Never thought that the Philosophy of the mind could go so deep like architecture. Good stuff.
maximusatlas
One immediate problem I have with this: materialism does not purport to be a logical or conceptual truth about the universe, but an empirical one. Hence, even if the number of logically possible thoughts outnumber the number of physical configurations, materialism merely needs to obtain with respect to actual thoughts. Human beings are finite in how many thoughts we may think, and it is arguable that this psychological limitation is an expression of our physicality (i.e., we have a finite number of neurons with finite processing power). This is why we are yet to encounter someone with the cognitive powers of a Laplacian demon. But our failure to do so becomes mysterious if we reject the idea that human mind's computational powers are limited by its materiality.
nubiannerd
Is the following statement a correct understanding of the key to this argument?
The number of thoughts about material things in reality outnumber the material things in reality, therefore thoughts can't be reduced to material things.
reverendgordontubbs
I love this argument! It's nice to have an argument against physicalism which doesn't hinge on intuitions about conceivability or possibility (which the physicalist can always remain skeptical about). Keep up the awesome work Josh!:)
kito-
I didn't know Searle thought reductionism is a form of eliminativism. That's funny, because I actually had that same thought, so it's good to know people like Searle have thought about it too.
TheBrunarr
Hey, Dr. Rasmussen! I absolutely love your content. I just have a single concern about this argument. So it goes
1. There is a thought for every class of towers.
2. There are more classes of towers than towers.
3. Therefore there are more thoughts than towers themselves.
And so, the argument goes on to say that there are more thoughts than possible brain states. But here is my concern. What if one stipulated that, when 2 brain states interact, say brain state A and brain state B, they produce a third thought, a thought different than a thought about state A or a thought about state B, but rather a thought about the *class* of state A and state B. So, to fit that back into the lego metaphor, one could interject the premise: there is a tower for every class of towers. In this way, now we are back at the same number of thoughts for towers, or, the same number of brain states for thoughts. Does this make the argument invalid? Thanks so much! :)
ibrahimdagher
I am a dualist, but I might have found an objection:
1. We cannot think the thoughts, that we cannot think.
2. Given our finite life time, we cannot test, whether we can have infinitely many thoughts.
3. We cannot know, whether we could potentially have inifitely many different thoughts.
This way out would imply that we can have so many thoughts, that we do not realize, that we are lacking thoughts, that we cannot have. And since we cannot think thoughts, that we cannot have and cannot empiricaly test, how many thoughts we can have, the amount of possible thoughts might actually be limited.
Maybe there are "Thought-Towers" we simply cannot hold, maybe there are concept combinations that are impossible for our mind, but we do not know about these, so that we lack awareness about these.
tieferforschen
The set of all logically possible toughts doesn't need to be instantiated in any physical state; the only thoughts that need to be accounted for are the thoughts that actually exist as physical states. The rest are only hypothetical, and the reductive physicalist would just say they don't actually exist. The thought of them might exist the same way you might personally think of the set of all natural numbers, but just like your mind doesn't need to actually contain the entire set of all natural numbers at any given time in order to have a thought of it, the entire set of all logically possible thoughts doesn't need to be physically instantiated in order to have a thought of it.
porteal
Excellent video! I have one question/potential criticism that is a little hard for me to clearly and precisely communicate, but I shall try my best!
The thrust of the criticism boils down to this: What reason do we have for thinking our thoughts can be sufficiently "fine-grained", as it were, so as to facilitate the accurate correspondence of a unique thought for each material configuration, no matter how increasingly complex the material configuration becomes?
The idea is that, at a certain point, it seems that material configurations become so complex and intertwined (say, containing hundreds of billions or trillions of parts) so as to go beyond our full and accurate grasp of them in thought -- our thought would be too coarse-grained, as it were, for accurately and fully representing or capturing the material configuration. This problem is best seen when we compare two such configurations. Suppose we take one material configuration with 900 trillion parts arranged and combined together in an extremely complex, intricate manner. Suppose we take this 900 trillion part configuration and tweak one part of it ever-so-slightly -- suppose we take one part from the interior of the arrangement -- so as to shift this individual material part picometers to the right. Then, these two material configurations are different, but it is hard to see I could have a thought of one that is not thereby a thought of the other precisely because they are so fine-grained that my mental representations of them would be sufficiently fine-grained to truly, accurately, and fully capture them and their difference. We know our minds are quite limited in a number of ways, including our powers of both imagination and conception -- and I fear that our mental representations (be it imaginative or conceptual) are too coarse-grained for having a unique thought correspond to each unique material configuration.
logicalliberty
here, but this reasoning would seem to imply the possibility of infinite thoughts given a total lack of a brain: 1) No brain, no concepts (set A). Size of set A is 0. 2) Set of classes of set A is set B. Size of B is 1, equivalent to thinking about thinking about nothing. 3) Why stop there? Set of classes of set B is set C, which has a size of 2. We're now creating classes of classes, or sets of sets. Seems reasonable. 4) This iterative process can continue to produce a set of arbitrary size, despite starting with the premise that there was no brain to think these thoughts.
tbucker
The reductive materialist would deny premise 1 since he thinks that thoughts are just material. So, it’s true that there are more classes of towers than towers but false that those classes have nonmaterial thoughts associated with each of them. What’s your response?
philosophyofreligion
Hi Josh, I'm reading through Who Are You, Really. I'm really enjoying it. A thought I had while reading your explanations of the different forms of your counting argument was that I can deny that logical operators like AND or OR linking two thoughts makes a new thought. It doesn't seem evident to me using introspection that I can have the thought "The sky is blue and the grass is green". It seems plausible that it might *seem* like I can, but I'm actually having three sequential thoughts. "The sky is blue", "and", "the grass is green". This is because thinking still happens in a temporal medium. One thought follows another thought, albeit very rapidly. What do you think?
barry.anderberg
What are your thoughts on Keith Frankish’s Illusionism? It’s been a more developed and sophisticated version of eliminative materialism
jimmyfaulkner
eh.. this assumes infinite number of legos/thoughts. you dont know that.
matswessling
so we have the space of brain configurations, and the space of logically possible thoughts is bigger than the space of brain configurations, however it could easily be that only a subset of the space of logically possible thoughts are available to us e.g. some thoughts might be too long and complex to ever be held in mind by us because we run out of memory and start corrupting it. for example if someone told you to consider the thought "T1 is my favourite tower or T2 is my favourite tower all the way up to T(trillion) " you wouldn't be able to think that thought all in one go.
so yes the space of logically possible thoughts is much larger than the set of thoughts that our brain states are able to bring about, and that's what we'd expect given our brains are material and came about through evolutionary processes.
jamesscalt
In the accompanying paper, "Building Thoughts From Dust, " your argument contains the premise, "There are more classes of physical properties than there are physical properties." But how many physical properties are there, such that there could be more classes than that?
Consider the physical properties of the form "being composed of N physical parts, " for every cardinal number N. For your premise to be true, there must be more classes of physical properties than physical properties of this form. But there is no number of classes of physical properties such that there aren't at least as many physical properties of this form. So the premise in question must be false.
Do you have any thoughts?
johnsonav
This might be a dumb question, but why can't one physical structure (Lego tower) ground two or more different thoughts? I have the intuition that this is possible, but I might be confused.
m.l.pianist
1/ From P you may infer P _LEGO_ Q
2/ From P _LEGO_ Q you may infer Q
C/ Therefore from P you may infer Q
poozletekitoi
Wrong, because we have a physical brain, so our thoughs are limited, and a simple turning machine can produce a infinitely varied output from a finite set of instructions, does the turning machine has a soul too ?
Ryba
i feel so dumb. what would be a synonym for "class"?
