‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

I hope you enjoyed your toast, but what I have to say here might not be quite so palatable.

Let's start with the cooking example, as it epitomizes the difficulty in all of them.

What you call "the classic materialist move" - to just say "yeah but it's just flour, water, and yeast" - is a rather simplistic parody of the full physical description of the process, and it does not even begin on the explanation of the process that science can give. A materialist would have no problem with saying that bread is different from its ingredients, whether considered either separately or collectively, and she could go along with calling this an ontological difference. The thing, though, is this: just because flour, water, and yeast are physical things, and they have now been turned into something that is in a different ontological category - namely bread, or baked goods - it does not follow that this bread cannot be a physical substance, and this argument provides no justification for the premise that it is not.

At this point, you may be thinking that you had no intention of saying bread is nonphysical, but if so, then that only emphasizes the point, as, in the rest of your analogies, you are doing the equivalent of exactly that (for example, concepts of sound are not ontologically the same as sound waves and the latter are physical, and from this, it is supposed to follow that the former are not.) The general schema here is this invalid syllogism:

Major premise: X is physical.

Minor premise: Concepts of X are not in the same ontological category as X itself.

Conclusion: Concepts of X are not physical.

Once we remove the ineffective ontological argument from your posts, all we have is a number of claims that mental phenomena cannot be physical phenomena, presented without any reason given to think they are true, and in the parallel thread where I am debating geye1234 [1] I explained why, for a conclusion of this sort to be taken as a fact - i.e., a justified true belief - you need to give readers a reason to think your conclusion is justified, which in turn means giving them a reason to think its premises are.

By the way, what is potential matter, as opposed to the alternatives of raw and physical matter?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42345089 , 3rd. paragraph.

... continued from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42389025

You confuse imperfect definition with complete indefinition. If Bob says that he will meet Bill at the "foot of the mountain", that provides meaningful definition about Bob's future location. It is not complete: it's not sufficient to provide GPS coordinates, and it leads open a range of possibilites (which trail? for example). But it is sufficient to convey some meaning, and equally to convey some meaning about where Bob will definitely not be: the summit of the mountain, for example, or half way up the mountain, or Times Square, etc etc. Bob's statement therefore provides definition; it defines; it draws lines around what he does and doesn't mean. It is not complete: further definition is possible. But its incompleteness does not negate the definition that it does provide.

If I said for the sake of argument "I can't describe this likeness in full detail, and I think it's impossible to do so even in theory, but nonetheless I know that some sort of likeness between thought and reality is necessary for thought to be valid: thought and reality cannot be completely unlike", that would be meaningful as far as it goes. It would be sufficient to define my claim to a degree, and would be opposed to certain contradictory claims.

Now you show you have some idea of what "likeness" means in your response. In particular, your rhetorical flourishes about acorns, genetic signatures, death, and neutrinos, and how thoughts cannot be like their objects in the sense that they're from acorns, have genes, etc, show that some sort of definition has got across. You have some grasp of what likeness means. This is not surprising. Often we use words like "be", "thing", "fact" and "like" where the complete definitions may not be known, but the words and concepts nonetheless contain meaning. That doesn't mean we shouldn't seek more detail and greater clarity in our concepts -- we most certainly should. But it does mean that not being able to thoroughly define a word precludes its conveying meaning. This is especially true for common, everyday words such as "like". We use the word all the time; perhaps we can't define it, but we use it meaningfully nonetheless.

My claim above was very limited: that a true thought is, in some sense, like its object. It was a limited claim, using a definition of 'like' which, while incomplete, is enough to convey some meaning. Precisely how a thought and its object are alike is one thing, but that they are alike is something else. We could theoretically know that the latter must be true while knowing nothing whatsoever of the former. (To be clear, this isn't my position -- my position is basically Aristotelian realism -- but for the sake of argument, it could theoretically be true.) My claim that thought and object must be alike is not undermined by a hypothetical inability to explain how they are alike, assuming I present other reasoning that is sound. Just as someone without knowledge of the earth's rotation could tell you that it was day or night without telling you how it was day or night.

Much of the rest of your reply rests on the chain of causality theory which I address in my other post[0]. In short: a cause cannot explain truth in the mind, because any given cause faces the same question that the mind does about how it can be true, so unless you are going to attribute the cause's truth to its cause, and so regress into infinity, you need to find another explanation.

You claim that section 1 of [1] is moot. The first argument in support of this claim, that 'likeness' is too vague to mean anything, has failed. It does not get you off the hook to show that my argument -- that it's impossible for a thought to be both a) true and b) entirely unlike the reality it purports to be about -- is invalid.

More to follow on your other points when I get a minute.

I only recently noticed that you are replying to the parts of my post (split up only because of the limit on the size of comments) directly under each one. If continued, I think this would rapidly become difficult to follow, So I will respond at wherever the bottom of this thread has reached at the time. I will also try hard to keep comments within the size limit.

This is a reply to two posts upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42389025 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42395650

Far from adding any specificity to what you mean by likeness, your Dec. 12 post [1] continues to avoid doing so. This seems very odd, as one hallmark of true theories is that the more one can say about them, the more strongly justified they appear (I suppose, under your thesis, you would say they become more like reality?) Why would you pass up on multiple opportunities to make your thesis as strong as you can? Or has it already reached that point? The direction of this discussion suggests the latter is the case - but you still have an opportunity to turn that around.

Your 'meet at the foot of the mountain' analogy falls flat, as no example of a situation where there is sufficient information does anything to establish that, in a different case, there is sufficient information.

The reason why what you have said so far is inadequate is that you have made a very strong assertion ("materialism makes rational thought impossible, and is therefore false" [2]) which you say follows from your claim that true thoughts have some sort of likeness to reality, but you have not offered any reason for a reasonable skeptic to think that your assertion states a fact - i.e. a justified true belief. As it stands, it does not meet even the 'justified' criterion. The fact that you have said literally next to nothing about how thoughts are like reality is just one of the things standing in the way of this assertion having any justification, though it is the one that we come to first, as the other big, so-far unjustified leap - to your anti-materialist conclusion - is predicated on it.

"Now you show you have some idea of what 'likeness' means in your response" - indeed, I have an idea of how one could say that true thoughts are like the reality they are about, and, in fact, I wrote "personally, I do not suppose that one could think meaningfully about reality without there being a correspondence, at some more-or-less abstract level, between the thoughts and the real world, and for all I know from what you have said about it, that may or may not be what you mean when you say 'similarity' or 'likeness'." [3] I do not know whether it is anything like what you mean, because you have been so opaque about it.

You could certainly say that my correspondence is no more specific than your likeness - and you would be right - but that is not a problem for what I am saying, because, once again, I am not claiming anything that is predicated on it.

Contrary to what you say here, my position is not dependent on whether my position on the 'central question' that you posed in the beginning (what is it that makes a thought be one about reality? ) is actually correct: I believe that information flow from the real world via chains of causality is sufficient to explain why true thoughts reflect the world as it is, but even if this is completely false, it would not mean that your thesis has been justified: it has to stand up on its own merits.

Consequently, I do not have to say anything more about chain-of-causality, but I am not averse to scrutinizing it, so I am happy to take on the infinite regress issue and show that it is not a problem. For example, you wrote "someone without knowledge of the earth's rotation could tell you that it was day or night without telling you how it was day or night", and that is true enough, if they could see daylight, or hear the sounds characteristic of day- or nighttime activity, or read a clock (or from their body's circadian rhythm, absent any better information, but that does not work for long.) In all these cases, the thought arises from information flow along a chain of causality that does not, in any circumstance, need to be followed back any further than the rotation of the Earth, so there is no infinite regress. Furthermore, there is no need for the person to know about the rotation of the Earth, as that rotation causes corresponding phenomena, which in turn feed information to our subject - information which allows them to deduce the fact of it being day or night so long as they have some knowledge about how to differentiate the two (the chain is there even for clock-reading and circadian rhythms, which are synchronized to the Earth's rotation.)

You seem to have come to your infinite regress conclusion because I occasionally used phrases such as 'factual information'. That is just a shortcut for referring to information caused by the actual state of the world, either directly or through a process of sound reasoning from direct information, and I should have been clear about that.

We can continue with this line of thought: a person might wake up, look at a clock reading, say, 13:00, and think it is daytime - but in one case the clock is working correctly, and in the other, it is broken, and it is actually midnight. This is no problem for CHOC, as in the latter case, there is no causal chain from the Earth's rotation to the clock's reading. According to your thesis, this thought is like reality in the first scenario, but unlike reality in the second - yet it seems to be the case (or at least it plausibly is) that the thoughts in the two scenarios are identical (they can certainly be expressed by the same proposition.) From this consideration, it seems that likeness to reality is not an intrinsic property of thoughts, but merely a correspondence between them and reality - and mere correspondence does not seem to be a problem for materialism, at least not without further explanation.

With phrases like "you need to find another explanation" and "it does not get you off the hook to show that my argument ... is invalid", I feel it is necessary for me to repeat what I said earlier about burden-shifting: "in order to show that your argument has failed to make its case, I neither need to show how there can be likeness that is not physical likeness if materialism is true, and nor do I need to show that likeness is not necessary for a thought to be about reality. On the contrary, you have chosen to make a strong claim - essentially that the mind cannot possibly be the result of physical processes [4] - and to sustain that, you need more than arguments grounded in appeals to intuition about how things either must or cannot be. In particular, anything resembling 'so prove me wrong' would amount to burden-shifting, and while we are about it, the alternative to 'the mind cannot be a physical phenomenon' is not 'the mind must be a physical phenomenon', it is 'the mind might be a physical phenomenon.'"

All of this is probably moot, however, given the sibling comment in which I show, using an argument revealed to me by this discussion, that materialism is correct;)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42395650

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42319985 , in the summary.

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42345041 , final paragraph.

[4] After I wrote this, you made it quite clear how strong of a claim you are making: "materialism makes rational thought impossible, and is therefore false." [see footnote 2]

The 7-step argument for materialism I have presented above is not intended to be sarcasm. I might be guilty of presenting a parody, in that it closely resembles your argument in most respects, but it has a serious purpose - an attempt to focus attention on the need for statements to be sufficiently well-defined and justifiable that a reasonable skeptic could find them persuasive. The challenge it presents you with is to refute it with a non- question-begging, non- burden-shifting response that would not apply, mutatis mutandis, to your own argument.