  a new formulation will likely have to come from people outside of academia and they will have to turn a deaf ear to the condemnation of critics who can only think in physical proofs.           

Thanks, Stefan! Do know if the book you described has been translated to English? If so, do you recommend a particular version/translater.

Dear Michael,

Thank you. What I meant was that analytical thinking used to explain consciousness creates paradoxes - only one of which is that of measurement. Another paradox is apparent motion - an illusion that has escaped explanation for a century. It never occurs to philosophers/scientists that apparent motion is NOT an illusion but a primary datum of consciousness and that it is its analytical description (i.e. two lights flashing in succession) that is at fault, that is, incapable of capturing the dynamical phenomenon. Science attempts to freeze experience in order to study it. This brings benefits but also causes a loss of information (as does any type of analysis).

There is then the paradox of delay in consciousness and many others. What I meant by "linearised products" is that mathematics and geometry consist in describing the world by means of scales which possess equal intervals. This simplifies calculation etc. but takes us away from the original subjective perspective (which is non-linear).  Things that are closer are larger, more salient and possess more information etc. Dehaene has shown that the subjective number line in some indigenous cultures is logarithmic - larger numbers are "further" away and bunched together. Learning mathematics "irons" these nonlinearities out and creates nice interval lines and scales. Is it then surprising that psychophysical measures show non-linearities in perception?

Finally, re physics, similar problems occur there. How do you measure the speed of light objectively when you are ultimately perceiving that same light (irrespective of sophisticated apparatus) etc. You are embedded in the medium (light/consciousness) and are pretending that somehow you are outside and therefore "objective". Consciousness creates measurement and everything else and until we address this properly, it will be difficult to progress.

Aleksandar,

The retinoid model of consciousness explains apparent motion as an expected natural phenomenon because the short-term memory of retinoid space maintains flash-1 until flash-2 is presented. Then the activation of selective attention drags the representation of flash-1 to the new target of flash-2, giving a real brain path of experienced motion. This is a very brief description of the process, but you probably get the point.

Dear Arnold,

Thank you, I shall certainly look up your model. The point I'm making is that there is no need to explain the illusion because there is no illusion. The movement comes first and all analytical explanations (that mostly require some post-hoc legerdemains such as reconstruction, reconciliation etc. - see Dennett) fail to capture it by virtue of not possessing the information needed to describe dynamic processes. This is not surprising given that analytical models were created in order to be static and amenable to manipulation, computation etc. 

You are making the same mistake most others make when they get up every morning. You THINK that you have free will. You don't.

Have you considered holographic fractal analysis.

 Dear Michael,

Maybe your question could be paraphrased as 'contemporary thinking about the distinction between mind and body is very muddled'? I would agree. But I think part of the problem, as others have suggested, is that the twentieth century literature on this consists mostly of lurching from one false premise to the next until people get bored with arguing in circles. To my mind people like Patricia Churchland, David Chalmers, John Searle, Peter hacker, Ludwig Wittgetnstein, Dan Dennett, etc etc all get tied in knots because they have not read the background literature from the foundation of science - in particular Descartes and Leibniz. What we see is a sort of re-enactment of a civil war between straw men in full costume. 

So science is not just third person objective stuff. Nor is it really reductionist in aim. Nor was Descartes a substance dualist. And although Leibniz was a monist in one sense Spinoza was a Monism in a quite different sense. The whole thing is a garbled mass of Chinese whispers.

It is hard to know where to start but it may be worth focusing on the fact that Descartes was not a dualist in the sense often supposed. He was a very hard nosed physicalist. But his physics was primitive and he found he had to divide it into extended matter and something unextended that he called spirit - which was the cause of all change since matter was inert. We would now call spirit 'force'. So Descartes' dualism is entirely within our phsyics. There is no problem with interaction because we are entirely happy that force interacts with matter. Leibniz's claim that Descartes's model could not work has been handed down for generations but he got it wrong.

What both Descartes and Leibniz understood, and is now largely forgotten, is that phenomenal experience must be totally proximal or immediate (meaning with no intervening mediating steps). That is why you cannot get it out of a mill or system. The idea that experience arises out of complex systems is causally incoherent. Which bit experiences the experience? The brain uses proximal patterns to represent distal patterns - that is why it is useful. Our problem is that we have no way of ascertaining from outside what the code is for representing. Everything consists of instances of dynamic relation but we are used to proximal relations being used to tell us about distal relations. Leibniz got pretty much all of this sorted but he got forgotten because he is a bit more subtle than Newton's billiard ball account and lots of people find him hard to follow.

Put another way, the 'conceptual transformation' we need is to read the seventeenth century natural philosophers with a bit more care and see that they had got a pretty good account of things at the start, which got dumbed down subsequently and then completely garbled in the last century by people with no understanding of science.

This seems convoluted. Our "experience" is entirely inside of a skull with no proximal or immediate connection to reality at all. There is no way to prove awareness, consciousness, experience etc. is not illusory, as Descartes failed to acknowledge. Russell clarified the discussion more but again we haven't proven anything really inside our little brain box yet. Perhaps there is a key to the door but no one has found it.

Stephen,

Ilusions are real conscious experiences. Logical proof is a human invention.

Dear Jonathan, for Descartes the thinking substance is not a physical force. I don't know how you arrived to this conclusion. The thinking substance is responsible for the operations of thought, not for physical movement. Matter for Descartes is not inert; it moves according to mechanical laws created by God.

You are making the usual mistake, Alfredo. If you get the Meditations up online and search for 'physics' I think you will find only one use of the word in the context of how to understand God. God is part of physics for Descartes - he is the source of all dynamic relations, all motion. And he argues that the human soul is a semi-independent source of motion. (Descartes also uses physics in the practical sense of engineering in other texts but he does not talk of 'physical', only of 'material'. The two are quite different.)

So a physical force for Descartes is either God or a soul. He is explicit on this. The idea that God is outside physics was created by those who wanted to preserve a magic deity they could use as a source of punishment for their congregation that operated outside the rules of everyday dynamics. Descartes was not that sort of dualist at all.

Descartes was unclear how thinking would influence matter. He was struggling with very early ideas of action before Huygens and Hooke had paved the way for Leibniz to see that all matter is in fact just aggregation of internal force units. He suggested that the soul would cause subtle fluids in the nerves to swerve without violating his law of conservation of motion. Leibniz is always out to show he is cleverer than Descartes so he says that since it is directional momentum that is conserved Descartes cannot get swerving without violation. But planetary motion shows how force will cause swerving without violation of conservation of momentum. Leibniz made a trivial error.

So Descartes very definitely indicates that the soul is responsible for movement of matter. In fact if the soul is an electromagnetic unit that swerves the subtle fluid of sodium ions his story is pretty good. Matter is very definitely inert and incapable of generating motion for Descartes. If you remember Descartes says that all motion is derived from God (or souls) and has to be maintained constantly by God. All that matter could do was to exclude other matter from its space - to be extended. For Descartes extension exhausts the properties of matter. 

Dear Stephen,

I am not sure what you find convoluted. It is just physics. What may be convoluted is the process of disentangling oneself from intuitive ideas of how things work and all the muddled literature that has grown up around intuitive interpretations of science.

I don't understand your statement about experience not being connected to reality - how would we know were we are or what we are eating if it was not?

Russell tried hard to understand physics, to his credit, but in the end never quite understood the implications of dynamism. So he says that physics can only deal with dynamic relations, which is right, and that experience is the one intrinsic feature of matter, which has to be wrong because if it were not relational (i.e. truly intrinsic) we could not talk about it. What he should have said is that experience is the one truly proximal feature of dynamic units. (I use proximal in the dynamic sense of events - to be proximal is to be part of the very same event, not some causal antecedent or consequent.) As it stands Russellian monism is actually a dualism because experience lies outside physics. Leibniziain monism is a true monism because everything is physics and its dynamic underpinnings - metaphysics (again nothing to do with spooky non-physical).

I cannot yet quite see what your position is, Stephen? It would be interesting to hear.

Hi Jonathan,

I apologize for failing to explain what I meant by convoluted and I must agree with your statement of intuitive understandings which confuses already muddled literature. What sounded convoluted to me, and perhaps I am missing the point, is to conflate 19th and 20th century philosophical arguments with current neuroscience. My statement about reality being removed from experience is based on my understanding of the current literature in the natural sciences, clearly placing a limit not only on naked observation but those at the subatomic level where quantum effects dominate. Whatever representations we may experience they cannot be directly connected to the physical universe because of the biological sensory apparatus involved and the internal virtual reality in which we are all stuck - "consciousness" etc. In other words the conversation has moved beyond the issue of monism or dualism. I'm afraid I cannot follow your critique of Russell as his neutral monism also appears to transcend the discussion.

Steve

"Whatever representations we may experience they cannot be directly connected to the physical universe"

I thought you were a monist and that the supposed contradiction was purely epistemological?

Dear Jonathan, I am sorry, but I still think that your interpretation is wrong. For instance, the gravitational force between the sun and the earth. How could it be a product of the human mind? Although I am a anti-Cartesian person, I would not believe he was a fool to the point of believing that the action of the thinking substance on matter could operate on that scale. The action of mind over matter would be limited, and possible only on the human body with the intermediation of the pineal gland. The Kantians may say that the concept of a physical force is a construction of the human mind, but I suspect this is not what you meant.

Thanks for the clarification, Stephen. Let me try and unpick that a bit further.

I would not want to imply that contemporary philosophers and neuroscientists are making exactly the same mistakes but there is quite a lot of overlap. One thing they share is an insistence that Descartes was misguided - for very shaky reasons. 

But let's look at the scientific arguments you raise. You say that the representations we experience cannot be connected to the physical universe. I think there may be a Kantian false premise in there. Our representations will be connected to the universe in the only way we can understand things to be connected - causally connected. Dynamic patterns in the world will through causal chains give rise to internal representations that co-very with those patterns in a useful way. What you seem to be implying is that there is some other sort of disconnect, which I suspect is close to Kant's idea that we cannot 'know the thing in itself'. But there is no such thing as the thing in itself, beyond the pattern of causal connection that we CAN know, through careful scientific exploration and inference. To know about electrons we do not need to see little charged billiard balls. We just need to understand the dynamic dispositional rules they instantiate - and we are doing pretty well on that. Modern science does not indicate there is anything in the world we cannot connect with or observe. Science is based on dynamism - the idea that we can only ever know patterns of causal connection, invented by Leibniz. It says nothing about 'what the world is like' in any other sense. That is the 'physical' world in the layman's sense that science has never claimed to address.

So I agree that we need to differentiate the use of the word 'red' to indicate a feature of an experience and the use of the word to indicate an external dynamic disposition of differential reflectance, emission or transmission or a wavelength of light. But that is not modern science. It is clearly laid out in Leibniz and implicit in the pre-Socratics 2500 years ago.

And apart from anything else experience itself is clearly part of our real universe if anything is so it cannot be disconnected from it.

I am still not quite sure what you are suggesting - or should I say what your position is. So I guess I am puzzled in a way that echos Marcus's post.

You say that Russell transcends the discussion but again I am not sure what you mean by that. My point was that although Russell thought he had a monism it has to be a dualism because his mental aspect is incompatible with physics, even if he hoped it would be a complement. His error was to forget his own appreciation that everything we can even begin to have a conception of must be relational. The relevance to neuroscience is that my contemporary neuroscience colleagues make exactly the same mistake.

Alfredo, that is clearly not the point I was making. I used planetary motion as a simple example of how Leibniz's critique about the soul not being able to swerve bits of body fails in general physics terms. I am of course not suggesting that minds operate on that scale. I am merely dismissing the hackneyed idea that there is some problem of interactionism relating to conservation laws - there is none. A simple answer for the Cartesian soul is that whenever it swerves some subtle fluids in the nerves a bit to the left the pineal correspondingly swerves a bit to the right, just as the sun 'swerves' a bit as the earth orbits it. We are now so used to the idea of things like magnetic and electric force fields but one has to remember that for Descartes such ideas simply had not yet been invented. His theory is muddled and inconsistent, but there is nothing non-physical about his soul, at least in the sense of being outside physics.

Jonathan, is thinking inside physics? Which physics?

As I understand it thinking would be for Descartes within his physics, his physics meaning all his explanations for causal relations in the world - or everything explained by those explanations. Descartes is ahead of contemporary neuroscience in that he explicitly includes a non-mechanical set of relations that for him cover thinking but which fit in to a schema that is compatible with mechanical relations outside that. He does not give any indication what he thinks the dynamic rules of thinking are, other than that they can use language, but he sets up a category within his range of explanations.

Contemporary neuroscience tends to pretend that there are no causal relations involved in the phenomenal aspect of thought - they just arise from 'activity of re-entrant networks' or 'ignition of assemblies' or some other obsfuscating terms. Ironically, neuroscience has lots of new physics that it could make use of to construct the relevant relations - which no doubt Descartes would have been very pleased to make use of.

On a broader front, if physics at any time is all the explanations for causal relations current at that time then I would have thought thinking would always be within physics. It might be an area where detail was very hard to ascertain, as it is for dark matter, but dark matter is still part of physics. A definition of physics that does not include thinking must I think be the handywork of someone who wants physics to be some limited exercise that they do not have to believe is indeed all the explanations for causal relations. It is a bit like the man with the long white beard that non-Christians think Christians take to be their God.

Hi Marus and Jonathan, 

Unless I am mistaken, an indirect connection through a transfer of information does not violate the principle of monism. I took issue with the idea of proximal so no false premise I hope.

I believe Russell explained, in chapter 8 and elsewhere in his "The Problems of Philosophy," the issues you refer to about Kant and a priori knowledge.

Maybe we are agreeing but don't realize it here. Our internal reality and our mental representation is not the same as physical reality but both exist within physical reality. The problem arrises when we try to use rules of thought and come to realize reality itself violates the rules of thought, e.g. something cannot be and not be something simultaneously. Quantum physics shows it can. A nice example of observable contradictions of logic in the physical world can be seen simply by taking 3 sheets of polarized film. Place two so no light passes through then slip a third in-between and light re-emerges. This is impossible if there is a physical universe as we conceive it - unless I am being duped by the gentleman I saw perform it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc

My point of view is that we are likely part of vast complex information process and to resurrect old arguments of dualism versus monism is to ignore the current science. Therefore my answer to the initial questions - "Is there is an underlying paradox within the current psychophysical reductionist framework? What conceptual transformations must be called upon that aim to advance our understanding of the relation between humanity and nature, and between mind, brain and body?" is that the question contains within it certain assumptions that no longer are relevant because out understanding of reality has changed based on current observations using the scientific method.

Steve

Dear Jonathan, physics is about matter/energy in space/time and causation - in the Modern sense of the term - is within physics. Thinking processes are not causal in the sense of Modern physics, but only in the sense of Aristotelian formal causation. In the category of mental processes there are also feelings, which belong to a third class.

Modern philosophers confused Aristotelian ontology with Thomism and rejected the theocentric metaphysics of the latter (a misrepresentation of the original Aristotle, whose lost texts were discovered from Arabian translations and "adapted" to the Catholic doctrine by St. Thomas Aquinae).

As the framework of Modern science does not allow thinking or feeling processes to be conceived within physics, Spinoza and Leibiniz had to return (conceptually speaking) to the real Aristotle, to (respectively) resurrect his forgotten concepts of potentiality and teleology. I believe that Descartes is too close to the fathers of Modern physics to afford this kind of conceptual movement.

By the way, your first paragraph is Kantian, because you conceive causation as a schema in the mind, not as a process in a mind-independent reality. In this case, the "dynamic rules" of thinking (logical and mathematical rules) could be conceived as a subset of the "dynamic rules" of causation. However, (although I am not a specialist in these philosophical matters) there are many arguments for the contrary claim, by the Idealists (arguments for the reduction of the dynamic rules of causation to the dynamic rules of logics and mathematics).

Dear Alfredo,

You are wandering off the point and being very Procrustean, I think. My point was that Descartes's soul was essentially a unit of force. Physics uses words like matter and energy but I doubt you will find anyone who denies it also deals with force. Moreover, in modern physics 'matter' is probably only talked about in television programmes for the layman. The subject of study is considered to be the interactions between dynamic field units and fields of potentials - which are Aristotelian formal causes.

Only laymen and philosophers think physics is 'restricted to matter' - maybe because they want room for something more airy fairy. Modern physics has confirmed Leibniz's deduction that our intuitive sense of matter arises from the interactions of force units. Unless something exerts or responds to force it is unknowable. If a physicist discovers some evidence for an aspect of reality that does not fit in the current knowledge about forces she does not say 'oh that is not matter' but instead immediately makes room for it and calls it 'dark matter'. Matter just means anything that can cause through force. Moreover, the ultimate yardstick of what it causes is experience, so thinking and experience are integral to physics in that sense too. 

I agree that modern neurophysics has lost touch with where thinking and feeling fit into the force based model - that was exactly my point - that Descartes did a better job, even if his results were crude. But that does not mean that thinking and feeling are outside a more enlightened neurophysics. If you talk to someone with a broader perspective like Semir Zeki he is quite comfortable with a place for experience in physics. 

And you cannot say that thinking processes are not causal in the sense of modern physics. If I think I will have another cup of coffee I find myself caused to go to the coffee machine and make one. Physics suggests that the causes involve neurons firing and integrating signals.

And you don't seem to have read my first paragraph properly. I deliberately phrased it so that both common uses of the word physics are included - the schema of ideas or study, AND what is being studied. I am allowing the reader to take whatever metaphysical position they prefer and, as you know, I think Kant is an irrelevant dumber-down in all this.

I stick to my contention that for Descartes the soul was within his physics and that if you read Passions of the Soul you will see that he was intending to explain as much as he could in very much the sort of reductive causal relational terms we are used to in our own physics. He just found the soul incompatible with billiard ball collision mechanics - which we can now understand very easily since such mechanics has been abandoned at the fundamental level.

Best wishes

Jo

Dear Jonathan, your last response is good and corrects my errors of interpretation of your views, but regarding the central issue being discussed I still disagree. See: in Modern physics, a force (e.g. gravitational) was deduced from the observation of changes in the movements of macroscopic bodies. In the case of human body movement, the force would be the activity of muscles and nerves, not the thinking substance. Remember Kim's argument!

Dear Alfredo,

I don't know Kim's argument (although my impression of Kim has been that he has missed the point, like most philosophers of science). 

You refer to Modern physics with a capital M - which tends to mean seventeenth century and since you say 'was deduced' I take it that this is what you mean. I think it is interesting to look at how Newton's Laws became formulable. As I understand it a key step was the recognition in the 1660-1680 period that collision laws were dependent on internal elastic forces. That gave a basis for the idea of every action having an equal and opposite reaction for earthbound mechanics that Newton could then harmonise with cosmic mechanics. Crucially, the deformations involved and the distances over which elastic forces operated were often invisibly microscopic. So there was an understanding that force operated at the invisibly small level. Sure, the effects were studied on visible objects but that applies to thinking as well, since thinking gives rise to movements of the body.

For the human body we can agree that the forces would operate within muscles or nerves and that is what Descartes is good at - he has a specific hypothesis that the forces of soul operate within the domain of the pineal. His key mechanical point is that this force cannot work the way collisions work. That is fine. Muscular contraction makes use of electrochemical forces (maybe with quantum effects) without any collisions. Neural excitation does not involve collisions. It is all very reasonable. The mistake everyone makes is to think that Descartes's soul works by some magical handwaving. But Descartes was not interested in magical handwaving. His argument for the existence of God is largely based on the existence of great regularity in the world. As Pierre Changeux said in Helsinki, Descartes is what we would now call a no-nonsense physicalist. 

As Leibniz points out, Descartes main error is to think that independent force units only occur in association with human pineals. Leibniz sees that everything consists of aggregates of such units. The rest of the physics world tend not to delve as deep as Leibniz but they would probably have agreed in practical terms. Sure there are dislocations in the hypothesis building but as I see it most people read their own closet dualism into Descartes's physicalism.

If one asks a contemporary neuroscientist what dynamic relational event is a 'thought' they are likely to come up with waffle that makes no dynamic sense. At least Descartes puts his ideas within the framework of actual causal chains of events.

What was Kim's argument? I am intrigued.

Jonathan, please see the section "Argument against non-reductive physicalism" in the Wiki page below

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaegwon_Kim

Alfredo: that looks like a typical example of a philosopher generating valid but meaningless conclusions from inadequately defined premises.

People say that physics only allows one sufficient cause of an event, but which sense of 'physics' is being used? If we take physics as all those aspects of the world we hope to explain by dynamic theories then lack of overdetermination is just a truism. To say that there are two independent sufficient causes of an event both of which caused it is incompatible with our conception of cause. It is metaphysics, not physics. 

If we take physics as the set of dynamic theories that do the explaining it is commonplace to have multiple sufficient causes. You can have a classical level cause, a quantum level cause, a statistical mechanical cause, and causes at all sorts of scales. Moreover, there are plenty of loose ends so that lots of common events cannot be fully accounted for by the theories. The elephant in the room is that despite the fact that physics, as a set of theories, is about dynamic rules that predict the nature of our experiences it completely fails to give rules for the way the final proximal events in our brains determine those experiences.

Put another way, overdetermination is only a problem if we presume that 'mental causes' are somehow distinct from physical ones. I don't quite understand the wikipedia article because I would have thought that a theory that says you cannot reduce the mental the physical is not physicalism. (I suspect I just think 'non-reductive physicalism' is incoherent anyway.) As I understand it the main mark of mental events is that they are events that we infer to have occurred on the basis of internal monitoring routines in our brains rather than perception through sense organs. It is an epistemic category. So there is no reason to set it up as an alternative to physical unless we treat that as epistemic too - things perceived through senses. But we clearly do not restrict physical to things we have seen or touched. We think of the Cambrian period as physical, what we read about in books as physical etc etc. We are pretty catholic about how we know about it.

The really interesting differences between mental and physical events have to do with things like indivisible complexity - precisely the things Descartes and Leibniz focussed on. They did not get tied in knots confusing epistemic and ontological categories.

Dear Jonathan, the discussion of Kim's argument is complicated and has been overdone by philosophers. I will give my version of the solution, which is not much different from what you have been proposing, with the exception that I do not agree that Descartes could be classified as Physicalist philosopher (reductionist or non-reductionist). He is simply a Substance Dualist philosopher, as agreed by everybody in the field of Philosophy of Mind.

The Pereira-Aristotle solution (that appears in the figure below, from my Cambridge UP book chapter - with a minor change) is to distinguish two types of natural causes:

a) Physical causes, including Aristotle's Efficient and Material causes;

b) Mental causes, including Aristotle's Formal and Final causes.

In the Figure 1 drawing that illustrates Kim's argument (see my post above),  F1 -> F2 is physical causation, and M1 -> M2 is mental causation. In my diagram below, I call physical physical and mental informational. I also refer to a third level of relation, "inferential", that applies to mental conscious states only, but this is another complex issue that I will not discuss in this post.

The main message is that both for Descartes and Pereira-Aristotle views, mental relations are not "physical" in the Modern sense of the term, and then Kim's argument does not apply. On the other hand, this position implies we are not orthodox Physicalists - Descartes is a Substance Dualist and I am a Triple-Aspect Monist! For me the physical aspect of reality is just one of the three aspects (physical, informational and conscious). TAM is a kind of Naturalism, but not Physicalism.

Thank you, Jonathan, Alfredo and everyone else for your very thoughtful contributions to this discussion! I am fascinated with several ongoing themes, such as, the preconditions for the "dynamic rules" of thinking (which can or cannot be independent of human thought itself), and how physics reconciles "dark" matter the same obfuscating ways that neuroscience reconciles conscious experience. From this, my initial, general question (re-stated) is how can a "new physics" be employed to construct the necessary relations for thought? Jonathan hinted that the use of it would make Descartes very pleased... I am intrigued!

Although a bit of a tangent from the question posed above, all of these themes resonate with some of my previous readings of Giles Deleuze. He was the so-called post-modern philosopher espousing a dynamic ontology. From a historical standpoint, it is important to link Deleuze’s ontology with Heraclitus, the first philosopher of difference and change. Whereas Heraclitus’ predecessors had sought to identify the one primordial, self-identical substance, out of which all others had emerged, Heraclitus conceptualized the world nothing more than the world in a permanent state of flux. Thus, where Heraclitus diverges from his Milesian forbears in that his first principle was not a substance, but rather the dynamic elements of nature, namely, fire (I prefer the term 'energy' instead). The point here is that this elemental force is different in that it is not a thing, but a process: nothing more than its own transformation. A theme that is all so consistent here...

Also, in connection with Leibniz, Deleuze stated that, "Leibniz then was right to say that the individual monad expresses a world according to the relation of other bodies with its own, as much as it expresses this relation according to the relation of the parts of its own body. An individual is therefore always in a world as a circle of convergence, and a world may be formed and thought only in the vicinity of the individuals which occupy or fill it." (The Logic of Sense, pg. 110). Conscious experience is that 5th dimension, namely perceived as the intensity of that convergence (at that point in time). He goes on to say that the world itself has a surface capable of forming a potential of "singularities", which maybe infinite in an order of (possible) convergence, but have a finite energy for which to be "actualized".

Furthermore--but a further divergence: with respect to the ongoing changes in the distributions of energy, he  makes a link with the problem of entropy: when a "singularity" is extended over a line of ordinary points and that potential energy is actualized, it then falls to its lowest level, allowing for a living present. So to be actualized is to be expressed just like Leibniz held that each individual monad expresses the world. How this fits into the laws of thermodynamics is relevant, but still needs further explication. Also, how any convergence relates to any talk of representation remains an open question for me.

-Michael

Dear Alfredo,

I do realise that everyone but me and perhaps Jean Pierre Changeux agrees that Descartes is a substance dualist, but I think they must be wrong. For Descartes a 'substance' was an entity that depended for its existence on itself alone, or only on itself and God. Matter for Descartes had parts and was infinitely divisible. So there could be no material substances because any material object would depend on its existence on infinitely many parts. As far as I can see the people who invented the term 'substance dualist' did not get clear in their minds the difference between the seventeenth century meaning of substance as entity and the modern meaning of substance as type of material. Descartes is a substance pluralist like Leibniz in that he thinks there are lots of substances, contra Spinoza, but they are all mental. This has to be the case does it not?

Your division of causes sounds a bit like Leibniz - for whom efficient causes are part of the story of apparent matter and final causes are part of the story of fundamental dynamics. But of course Leibniz is not suggesting that these are somehow working alongside each other - they are just the different descriptions that are required for different levels of analysis. 

I don't actually think there is an agreed modern or even Modern sense of physical. I think that is why KIm and his friends are talking to themselves without knowing what they mean.

Dear Michael,

You ask 'how can a "new physics" be employed to construct the necessary relations for thought'?

I don't think we need a new physics. I think we need a rather old physics - as given us by Leibniz and now shown to be the fundamental physics by field theory. In Leibniz and the modern derivatives of the time dependent Schrodinger equation a dynamic unit is described in relation to a universe, or universal field of potentials. Thought is characterised by a point of view and Leibniz sees that dynamic units must be points of view. The tricky question is which dynamic units inside brains are the sorts of points of view we think we talk about. They cannot be aggregates of lots of dynamic units connecting to each other by signal sending because a signal sender and its receiver cannot be said to be one point of view. So my understanding is that the points of view in brains we talk about must operate from a domain associated with an individual neuron - a single computational or informational juncture if you like. Many people find this very hard to comprehend but Leibniz understood it and it is the default assumption to be drawn from ordinary neuroscience if one sticks to the locality constraint of all other physical science.

I have come across commentaries on Deleuze quite frequently and even tried to read some of him. I am afraid that he is a hand-waver. He is attracted to Leibniz I think for the sort of reason that people are attracted to the Veda - maybe that you can solve philosophical paradoxes by turning arguments inside out and folding them over or some such. Leibniz is nothing like that. He is a hard-nosed theoretical physicist who never hand waves. Russell's comment (ironically) was that Leibniz was much too interested in practical applications. Deleuze takes a quote from Leibniz and then uses it out of context to create some sort of airy-fairy word salad. The examples you quote are fairly typical. They start off with a key Leibnizian idea then completely mangle its meaning. Leibniz has absolutely nothing to do with the Continental philosophical tradition. He belongs in the tradition of Galileo, Maxwell, Einstein and Feynman. 

 Dear All,

Perhaps I have elbowed myself out of this discussion by not delving into the specifics of describing the philosophical positions of Leibniz et al. If you go over the conversation you are all having it can be seen to contain much back and forth about who meant what and when and how. This is a particular type of cognitive process which I identify as linear in nature and constrained by the imprecision of language to attempt describing complex, dynamic processes which are so vast they dwarf the size of the known universe. I have been trying to suggest that before answering Michael's question, I paraphrase as what conceptual transformations must occur to advance our understanding of mind, body and brain, we must first identify what we cannot know. To speculate on what a 17/18th century genius may have thought about modern neuroscience is an interesting intellectual exercise but unless I am missing something I do not see a path to answering Michael's question from that process. Not to slash the gordian knot here but I do see a forest for the trees dilemma in a discussion of philosophical positions by brilliant minds who none-the-less probably would not understand current science. This is because current science has become highly specialized due to the expansion of knowledge so most of us have a hard time keeping up. Michael's question is an important one because it drives at the core idea of the nature of our personal human experience as something decidedly different from the physical world in which we live and as you all have been describing is a long-time target of philosophical inquiry. In order to change a conceptual process one must be willing to suspend (momentarily) all presuppositions by asking "how do we know this?" It goes to the core of thinking itself, which is the tool we are using to find an answer to Michael's question. Just as Einstein suspended the assumption that time was constant to find his theory we must suspend our presumptions to answer Michael's question. I propose suspending the presumption of physical versus non-physical reality - captured in the monism/dualism argument by saying reality (all that exists) is something else - information which behaves quite differently than physical matter. But perhaps I have failed to understand your discussion and you have already captured this idea. Apologies if that is the case. Very interested in your tDCS research, by the way Michael.

Dear Stephen,

The path to answering Michael's question via discussing Leibniz may simply be that Leibniz gave us the answer and there is little point re-inventing the wheel. 

You start your post with some methodological generalities that sound fair enough but I am not quite sure where they help. What is it we cannot know. You seem to want to tell us that but don't say. And I am not sure that specialisation in science is all that important. It is just that a lot of people in science do not think very deeply about what the real questions are they think they are addressing.

You go on to suggest suspending the presumption of physical versus non-physical but I don't think any of us, or Leibniz, was making that assumption. We argued a bit about Descartes but in my view he did not make that presumption either.

You end up by suggesting that reality is information which behaves quite differently from physical matter. But what exactly do you mean by that? Are you suggesting that physical matter is just a well founded illusional appearance and that at a fundamental level everything is the passage of information. That would be pretty much Leibniz's view and also the view of modern physics, so nothing new it seems? I prefer Leibniz's idea of perception rather than information though. Rovelli talks of all fundamental interactions being passage of information but as Dretske has pointed out information is actually a bit more complicated than just these individual dynamic baton-passings. It only becomes information in the context of divergent and convergent paths in the context of a system that can maintain patterns of stable co-variation. Information is a bit of a can of worms I think. 

Or are you suggesting that the passage of information occurs alongside and independently of the behaviour of physical matter? That would seem to raise a lot of difficult problems, particularly if modern physics assumes that 'physical matter' is just a placeholder for information passing anyway. It is not the information is different from matter, it is just a more refined description of the same reality is it not?

Put another way - what do we achieve by your proposal that we could not achieve just by carrying on with physics as it is? All tests of theories of information to date rest on testing the behaviour of the physical substrates involved. Are you suggesting some other way of testing things?

Can you give us an example of what you have in mind? If it is information do you have ideas about what dynamic unit is being informed and by what signals?

Hi Jonathan,

You are right about my posts being generalized. I was being lazy as the time required to thoroughly respond is significant. Let me be more precise this time and address your ideas one by one in detail.

1> Leibniz may have answered Michael's two questions (What conceptual transformations must be called upon that aim to advance our understanding of the relation between humanity and nature, and between mind, brain and body? Is there is an underlying paradox within the current psychophysical reductionist framework?)

The immediate answer if we we are to be kind to Leibniz is that we simply cannot know because we can only speculate on what Leibniz would think if he was alive today. And since the current understanding of "the relation between humanity and nature and between mind, brain and body . . . in the current reductionist framework " [assuming this is an accurate description] must incorporate scientific discoveries relevant to the issue, which have occurred after Leibniz's death, including but not limited to Quantum Physics and Evolutionary Theory. These and other discoveries are relevant because they would make Leibniz idea of monadism inconsistent with observation and current science. Monadism is inconsistent with Quantum Physics and Evolution as they are mutually exclusive ideas in that monadism relies on appetition, whilst the later concepts on a process without appetition. Most saliently monadism has no track record of making a single reliable scientific prediction. But most importantly Leibniz has not answered Micahel's question because Michael's question demands a new idea and Leibniz relies on one of the oldest ideas ever, God. Even if we presume Leibniz is correct and God is responsible for all of creation we must then look at the mechanism Leibniz describes to explain the mind/body problem and his explanation is simply coincidence based on divine design which I fail to see as any sort of explanation at all. Please see the following link: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/#MetPriSub.

2>(Paraphrasing) How does acknowledging the limits of a linear discussion and of language help answer Michael's question? Is specialization in science unimportant to answering Michael's question? What is it we can't know and why is that important to answering Michael's question? Do people in scion fail to think more deeply about "real" questions and if true does it then fail to answer Michael's question?

By acknowledging the limits of the human language and a linear progression of ideas to describe a vastly complex universe with properties beyond the properties of language and linear progression we must allow the possibility we cannot derive an answer with this method. Science specialization which herein I include theoretical physics and advanced mathematics has developed tools such as holographic and fractal analysis which can describe the behavior of nature to make accurate predictions which would be impossible otherwise and thus related to the question of what changes are necessary to resolve the apparent mind/body paradox. What we cannot know is what we do not know that we do not know and that which cannot be known through the process of thinking in the manner we are engaged in. We also cannot know both the speed and location of a subatomic particle (Heisenberg) and cannot know the proof of certain mathematical statements or their consistency (Goedel). These unknowables relate to the mind/body question here because we must acknowledge that the apparent paradox may be illusory due to missing information leading us to assume there is an inconsistency that could be explained with the missing information such as a mathematical or other model of the nature of physical versus mental objects as consistent and integrated. It would be a logical fallacy of composition to presume that because (the opinion that) certain scientists do not think deeply that science cannot answer deep questions.

3> Do Descartes and Leibniz presume there are both a physical and a non-physical reality? Was this discussed above and how would suspension of that paradox help answer Michael's question?

I think the evidence that both Decartes and Leibniz believed in both physical and non-physical realms is both acknowledged by every major scholar I am aware of and apparent in their writings: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/#MetPriSub and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-modal/. My reading of the above discussion is that was precisely the issue being debated and suspension of that premise is my suggestion as it cannot be resolved and thus we must change the perspective to add a new idea to answer Michael's question by the suggestion reality is neither as it appears to be physically or mentally but is some other thing which we should try to describe in terms of its informational properties.

4> What do I mean by saying reality is different from how we have historically described physical matter? Am I saying physical matter is just information in transition consistent with modern physics (which is nothing new) and is this the same as Leibniz's monadism? Does the description of physical reality as information instead of physical and non-physical become a "can of worms" (an endless problem not leading to a solution) in the light of Dretske and Rovelli and the idea that information must exist within a system with paths that must maintain stable co-variation in order to answer Michael's question?

What I mean is that all of the assumptions we make about physical reality must be momentarily suspended to imagine reality as something different than how it has been described in the past. No. Leibniz's monadism relied upon the  concept of spiritual or divine essence because he described it as such using terms such as God. I did not imply that because information has a quality of being able to transfer or pass that it necessarily must pass through or into something else such as a medium or other thing. Information can transfer within itself as something which would allow that to occur and we may not have adequate language to describe it. So this may be a can of worms but sometimes that may be the result of not having adequate tools to understand the nature of physical reality. I am not aware of a conversation between Fred Dretske, an academic philosopher and Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist on the nature of information passage. Dretske's work did not comment on the nature of physical reality as information but on the representation of mental facts as informational functions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Dretske#cite_note-16. Carlo Rovelli spoke about time and quantum gravity it appears and I found nothing about informational conceptualizations beyond what I imagine would be Hawkings revelation about black hole information retention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Rovelli. The concept of covariation does not appear to coincide with my reading of the work of Dretske or Rovelli as it refers to attribution, causation and I would insert here to make it consistent with Leibniz assuming the connection - appetition. Perhaps I fail to follow your connections here or you meant something else. I do not see this idea, if I understand it correctly, to be related to mine or to lead to an answer to Michael's question. But perhaps I am missing something.

5> Am I suggesting the passage of information occurs long and independent of physical matter? Does that raise a lot of difficult problems and does modern physics assume physical matter is a placeholder for information? Is information just a more refined description of the same reality?

No. Parallel disconnected action between information and matter is Leibniz assumption in his monadism. I think the evidence based on the theory that the entire universe/multiverse/whateververse is itself information and nothing else eliminates problems but yes creates many problems in terms of explanation, measurement and validation as every large scale cosmological idea must but I do not think this makes it less valid as a result. I do not agree that "modern physics" (whatever that may be) assumes matter is an information placeholder or anything of the kind necessarily, though many argue the idea of physical matter being a medium. This idea strikes me as the "ether" argument so well dismissed by the experiment of Michelson-Morely. What I refer to instead is more along the lines of the universe as a simulation, holograph or if you are spiritually inclined a dream God is having. The sort of thing I am referring to is along the lines of the experimental physics you can find here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847 or my earlier reference which was ignored in this discussion about the quantum eraser.

6> What do we achieve by my proposal we could not achieve just by carrying on physics as it is? Do all tests of theories of information rest on testing behavior of the physical substrates? Am I suggesting another way of testing?

By dropping certain assumptions such as Einstein did in imagining time as a changeable variable we can imagine things differently and propose hypotheses which are free of those assumptions and then design experiments accordingly. Einstein used thought experiments so I assume we can as well. Thought experiments which propose that there is no duality in fact between mind and body because unlike Leibniz's assumption of two separate yet somehow coordinated realities (through God's perfect design) we assume the reality is only the information and the physical is the manifestation. Not all theories of information rest on testing the behavior of the physical substrates because we can perform simulations. This does not have to be magical or spiritual but merely physics and mathematics. I do suggest another testing method, therefore - simulation.

7> Can I give an example of what I have in mind? Do I have ideas about what dynamic unit is being informed and by what signals?

I have provided a link to a simple experiment demonstrated on Youtube to show what I am talking about https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc. I would also point to theories of a holographic universe, string theory, branes etc. To be specific the physical reality we observe and react with which appears to exist, upon careful scientific experimentation fails to behave as if it does exist under certain circumstances. When this happens we have a choice - believe reality is all an illusion or assume we are missing something. I tend to believe the later. Relating this to Michael's question we must admit that if we assume there is a mind/body paradox then if physical experimentation reveals something non-real about reality that may be a clue that we are not thinking correctly about the issue of a mind/body paradox. The most powerful evidence I think we have, other than physical reality is the information we retain both individually and as part of earth's biome. I cannot subscribe to the idea of dynamic units and signals as those ideas presume too much to be of any use when we are trying to ascertain the answer to the question: What conceptual transformations must be called upon that aim to advance our understanding of the relation between humanity and nature, and between mind, brain and body? Is there is an underlying paradox within the current psychophysical reductionist framework? I suggest the answer is yes and it lies in failing to suspend our assumptions of a physical reality as we have come to understand it in classical physics. In order to make a conceptual transformation we must hypothesize experimentally to see if we could explain consciousness, awareness, intellect and human experience as a part of an informational process which may manifest in an illusory physical reality which acts as if it is there but only to other parts of itself.

That's all I got gents. I need to get back to taxonomy and fractals.

Dear Stephen,

Thanks for that. I now understand your position, which seems to be the position I think we find in Leibniz. The tragedy of Leibniz's genius is that 99.99% of humans cannot understand what he is saying. You must be one of the 0.01% because you understand what the guy in the U-tube video is saying and that is what Leibniz is saying, more or less. In fact the guy in the U-tube is still making some naive realist mistakes that muddy his own thesis but he is doing quite well. But you would probably agree that only 0.01% of people understand what the U-tube guy is saying and why he is roughly right. 

Leibniz has been understood by a few both at his time and over the last 300 years but the Stanford Encyclopedia type received view of him has been hopelessly wrong because it is the consensus of people who do not understand. Things are changing maybe. Even Rosa Antognazza, who is pretty traditional in her view, agrees that 'psycho-physical parallelism' is a misreading. It derives from the rather flowery metaphorical paragraphs, mostly after no. 80 in the Monadology. If one takes the early paragraphs seriously one can see that there are no two realities for Leibniz. There is a fundamental monadic reality and then there is the appearance of matter that arises from that through our imperfect perception. 

Richard Arthur's new book (just 'Leibniz') gives a good account of how Leibniz is much more practical than people think and how he has been accused of 'magical' metaphysicality when that is the opposite of his intention. I must admit that I go further than Richard in de-spooking Leibniz but we are close on many things. 'God' is just the totality of all reasons for the dynamic regularities of the world. All physicists have an equivalent underlying unknown - as in Einstein's comment about how extraordinary it is that the universe is predictable.

So monad and quantum are just the same thing - the fundamental dynamic unit, with no hardness or size or shape. Had you read Monadology without reading the commentators first, as I did, having boned up on QFT beforehand, I think you would have found him saying exactly the same thing (sadly, this cannot be tested). So I would argue that lots of things Leibniz said have proved right. He predicted that the fundamental level of reality consisted of what we now call quanta - indivisible dynamic connections or units of informing. But he does better than Shannon because he tackles the issue of the first person - which is where we started. (He also predicted the correct instalments for life insurance policies and all sorts of other things.)

You might be interested in my re-write of Monadology for a modern audience:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/jonathan-edwards/monadology

What is to my mind so powerful about Leibniz is that by laying out the logical entailments of a dynamic indivisible he shows that everything the man in the U-tube video says should be obvious from the outset. von Neumann's chopping things up into two processes is forbidden. Everything is undivided relations with no interstices. 

So as far as I can see we can agree that 'physical' is a meaningless term hung onto by the 99.99% who don't understand and that we can talk in terms of dynamic or informational connections. But if one does one has to take dynamic units seriously and human subjects must be indivisible dynamic units. That to me is where the power of the metaphysical analysis comes. You only address Michael's question if you ask what dynamic unit, or what monad or what 'psi' (taking into account all the nuances about psi not being a particle but a unit of information with measurement being a continuum etc. etc.) is the human subject. And as the guy in the video says psis are not abstruse minutiae, they are often everyday phenomena.

And I stick to Leibniz because he provides a stock of basic laws that consistently offer ways to go beyond even the U-tube guy. 

Hi Jonathan,

Well I thought I was going to return to taxonomy and fractals but your work on Leibniz is quite thought provoking and an impressive accomplishment that must have taken some time to complete. I must admit that since I failed to pass French level VI at UCLA 30+ years ago I have not read Voltaire, Descartes or Leibniz in the original language but I suspect that given the subtlety of these ideas it may be necessary since English often fails to possess the level of description found in more intact languages. I am grateful the original was not written in Latin or ancient Greek.

Having said that I must also admit I am not seeing the agreement you do about our perspectives since my understanding, upon a cursory first pass over your Monadology, is that monads as indivisible substances differ in quality to the idea of an information process or algorithm and require certain properties which violate my current understanding of the mind/body question in the following ways: 1) the homunculus dilemma - though a monad is defined as the last homunculus that begs the question and fails the tautology test i.e. what drives the appetition of the monad? 2) reductionism - the monad is an irreducible substance from which all else is created but as a substance must at some point of organization transition from substance to process and we are once again facing he mind body dilemma of Descartes looking for a transitional pineal gland.

I think I can see a way we can agree and that would be to place the monad after the process as a manifestation of the algorithm. Then I think it all works out. The problem I believe is in the concept of an indivisible unit of consciousness that is substance which we can only avoid if it goes the other way from a divisible process to an identifiable substance - the monad. We need to borrow from eastern philosophy to explain the origin of the process from nothing however and I'm not so sure it works out unless we drop the presumption of time which means the process has always existed, which I do not like.

I do not understand how Leibniz' laws go beyond Quantum Theory or address Ron Garet's GoogleTechTalk I shared. I think he is demonstrating that physical reality is not behaving in a manner that makes sense to us which is rather disturbing since as I pointed out either we are missing something major or reality is not real. I do not see how the monad helps in our understanding of this phenomenon but I have not yet read your Monadology thoroughly or in French so I may be failing to understand your position.

Dear Stephen,

There are several good English translations. I only use the French to ensure checking of potential ambiguities.

Leibniz saw the monad as an automaton progressing through perceptions much as a computer progresses through states. That is, I think, why he built the first mechanical automata (some of which are still in Hannover and don't work!). Appetition is the internal principle of change that takes the monad from one 'state' to the next. In a computer I guess that is some cyclical electronic clocking drive. In the TDSE I think one can equate it to the term that gives a differential of psi - i.e. the type of change of psi that defines the nature of psi (since psi is defined in terms of its own differential and a universal field of potentials V). Leibniz makes the mistake of treating sequence in space and sequence in time as separable and there are important problems that ensue but he is still about 200 years ahead of everyone else.

I think the homunculus dilemma or fallacy is a straw man. Nothing 'repeats entire the talents it is rung in to explain' as Dan Dennett rather oddly put it. For Descartes and Leibniz the body is just part of the way in to the soul, a bit like in Andy Clark's version of Extended Mind, just part of the way to the money. Appetition is the internal principle of change of the dynamic unit (which by definition of being dynamic has such a principle).  As Indicated above, that fits neatly with the TDSE. There is no counterpart in classical physics but Leibniz sees this clearly. The harmony of the fundamental monadic or quantum level with the apparent mechanical or classical level is like the correspondence principle. You get the same result but from quite different premises. (This is actually a cheat because the classical account just follows empirical findings so has to agree with the deeper explanation if it is right.)

I am not sure what you mean by transition of substance to process. Leibniz is a dynamist, like all modern physicists at least should be (and James Ladyman explains why). 'Substances' (i.e. individual entities; I wonder if you are using substance in a lay modern sense of stuff) are events or processes or dynamic connections from the outset. They consist of this internal principle of change. 'Every Thing Must Go' (Ladyman) could have been Leibniz's motto (and is the punchline for the man in the U-tube too).

So to my mind the algorithm is the manifestation of the monadic process, or maybe just is it. Leibniz's monads exist from the outset of reality, just as all modes of excitation in QFT in fact do, although the values you can get from the TDSE may be infinitesimal for almost all times and places. This is where one gets into seriously treacly time interpretation issues which are interesting for another day but I agree probably not here. Leibniz gets time wrong in certain respects, but really only in his practical interpretations. His initial principles look as good as any to me.

For me Leibniz goes beyond QFT in placing the observer firmly in the theory. QFT makes no attempt to place observers in an observer-dependent theory. Leibniz takes the existence of observers with viewpoints as his starting point and ends up with something like QFT. That suggests to me that he has a deeper grip. So when I read Leibniz for the first time I could see clearly why Bohm and Everett and von Neumann were arguing over artefacts of unclear thinking. Moreover, in New Essays on Human Understanding, written in reply to Locke, Leibniz gives an account of the classical events that he thinks would provide the dynamic domain that set the monadic unit up for its experience of the world. I think he may have been very close to the mark, based on recent studies of electroacoustic phenomena in dendrites.

I forget the details but Garet still talks as if QFT was a bit weird and his rejection of Everett i see as lame. I suspect that he has not yet seen how Leibniz's arguments sweep all that clutter off the desk and show that it is absurd to think that the real world is any other way than it is. Anything else hits a contradiction.

I don't expect you to be convinced overnight. It took me twelve years to work through all the relevant issues on this and I am still finding myself very much outside the received wisdom. But I am not the only person thinking along these lines. There is a huge amount (600 pages) of other related stuff on my website 

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/jonathan-edwards

but I don't want to cause indigestion.