Multisense Realism

0:51 What’s down there?
0:54 The laws of fundamental physics, quantum mechanics,
0:57 perhaps string theory below that,
0:59 perhaps a final theory of everything,
1:01 the holy grail of science.
1:04 I see a challenge to this model of how the world works.
1:08 It’s called Strong Emergence.
1:10 And it claims that each level of the hierarchy of the sciences
1:15 from physics to chemistry to biology to psychology
1:18 has its own special laws.

Right away I have problems with the assumptions being made here. Physics, chemistry, and biology may have their own special laws, but they are laws about physical, concrete, tangible phenomena, not feelings, perceptions, ideas etc. In the list “physics to chemistry to biology to psychology” one of these is not like the other. If psychology had laws, they would pertain not to organs, cells, or molecules but to aspects of conscious experience where no tangible object appears at all.

2:40 George, the claim that has been growing is that
2:44 in order to explain how everything works,
2:47 you need this concept of emergence.
2:49 Okay. Well, let’s ask the following question.
2:52 If we knew everything about what was the state of the universe
2:57 at the time of the last scattering
2:59 of the cosmic microwave background of matter.
3:02 Which is basically 14 billion years ago,
3:04 could you predict what you and I are saying
3:07 to each other today from that data?
3:09 Some of the strong physicalists believe that, that would be
3:12 the case and I think it’s absolutely clear that
3:15 there it isn’t remotely possible this would be the case,
3:18 because the fluctuations on the surface of the last scattering,
3:21 if you believe standard cosmology
3:23 or random Garcia fluctuation.
3:25 Now, out of that, emergence has taken place over time
3:28 of animals, of human beings are able to think.
3:33 And human beings then can discuss and produce books
3:36 like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity,
3:39 Darwin’s book on the origin of the species, okay.
3:42 Now, those books contain logical argumentation.
3:47 There is no way that logical argumentation was implied
3:51 in any sense by that data
3:52 on the cosmic microwave background surface.
3:55 Something has happened between there and there
3:57 which has led to that logical argumentation appearing
4:01 in the real world which it has undoubtedly has done.
4:04 On its surface, that’s correct.
4:07 But what I could do is I can throw in an evolutionary picture
4:10 and then it would develop the nervous system and the brain.
4:13 And then you have interactions between brains
4:15 and communities and I can give a story.
4:18 Yes, but the physics does not come into that story,
4:22 in any way, except facilitating what, what —
4:24 you’re bringing in a Darwinian picture.
4:26 No physics book has got Darwin’s law as a law of physics.
4:29 Sure. Sure.
4:30 No physics books has got a law, has got the Hodgkin Huxley
4:34 equations as a law of physics.
4:35 They are imagined.
4:37 But those rules or laws or understandings came out of
4:41 a mechanism of the brain that somebody came up with.

That last line is a good example of how much the idea of emergence is based on circular reasoning. To say that understanding is a mechanism of the brain assumes the conclusion that emergence is supposed to be explaining. We do not actually know that any such mechanism exists in the brain, only that we can see certain correlations between our direct experiences and our perceptions of activity in the brain through imaging devices. Any direction of causation from brain to experience is being inferred by our preference, not compelled by an understanding of how or why experiences emerge from unexperienced brains. The fact that a brain is itself a part of our experience is overlooked, as is the possibility that such images and appearances of brains could be generated by, for, and within conscious experience.

4:44 And in some ultimate analytical sense, you could describe how
4:50 those ideas came, in terms of something in the physical world.
4:53 Unless the claim is that at some levels, there is something
4:59 that is absolutely non-reducible to the physical.
5:03 The claim is that through some of the processes you indicated,
5:08 many of which are not physical,
5:10 although they’re allowed by the physics.
5:11 Brains came into being which are able to carry out
5:14 logical argumentation as an argumentation
5:17 at the psychological level.
5:19 And that argumentation is what leads to, for instance,
5:23 E to the I pi plus one is equal to zero
5:26 being written down on a piece of paper.
5:28 The physics knows absolutely nothing about that.
5:30 You have to have the emergence of the possibility
5:33 of logical argumentation to take place.
5:36 That logical argumentation then has the possibility
5:38 of controlling what appears on the piece–
5:41 So, so, okay.
5:42 But you’re not requiring anything of a non-physical
5:45 nature here at this point, or are you?
5:47 I am. An idea is a non-physical thing.
5:51 An idea is realized in the brain
5:53 but the idea itself is not a physical thing.
5:56 Okay.
5:57 Now everything we see around us here, basically, except for
6:00 the trees was designed by the human mind.
6:03 So, the mind is coarsely effective and thoughts
6:06 are coarsely effective but a thought is not a physical thing.
6:09 It’s realized in a physical way
6:10 but it is not of itself a physical thing.

At this point, I agree with George at least on one thing – that indeed ideas are not physical or reducible to the physical, unless we dilute the term physical so much that it really includes anything and becomes meaningless. I disagree, however with the assertion that “An idea is realized in the brain“. Introducing this term realized carries with it the full weight of physicalist bias, rolling right over the Explanatory Gap and Hard Problem and making the same mistake that Galileo and Locke made by pronouncing physical/extended properties “Primary” and everything else Secondary.

Physically, we see no process of realization, whatever that might mean, inside of the tissues of a brain. We see cells, fluids and molecules moving around. If we use physical instruments to bounce electromagnetic force off of the water in the brain we can read into those movements other geometric patterns of activity, but that activity, as far as science is concerned, is purely quantitative change in the way that charge/polarity is distributed. There’s nothing more likely to emerge from the Magnetic Resonance of water in the brain than any other physical property of any organ. It’s all just visual geometries overlaid onto molecular movements over time.

We now have two filler terms, emergence and realization, to smuggle in unscientific, non-explanatory fictions into physics and conscious experiences that create a false bridge between them, doing unspecified non-physical things in both directions. In reality, we have not established or explained anything, only added abstractions to hide our ignorance and make ourselves feel clever. The explanatory gap remains as dualistic as ever, with Physics, Chemistry, Biology, brains, and ‘realization’ back in the Cartesian Res Extensa realm, and Psychology, ideas, emergence, eiπ +1=0, and logical argumentation firmly in Res Cogitans.

Also mentioned by this point is the seductively innocuous term level: “at the psychological level“, “at some levels, there is something that is absolutely non-reducible to the physical.” This idea of levels is itself completely non-reducible to the physical. It is an idea about our typical ranges of perception. Physical phenomena, if they could exist independently of all detection and perception, would have no levels. Every scale from the Planck to the Cosmological would exist in the same ‘level’ and there would be no other. Physics would not get blurry vision trying to focus on a grain of sand or have to move its head to see all of the Milky Way. Everything would just exist as it is – particles unable to detect each other in any way. Nothing to aggregate or sum instantaneous events into linear time durations. Nothing to make novel geometric wholes appear (invisibly? intangibly?) from scale-dependent perceptual appearances of adjacency of parts. We all know that at the particle scale the ratio of particle to space is incredibly minute, and there is no particular reason to lump those particles together into the shapes that happen to be visible in human perception.

6:13 The idea exists and it has its own validity
6:17 but it is only realized
6:20 because of the physical things going on below?
6:23 I mean, if there’s nothing else.
6:25 Unless you’re saying that the laws of physics,
6:27 when they get to a certain level, create thing that
6:30 in principle can never be understood
6:32 by the microphysics laws.
6:34 Well, it can’t be understood.
6:35 You can’t understand E to the I pie plus one is equal to zero
6:39 in terms of maxual decrays [ph] and interacting electrons.
6:41 I think that’s pretty obvious.
6:43 You can’t understand it at that level.
6:44 You can’t understand that at that level, that’s right.
6:48 But ultimately, that’s the only way it’s realized in terms of–
6:51 No, no. That’s just the way it’s realized, yes.
6:53 So, you’ve got multiple levels.
6:55 You’ve got the atomic level.
6:57 You’ve got the molecular level, you’ve got the systems level.
6:59 All of these are simultaneously causations taking place
7:02 simultaneously, and all of them, in such a way,
7:05 that the logical thing can be worked out.
7:07 But it’s the logic which is driving what happens.
7:10 It’s the physics which enables it to happen
7:12 but the logic is deciding the outcome.
7:15 So, you have what would be downward causation?
7:19 – Downward realization. – Downward realization.
7:22 So, what’s the difference between causation
7:23 and realization? You didn’t like my word causation?
7:25 I’ve been persuaded recently, different from what I’ve written
7:28 about before, that causation is always horizontal.
7:32 Emergence is vertical, and realization is downwards.
7:35 Oh, yeah. That, that I can, I can understand that.
7:38 I’m just trying to think this out,
7:40 get me wherever you want to get me.

In this section, amidst more discussion of levels and realization are more physicalist assumptions that are treated as a priori givens: “But it’s the logic which is driving what happens. It’s the physics which enables it to happen, but the logic is deciding the outcome.” Nobody can claim to know that this is true. We know that when we observe physical phenomena and physical instruments, and then analyze those observations with certain mechanistic modes of sense-making, we can tell causality stories that make sense. We do not, however, know that what we imagine is driving those stories is the only driver of causality, or indeed if it is even correct that it is physical appearances that are doing more enabling than the non-physical appearances. If the universe were nothing but logic and physics, there would not even be a way for any part of such a universe to conceive of any alternative. Logical and physical would describe everything, so the words would be meaningless.

We do not live in a universe like that. In our universe, logic and physics are but a small portion of what we experience. If anything emerges from that, there is so much more of it that it is hard to justify seeing the physical as the realizer and the perceptual as the emergent. Even under physicalism, we literally have no experience of anything other than perceptual phenomena. If the physical objects we perceive exist beyond all perception, we will never be able to access it except as inferences from our intellect (what noumena actually refers to, etymologically).

7:42 Well, what is useful as a computer is an analog
7:46 and when a computer, for instance, sorts a list of names,
7:49 you feed in a program at the top and an algorithm
7:53 is changed down through a series of virtual machines
7:56 to the bottom level, by compilers and interpreters.
7:59 And that’s the machine language at the bottom.
8:01 The machine language does it and then it goes up again
8:03 and what you fed in at the top, results in the list
8:06 being printed out.
8:08 The electrons flowing the gates enable it to happen
8:10 but it’s the algorithm which has decided
8:12 what will, in fact, happen.
8:14 But the algorithm is represented ultimately
8:16 in terms of the transistors and…
8:19 Correct. And at this level, it’s the laws of —
8:22 it’s Maxwell’s equations, and Newton’s equations
8:24 at this level. But at this level,
8:26 it is the logic of the algorithm which is deciding
8:29 what will happen at that level and ultimately, it’s that
8:32 which decides which electrons will flow through
8:35 which gates at the bottom level.
8:36 It’s the top level decides what will be done
8:39 and the lower levels carry out the work.

At this point, the argument really loses all grounding in physics and succumbs entirely to a cartoon workflow from top level non-physical algorithms to bottom level physical semiconductor components and back. All of these claims are false:

“that’s the machine language at the bottom“
“it’s the algorithm which has decided“
“But the algorithm is represented ultimately in terms of the transistors“

Any sort of language is a feature of how we understand and communicate consciously. Physics, if it could exist independently of consciousness, would not need a language, it has fundamental forces and statistically inevitable recombinations to do all of the ‘deciding’. Electromagnetism, not algorithms, are opening or closing gates. Transistors can have no inkling of any grand logic inscribed by human programmers in some non-physical never-never layer. They don’t need logic.

Microphysical behavior is the same regardless of whether or not they are grouped together in some semiotic schema. Those behaviors – which are nothing but the movement of particles relative to each other, do not represent anything. They are not terms in an algorithmic language. The machine components have no access to any other level or layer. Their presence is a purely tangible-haptic geometric-dynamic fact. Not only would other levels have no functional role in influencing electromagnetism, electromagnetism has no physical way to be influenced by them. It’s the interaction problem of Dualism. The only ghosts in the machine that physics allows are physical ghosts like charge, mass, and spin. Nothing physical is summing them up or transforming them into non-physical ‘seemings’.

As far as the connection between Machine language and Machine goes, I have discussed here why it does not survive causal closure, and is in fact just another infinitely broad explanatory gap between abstract logical concepts and concrete physical objects.

8:41 So, let me ask this question.
8:43 We know the H2O is water.
8:45 If I gave you some gas of hydrogen,
8:47 gas of oxygen and hydrogen, could you ever predict
8:50 that if you got a lot of it together, it would be wet?
8:53 No. The answer is no, you can’t.
8:55 This is one of the problems with–
8:57 Okay. So, I think there are people who say that you can.
9:00 Well, alright. Let me, let me–
9:01 Because you — when you know that the angle
9:03 between the hydrogen and the oxygen,
9:05 then you can put a lot together, you can see how they would slip,
9:07 and how wetness could occur.
9:09 There is a great problem in deriving the macro properties
9:12 of waters from the micro properties.
9:13 But let me make the following statement.
9:15 By the time you’ve done that, the hydrogen atom
9:18 no longer exists as a hydrogen atom.
9:20 It only exists as a water molecule.
9:22 So, the lower level no longer exists
9:24 as the individual entities.
9:25 They’ve got incorporated at a higher-level interchange.
9:27 Okay. But if you knew everything about
9:29 the hydrogen and the oxygen you should be able to predict
9:32 the wetness of water if you have it in groups?
9:35 You should. In the case of water, in principle, absolutely.
9:38 You can do that.

This popular example of emergence is another example of circular reasoning fouling up our understanding. What we experience as water has different aspects – in the visible sense, we see images of familiar blue colors, transparency, and shapes like waves and droplets, clouds, mist, etc. In the aural sense, we hear familiar splashing and bubbling, tidal waves crashing, sounds of pouring and spilling onto solid matter. There are flavors and odors that we associate with water also. All of these qualities can and are experienced regularly in ordinary dreams and imagination. If this is water, it is not physical.

H2O refers not to the water that we experience, but to a molecular arrangement that makes sense to us intellectually within the context of chemistry that can be applied to accurately predict and control many of the experiences in our waking consciousness of physical qualities. These are not necessarily different from dream qualities, as dreams can be quite exhaustively realistic, even under deliberate lucid inspection, however we can agree that while we are awake, our experiences of the physical world appear to us to have characteristics that *certainly must* separate it from mere dreams. Of course, during dreams, our waking experience may not be accessible at all, and we often have no way to doubt the reality of the dream, even if the contents appear to be floridly surreal by comparison with typical states of waking experience.

When we think more carefully about the relationship of H2O to wetness, there is nothing that suggests an emergence relationship, or a bottom-top flow of causality or morphology. Wetness is a tactile sensation. It can appear in a dream. H2O is an intellectual concept. It too can appear in a dream. What H2O is supposed to describe, if it could exist independently of consciousness, would not be wet at any scale. It would not constellate into novel geometries of visible appearance or tangible splashiness. H2O refers to a hypothetical, noumenal phenomenon that has no need for levels of emergence or realization, and no physical theory tells us how or why any of that would be physically conjured into existence. Again, the explanatory gap between noumenal molecular objects and any sort of wetness, image, sound, flavor or smell that we call water is infinitely wide. Nothing that happens in a brain sheds any light on this gap. We remain forever on the phenomenal side of it.

9:39 So, the question is, is the water example different
9:41 than your other examples?
9:42 Absolutely, because in the other cases,
9:45 there’s logical stuff going on at that level —
9:48 well, let me go back to that computer example.
9:50 Exactly the same logic gets re-written
9:53 at each of those levels.
9:54 It gets written in Fortran, it gets re-written in Java.
9:57 It’s written in Assembly.
9:58 Gets re-written in machine language.
10:00 And then, it gets incorporated into physical systems.
10:04 The logic is still the thing that is driving everything.
10:08 And the logic does get embodied in the lower level structures,
10:11 they are realizing it, but the thing that is driving it
10:14 is an abstract entity of the logic.Simple vs Weak Emergence
10:18 KUHN: This is Strong Emergence in its full-throated defense.
10:22 George is its apostle.
10:25 And I learned to distinguish Strong Emergence
10:28 from Simple or Weak Emergence.
10:31 The latter is the idea that radically different properties
10:34 in science, can, with deeper knowledge
10:36 of the underlying physics, be explained,
10:39 like the wetness of water.
10:41 Everyone signs on to Simple or Weak Emergence.
10:44 It’s not controversial.What is Strong Emergence
10:48 But Strong Emergence would be an astonishing thing.
10:51 Utterly transformative.
10:53 A new radical way of how the world works.
10:58 Could human logic,
11:00 at the highest macro level in our minds,
11:02 drive the physics at the lowest micro level in our brains?
11:07 Even though human logic itself is composed of nothing
11:10 but that same microphysics in our brains.
11:13 It sounds circular, mysterious, yet I’d be hard pressed
11:18 to name a more axial question in the physical world.
11:23 That’s why I subject Strong Emergence to strong critique
11:27 and here at the Crete conference,
11:29 I have no trouble finding strong critics.

This is a bit of reiteration of the previous examples, which I have addressed already. The logical leap is hidden between these lines:

“9:58 Gets re-written in machine language.
10:00 And then, it gets incorporated into physical systems.“

“Gets incorporated?” How? Physically? This is pure metaphor. The machine language is for our understanding. It has no causal power to manifest electromagnetic changes in a semiconductor. No, the only thing that gets incorporated into physical systems is voltage. Nothing is being written or read, just zapped electrostatically. Human hands are making the hardware that make that happen, not telepathic minds or software language. Nothing is being realized except in our imagination and perception. The emoji is not realized by code, but by a video display and human visual perception.

Moving on to the next interview in the video with David Albert, the assumptions of physicalism are even more explicit. His argument is summed up as follows:

13:29 And yes, I think that a sort of idea that the world
13:34 can potentially be reduced to a set of fundamental mechanical
13:38 phenomena in order to defend the sanctity of human life
13:43 or something like that, the specialness of consciousness,
13:46 the death of this project has been announced.
13:49 And those announcements have always turned out
13:52 to be premature.

This is not a philosophically persuasive argument. As many philosophers have pointed out, using scientific methods designed to specifically disqualify and remove non-physical qualities cannot be expected to have the same validity when deployed against physical phenomena as non- or trans-physical phenomena. It is like someone poking out their eyes and saying that they have been successful in navigating the world ever since using their other senses, so they are sure that color and image will turn out not to be visible either.

The expectation of material science eventually providing reductionistic explanations of immaterial appearances is what I like to call the fallacy of pseudo-credulity. It’s a betrayal of the very scientific spirit that it purports to champion.

In the next interview with Barry Loewer, the position is laid out as follows:

21:57 Strong Emergence says there’s something that happens,
21:59 in some sense, in the physical world,
22:01 that as you go up a level,
22:03 the laws of physics at the lowest levels will,
22:05 in principle, not be able to make that jump
22:08 to that level of biology.
22:11 That is right. I think that the weight of reason
22:14 is on the side of they can make the jump.
22:17 And here’s the reason I’m saying that.
22:19 That if the jump couldn’t be made,
22:21 then there must be some ways in which
22:24 the microphysical world evolves,
22:26 which can’t be accounted for in terms of microphysics.
22:29 And the reason for that is that any change in the world
22:33 at a macroscopic level, let’s say that involved biology
22:36 or psychology, could itself make for a change at the micro level.

Here again psychology is lumped in with physics and biology, completely ignoring the explanatory gap and assuming a difference in degree rather than the difference in kind that we experience directly. There is no level of brain activity that is psychological. Microphysical states cannot be assumed to jump from geometric states of tangible objects/particles to intangible states like percepts or concepts. If such a jump could exist, there is no good reason to justify calling that jump physical.

24:05 I think if causation as just evolving truths like —
24:08 look, if the psychological event hadn’t occurred,
24:12 then the physical event wouldn’t have occurred.
24:14 So, if you hadn’t thought about elephants,
24:17 you wouldn’t have waved your hand like that.
24:19 And there’s also a physical counterfactual.
24:22 If such and such had not gone on in your brain,
24:24 you wouldn’t have waved your hand like that.
24:25 And these are perfectly compatible with each other

The last line here exposes the fallacy. While neurological processes and psychological experiences can seem perfectly compatible with each other, that sense of compatibility is purely psychological, not physical. That’s a problem if we’re asserting physical reduction of causality. We lose the very parsimony that physical reduction explanations require to validate itself.

At the very end, Robert Kuhn at least touches on other possibilities.

25:15 If fundamental physics would be forever not capable
25:18 of explaining biology or psychology or anything else,
25:22 if that reduction could not ever be made, then one must conclude
25:27 that there are mechanisms by which the microworld evolves
25:31 which cannot be accounted for in terms of physics.
25:37 Is this a contradiction?
25:40 Yes, if reality is confined to the physical,
25:44 but there is no contradiction
25:46 if one dares venture beyond the known physical world.

That’s where panpsychism, nondualism and my own multisense realism come in…