Awesome Erik! I found the exercise surprisingly fruitful, turns out Chatgpt is a pretty good sparring partner! Clicked on that link but doesn't seem to be working?
I'd never used ChatGPT before. It speaks well of “non-physical entities.” Sorry for the slow response (eight-hour time difference). The link works, but it shouldn't have the period and should just end with 3. It's weird — it opens from my computer browser but not my phone.
This took me an hour this morning to read and comprehend. Your questions are well thought out and compelling, and I hesitated to respond because it will reveal my philosophical naivete (I'm a writer, not a philosopher), but you inspired me to ask ChatGPT some questions of my own. If you're interested, I copied the conversation into a Google doc: https://tinyurl.com/mwbes4a3.
Very interesting Erik, very cool to see from the other side of the conversation! There seems to be an assumed reductive physicalism throughout your questions - reality (what is most real) just is the physical universe within space and time guided by unchanging natural laws, and human beings work according to this reductive physicalism as well, with mental states reducing entirely to physical brain states. It’s certainly the 20th and 19th century paradigms. The mistake reductive physicalists make is assuming that reductive physicalism just is the case and isn’t a metaphysical position (it’s the metaphysical position that metaphysics is reducible to physics, so you are still doing metaphysics in dismissing metaphysics) that goes back to the atomists and natural philosophers of ancient Greece.
Reductive physicalism has a lot of weak points, for example:
1. Free-will and consciousness: if you take this position seriously (like robert Sapolsky) you reduce everything to mechanisms and efficient causality and then you have a billiard ball universe and a random process of evolution, and you end up with human beings are hydraulic machines without free-will and our consciousness is epiphenomenal or accidental, and also useless because we don’t have free-will? If we are physical automata, why would we be capable of truth and knowledge?
2. The problem of perception: is our sense-perception of the external world accurate? Physicalism relies on taking sense-experience at face value, that the world of mind-independant objects we see is how reality actually works. This naive realism is undermined by recent cognitive science (predictive processing framework) that shows how most perception is guided by predictive models and so most of what we see is actually memory! The brain and nervous system are in the body, not the world, and so we use predictive models to interpret and explain sensory information, focusing on where the map and the territory don't match (prediction errors). Donald Hoffman's argument that sense perception evolved for survival and reproduction also tracks with this in that our sense perception didn't evolve to percieve objective reality!
3. Post-modernism: reductive physicalism opened the door to post-modernism which is that if the world is just material mechanism there is no meaning, purpose, morality, but also really truth or knowledge in the final analysis. The world is all power games, like Marx or Faucault, or we are hyradulic machines driven by impulsive desires like Freud, a will to power like in Nietszche. Reductive physicalism is at the root of many of the horrifying philosophies of the 20th century.
The classical worldview is not physicalist or nominalist, looking at both particulars and universals as real, albeit the later as realer. And is not reductive but rather focuses on emanation and emergence, top-down causality and bottom-up causality, which in my opinion is a much more complete and coherent account of reality than reductive physicalism. The logical argument for the necessity of god comes from accounting for intelligibility, but physicalism just assumes intelligibility is not a problem because of naive realism, which is how you can have a 'brute fact' reality based on sensory experience. But I don't think the best science of mind and perception supports that anymore.
Awesome Erik! I found the exercise surprisingly fruitful, turns out Chatgpt is a pretty good sparring partner! Clicked on that link but doesn't seem to be working?
I'd never used ChatGPT before. It speaks well of “non-physical entities.” Sorry for the slow response (eight-hour time difference). The link works, but it shouldn't have the period and should just end with 3. It's weird — it opens from my computer browser but not my phone.
This took me an hour this morning to read and comprehend. Your questions are well thought out and compelling, and I hesitated to respond because it will reveal my philosophical naivete (I'm a writer, not a philosopher), but you inspired me to ask ChatGPT some questions of my own. If you're interested, I copied the conversation into a Google doc: https://tinyurl.com/mwbes4a3.
Very interesting Erik, very cool to see from the other side of the conversation! There seems to be an assumed reductive physicalism throughout your questions - reality (what is most real) just is the physical universe within space and time guided by unchanging natural laws, and human beings work according to this reductive physicalism as well, with mental states reducing entirely to physical brain states. It’s certainly the 20th and 19th century paradigms. The mistake reductive physicalists make is assuming that reductive physicalism just is the case and isn’t a metaphysical position (it’s the metaphysical position that metaphysics is reducible to physics, so you are still doing metaphysics in dismissing metaphysics) that goes back to the atomists and natural philosophers of ancient Greece.
Reductive physicalism has a lot of weak points, for example:
1. Free-will and consciousness: if you take this position seriously (like robert Sapolsky) you reduce everything to mechanisms and efficient causality and then you have a billiard ball universe and a random process of evolution, and you end up with human beings are hydraulic machines without free-will and our consciousness is epiphenomenal or accidental, and also useless because we don’t have free-will? If we are physical automata, why would we be capable of truth and knowledge?
2. The problem of perception: is our sense-perception of the external world accurate? Physicalism relies on taking sense-experience at face value, that the world of mind-independant objects we see is how reality actually works. This naive realism is undermined by recent cognitive science (predictive processing framework) that shows how most perception is guided by predictive models and so most of what we see is actually memory! The brain and nervous system are in the body, not the world, and so we use predictive models to interpret and explain sensory information, focusing on where the map and the territory don't match (prediction errors). Donald Hoffman's argument that sense perception evolved for survival and reproduction also tracks with this in that our sense perception didn't evolve to percieve objective reality!
3. Post-modernism: reductive physicalism opened the door to post-modernism which is that if the world is just material mechanism there is no meaning, purpose, morality, but also really truth or knowledge in the final analysis. The world is all power games, like Marx or Faucault, or we are hyradulic machines driven by impulsive desires like Freud, a will to power like in Nietszche. Reductive physicalism is at the root of many of the horrifying philosophies of the 20th century.
The classical worldview is not physicalist or nominalist, looking at both particulars and universals as real, albeit the later as realer. And is not reductive but rather focuses on emanation and emergence, top-down causality and bottom-up causality, which in my opinion is a much more complete and coherent account of reality than reductive physicalism. The logical argument for the necessity of god comes from accounting for intelligibility, but physicalism just assumes intelligibility is not a problem because of naive realism, which is how you can have a 'brute fact' reality based on sensory experience. But I don't think the best science of mind and perception supports that anymore.