What does "physical" mean?

[Philip Thrift]

https://www.academia.edu/38245741/What_does_physical_mean_A_prolegomenon_to_panpsychism

What does “physical” mean? A prolegomenon to panpsychism

Galen Strawson

2021, forthcoming - Mind and Being

[1] What does the word ‘physical’ mean in its most general theoretical philosophical use? It’s used in many different ways, and it’s hard to imagine that philosophers could reach agreement on a best use. [2] Should we tie the meaning of ‘physical’ closely to physics? To do so (in a non-circular way) is to run the risk of ruling out the possibility that there might be two different universes that were ‘formally’ or structurally identical or homomorphic although substantially different—made of different stuff. [3] Perhaps that is not in the end a real possibility. Even so, it seems that we shouldn’t define ‘physical’ in a way that rules it out a priori. [4] If so, it may be that the word ‘physical’ is best used to denote a certain fundamental structure-transcendent stuff-nature—call it P—that allows the possibility that a universe with stuff nature Q structurally identical to a physical universe isn’t physical. [5] Can we suppose ourselves to know something about the ultimate intrinsic nature of P, if physicalism is true? I argue that we can. [6] Can we draw any further metaphysical conclusions from this knowledge? I argue that we can. We can show that panpsychism in some form constitutes the most plausible theory of the ultimate nature of P.

@philipthrift

[John Clark]

Galen Strawson

>What does the word ‘physical’ mean in its most general theoretical philosophical use? It’s used in many different ways, and it’s hard to imagine that philosophers could reach agreement on a best use. 

 

Yes, and that's why unlike physicists and mathematicians philosophers haven't discovered anything new in a thousand years, they can't even agree on what questions to ask much less find the answers.

 

> Should we tie the meaning of ‘physical’ closely to physics?

Obviously physics is the study of the physical so the answer is yes.

 

To do so (in a non-circular way)

All definitions of "physical" or of anything else becomes circular if you go far enough, that's why language needs examples to give words meaning, so physics is what physicists study.

> is to run the risk of ruling out the possibility that there might be two different universes that were ‘formally’ or structurally identical or homomorphic although substantially different—made of different stuff.

I don't know what identical but substantially different means but another good definition of physical is one of Richard Feynman's favorite words, "stuff".

John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

Unfortunately that is based on the Aristotelian philosophy, which is incompatible with mechanism. The “stuff”, with mechanism, is explained in term of statistics on computations (which requires much less ontological commitment than any sort of primary stuff that nobody can see, as “seeing” require interaction).

Physicist measure numbers and infer relation between measurable numbers. The 3p physical, that is those sharable number relations,  is the object study of physics. “Physical” admits also a first person sense, like with “ a physical sensation”, which brings the mind-body problem, where, as the platonism philosophers understood, makes highly dubious that the physical can be used to understand the metaphysical, needed to justify the existence of the (appearance of) stuff.

The use of stuff in metaphysics is only slightly less naive, and as much invalid, than the use of “god” as an explanation in philosophy. 

The god of the greek theologian (not of the greek myth and legend) is only the god of monism: the idea that there are first principle explaining everything. That is at the root of modern physics, but with the mind-body problem, we can guess that physics cannot be the fundamental science. With mechanism, Darwinism’s spirit is extended to the original and logical development of the physical laws from arithmetic. Up to now, the observation of nature confirm mechanism, and disprove materialism.

This is hard to swallow for dogmatic materialist, as many still exist in our Aristotelian (weak materialist) era. People confuse the serious evidence for a physical reality with evidences that the physical reality is primary, but that is simple category error, facilitate by the fact that theology and thus philosophy (which is just theology without a notion of God) are separated from science.

The difference between science and bad theology/philosophy, is that in science, we never abandon a concept of an idea, but change the theories and definitions when we get contradiction. We don’t say “Earth do not exist” when we learn that “Earth is not flat”, or” not supported by infinities of turtles”, or "not at the center of the universe”: we just change our views.

Mechanism reduce both mind and matter to only one mystery: our understanding of natural number, but it explains why this mystery is absolutely unsolvable. That explanation of mind and matter is constructive, making the theology of the universal machine both a pure branch of mathematics (even of arithmetic) and a testable experimental subbranch of physics.

In that Mechanist frame, the 3p physical is given by the “theory of quanta” obtained from the theory of the observable (defined with the intensional variant of G and G*), and the difference between G and G* (and the corresponding intentional variant) makes precise the difference between the sharable and measurable quanta, and the non sharable, but still experienceable qualia, which gives the 1p physical qualia. Qualia obeys a quantum logic which extends the logic of quanta, corroborating the fact that with mechanism, all the physicalness is obtained as a first person plural reality. 

Bruno

John K Clark

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