How to deal with non-realism?

single-level-of-reality reductionism

There were and are materialisms which explicitly talk about multiple levels of reality. Someone who believes that the brain is made of atoms but that consciousness is "strongly emergent" is still a materialist - at least compared to someone else who believes in a separate soul-substance.

But yes, mostly I am saying that a lot of materialism involves stealth dualism - the materialists are property dualists and don't realize it.

One place you can see this, is when people talk about consciousness as "how it feels to be an X", where X is something material (or computational). For example, X may be a certain arrangement of atoms in space. And how it feels to be X is... some detailed specific conjunction of sensations, thoughts, intentions, and so on, that adds up to a single complex experience.

Obviously we could make a 3D plot of where all those atoms are, and zoom around it and into it, view it from different angles, and we'll still see nothing but a constellation of atoms in space. You won't "see the experience from the inside" no matter how many such views you try.

"Single level of reality" implies that there is nothing more to those atoms than what can be seen in such a view. Yet the experience is supposed to be there, somewhere. I conclude that a conventional materialist theory of consciousness involves positing that the brain has properties (the "feels" or "qualia" that make up a conscious experience) in addition to the properties already stipulated by physics.

But abstracted causal models are the whole of natural-scientific ontology at the present time, and materialists try to believe that that is the fundamental nature of reality,

No! Of course, if a more accurate map of reality is developed, the reductionists will say that "this is the closest we have to knowing the true base level of reality." Only strawman-level reductionists will say "this is the most accurate map we have? Okay, that's base reality."

You've missed my real point. Yes, a materialist is happy to say that their currently favored model is probably not the whole story. I'm saying that all the available models will suffer from the same deficit.

Consider the argument I just gave, about how the "feels" are nowhere to be seen in the atom plot, yet they are supposed to exist, yet only atoms are supposed to exist. This is a contradiction that will not be affected by adding new atoms or rearranging the old ones. All models of the world as atoms in interaction are "abstracted causal models", the result of a centuries-long effort to understand the world without talking about so-called secondary properties, which have to be reintroduced once you want to explain consciousness itself. And it's at that point that these subjective properties form an "overlay" - they have to be added to the physical base.

and the aspect of reality which we experience more or less directly in subjectivity, is some sort of alien overlay.

Also not true! Why, if there was a direct one-to-one correspondence between subjective experience and reality, there would never be any surprising facts, and there would be no need to distinguish the map and the territory.

There's supposed to be a 1-to-1 correspondence between subjective experience and the physical reality of the part of the brain responsible for being the experience - not a 1-to-1 correspondence between subjective experience and the physical world external to the brain.

I hope it's now clear that I'm not accusing materialists of identifying their models with reality at that level. It's the identification of experiences themselves with physical parts of the brain where the problem lies, given the physical ontology we have. Obviously, if physics already posited the existence of entities that could be straightforwardly identified with elementary qualia, the situation would be rather different.

the reductionism we have available to us now, while incomplete [...] is not at odds with subjective experience (they add up to normality, after all)

Adding up to normality is a slogan and a (doomed) aspiration here. I believe 2+2=5, I know it sounds strange, but it's OK because it adds up to normality! Except that normality is 4, not 5. Or in this case, "normality", i.e. reality, is that experiences exist. Even if we were to take a virtual trip through an atom-plot of a brain, and we arrived somewhere and you pointed at a specific cluster of atoms and said, "There's part of an experience! That cluster of atoms is one pixel of a visual sensation of red", I'm still not going to see the redness (or even see the "seeing of redness") no matter what angle I choose to view that cluster of atoms. If the redness is there, it is there in addition to all the properties that feature in the physics.

You have said in the past that the computational theory of mind implies dualism. [...] I never found an argument that supported this claim. Do show me, if you've got one.

Maybe it implies trialism. We end up with three levels here: the level of atoms (i.e. the fundamental physical level), the computational state machine which describes cognition and consciousness, and the experiences which we are supposed to be explaining.

A computational theory of consciousness says that a given state of consciousness just is a particular state in a particular state machine. The argument for dualism here is similar to the argument for dualism I gave for the arrangement of atoms, except that now we're not dealing with just one arrangement of atoms, we're dealing with an enormous equivalence class of such arrangements - all those arrangements which instantiate the relevant state machine. Pick any instance, any individual member of that equivalence class, and the previous argument applies: you won't "see the experience from the inside", no matter how you examine the physical configuration. The existence of the experience somewhere "in" the configuration implies extra properties beyond the basic physical ones like position and momentum.

Systematically associating conscious states with computational states will allow you to have a systematic property dualism, but it will still be property dualism.

Your argument about arranging atoms to make consciousness 
also applies to arranging atoms to make apples. 

Edit: This comment was upvoted three seconds after I posted it. I don't know how or why.

Probably someone saw your comment/house analogy and found it very clever and upvoted before reading on.

I like quantum mind, but despite the unity of superpositions matching the apparent unity of subjective experience, does it really give us much? I think the answer is no, at least until we have a better understanding of the physics of (quantum) computation, a better theory of computation in light of that, and a highly advanced computationalism/monadology in light of that. And even then Leibniz' solution to the mind-body problem was literally Goddidit. (Which is an intriguing and coherent theory that explains all the evidence, but you'd think there'd be something better. Also Leibniz' God causally influences monads, which aren't supposed to be influence-able, so his metaphysic seems sort of broken, even if you can fix that bug with a neat trick or two maybe.) Quantum mind might help us do uploads, but it still wouldn't have the answer to the mind-body problems, we still wouldn't know if the uploads were conscious. Or is apparently matching a phenomenological property with a physical property (unity of experience/superposition) somehow a big philosophical step in the right direction?

what could there be beyond the causal stuff?

Maybe my basic point is that there is more to the "stuff" than just "being causal". This is why I talk about abstracted causal models as ontologically deficient. Describing yourself or the world as a state machine just says that reality is a merry-go-round of "states" which follow each other according to a certain pattern. It says nothing about the nature of those states, except that they follow the pattern. This is why functionalist theories of mind lead to patternist theories of identity.

But it's clear that what we can see of reality is made of more than just causality. Causal relations are very important constitutive relations, but then we can ask about the relata themselves, the things connected by causality, and we can also look for connecting relations that aren't causal relations. Being shaped like a square isn't a causal relation. It's a fact that can play a causal role, but it is not itself made of causality.

These are ontological questions, and the fact that we can ask them and even come up with the tentative ontologies that we do, itself must have ontological implications, and then you can attempt an ontological analysis of these implication relations... If you could go down that path, using beyond-Einsteinian intellectual superpowers, you should figure out the true ontology, or as much of it as is accessible to our sort of minds. I consider Husserl to be the person who got the furthest here.

One then wants to correlate this ontology derived from a phenomenological-epistemological circle of reflection, with the world-models produced in physics and biology, but since the latter models just reduce to state-machine models, they cannot in themselves move you beyond ontological hollowness. Eventually you must use an ontology derived from the analysis of conscious experience itself, to interpret the formal ontology employed by natural science. This doesn't have to imply panpsychism; you may be able to say that some objects really are "things without an inside", and other objects do "have a subjectivity", and be able to specify exactly what it is that makes a difference.

This is a little removed from the indexical problem of

why am I me, and not someone else?

That's a question which probably has no answer, beyond enumerating the causes of what you are. The deep reasons are reserved for why there is something rather than nothing, and why it is the sort of universe it is. But in a universe with many minds, you were always going to be one among many.

If you were to find that the nature of your personal existence looked rather improbable, that would revive the question a little. For example, if we thought electrons were conscious, then being a conscious being at the Avogadro's-number-of-electrons level of organization, rather than at the single-electron level of organization, might look suspiciously improbable, given the much larger numbers of electrons in the universe. But then the question would be "why am I human, and not just an electron?" which isn't quite what you asked.

I think, therefore "something" is

I agree with this part.

The universe doesn't care whether I landed in vulcan by shuttle or by energy beam, it's the same configuration.

I think what you're saying is that in the present, there's no difference between your current configuration having resulted from a life lived for 20+ years, and your current configuration having materialized five seconds ago. Well, if by hypothesis the configuration is exactly the same in the two scenarios under consideration, then the configuration is exactly the same. That much is true tautologically or by assumption.

Now if we ask whether it's "still you" in both cases - one where you live out your life with physical continuity, and one in which you are briefly eradicated and then replaced by a physical duplicate - you do have some freedom of self-definition, so the answer may depend a little on the definition. (For now I will not consider the Yudkowskian possibility that there is a unique correct definition of personal identity to be found by superintelligent extrapolation of human cognitive dispositions, analogous to the CEV theory of how to arrive at a human-correct morality.)

But there are obvious and not-so-obvious problems with just saying "the configuration's the same, therefore there's no difference". An obvious problem: suppose we make more than one copy of you - are they both "you"? Less obvious: what if the history of how the configuration was created does matter, in deciding whether you are the same person as before?

Does "having the memory of being in a green room" really imply "you have been in a green room"? We don't normally trust memory that absolutely, and here we are talking about "memories" that were copied into the brain from a blueprint, rather than being caused in the usual fashion, by endogenous processing of sensory input. It is reasonable to imagine that you could be that person, whose brain was rewired in that way, and that after reflecting for long enough on the situation and on how the process worked, you concluded that it wasn't you who was in that room, or even that nobody was in that room.

I'm not even convinced that the unlimited capacity to recreate a whole conscious mind "in midstream", implied by so many thought-experiments, is necessarily possible. There are dynamical systems where you just can't get to places deep in the state-space without crossing intermediate territory. If all that matters for identity is having the right ensemble of mesoscopic computational states (i.e. described at a level of coarseness, relative to the exact microphysical description, which would reduce a whole neuron to just a few bits), then it should be possible to create a person in mid-stream. But if the substrate of consciousness is a single quantum Hilbert space, for some coherent physical subsystem of the brain, then it's much less obvious that you can do that. You might be able to bang together a classical simulation of what goes on in that Hilbert space, in mid-stream, but that's the whole point of my version of quantum-mind thinking - that substrates matter, and just implementing a state machine doesn't guarantee consciousness, let alone persistence of identity.

I assume by "physical brain" here you mean one made of protoplasm.
What does contemplating the possibility that you aren't running on such a brain now do to your confidence?

We are talking about mind-matter dualism: substance dualism, where matter is one type of thing and mind is another type of thing, and also property dualism, where everything is made of matter, but mental states involve material objects with extra properties outside of those usually discussed in physics. You appear to be talking about some other kind of "dualism".

I largely agree with Cyan, but with a little more empathy for your mom's viewpoint. For example, you write:

There is something. All that there is, we generally call "reality". Note that by this definition, reality is unique.

So you throw out a description and a quantifier, and slap a label on the result. Doesn't that sound a little similar to naive set theory? Maybe it's not as straightforward as it looks.

I'm not actually resistant to defining "reality" your way; I think it's not actually a step toward sets that don't contain themselves. But it takes some sophistication to see that, and your mom might lack the formal skills to discriminate innocent-looking "logic" that leads to paradox from innocent-looking logic that doesn't. Note that she needn't have studied set theory to have run into similar exercises in labeling and deductive argument that subtly lead to insane results.

If that's the case, she should see a god which really does hate homosexuality, eating pork, and considers working on the sabbath worthy of death, or wants the whole world to live under Sharia law, as equiprobable with one that loves everyone. She most likely behaves as if she had some means of discriminating between supernatural hypotheses even if she disavows being able to.

Yeah, that happens -- a fair number of the born-again narratives I've come across read like that. But the reason I was thinking of this group in particular is that, for a lot of people on the post-Christian agnostic spectrum, organized religions really are the bad guys: nondenominational Christianity is usually given a pass, but actual churches get blamed for all sorts of stuff. That's a nontrivial obstacle for someone raised in that milieu.

Dharmic religions don't seem to count as "organized" in this context, for reasons which are kind of opaque to me but probably have to do with exoticism. So I expect a lot of Western Buddhists and Hindus come out of this sort of space too -- n=1, but that's more or less how my college roommate found Hinduism.

You are right that my pithy summary was misleading. This may be a terminological point, but I am confused about how a hard-core scientific anti-realist can believe in predictions. At the very least, someone who thinks there is no objective physical reality has a hard time explaining why science seems like a one-way ratchet, with predictions always getting better and never getting worse.

I agree that science, like all facts, are socially-mediated. I think the case for incommensurability between certain scientific theories is overwhelming. But it seems like there must be some regularity external to human minds for scientific predictions to work the way we've observed them to work. (I vaguely recall my Philosophy of Science professor saying something like "Preserve the phenomena")

In short, the problem of Induction says that we can't prove the sun will rise tomorrow in the sense that we can prove that 3 + 5 = 8. But hardcore scientific anti-realism proponents seem like they should be surprised when the sun rises tomorrow (more precisely, when they experience what appears to be the sun rising tomorrow) because they literally believe that there is no mechanism that suggests it will happen. (Or am I just setting up a strawman?)

I like your explanation of the distinction between (metaphysical) skepticism and anti-realism. Another way of putting it would be that the for the skeptic, the standard to evaluate beliefs/theories is correspondence with objective reality, but they also believe that there is no reliable way to compare map and territory and therefore all our beliefs are unreliable. The anti-realist denies objective reality is a meaningful concept, judges beliefs by some other standard like consistency or pragmatic usefulness, and if happy to endorse them if they satisfy it.

Or as Thomas Nagel memorably put it in this passage from The View From Nowhere, epistemological theories can be classified as skeptic, reductive (meaning not "reductionist" but "anti-realist"), or heroic:

Skeptical theories take the contents of our ordinary or scientific beliefs about the world to go beyond their grounds in ways that make them impossible to defend against doubt. There are ways we might be wrong that we can’t rule out. Once we notice this unclosable gap we cannot, except with conscious irrationality, maintain our confidence in those beliefs.

Reductive theories grow out of skeptical arguments. Assuming that we do know certain things, and acknowledging that we could not know them if the gap between content and grounds were as great as the skeptic thinks it is, the reductionist reinterprets the content of our beliefs about the world so that they claim less. He may interpret them as claims about possible experience or the possible ultimate convergence of experience among rational beings, or as efforts to reduce tension and surprise or to increase order in the system of mental states of the knower, or he may even take some of them, in a Kantian vein, to describe the limits of all possible experience: an inside view of the bars of our mental cage. In any case on a reductive view our beliefs are not about the world as it is in itself – if indeed that means anything. They are about the world as it appears to us…

Heroic theories acknowledge the great gap between the grounds of our beliefs about the world and the contents of those beliefs under a realist interpretation, and they try to leap across the gap without narrowing it. The chasm below is littered with epistemological corpses.[1]

[footnote 1] A fourth reaction is to turn one’s back on the abyss and announce that one is now on the other side. This was done by G.E.Moore.

Book recommendation. Borrowed it from the SingInst library. Haven't finished it yet, but what I've read is really good, and since you like Kuehnelt-Leddihn-style history of ideas and coherentistic epistemology you'll almost certainly dig it.

Also relevant to FAI: we're trying to pull a similar thing. Inventing Justification or summat.

Mostly agree, except I don't understand why you think the OP's use of "realism" is nonstandard.

I'd argue, however, that Marx and Marxism are shot through with moralisms, starting with the Labor Theory of Value, Surplus Value, etc. Any theory of Objective value is implicitly a morality.

Marxian value theory is not normative axiology; it's a positive but partial theory of price formation and certain macroeconomic variables which is true in some worlds but not others.

(This is not to deny that people who try to change the world but deny being moralists are confused on that point or using language differently.)

I'd argue, however, that Marx and Marxism are shot through with moralisms, starting with the Labor Theory of Value, Surplus Value, etc. Any theory of Objective value is implicitly a morality.

Agreed. They were reflectively inconsistent in much the same way the OP's mother is inconsistent with respect to her (physical) non-realism.

I fail to see how this is supposed to contradict what I said.

(B) follows from (A), at least if we take (B) as elliptical for

(B') to attempt to enforce it, if the ideology indicates that this is valuable, with all the energy of which he is capable.

And Mussolini's ideology presumably did indicate that enforcement of Italian values is valuable.

I may be misunderstanding you, but it seems I have the same objection to this assertion that I raised here. That is, I don't necessarily know my own moral beliefs, let alone my society's. (Of course, that's not to say that you don't; if all you meant by "which I do" was a claim about torekp's knowledge, I withdraw my objection.)

If one has moral certainty and a moral anti-realist position, one is deeply confused.

It only seems that way to you because you've retained enough meta-moral realism to believe that there's something wrong with having an inconsistent about your position on morality.

If one has moral certainty and a moral anti-realist position, one is deeply confused.

I think that if one has moral uncertainty and a moral anti-realist position, one is also deeply confused.

Both certainty and uncertainty imply that there's something real to be certain or uncertain about.

thanks!

I think at this point it might be helpful to taboo "reality". I would rewrite your statement as something like this:

If my senses are transmitting perceptions that appear to be the result of my interaction with another agent, then, assuming that the agent does indeed have the ability to operate independently of myself, that agent and I share at least one communication channel that is common to both of us.

That sentence is unwieldy and, frankly, boring, but it does avoid making unwarranted assertions.

That said, going into this much detail is probably not useful. If you and your interlocutor can't even agree on whether both of you exist, there probably isn't much room for productive dialogue.