plateauphase

plateauphase t1_jdqlimg wrote

yeah, it's kind of impossible if not absurdly difficult and jarringly unintuitive under physicalist assumptions. fortunately, the scientific theories are metaphysically neutral, so it's open for alternative interpretations, such as analytic idealism!

basically, physicality is the appearance of mental processes from across the private conscious pov. like the dashboard of dials on a plane, which definitely display measurements of an external world, physical properties represent the external world, which is not physical, but mental. mental just means of the same kind that consciousness is, which is all we ever directly know.

this doesn't explain mind in terms of an other existent, but takes mind as the reductive base, exactly like physicalism doesn't explain 'the physical', but takes that as the reductive base. however, while 'physicality' is a perfectly transcendental, non-mental existent, which cannot be experienced and is a metaphysical postulate, not an empirical observation, consciousness, mental processes, experientiality is the only given of nature which we directly and most intimately know.

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plateauphase t1_jdotnsz wrote

my friend, last year's nobel in physics was awarded for experiments that ruled out local realism [1], [2], [3], [4]. current best scientific understanding indicates that physical properties don't exist before measurement, ie. physicality doesn't have standalone existence.

anton zeilinger: "there is no sense in assuming that what we do not measure about a system has reality."

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plateauphase t1_ja4k5eh wrote

"current scientific knowledge does seem to imply there is stuff with intrinsic properties, where interactions between them generates everything we feel, see, and experience in this universe."

contrariwise, the standard model, as currently understood through QFT doesn't clearly motivate the existence of corpuscular, individual, intrinsic existents/properties. that's a folk ontology sourced myth. there's a really good book about this, called 'every thing must go' by james ladyman and don ross. also interdependence - biology and beyond by kriti sharma

+ these two articles sketch out some serious difficulties with interpreting QFT and its predictive success and physicalism -

[1] -- does the mathematical nature of physics underline physicalism?
[2] -- what is real?

you also connected your opinion with statements about how experientiality - phenomenal consciousness arises/appears, but physicalist theorizing about consciousness so far has been woefully unclear regarding precise mechanisms and lacking empirical substantiation. the hard problem cannot be handwaved away, the difference between qualitative and quantitative is a principled one, where the latter is an attribute of the former as far as we can know, so attempting to pull out the territory from the map is understandably 'difficult'.

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