The results so far of my New Year's poll concerning whether cubes are necessarily physical is that 66.7% say they aren't. And I must admit I'm a bit shocked at the numbers. I wonder how much depends on the specific example. So let's do this again, this time without cubes. How about electrons? Or five pounds of ground beef?
- True or False? Necessarily, for all x, if x is an electron, then x is physical.
- True or False? Necessarily, for all x, if x is five pounds of ground beef, then x is physical.
How many Brain-Hammer Heads think there are worlds with ectoplasmic electrons? Ghost beef?
Obviously anything that is a cube, electron, or five pounds of ground beef is physical. It's so obvious that it strikes me as a philosophically inert observation. What I want to know is: where are you going with this?
ReplyDeleteI was wondering when someone was finally going to ask!
ReplyDeleteBasically, I'm working out a hunch that what's driving a lot of (what strikes me as) bonkers metaphysics floating around these days is that certain people have gotten accustomed to working with super thin, atomistic, nondescriptive conceptions of key terms like "mind," "physical," "experience" etc.
Witness how much mileage people have been getting on the totally empty phrase "that in virtue of which there is something it's like". Combine that with a similarly empty conception of the physical like "something that physicists might feel the need to talk about some day" and it's little wonder that many people think they can coherently conceive of the mental without the physical and vice versa.
Hey! I specifically complained about the lack of definitions! I quote, in part:
ReplyDelete"Though, for that matter, you haven't really defined 'physical' either."
Where's my pat on the back???
So what are your definitions of the key terms, like mental, physical, mind, and experience?
Though, given the small sample size of your poll, calling the results "shocking" may be overstating things a bit.
Electrons and beef: necessarily physical.
ReplyDeleteCubes: come on! There are lots of cubes in physical space, of course. (Though, just try and discriminate/perceive one!) But, yer abstract spaces aren't physical, and their constituents aren't either.
A commitment to abstract space, though, will not get you the thin notion of the physical or the mind that's supporting the bonkers metaphysics you mention. It's just space. So, don't blame us platonist mathematicians for any loopy dualism about the mind.
Hey Russell, good to hear from you!
ReplyDeleteThanks for bringing up mathematical platonism. Tell me what you think of the following line of thought.
The mathplatonist who believes in the existence of nonphysical cubes needs to choose between
1. There are only nonphysical cubes
and
2. There are both nonphysical cubes and physical cubes
But here's a worry about 2. I assume that being a nonphysical cube entails being a cube that has no physical properties. Arguably, then, if there are cubes that are nonphysical then the property of being a cube can't itself be a physical property. Since nonphysical cubes are assumed to have no physical properties, then there is no physical property that the property of being a cube can be identical to.
If being a cube, then, is not a physical property, it seems kind of mysterious how there can be physical cubes. In worlds with only physical properties, how can there be cubes in them?
Hey back at you. I'm sorry we didn't see each other more at the Eastern.
ReplyDeleteI would take 'physical cube' to refer to cubic regions of physical space. The physicalist, I assume, welcomes spatio-temporal points (even if derived from more-basic spatio-temporal regions), in order to ascribe field properties (like gravitational or electro-magnetic force) to something. So, take a sphere, rather than a cube, since its definition is simpler, and any particular spatial point (ignoring the temporal axis). The set of all spatial points equidistant from our given point is a physical sphere. In contrast, a non-physical sphere would be the set of all non-physical points a given non-physical distance from a given non-physical point.
There is some question about the relation between the non-physical definitions and the physical ones. But, they have structural similarities such that the theorems in one domain can transfer to the other.
Or, am I missing the point?
Hi Pete,
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think, then, of Putnam's claim (in "The Nature of Mental States") that functionalism is compatible with dualism? I thought it fairly common for a functionalist to acknowledge that there are possible worlds where states of Cartesian souls occupy the functional roles definitive of mental states. This isn't supposed to threaten physicalism, however, since (it is supposed) there are no Cartesian souls in our world; all the relevant functional roles are occupied by physical stuff.
Martin
Hi Russell,
ReplyDeleteYeah, it would have been nice to hang out more. Let me know when you're back in NYC.
One of the crucial parts of the point I'm trying to make is the part about physical cubes (or spheres or points) having only physical properties. I wonder if you reject this. I want to ask questions like, What makes physical points and nonphysical points both points? If it is due to structural similarities, then there must be property commonalities, and if I get to assume that the physical points have only physical properties and the nonphysical points have no physical properties, then the property commonalities can't be physical.
Perhaps part of what's motivating me here is the following; the closest thing to platonism that I can get my head around is Quinean Pythagoreanism whereby you start with sets, build numbers, build 5-tuples for spacetime coordinates (the 5th position in each 5tuple reserved for fundamental physical occupants of the spactime points). Complex physical objects are sets of the 5-tuples. On QP, the set of physical objects is a proper subset of the set of math objects. On such a view, none of the physical objects would have only physical properties, and so it avoids the problem I'm trying to pose.
Excellent question, Martin. I'm very puzzled by versions of functionalism that emphasize their compatability with dualism but still claim to be versions of physicalism. If what it means for our world to be a physical world is that it has only physical properties, and this world's inhabitants have beliefs, I have no idea how it can be true that there are ghost worlds where entirely nonphysical ghosts have beliefs.
ReplyDeleteI tend to interpret most functionalists as dualists. If you want to see my thoughts on this spelled out, check out my paper "Supervenience and Neuroscience", forthcoming in Synthese.
Hey Pete,
ReplyDeleteDaniel Dennett once remarked that Jaegwon Kim complained to him that all he did was "tell stories," leaving it up to the reader which moral to draw. C'mon, Dan, are you a non-reductive physicalist? A reductive physicalist? An eliminativist? Dennett's response was, roughly speaking, "I'll give you my answer once you metaphysicians get some agreement on how we should think about these notions and figure out what we should say about tables, smiles, and football teams. Until then, I will respectfully decline to get bogged down in these disputes." Part of what Dennett was getting at, I suspect, is what you were getting at in your response to Rosemary: the way the discussion of physicalism and 'what it is like' is being carried out is so thin--I daresay, ill-specified--that it is almost laughable to declare with any confidence that physicalists cannot explain consciousness (or that they can). In this way, I applaud your efforts here: hey, are cubes physical? what about the ground beef you bought at the butcher shop?
While we're at it, how about that toothache? Is that physical? Sure! It's in my damn tooth, after all, and if it's in my tooth, it's physical (a little Oxford philosophy for the kids). Now, I don't have much sympathy for settling the mind-body problem by doing ordinary language 'therapy,' but dude, there is a part of me that thinks that if we paid attention to how the folk talk about this stuff, various anti-physicalist intuitions would evaporate.
With that said, I'm not sure what we should make of what the "woman on the street" says about her pains, depression, and experiences of red. I don't think that asking the woman on the street is a good way to do physics, and I don't see why it is a good way to do psychology.
OK, so I don't know where I am going with this, except that the volumes of philosophy written about this looks downright silly compared with the well-established science we have on even the most modest issues in psychology.
MR
I think that I don't know what a physical property is. If it's any property of a physical object, then there's no problem, but that couldn't be what you mean. But, properties, being universals, can't themselves be physical, right? So, I'm just not sure what you mean.
ReplyDeleteYou seem to be worried that the physical sphere and the non-physical sphere share some properties, which would mean that such properties can not be purely physical. But, isn't it the case that any time two individuals share a property, we have a non-physical something? If your solution is to deny that properties have any ontological status, then why worry about whether this aardvark shares that property with a geometric object?
Is the equator a physical object? It seems to have mathematical properties. How about a set (or collection) of three aardvarks? Jerry Katz called such things composite objects, since they have both physical and non-physical (mathematical) properties. That seems right to me.
BTW, I'm not sure I get your version of QP. I thought his Pythagorean ontology was just the quadruples of s-t points (then reducible to real numbers) and their various field properties. If you want to collect disparate points into complex objects, you could take their mereological sums, I suppose.
Martin,
ReplyDeleteI enjoy your remarks and endorse Dennett's attitude. I hope, though, that I'm not giving the impression that I give a flying fart what the folk think. Here's a relevant oldie-but-goodie you might dig:
http://www.petemandik.com/blog/2006/08/08/what-is-the-point-of-experimental-philosophy-if-philosophy-isnt-conceptual-analysis/
Russell,
ReplyDeleteIf a philosopher tells me that no universal is physical, I totally get their meaning. But here's a way of squaring that with the way philosophy of mind usually works. We sort some universals into the physical pile (which includes being negatively charged, having mass), some into the mental pile (e.g. believing that P, feeling Q) and then we publish a shitload of books and articles about whether one pile is a proper subpile of the other.
So, on this general way of talking, two particulars can both partake in the universal, being negatively charged, and thus both instantiate one and the same *physical* property.
Re QP. I guess mereological sums instead of sets for composite physical objects makes a lot more sense. But re n-tuples, I thought the way you say that a spacetime point has one field property rather than another (or none at all) is by reserving a number for each of the field properties and then sticking it into the fith position of a 5-tuple. But look, all of my Quine books are at my campus office and I'm not going there til next week. So I'll just cry "uncle" on this issue.