Ironically your example is far far more complicated than what you present…. And reality is far from the certainty of your conclusion!!
First of all you fail to properly define what ‘wetness’ actually is. That’s not trivial!
“wetness” is an example I use on this forum a lot. If you search on it in my old posts, it comes up a bunch, and I’m the one pressing both the complexity and difficulty of “wetness” as a seemingly simple phenomenon, as well as pedagogy for emergent characteristics.
We can have two definitions (perhaps more than 2 but I will stick with these 2 for now):
Wa: Wetness as the behavior of (polar) liquids like water.
Wb: The SENSATION of wetness we experience.
The two are not the same.
I’m not sure that’s true, or rather, I think “same” is a tricky term to use there, but no matter: in either case, I suggest the goal obtains in terms of raising the concept of emergence.
Wa
We CAN reduce Wa as an interaction of electromagnetic forces, i.e. the interaction of electrons, which involve electromagnetism (and quantum mechanics).
Yeah, you’ve been reading my posts, I guess!
So no real “new” property emerges, but only a more complex (much more!) case of electromagnetic interaction between atoms!
This is emergence. It’s phenomenologically new and novel, but it’s not magic, it’s just more fundamental components interacting in ways that produce properties and dynamics not exhibited in the component bits alone.
Hence, “wetness”, is not really a new property in the sense of Wa.
That’s one way to emphasize the role of emergence, sure.
Wb…
The picture here is already more complex. Here we enter the philosophy of mind and of perception of the world through senses.
Some philosopher might talk about “qualia”… others will deny them… The debate here is far from over but for now I will concede to the materialist position (like Dennett’s) that the sensation of Wetness, i.e. Wb is also reducible to electromagnetic interaction.
OK, well this takes us back to “same”, per my comment above. Wb, as I understand it is just a different mode of description of the same physical phenomenon.
BTW: Erwin Schrödinger (yes the one from the famous equation!) would and did disagree with Dennett position (even if he did not know Dennett). He regarded that sensation could not be entirely reduced to physical descriptions… but like I said it’s a debate that is far from settled (although Dennett or the Churchlands try to convince people to think it is, in some of their books, but that is more a dishonest trick than reality of the matter)
So even physical scientists (then and now) do not all think alike on this question.
Well, it’s important to note that Schrödinger’s ideas on this were informal, non-scientific conjectures. He’s welcome to them, but these are not ideas scientifically delivered. Watson of DNA discovery fame thought that DNA was dropped here by aliens, Newton in his off time pursued crazy imaginations about alchemy, aether, and the Trinity, among other things.
We have to be careful to look at the
science a scientist is offering, qua science. Speaking on other grounds, they are often as nutty as the rest of us, and sometimes more. As I understand Schrödinger, his “Mind and Matter” was heavily influenced by his love of Schopenhauer’s ideas. Whoops. That’s his prerogative, but we’re off in left field, far from science and into the wilds of incorrigible intuition at that point.
Let’s now however turn to consciousness or even rational intelligence, which is human intelligence.
Consciousness and rational intelligence can’t be reduced as physical processes.
Hmmm, I thought that was a question under considerable scrutiny and dispute? Doesn’t materialism hold otherwise?
Or at least they are fare LESS reducible than the ‘sensation of wetness’ can be and we already seen that such sensation itself can not be easily reduced as a series of physical interactions (although I conceded to such reduction above just for sake of the brevity).
Where is this shown? I missed that. I’m aware of the strong superstitions people have on this issue, but not aware of any science or demonstrable knowledge concerning the non-reducibility or dualist nature of mind.
Again there is a huge debate between philosophers of the mind and even between neuroscientists regarding the mind.
Well, that makes your statements above somewhat of an overreach, then, eh? From a scientific standpoint, I’m not aware of ANY performative models that are not purely naturalistic. So while I’m happy to say the matter is still under dispute, from a scientific perspective, this is a discipline that is just getting off the ground, but dualism and supernatural hypotheses don’t even
qualify epistemically for consideration.
If, on the other hand, we are resigning ourselves to a battle of conflicting intuitions and superstitions, and not looking for any objective arbitration on the matter via science, we can just give up now – it’s all theology, hopelessly futile and intractable as a matter of inquiry.
No one, as much as they would like, even came close (as much as they wish to) in any sense to reduce the mind (*) as a series of physical properties.
That would or will be quite a feat, yes. But you could have said the same thing about reducing matter to elementary particles not so long ago, too. Importantly, science is not aware of any problem in
principle with the reducibility of mind to natural processes.
Actually the more neurological research is performed the more complex this conundrum seems to get!
Yes, but we could say the same things about physics, particularly when physics at Planck scales got the focus of inquiry. Complex is an understatement. And yet, it’s reducible, natural, non-magical, non-supernatural, the working models we’ve produced.
If you read for example James Ross’ work on the Immaterial Aspects of Though in the of mind and thought, it even appears, if Ross is right, that reduction of the mind to the material brain is both impossible and absurd.
Crucially, Ross does not and cannot provide a means of testing whether his ideas are right, or wrong. Like Searle, Kripke and others, this is an appeal to intuition, or “pure reason”, if I recall Ross, his hangup is determinacy. But it’s a dead end, because it’s analytic philosophy, ideas which cower and hide from the adjudicating light of science. We can’t make any progress on Ross’ ideas because he hasn’t got any epistemic ground to judge them on.
More importantly, consciousness and rational thought and especially intentionality ARE entirely NEW properties, unlike wetness ‘Wa’ or even 'Wb’
That’s not shown. It may be they are just as reducible as wetness, just much more complex, beyond our current capabilities to reverse engineer.
So your statement,
in which you seem to confuse mind with brain, which are, unless proven, NOT the same thing, is actually nothing more than naive ‘wishful thinking’, compared to the matter of the mind-brain relationship that plagues many philosophers and scientists.
Science doesn’t “prove”. That’s an archaic conceit of abstract and analytic philosophy. Science builds models and tests them, and prefers more performative and economical models over less performative and less economic models.
Scientists can make headway on this, at least in principle. Philosophers are completely impotent on this question, unless they defer to science.
The human mind has not been reduced to physical processes alone, not by a very, very long shot… and there is NO guarantee it can be!
No, but we are not aware of any insuperable problems, and science has in its wake a long list of “reductions” of other complex phenomena that were once thought to be magic, or supernatural or otherwise non-reducible, non-mechanistic. None of that guarantees anything, but it’s a pattern that should inform our expectations. In contrast to the poverty of dualist intuitions in terms of evidence and performative models we can test, it’s a conspicuously lopsided contest between them.
(*) NOTE:
SOME parts and functions of the mind ARE reducible to physical brain processes, that is certain and out of discussion. But here we are focusing on Consciousness and Rational Intelligence here, not, for example, ‘vision’ or senses… although as I said, sensation is also under debate in the field.
It’s a familiar and now time-honored trend. Science just de-magicalizes, naturalizes and mechanicalizes one thing after another. Science is a major killjoy for superstitious types.
-TS
That zero-energy transaction theory sounds intriguing. Do the laws of thermodynamics still hold?
