(Dec 2, 2016 05:39 PM)Carol Wrote: [ -> ]What does this mean? "Experience may arise from the physical, but it is not entailed by the physical." Is there a reality other than the physical one?
It just signifies that experience (or the power of consciousness to "show" anything at all) is a
"Oh, don't forget this" add-on to the physical / material school of thought. The incongruity between qualitative events (in phenomenal context) and quantitative matter (when the latter is treated as independent of and prior to consciousness) can simply be represented with a blank placeholder / question mark. It doesn't have to be filled with a particular consequence or a particular selection from a set of options regarding what it could mean or might imply. (Like "this is evidence of dualism" or whatever candidates.)
As Chalmers said, experience does not fall out of physical procedures or matter's style of be-ing and coherence of parts; experience would not be anticipated (at least in terms of physical theory / concept alone). There may be correlations between the unexpected presence of visual, aural, tactile, etc phantasma and the expected stuff (like the odor of garlic corresponding to _X_ neural fibers firing in the brain). But the two classes seem radically different.
The otherwise hidden material "stuff" makes itself known by reasoning / memory (conclusion-making) and the language or symbolic affairs which mediate such. While the phenomenal "stuff" perversely announces itself by simply "being there" in either introspection or extrospection. (Again, the abstract symbolic activity or data processing of the former can take place in the non-conscious "dark" as computers demonstrate; as can even images and music that have been broken down and converted into on/off digital states. But the phenomenal versions of such things entail they are being "shown" as qualia arrangements rather than abiding at that otherwise invisible, material level or manner of existence.)
A crude (partially flawed) analogy would be a room full of all the structural things that can be built out of plastic, interlocking Lego bricks. But then there is an orange in the room, also, resting at the top of a Lego-composed tower. The orange is an extraneous item which does not seem to follow from everything else (that results from the constrained sizes, character and relationships of the plastic blocks).
The remedy of course, would be to posit that there is something more fundamental than both Lego bricks and the orange which both have in common, which thereby could yield the unusual orange and the plastic blocks. Or add a novel, precursor property / capacity to Lego bricks whose combinations could then emergently account for the orange (making proto "orange-ness" as ubiquitous as the blocks).
However, such tactics are forbidden or are at least very unpopular. Experts of this or that professional expertise do not wish to discard the preset idea that Lego "stuff" is primary, or add new abilities to Lego "stuff" which may be un-testable or border on the fringe. Thus, the presence of the orange in the room or at the top of the Lego-built tower remains a curious item which is ignored or dodged around. An empty placeholder in terms of sufficient or deeper explanation.
Quote:Can anything give nonphysical reality form and structure?
In terms of physics, there are tentative leanings toward
pregeometry being what makes "physical" (spatial / temporal) reality possible in the first place.
Brian Greene:
Today's scientists seeking to combine quantum mechanics with Einstein's theory of gravity (the general theory of relativity) are convinced that we are on the verge of another major upheaval, one that will pinpoint the more elemental concepts from which time and space emerge. Many believe this will involve a radically new formulation of natural law in which scientists will be compelled to trade the space-time matrix within which they have worked for centuries for a more basic "realm" that is itself devoid of time and space.
This is such a perplexing idea that grasping it poses a substantial challenge, even for leading researchers. Broadly speaking, scientists envision that there will be no mention of time and space in the basic equations of the sought-for framework. And yet — just as clear, liquid water emerges from particular combinations of an enormous number of H20 molecules — time and space as we know them would emerge from particular combinations of some more basic, though still unidentified, entities. Time and space themselves, though, would be rendered secondary, derivative features, that emerge only in suitable conditions (in the aftermath of the Big Bang, for example). As outrageous as it sounds, to many researchers, including me, such a departure of time and space from the ultimate laws of the universe seems inevitable. --The Time We Thought We Knew ... NYT, 2003
Which at least superficially might seem to be intruding upon Plato or the ancient Greeks' intellectual realm. Which
contemporary philosophers interpret as being non-spatial and time-less (or amounting to such if Plato himself had had the surgical range of technical concepts available today for removing some of the ambiguity from his ideas in that regard). The lack of spatial properties is why an immaterial or idealistic ontology
ought to depend so much upon language and abstract symbols to represent it (there are no images, etc) -- why it should be dependent upon intellectual activity / furniture rather than the brute content of sensation.
But in that a "material" version of the world is usually against panpsychism (Galen Strawson's brand of materialism excluded), it rubs shoulders with an intelligible domain in respect to the "showing" and the qualitative content being gone, too. And if borrowing from physics, space / time affairs may be represented with quantitative slash abstract description rather than being pictorial (or pictures being unable to accurately portray and instantiate everything therein; often serving little more than metamorphical purposes).
I decided I better back up wanting to meet them, by learning something, so hopefully I don't embarrass myself too badly.