Responses to anti-materialists about mind

Since this is a topic I find stimulating to think about and be challenged on, I'll do some more direct responses about it here.

## Ian Wardell

Someone on Sean Carrol's twitter is saying his blog post here disproves materialism.  I've already done a lot of responses in the twitter thread that I should probably add to various places on this wiki.  For now, here, I'll engage directly with his blog post.

In particular, I think his responses to objections (at the bottom) is where I will focus. Because my objection is among them: consciousness, experience, and so on, may be entirely describable with physics (he says "quantities"). The rest of his article is merely the assertion that materialism is ruled out because consciousness isn't realizable materially. So this section is his only attempt to actually argue for his central claim.

### **Hopefully I can ignore one part, it doesn't apply to me**

Kind of a side note, about this objection he says:

> I believe the person who made this suggestion wasn't saying consciousness is measurable due to the fact *it is the very same thing* as certain physical processes. Rather they acknowledge the reality of consciousness as a distinct reality, but claimed it might eventually be measurable.
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I'm not like that. I believe consciousness and experience *are* the very same thing as certain states and processes in a physical system.

But, I don't think this will matter when we come to his following reasoning

### **His attempt to justify his foundational claim**

> Now, if consciousness can in principle be measured -- not just aspects of it, but wholly so -- this is to deny that consciousness has any qualitative elements. Instead, consciousness, like the rest of material reality, is wholly quantitative. Any experience can hence, at least in principle, be wholly conveyed by units of measurement(s).
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> This, though, seems transparently false. If we consider the experience of a particular shade of redness, then we can measure the wavelength of light that bounces off the observed object and enters our eyes. And we can measure the neuronal activity that the light precipitates. But at the end of this causal chain we have the raw experience itself. To suppose the raw experience itself can be measured is to suppose there is a third thing to be measured on top of the wavelength of light and all the activity in the brain. But anything measured in the brain would by definition be part of the activity of the brain. Moreover, whatever we measured, would be a particular reading on some measuring instrument. Such a reading can be ascertained from a 3rd person perspective i.e anyone can take the reading. The experience, on the other hand, is only known directly from the person having the experience. Hence to equate such an experience with a measurement simply ignores the facts.
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### **I attempt to understand his arguments**

So, this isn't totally easy to understand. I'll try to interpret it in some meaningful way, and then pose further questions. He seems to be saying that:

1. qualitative and quantitative are mutually exclusive, it would be unintelligible to say that one is derived from the other
2. we can measure the activity of causal physical chain, and at the end of the chain is "raw experience itself", according to his further clarification, this objection only applies to people with views different from mine, and I agree
3. experience is "only" "known" "directly" "from" the person having the experience (1st person experience). Thus measurement of it is not possible, because measurement is available for 3rd person perspectives to experience

### **I respond to his arguments**

I have to say, he seems to be going in circles, unable to justify his belief without starting by assuming his belief is true.

#### #1

He replies that this is a conclusion based on his blog post:

> The entirety of my blog post explains this very point. Indeed, if colours, sounds etc were able to be derived from the quantitative, then these secondary qualities would never have been relegated to the mind in the first place.
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This seems to be the relevant section in the post he means:

> the concept of material reality that both Galileo and Descartes advanced. They proposed that the material realm is wholly quantitative. [...]  But, what of the qualitative aspects of reality such as colours, sounds, and smells? These aspects of reality are not detectable by our measuring instruments and hence are not measurable. The only option was to stipulate that they simply weren't part of the furniture of reality at all (note the word stipulated, this was in no shape or form a scientific discovery).
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The key is "These [qualitative] aspects of reality are not detectable by our measuring instruments and hence are not measurable."

I initially had thought this was the same assertion as point #1, and thus thought I had covered it already. But, he now has indicated that it should be interpreted as an argument. I can only guess then that the word "are" (in the phrase "are not detectable") should be interpreted to mean "have been found, a posteriori, to be" (rather than "are, a priori, by definition" or something).

So, taking it that way, I continue.

While the phrase would seem to mean our current instruments, he must think this implies the same conclusion for all future advancements in detection technology as well.

But it ...it doesn't imply that. Quantitative science is difficult. Especially for the most complex of physical systems (like the brain with billions of neurons connected in particular ways to each other). It's entirely expected on the physical model (given the physical complexity involved) for this complexity to not be fully understood yet.

We don't have the technology to detect every single synaptic event in the brain yet. Does that mean there are no such synaptic brain events? No.

And if we can't measure all of the physical processes and states, and all of the *properties* of those physical processes and states, how do we know if none of the processes/states have the same properties (or whatever) as a qualitative experience? We just can't (so far). Does that prove that qualitative experiences are not actually such a physical process? No.

So if I'm interpreting his argument here correctly, it's just wrong.

#### #3

is probably just as false, confused, and question begging. But it is more interesting because I think there is something to explore here: the very concepts of measurement and identification

The key contested bit of this argument is where he says:

> The experience, on the other hand, is only known directly from the person having the experience. Hence to equate such an experience with a measurement simply ignores the facts.
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This isn't obvious to me. It's not obvious what he's saying, or that it's true.

So, how can I try to interpret what he means here?

Maybe it would help to take a particular experience. Say: dark blue.

Sure, the first person perspective knows directly that it is an experience of dark blue. But what about the 3rd person measurements? (Here's my page where I say (roughly) how this might physically work, and thus be measurable and whatnot. Though there may be other physical possibilities.)

What is it that they can't "know"? And why not?

* Surely our measurements are already good enough that we can make pretty accurate guesses what the person is experiencing. So we know *what* they are experiencing. In response he asserts his central claim yet again: "greenness (or any other experience) cannot be identical to any possible measurement." Why not?
* I think he means that the 3rd person people will not, themselves, *be experiencing* dark blue? But what does that have to do with whether or not *the experience of dark blue* is itself being measured/detected by them? (for example: what about the state/process being detected would be different from the state/process of someone experiencing dark blue? What does the 1st person experience possesses that would not be measured properties?)

Are one of these the right interpretation? What else could he mean?

So far he hasn't responded to these last bunch of questions. So I think maybe this part is redundant, and what he means is the same stuff I've now addressed under point #1.

He actually refused to read and respond to anything more from me, basically calling me stupid and unworthy of his time or whatever.

### **Qualitative VS Quantitative: musings**

Coming back to this quote and its thinking:

> Now, if consciousness can in principle be measured -- not just aspects of it, but wholly so -- this is to deny that consciousness has any qualitative elements. Instead, consciousness, like the rest of material reality, is wholly quantitative. Any experience can hence, at least in principle, be wholly conveyed by units of measurement(s).
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I kinda suspect there is a category error in this kind of thinking.

He implies that aspects of reality "are" qualitative or quantitative. What does that even mean? What about water (not our ideas and concepts and perceptions of water, but water itself), is water qualitative or quantitative? I think this is a category error. Water itself is neither. It is only *our description* of water which can be qualitative or quantitative.

I think the same applies to experience. Experience is neither quantitative nor qualitative. Only our descriptions take those forms, and we can describe it either way. Color, for example, can be described using three quantities (there's different ways to do this, such as using three primary colors, like Red Green Blue, or other ways such as Hue Luminosity and Saturation, these different ways are akin to using different spoken languages like English or French to try to describe the same thing), or at least degrees which can be quantified. And here is the science of doing that not just for light, but for human perception of it, and here's a theory that has six irreducible qualia which again can be described using just three quantifiable values (expressed as percentages).

These types of people want there to be something left over, that these numbers fail to specify something about the experience. Maybe. And so maybe we will find other numbers to fill in the gaps, as we always do. Maybe any leftover "quality" is really just one quantity: on or off. Is it blue or is it not?

But I'm not sure this really matters, given the category error.

Look at a neuron. What other neurons does its branches touch? And is that physical fact "qualitative" or "quantitative"? I think it's neither: it's spatial, it's physical. You can *describe* it using quantitative coordinates, or you can say it's attached to "this one" and "that one" but not "this other one".

Maybe any leftover "quality" is just the "meaning" of the signal. And meaning looks suspiciously like a network of connected things like neurons.