marginally physical objects

or, contemporary myths in physicalism

dare i suggest that there is a vagueness in what, exactly, is implied in the concept or ontological category of the "physical". our everyday definition of a physical object is something that you can bump your head against. yet it seems that even the most innocent of everyday, physical things are pseudophysical in that they are also at least in some bit abstract. also, some processes of these physical objects get lumped into the physicalist account. does this move the discussion from physical objects to.. well something else?

all in all, there are some specific cases i have in mind...where the vagueness of the category is painfully apparent. here are three scientific examples.

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1. fields - our best physics posits the existence of fields, not only as necessary objects in the universe (as, say, scientists might posit numbers and theories) but also as strictly physical objects. handydandy wikipedia says that a field is 'the presence of a physical quantity at every point in spacetime.' hm.. something should ring a bell already as the definition seemed a bit off. the field clearly isn't made up of whatever the most minute particle might be, just as i am or stars are. no, fields seem to be not physical objects themselves but the position, behavior, and propensity for specific physical objects as they pass along specific regions of spacetime. does this add up to a physical object? well no, it's not a physical object and it isn't even made up OF physical objects. so, if even in our most sacred science there are objects that are straddling the line ontologically, what can we expect in other fields?

2. mental states - no doubt our brains have a lot to do with our mental states. so much so, of course, that when our brain ceases to function correctly our mental states cease to function accordingly, ad empirically demonstrated in brain damage studies. but, as some people have asked before me i'm sure, are brain states the same as mental states? is there an identity relationship be tween these two characterizations of whatever it is that's going on inside my head? I think kripke's argument is very powerful... take a look at it and see for yourself.

N= necessarily
P = possibly

(a) N (heat = molecular motion).

this is a necessary a posteriori truth. is it possible to have heat without molecular motion? well no. no matter what, if it's heat, it's caused by molecular motion. sure, there might be sensations of heat without molecular motion. but if it's real heat, it's real molecular motion. now, can we say

(b) ? N (pain = c-fibers firing)

well let's put the identity to the test just like last time. is it possible to have the sensation of pain without it being pain? well it seems like the answer is pretty obvious, NO! if you feel pain you have pain! this calls into question whether c-fibres firing just IS pain. once again, this either means that definition of pain provided by the best anatomical science is incomplete (and it doesn't seem to be, at least here on earth), or that pain just is not the same as c-fibers firing, leaving us with

(c) ~N(pain = c-fibers firing)

rounding out the discussion on physical objects, and brain states, where does this leave us? well it leaves us in a more primitively intuitive position where we think that the brain and its states (physical objects) sure do have a lot to do with our minds (presumably other than physical objects) yet they aren't the same thing. so things like belief, pain, fear, etc are partially physical.

3. species - reading fodor's critique of natural selection has got me thinking a lot about philosophy of biology lately. one of things i've come to believe is that talk of species and groups of animals with similar properties and so forth isn't strictly speaking physical. of course, this comes of no surprise to anyone who's familiar with set theory or even mereology. anyway, the abstractions we can assign to the physical characteristics of individual animals across similar-enough genetic liniage definitely makes the concept of 'species' an ontologically dualist one.
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well then, what do these suggestions do, if anything? i think it does two things. first, it reinforces the insight mcginn had in saying that ontological categories are oftentimes ill-defined. in these three cases i have given examples with a focus on the vagueness of the 'physical' category, but in doing so i've also muddled up 'abstract' and 'mental'.

a further, more powerful consequence of establishing these marginally physical objects is the clear rejection of ontological physicalism. If there is someone who wholds that what there is is physical and that's all there is, yet what's physical can't be said to be always physical, then physicalism is false.

mind-body dualisms

i've become increasingly convinced that reductionist materialist explanations of consciousness are inadequate. this doesn't completely put me in the cartesian camp, but i wanted to make a brief post exploring some of the options available, from least to most ontologically pluralistic.

1. Predicate Dualism - perhaps there is oen ontological category, presumably materialism, which can be characterized only through the introduction of two predicate categories. this is not to imply that these predicates correspond to different properties. these predicates are just different ways to "look at" or "talk about" one thing with really one set of properties. so "mental states" and "physical states" can still be talked about, with only one substance and one set of properties. this view is usually appealed to in lieu of reductive materialism because the reductive accounts leave explanatory gaps. fodor holds this view.

2. Property Dualism - similar, perhaps, to predicate dualism, except acknowledging that the different predicates actually do refer to different properties that one substance has. so it's still the one (once again, presumably material) thing having two levels of properties. these two types of properties are usually described as differences of process. just as the stomach is used for digestion, the brain is used for cognition. even though he tends to deny it, it seems as though this is the view searle holds. nagel holds it too.

3. Substance Dualism - then of course there's good ol' fashioned cartesianism, where the mind and the body are wholly different things. there are (at least) two different ontological categories, thus explaining succinctly and intuitively the nature of the discrepancies between the properties ascribed to mental and physical events. a contemporary proponent of this view is david chalmers.

4. Mental Agnosticism (mysterianism) - i was at first tempted to lump mysterianism along with the substance dualists, but that would be unfair. mysterians are ultimately agnostics about this kind of thing, holding that the cognitive power of the human will leave this question unanswered. we're just not smart enough to know exactly what's going on in our minds, just as chimps are just too dumb to master calculus. this is the position that mcginn holds.

the easiest out is by far the third option. it is the most intuitive and the most explanatory. however, most people nowadays don't give it much of a chance because of the heavily materialist conception of the world we live in today. personally i don't see what the big deal is to posti necessary ontological categories if we have good reason to think they're necessary. however, i can see where they're coming from as i was a strict reductive materialist until recently. over the summer i'm going to read some canonical texts in each type of dualism so i can choose which one i find most reasonable, and which is closest to experience. but before i read any of the texts, let me say that i think the most reasonable position to take, at least prima facie, is the fourth option, #4. the hard problem, as chalmers put it, really is very hard. and there doesn't seem to be a straightforward answer to it in sight.

musical meaning

what is it in a song that has the ability to bring out meaning to its listener? is there anything in the song itself that has these properties, or is it all in the mind? i don't know if it's because i'm feeling particularly emo today, but i was listening to miles davis's classic ballad "blue in green". for the purposes of the post, listen to this one, at least in part:

all music is, at least if given a materialist ontology, is a series of noises of different frequencies arranged in a particular way in space-time. but then how is it that these noises carry what we each understand to have meaning of some sort? is this meaning external or internal? or some combination of both? i guess here i'm drawing a parralel to the philosophy of language. i suspect some answer to this can be arrived at if we take some ideas from frege. however, even this approach would be highly problematicc.

in frege's discussion of language, there are generally two aspects to names: their sense (the cognitive associations and dimensions of the name) and their reference (what those names actually refer to). but of course it isn't obvious that music refers to anything at all.

i'm honestly not in the mood for even trying to solve this puzzle right now, but i hope i have the effort to one day tackle this issue with the seriousness it deserves.

externalism in experience/sensations

ok this is going to be really short and i hope to expand on this later, but i was thinking about externalism in sensations. here's my thought: when you feel a pain, where exactly do you feel it? many people have argued that you can only feel pain in your brain. that is, if something pinches you on the hand, you feel the pain in your brain nevertheless because that's where the c-fibers directed.

but, if you realize that each particular pain has an origin, then that origin is necessary and thus, even though the brain registers the pain, it is actually felt whereever it was actually felt.

this intuition is largely caught in a thought experiment that to my knowledge, is new. it is no doubt inspired in part by kripkenstein on other minds and mcginn on imagination, but here goes.

is it possible to imagine a pain in your knee? well, sure, you can imagine your knee being in pain, and in the simulated pain, it is your knee that has the sensation. however, can you imagine a pain in your knee in your elbow? well that doesn't really make sense. you could imagine a pain in your elbow, even a particular type of pain, the same your knee had, on your elbow (sharp vs. chronic, etc), but you can't imagine a pain in your knee in your elbow.

if i'm right about this, then particular pains have necessary origins, which lend support to an externalist account of sensation.

however, an objection quickly arises in the cases of pain in phantom limbs. i either have to come up with a pretty damn good explanation for them, or categorize them as non-legitimate pains. i tend to agree with the latter, but then i'd have o come to the conclusion that sensations of pain are not the same as pain. however, kripke himself has argued for this claim, that sensations of pain ARE pain (and the argument seems to be sound).

how to reconcile my seemingly correct previous intuition with kripke's? this'll take some time to figure out.

incomplete answers to some queries

C (hey C!) asked some interesting and important questions which i will repost briefly. i will attempt to answer them as an exercise in critical engagement with the text.

he asks:

(1) what are the implications of when we are mistaken about concepts in this manner?

(2) Since employment of the two different concepts in the same linguistic instance results in the same answer, what is the fundamental difference between employing the two? Is the answer yielded actually the "same"?

(3) How does this differ from other forms of skeptical possibility, if at all? Does this generate a sort of skeptical problem similar to the Cartesian one?

ok. i think i'll try to answer (3) first, as it will make the answers to the other questions clearer. the skepticism kripkenstein presents is much more devastating than descartes's. this is because descartes's skepticism was epistemological in character, whereras this skepticism is both epistemological and metaphysical. descartes's skepticism was with the goal of establishing a certain, true set of beliefs from which to base the rest of his epistemological enterprise. foundationalist through and through, he designated an epistemically privileged set of propositions that he used to justify shakier propositions, so to speak. and much has been written (cs peirce, susan haack) about how this kind of cartesian epistemic skepticism was pretty much just bafoonery to get to propositions he wouldn't alter anyway because they were 'clear' and 'distinct' to him anyway, thanks to god.

however, kripkenstein's skeptical paradox is a more serious threat. not only does the quaddition example show that we, at this moment, don't know whether we are using addition or quaddition, an epistemic skepticism, there is no fact of the matter as to what mathematical function we are performing at the moment, a metaphysical skepticism. this of course extends to previous uses of the function and future uses of the function. and then the same principle carries over to not only addition, but ultimately every function, name, natural kind term, description, etc.

so, if we take a step back for a sec, what kripkenstein is actually doing is presenting to us a very real, encompassing, epistemological as well as ontological skepticism of meaning that pretty much runs the full sweep of both speech acts and mental acts. there is no fact of the matter concerning what we ever mean by any linguistic utterance. part of the problem here, of course, is that there is an underlying assumption that we have to explain meaning in terms of something else, but that problem isn't very relevant for the present discussion, so we'll just give it to him for now.

now to address (1). well the implication here is that we don't ever know what we're talking or thinking about because there is never any fact of the matter as to what we are talking or thinking about! the implications themselves are rather tough to formulate apart from this previous statement. my initial reaction was to say that "even if we think we know what we're talking about, we don't actually know because there is no fact to speak of." but the problems of saying this are pretty evident: i mean, communication in general would be a farse, but further even the possibility of cogent thought comes into question. if we take kripkenstein's skepticism seriously, then it is almost undeniably, irrefutably serious!

finally, for (2) i'm going to use another mathematical example. the functions (n+m), (n x m), and (n^m) are of course different functions. but if we happen to say for each of these functions n=2=m, then they all yield the same answer. the fundamental difference in them is the nature of the method of manipulating the numbers, but given specific circumstances they might coincide in output. the problem with kripkenstein's kind of skepticism is that all math, all communication through symbols, actually, is lacking meaning. if nothing has meaning, because there is no ontological fact concerning meaning, then every communicative act is a coincidence, just as those functions happened to coincide at 2.

well i hope i helped a bit, as it helped me understand kripkenstein a bit more myself.

kripkenstein's quaddition - exposition

oh kripke... or kripkenstein.. or whatever...

so here's the real deal. i have not read wittgenstein's philosophical investigations so take this entire post with a grain of salt--or a heap of it.

anyway the argument as it struck kripke goes somewhat like this:

suppose you've never performed the mathematical function "plus" with integers greater than 50. A is a teacher and YOU are B.

A: "17 plus 23 is..."
B: "40"
A: "yes! you got it! now, 58 plus 67 is..."
B [takes a bit longer. B computes in his head] "125."
A: "uh... i'm sorry. i don't think you understand. try again."
B [computes again]: "no i did it again in my head and.. well i was right. it's 125."
A: "uh... i think someone didn't teach you this right. 58 plus 67 is 5."
B: [baffled] "whaatt??"

so here's the trick. when you heard the word "plus" you thought that was a function where you combine numbers , such that

'plus (a,b)' = addition (a,b) --> 'a + b' when {x| -∞, ∞}

however, it is not logically inconsistent that "plus" really referred to the function of quaddition such that

'plus* (a,b)' = quaddition (a,b) ---> 'a+ b' when {x| -∞, 50} and '5' when {x| 50, ∞}

now, it's important to note that this skeptic who is proposing this skeptical scenario is not being a skeptic about the concept of addition. he's not saying that the concept of addition is vague in any way. he's just saying that it's not logically inconsistent to propose that it may be the case that whenever we use the word "addition" or the mathematical symbol of "+" we might be talking about quaddition instead of addition.

this skepticism, however, is not just an epistemological skepticism about whether we know we're adding or quadding, but it extends to a metaphysical skepticism about our own use of concepts. we can think we know what concept we're using but we could be mistaken.

i'm interested to see how or if kripke attempts to solve this...

on belief

right so i'm in epistemology class and we're discussing doubters of the legitimacy of the epistemological enterprise. one strategy of debunking epis. is to deny one of the major tenets of the definition of knowledge most people would agree with (JTB). susan haack starts to characterize certain beliefs on belief that deny beliefs. these are accounts like the churchlands' and/or stephen stich's, accounts that pretty much argue: that which we believe, the processes we'd describe as beliefs are (replaceable with/reducible to) --> (connectionist artificial intelligence/computational cognitive science). on other words, what we think is belief is really ONLY some type of neurophysiological goings on in our brain and that's that. something fishy going on here...

detour into the philosophy of mind for a sec: okay so it seems that if we assume materialism (which i do), then all physical objects are made out of material stuff and nothing more. to me, this includes whatever we might call the "mind." the brain causes these mental states we subjectively experience, so in a way even our minds are material. however, much like supervenient qualities emerge in ant colonies and such, i think "consciousness", whatever that is, can only be explained as an emergent property (at least not yet) explainable in terms of its constituent parts.

so in the sense i just kinda described in a really rough way, belief is at least in part physical, because it necessarily involves our brains and ourselves. but is there anything else to it?

as an admitted pragmatist, i think it does. specifically, there has to be an action-related element. peirce argued convincingly that a belief was a habit of action. eg if you want to ice skate, and you believe there is an ice skating rink at such location, you go to the location to ice skate. this is a simple modus ponens, observable through a person's behavior. to help account for certain cases where one's behavior isn't so clearly observable, f.p. ramsey proposed to interpret someone's belief as a willingness to bet on the proposition in question. haack brings up the objection that some people might be already be rich (therefore less hesitant to bet or more willing to bet for the fun of it) or maybe be adrenaline junkies of such (so more willing to bet in risky ways). but i think these objections do reflect real epistemological attitudes in people, in the sense that some people are more willing to risk their knowledge's ass (in a way being more fallibalist than others). so these two objections i put to the side.

however, where i run into a big problem is what i think is when one tries to quantify degrees of belief. sometimes people can believe things more than other things... i believe i'm currently in my american studies class more than i believe, say, the legitimacy of quantum mechanics, although i do believe both. either way, even though i'd be able to act/bet more on my being in class than the physics theory, i don't know how much more. it would be a lot more, but i couldn't put a dollar value on it. but again, even though the cash value of my belief may be indeterminate, that doesn't mean that belief has nothing to do with action.

i hate to put myself in a situation where i agree with this guy, but richard rorty once wrote something about this that i tend to agree with. he said something along the lines of the following: if you believe something and you are not willing to act on it at all, then you don't really believe it. you're just fooling yourself linguistically. there has to be some element of self-risk when you do believe something (i guess lending itself to the ramsean analysis.)


so i guess that's what i believe about belief... sorry... couldn't help myself