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In 'Mental Events' Davidson wrote "...mental events are mental only as described". Many have taken this and other of his remarks as showing that he holds that the anomalousness and irreducibility of the mental is conceptual only. But to me this opens up a further mystery: if basic ontology is physical, how is it possible for there to be relations among concepts which cannot be physically mirrored

Alan McKay
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  • Consider different usage of "ontology" here: If ontology only refers to independent being, one may very well state that mental events are depending on physical ones, emerge from them or whatever. In this sense, the conceptual sphere is an emergent property of physical being. That does not say that there is nothing mental, only that it is of a different kind than we ask for in ontology. – Philip Klöcking Jan 15 '16 at 12:59
  • what is conceptual irreducibility? – nir Jan 15 '16 at 17:47
  • Concepts, relations among concepts, and everything mental is only accessible through introspection. Davidson, like Kant, considered it too unstable and blurry to produce anything tangible. Therefore, whatever physical description of the underlying physical events there isn't enough "there" we can discern in the mental to match it to. As described, mental events are mental. – Conifold Jan 15 '16 at 23:03
  • @conifold, is there anything in a concept that may not be expressed with an English sentence? – nir Jan 16 '16 at 03:17
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    @nir Pretty much nothing that makes it a mental concept, as opposed to a propositional representation, can be so expressed. This is Davidson's point, physical descriptions are propositional representations that can be obtained from empirical experience, due to its stability and reproducibility, but not from mental introspection. – Conifold Jan 16 '16 at 03:29
  • @Conifold, you wrote "Pretty much nothing that makes it a mental concept, as opposed to a propositional representation, can be so expressed" — I ask, what remains? – nir Jan 16 '16 at 04:16
  • @nir You want to express in a sentence what by definition can not be expressed by a sentence? :) There are oblique ways of getting at non-propositional mental content: Husserl's phenomenology is a classical example, or metaphorical shifts of meaning described by Mary Hesse, or imaginative self reports in psychological studies. But of course they do not "express" it in the literal sense. – Conifold Jan 16 '16 at 04:53
  • @Conifold, what is the phenomenology of a concept ?!? I don't know of such a thing. I can have a phenomenal experience of a tree while looking at one, and there are components of that looking that language cannot express — but I see no such thing corresponding to concepts. If I contemplate the concept of a tree, I may see in my mind a particular tree, maybe the picture of a branch, or a forest - but these are all particulars — do you claim that in your mind something else is going on? and please don't appeal to cryptic theoretical terms without a pinpoint reference. – nir Jan 16 '16 at 05:23
  • @nir I am afraid I may not understand what you mean by "concept". According to Husserl for instance ideal objects are directly contemplated (or rather there is a spectrum between sensual perception of particulars and ideation of universals), and there is a number of techniques for manipulating them, e.g. free variation, epoche, etc. There is a halo of meanings and associations surrounding comprehension of any concept that is not only propositionally inexpressible but even inaccessible at will. Is this still about Davidson? – Conifold Jan 19 '16 at 02:18

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You touch an open question.

An ontology which includes only physical object will not suffice. At least one has to add entities from informatics centered around the concepts of information and information processing. Because mental processes can be considered information processing: The input results from our sensory organs, the processing employs in addition the actual internal state as a kind of memory. And the output are the actions of the system. Hence one needs a combination of informatics and physics necessary for the physical substrate of informatics.

To investigate the third person view of the mental and to capture it in a neuronal model is the subject of neuroscience. Here already intelligent and autonomous robots have been built, e.g., the rover on the planet Mars.

But qualia and the first person view are quite another issue.

Jo Wehler
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  • how does qualia fit it? is it to be understood as computable information? – nir Jan 15 '16 at 17:46
  • @nir qualia is a shorthand for subjective mental experiences like e.g., to experience a colour. The emphasis is on the subjective impression. Until now neither qualia could be captured by an objective description nor qualia could be implemented into an artificial autonomous system. Notably qualia do not equalize with computable information. The issue is highly debated, see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/ – Jo Wehler Jan 15 '16 at 17:56
  • I know that it is highly debated. but what do you think? can the mind be understood as computation? if so, what about qualia? – nir Jan 15 '16 at 18:20
  • @nir I consider the computational model of the mind today's most fruitful scientific model. Fruitful because it allows to apply informatics, notably the concept of states, state transitions, algorithms etc. See a former discussion in this blog on it's approach to consciousness http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/28526/how-might-the-integrated-information-theory-of-consciousness-assign-a-degree-of. But until now the computational model does not seem to approach the issue of qualia. – Jo Wehler Jan 15 '16 at 18:30
  • it seems that your answer is basically that you do not know. in particular you do not rule it out in principle. is that correct? – nir Jan 15 '16 at 18:54
  • @nir Today qualia are terra incognita. First, we have to venture into this land and to find out which scientific concepts suitably describe the data. – Jo Wehler Jan 15 '16 at 19:03
  • can we keep the discussion simple if possible? It is difficult enough to communicate clearly on philosophical problems, and on this problem in particular. If I understand you correctly, you believe that we cannot rule out in principle that the mind (including qualia) may be explained as computation. Is that correct? yes or no? btw, I am a dualist. I believe that there is something in my mind, which I call qualia, that in principle cannot be explained as computation. – nir Jan 15 '16 at 19:24
  • @nir Probably the problem of qualia is an ill-posed problem, ignoramus. Hence I consider it too early to make any speculations about its solution. – Jo Wehler Jan 15 '16 at 19:29
  • I did not ask you to make speculations about its solution. my question is simple: do you, or do you not, find anything in your mind that, in principle, may not be explained in terms of computation. it is perfectly ok to say "listen, I do not know how qualia may eventually be explained as computation, but I see no prima facie reason to rule it out in principle". That in fact seems to be your answer, if I understood you correctly. but I feel as if you avoid giving a straight answer, and I do not understand why. – nir Jan 15 '16 at 19:51
  • @nir You ask me for a conjecture about possible explanations of qualia. But I do even lack suitable concepts to first define the phenomena (qualia) which are to be explained later. - If you dispose of these concepts within a scientific setting, please tell me. – Jo Wehler Jan 15 '16 at 20:05
  • how can one dispose of concepts one does not have? – nir Jan 15 '16 at 20:15
  • @nir That's not my question: I ask for concepts which define the phenomena (qualia) which are to be investigated. – Jo Wehler Jan 15 '16 at 20:15
  • the thing I call qualia cannot be defined - Wittgenstein called it a Something about which nothing could be said. – nir Jan 15 '16 at 20:16
  • @nir "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." (Proposition 7 from Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) – Jo Wehler Jan 15 '16 at 20:22
  • he meant it as in forever — not as a temporary state of ignorance. not as in someone who is ignorant in economics, and therefore should be silent when other people discuss it, until he becomes knowledgeable, but as in a something which is in principle beyond language. – nir Jan 15 '16 at 20:27
  • Excellent point! Relationships, causation, state-sequences, information, etc are all non-physical. A purely physicalist worldview cannot even explain data or reasoning or causation, without even having to make recourse to the challenge of qualia. – Dcleve May 20 '20 at 17:33
  • @nir -- Wittgenstein was clearly wrong about that. We can communicate successfully between ourselves in discussing afterimages, color tones, and wine flavors. Jo Wehler, we have a lot of language that we use to characterize perception -- colors, flavors, pain, movement awareness, etc. And we have conceptual categories for these perceptions. Qualia to date have not been successfully characterized as formally as matter or information, and they may never be. SCIENCE may require the formalization, but we pragmatic humans have other useful disciplines we apply to non-science fields. – Dcleve May 21 '20 at 16:29
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Wehler is right. As your question is phrased, an exclusively physicalist ontology will not suffice (without deploying something like Wehler’s informatics ontology, or Klocking’s notion that concepts are emergent properties of [some] physical entities). But the ontological issue issue is alive and well, as you can see from nir/wehler’s lively discussion (with no end in site).

Start by considering the “knowledge argument,” which purports to show that physicalism is wrong because conscious experience involves non-physical properties, and is premised on the idea that someone who has “complete physical knowledge about another conscious being might yet lack knowledge about how it feels to have the experiences of that being”. See http:plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/ for a full rendition of the notion and issues. Here, you will find Frank Jackson’s formulation of the idea which underlies the knowledge argument in the now famous example of the neurophysiologist Mary:

“Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’.… What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.

The argument contained in this passage may be put like this: (1) Mary has all the physical information concerning human color vision before her release. (2) But there is some information about human color vision that she does not have before her release. Therefore (3) Not all information is physical information”

Your specific point is addressed later, where it is pointed out that “talk of ‘physical information’ in the context of the knowledge argument is ambiguous between an epistemological and an ontological reading," and two alternatives are offered: The weaker, epistemological version:

(1a) Mary has complete physical knowledge concerning facts about human color vision before her release. (2a) But there is some kind of knowledge concerning facts about human color vision that she does not have before her release. Therefore (3a) There is some kind of knowledge concerning facts about human color vision that is non-physical knowledge.

And the stronger, ontological, version:

(1b) Mary knows all the physical facts concerning human color vision before her release. (2b) But there are some facts about human color vision that Mary does not know before her release. Therefore (3b) There are non-physical facts concerning human color vision.”

The ontological version is then made explicit as follows:

“Premise P1 Mary has complete physical knowledge about human color vision before her release.

Therefore:

Consequence C1 Mary knows all the physical facts about human color vision before her release.

Premise P2 There is some (kind of) knowledge concerning facts about human color vision that Mary does not have before her release.
Therefore (from (P2)):

Consequence C2 There are some facts about human color vision that Mary does not know before her release.

Therefore (from (C1) and (C2)):

Consequence C3 There are non-physical facts about human color vision.”

And the article goes on to outline the various ways that C3 (ergo dualism?) can be avoided, and is a fairly good primer on thinking about whether your “basic” premise, that “ontology is physical” is tenable.

gonzo
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  • In order to build an ontology which covers also subjective experiences like qualia: Can you propose some entities, which are to be added to the ontology - besides physical entities (e.g., sensory organ, neuron, electrical excitation) and entities from informatics (e.g., pattern, state, state transition)? – Jo Wehler Jan 15 '16 at 22:20
  • Aside from the types of entities you have proposed, I cannot. As you’ve noted, their essential subjectivity, the fact that my pain is not your pain (the quale which most exemplifies this subjectivity), that “qualia” are not public, makes it tough to conceive of what such an ontology would look like. The most reasonable thing to say about them is that they are [very strange] properties of physical entities or states. Whether the cognitive and data sciences will someday combine in such a way as to revive and inform some form of identity and/or functionalist theory is an open question. – gonzo Jan 18 '16 at 19:53