There's a hugely important difference between other reductions and reductions of consciousness to physical stuff. All the other reductions are about behavior. And sure, perhaps we can explain how things behaves in terms of physical stuff. But the fact that we can successfully explain behavior--and this gives us a reason to be skeptical of Behe's arguments, for instance, for intelligent design--doesn't give us reason to think that we can explain subjective experience which is about what it's like to be in a certain state, not a fact of how that state behaves.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say there are other inductive arguments going the other way. Not a single mental state has ever been successfully reduced. And there are many examples in history of people saying things that appear radically different are reducible to each other--take, for instance, the claim among mechanist that action at a distance reduced to mechanical pulling or the claim of the Greeks that everything was made of fire/water/air/earth/some combination/the apeiron.
As Goff notes, the physical sciences were never intended by Galileo to reduce everything. Galileo's radical thesis--which has been majorly vindicated--was that everything other than consciousness could be reduced to underlying physical causes.
It can also be dangerous to carry linear extrapolation too far! One of the reasons that the things under consideration like consciousness and mathematical facts have resisted reduction may be that unlike the things we've reduced, they can't be reduced even in principle. The fact that reduction covers the easy cases doesn't show it covers the difficult cases.
Thanks for the comment, and I hear the point. I would say that 1) this does just seem like another object-level counterargument that may give some weight, but I’m not sure it would be enough. 2) You can always make the reference class for the induction narrow enough to go both ways, but the idea is to create a reference class that is reasonable -- all science seems good to me but maybe you disagree, and I’m not exactly sure how to resolve that. 3) Your last point seems similar to the Grue point I made in that they anticipate the same experience, and I’m not sure I understand which part of the objection to that doesn’t hold.
1) Well I think it's a reason the reference class shouldn't just be successful reductions.
2) Yeah, I do disagree. I think in a lot of cases like this, it's not obvious what the reference class should be so it's hard to put too much stock in it.
3) There's an important difference. If you only had a method for finding green things, it wouldn't be a reasonable induction that everything we've discovered is green. Simillarly, if we only count reductions, then it's no surprise that we've reduced everything that we've reduced.
This is a well written and clearly argued article.
But from a non-physicalist point of view, it reduces to question begging. In premise 1 you appeal to all the “many things” that have been successfully explained by science. What do they have in common? It was possible to explain them with scientific methods.
A helpful distinction here would be between super-natural and preter-natural. Supernatural means something that is - in fact - beyond nature, whereas preternatural means having the appearance of being divine.
Preternatural is things we don’t understand how they function, or what they are, so it’s not only unsurprising, but entirely expected that preternatural things would be steadily explained as science progresses in understanding the natural world.
Whereas supernatural means it’s of an entirely different order of things. So we’d expect to find it can’t be explained by physics.
And I think the two things the non-physicalist can definitively point to are qualia (and intentionality) as well as the cause of the natural world itself. Both of these have logical arguments why science can never explain them.
There's a hugely important difference between other reductions and reductions of consciousness to physical stuff. All the other reductions are about behavior. And sure, perhaps we can explain how things behaves in terms of physical stuff. But the fact that we can successfully explain behavior--and this gives us a reason to be skeptical of Behe's arguments, for instance, for intelligent design--doesn't give us reason to think that we can explain subjective experience which is about what it's like to be in a certain state, not a fact of how that state behaves.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say there are other inductive arguments going the other way. Not a single mental state has ever been successfully reduced. And there are many examples in history of people saying things that appear radically different are reducible to each other--take, for instance, the claim among mechanist that action at a distance reduced to mechanical pulling or the claim of the Greeks that everything was made of fire/water/air/earth/some combination/the apeiron.
As Goff notes, the physical sciences were never intended by Galileo to reduce everything. Galileo's radical thesis--which has been majorly vindicated--was that everything other than consciousness could be reduced to underlying physical causes.
It can also be dangerous to carry linear extrapolation too far! One of the reasons that the things under consideration like consciousness and mathematical facts have resisted reduction may be that unlike the things we've reduced, they can't be reduced even in principle. The fact that reduction covers the easy cases doesn't show it covers the difficult cases.
Thanks for the comment, and I hear the point. I would say that 1) this does just seem like another object-level counterargument that may give some weight, but I’m not sure it would be enough. 2) You can always make the reference class for the induction narrow enough to go both ways, but the idea is to create a reference class that is reasonable -- all science seems good to me but maybe you disagree, and I’m not exactly sure how to resolve that. 3) Your last point seems similar to the Grue point I made in that they anticipate the same experience, and I’m not sure I understand which part of the objection to that doesn’t hold.
1) Well I think it's a reason the reference class shouldn't just be successful reductions.
2) Yeah, I do disagree. I think in a lot of cases like this, it's not obvious what the reference class should be so it's hard to put too much stock in it.
3) There's an important difference. If you only had a method for finding green things, it wouldn't be a reasonable induction that everything we've discovered is green. Simillarly, if we only count reductions, then it's no surprise that we've reduced everything that we've reduced.
This is a well written and clearly argued article.
But from a non-physicalist point of view, it reduces to question begging. In premise 1 you appeal to all the “many things” that have been successfully explained by science. What do they have in common? It was possible to explain them with scientific methods.
A helpful distinction here would be between super-natural and preter-natural. Supernatural means something that is - in fact - beyond nature, whereas preternatural means having the appearance of being divine.
Preternatural is things we don’t understand how they function, or what they are, so it’s not only unsurprising, but entirely expected that preternatural things would be steadily explained as science progresses in understanding the natural world.
Whereas supernatural means it’s of an entirely different order of things. So we’d expect to find it can’t be explained by physics.
And I think the two things the non-physicalist can definitively point to are qualia (and intentionality) as well as the cause of the natural world itself. Both of these have logical arguments why science can never explain them.