The Self
Philip Thrift
…
Genuine, realistic materialism requires acknowledgement that the phenomena of conscious experience are, considered specifically as such, wholly physical, as physical as the phenomena of extension and electricity as studied by physics. This in turn requires the acknowledgement that current physics, considered as a general account of the nature of the physical, is like Hamlet without the prince, or at least like Othello without Desdemona. No one who doubts this is a serious materialist, as far as I can see. Anyone who has had a standard modern (Western) education is likely to experience a feeling of deep bewilderment—category-blasting amazement—when entering into serious materialism, and considering the question ‘What is the nature of the physical?’ in the context of the thought that the mental (and in particular the experiential) is physical; followed, perhaps, by a deep, pragmatic agnosticism.
Even if we grant that there is a phenomenon that is reasonably picked out by the phrase ‘mental self’, why should we accept that the right thing to say about some two-second-long mental-self phenomenon is (a) that it is a thing or object like a rock or a tiger? Why can’t we insist that the right thing to say is simply (b) that an enduring (‘physical’) object—Louis—has a certain property, or (c) that a two-second mental-self phenomenon is just a matter of a certain process occurring in an object—so that it is not itself a distinct object existing for two seconds?
I think that a proper understanding of materialism strips (b) and (c) of any appearance of superiority to (a). As for (c): any claim to the effect that a mental self is best thought
of as a process rather than an object can be countered by saying that there is no sense in which a mental self is a process in which a rock is not also and equally a process. So if a rock is a paradigm case of a thing in spite of being a process, we have no good reason not to say the same of a mental self.
But if there is a process, there must be something—an object or substance—in which it goes on. If something happens, there must be something to which it happens, something which is not just the happening itself. This expresses our ordinary understanding of things, but physicists are increasingly content with the view that physical reality is itself a kind of pure process—even if it remains hard to know exactly what this idea amounts to. The view that there is some ultimate stuff to which things happen has increasingly ceded to the idea that the existence of anything worthy of the name ‘ultimate stuff’ consists in the existence of fields of energy — consists, in other words, in the existence of a kind of pure process which is not usefully thought of as something which is happening to a thing distinct from it.
As for (b): the object/property distinction is, as Russell says of the standard distinction between mental and physical, ‘superficial and unreal’ (1927: 402). Chronic philosophical difficulties with the question of how to express the relation between substance and property provide strong negative support for this view. However ineluctable it is for us, it seems that the distinction must be as superficial as we must take the distinction between the wavelike nature and particlelike nature of fundamental particles to be.
Obviously more needs to be said, but Kant seems to have got it exactly right in a single clause: ‘in their relation to substance, [accidents] are not in fact subordinated to it, but are the manner of existence of the substance itself’.
Brent Meeker
In the 1990s many analytic philosophers were inclined to deny that the expression ‘the self’ referred to anything at all. Others said that its meaning was too unclear for it to be used in worthwhile philosophical discussion. A third group thought that the only legitimate use of ‘I’ and ‘the self’ was its use to refer to the human being considered as a whole. This paper rejects these views. It makes a proposal about how to endow ‘the self’ with sufficiently clear meaning without taking it to refer to the whole human being. One needs to begin with phenomenology, with self-experience, with the experience of there being such a thing as the self. One can then approach the questions about metaphysics of the self—questions about the existence and nature of the self—in the light of the discussion of the phenomenology of the self.…
Genuine, realistic materialism requires acknowledgement that the phenomena of conscious experience are, considered specifically as such, wholly physical, as physical as the phenomena of extension and electricity as studied by physics. This in turn requires the acknowledgement that current physics, considered as a general account of the nature of the physical, is like Hamlet without the prince, or at least like Othello without Desdemona. No one who doubts this is a serious materialist, as far as I can see. Anyone who has had a standard modern (Western) education is likely to experience a feeling of deep bewilderment—category-blasting amazement—when entering into serious materialism, and considering the question ‘What is the nature of the physical?’ in the context of the thought that the mental (and in particular the experiential) is physical; followed, perhaps, by a deep, pragmatic agnosticism.
Even if we grant that there is a phenomenon that is reasonably picked out by the phrase ‘mental self’, why should we accept that the right thing to say about some two-second-long mental-self phenomenon is (a) that it is a thing or object like a rock or a tiger? Why can’t we insist that the right thing to say is simply (b) that an enduring (‘physical’) object—Louis—has a certain property, or (c) that a two-second mental-self phenomenon is just a matter of a certain process occurring in an object—so that it is not itself a distinct object existing for two seconds?
I think that a proper understanding of materialism strips (b) and (c) of any appearance of superiority to (a). As for (c): any claim to the effect that a mental self is best thought
of as a process rather than an object can be countered by saying that there is no sense in which a mental self is a process in which a rock is not also and equally a process. So if a rock is a paradigm case of a thing in spite of being a process, we have no good reason not to say the same of a mental self.
But if there is a process, there must be something—an object or substance—in which it goes on. If something happens, there must be something to which it happens, something which is not just the happening itself. This expresses our ordinary understanding of things, but physicists are increasingly content with the view that physical reality is itself a kind of pure process—even if it remains hard to know exactly what this idea amounts to. The view that there is some ultimate stuff to which things happen has increasingly ceded to the idea that the existence of anything worthy of the name ‘ultimate stuff’ consists in the existence of fields of energy — consists, in other words, in the existence of a kind of pure process which is not usefully thought of as something which is happening to a thing distinct from it.
As for (b): the object/property distinction is, as Russell says of the standard distinction between mental and physical, ‘superficial and unreal’ (1927: 402).
Brent
Chronic philosophical difficulties with the question of how to express the relation between substance and property provide strong negative support for this view. However ineluctable it is for us, it seems that the distinction must be as superficial as we must take the distinction between the wavelike nature and particlelike nature of fundamental particles to be.
Obviously more needs to be said, but Kant seems to have got it exactly right in a single clause: ‘in their relation to substance, [accidents] are not in fact subordinated to it, but are the manner of existence of the substance itself’.
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Philip Thrift
Brent Meeker
Brent
Philip Thrift
Philip Thrift
Brent Meeker
There is only physical reality - no alternative, separate, mental reality - just in the way Strawson writes.
You've seen me refer to that Rorty chapter for 20 years now. (If you were paying attention.)
I don't know what more you want to convince you that neural monism is woo woo.
* Neutral monism is a monistic metaphysics. It holds that ultimate reality is all of one kind. To this extent neutral monism is in agreement with the more familiar versions of monism: idealism and materialism. What distinguishes neutral monism from its monistic rivals is the claim that the intrinsic nature of ultimate reality is neither mental nor physical. This negative claim also captures the idea of neutrality: being intrinsically neither mental nor physical in nature ultimate reality is said to be neutral between the two.
Brent
Brent Meeker
Brent
I guess I will go through 2020 seeing more of that kind of thing.
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Philip Thrift
Bruno Marchal
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Bruno Marchal
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Bruno Marchal
It's baffled me to see that people believe in that all my life (or since high school days anyway). It's just plain weird.
I guess I will go through 2020 seeing more of that kind of thing.
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Bruno Marchal
On 2 Jan 2020, at 12:39, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wednesday, January 1, 2020 at 7:14:15 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote:
On 1/1/2020 2:50 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:
Where to people get the idea that there are any non-material things? It's baffled me to see that people believe in that all my life (or since high school days anyway). It's just plain weird.
Perhaps it's because there are predicates and relations of material things.
Brent
To me - and I think this is consistent with other neopramatists [ Richard Rorty, etc. "drawing inspiration from John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, Wilfrid Sellars, W. V. O. Quine, Jacques Derrida" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neopragmatism ], predicates and relations are (just) linguistic entities that appear in sentences.
They are - as written sequences of letters (like you are looking at right now on a laptop or smartphone, which are probably just electronic dots on a screen of pixels, so 100% material) when combined - become operators to be used in the language 'game’.
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Philip Thrift
On Monday, January 6, 2020 at 5:03:46 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 31 Dec 2019, at 21:06, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:
...
Materialism and Mechanism are logically incompatible. You don’t need the Movie-Graph Argument to understand this. If matter plays a role in consciousness, it has to have a non computable and non first person recoverable role, and mechanism has to be false, but there are no evidence for that. On the contrary the quantum weirdness, and consciousness/matter relations are well explained by mechanism, at least until now. That would not be the case if physics was still Newtonian.The universal machine has to self (or even 8) well described by the Theaetetus’ variant (the difference between provable(p) and (provable(p) and p). The first one is nameable, the second one is not.Without any evidence, it is premature to commit oneself into an ontology.Bruno
CHIMP
consciousness hyper-intrinsic massless particle
Philip Thrift
On Monday, January 6, 2020 at 5:12:51 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 1 Jan 2020, at 11:50, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:Where to people get the idea that there are any non-material things?They have a lot of examples, like numbers, game, love, emotion, consciousness, etc.
Bruno
Brent Meeker
On 1/6/2020 3:20 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> Ostensive pointing is dream able, and as such cannot be used as a
> logical argument in favour of any ontology.
argument against ostensive pointing. The fallacy is you assume only
logic can provide evidence. Experience is also evidence, even dream
experience. If you dream of something, that something will be based on
your experience and biology.
Brent