We have folks on both sides of this question, so it should make for an interesting discussion.
(I’m a ‘yes’, by the way.)
257 thoughts on “Is biology reducible to physics?”
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The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
keiths,
Well that’s put a value on my hugs 🙁
Beers if we meet IRL?
Is the Keiths and Walto show over? I am tempted to open a Keiths and Walto thread so anyone interested in their exchanges can read them there and those who don’t can save wear on their scroll finger.
Adult behaviour is requested.
So far, I have found her mainly easy to follow, except for a few involved arguments which I skim to be frank (eg the very detailed discussion of sortals and genus and species and what we are allowed so assume for conceptual/analytical arguments based on how competent speakers use such terms).
I did skip to the conclusion and noticed she assigns (what I think is a correctly) limited role for metaphysics. Namely, to clear up thinking on how we do/should use words but then to leave the determination of the nature of reality to science. Apparently her next project is a book length version of that type of deflationism.
I don’t remember you posting a link to her stuff commenting on the manifest and scientific images, but there is a chapter in her book where she argues (roughly!) that Sellars thought the entire scientific framework would eventually replace the manifest framework, but she counters that since both can never be complete, that cannot happen. Is that what the paper you mention covered?
You did post a link to her 1997 paper which tried to counter Kim’s arguments about the causal impotence of mental events under non-reductive physicalism. I found it interesting. However, after the L&R series of backhanded attacks on Kim (“best of a bad lot”), I have to wonder if all those arguments about types of supervenience and causes are irrelevant. Too bad, because I spent a lot of time trying to understand the intricacies!
One last question about Thomasson: why did she choose that picture for her web site (possibly NSFW!). Is it some kind of visual reminder of her Scandinavian ancestry? Or possibly some obscure form of feminist irony?
Keith: Since KN is here, I’ll leave it to him to respond if he wants.
So I take it that you think SwampMan’s mental representations and referring terms would have intentionality. However, if he saw “his” (that is, the duplicated person’s) wife, then his thought “this is my wife” would misrepresent and if he said “this is my wife” then “wife” would refer but not correctly.
As best I can tell from the IP chapter, Dennett does not answer the fact question directly. He says instead that the proposed situation is so distant from what could happen in physical reality, where people have histories and have evolved, that it is a pointless thought experiment.
(However, physics has a similar thought experiment with quite possibly similar probabilities: Boltzman brains. However it does conform to physics, ie thermodynamical, laws).
Millikan’s comment (PDF) is too subtle for me to do justice to (let alone dismiss!) in a brief blog post. But I understand her as taking the thought experiment seriously, but arguing that given its total disregard for what we know about reality, we have no rational reason to conclude anything about Swampman’s intentionality.
RTH,
Sure!
Alan Fox:
Alan,
Your bias is showing again. In the future, please pay attention to who actually says what instead of lumping me in with walto.
Please direct your request to the appropriate party and leave me out of it.
Bruce,
Here is the comment in which he links original intentionality to autopoiesis.
Bruce,
It still baffles me that Dennett dodges the Swampman question, because unlike Millikan’s, his position doesn’t seem to be threatened by it.
Fine with me. This thread, guano, moderation, the keiths and walto show, walto does it alone, not sure what the difference is if the same content is there.
Most of the Dennett stuff was on a thread supposedly on obscurantism, then keiths wanted it moved to some other thread, and as I give give give when he asks, asks, asks, it’s now here. But if it’d stayed there, that would have been fine too, IMHO. He starts most of the threads, and then directs discussions elsewhere and/or whines if it gets moved without his permission, so I think it’s best if you just let him continue to conduct.
Or he may chastise you violently one more time.
Bah. Now would have been good for us. Thanks anyhow.
keiths,
I find the fact that you are baffled that Dennet dodged a question, rather baffling really. That is his specialty.
I heard him recently talking about how the hard question of consciousness has been solved. What is his rationale for saying that? Well, because all the problems concerning how the brain works are hard questions, so consciousness is no harder to explain than any other capabilities. We just can’t yet.
Viola. Problem solved.
Dennet said that practically verbatim on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, and the bozos on the show like Evan and Steve just nodded and said, Oh, yes, very interesting, very interesting. So there is no hard problem of consciousness. I see. Very clever Daniel.
Terrific skeptics.
Hey, that’s great that you are finding her book easy now. When I first recommended her you took a look and said it seemed too hard. You are really progressing, man! The article I reprinted is called, “A Non-reductivist Solution to Mental Causation.” The same argument appears early in her book.
Dunno where that pic comes from. It’s odd, isn’t it?
I think I may have mentioned that while Thomasson is maybe my favorite living philosopher (it makes me happy that we had one prof. in common), my least favorite is also a woman–Diana Raffman. The paper I recently finished on aesthetics is an attack on a paper of hers–and I really dislike her epistemology and phil. of mind too.
However, as people know here, I’m too nice and courtly ever to really whack anybody.
BTW (and ETA and etc.) there’s a solid critique of Thomasson’s book by Terry Horgan on the Notre Dame philosophy reviews site. I don’t know if she has responded anywhere.
I think so, yeah. But as (you tell me) Millikan says, once stuff gets really far-fetched it’s hard to know what to say.
Er, yes, and then there is the following exchange I had with him…
walto,
I didn’t ask for comments to be moved. I simply said:
That is indeed my position. I admire Dennett immensely for what he is able to do with the philosophical resources at his command, but I don’t start off where he does. Dennett thinks that intentionality consists of what is attributed to a system on the basis of the stance taken towards that system. So realism about intentionality is ruled out from the very beginning, and I don’t see why it should be.
I’m a realist about original intentionality and I’m not afraid to admit it! So in that respect I would seem to align with Searle. But Searle locates original intentionality in the brain, which strikes me as quite wrong-headed; original intentionality is a feature of the whole organism, not one of its parts. And I see this kind of original intentionality, what I call “somatic intentionality” as pre- or non-linguistic (‘discursive’) and in particular non-decompositional. Individuation between somatic intentional contents is going to be very loose and imprecise, though it will be based on the specific tasks or purposes that the organism’s activity is oriented towards. Put otherwise, somatic intentionality doesn’t conform to Evans’ Generality Constraint for conceptual content.
(I leave it open whether non-discursive, somatic intentionality is nonconceptual content or a different kind of conceptual content. Still haven’t figured out where I want to come down on that issue.)
So why does a bacterium have original intentionality and the two-bitser have derived intentionality? Because the former is an autopoietic system that engenders significance and meaning in its environment through its purposive activity, and the latter isn’t.
Kantian Naturalist,
Nice post.
phoodoo:
Somehow, I doubt the accuracy of your paraphrase. More likely, Dennett was saying that the so-called “Hard Problem” is no harder than the so called “Easy Problem”.
And:
Could you provide an actual quote instead of a paraphrase?
Also, don’t forget to tell us (on the “tautology” thread) why fitness is tautological if batting averages are not.
KN,
That quote is from me, not BruceS. I’m glad I accurately represented your position.
walto,
If you liked that, you’re going to love the book!
keiths,
Oh, I know where the quote was from — why it showed up as being from BruceS in my post, I don’t know. And yes, you did accurately convey my position! Thank you!
The question Dennett would have us ask is, why should be believe that there is any such thing as a “hard problem of consciousness” in the first place?
Ticking away here in the depths of the problem is Dennett’s commitment to verificationism. It’s not a verificationism about semantics, though. It’s something else, and until I read Every Thing Must Go I didn’t see it. Dennett is committed to verificationism about epistemic significance. If a question can’t be formulated in terms that admit of empirical, publicly available criteria as to what would count as a good answer, then it’s not a question that we should bother asking.
With this commitment firmly in place, Dennett is justified in shrugging his shoulders at qualia — because no statement about such ostensibly private states (the qualia) can be publicly verified. It’s not that statements about qualia are meaningless, but that they aren’t interesting enough to be worth our time.
And it must be stressed that when Chalmers makes this distinction between “the easy problem of consciousness” and “the hard problem of consciousness”, and he wants to justify the intelligibility of statements about qualia, he does so on the basis of a completely different theory of meaning than anything Dennett would accept. Dennett’s semantics comes out of Quine, Wittgenstein, and Sellars; Chalmer’s semantics comes out of Kripke, Kaplan, Stalnaker, and Jackson. It’s all about pragmatism (Dennett) vs. realism (Chalmers) in the semantics that then drives their respective “intuitions” about qualia, and thence about whether there’s a difference that makes a difference between the easy and hard problems of consciousness. (Though it’s also true that Chalmers and Jackson have a much more demanding conception of “explanation” than Dennett does, since Chalmers thinks that all explanations are reductive.)
KN,
Perhaps you clicked on ‘Quote in reply’ under Bruce ‘s comment in which he quotes me? If so, the software assumed that you were quoting him, not me.
Yes, that’s what happened!
Is “let’s continue elsewhere” not a request to move? Is this like the doubtful/dubious distinction?
Are you OK? (And if you are, please be gentle, because, again, this stuff is soooooo complicated for me if you don’t put it into “steps” with numbers and variously strewn therefores.)
walto:
Feel free to start more threads of your own. The Thomasson paper would be a great topic for a thread. I’ll probably do one in the next couple of days if you don’t beat me to it.
I do feel thus free, thanks. And when I’ve wanted to start a thread, I’ve done so.
Yes, I agree.
That’s why I ignore keiths when he says that there is no sign of semantics in the neural signals. That’s the wrong place to look. When I say that the brain is a semantic engine, I mostly mean that it is engaged in managing our interactions with the world.
I’ve ordered a copy.
Wow. Looks really nice. Congrats!
Wish there were a “look inside” thingy at Amazon, though. 🙁
A “Look Inside” feature would be nice. I don’t know why Amazon has that available for some books and not others. I’ll ask the publisher.
Here’s the table of contents:
Introduction: Why a New Account of Intentionality?
Methodological Preliminaries
The Plan of the Book
Chapter 1: Intentionality and The Problem of Transcendental Friction
Original Intentionality and the Naturalist Challenge
The Naturalistic Challenge to Intentionality
The Demand for Transcendental Friction
Chapter 2: The Epistemic Given and the Semantic Given in C. I. Lewis
Lewis’s Kantian-Pragmatist Rejection of the Epistemic Given
Lewis’s Commitment to the Semantic Given
Lewis on Language and Meaning: Why Lewis Accepted The Semantic Given
Chapter 3: Discursive Intentionality and ‘Nonconceptual Content’ in Sellars
Conceptualistic Pragmatism and Physical Realism
Sellars Between Physical Realism and Conceptualistic Pragmatism
The Concept of ‘Non-Conceptual Content’
Chapter 4: The Retreat from Nonconceptualism: Discourse and Experience in Brandom and McDowell
Brandom’s Rationalistic Pragmatism
McDowell’s Transcendental Empiricism
The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate
Chapter 5: Somatic Intentionality and Habitual Normativity in Merleau-Ponty’s Account of Lived Embodiment
Motor Intentionality and Habitual Normativity
Sellars’s Bifurcation of Somatic Intentionality
Before Jones: The Myth of Julia
Chapter 6: The Possibilities and Problems of Bifurcated Intentionality
Myths of the Given and Transcendental Friction
Words Made Flesh (Compare and Contrast)
Can ‘Intentionality’ Be ‘Naturalized’?
Conclusion
Appendix: Is Phenomenology Committed to the Myth of the Given?
Works Cited
Neil,
Yet you said this about a flip-flop:
Why look for meaning in a flop if not in a neuron?
KN,
Amazon doesn’t list a price for the hardcover. Do you know what it’s going to be, approximately?
I’ll probably buy the Kindle version, but I’m curious.
Unfortunately, not cheap. The publisher lists the price as $99. I wish I could say that it’s worth it, but that’s a lot of money for a 200-pg book. And I don’t know if it will be re-issued in paperback. I do have some buyer’s remorse for having gone with this particular publisher. Also, I wasn’t given a choice as to cover design — that’s just the standard design they use on all their books. I’m grateful to P&C for all they’ve done for me, but if I do a second book, I’ll send it to a much more prestigious publisher that will give me a bit more flexibility.
KN:
Thanks. I’ve ordered the Kindle version. 🙂
Anyway, here’s the gist of the argument — and it’s good for me to practice this, for interviews and the like —
I start off with John Haugeland’s distinction between three different theories of original intentionality: neo-Cartesianism, neo-behaviorism, and neo-pragmatism. Neo-Cartesianism locates intentionality in mental states, neo-behaviorism locates intentionality in organism-environment interactions, and neo-pragmatism locates intentionality in socio-linguistic norms. The main reason why it seems like intentionality cannot be naturalized — in Alex Rosenberg’s eliminativism — is that he assumes a neo-Cartesian conception of intentionality. I adopt what I call “bifurcated intentionality”: that there are two different kinds of original intentionality, somatic intentionality (which captures what the neo-behaviorists were right about) and discursive intentionality (which captures what the neo-pragmatists were right about).
The main reason why we want both kinds is that we need to satisfy the need for “transcendental friction”: we want to be able to guarantee that our thoughts have empirical content, or are about the world that we discover and do not create. I argue that C. I. Lewis, Sellars, and McDowell all try to satisfy this demand in different ways and that none of their views are entirely satisfactory. Instead I use Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment to develop a theory of somatic intentionality as pre-reflective and pre-discursive. Since the main worry in the Sellarsian tradition is that this a version of the Myth of the Given, I take some time to show why Merleau-Ponty is not vulnerable to that worry.
This allows intentionality to be naturalized if living bodies and linguistic norms are naturalizable. On the one hand, neither is an attractive candidate for positing non-natural or super-natural entities; bodies and languages certainly exist in space and in time, and have their own conditions of genesis and extinction. On the other hand, both pose obstacles to any kind of easily reductive naturalism. (I’m cagey about that last point in the book because I hadn’t thought it through as clearly as it needs to be.)
Bottom-line: (i) discursive intentionality and somatic intentionality are the two main kinds of original intentionality; (2) intentionality can be naturalized if we adopt a non-reductive naturalism, but not if we insist on reductive naturalism.
Kantian Naturalist,
Re: Merleau-Ponty, who are the non-English speaking philosophers that we should be reading today? It seems like nobody in the analytic philosophy world reads anything not originally written in English since….I don’t know…Tarski and a couple of the other Polish logicians?
(FWIW, I guy I went to grad school used to call M-P “Merly-Pontu” –not sure why.)
I find it hard to think of much that isn’t an example. Is there any doubt that QT or at least quantum electrodynamics is the appropriate arena of physical theory for treating the multitude of interlocking quantum gadgets that form the molecular basis of life. I think so, but how many problems in biology are treated from first principles? All that comes immediately to mind are some computational efforts in protein folding which in fact involves a considerable number of judicious approximations. But I am no expert in this area.
But even so I lack the sense of what you think would be achieved philosophically by such “reductive” treatments in the first place. Consider the singlet state of two entangled spin 1/2 particles that figures so heavily in the discussions of quantum foundations. THe Hilbert ray of this rotationally symmetric system is
|1+>|2-> – |1->|2+>
in the usual notation. What does this “state” tell us? One is a negation: that the individual spins are undefined and the second is a counter-factual: That if joint measurements of spin are made along two axes the results will correlate as minus the cosine of the angle between the axes (upon which the above expression will no longer be a correct description). That exhausts what we know about it. Where is the ontological content here? There is no physical process or mechanism revealed by this correlation. As Freeman Dyson stated (in the context of quantum electrodynamics) “the processes of nature described by these (most fundamental of) equations are hidden from us.”.
This is the kind of content that your “reduction” if it can be carried out, can be expected to achieve. We will still be as puzzled by what and how and why the physical world is constituted as before.
If the usual and often qualitative interpretive rubrics of biochemistry were in some biological context found to be completely lacking a more fundamental treatment would almost surely be attempted if it were thought to be feasible at all. This would be an interesting endeavor but its aim would not be to make a philosophical point about reduction but to do what science is always trying to do which is to describe the relations between the appearances correctly.
Humph. You bought my book USED.
X(
Richard never would have done that to me, I bet.
To be fair I haven’t bought one at all. Er……because…erm?..I want a signed copy! Yes that’s it. Please make it out to “My dearest HuggyBear x x”.
No prob. I could give it to your Aunt Sue at the villa!
Analytic philosophers are hardly a uniform bunch, but I’d say that within the past twenty years or so (since the 1990s) there have been increasingly friendly appropriations of various Continental philosophers within the analytic tradition. When I was in grad school (1997-2005) the running gag was, “there are philosophers who write on Continental philosophers for analytic audiences, and they both have good jobs.” But even then there was a lot of really good analytic work on Continental figures, and it’s only gotten better since.
I myself started off doing Continental philosophy in a pluralistic program that was friendly to both analytic and Continental philosophy, and ended up writing on Nietzsche. I’ve come across extremely good, analytically-influenced work on Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Sartre, Beauvoir, Arendt, Foucault, and even Derrida. Lately I’ve noticed that people writing on Adorno are finding bridges between his stuff and people like Cavell, Sellars, Brandom, and McDowell.
If the question is, “who is the most important Continental philosopher per se?”, I’d probably say Hegel. There’s no shortage of top-notch analytic interpretations of Hegel by people like Bob Pippin, Terry Pinkard, Ken Westphal, Paul Redding, and Robert Stern. For 20th-century Continental philosophy, Heidegger. Here I’d say that Hubert Dreyfus has been the major influence driving analytic interpretations of Heidegger, and through his former students (like Bil Blattner, Taylor Carman and Iain Thomson) analytic-friendly studies of Heidegger are really taking off. (I can’t stand Heidegger, but there’s no questioning his influence or importance.)
The Continental philosophers I myself work on, apart from Merleau-Ponty, are Adorno and Levinas. There is some analytically-influenced work on Adorno that seems to have started with Jay Bernstein. Bernstein is an interesting cat — he was a Sellarsian in the 60s, then discovered Hegel through Sellars. His book on Adorno is what introduced me to Sellars, Brandom, and McDowell — whereas for most philosophers, it was an introduction to Adorno. Analytic-friendly readings of Adorno can also be found in recent work by Brian O’Connor, Espen Hammer, and Martin Shuster. I’ve read a lot of Deleuze but I don’t work on him, though I’m a huge admirer of John Protevi’s work on Deleuze and science.
Quite a few factors have gone into shaping the rift between analytic and Continental philosophy, though I think that this rift is largely (though not entirely) a thing of the past. I find that my own efforts to bridge the rift are warmly regarded by both analytic and Continental philosophers under 45 or so; older philosophers are more hostile, because either they are so heavily trained in analytic philosophy that they don’t understand how I can find any value in Continental philosophy, or the other way around.
I’m afraid I’m mostly ignorant of contemporary Continental philosophy. There is a new movement in Continental philosophy that goes under various names like “speculative realism” or “object-oriented ontology”, etc. Here the big names are Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Adrian Johnston. I’ve read some stuff by the first two but nothing by the others. All of them are responding in various ways to Alain Badiou, of whom I know almost nothing. What unifies these figures is the rediscovery of metaphysical realism. Metaphysical realism was virtually destroyed by phenomenology and esp. by Heidegger’s criticism of metaphysics. But now metaphysical realism has come back with a vengeance! And these are also philosophers who take science seriously and take the time to understand it — in sharp contrast with Heidegger, who barely knew any science and, quite frankly, was afraid of it.
walto,
But I cherish the fact that my used copy is signed by the author, even if the dedication is to someone else. 🙂
If KN can figure out how to sign my Kindle copy of his book, I’ll be set.
Kantian Naturalist,
Why should one care what question DENNET would have us ask? His answer to the question of how do we explain the difficult question of consciousness is to say, well, don’t ask that question, ask a different one. Only fools and philosophy students would accept such a ridiculous answer.
His book is called Consciousness Explained for crying out loud.
So MY question to him would be, WHY did you call it Consciousness Explained, when you don’t explain consciousness at all!! The answer to that is NOT, “Well, its the wrong question.” The hell it is Daniel. You are just incapable of answering that, but you are a charlatan selling books.
Anyway, Keiths will still believe you, so you can sell one to him.
keiths,
Because fitness and survival are the same meaning fool, its been explained to you about 100 times. That means your batting average is zero.
One of the many things that philosophers do is figure out which questions are worth asking, and why. Dennett’s view is that a certain kind of question about consciousness is a meaningless question. Put otherwise, the idea that there is a “hard problem of consciousness”, as distinct from “the easy problem of consciousness”, rests on a mistake about cognitive significance. (The name of that mistake: the Myth of the Given.)
Dennett might be wrong (though I do not think he is), but it would surely be anti-philosophical to assume that he must be wrong due to one’s dogmatic metaphysical or religious commitments.
That’s a pretty strong ad hominem from someone who gives little appearance of having actually worked through any of Dennett’s arguments or intuition-pumps.
KN,
That last point is critical, though. If the intentionality of living bodies and linguistic norms can be reduced to syntax, then it no longer qualifies as original intentionality.
phoodoo,
I’m still awaiting an actual Dennett quote, and not merely a questionable phoodoo paraphrase, to justify your claim about Dennett’s argument.
keiths:
phoodoo:
Fitness is a measurement of average success in survival and reproduction. A batting average is a measurement of average success in batting. If fitness is a tautology, then so are batting averages.
Good job, phoodoo! You can save MLB teams the millions of dollars they’ve been wasting on hitters with high batting averages. You’ll be famous for revolutionizing the game!