Very briefly, it's not my 'intuition' that a thought must be like reality for it to be about reality. It's a claim I hold to be grounded in reason. My reasoning may be right or wrong, but either way, it's not an intuition (or a feeling, or anything else of the sort).
Anyway, to the main point. You wrote:
> The point in my penultimate paragraph is this: If we suppose that there is a causal flow from the real world to brain states via the sense organs, and adopt the premise that (changes in) mental states are caused by (changes in) brain states, then we have at least the outlines of an answer to your tacit initial question (what is it that makes a thought being one about reality?) that does not invoke or depend on any concept of likeness or similarity. In what I quoted above, you certainly seem to be saying that the only thing that could make a thought about reality is that it has a similarity (in some nebulous sense, at least) to reality, but here we have another way for a thought to be about reality that does not depend on likeness in any sense.
This clarifies our disagreement well. I will divide my response into two sections: 1. Why it is necessary for a thought to be like reality if a thought is to be about reality, 2. Why a causal chain cannot provide either likeness or a substitute for likeness.
1.
A thought can be right or wrong, but right-ness implies likeness to reality, while wrong-ness implies un-likeness. To illustrate: suppose Bob has a thought about a tree. Let's say it's "this oak tree is made of wood". Now suppose his friend Bill thinks "this oak tree is made of copper". I take it we can premise that Bob is right and Bill is wrong.
But for our premise to be true, their thoughts must be compared to the tree itself. There is no other way to judge their thoughts' right-ness or wrong-ness. For Bob's thought to be right, it must be like the tree (and the opposite for Bill's). Any conception of thought that lacks likeness makes this impossible. If we deny that both Bob's and Bill's thoughts are like the tree (which is necessary if we "do not invoke or depend on any concept of likeness or similarity"), neither Bob nor bill can be right. The concept of right-ness is predicated on that of like-ness. If, therefore, you drop the concept of like-ness, you lose the possibility of right-ness. And in this situation, all thought becomes meaningless, including the thoughts we're having right now about the nature of the mind.
Therefore we can conclude that likeness is necessary for correctness, and therefore for thought to be about reality.
Be aware that my claim is very limited. I am not, right now, making any claim as to what this likeness may be like. I am simply saying that likeness in some sense of the word is necessary for rational thought. Hence I disagree that may claim is 'nebulous'; rather, it's limited.
2.
A causal chain does not rescue your denial of likeness from its implications. As I stated above, causal chains happen everywhere in nature ("the tree causes a rustling sound"). A brain state is one result of a particular causal chain, but there is nothing special about it on that account. There is nothing that gives it the possibility of being rational, or correct. More specifically, a causal chain cannot in itself be 'right' or 'wrong'. It is possible that a causal chain will cause Bob to think a tree is made of wood, and cause Bill to think it's made of copper. This is not enough for Bob to be right and Bill wrong, because the chain has no connection to correct-ness. It can't give us reason for saying "Bob's thoughts are like reality, and Bill's are not". A causal chain is not right or wrong, or rational in any sense. That someone has been caused to think something doesn't mean he has a reason for thinking something. So a causal chain cannot provide a substitute for likeness if we want to rescue the concept of rational thought. Whether or not a brain state causes a mental state is irrelevant to this fact, contrary to what you claim.
Nor can a chain provide physical likeness itself. The materialist view of the mind closes off any other way in which likeness can be achieved, because (if it's consistent) it postulates that brain states, ultimately reducible to fundamental particles, are all that objectively exist. You claim "an understanding of causality may potentially lead us to being able to say... in what way thoughts are similar to reality", but you offer no details. I deny this is so -- causality can't rescue your position; it can't make there be some like-ness that is somehow both material and yet does not involve arrangements of atoms that are similar, which we've already ruled out. I'm happy to hear details if you think otherwise.
To summarize:
1. Rational thought requires (the possibility of) likeness
2. Materialism makes likeness impossible, because it reduces the mind to physical states, and a brain's physical state is not like the object of its thought [your arguments about causality do not gainsay this]
3. Therefore materialism makes rational thought impossible, and is therefore false.
So my claim way upthread, that 'there is an immaterial component to our thought, and therefore to our existence' must stand.
I am rather busy today, but don't worry - I have a rather comprehensive response in the works, and I will post it within a day - stay tuned, as they used to say...
It is good to see that we are more-or-less on the same page about what the issue is, but I can also see, from some of the things you say here, that I need to do a more thorough job in explaining myself. In the following, I will give a “Bill and Bob” example showing how I think chain-of-causality answers what I will call, for brevity, the central question (what is it that makes a thought be one about reality?), and I will make more clear how this view stands in relation to similarity.
I realized, reading your reply, that I had not make it clear that chain-of-causality is about information flow: how does information about reality shape our thoughts so that they conform to reality? It also gives an account of how and why this quite often does not work, leading to people thinking and believing falsehoods.
I also realized that its premises can be weakened, and as a consequence, it is not explicitly a materialist hypothesis. Previously, I wrote “If we suppose that there is a causal flow from the real world to brain states via the sense organs, and adopt the premise that (changes in) mental states are caused by (changes in) brain states, then we have at least the outlines of an answer to your tacit initial question” [i.e. what I called the central question above]. That second (emphasized) premise can be weakened to “changes in mental states are caused by sensory inputs and ongoing mental processes.” This modified premise seems more congenial to anti-materialists, given the considerable empirical evidence that this is in fact what happens.
Without further ado, here’s my Bill-and-Bob scenario. I have altered from your original one to make Bill’s mistake seem more plausible.
Bill and Bob are hiking a mountain trail when Bill sees a stone, having glittering yellow inclusions, beside the path. "We've found gold!" he exclaims, picking it up and showing it to Bob, but Bob takes it, examines it closely, and replies "it's just iron pyrite, Bill." - and he is right.
So what causal chains might lead up to this exchange? There are all sorts of possibilities, going back to the big bang, though it seems likely they will mostly be variations on a theme. We might pick up the story with humans discovering gold and naming it, something that happened independently in many different places by many different people, and the names they gave it were, for the most part, independent, related only by their being all names given by various people to this one substance (I am making an issue of naming here in order to use it in making a point later.)
The causal story continues with gold being widely seen as valuable on account of various properties, such as being nearly inert and having a density and abundance in the sweet spot for being a portable currency. At some point, it is discovered that another substance found in nature looks superficially like gold, but is not, and sometimes can quickly be distinguished from gold on account of its tendency to form characteristic cubic crystals.
Most of what Bob and Bill hold to be truths about gold has probably come to them via language: even though they have probably seen and held gold artifacts, it is likely that they had already been primed for those experiences by being told what gold is like, and it seems highly likely that this is how they came to know that it is valuable, as well as being how Bob came to know about iron pyrite and ways of distinguishing it from gold ore.
Note that having much of this chain being in the form of language is not a problem for either this causal story or for physicalism, as communication of information via language is itself widely and uncontroversially seen to be a causal process.
From this point, it is very easy to see how Bob's causal chain could lead to him making his true statement, while Bill's did not - here, it is just a matter of Bob's chain conveying more complete factual information. In other cases, it might involve things like Bill receiving false information and taking it to be credible, or Bob having a better memory or a greater bias towards skepticism than Bill.
Note that the causal chain of information flow does not stop at one’s sense organs: as postulated in my premises, prior mental states and ongoing or further mental processes are also involved in how the mental state changes in response to the sensory input. For example, if Bob is more skeptical than Bill, it might be a result of painful past experiences biasing him to be wary.
Similarly, if someone receives some unwelcome information, and, as a result of their reaction to it, says something false, this is not something happening outside of the chain of causality. It is also one of at least five mechanisms by which false thoughts can arise - the others I have in mind are incorrect reasoning (including, but not limited to, motivated reasoning and rationalization in the psychological sense), reasoning from incomplete information (whether known to be incomplete or not), simple misunderstanding, and deliberate attempts to deceive (aka lying.)
Now let's move on to what this does and does not imply. In part 1 of your latest post you write "If we deny that both Bob's and Bill's thoughts are like the tree (which is necessary if we "do not invoke or depend on any concept of likeness or similarity"),..." The quote-within-the-quote here is taken from this passage: " If we suppose that there is a causal flow from the real world to brain states via the sense organs, and adopt the premise that (changes in) mental states are caused by (changes in) brain states, then we have at least the outlines of an answer to your tacit initial question (what is it that makes a thought being one about reality?) that does not invoke or depend on any concept of likeness or similarity." [Since I wrote this, I weakened the second premise, but that has no consequences for the issue here.]
What this says is that there is a putative answer to the central question that does not make use of the premise that true thoughts are like the external reality that they are about [1].
One of the things this neither says directly nor implies is that this answer is predicated on the assumption that thoughts are not like the external reality that they are about (I hope it is obvious that it does not say this directly, and we can see that it does not imply it by noting that you can add either the premise that true thoughts are like the external reality that they are about, or the premise that they are not, and in either case you get a valid argument, the conjunction of which is equivalent to the argument without either premise.)
In other words, this is a putative answer to the central question that is completely independent of the question of whether there is a similarity between the thought and reality: if there is similarity, that’s fine but inconsequential, and the same goes if no similarity can be found.
I hope this makes it clear that this is not an attempt to show that there is a way for materialism to be consistent with your thesis that similarity is essential for thoughts to be about reality; On the contrary, it is an argument with implications that go against that thesis. Again, this neither implies nor requires that there cannot be any similarity. Personally, I do not suppose that one could think meaningfully about reality without there being a correspondence, at some more-or-less abstract level, between the thoughts and the real world, and for all I know from what you have said about it, that may or may not be what you mean when you say 'similarity' or 'likeness'. Even if it is, that certainly does not mean that I am rationally obliged to accept your premise that it is the one and only reason why thoughts can be about reality. Quite the opposite, in fact: I suppose that it is information flow along chains of causality that both enables this property of thought and leads to thoughts having a correspondence with reality.
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[1] I am assuming that we can agree that this discussion is limited to considering thoughts in the form of propositions about an objective reality which we assume to exist.
Thanks again for taking the time to write such a detailed response. I'm responding only to the first comment here, though I have read the others and I don't think they would alter what I write here. I will get to the other two asap. For this comment, I will limit myself to attempting to undermine the claim that causality can, in principle, make a thought be right or wrong (that is, about reality or not). I won't attempt to defend 'likeness' here: that will need a second response.
You refer to how a causal chain can convey information. More specifically, you refer to this information using the terms true and false, or using terms that are derived from truth/falsehood and make no sense without them. For example, you say that "Bob's causal chain [conveyed] more complete factual information". I would say that this is another way of saying information that is either true, or closer to the truth, than Bill's, and I don't think this is controversial, but please state if you disagree. As another example, you say Bill "[received] false information and [took] it to be credible"; and that this led to Bob's true statement. You also refer to a "false" statement in reaction to "unwelcome information" as something that is within the chain of causality. You then list several other mechanisms by which "false thoughts" can arise, listing these as "causal chains of information". (Henceforth I will use "CHOCs" to refer to chains of causality.)
My question is what is it that would make the CHOCs true or false? Everything that I said above about a brain state not being per se true or false applies to the examples of CHOCs you have listed here. More generally, it also applies to any CHOC that could be considered information. The print on a textbook, the brainstate of the textbooks' authors, the Word document that exists as a series of magnetic states on the authors' hard drives, the vibrating vocal chords that moved the authors' ears 20 years ago when they were at college, the tired brain of the typesetter who messed up the labeling in textbook B: every question that could be asked of Bill's and Bob's brainstates could also be asked these things. Specifically, what is it that makes them true or false?
Obviously, you could give the same reply that you do for B&B's brainstates, and say that the causes' own causes make them true or false. But you'll easily perceive that this just pushes the problem back another stage, and leads to an infinite regression. If the textbook's truth is caused by the truth in the author's mind, what causes the latter? We go onto infinity.
So it seems you have no justification for calling a CHOC 'true' or 'false', or believing that it conveys information that can be described in these terms. (To be clear, I think the possibility of T/F, and the possibility of conveying information, stand or fall together -- I don't think this is controversial but let me know if you disagree.) If a cause explains T/F, it must itself have its truth or falsehood explained by its own cause. You thus either face infinite regress, or need to provide some other explanation that applies to a non-mental CHOC but not to a brainstate.
(Btw, I'm not denying that a CHOC can be _associated with_ information transfer in any sense at all. That would lead me to deny that information about reality can come in through the senses, which I think we both agree would be wrong. Nor am I denying that the info associated with a CHOC can be true or false. But it is the mind that makes said association. The info conveyed by the ink on the textbook's page is only understood to be true, and is only understood as information, when in the mind. The text on the page causes the mind's thoughts in a certain sense, just as licking the page causes an inky sensation in the tongue. But the text can't _be_ information independently of the mind, and therefore can't carry T/F independently of the mind, and therefore can't explain the mind's thoughts' being T/F. I don't want my objections about causality to seem to imply that knowledge is innate, in some Platonist or rationalist sense.)
I will defend "likeness to reality" as the answer in the next exciting installment :-)
I only recently noticed that you are replying to the parts of my post (split up only because of the limit on the size of comments) directly under each one. If continued, I think this would rapidly become difficult to follow, So I will respond at wherever the bottom of this thread has reached at the time. I will also try hard to keep comments within the size limit.
Having (I hope) clarified these matters, let's move on to the argument as set out in your numbered sections:
A thought can be right or wrong, but right-ness implies likeness to reality, while wrong-ness implies un-likeness. To illustrate: suppose Bob has a thought about a tree. Let's say it's "this oak tree is made of wood". Now suppose his friend Bill thinks "this oak tree is made of copper". I take it we can premise that Bob is right and Bill is wrong. But for our premise to be true, their thoughts must be compared to the tree itself. There is no other way to judge their thoughts' right-ness or wrong-ness."
The last sentence here is the first occasion in your latest post where you make a sweeping claim without offering any justification for it to be accepted. When you construct an argument, you can use, as a premise, any statement that is in the form of a proposition, but for it to be a sound argument, you have to show that it is a fact, and in epistemology and elsewhere, the generally-accepted basis for regarding a premise as being factual is the JTB criterion: it states a justified, true belief. Your say-so does not amount to either verification of the claim as being factual or justification for thinking it is.
The first problem in attempting to verify this premise is that you have not given the slightest explanation of what it means to say a thought is like reality. What would it mean to say that Bob's thought of an oak tree is like an actual oak tree? Does it grow from an acorn? Does it have the genetic signature that is shared by oak trees? These are both facts about them that might be the content of thoughts - indeed, they are right now, as you read this!
It gets even more problematic when we move on to a broader range of propositions. Take the claim "the highest mountain in the world is in Asia." In what sense does this thought have the property of being in Asia? Alternatively, if it does not actually have this property, then what does it mean to say this thought has a relevant likeness to the facts of the matter? When I learned the other day that Phil Lesh had died, was there something dead about my thought? Or there is this: "beta decay produces neutrinos." Does the neutrino component of this thought respond to the weak force? Furthermore, there was a time when neutrinos were postulated but had not yet been discovered - and then, when it was, did thoughts about neutrinos suddenly gain a likeness to neutrinos themselves?
What's more, Bob's thought about oak trees, as you have presented it, is a sentence, rather than an ineffable feeling that an oak tree is made of wood - i.e., it is a sequence of words conforming to a grammar. Do the words "tree" and "wood" have a likeness to the things they denote? One can easily doubt it on the grounds that words seem to be arbitrary: except for the relatively few onomatopoeia (and not strongly even then), it seems that words are not constrained to be in any way like the reality they express: for example, when physicists named the charm quark, were they obliged to pick the word 'charm' in order to ensure that propositions containing it had the necessary likeness to reality? Of course not! The problem for you here is multiplied by the fact that there are a great many different languages, with wildly varying sounds at the level of both words and grammars, yet despite all this, we obviously are not in the situation you claim would come to pass if your thesis fails: we have not lost the possibility of rightness, and all thought has not become meaningless.
Perhaps you think that this likeness is not to be found in individual words, but only in propositions as a whole - but this does not do away with the need to explain how this likeness comes about. Furthermore, this position is, ipso facto, one in which the likeness is emergent, so, in constructing an explanation along these lines, you will have to overcome your struggles with the concept of emergence and embrace it.
There are other claims in the first section that are moot in the light of the clarifications above, so there is no need for me to address them here. This also applies to quite a few statements in section 2, but there are a few that give pause. For example, I am curious as to what you suppose follows from your statement that "A brain state is one result of a particular causal chain, but there is nothing special about it on that account." What does being special have anything to do with whether it might be part of an answer to our central question? I can see that things like falsifiability and consistency matter, but being special...? In fact, not being special seems to me to be a virtue: the chain-of-causality story is straightforward, has clear premises, does not require the acceptance of propositions for which no justification is given, and does not stray far from uncontroversial facts about minds and communication.
I believe your objection "more specifically, a causal chain cannot in itself be 'right' or 'wrong'. It is possible that a causal chain will cause Bob to think a tree is made of wood, and cause Bill to think it's made of copper. This is not enough for Bob to be right and Bill wrong, because the chain has no connection to correct-ness." has been thoroughly addressed above: in short, it is the flow of information originating in the real world that makes it possible for thoughts about the real world to be correct.
You go on to say "It can't give us reason for saying "Bob's thoughts are like reality, and Bill's are not"."My first response to that is until you can say what the similarity is between Bob's thought and reality, and give us a decision procedure by which we can tell that Bob's thought is similar to reality while Bill's is not, then even if we accepted your thesis, we would still not have a reason for saying "Bob's thoughts are like reality, and Bill's are not", because we would not have enough information to make the call.
I propose that the way we get a reason for deciding whether a proposition is realistic is that we make use of information flowing on the chain of causality to draw our own conclusions. I get the impression that you feel this is not good enough, but the thing is we are in no better position than are Bob and Bill: the best we can do is to make the call on the basis of what we already believe to be true, or what we come to believe is true as a result of investigations into what information we have, whether it can reasonably be regarded as factual, what other information might be available and what effect it could have on our decision (for example, we might initially side with Bill, but change our minds after Bob explains to us why he thinks the rock is just pyrite. This is another example of a causal chain bringing about true thoughts, and it is, roughly speaking, the sort of process that Bayesian reasoning seeks to formalize.)
The truth of any proposition about reality is not determined by whether or how we can determine that it is correct; it is either true or false from the get-go. The Collatz conjecture, for example, is either true or false now, and has been at least since it was first conceived of (mathematical Platonists presumably think it has always been either true or false) - the problem is just that we do not know which it is.
There is no oracle that reliably sorts all propositions into true or false buckets; Gödel, Turing et.al. hammered the nails into that coffin, and it is obvious that we don't need an oracle in order to avoid the dire situation you claim would follow from your thesis being false (plus, if this oracle was an essential tool in making sense of the world, it would already have been used to find out if the Collatz and other conjectures are true or false.) It is not, therefore, a problem for chain-of-causality that it cannot do so, and if you think it is, it would be inconsistent for you to assert that it is not also a problem for your thesis.
You confuse imperfect definition with complete indefinition. If Bob says that he will meet Bill at the "foot of the mountain", that provides meaningful definition about Bob's future location. It is not complete: it's not sufficient to provide GPS coordinates, and it leads open a range of possibilites (which trail? for example). But it is sufficient to convey some meaning, and equally to convey some meaning about where Bob will definitely not be: the summit of the mountain, for example, or half way up the mountain, or Times Square, etc etc. Bob's statement therefore provides definition; it defines; it draws lines around what he does and doesn't mean. It is not complete: further definition is possible. But its incompleteness does not negate the definition that it does provide.
If I said for the sake of argument "I can't describe this likeness in full detail, and I think it's impossible to do so even in theory, but nonetheless I know that some sort of likeness between thought and reality is necessary for thought to be valid: thought and reality cannot be completely unlike", that would be meaningful as far as it goes. It would be sufficient to define my claim to a degree, and would be opposed to certain contradictory claims.
Now you show you have some idea of what "likeness" means in your response. In particular, your rhetorical flourishes about acorns, genetic signatures, death, and neutrinos, and how thoughts cannot be like their objects in the sense that they're from acorns, have genes, etc, show that some sort of definition has got across. You have some grasp of what likeness means. This is not surprising. Often we use words like "be", "thing", "fact" and "like" where the complete definitions may not be known, but the words and concepts nonetheless contain meaning. That doesn't mean we shouldn't seek more detail and greater clarity in our concepts -- we most certainly should. But it does mean that not being able to thoroughly define a word precludes its conveying meaning. This is especially true for common, everyday words such as "like". We use the word all the time; perhaps we can't define it, but we use it meaningfully nonetheless.
My claim above was very limited: that a true thought is, in some sense, like its object. It was a limited claim, using a definition of 'like' which, while incomplete, is enough to convey some meaning. Precisely how a thought and its object are alike is one thing, but that they are alike is something else. We could theoretically know that the latter must be true while knowing nothing whatsoever of the former. (To be clear, this isn't my position -- my position is basically Aristotelian realism -- but for the sake of argument, it could theoretically be true.) My claim that thought and object must be alike is not undermined by a hypothetical inability to explain how they are alike, assuming I present other reasoning that is sound. Just as someone without knowledge of the earth's rotation could tell you that it was day or night without telling you how it was day or night.
Much of the rest of your reply rests on the chain of causality theory which I address in my other post[0]. In short: a cause cannot explain truth in the mind, because any given cause faces the same question that the mind does about how it can be true, so unless you are going to attribute the cause's truth to its cause, and so regress into infinity, you need to find another explanation.
You claim that section 1 of [1] is moot. The first argument in support of this claim, that 'likeness' is too vague to mean anything, has failed. It does not get you off the hook to show that my argument -- that it's impossible for a thought to be both a) true and b) entirely unlike the reality it purports to be about -- is invalid.
More to follow on your other points when I get a minute.
I only recently noticed that you are replying to the parts of my post (split up only because of the limit on the size of comments) directly under each one. If continued, I think this would rapidly become difficult to follow, So I will respond at wherever the bottom of this thread has reached at the time. I will also try hard to keep comments within the size limit.
Moving on: "That someone has been caused to think something doesn't mean he has a reason for thinking something." True enough, and nothing in my position either implies or is predicated on the assumption that they would. On the other hand, in cases like this, there is a reason that they had the thought, namely whatever it was that caused the thought. I bring this up because I am wondering whether there is some unwarranted conflation going on between these two different uses of 'reason'. If not, could you explain more fully the significance you see in this comment?
Next: ”The materialist view of the mind closes off any other way in which likeness can be achieved, because (if it's consistent) it postulates that brain states, ultimately reducible to fundamental particles, are all that objectively exist." If, by likeness, you mean some correspondence between a thought about the world and the world as it is, then information flow along causal chains might do that, and you have not said anything which shows that it cannot. On the other hand, it is not necessary to show that this must happen, as chain-of-causality provides a plausible answer to the central question without requiring any particular likeness.
Another problem with this statement is that, as it stands, the clause following the 'because' does not appear to explain or justify the clause preceding it. If you think it does, please explain.
As I write this, I see there might be yet another problem over what 'any other way' in the conclusion is referring to - it appears to be 'a chain' from the preceding sentence, presumably a chain of causality. Did you intend your conclusion to be ' the materialist view of the mind closes off any way, other than a chain of causality, in which likeness can be achieved?' If it is, I do not discern what this is intended to refute.
Regardless, this is a metaphysical claim. I prefer to avoid using such things, as they tend to take the form of intellectual overreach into areas where nothing definite can be said. We can approach the question of whether the mind is a physical phenomenon without metaphysics, just as we can do the same with the question of whether the weather is a physical phenomenon.
”You claim "an understanding of causality may potentially lead us to being able to say... in what way thoughts are similar to reality", but you offer no details...” Well, there has been no pressing need for me to do so, as chain-of-causality offers an answer to the central question without involving similarity in any way, but I will happily offer a deal - you say specifically what sort of similarity you think you need, and I will see if I can explain or accommodate it within chain-of-causality.
In addition, I can’t let this particular statement go without noting the irony of you chiding me for not providing details!
"... I deny this is so -- causality can't rescue your position; it can't make there be some like-ness that is somehow both material and yet does not involve arrangements of atoms that are similar, which we've already ruled out." Frankly, I have no idea what you are saying here, but whatever it was, I suspect that it is moot now that I have clarified my position. If you think it is still an issue, could you provide more details?
Finally, I don't think there's anything to say about the conclusion - obviously, I'm not persuaded that it is correct, for all the reasons above. There is, however, one more thing that I want to go back to, as it pertains to this discussion as a whole. You have acknowledged that your claim is very limited, in that you are not making any claim as to what this likeness may be like. One of the consequences of it being limited in this way is that no conclusion of your arguments can rise to the level of being taken for a fact - a justified true belief - until you can say enough, about what it means to say that thoughts have a likeness to reality, for that premise to be regarded as justified (to be clear, this is a necessary but not sufficient condition.) You cannot avoid critical analysis of your thesis by not making affirmative statements about what it means, as the absence of such claims is one of the bigger problems with it. If you remain aloof about this, anyone evaluating your claim on its merits would be fully justified in being equally aloof about whether your argument is sound.
No problem - I'm afraid my posts are longer than they could have been with more thorough editing.
If I had spent more time on it, I might have noticed that in your reply upthread to thephyber, you had written "I'm obviously talking about the concepts we use to think about reality, not about the words we use to describe it." You are entitled to have some fun pointing out that you had already anticipated the paragraph in which I bring up the arbitrariness of language.
That is not to say, however, that there is nothing to see here. We represent, communicate and reason about concepts, including concepts about reality and the real world, with languages that are arbitrary in their syntax and grammar. In addition, large swaths of factual knowledge about the real world can be learned through language alone (for example, it is the only way that I have come to know anything about atomic and subatomic physics). Given these facts, a rational person is entirely justified in doubting your claim that neither arrangements of atoms, nor anything else physical, are capable of having (or giving to concepts) the likeness to reality that your argument is predicated on.
On reflecting on all you have said in this thread here, I have come to see that there is an argument to settle this issue once and for all. It goes like this:
1: If there is no way to distinguish true thoughts from false ones, all thoughts become meaningless.
2: Not all thoughts are meaningless.
3: There is a way to distinguish true thoughts from false ones (from 1 and 2.)
4: The only way to distinguish true thoughts from all others is if there is a correspondence between the thought and the reality.
5: There is a correspondence between true thoughts and reality (from 3 and 4.)
6. Nothing immaterial corresponds to reality.
7. Anything not immaterial is material (from the law of the excluded middle.)
Conclusion: True thoughts must be material (from 5, 6 and 7.)
Far from adding any specificity to what you mean by likeness, your Dec. 12 post [1] continues to avoid doing so. This seems very odd, as one hallmark of true theories is that the more one can say about them, the more strongly justified they appear (I suppose, under your thesis, you would say they become more like reality?) Why would you pass up on multiple opportunities to make your thesis as strong as you can? Or has it already reached that point? The direction of this discussion suggests the latter is the case - but you still have an opportunity to turn that around.
Your 'meet at the foot of the mountain' analogy falls flat, as no example of a situation where there is sufficient information does anything to establish that, in a different case, there is sufficient information.
The reason why what you have said so far is inadequate is that you have made a very strong assertion ("materialism makes rational thought impossible, and is therefore false" [2]) which you say follows from your claim that true thoughts have some sort of likeness to reality, but you have not offered any reason for a reasonable skeptic to think that your assertion states a fact - i.e. a justified true belief. As it stands, it does not meet even the 'justified' criterion. The fact that you have said literally next to nothing about how thoughts are like reality is just one of the things standing in the way of this assertion having any justification, though it is the one that we come to first, as the other big, so-far unjustified leap - to your anti-materialist conclusion - is predicated on it.
"Now you show you have some idea of what 'likeness' means in your response" - indeed, I have an idea of how one could say that true thoughts are like the reality they are about, and, in fact, I wrote "personally, I do not suppose that one could think meaningfully about reality without there being a correspondence, at some more-or-less abstract level, between the thoughts and the real world, and for all I know from what you have said about it, that may or may not be what you mean when you say 'similarity' or 'likeness'." [3] I do not know whether it is anything like what you mean, because you have been so opaque about it.
You could certainly say that my correspondence is no more specific than your likeness - and you would be right - but that is not a problem for what I am saying, because, once again, I am not claiming anything that is predicated on it.
Contrary to what you say here, my position is not dependent on whether my position on the 'central question' that you posed in the beginning (what is it that makes a thought be one about reality? ) is actually correct: I believe that information flow from the real world via chains of causality is sufficient to explain why true thoughts reflect the world as it is, but even if this is completely false, it would not mean that your thesis has been justified: it has to stand up on its own merits.
Consequently, I do not have to say anything more about chain-of-causality, but I am not averse to scrutinizing it, so I am happy to take on the infinite regress issue and show that it is not a problem. For example, you wrote "someone without knowledge of the earth's rotation could tell you that it was day or night without telling you how it was day or night", and that is true enough, if they could see daylight, or hear the sounds characteristic of day- or nighttime activity, or read a clock (or from their body's circadian rhythm, absent any better information, but that does not work for long.) In all these cases, the thought arises from information flow along a chain of causality that does not, in any circumstance, need to be followed back any further than the rotation of the Earth, so there is no infinite regress. Furthermore, there is no need for the person to know about the rotation of the Earth, as that rotation causes corresponding phenomena, which in turn feed information to our subject - information which allows them to deduce the fact of it being day or night so long as they have some knowledge about how to differentiate the two (the chain is there even for clock-reading and circadian rhythms, which are synchronized to the Earth's rotation.)
You seem to have come to your infinite regress conclusion because I occasionally used phrases such as 'factual information'. That is just a shortcut for referring to information caused by the actual state of the world, either directly or through a process of sound reasoning from direct information, and I should have been clear about that.
We can continue with this line of thought: a person might wake up, look at a clock reading, say, 13:00, and think it is daytime - but in one case the clock is working correctly, and in the other, it is broken, and it is actually midnight. This is no problem for CHOC, as in the latter case, there is no causal chain from the Earth's rotation to the clock's reading. According to your thesis, this thought is like reality in the first scenario, but unlike reality in the second - yet it seems to be the case (or at least it plausibly is) that the thoughts in the two scenarios are identical (they can certainly be expressed by the same proposition.) From this consideration, it seems that likeness to reality is not an intrinsic property of thoughts, but merely a correspondence between them and reality - and mere correspondence does not seem to be a problem for materialism, at least not without further explanation.
With phrases like "you need to find another explanation" and "it does not get you off the hook to show that my argument ... is invalid", I feel it is necessary for me to repeat what I said earlier about burden-shifting: "in order to show that your argument has failed to make its case, I neither need to show how there can be likeness that is not physical likeness if materialism is true, and nor do I need to show that likeness is not necessary for a thought to be about reality. On the contrary, you have chosen to make a strong claim - essentially that the mind cannot possibly be the result of physical processes [4] - and to sustain that, you need more than arguments grounded in appeals to intuition about how things either must or cannot be. In particular, anything resembling 'so prove me wrong' would amount to burden-shifting, and while we are about it, the alternative to 'the mind cannot be a physical phenomenon' is not 'the mind must be a physical phenomenon', it is 'the mind might be a physical phenomenon.'"
All of this is probably moot, however, given the sibling comment in which I show, using an argument revealed to me by this discussion, that materialism is correct;)
[4] After I wrote this, you made it quite clear how strong of a claim you are making: "materialism makes rational thought impossible, and is therefore false." [see footnote 2]
Ok, thanks for this latest reply. I thought your 7-point jest syllogism was a sarcastic response to my two most recent comments (made 2-3 days ago) so I didn't bother adding to what I'd already said; so if I seem to have ignored half of what you wrote, that's why.
I agree, let's keep everything here from now on. I will reply to this comment soon.
The 7-step argument for materialism I have presented above is not intended to be sarcasm. I might be guilty of presenting a parody, in that it closely resembles your argument in most respects, but it has a serious purpose - an attempt to focus attention on the need for statements to be sufficiently well-defined and justifiable that a reasonable skeptic could find them persuasive. The challenge it presents you with is to refute it with a non- question-begging, non- burden-shifting response that would not apply, mutatis mutandis, to your own argument.
Well I'll get back properly as soon as I can, tomorrow I hope, but premise 6 of your 7-point sequence is false (or, if you prefer, we don't agree on it). Indeed, it seems question-begging, but this is so obvious that I assume you have something else in mind...
Remember what I said: The challenge it presents you with is to refute it with a non- question-begging, non- burden-shifting response that would not apply, mutatis mutandis, to your own argument - and for that, it would be helpful if you list your premises as I have done. I mentioned a while back that you cannot justify your conclusion by being aloof (or vague, for that matter) about the argument for it.
Note that this nominal counter-argument does not render irrelevant the question of what you mean by 'likeness', and whether it differs from the sort of correspondence that information flow along causal chains can bring about. In fact, if you do not say anything definite, I can simply assert, as a premise, that they are the same thing, and rephrase this nominal counter-argument accordingly.
> Far from adding any specificity to what you mean by likeness, your Dec. 12 post [1] continues to avoid doing so.
Very good.
My "theory", if you must call it that, is Aristotelian moderate realism. A full discussion of what I mean by "likeness" would necessarily invoke concepts from that worldview. So it would therefore involve debating the truth/falsehood of said worldview. I don't want to do that for two reasons: first because it'd take the scope of the discussion far beyond whether thought can be material or not, and time is a big constraining factor. And secondly, we'd just be re-inventing the wheel. You'll find moderate realism ably defended by several authors who I can recommend if you're interested, and no doubt you'll know of your own list of attempted debunkings.
But as a compromise, I can propose the following partial definition: Two objects are alike if they are the same in some respect.
So an apple and a banana are the same in that they are both fruit (and this works even if categorizations of this sort are merely conventional), but different in that one is red and the other yellow.
More formally, we could say that A and B are alike if we can predicate X of both A and B. As a corollary, A and B are entirely un-alike if we cannot predicate anything of both A and B.
If you're good to go with that we can proceed. It would then be necessary to ask
(1) Whether a thought must be like its object (using the definition just given) in order for it to be about its object;
(2) If so, in what manner it must be like its object;
(3) Whether said manner can be material.
I don't think "the same" can be usefully (verbally) defined, since there is a point at which verbal definitions involve defining words whose meaning is more-clear in terms of those whose meaning is less-clear.
> The challenge it presents you with is to refute it with a non- question-begging, non- burden-shifting response that would not apply, mutatis mutandis, to your own argument - and for that, it would be helpful if you list your premises as I have done.
It is possible I misunderstand you, but it doesn't appear to present me with a challenge. Premise 6 is false in any interpretation that could be given it. That is not question-begging, nor is it burden-shifting, and whether this response applies to any aspects of my own argument is precisely what we're debating. Points 1 thru 5 are unobjectionable, assuming some unusual meaning has not been assigned to any of the terms.
Is your point that I'm stating the opposite of premise 6 in my argument without justification?
The latest reason for not saying what you mean by likeness is that you don't want to do what it would take. While I can understand your reluctance to go there, it does not make the problems created by the absence of any specifics about this likeness go away.
You say that doing so would take the scope of the discussion far beyond whether thought can be material or not. This is surprising: this likeness, and claims about what follows from it, are key premises to your argument, and so, surely, establishing what this likeness is and how it leads to your conclusion is central to addressing the question of whether thought can be material or not has been answered by your thesis?
Your assertion that this would be re-inventing the wheel does not seem to fit with your concern about the scope of the ensuing discussion, either - if it's all been worked out already,how come it hasn't been written up already in, say, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, all packaged up and demanding little more of your time than some commentary (it is also implausible that if this wheel has already been invented, philosophers would still be about equally divided over the question - and yet they are.)
As it stands, your claim that the answer is already out there is yet another one made without justification, and any suggestion that skeptics of your bold claim should figure this out for themselves would amount to another form of burden shifting.
Examining your compromise, "two objects are alike if they are the same in some respect" seems to me to be a good definition of 'alike' (better than those in the couple of dictionaries I looked at, IMHO) and likewise, I have little to say about "more formally, we could say that A and B are alike if we can predicate X of both A and B. As a corollary, A and B are entirely un-alike if we cannot predicate anything of both A and B", except that we need some sort of restriction on appropriate predicates (I don't think it would be helpful to say that a horse is like a dogma on account of their English-language names both having five letters.)
With regard to your three questions: there's nothing wrong with 1, though the definition of 'like;' that you have just given is so broad as to give little or any guidance; 2 is both the one I think might be answered by information flow via CHOC and the one you have resolutely avoided addressing (you still have not even said whether or not my CHOC-mediated 'correspondence' is your 'likeness'), and at 3, we can equally ask whether said manner can be immaterial.
You go on to say that you don't think "the same" can be usefully (verbally) defined,which I find surprising, as philosophers seem to use the word 'identical' with great abandon - is that not more or less the same? I might get your point if you said which more-clear and less-clear words you are thinking of here.
After this you seem to abruptly switch topic, leaving me puzzled as to what you are driving at in the six paragraphs beginning "But, as a compromise..." Is there something missing? It feels as if there is.
The point of the alternative argument is not so much that you are stating the opposite of premise 6 (arguably what you have said, in various ways, is not quite the opposite), but that both of them depend on leaps of faith for which no justification has been given.
One other thing I am still curious about is whether your likeness is intrinsic to thoughts (I gave my reasons for doubting it could be in my first Dec. 14 post, beginning "We can continue with this line of thought...")
I have been thinking more about the section that I felt was incomplete: are you saying that 1) as you don't think 'the same' can be usefully (verbally) defined, and 2) as you have defined 'alike' as essentially 'the same in some respects, but not all', then 'alike' itself cannot be (verbally) defined? If so, then that seems to add to the difficulties in accepting your argument as sound.
I also do not get the significance of 'verbally' in parentheses. Are you suggesting there is another way to define sameness, and if so, what is it, and why not use it here?
I think this conversation has reached its end. The requisite goodwill appears to be lacking. We'll agree to disagree: you leave me with my Aristotelianism, and I'll leave you with what I think is your stated position that your thoughts don't need to bear any resemblance to reality for them to be real.
Well, that's too bad, as I had come to look forward to these exchanges in much the same way that my wife anticipates the Times crosswords - i.e. as a challenging but ultimately inconsequential mental exercise (I say inconsequential because this sort of debating shows no sign of solving the puzzle of what minds are.)
It seems to me to be an unfortunate choice for you to retire with a somewhat serious, yet passively-voiced, allegation, but if that is how you want to present yourself, then so be it, and people can make of it what they will. Best wishes to you!
> and I'll leave you with what I think is your stated position that your thoughts don't need to bear any resemblance to reality for them to be real.
Just for the record, I will point out something I wrote in the very post you are replying to: in response to your question "in what manner must [a thought] be like its object", I wrote "[this question] is both the one I think might be answered by information flow via CHOC and the one you have resolutely avoided addressing (you still have not even said whether or not my CHOC-mediated 'correspondence' is your 'likeness')."
As you have repeatedly refused to address the question of whether it is what you mean, I will just say this: you have not shown that anything more is needed in the way of likeness in order for someone to have true thoughts.
Why are you avoiding this issue? Pretending I haven't answered your question is not helping you.
Anyway, to the main point. You wrote:
> The point in my penultimate paragraph is this: If we suppose that there is a causal flow from the real world to brain states via the sense organs, and adopt the premise that (changes in) mental states are caused by (changes in) brain states, then we have at least the outlines of an answer to your tacit initial question (what is it that makes a thought being one about reality?) that does not invoke or depend on any concept of likeness or similarity. In what I quoted above, you certainly seem to be saying that the only thing that could make a thought about reality is that it has a similarity (in some nebulous sense, at least) to reality, but here we have another way for a thought to be about reality that does not depend on likeness in any sense.
This clarifies our disagreement well. I will divide my response into two sections: 1. Why it is necessary for a thought to be like reality if a thought is to be about reality, 2. Why a causal chain cannot provide either likeness or a substitute for likeness.
1.
A thought can be right or wrong, but right-ness implies likeness to reality, while wrong-ness implies un-likeness. To illustrate: suppose Bob has a thought about a tree. Let's say it's "this oak tree is made of wood". Now suppose his friend Bill thinks "this oak tree is made of copper". I take it we can premise that Bob is right and Bill is wrong.
But for our premise to be true, their thoughts must be compared to the tree itself. There is no other way to judge their thoughts' right-ness or wrong-ness. For Bob's thought to be right, it must be like the tree (and the opposite for Bill's). Any conception of thought that lacks likeness makes this impossible. If we deny that both Bob's and Bill's thoughts are like the tree (which is necessary if we "do not invoke or depend on any concept of likeness or similarity"), neither Bob nor bill can be right. The concept of right-ness is predicated on that of like-ness. If, therefore, you drop the concept of like-ness, you lose the possibility of right-ness. And in this situation, all thought becomes meaningless, including the thoughts we're having right now about the nature of the mind.
Therefore we can conclude that likeness is necessary for correctness, and therefore for thought to be about reality.
Be aware that my claim is very limited. I am not, right now, making any claim as to what this likeness may be like. I am simply saying that likeness in some sense of the word is necessary for rational thought. Hence I disagree that may claim is 'nebulous'; rather, it's limited.
2.
A causal chain does not rescue your denial of likeness from its implications. As I stated above, causal chains happen everywhere in nature ("the tree causes a rustling sound"). A brain state is one result of a particular causal chain, but there is nothing special about it on that account. There is nothing that gives it the possibility of being rational, or correct. More specifically, a causal chain cannot in itself be 'right' or 'wrong'. It is possible that a causal chain will cause Bob to think a tree is made of wood, and cause Bill to think it's made of copper. This is not enough for Bob to be right and Bill wrong, because the chain has no connection to correct-ness. It can't give us reason for saying "Bob's thoughts are like reality, and Bill's are not". A causal chain is not right or wrong, or rational in any sense. That someone has been caused to think something doesn't mean he has a reason for thinking something. So a causal chain cannot provide a substitute for likeness if we want to rescue the concept of rational thought. Whether or not a brain state causes a mental state is irrelevant to this fact, contrary to what you claim.
Nor can a chain provide physical likeness itself. The materialist view of the mind closes off any other way in which likeness can be achieved, because (if it's consistent) it postulates that brain states, ultimately reducible to fundamental particles, are all that objectively exist. You claim "an understanding of causality may potentially lead us to being able to say... in what way thoughts are similar to reality", but you offer no details. I deny this is so -- causality can't rescue your position; it can't make there be some like-ness that is somehow both material and yet does not involve arrangements of atoms that are similar, which we've already ruled out. I'm happy to hear details if you think otherwise.
To summarize:
1. Rational thought requires (the possibility of) likeness 2. Materialism makes likeness impossible, because it reduces the mind to physical states, and a brain's physical state is not like the object of its thought [your arguments about causality do not gainsay this] 3. Therefore materialism makes rational thought impossible, and is therefore false.
So my claim way upthread, that 'there is an immaterial component to our thought, and therefore to our existence' must stand.