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In an earlier
thread entitled "Function and functional organization", I had posted
my definition of the term "material reality":
JohnM
commented:
The use of "noumenal" comes to your first rescue:
in my understanding it is compendial, without detailing, so in grouping
together 'nouns' into 'noumena', we may include otherwise outstanding
features (not only within our mind-content). So the only remaining objection I
can think of is the word "material", unless you extend that into
nonmaterial-material. Like: anything that can be called "physical"
(reductionistic science-_expression_). 'As I feel' (watch that _expression_!)
the adjective 'material' in the term "reality" makes it a limited model.
My reply was:
Well, I
have to admit that I have been wondering myself the last few days how to
characterize the term 'material', and whether it really ought to
properly be applied to all "reality" (as in my original statement), or
not. I have not come to any conclusion on that
yet. =================
After spending some time thinking about this, I have
come to realize that the distinction between "reality" and "material
reality" has its roots in the distinction between the "inner
world" and the "external world". The inner world is available,
individually, to us only by introspection, whereas the external world is
available to us via sensory means. Thus, for a single observer "material
reality" is equated with his external world, and "reality" with (inner world +
external world).
As soon as we
admit more than one observer (more than one extant "inner world"), then the
situation gets interesting. If I and you are two such observers, both of us can
identify that your body is in the material, or external, world. This includes
your brain. I am then inclined to argue that your inner world likewise,
therefore, belongs to the material world insofar as your mind (and thus
your inner world) is - as best we can tell - based in processes
occurring in the brain. You would apply the same reasoning to me and my mind,
and as a result we would conclude that there is only the material world - our
individual inner worlds are only epiphenomena of our individual perspectives,
and that from a collective 'scientific' viewpoint we see that the material world
encompasses all of our bodies and brains and thus even our inner
worlds.
But I think
that this reasoning tries to reduce "inner world" to "brain processes", and to
reduce subjectivity to neurochemical activities. In such a reduction, the
essential characteristic - subjectivity itself - is lost. Seen from the other
direction: there is no way to pile up objective data about the brain (or
anything else) so as to cross some threshold from objectivity into
subjectivity. I think philosopher John Searle states it nicely by
saying that the mind has a "first-person ontology" (in his book "The
Rediscovery of the Mind"). In other words, we cannot simply observe each
other and conclude that our respective inner worlds are only epiphenomena, and
that the material world encompasses all reality.
This does not have
to mean that the mind thereby becomes some ephemeral entity of a
spirit world, or anything like that. As Rosen points out [EL 139], all we have
to realize is that we find ourselves in a position just like the
measurement problem in QM, where all our attempts to fully
objectify the problem fail, not due to anything mystical, but rather, due to
inherent impredicativities. Similarly, Searle argues that a science of
mind would be a very different and difficult scientific endeavor to pursue,
but it would nonetheless be possible.
In light of this,
I modify my original statement as follows (change in bold):
I acknowledge that my use of the term "the external world"
instead of "one's own individual external world" indicates that I presuppose
that 1) that the posited noumenal entirety is common to all observers, and 2)
that multiple observers can, in principle, perceive and cognize this common
noumenal entirety in ways that do not conflict.
I suspect that the more usual version of presupposition
#2 is something like: "that multiple observers can, in principle, perceive and
cognize this common noumenal entirety in ways that must directly
agree." I think that this is the basis of pre-relativistic thinking of
space and time, and that this still befuddles the thinking about the measurement
problem in QM, and the mind-body problem. In short, a presupposition stated in
that way has as a corollary that: the subjective can always be adequately
isolated from the objective in any scientific study.
My 'looser' version ("..in ways that do not conflict")
allows for direct agreement, as well as for transformations from one observer to
another (such as the Lorentz transformations in special relativity, for
example), such that those transformations will not lead to conflicts between the
observers. However, this wording also allows the possibility that for certain
situations there may exist no such transformations. In those cases, there
is no agreement between observers (due to the inability to transform one
observers information to the other), but there is, more importantly, no conflict
between them. A corollary of this view is that: isolability of subjective from
objective in a given scientific study will depend on the situation under
consideration.
With regards to a recent thread topic, treating organization
as a "thing" in the material world [LI 119, 126], it becomes worth investigating
the phrase "perceive and cognize" that I used. In the case of organization, what
is being perceived and cognized is not observables per se, but rather, the
relations between observables. That these relations lack
"tangibility" would seem to make them non-material or non-physical.
As Rosen points out: "Indeed, a relation between phenomena
depends on a double imputation: the first from sensation to phenomena, the
second from phenomena to relations between them. Thus, if our knowledge of
phenomena is already once removed from the ambience, any talk of entailment, or
any other kind of relation between phenomena, is twice removed." [LI 56]
Treating such relations as
"things" is thus a bit of a gamble, but without a presumption
that relations between observables are even possible, science itself would
be moot. The question is whether these particular relations ("organization") are
"real" or not (in the same sense that other "things" in the material
world are "real"). For Rosen, "organization is that attribute of a natural
system which codes into the form of an abstract block diagram" [LI
126]. So, to the degree that these relations are 1) identifiable
(i.e., measurable as relations between observables), and 2) encodable into
abstract block diagrams (which form the models of commuting modeling relations
with a natural system), this attribute of organization is indeed something
we can "perceive and cognize". In doing so, we have enlarged the
notion of "thing" and also, by legitimizing the notion of organization,
implicitly legitimized the notion of
context-dependence.
Regards,
Tim
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