The Exclusivity of Physical Existence


Rafael

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.. Rafael and I... hold that consciousness is a form of the physical.

Which is fine, but in which case surely means that consciousness is determined by the laws of physics (even if all those laws are not discovered yet). Which makes it rather hard to argue man is "free to choose." (Of course one might then try to argue that free will is "form" of the laws of physics, but of course this would be merely a word game that avoids the problem).

"The mind is real, and that means that the mind, including the conscious mind, is concrete." Rand should surely go for that formula because she takes all existents to be concretes. Rafael and I are asserting that all concretes are physical.

Which is also fine. However, according to Rand, human consciousness' speciality is abstracting - and even abstracting from abstractions. And according to the Ayn Rand Lexicon:

"Abstractions as such do not exist: they are merely man’s epistemological method of perceiving that which exists—and that which exists is concrete."

So there's a dualism right there. To wit, the products of consciousness - abstractions - are not concrete. Why, if in Objectivism the mind's products are abstract (that is, non-physical, non-concrete etc) do we need to characterise the mind itself as "physical"?

It seems to be a verbalism - and admittedly verbalism is difficult to avoid in this topic - that doesn't really get you anywhere.

Edited by Daniel Barnes
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Daniel, thanks for those serious points.

We should be wary of saying that natural biological systems or engineered machines are determined by the laws of physics, and saying nothing more. The heart or the brain operate not only in accordance with principles of physics and chemistry, but in accordance with biological principles. No freedom worth having would be contrary to the laws of physics, and no concept of freedom that did not require a biological setting could be sound.

Just as there is no such thing as a specific motion that is not motion relative to something specific, so there is no such thing as physical determinism that has no specific range of predeterminism. That the mass-energy of the universe have its present value may have been predetermined from eternity, but more typically, physical systems and their characteristics have only finite ranges of predeterminations.

http://objectivity-archive.com/volume2_number4.html#183

I mean limits of predeterminism, not merely limits of foreknowledge of what will happen. On the wedding day of my father’s parents, my future existence was indeterminate. It was not simply unknowable as a practical matter. There was no such determinate thing about the future to be known. This finitude of predeterminism is not peculiar to living or engineered organizations of matter and energy, it is pervasive at the level of physics as well.

Your point about the existence of abstractions is really good. Rand’s view expressed in your quotation is ancient in the history of philosophy, and it is the view held overwhelmingly by philosophers today. Frege famously posited a “third realm” for the residence of abstractions, but he hasn’t had many takers on this.

Psychological operations are concretes, yet how can abstract items they handle be said to exist if (i) abstract and concrete are polar concepts and (ii) “abstractions as such do not exist”? Rand’s qualification “as such” can be taken to include the idea that abstractions are occasioned only with concrete psychological operations engaging them. But that cannot be all Rand was faintly alluding to by that qualification “as such.”

I have an angle. In §XII of “Induction on Identity” (Objectivity V1N3), I drew a distinction between specific and particular identity. (Note 34 here: http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/in...amp;#entry38734 ) In acts of abstraction, one suspends in imagination some of an item’s particular identity. Then abstractions would only be in imagination (in conceptual thought with its imaginative character), though they can be about existing items (actual or potential), which have all of their specific and their particular identity.

Rand had some ideas about how to comprehend the standing of products of consciousness such as abstractions. “Two fundamental attributes are involved in every state, aspect, or function of man’s consciousness: content and action—the content of awareness, and the action of consciousness in regard to that content” (ITOE 29–30). “Concepts pertaining to the products of psychological processes, such as knowledge, science, idea, etc. . . . are formed by retaining their distinguishing characteristics [distinctive sort of mental grasp by certain sorts of process] and omitting their content” (35). The concept abstractions regards them with something of their real occasions, preeminently their specific content, deliberately left out.

Plenty of good work remains.

Edited by Stephen Boydstun
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Plenty of good work remains.

Biological happenings are the result of fields and particles at work. Currently we are not smart enough to make an explicit reduction of biological phenomena to the underlying physical phenomena so we resort to ideas like emergence and higher level laws to make sense of what we do see (or measure).

Demokritus and Luekipus were right.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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  • 2 years later...

.

Coming this November, from Terrence Deacon: Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter

Rand and Deacon

How Life?

Physicality of Consciousness

Rafael,

You are surely correct to say that there are more relations between consciousness and existence than the relation of primacy of the latter in respect of the former. You are surely correct, too, in saying that Rand would concur in that verdict. She takes as an axiomatic cohort of “existence exists” that in the act of grasping the statement “existence exists” one perceives another fact: “that one exists possessing consciousness of . . . that which exists” (AS 1015). The exists in the phrase “one exists possessing consciousness” is a physical and living existence.

Rand goes on to affirm (in AS, in “The Objectivist Ethics,” and elsewhere) that consciousness is a phenomenon arising in living animals with nervous systems. She even attributes consciousness to insects (ITOE 80). That is probably too liberal, for reasons we can go into later if anyone wishes to pursue it. For any animals that do possess consciousness (sponges are excluded for sure), it is the principal means of their distinctive form of physical survival. That view is Rand’s, and it is pervasive in her writings on ethics and on epistemology.

You write that “to Rand, consciousness is (apparently) the antithesis of physical existence.” You say that “physical existence can be analyzed in terms of basic physical constituents; consciousness (as Rand has it) cannot.” Paul Mawdsley asks (#4) where one finds Rand stating such a dualism between consciousness and physical existence.

One statement of Rand’s that could be taken as leaning towards such a dualism is her statement that “these two—existence and consciousness— . . . are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake” (AS 1015–16). Rand maintains that these axiomatic concepts (existence and consciousness and identity too) designate fundamental metaphysical facts standing with every bit of one’s knowledge and the whole of one’s knowledge (AS 1016, ITOE 56–59). The concept consciousness, as axiomatic concept, underscores “the primary fact that one is conscious” (ITOE 59).

That much is consistent, however, with Rand’s physicalist conception of consciousness in the following statement: “Consciousness is an attribute of certain living entities, but it is not an attribute of a given state of awareness, it is that state” (ITOE 56). Consciousness as a state of awareness is an attribute of a certain physical, living organism in Rand’s view.

There is another statement of Rand’s that is at first blush contrary to a physicalist conception of consciousness. Rand writes that axiomatic concepts such as consciousness identify “a primary fact of reality, which cannot be analyzed, i.e., reduced to other facts or broken into component parts” (ITOE 55). Of course Rand does divide consciousness into sensation, perception, conception, evaluation, and so forth. These can be components in some conscious episode. A reductive analysis of an episode into such elements as these does not reduce conscious living activity to nonconscious living activity. So if Rand or anyone else does not think consciousness can be reduced to the nonconscious living activities from which it arises, they have not contradicted that thesis by such a division of consciousness into species such as perception and conception.

The first blush fades as Rand continues. She writes that “one can study what exists and how consciousness functions; but one cannot analyze (or ‘prove’) existence as such, or consciousness as such” (ITOE 55). One cannot analyze or “prove” the fact of consciousness as such in terms of nonconsciousness without an underground circularity, and circularity shows failure of logical reduction. That is what Rand is saying here in ITOE and in AS. Rand’s physicalist conception of consciousness contained in the quotation paragraph before last is harmonious with her statements concerning the nonanalyzability and irreducibility of consciousness.

There is one more statement of Rand’s that I would like to mention which leans towards a dualism in which consciousness cannot possibly be a physical process. This occurs in the course of Rand’s treatment of the nature of perceptual illusions. She writes that one’s “organs of perception are physical,” that they have no power to distort, that the evidence they present “is an absolute,” but that one’s mind “must discover the nature, the causes, the full context” of one’s sensory material (AS 1041). There is a suggestion here that although one’s sensory organs are physical, one’s mind is able to understand perceptual illusions because it is not physical—or anyway not only physical—and that if the mind were physical there could be no such thing as illusions nor the ability to diagnose them.

Any leaning towards a dualism in which consciousness cannot be a physical process seems to evaporate when Rand writes in ITOE (1966–67) that all episodes of consciousness are measurable (7, 11–17, 25, 29–33), that a thing not measurable would be without identity, without existence (39), and that cognitive systems are measurement systems (11–15, 21–24).* Every aspect of a measurement system is itself measurable. Consciousness is required for making measurements, but measurability of consciousness itself strongly suggests that there is no residual nonphysical ghost in the biological system that is consciousness.

* [For more on this, the interested reader should see my essay “Universals and Measurement” in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 5(2):271–305.]

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Plenty of good work remains.

Biological happenings are the result of fields and particles at work. Currently we are not smart enough to make an explicit reduction of biological phenomena to the underlying physical phenomena so we resort to ideas like emergence and higher level laws to make sense of what we do see (or measure).

Demokritus and Luekipus were right.

Once again, totally wrong.

There are all sorts of things, from the concepts of sexual selection and ecological niches to presidential elections and Shakespearean sonnets which do, of course, require physical embodiment of some sort to exist but which cannot and never will, in any meaningful way, be reduced to a meaningful description of the mass, charge, position and velocity of particles.

This messianic reductionism is mere pseudo-scientific posturing. It is a declaration of faith in the absurd, with the will of God to be revealed to us in the afterlife replaced by a future reduction of all concepts to the description of the motion of particles once we become smart enough. In each case we are sold a pig in a poke and told we will see the pig only once we develop true vision.

Bob does not understand the difference between substance and form and that form cannot be reduced to substance.

But Bob is not content to leave it there. Yet further proof of Bob's pretense is the pseudo-Greek he affects, in case you are tempted to take him as an authority on the subject. Bob apparently knows that the original Greek kappa is normally replaced by a cee in Latin, so he changes Democritus to Demokritus, missing the fact that -us is not the original (Δημόκριτος) either. The original Greek for Leucippus is Λεύκιππος, which would be transliterated Leukippos. Our self-fancied philosophist and scientician has butchered the job, inverting the vowels, deleting a pee, and once again missing the incorrect -us ending.

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But Bob is not content to leave it there. Yet further proof of Bob's pretense is the pseudo-Greek he affects, in case you are tempted to take him as an authority on the subject. Bob apparently knows that the original Greek kappa is normally replaced by a cee in Latin, so he changes Democritus to Demokritus, missing the fact that -us is not the original (Δημόκριτος) either. The original Greek for Leucippus is Λεύκιππος, which would be transliterated Leukippos. Our self-fancied philosophist and scientician has butchered the job, inverting the vowels, deleting a pee, and once again missing the incorrect -us ending.

Very petty. And everything that exists IS physical. There are no non-physical things in the Cosmos.

Unfortunately we are not smart enough to be complete reductionists so we have to cheat a bit in order to cope.

Atoms in the void. That is all there is to it.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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