As you've mentioned it twice now I'm just going to interject: I share the intuition that Mary learns something. I just deny that what she learns is not physical. I don't think physicalists are committed to the belief that all physical brain states can be directly instantiated by simply book-learning about those brain states.

Yeah pretty much. If we modified the argument so it was not reading black & white books (etc) but Mary's brain being induced into all possible states that are 'about' colour, then the thought experiments falls apart.

This is definitely a common problem.

Aye.

fair enough. I'm probably confusing some of the details of this experiment with the Dennett one using robots in which the physical instantiation is not an issue, because the robot is able to modify it directly

Noone has assumed such a thing.

Here is what the argument states:
a) Mary holds all physical knowledge about color vision
b) Mary can learn something new about color vision

That means the argument as a premise argues that all knowledge of color vision is more than all physical knowledge of color vision. What I think or do not think does not ever enter the equation. The argument begs the question completely on its own merits.

Here is a similar set of premises:
a) Mary knows every living being from planet earth
b) Mary gets to know a new living being

Ah, I think you are missing that (b) is the conclusion of the argument, not a premise.

It is both. Hence begging the question.

I can see how reading through the explanation of it that zumby posted could lead you to conclude that it's a premise of the thought experiment, but it is not properly so, compare this description of the original formulation from the Wiki:

You can see that it does not beg the question. What zumby posted is a summary of the argument where you conclude that yes, Mary learns something.

That is not a very good quote, as it would make it a question and not an argument. It is lacking these sentences:

When you add those, it is easy to see that Jackson is begging the question.

It is a question though, it's a thought experiment. The intent that the originator has in posing it is the expectation that most people's intuition will be to say yes

This is why I said before it's not properly an argument at all, it's an intuition pump. I have been saying "argument" and probably I should stop doing so since it seems to be confusing the issue. But as I said before, one of the arguments against the Mary's Room as a thought experiment is that it's not properly an argument, it's just an assertion based on an unjustified intuition. The point of the thought experiment is to tease out the intuition and make it plain

Or, in other words, "when you add those" lines from Jackson, that's not the thought experiment, that's Jackson's original response to the question posed by the thought experiment.

I dont think temperature is such a good example. Temperature is simply the measurement of how fast atoms are vibrating or moving around. I would imagine that you could measure the temperature of one atom. Dynamic arrangements dont create temperature, we simply measure something, and call it temperature. But the thing that we are measuring is always there ( the vibration or movement of atoms). I would probably argue that there is no such thing as temperature at all.

emergence just seems to be a way of saying "we dont know how this happens"

I have read Jackson's original essay, and he himself calls it an argument. And though he certainly implies it is an appeal to intuition, but he also uses phrases such as "physicalism is incomplete" and "it follows that physicalism leaves something out".

Also, for what it is worth; That me sitting inside doing a physics calculation on the color red is not the same as me going outside and seeing the color red is not something that is incompatible with physicalism. Indeed, if it was the same (most forms of) physicalism would be disproven as two different "configurations" of the universe yielded an identical universe.

OK. I think he's wrong to call it an argument. I think we're basically just arguing about what is the more proper objection, although I think we have similar objections to begin with. It feels better to me to say he's wrong because he's making a bare assertion based on an intuition which is not an argument, rather than saying he is begging the question, but I'm not sure it's worth making too big of a fuss about it at this point

zumby pointed this out a bit ago, and I agree with both of you.

If I say, “the belief ‘materialism is false’ weighs 2 grams,” doesn’t that strike you as odd? Aren’t you going to ask how that is possible or how that could be? Don’t you feel justified saying it can’t be the case that a wholly immaterial entity or process has mass? Well, the same goes for saying a wholly material entity or process has content. How is that even possible?

Excluding the ludicrously high number that is actually not strange at all. We know the brain generates electric fields, and that energy has mass is rather trivial.

You are probably doing the very common error of confusing mass with matter. Matter is not mass, matter has mass.

Sure, we already know you don't allow any phenomena higher than the absolute fundamental level into your ontology, so this isn't a surprising claim for you.

Leaving that aside, regardless of whether temperature is the perfect example, claiming that a system or object can only have properties shared by it's components is a straightfoward composition fallacy. Another example would be:

P1) The component parts of a Boeing 747 (the nuts, bolts, sheets of metal, chairs etc) do not have the property of being able to fly across the Atlantic under their own power
C1) Therefore a Boeing 747 does not have the property of being able to fly across the Atlantic under their own power

You are possibly confusing weak and strong emergence. Weak emergence (the type I am talking about here) is well understood and not at all mysterious:

Quote:

Originally Posted by David Chalmers

We can say that a high-level phenomenon is strongly emergent with respect to a low-level domain when the high-level phenomenon arises from the low-level domain, but truths concerning that phenomenon are not deducible even in principle from truths in the low-level domain.

We can say that a high-level phenomenon is weakly emergent with respect to a low-level domain when the high-level phenomenon arises from the low-level domain, but truths concerning that phenomenon are unexpected given the principles governing the low-level domain.

The emergence of high-level patterns in cellular automata—a paradigm of emergence in recent complex systems theory—provides a clear example. If one is given only the basic rules governing a cellular automaton, then the formation of complex high-level patterns (such as gliders) may well be unexpected, so these patterns are weakly emergent. But the formation of these patterns is straightforwardly deducible from the rules (and initial conditions), so these patterns are not strongly emergent. Of course, to deduce the facts about the patterns in this case may require a fair amount of calculation, which is why their formation was not obvious to start with. Nevertheless, upon examination these high-level facts are a straightforward consequence of low-level facts. So this is a clear case of weak emergence without strong emergence

Source: http://consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf

Some brief examples of cellular automata & 'gliders':

You are just be repeating yourself. My answer to this post could be the exactly same as the one you quoted. Perhaps you can address my question of whether you are ruling out a physical explanation of mental content a priori, or just demanding that we hurry up and solve the problem?

I don’t believe matter can think.

I don’t believe matter or material interactions can think, derive content, exhibit intentionality, develop sentience and sapience, develop a transcendent self-awareness, etc. I don’t believe such because I don’t see how, in a nomological sense, it could be so.

Not to be mean, but someone who confuses mass and matter in his examples doesn't pull much weight when it comes to discussing the nomology of the universe.

Intuition is fine, but it is bound to the self. Talk of "transcendence" is akward when we know our understanding must be understood hermeneutically with us as an interpreter, even phenomenologists like Heidegger accept this.

Consider this: Intuitively speaking, the world is a flat plane. It is only when you relate to yourself as a physical object in relation to our planet it becomes self-evident that it is not.

This whole physicalism vs non-physicalism discussion is sort of semantics in my view, because either 1 of 2 things are the case here:

1. Physicalism is true, and we just don't yet understand everything about matter (namely the way that "mind-like" stuff emerges from purely physical processes)

or

2. Physicalism is false - matter and mind are 2 distinct things.

In both cases, we recognize that 2 different kinds of things are going on (regardless of their origin), and we separate these concepts. So that result is all that matters (pun intended).

Also, this video deserves its own thread IMO.

So, for example, could it be considered a weakly emergent property of my arm(+ rest of body, I guess) and a rock, for the rock to be propelled a certain distance in a parabolic trajectory?






Possibly. Are there any examples of strong emergence, other than consciousness?

A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram's book on (mostly) cellular automata is an interesting read, even if you do have to tolerate the fact that it's written by Wolfram.

duffee: I was trying to think of some sort of easy way of arguing for the reducibility of beliefs, and while it seems imperfect, the simplest thing I could think of to ask you was: What do you think accounts for the efficacy of psychotropic drugs?

I say this question is imperfect since you may say that the content of beliefs is somehow distinct from the altered states of consciousness that occur on (for example) LSD, but even so the fact that certain simple physical substances cause profound changes in conscious experience and, I think arguably on beliefs, at least in the short term, does this not seem like reasonably strong evidence for matter and material interactions being intimately involved in the processes you mention?

You could possibly call it emergent, but given that the system is has so few components I think that would lead to a definition that is so broad as to be uninformative.

Unhelpfully, it depends very much on how one defines 'strongly emergent'.


To give a better framework in which to address your two questions, let me quote extensively from Mindware, by Andy Clark, on the subject of different ways to demarcating emergent properties (emphasis authors own, UK English spelling is my doing):

Just realised his second definition makes use of an example better elucidated in another of his books, so this second example is a mashup of passages from two different books by Clark:

Now, even though that seems like a lot of text, it's really only a subset of concepts of emergence (specifically those that tend to get talked about by scientists). If you read the SEP entry on emergent properties you'll run into all sorts of other concepts (for example, explication on the difference between ontological and epistemological emergence). My personal commentary on Clark's four models are that 1) is the sort of definition I am primarily thinking about when talking about consciousness as an emergent property. 2) I'm not really familar with as a common model, and therefore although 3) seems very reasonable I don't currently share the motivation to encapsulate both 1 & 2 that Clark does. I suspect that Clark's particular interest in robotics is the motivation. Also, pace Clark, definition 4) I am very familar with, and some conjunction of 1 & 4, IMO, is often the model you will run into when dealing with dynamical systems theory / Chaos theory.

The upshot of all this is to say that, just because some people use emergence as a way of introducing spookiness into the world, doesn't mean you should assume that that is what emergence means to everyone, much like abuse of quantum theory by woo-peddlers shouldn't motivate use to reject talk of non-locality or whatever.

You can also download the Game of Life and play with it directly here.

And while I'm sharing links, these two videos from Robert Sapolsky's course on human behavioural biology would make great background material:





(The whole series is excellent btw)