npage85: knowing the fundamental character of X

And page 85 made a video called "The Brain Doesn't Create the Mind." In it, he tried to use a deductive argument to prove the existence of souls. It went like this:

Premise one: All fundamentally same processes create fundamentally same products.

Premise two: Brain processes accompanying different subjective experiences are all fundamentally the same, so electrochemical activity between neurons.

Premise three: All subjective experiences are fundamentally different.

So, I think he means, for instance, the experience of seeing a ball is fundamentally different from the experience of hearing a roll of thunder. Therefore, subjective experiences are not the products of brain processes.

The problem with this argument is that it assumes that we have an objective way of deciding what the fundamental nature of a thing or a process is. Is wine fundamentally a drink made from grapes, or is it fundamentally a drink whose alcohol content falls in a certain range, or perhaps both? Is it a grape drink whose alcohol content falls within a certain range? Maybe. Or is it fundamentally just an alcoholic drink?

So, is it fundamentally the same as beer, or is it fundamentally just a drink? Is it fundamentally the same as orange juice, or is it fundamentally a fluid? Is it fundamentally then the same as lighter fluid, for instance? Or is it fundamentally a collection of molecules?

So is it fundamentally the same as a loaf of bread, or is it fundamentally a collection of atoms? And so on, you can keep going. For N page 85's arguments to work, he first needs to explain how we can objectively resolve disputes about what the fundamental character of a thing is.

He responded to this objection with a video in which he outlined a method for examining a process and distilling its fundamental character, the idea being that you can compare the fundamental character of two different processes, and you will know whether they're the same or not fundamentally.

In this video, I'm going to explain why his criteria for determining what the fundamental essence of a process is are problematic. I'm going to do that by showing how his criteria lead to conclusions that I don't think he would accept.

He presents various steps we can take which remove various parts of a process, ultimately leaving only that which corresponds to the process's fundamental character. So, the first step he suggests is to take the process and remove its non-controlled variables.

In the process of making beer, there are certain variables that beer makers clearly take steps to control, and there are other variables that they don't control. But what about other kinds of processes? For instance, who is controlling the variables in the process of a tree growing? Variables such as soil acidity, moisture, sunlight, etc.—often no one is.

If you remove the non-controlled variables from the process of a tree growing in the wild, you're left with nothing at all. So, our conclusion would have to be that this process has no fundamental character, according to N page 85’s criteria.

We'd have to agree that the growth of a tree in a botanical garden where it is maintained by a gardener is a fundamentally different process than the growth of a tree in a primordial forest. I doubt that N page 85 would be happy with this consequence of his suggestion.

The second thing he suggests is that we take the process and remove all parts of the process that don't produce any significant products. He goes on to define significant in quite a specific sense. For a product to be significant, it has to satisfy two conditions.

The first of those is that it has to be of lower entropy than when it began. So, when we initiate the process of making compost, for instance, our aim is to create a product which is actually of higher entropy, which is less organized than its ingredients before the process began. So, if we removed all the parts of the process of making compost that produce products of lower entropy, we'd also be left with nothing.

We'd be forced to conclude that the process of creating compost has no fundamental character. So, I don't think N page 85 will be happy with that either. The requirement for products to have a lower entropy is problematic.

So, for now, we'll substitute this requirement with another very problematic one, but at least it will let us go on and see what's wrong with N page 85's other suggestions. So, for now, we'll say that the first condition that has to be met for products to be considered significant is that it has to be useful for something.

We can all agree that compost is certainly useful for something. So, now we come to the second condition that has to be met for a product to be considered significant. That is, it should be not pre-existing; the product should be a new thing that arises from the process and does not predate it.

So, we get an example. In the process of making beer, N page 85 suggests that we can conclude that flavor compounds are not a significant product of the process since they were in the plants to begin with. They were not created by the process, and the problem here should be obvious, I think.

If we look closely enough, all the components of beer, including the parts that make up its alcohol content, existed before the beer making process began. What is true is that there is a certain pattern of matter that we call alcohol that did not exist before the beer making process began. It emerged through the process; that pattern wasn't there before.

So, we might want to seize upon this and say, “Well, maybe alcohol can still be a significant product of the process of beer making,” because it's a new pattern that emerged during that process.

So, we can maybe redefine N page 85’s idea of significance in the following way: The product of a process is a significant product of that process if and only if it's a new pattern and it's useful for something.

So, we could say that, but if we do that, then it badly damages our project to look for the fundamental essence of beer, for instance. And here's why: Significant products of a process are new patterns that are useful; the fundamental parts of a process are those parts which give rise to significant products.

Premise one: All parts of the process of making beer give rise to the pattern we call beer. The first conclusion is that all parts of the process of making beer are fundamental to that process. The second conclusion is that the process of making beer is therefore fundamentally different from the process of making any other kind of drink.

So, to finish off, here are the things that N page 85 needs to pay attention to if he's going to take another stab at explaining how we can get to the fundamental essence of a thing or a process.

First, he needs to notice that processes are not under the control of people in all cases. So, for instance, a tree growing in a forest somewhere—do these processes have a fundamental character? If you think they do, your explanation needs to account for that.

The second thing is there are processes that create useful things whose state of entropy is greater than the entropy of their parts before the process began. The example is making compost. Do these processes have a fundamental character? If you think they do, your explanation needs to account for those also.

The third point is, when talking about products created during a process, you need to acknowledge that we are actually talking about rearrangements of matter. If anything could be said to be created in such a process, then it's a pattern of matter that's created.

And related to that is the following point—alcohol, for instance, is a pattern created in the process of making beer. We can agree on that. But another pattern created in the making of beer is beer itself. Beer is a pattern that did not exist before the process began.

So, if you decide that the new patterns a process creates define the fundamental character of that process, then beer making is fundamentally different from wine making, because while both create the alcohol pattern, they also create the beer pattern and the wine pattern, respectively.