Hello Alkis Piskas,

OK. No problem. Thanks anyway.

I apologize Alkis! If you would like, then perhaps asking me questions about it might help further the conversation. I will do my best to adequately respond!

Bob

Hello Foolos4,

This is only part of it. You are leaving out important information that cannot be gained simply by looking at an arrangement of parts. An engine does work. That work depends on parts but is not in any of the parts or combination of parts. The whole cannot be explained without an explanation of what the engine does, how it functions as a whole within another whole, a car for example.

I think we will have to just agree to disagree at this point, as I don’t see how to further the discussion without circling back around.

I am claiming that there are no disembodied minds. We find bodies that seem to be without mind, but no mind without bodies. The physical is ineliminable.

This is partially true. I can get on board with the idea that our minds do not exist without bodies because our bodies are extrinsic representation of our minds. So of course we should expect to a dead body to still have an alive mind, but this doesn’t mean that the mind is reducible to the brain.

An actual tornado is not an assemblage parts. Wind does not combine with dust, etc. The forces that create the tornado create the wind and raise the dust.

You are just, at best, pushing the question deeper and it doesn’t negate my point. When you understand the forces, wind, dust, etc. you thereby explain the weakly emergent property of a tornado. You can add whatever other parts you would like.

What is at issue is methodological rather than ontological. Because we do not have access to disembodied minds we must look to the embodied minds of living being. That is the only place we find mind.

I am not completely in disagreement with you: I think we should do more research on minds. But that research isn’t going to afford us an explanation of what mind is (as I have already stated and provided a proof for).

”Either a)there are physical things that we are aware of within experience or b) there are no physical things without experience. “

a) states that there are physical things and that we are aware of these things within experience. If, however, you accept b) then it is not simply that we are aware of these things in experience but that they would not be without experience.

Firstly, “Either or” entails a dilemma, and A and B are not a dilemma (as I mentioned earlier).

Secondly, A in your quote and A in your elaboration are not the same claim: the former simply posits that there are physical things within experience while the latter claims that there are also physical things outside of our experience that we experience within our experience. Those are two different claims.

If that is what you are getting at, then I deny A and accept B (and it would be a dilemma).

If one cannot be solved in terms of the other this cuts both ways.

As I already explained, there is a symmetry breaker.

And once again, it has not been proven that physicalism is unable to solve it even theoretically. You are convinced it can't. You should leave it there.

I provided an argument and you didn’t really counter it. Instead, you just keep claiming that I am wrong and am presuming it. If you think I am wrong, then counter the argument (I outlined it in a previous post).

I have no introspective experience of a universal mind. Private experience cannot stand as public, shareable evidence. In your mind is the idea of universal mind. That idea in your mind is only evidence that your embodied mind can entertain the notion of a non-embodied mind .

It’s introspective evidence. So if you haven’t experienced a dream in your life (which I highly doubt), then, yes, you shouldn’t be convinced by it.

My mind that produced the dream is an embodied mind.

If you are a physicalist, then yes.

Whatever I dream, whether a body is present in it or not, it is the dream of an embodied mind.

If by “embodied” you just mean that your mind corresponds to a physical body, then I agree. If you mean, on the contrary, that your mind is your body then I disagree with that ontological claim.

Bob

Hello Mww,

Cards on the table kinda thing, I must say, if we’re discussing analytic idealism from a Kantian perspective, I’m not sufficiently versed in the one to juxtaposition to the other. So maybe you should start with a brief synopsis of what analytic idealism is. Or, just start anywhere you like.

Sure thing. To put it briefly:

Analytic Idealism is the idea that reality is a mind-at-large (i.e., a universal mind) and that is the brute fact of reality (i.e., is metaphysically necessary). We, as ‘minds’, are disassociated alters of that universal mind, such that we are ‘cut off’ from experiencing everything at once. The ‘physical’, in the colloquial sense of the term (viz., tangible, solid objects within conscious experience), is an extrinsic representation of the mental; just like Schopenhauer’s epistemic dualism, so Analytic Idealism posits that one can come to know the world from two sides: the representations (which is the physical stuff) and the mental events which are being represented. In terms of ourselves as alters, since we are merely disassociated from the rest of the mind, when we die we re-integrate with the universal mind (kind of like how you realize that your mind was responsible for the whole vivid dream after awakening although you wrongly associated your identity with a particular character when it was occurring). For Kastrup, the thing-in-itself, like Schopenhauer, is the universal mind.

Can you give a brief elaboration of Kantianism as well?

Please navigate the discussion as you please.

Bob

Hello Tom Storm,

How do you feel about Kastrup's most extraordinary claim, that humans and all conscious creatures are dissociated alters of mind-at-large?

I think that it is a good hypothesis for explaining the soft problem of decomposition, but I don’t think there is enough evidence to support it completely yet.

I think it connects well with the dream analogy that most idealists use: the other dream characters are conscious as well.

I initially thought that the need for a mind-at-large made Kastrup similar to Berkeley,

Subjective idealism is similary to objective idealism, but they have differences. Also, I am starting to consider Berkeley to be neither really a subjective or objective idealist but, rather, the original ancestor of them both: he seems to have incompletely and somewhat incorrectly worked out metaphysics, but he did us all a favor by starting the convo about idealism. So I think Kastrup accepts and rejects different aspects of Berkeley’s idealism (especially the subjective idealist parts).

Mind-at-large is critical to Kastrup's position. I wonder how we can arrive at a reasonable belief that this entity is all there is and that we are all expressions of it?

The idea is that we can’t explain reality completely with reductive physicalism, so we should try with mind (which is the only other thing we have empirical evidence of) and see if it accounts for reality better. Kastrup argues, long story short, that it does account for reality and better than reductive physicalism. In metaphysics, there is no certainty about the positions: it is more about increasing explanatory power while decreasing complexity.

Bob

Hello Alkis Piskas,

Which includes our mind, doesn't, it? I didn't say only our mind.

You said:

Anyway, I will have to assume that by mind-(in)dependent you mean that the existence of the physical universe (matter and energy) is in/dependent of/on our mind.

Which implies (unless I am misunderstanding) that you think that my term ‘mind-independence’ refers to an existence of the physical universe that is independent of our mind. I am clarifying that that is false: I don’t count something that is independent of our minds, but yet still dependent on another non-human mind. If that was what you were saying, then I apologize as I didn’t understand that from it.

BTW, what other mind do you have ... in mind, besides ours, that is more advanced and more complex and on which the p.u. could can be dependent on?

I am not sure it can be called more advanced and complex, but the universal mind is what I was thinking of.

What I mean, in these two cases, is that you seem to try to reject my interpretation of your statemnts as incorrect, with no real reason. This only creates unnecessary "traffic" in our discussion and prolongs it without reason to maybe lead to an impass.

I am not trying to disagree with what you are saying: I am just clarifying where I think it needs to be clarified. No, ‘I cannot account for myself as’ is not the same sentence (essentially) as ‘I cannot consider myself as’. I was not saying that people should question whether they are conscious but, rather, the fact that they cannot account for it (i.e., explain it) under physicalism. I agree with you that we should be fairly incredibly certain that we are conscious.

But HPC does not say of imply that we should doubt about our consciousness or that we are conscious beings

Just a side note, some physicalist do deny that we have qualia: the subjectively unique experience part; however you are right that they do not doubt that we are conscious.

It is a problem of "mechanics", a problem of scientific explanation, proof, etc. Not of its existence!

Agreed.

Bob, I asked for a simpler description or argumentation if possible, not more complicated!

Sorry, I am not sure how to simplify it down further!

Bob

Hello Fooloso4,

An engine is not an assemblage of found parts. The parts are designed and manufactured as parts of a whole. Even something as simple as a bolt cannot be understood in isolation, without it being a part of a whole.

Correct. This doesn’t negate the fact that one can explain the whole by reduction to its parts and the relationship between those parts in their proper arrangement.

A biological entity is not put together out of parts. It can be separated into parts but unlike the engine those parts did not exist prior to the living being.

Correct. Again, this doesn’t negate my point: if one is fundamentally claiming that the mind is a part (or group of parts) of a physical body which emerges due to the specific relationship between those parts, then they are thereby claiming that the mind is reducible to the body.

They are not emergent. Once again, parts are parts of some whole. The relation of parts is inherent in the design of the parts. They are designed with their function and purpose in mind.

The purpose is irrelevant for all intents and purposes here. We can likewise take a natural example with no human purpose embedded into it: take a tornado. A tornado is explained by the reduction of it to its parts (e.g., wind, dust, etc.). Now wind, dust, etc. on their own do not completely account for a tornado: the other component is how they are arranged (e.g., cold and warm wind colliding causing spiralling rotations, etc.). The fact that the parts on their own do not completely account for the tornado does not mean that we aren’t still claiming that the tornado is weakly emergent from the parts in a specific arrangement. Same thing is true for everything else, including engines.

Of course there is more that needs to be explained!

Firstly, for all intents and purposes right now, I am strictly talking about how something works when I am talking about explanations (although I do think all explanations are reductive, but that is going to derail the conversation). Physicalism is arguing that it can explain (in terms of the how it works) a mind in terms of the physical biological brain.

What is it for?

This explanation is different, but still reductive. We reduce the ‘for’ to the purpose bestow onto it by the person utilizing it or perhaps the person who created it (depending). This isn’t irreductive.

What does it do?

When I explain the relations of the parts and the parts themselves, I am thereby explaining what it does. It may not be as clear to you what it does until you watch it work, but theoretically you can figure out what it will do just by understanding the parts and the relationship the parts have to each other when the engine would be on (even if you never witness an engine on). This is only possible because it is an reductive explanation.

What is its purpose?

This is the same question as what it is for.

Either a)there are physical things that we are aware of within experience or b) there are no physical things without experience.

That is a false dilemma. As an analytic idealist, I accept both A and B. If you want to make it a true dilemma, then it would have to be:

A) There are physical things without our experience which somewhat (or completely) correspond to the physical things within our experience; or

B) There are no physical things without experience.

Your version of #A doesn’t actually claim there are mind-independent physical things, it just asserts that we experience physical things within our conscious lives: virtually no idealist is going to disagree with that.

Either a) you are a substance dualist or b) you are a monist. If b) then you cannot sidestep an explanation of how mental stuff gives rise to physical things.

This is true, and I am a monist; and, yes, I agree that I cannot sidestep the problem of how the mental stuff gives rise to physical things within conscious experience. It is a soft problem, though, because it is reconcilable in the view; whereas the hard problem of consciousness is a hard problem because physicalism is provably unable to solve it even theoretically.

Idealists mean there are physically-independent minds. Given the central importance of conscious experience in your account, what do you make of the fact that we have no conscious experience of disembodied minds?

I am not even sure what it would mean to say that one experienced a disembodied mind: I am not claiming that we have evidence of minds existing that have no bodies except for the universal mind. With the universal mind, we do have introspective experience of this.

When you have a vivid dream, let’s say you find yourself consciously experiencing walking through a park (all within a mere vivid dream while you are asleep), you falsely associate your identity with the character (of which usually resembled yourself from reality) and consciously experience the dream world from their perspective. From their perspective, the beautiful nature they are walking through (i.e., you are walking through as the conscious experiencer of the vivid dream) appears to be distinct from themselves; however, once you wake up you realize that your mind was responsible for it all: the trees, the walking path, the fellows people you conversed with, etc. were ideas in your mind and ‘your mind’ as the character perceiving it in the dream was an illusion. Your mind, as the producer of the dream, did not have a body in it. I think an analogous situation is true of reality itself: we are within the universal mind but we perceive it from our own perspectives. However, I am not claiming that there are minds other than the universal mind that can be empirically proven to exist without bodies—I haven’t seen any evidence of that.

Bob

Hello creativesoul,

Organs are extrinsic representations of senses within one's perception. Senses are not existentially contingent on perception. However, the organs are existentially contingent upon one's perception.

Yeah...

I'm sorry, but that just looks like a word salad, to put it mildly.

How is any of that word salad? Can you give an example?

By ‘organ’, I am referring to the physical, biological, functional part of the body. The physical, under analytic idealism, is a representation within perceptions: spatiality isn’t an attribute of things-in-themselves. So, yes, the organs are perceptive-dependent because they are, by definition, something physical pertaining to your physical body. Likewise, yes, the senses can be viewed two different ways due to the duality of representation and mentality: the senses in terms of the physical representation of them, and the sense in the immaterial faculties of the mind. I would like to remind you that under analytic idealism the world can be known two different and equal ways—i.e., epistemic dualism.

As if one's organs do not exist without subjective qualitative experience. Seems to me to be the wrong way around. The experience, particularly the depth and breadth of human experience, is existentially dependent upon the biological machinery.

It isn’t that the senses can persist when the biological organs are clearly not working...no no no: the dysfunctional or completely dead organ is an extrinsic representation of the dead sense. You as an organism is the extrinsic representation, within your dashboard of experience and within our dashboards of experience, of your mind. So it isn’t that I am saying there are two completely separable parts (e.g., the organ and sense) but, rather, that the organ is the representation within our perception of the sense. They are interlinked so to speak.

Is that the acceptable standard for all accounting practices, or just some of them?

I don’t follow.

Are you claiming that the position you're arguing in favor of successfully accounts for the hard problem without obscurities?

There is no hard problem of consciousness under analytic idealism: that only happens of one is a physicalist. Positing mind comes from mind is not a hard problem, but positing mind comes from the brain is.

Oh... and you're equivocating terms to an extent I've not witnessed in quite some time. Particularly the term "perception(s)"

I am equivocating “perception” with what?

In addition, it seems there's a fair amount of anthropomorphism going on as well.

This just sounds like the classic counter-argument of “the world doesn’t have to be like our minds” but, again, that isn’t what I am arguing.

I'm afraid I simply do not have the time to make all this explicit. So, I'll just have to leave it all as bare assertion, but not for the lack of empirical evidence throughout the thread. Rather, due to the lack of time and personal priorities...

Absolutely no worries my friend!

Bob

Hello Mww,

The problem is that attempting to understanding Kantian idealism may very well negate your promotion.

I am not afraid of being wrong. I would rather understand everyone’s perspectives even if it negates my own.

We get into this deep enough, you may find your idealism was Kantian all along, or, if it most certainly was not,

Analytic idealism is neo-schopenhaurian, so it should be somewhat neo-Kantian. I don’t think diving into Kantianism is going to necessarily negate the view; although it certainly might.

And even if questions regarding Kantian idealism are merely a matter of your own personal interest, satisfying that interest isn’t necessarily to support your thesis.

The goal of this discussion board is not to just convince everyone of analytic idealism but rather to share thoughts and test the theory. If Kantianism is going to test it, then let’s do it.

In short, it’s possible you’re wasting your own time.

Learning is never a waste of time.

In short, I would much appreciate it if we kept discussing it, as I am interested in your take from a Kantian perspective. If you would like, I can DM you instead? I don’t mind it being in this thread, but I will leave it up to what you are most comfortable with.

Bob

Hello CreativeSoul,

It seems you're lumping thought, belief, perception, imagination, olfactory, visual, tactile, auditory, gustatory, and all sorts of things into the category of subjective experience

Fair enough, let me try to elaborate on those terms.

From an analytic idealist’s perspective, one’s organs that correspond to those senses you listed (e.g., auditory, gustatory, olfactory, etc.) are extrinsic representations of those senses of the immaterial mind within your perception (and other’s perceptions). I am not saying that your senses exist only within your subjective experience, because subjective experience is synonymous, in the case of humans, with perception and your senses are not contingent on your perception to exist (however their extrinsic, physical representations do depend on perceptions).

By ‘experience’, mean it in the most general and primitive sense: knowledge of something as a subject. In terms of analytic idealism, ‘experience’ is a spectrum of grades. I mean the same thing by ‘subjective experience’ and ‘consciousness’.

By ‘your or my subjective experience’, I mean the perceptions you have (which are qualitative and represent the external world around you), as we are higher experiential life forms.

By ‘meta-consciousness’ or ‘meta-subjective experience’, I mean the ability of a mind to have self- knowledge (i.e., knowledge of itself: experience specifically in relation to its experience and identity).

‘beliefs’ are ‘behavioral attitudes towards a proposition’.
‘imagination’ is the mind’s ability to conjure up images which are not direct representations of the world around it (e.g., picturing a unicorn in my head right now).
‘thoughts’ are the mind’s ability to utilize its faculty called ‘reason’ to generate concepts and derive conclusions about the world around it and its own imagination. Arguably, I would count this faculty as also a sense since it inputs the perceptions and creates concepts of them, which is the same general form of all other senses (i.e., input → representation).

Hmmm... but you explicitly forbid physicalist accounts from appealing to obscurity???

I understand that prima facie it seems hypocritical, but let me clarify. I am fine with soft problems having obscurities in their explanations but not hard problems. That is the difference.

Bob

Hello Alkis Piskas,

Anyway, I will have to assume that by mind-(in)dependent you mean that the existence of the physical universe (matter and energy) is in/dependent of/on our mind.

I mean that it is independent of any mind, not just ours.

Then you say, "If it is the latter, then I cannot account for myself as a conscious being." Does this means that you cannot consider yourself as a conscious being?

I mean that if the world is mind-independent, then there is a hard problem of consciousness, which I take to be a ‘hard problem’ in the sense of being irreconcilable as opposed to merely a difficult problem for physicalists to solve.

In other words, physicalism cannot account for what I would consider the realist part of existence for human beings: their conscious, qualitative experience. The only other feasible option is to posit mind as fundamental to account for it.

BTW, for me, examples act as arguments, even better.

I agree, but, unfortunately, I am not that great at examples and analogies—but I can try. When you look at a green pen, your immediate experience of it is within your conscious experience. You feel and see the qualities of the pen, which make up the pen from your direct conscious experience, which your mind is representing to you as the green pen. Under physicalism, they can explain how your brain comes to understand the pen as green (e.g., the pen absorbs all the colors within the light that hits it other than green, which it reflects, and that light goes into your eyes and, in turn, your brain interprets as green). However, they cannot account for why you had a qualitative experience of a green pen—of the greeness, for example. There is no reason for you to likewise have an experience of a qualitative green pen.

I just thought ... Why don't you start by giving a definition or description of "universal mind"?

An immaterial subject in which mental processes occur and of which the entirety of reality is whithin.

Bob

Hello Fooloso4,

You cannot understand an engine if you do not understand the parts. That is the reductive part. But you can't understand an engine at that point. The parts have to fit and operate together. You have to look at the functional whole. That is the non-reductive part of the process.

I think you are forgetting or misunderstanding that the parts themselves don’t completely constitute the reductive explanation. When one explains an engine, they do so by reducing it to its parts and the relation between them when put together properly. Once one explains that, they have thereby reduced the engine to the specific relational constitution of its parts. I think you are more thinking of it in terms of the parts on their own and the relations between them as non-reductive, but that isn’t true. The relations between the parts that constitute the engine is weakly emergent from the parts (in that particular arrangement that produces them) and the engine itself is the weakly emergent from the relations and the parts: none of this is non-reductive. For an explanation to be non-reductive, it entails that one cannot reduce the thing to its parts and relation of those parts to one another.

With the engine, it is 100% a reductive explanation because once I explain to you the parts and how they relate to eachother there is nothing more that needs to be explained about the engine. If it were strongly emergent, then there would be something extra that is unexplained.

If the mental cannot be explained in terms of the physical then the physical cannot be explained in terms of the mental.

There is a symmetry breaker between the two accounts: one posits mind is in mind, whereas the other posits non-mind has mind. The former is a soft problem, the latter a hard problem.

In other words, the physical not being able to explain the mental doesn’t entail that the mental cannot explain the physical as mind-dependent and only in the sense of the colloquial usage of the term (i.e., an object within conscious experience with solidity, size, shape, etc…). Most idealists do not deny that there are physical things, but they mean it in the sense of tangible objects within experience. Physicalists do not mean it this way: they mean that there are actual mind-independent objects beyond the tangible objects within your conscious experience.

Bob

Hello Mww,

I really appreciate your elaboration, as it appears I may not have understood Kant as well as I originally thought I did. Let me pick your brain a bit more.

Firstly, let me clarify what I thought the terminology was, and you tell me what you think.

By ‘synthetic’, I took it to mean that something is added which wasn’t previously there. For example, the judgment of ‘all bodies are heavy’ is synthetic if one is defining ‘body’ in a way that doesn’t itself immediately contain ‘heaviness’.

By ‘analytic’, I took it to mean the coming to understand something which is already there. For example, the judgment of ‘all bodies have extension’ is analytic if one defines ‘body’ in a manner that immediately includes the concept of ‘extension’.

By ‘a priori’, I took it to mean that which is necessary for the possibility of experience; and by ‘a posteriori’ that which is derived from experience.

By space and time being synthetic a priori, I was taking it that Kant was arguing that space and time are necessary for the possibility of experience and that they are produced by our faculty of representation (which I guess I may have inferred was our minds that had that faculty). Is that an improper usage of the terminology?

But nevertheless, benefit of the doubt: where does the notion that space and time are synthetic a priori come from?

Honestly, I probably just misused the terms then. I only found one search result for that term and it was:

Since the propositions of geometry are synthetic a priori and are recognized
with apodictic certainty, I would like to inquire as to the origin of such
propositions and what supports the understanding in order that it achieve to
such utterly necessary and universally valid perceptions?

It has been a while since I read the book admittedly.

Synthetic/analytic has to do with logic, hence subsumed under reason, but space and time have to do with empirical objects hence subsumed under intuition.

Interesting: wouldn’t Kant be thereby claiming that we have a unified faculty called ‘reason’ and ‘intuition’ which then, to me, would have to be outside of space and time? No?

And while space and time are representations a priori, they are not synthetic.

I would interpret this as you saying that space and time are necessary preconditions for the possibility of experience but not that they add anything new to experiences. In that case, where does space and time originate in? Would you say that they aren’t productions of our mind?

Now this stipulates that there are synthetic a priori principles of knowledge, but that is not to say space and time are themselves synthetic a priori.

I didn’t quite follow this part: so you are saying that the pure forms of sensuous intution are a part of the mind, or no? And that entails that there are ways we come to know the world (synthetic a priori principles of knowledge) but aren’t those principles in our mind? Wouldn’t that entail that space and time are also?

Whatever other origins there are for space and time are irrelevant to any system that conceives its own.
…
Could our intelligence originate space and time in a different way?

To me, this sounds like you are saying that space and time are conceived by minds, but you are calling it a ‘system’ or ‘intelligence’. How is your claim different from saying our minds conceive space and time?

I say I understand the pure ideality of space and time, but don’t understand what you mean by qualifying them with synthetic.

I mean that our minds are adding something which isn’t a part of the objects that are impressed on our senses, namely the pure forms of intuition.

Noumena are not things-in-themselves. The latter are real spatial-temporal existences, the existence of the former is only possible for an intelligence unlike our own.

Interesting, I thought the phenomena vs. noumena distinction was the same as representations vs. things-in-themselves: are they not?

If a thing-in-itself is a real spatial-temporal existence, then wouldn’t we have access to things-in-themselves (just not directly)(but just not noumena) because Kant agrees that we can know about things within the empirical, external world. For example, wouldn’t another organism be a thing-in-itself that is being represented phenomenally within one’s perception, and we can infer how accurately we are representing that other spatial-temporal organism.

If by beyond the two pure forms of intuition you mean not conditioned by them, then it is the case noumena are beyond them. Still, anything not conditioned by space and time is utterly unintelligible to us, therefore we are not authorized to say that which is beyond them, are noumena.

I thought noumena were purely negative conceptions and are that which is beyond space and time, and I also thought things-in-themselves were the same as noumena.

Again with your vocabulary, the mind is not outside time, is conditioned by it

Would it be fair to say that space and time are not something our minds produce (and not even as the pure forms of intuition) but rather our conscious-perceptive forms of intuition (i.e., of experience) are objective (i.e., only in the sense of being beyond our subject minds) and our minds are within time (but arguably not space)?

how can anything at all be known beyond the mind, if the mind is absolutely necessary and sufficient for all knowledge.

Because we can infer what most reasonably is the case. If it were the case that we can’t infer anything beyond one’s mind, then I wouldn’t even be able to claim your mind exists (nor that you are conscious).

in that mere perception and representation in phenomena does not give any knowledge at all.

I think empirically we can infer things sufficiently even though they are phenomena. I can learn to explain most parsimoneously other people as conscious beings even though I have no direct access to that knowledge experientially (for example).

You said the mind produces, and in common vernacular to produce is to actualize, I should think.

Correct. But I was thinking that the mind produces only the space and time which it requires to perceive whatever it is that is within ‘view’ so to speak. Although I would expect to find infinite space as I zoom into my perception, I don’t see an infinite space all at once per se.

Space does not represent any property of objects as things in themselves, nor does it represent them in their relations to each other; in other words, space does not represent to us any determination of objects such as attaches to the objects themselves.

But then isn’t space something our mind is introducing into experience, which doesn’t pertain to things-in-themselves, which would mean that it is synthetic?

Great talk; I’m liking it, so….thanks.

Likewise my friend!

Bob

Hello Fooloso4,

By analogy, you cannot understand how an engine works by taking it apart. A pile of parts is not an engine. Taking it apart in only a part of the process whose goal is to understand the whole.

I don’t see how this helps your case that physicalism doesn’t dissolve into reductive physicalism. The pile of parts of an engine does explain the weakly emergent property (or properties) of a running engine. The explanation is to reduce the weakly emergent properties to the its parts: this isn’t to say that when we have a pile of parts that we know what weakly emergent properties will arise given it being assembled but, rather, that we can account for those weakly emergent properties by reductive analysis of the parts and how they relate to each other. So, yes, physicalism dissolves into reductive physicalism.

Insisting on a metaphysical position when trying to understand a biological organism is counterproductive

I don’t have a problem with being ontologically agnostic when performing science. Nevertheless, we can know that the reductive physicalist’s position doesn’t work and so we shouldn’t expect science to prove it.

Physicalism is not a rejection of mind. To the contrary, it seeks to understand mind in terms of the organisms that have minds, without assuming that mind comes from somewhere other than the organism.

Reductive physicalism is the idea, most generally, that the mind exists but is weakly emergent from the brain. Irreductive physicalism makes the nonsensical claim that it is strongly emergent. I am not claiming that reductive physicalists say there are no minds but rather that it can be explained by reducing it to a combination of mind-independent parts.

A misunderstanding of physicalism is not proof. Brain states are only part of the story. But of course the brain is an important part of the story. It is not clear what you think a brain state is.

By ‘brain state’ I referring to any state that the brain may be in (e.g., neural firings, wavelength resonance in terms of sleeping vs. awake, etc.). One can just use the term ‘mind-independent organic part’ where I say ‘brain state’ if you would like to keep it more abstract. Most people agree that if reductive physicalism is true then that the ‘mind-independent organic parts’ is brain states that produce the mental states.

Consciousness is not a set of biological functions. I think this mistake is the source of your claims about brain states.

If consciousness can’t be reduced as a weakly emergent property to a set of biological functions, then you will have to posit that it is a part of a different substance than physicality.

I would counter by saying you can't prove it by metaphysical argument, but you think you have. Back to the top of this post.

You didn’t counter my argument except maybe in the previous quote (of you made above). If consciousness isn’t a set of biological functions, then you can’t claim it is a part of a physical substance. Are you suggesting that there is a different methodological approach that proves things are mind-independent without using reductive explanation (which is what we use for explaining everything)?

Bob

Hello Alkis Piskas,

BTW, how can we infer that "universal mind" exists? Can you present a specific agrumentation to support it?

There is an external world that my mind is representing: either that world is mind-dependent or mind-independent. If it is the latter, then I cannot account for myself as a conscious being. Therefore, the most parsimonious account of the data of experience (being that the latter can’t even account for experience) is that it is mind-dependent. Now, either the mind-dependent world is only my mind or it has other minds: the former is special pleading that somehow I am the only non-philosophical zombie when other people clearly exhibit the same symptoms of being conscious, so I say the best explanation is the latter. Now, either these minds are ontologically primitive or they a part of a universal mind: the former doesn’t cohere with empirical knowledge as it is clear that organisms are born and die within the world, so I would say the best explanation is that they are a part of one universal mind. (also, side note, if one posits that the minds are ontologically primitive then they also have to account for how they experience the same objective world which they obviously do).

That would be the short proof.

Bob

Hello Mww,

So no, the mind does not produce space and time, it conceives apodeitic conditions as explanatory devices. Therefore, it is possible the mind has no warrant for ontological status.

But under Kantianism the mind is producing space and time (being synthetic a priori), is it not? Perhaps you have a neo-kantian view, but I am talking about Kant’s original argument.

For your position, are you saying that the mind doesn’t produce space and time? Rather, it just has a priori logic that is required for one to represent to the world around them to themselves?

FYI, he wrote the precursor essays that would eventually become tectonic plate theory, nebular theory, tidal retardation of axial velocity theory...

That is very interesting: thank you for sharing!

Again, FYI……in CPR, mind is the subject of a proposition 176 times, reason is the subject over 1300 times, in ~800 pages total. Mind can be merely a convenient placeholder, signifying nothing more than the terminus of infinite regress hence omitted generally without detriment to a metaphysical theories of the human condition, but reason cannot, insofar as reason actually belongs to every human and without which he is just an animal. If we’re going to reify an abstract, let’s reify that which a human can be proved to possess, rather than that which he could conceivably do without.

The same argument, by my lights, still applies whether you invoke ‘reason’ or ‘mind’: either there is a unified subject that is producing a representation of the world to itself or there isn’t. If Kant is right in that we represent the world in space and time and that there isn’t a space and time beyond that, then, by my lights, he can’t also claim that we can’t understand the noumena because that unified subject, in order to produce space and time (i.e., synthetic a priori pure forms of intuition), must be outside of those synthetic apriori forms. I am not following what your response is to that argument, could you elaborate more please?

Kant proves that the impossibility of denying the existence of my own body is sufficient to prove the existence of the external world. The reverse establishes the truth, in that without an external world conditioned on space and time, there is no apodeictic certainty for my own body, the denial of which is blatantly contradictory. As such, the inference of an external world is not necessary, for its reality is certain. It follows that that by which we are impacted and that from which representations are given and empirical knowledge is possible, is not the thing-in-itself, which is the ground of his empirical realism doctrine from the beginning.

Correct me if I am wrong, but it sounds like Kant is arguing that there is an external world that is impressed onto our senses but that is not the thing-in-itself. But, then, I ask: doesn’t that concede that the mind’s synthetic a priori pure forms of intuition isn’t the only origin of space and time? If we are admitting that the world is external to our mind and that it operates likewise in space and time, then space and time are not purely synthetic. What you say to that?

To me, when I read CPR, it sounded like he was claiming anything beyond the two pure forms of intuition is the noumena (i.e., the things-in-themselves) and the only way that works is under epistemic solipsism (viz., if the phenomenal world around me is just a representation under space and time that are synthetic of my mind, then I cannot know anything about an external world beyond my mind because it lies outside of space and time).

Likewise, if space and time are truly synthetic of my mind, then how do I even know that my mind is representing anything beyond its self? Likewise, the other option is that my mind doesn’t exist and the thing-in-itself is the only thing that does.

Your way, re: the production of space and time, requires the production of two infinites, with all the irregularities found therein. My way needs no infinites, but only those spaces and times which condition the perception, or possible perception, of an object, followed by the experience or possible experience thereof.

I don’t think my view requires two actualized infinite spaces and time: the space and time produced by minds (which is only what is required for perception) is a representation of the ideas of space and time within the universal mind. I think within Kant’s view space and time are not a representation of anything (being synthetic a priori).

Bob

Hello Sime,

If your "analytic" idealism abandons "esse is percipi" how does it differ from representational realism?

“perception”, under analytic idealism, is an evolved faculty of higher conscious life forms: it is the ability for a life form to represent to itself the outer world. Firstly, the most parsimonious explanation of the world around us (and the observed regularities) is that there was a world prior to perceptive-organisms. Not only do not all organisms and life forms, especially the lower forms, perceive but likewise they haven’t always existed in reality either. For Berkeley, the world prior to perceptive beings is not real: it is just something God is projecting onto your dashboard of experience. To me, that is an incredibly unparsimonious explanation.

Likewise, according to berkeley, because there is no world beyond perceptions, objects (within perception) don’t have definite sizes: God is projecting different sizes for the same objects depending on what angle and distance you are viewing them. This has to be the case if one goes the subjective idealist route, whereas objective idealists (which I would count analytic idealism in this group) posit that we are all within a universal mind and thusly there are definite sizes to objects: we just, as higher evolved life forms, perceive it differently depending on how we observe them. I find this to be a better explanation and much more parsimonious.

Objective idealists think that there really is a tree but it is fundamentally ideas that are being represented on your dashboard of perception, whereas subjective idealists claim there is not tree (and not ideas corresponding to it outside of perception other than God’s projection of it onto them).

Berkeley's subjective idealism was already "analytic" in the sense that he postulated that observation and conception is tautologically equivalent to existence.

Yes, but the perceptive world around you is completely synthetic under his view and I don’t see how that coheres with modern science.

It is much more parsimonious to claim that our perceptive screens are representations of something real, but in terms of analytic idealism it is a representation of ideas and not mind-independent objects. Perhaps this view is a form of representational realism, I am not sure.

What Berkeley's principle is actually saying, is rather trivial ; that only what is observed or conceived can be thought or talked about. If a realist asserts that "unperceived objects such as quarks exist", Berkeley wouldn't contradict the content of the assertion but remind the realist that his use of "unperceived" requires elaboration until it refers to something thought or perceived, for the assertion to become sensical.

To me, this is just false. I don’t need to perceive other people being conscious directly to know that they are conscious. I don’t need to perceive that other people see the world in a colorblind, black-and-white manner to acquire the knowledge that they are really perceiving it that way. Perhaps you might counter that the principle pertains to someone perceiving it and in that case I still thinks it is false.

The best explanation for people getting sick is germs, regardless of if anyone has ever perceived germs. The best explanation for why the atomic bomb worked is that there are atoms. The best explanation of organisms is that they represent an external reality to themselves: they acquire knowledge of it and that is their perceptions.

Now, where I can get on board with this, and maybe this is what you were conveying, is that it doesn’t follow that an atom, as a physical mind-independent entity, exists as a part of the underlying ontology of reality simply because we should expect to perceive it if we ‘zoom in’ far enough within the dashboard of our perception. The difference between Berkeley and Kastrup, for example, is that the former claims the atom doesn’t correspond to anything outside of one’s perception while the latter claims that it corresponds to ideas in a universal mind (of which our perceptions are representing). For Kastrup, we are not immortal souls that have ideas impressed on us by God but rather we are in God.

Bob

Hello Manuel,

It's the eternal problem of the one and the many. Are we ourselves in reality separate beings or are we one being, that perceives itself as many? The latter option is not so trivial to get rid of...

I see. Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism would postulate that we are truly one mind but we only have phenomenal access to our own mentally because the universal mind has DID.

Still basing a large part of one's philosophy on DID is risky and one should be cautious in relying on it too much. Maybe when more is learned, it could be sensible to use, or it could end up being a false avenue.

This is fair. I think even without postulating DID we can infer that everything is most feasibly mind, but then we have to leave the soft problem of decomposition open-ended for now. To me, I gravitate towards naturalistic explanations (as I don’t find it appealing to just say ‘God’ creates our souls or something), so I would still argue that our minds are separate but that separation from the universal mind is a natural process (whatever that process may be). I can say that the extrinsic representation of that process is evolution + procreation, but there isn’t a complete account of the underlying mental processes nor how the first life form was created. I would say that the first life form is going to be best account for by abiogenesis because that is what it will ‘look like’ from the phenomenal side of things but metaphysically it will be the first separation of a mind from the universal mind.

Bob

Hello Fooloso4,

Right, you have said that several times. But that is not something you know.
…
Right. You are claiming that we can never provide a physical explanation. But again, that is just an assertion, and it is not evidently true.

I outlined an argument for why I do know this. I am unsure as to why you said this: it is unproductive.

There you go. Based on your definition. But creating a definition and then rejection something because it contradicts your definition does not hold water.

I already addressed this in the previous post:

Bob Ross:

You say that I am question begging because my definition merely precludes scientific investigation. I want to clarify that I am not doing that: my definition of a ‘hard problem’ is that it is irreconcilable under the view in question—there is nothing question begging about that. I am then, on top of using that definition, claiming that the ‘problem’ of consciousness for reductive physicalism is a hard problem in the sense that I defined it. There is nothing question begging about that because I am not saying that the definition is the proof of it being a hard problem. Now let me explain why I think there is a hard problem of consciousness for reductive physicalism (and it is not merely a soft problem of consciousness).

So, why did you make the same claim again despite me clarifying that I am not making that claim?

The Hard Problem is a term of art. It has a specific meaning as defined by Chalmers and is used as defined. Calling something "a hard problem", stipulating it is irreconcilable with physicalism, is your problem, not the accepted meaning of the hard problem.

I clarified exactly what I meant by the terms. If you semantically disagree, then forget those terms. I am claiming that reductive physicalism cannot account for consciousness. It isn’t productive for us to bicker about the terms. I express that claim as the “hard problem of consciousness”, you clearly don’t but, most importantly, this doesn’t matter for all intents and purposes of the substance of the debate.

Physicalism need not be reductive physicalism.

This is true and that is why I specifically used the term ‘reductive physicalism’. I do not think that irreductive physicalism is a valid position (as it either dissolves into reductive physicalism or becomes a closeted substance dualism). I can elaborate on that if you would like.

The recognition that a living organism can be conscious, is not reductive

Correct, but the claim that the living organism is fundamentally a mind-independent organism is to reduce consciousness thereto.

To claim that consciousness must come from elsewhere because a physical explanation must be reductive is misguided.

If one cannot account for consciousness with a reductive physicalist approach, then the only other option is that it is not emergent. The proof that it is emergent rides on the idea that it can be reduced to brain states.

It is not that biological functions impact consciousness but that it creates consciousness.

As I said before (in the proof), the only way to argue that it creates consciousness (without just making it up) is to argue in the form of “consciousness is [set of biological functions] because [set of biological functions] impact consciousness in [this way]”. You are assuming it creates consciousness even though this form of argument cannot prove it.

To ignore these physical organisms because you reject reductive physicalism is willful blindness.

The only way you can prove that consciousness is produced by the brain is by the reductive physicalist method. So if you can’t prove it with reductive physicalism, then you have no reason to believe it.

Bob

Hello Fooloso4,

I fear as though we may be slightly speaking past each other, so I am going to try and slow things down.

When I claim that reductive physicalism has a ‘hard problem of consciousness’, I am claiming that it is impossible for that metaphysical theory to explain consciousness: I am not claiming that we merely haven’t yet. Thusly, I am claiming that it is impossible for science to decipher how brain states produce mental states. Let me explain why I think that, but first let me clarify one more thing.

You say that I am question begging because my definition merely precludes scientific investigation. I want to clarify that I am not doing that: my definition of a ‘hard problem’ is that it is irreconcilable under the view in question—there is nothing question begging about that. I am then, on top of using that definition, claiming that the ‘problem’ of consciousness for reductive physicalism is a hard problem in the sense that I defined it. There is nothing question begging about that because I am not saying that the definition is the proof of it being a hard problem. Now let me explain why I think there is a hard problem of consciousness for reductive physicalism (and it is not merely a soft problem of consciousness).

Reductive physicalism is a methodological approach that explains something in terms of reducing it to other physical entities (e.g., my computer works by using electricity as its power, CPU to process information, hard drive to store information, GPU to render graphical content, etc. of which the ‘computer’ is explained in terms of reduction to its physical parts), so in order to explain consciousness on this view one has to reduce mental states to brain states. So far so good.

Now, let’s abstract out what this kind of explanation of consciousness would look like. One would have to try to explain it in terms of “consciousness is [set of biological functions] because [set of biological functions] impact consciousness in [this way]” (where you can input whatever biological functions and impact you would like in for the brackets); but, no matter what biological functions one gives as the set and what impact those functions have on conscious activity, the conceptual question is still open-ended: why do those biological functions give rise to consciousness? This sort of explanation never explains consciousness: not even in principle. It doesn’t matter how air-tight of an analysis neuroscientists can give some day about the impact of brain states on conscious states: the question of how brain states give rise to mental states is forever open-ended under that sort of explanation. This is why I can, by abstraction, understand that neuroscience will never account for how consciousness is produced.

This isn’t just “they may someday account for it even though I can’t fathom how” kind of argument: the abstracted form of the explanation, under reductive physicalism, offers no explanation.

What are your thoughts?

Bob

Hello Alkis Piskas,

Yet, it [plants] does!

I am unsure as to whether the fact that plants retain memories, to some extent, qualifies them as perceptive. If that does qualify them, then it is a very low degree of perception. Either way, that is interesting: thank you for sharing!

That's why I like to connect consciousness with perception. Because we can know that the another person or a dog, etc. are conscious too --besides ourselves, who can experience consciousness directly-- by observing their reactions to stimuli, communicating with them, etc. If they react, it means that they can perceive and therefore they are conscious entities.

The idea is that, although we can’t infer that everything is a part of a universal mind by directly experiencing it like a dog (for it isn’t, by its nature, a member of reality but, rather, fundamentally reality itself), we can infer that it exists because otherwise we have no ability to explain the mental: we have the hard problem of consciousness. We posit that the most parsimonious explanation for what reality fundamentally is is mentality because positing it is mind-independent leads to an irreconcilable dilemma.

My point is that we infer there is a universal mind just like we infer there are other conscious animals: we don’t directly experience either one. The fact that an animal (or even another human) behaves as though they are conscious doesn’t in itself count as directly experiencing other conscious beings.

Bob

Hello Mww,

Thank you for the elaboration! Space and time is the aspect of every theory that I find unsatisfying (and so I am still working through how to metaphysically account for them); so let me pick your brain a little bit.

No, he didn’t correct the error; there wasn’t one to correct. It is impossible to know what things are in themselves, iff the human cognitive system is representational, which they both accepted as the case, and that necessarily.

I find there to be a conceptual error here of Kant’s (and maybe perhaps Schopenhauer to) of the mind’s ontological status.

If we have no access to the things-in-themselves because our experience is just the expression of them in space and time which is produced by our minds, then our minds must be a thing-in-itself. If our minds are not a thing-in-itself, then they are not outside space and time, but to produce space and time they would have to be outside of it: therefore, if they aren’t a thing-in-itself, then our minds do not produce space and time.

If our minds are a thing-in-itself, then it does not hold that we cannot infer past the forms space and time; and, in that case, mind is fundamental. So, to me, Kant can’t claim that we cannot know the thing-in-itself on grounds of the mind producing space and time, because that entails that the mind is a thing-in-itself which is producing representations of other things-in-themselves via the forms space and time. The only way to reconcile this (by my lights) is for Kant to claim that our minds have no ontological status either—but, then, the mind cannot be producing space and time. What would your response to that be?

Sometimes I hear people saying that Kant was only talking about something epistemic about minds as opposed to ontological, but I don’t see how that works either. If the forms of representation are space and time, then that thereby (by my lights) admits the mind as having ontological status.

All S did was take that which is impossible to not know….the will….and call it the thing-in-itself, a philosophical blunder for which there is no legitimate excuse.

I think the difference is that Schopenhauer rightly pointed out that ideas are what are represented in the physical, and we can know this through introspection: that is the contribution I think Schopenhauer made; however, those ideas which are being represented are also within time (just not space until they are represented physically), but they originate from nowhere. The constant flow of ideas which are represented physically, that each of us have access to through introspection, quite literally are a series (in time) of something—and this is where our introspective access ends. What we can know from this is that the physical is a representation of the mental—but where and what are the ideas that are temporally being enacted into physical representations? Schopenhauer posits that the best metaphysical explanation is that each idea is a part of a will and that will is outside of time and space. Perhaps you would claim that we can’t know what is the “cause” of those series of ideas—it is just beyond our knowledge.

it is impossible such knowledge can be of the original energy source.

I don’t think this counters Schopenhauer’s point: no one was claiming that we have a exact, mirrored knowledge of the thing-in-itself. We are organisms that produce perceptions which are filtered representations of our environment. Schopenhauer, rather, was arguing that the best metaphysical explanation for the unknown-origined ideas, which are being represented in physical terms, is that they are an eternal, unified will (which is the thing-in-itself).

Going back to the problem with positing space and time are synthetic a priori (of a mind) while also claiming we have no knowledge of things-in-themselves, I find that Kant’s view is incompatible with reasonable, parsimonious metaphysical explanations of scientific knowledge. For example, we have ample empirical knowledge to back that the most parsimonious explanation of our bodies is that it takes in senses from our environment and represents it to ourselves. We are impacted by other bodies, rocks, etc. and we represent that to ourselves; but, with Kant’s view, we are forced to claim that we cannot infer that there is an natural environment, that we are impacted by other bodies, etc. because we cannot know anything about the things-in-themselves. If we can’t know anything about things-in-themselves, then our observed impact of other bodies on our own is merely more representations that cannot be used to infer anything beyond them. All we can know is that, transcendentally, they are representing something--but no more than that. To me, we can reasonably infer things about the things-in-themselves.

noumena is a conception of a general class of conceptions

To me, as far as I am understanding the categories and noumena, they are beyond space and time (being a priori and some synthetic of minds); but then the mind is a thing-in-itself, is it not? It seems as though Kant is trying to argue we can transcendentally come to understand how our mind represented things, and that includes the two pure forms of intuition, but yet that is exactly the concession that we can infer, based off of experience, at least certain aspects of at least one thing-in-itself: our mind. Again, if our mind doesn’t ontologically exist, then it can’t be producing space and time to represent things to itself.

The categories are those primitive conceptions, not by which they are but by which representations of objects can be united such that a cognition is possible.

Wouldn’t these categories have to be beyond space and time, since they are also a part of how the mind synthetically represents objects within space and time?

To me, I think there is a neo-Kantian view that physicalists could hold whereof the mind, being an emergent property of the brain, is producing a representation of time and space that exists beyond their mind (in the mind-independent world) and that would have categories in the brain.

Again, I appreciate the elaboration and look forward to your response!

Bob

Hello Alkis Piskas,

So, I have created the following list, prompted by your request! :smile:

Thank you! I will take a look!

But consciousness is not limited to perception. I would mention that if I knew you would scrutinize my statement! :grin:

I apologize: I wasn’t trying to scrutinize your view but, rather, provide clarification in relation to analytic idealism.

OK, but consciousness a characteristic of all life: Living organisms as well as plants.

Correct, and this is why I just wanted to clarify “perception” vs “consciousness”. A plant is conscious but does not perceive anything.

All this is fine. But the "universal mind" is only a concept for me: I have no experience of it.

I agree. But I want to elaborate that other people and plants beings conscious is also a concept in that same sense (that we don’t experience it). I don’t find this to be a problem: we can know things without experiencing them.

Bob

Hello TheMadMan,

In a human being, the Formless is in a relationship with the form and thus it is subject to different laws, laws of spacetime. The Formless does not lose its nature but it becomes limited by the form.

I believe I followed: essentially the eternal and formless mind is expressed within the forms of space and time, correct? If so, then I think you are essentially saying exactly what schopenhauer was trying to get at with his eternal formless will, which is the expression of platonic ideas from our perspective within space and time (i.e., the formless being forced to the form of space and time expresses grades of platonic ideas).

For some reason humans are born with the potential to realize that Formless Mind which is the original source of his/her consciousness.

This is where I stop following: how does one realize the formless mind? To me, we are stuck with the two pure forms of experience: space and time. How could one transcend them?

Bob

Hello Fooloso4,

How does what I say differ from the hard problem as described by Chalmers? He concludes:

I apologize: I didn’t understand what you were asking.

I didn’t really have a problem with what Chalmer’s was saying because I was interpreting his formulation of the hard problem as from the presumption that the physical does produce the mental, and he was noting that this makes no sense (which I agree with: if the physical does produce the mental, then we should expect us all to be philosophical zombies). I also agree with him that the consensus amongst most people is physicalism (and I would say scientists tend to be physicalists).

However, my point with your quote was that it asserts the presumption (which arguably Chalmer’s is making too) as true (that physicality produces mentality); while I was interpreting Chalmer’s in the sense that he is formulating the puzzling fact of qualia for physicalist accounts of the world, which only exists if you presume physicalism.

With your claim (that you quoted as well), I was pointing out that you were claiming (if I didn’t misunderstand you) that science can eventually come to understand how the biological functions give rise to experience (because you were saying science is the rightful investigator of the hard problem whereas I was saying it is squarely within metaphysics), which implies that the so called hard problem is actually a soft problem (as science can only account for how that works if it is possible to explain it scientifically, and the idea behind calling it a ‘hard problem’ is that we know it is impossible to do so). I am not sure how Chalmer’s defines a ‘hard problem’.

If you agree that it is a hard problem, then I think you should also agree that science can’t help solve it. Otherwise, it is a soft problem. For me, that is a matter of definition: perhaps you semantically disagree?

Likewise, your claim was presuming physicalism at the start. You can’t claim that biological functions product or give rise to experience without being committed already to physicalism: the metaphysical claim comes before, in this case, the claim that science is the rightful investigator of consciousness (since you are presuming, in the question at least, that biological functions produce mental events).

If experience arises from a physical basis, then the question of why and how biological function gives rise to experience, is the hard problem

This is sort of correct but I would like to clarify: a “hard problem” is a purported irreconcilable problem in the theory, whereas a ‘soft problem’ is a purported reconcilable problem. Chalmers, as I understood the quote, is just formulating it a bit like a suspicion rather than a true hard problem: I could see how his wording makes it seem like the hard problem is something that could be reconciled someday; but I disagree if that is what he is implying. I agree with the questions he is raising against physicalism though.

You are right that the hard problem of consciousness is fundamentally asking “why and how biological function gives rise to experience?” but I would say that the idea behind calling it a ‘hard problem’ is that there cannot be an account of it. It is a brick wall that the theory has hit.

It sounds like you may be saying it is a ‘hard problem’ only in the sense that it is going to be very difficult to solve: is that correct?

Now you might think that science will not yield an answer, but that does not mean investigating the problem scientifically is not an investigation of the hard problem.

I can agree that someone could think that doing neuroscience, for example, was an investigation into resolving the hard problem—but once they realize that it is impossible to understand it via science then they realize that it is squarely a dispute within metaphysics (which was my original claim). In other words, it is only an ‘investigation’ insofar as we are ignorant on how to investigate it.

The physical transmission is not an extrinsic representation, it is the medium through which data is transmitted.

In terms of analytic idealism, the physical transmission, which is a phenomena, is a medium through which data is transmitted, and metaphysically it really is the extrinsic representation of mentality (of immaterial ideas). They are two sides of the same coin: analytic idealism is a form of epistemic dualism.

If the signals in the nervous system are blocked that shows that the transmission of data is physical.

I disagree. If the physical is an extrinsic representation of the mental, then the inhaling of anesthesia and your brain’s neural network firing less (or what have you) is simply an extrinsic representation of mental events. If you hooked up a brain scanner to a person that is knocked out on anesthesia and see certain neural activity (or the lack thereof), then you could explain it as it either being your mind’s perceptive representation of the mental events or as brain interpreting there physical body and then producing a qualitative experience of it that you fundamentally witness consciously. These are the competing views.

This makes no sense. An anesthesiologist uses drugs not something mental. She does not rely on hypnosis.

Just like how the ingestion of a drug and the side effects thereof in a video game is merely a representation of 0s and 1s, so would analytic idealism postulate that the ingestion of a drug and its side effects in the world is simply a representation (as what is fundamental is the ideas: analogous to the 0s and 1s so to speak).

From an analytic idealist’s perspective, you are essentially arguing that simply because the character in the video game passed out and when measured by a brain scanner by another character they see reduced brain activity (or neural activity or what have you) that thusly the character must be fundamentally the ‘physical’ (in the colloquial sense of the term) stuff that the doctor character in the video game can biologically examine; but, in actuality, the character is the representation of 0s and 1s. My point here is just that I think you are conflating the dashboard of experience with the thing-in-itself: it does not follow that what is truly happening is physical stuff (in a colloquial or even formal sense of the term) simply because we experience it as tangible within our dashboard of experience.

These drugs affect awareness, they disrupt the mind.

Again. The video game doctor can likewise appeal that the other character (that is knocked out from anesthesia) was disrupted by the inhaling of the drug: does that mean that the character fundamentally exists as that ‘physical’ stuff? No. That character is the representation, in the case of a video game, of 0s and 1s.

Bob

Hello Janus,

This is the crux of the issue for me. I am unconvinced by Schopenhauer's (and Kastrup's derivative) claims that we know the "in-itself" on the basis of some kind of postulated intellectual intuition

I see. Let me try to clarify a bit.

The idea is not that we know of the thing-in-itself from an intellectual seeming (i.e., intuition) but rather that, because we are self-conscious, we have the unique ability to understand empirically (from introspection) that the mental is manifested as something physical. It is an introspective, empirical claim: it is not a claim that we somehow intellectual grasp that it is the case (although maybe perhaps our empirical observation of it as an outward expression is an intellectual seeming).

this cannot be knowledge but is just a feeling

Perhaps I misunderstood you, as intellectual seemings are not feelings. If you were saying schopenhauer was basing the aforementioned claim on a feeling, then I think the previous clarification I made (above) clears that up: it is an introspective, empirical claim.

Another significant problem I have with the idea is that there is a huge body of consistent and coherent scientific evidence that tells us there we many cosmological events long before there were any minds.

If by “mind” you are referring to the idealistic sense of the word (i.e., an immaterial, conscious, and thinking—in the sense of mental activity and not complex cognitive deliberation—subject), then there are no such scientific evidence. None of it suggests that there were cosmological events prior to a mind but, rather, that there were such events prior to organic minds. In other words, the analytic idealist agrees that there was a world prior to you, me, or any other animal and plant: this doesn’t contradict the view at all. If you think there is compelling scientific evidence that there was absolutely not conscious activity prior to organisms/animals/plants, then please share! I just don’t see any.

Also, I should mention that the term “mind” in a physicalistic sense entails that there were organisms which existed without minds (because the mind is an emergent property of the brain that comes with higher life form complexity). Is that what you are referring to?

Bob

Hello creativesoul,

What is the conscious mental experience that I have every day and every waking moment of my life?

It is the subjective perceptions that collectively makeup your life. It is your feelings (e.g., feeling pain), tastes (e.g., the sourness of the apple you bit into), hearing (e.g., hearing a piano playing), sight (e.g., seeing a tree), smells (e.g., smelling the stench of a rotten apple), thoughts (e.g., thinking about the tree of which you see), and imagination (e.g., picturing a pink elephant eating a mango).

Every waking moment you are immersed in a rich qualitative experience.

Exactly what qualia are you referring to?

Qualia refers to the unique perceptive experience that is generated by your senses (and obviously the idealist and physicalist are going to disagree about what those senses ontologically are—viz., mind-independent organs vs. mind-dependent faculties of a soul).

When you look at a tree, that is a qualitative experience you are having which is a perception generated by your senses of input from reality.

Is obscurity allowed now?

Obscurity about what? I do not deny that every metaphysical theory has its obscurities. My point was that the hard problem can only be accounted for by an obscurity, and since it is a hard problem it makes it very epistemically costly to hold the theory (I would argue). Whereas, a theory that, for example, cannot give currently a complete and accurate account of something that is possibly explainable under the theory (e.g., like how a certain drug completely affects brain activity under physicalism) is an obscurity (now) but only of a soft problem (and thusly not as bad as a hard problem).

Bob

Hello creativesoul,

Well, as above shows nicely, you've just contradicted yourself.

Where is the contradiction in the quotes of mine you mentioned? They both claim that physicalism cannot account for qualia.

I'm not sure what you're claiming

I am claiming that reductive physicalism cannot account, under its reductive physicalist approach, for qualitative experience (e.g., subjective feeling, subjective sense of touch, etc.) other than by obscurely saying it “somehow” produces it.

Perhaps it's better to take this slowly. Our respective positions are very different, and that seems to be on a foundational/fundamental level. Right now, I'm just wanting to ensure that I am aiming at the right target, so to speak. So, I ask...

Exactly what qualia are you and other proponents of the hard problem saying that reductive physicalism cannot account for?

Taking it slow sounds good to me! My answer was:

Not a single mental event is explained as actually produced by brain states nor could it be explained in that reductive physicalist manner. All they can do is point to another correlation (or causation) between mental and physical states which doesn’t further progress the physicalistic explanation of qualia.

Did you find this to be an unsatisfactory answer? To try to say it in other words, reductive physicalism cannot account for qualia, not just any particular aspect of qualia. To me, it is like you are asking “which red trucks can they not explain?” and I am answering “all red trucks”. Are you asking “what a red truck is?” (essentially). Because qualia is subjective, qualitative experience (e.g., subjective feeling, subjective touch, etc.). It is the conscious mental experience that you have every day and every waking moment of your life.

Bob

Hello creativesoul,

Without appeal to obscurity, reductive physicalist approaches can account for qualia at least as well as any other position.

I disagree: it can’t account for it at all. The fact that the brain interprets the world mechanically in this manner and that those processes have a “causal” (or correlative) relationship with mental states doesn’t account for the mental states themselves at all. Under reductive physicalism, we should expect no qualia: just philosophical zombies. Under idealism, we should expect no philosophical zombies but rather rich, conscious subjects.

I would argue better than, especially if obscurity is unacceptable.

Could you please elaborate? How so?

There's a need for you to elaborate on exactly what counts as qualia, for that is precisely what any approach is supposed to be taking account of

Qualia is subjective, qualitative, and conscious experience (e.g., the subjective feeling of pain, subjective seeing redness, subjective touching of a book, etc.). The bare minimum criteria is that the event is a mental, subjective, and conscious experience.

The position you're working from and/or arguing in favor of presupposes that there is a distinction between biological machinery doing it's job and so-called 'subjective' experience.

It’s not so much that there is such a distinction in actuality but, rather, that the reductive physicalist account on explains biological machinery and doesn’t account for the subjectivity. I, as an idealis, can happily grant that, since mental events are primal, there is no biological machinery doing something completely separately from subjective experience (however, under physicalism, all we get is an explanation of the biological machinery).

I'm also quite unsure of the invocation of 'mechanical awareness', in terms of AI or something akin. I've not likened experience to that, nor would I. It's a red herring. Unnecessary distraction.

I am not sure I followed this part: could you please elaborate? How is mechanical awareness a red herring?

My point was that reductive physicalism expects and explains the world in a manner that only expects and explains mechanical awareness (akin to a future AI or something as a mere analogy) and not qualitative experience. It is utterly shocking under a physicalist view that we are conscious.

Exactly what qualia are you and other proponents of the hard problem saying that reductive physicalism cannot account for?

Maybe I am misunderstanding you, but my claim is not that they can’t account for a particular subgroup of qualia but, rather, all of it. Not a single mental event is explained as actually produced by brain states nor could it be explained in that reductive physicalist manner. All they can do is point to another correlation (or causation) between mental and physical states which doesn’t further progress the physicalistic explanation of qualia.

Bob

Hello Mww,

There isn’t a proof, per se, only an internal affirmative logical consistency.

I just mean what is the case for it? What do you mean by it being an internal affirmative logical consistency? I don’t think it is necessarily the case that the mind fundamentally uses if conditionals (for example) to produce perceptive experience (although it might).

Yes, I could elaborate on the rationality justifying the categories, but to do so is a foray into the seriously transcendental, which may be a different idealism then is represented in the theme of your thread.

I would prefer if you did elaborate on it, so I can understand the argument for those categories better!

Bob

Hello TheMadMan,

By materialistic I don't mean the materialism worldview.

I see.

Although I am not sure I entirely understood your post yet, let me try to adequately respond.

By materialistic I mean the mind obeys space-time.

Although I am not entirely sold on this part, Analytic Idealism would posit that our minds are alters of a universal mind, and space and time only emerge as a production of perceptive conscious beings. In terms of analytic idealism, the world around you that you are perceiving is fundamentally the unfolding in space and time (which are synthetic but arguably not a priori in the sense schopenhauer exactly meant it) of eternal platonic ideas. Although space and time do not behave necessarily as we would intuit from normal every day-to-day experience, they are also within the eternal ideas as we are, as evolved emergent perceptive and self-conscious beings, a part of those eternal ideas.

Honestly, I am not entirely sold on this part yet, but that would be the response.

In every metaphysical theory, I find there is the problem of accounting for the inevitable eternal somehow continually “converting” into something temporal—and I don’t know how to account for it adequately under any theory.

1. the duality of mind (spacetime) and 2. the non-duality of non-mind (spacetime-less)

Are you saying that the mind can “switch” (so to speak) between two modes of existence or perceptive capabilities?

I mean that you simply cannot express it fully since systems of thought will always be limited.
And yes in different periods of human history it has to adapt and evolve to make sense.

I agree.

Bob

Hello Alkis Piskas,

So, if you find a philosophical term that combines both these two kinds of philosphical views, I would be much obliged!

I am not sure I am familiar with a term that means a hybrid view of rationalism and empiricism; but, then again, I would need you to explain further what you mean by those terms to give a more precise answer.

For example, I do know that many modern-day empiricists do hold that there is a priori knowledge.

However, Eastern philosophers, as well as Western ones who have borrowed elements from Eastern philosophy, as I have already mentioned, talk a lot about metaphysical subjects but they almost always offer a detailed description of as well as examples for them

Could you give an example of such a detailed description of consciousness?

Yet, "obscurity" and lack of explanation for me means lack of real undestanding. And this holds for both physical and non-physical things.

There is always going to be some obscurities in any metaphysical theories one takes: metaphysics is about trying to maximize explanatory power while minimizing the explanatory parts. It isn’t even apparent that we will one day be able to definitively understand the entirety of reality.

In terms of Einstein, I would think that what he meant was that one should be able to articulate their position concisely and precisely to opponents, which is what you have to do for little children or else it goes straight past there heads. It doesn’t violate his principle to explain to a child that we don’t know: it is clear and simple what it means for one to not know. On the contrary, Einstein is referring to (I would think) sophistry and rhetoric that can convolute and even mask bad positions as somewhat feasible.

Yes, I know that. Yet, it does not explain what "consciousness" is. This was my point.

If by “explain what ‘consciousness’ is” you are asking how it works, then only via empirical inquiry will we find out. If by that question you are asking for a deeper ontology, then that will not be afforded in analytic idealism because the universal mind (i.e., consciousness) is posited as metaphysical necessary. Every metaphysical theory has to have a bedrock (i.e., something that is unexplainable) and for objective idealism it is mind. For physicalism, it is some sort of elementary particle or quantum field or what have you. There is no way to account for reality completely without hitting a rock bottom.

But there are a few I know that have descibed this quite well and in a plausible way.

Could you give an example?

Still, I can safely say, as general description, that consciousness is perception

Interesting. For analytic idealism, consciousness is not synonymous with perception. “Perception” is used to denote conscious beings that have evolved to have the faculties to represent its environment to itself (viz., to take in sensations/input and generate an understanding of the causal order and such). Consciousness is a broader term (under analytic idealism) that includes all mind-operative mental processes. The universal mind, for instance, does not perceive: it is more fundamental, primitive willing which operates blind of itself and others. Think of it like the difference between plants, which will on a basis of very basic stimulus responses, vs. a complex animal (like a dog): the plant is perceiving anything but yet, under analytic idealism, is conscious.


Bob

Hello Janus,

So, you agree there is a mind-independent world, you just don't agree that it is physical?

Good question: no. I agree that there is a reality which transcends your and my mind (i.e., our experience as conscious beings), but that reality is not fundamentally mind-independent.

Likewise, since I deny that reality is “made up of” mind-independent things, I also hold that it is not physical (because ‘physical’ entails, in the formal sense of the term, mind-independence).

I have no argument with that since the definition of 'physical' derives from how things appear to us: tangible and measurable.

You may be using the colloquial sense of the term ‘physical’ (i.e., objects with solidity, size, shape, etc. within our experience): I don’t deny that kind of physicality. I deny the physicalists idea of ‘physical’: mind-independent objects (or parts more generally speaking).

I think Kant's claim that we don't know what things are in themselves stands

I disagree: I think schopenhauer finished Kant’s project by correcting this error of Kant’s. Being self-conscious, we are uniquely able to acquire the thing-in-itself: mind (i.e., what schopenhauer called will). We can understand the reality has two sides: mind (subject) and object. They are not completely separate but, rather, two sides of the same coin. When I will for my arm to raise, it manifests in conscious experience as an potential infinite chain of causality. The chain, according to schopenhauer, is not the complete explanation of what happened but it is all we have access to when it comes to every aspect of reality other than ourselves. We only ‘see’ the world from both of its sides within our own introspective conscious experience: otherwise, Kant would be correct in that we would have no clue what the thing-in-itself is.

Saying that things are fundamentally mental is an example of the same kind of category error, because 'mental' is a term denoting how certain phenomena: thoughts, feelings, volitions and so on, seem to us. That is to say they seem to be different than the objects of the senses in that they seem intangible and are not measurable.

I think this would follow if Kant were correct in saying that we never come to understand the noumena—but we can. The mental activity is outwardly expressed as physicality. When I am sad, the extrinsic representation of that is tears and, if one were to biologically test me, certain hormonal secretions.

meaning that the former can be reductively modeled in a mechanical or causal way, and the latter cannot, which makes it seem as though there will always be am unbridgeable explanatory gap.

I agree with this part. However, the idea with analytic idealism is that the mental events are expressed as physical events but yet the former do not “cause” the latter (in the sense of the typical physical causation).

I have never heard a convincing argument that this gap can somehow be crossed by an explanation that holds together on both sides of it

What problem do you have with positing the physical as an outward expression of the mental?

Bob

Hello Foolos4,

In Chalmers own words, from "The Hard Problem of Consciousness":

I didn’t find anything I disagree with in the quote from Chalmers you made: was there something in it you thought is a problem for my view?

This example works against your claim. If I am anesthetized I do not dream. Signals in the nervous system are blocked.

Firstly, it was an analogy to demonstrate that, under idealism, the “transmission” is fundamentally immaterial (i.e., mental) and not physical. The physical “transmission” is the extrinsic representation of the mental.

Secondly, anesthesia causing you to not dream and the signals in the nervous system being blocking thereby is expected under idealism too (and definitely doesn’t go against the theory). Anesthesia, like everything else, is fundamentally mental under idealism, and the outward expression of the mental idea of anesthesia disrupting your mind (mentally) is the blocking of signals in the nervous system (which can be observed empirically when someone is under anesthesia). The idea behind the analogy was not to take it so far as to say that you must dream for mental transmissions to occur but, rather, that in the same manner that your mind (even under physicalism) produces conscious experience during sleep via immaterial ideas so is it the case with reality.

Bob

Hello Fooloso4,

The question of why and how biological functions give rise to experience has everything to do with science!

What you described here is a purported soft problem of consciousness, which would, indeed, be expected (under physicalism) to be explained eventually (or at least possibly) by science. However, the hard problem is metaphysics proper. A scientist does not decipher in their job that there is a hard problem of consciousness (i.e., that there is a conceptual explanatory gap between mechanical awarenss and qualitative experience): on the contrary, the moment that dawns on them they are engaged in metaphysics and not science. Science is about empirically testing things to better understand behaviors of those things, metaphysics is about understanding that which lies beyond the possibility of all experience (but yet still meaningfully pertains to reality). In this case, the hard problem is only ever postulated by application of pure reason: not any empirical tests.

Blocking such inquiry because it does not fit your metaphysical assumptions is the metaphysical, that is, conceptual problem.
…
we should not exclude the physical organism out of some metaphysical conviction

I think you may have misunderstood what I was saying: it is not that science isn’t a consideration when coming up with one’s metaphysics (on the contrary, empirical adequacy is important for any metaphysical theory to be taken seriously); but, rather, it is only a negative criteria: one can only negate certain metaphysical theories with scientific facts, whereas the vast majority or perfectly coherent with science yet are directly incompatible with each other (e.g., physicalism and idealism). This is why I referred to science as a supplement in metaphysics: one’s metaphysics should adhere to scienctific knowledge, but that doesn’t prove the theory--one also needs to consider parsimony, intellectual seemings, internal/external coherence, logical consistency, explanatory power, etc.

but if your metaphysics excludes scientific inquiry then it is a dead end. It is embodied minds that we must deal with, and so science is not merely a "supplement".

I don’t see how you can claim I am both excluding scientific inquiry (in my metaphysics) and considering it a valid supplement. By supplementation, I mean that it strengthens the metaphysical theory (but does not prove it) to be empirically adequate.

The question of being is a philosophical question, but that does not mean that science, which deals with actual beings, is excluded from ontological inquiry.

If you are a strong scientific realist (viz., you think that science produces true results of what entities fundamentally exist), then I understand why you would claim this. However, I deny this. Just like trees, I hold that atoms are a nominal distinction and they do not exist in the underlying ontological structure of reality but, rather, they are extrinsic representations of fundamentally mentality. Science tells us that we should expect this to behave as though there are atoms and, I would go so far as to say, that there are phenomenally atoms, but not that there are noumenally atoms.

Right, we don't experience that the world is physical, our experience includes things that are physical.

By ‘physical’, I was not referring to the colloquial usage of the term (i.e., something with solidity, shape, size, etc.) but, rather, what it means in relation to physicalism: something that is mind-independent. In the sense as it is used for physicalism, it is an abstract inference and does not exist within our experience.

How is the data transmitted to us if not physically?

Think of a vivid dream you have had, there is nothing physically being transmitted while you are flying in the sky (in your dream) or walking the dream world streets: it is mental events occurring from your mind and they are still occurring. The brain activity measurable when you are dreaming is simply the extrinsic representation of that mental process. Same thing with the objective world, being in a universal mind.

Bob

Hello Mww,

He argued only enough to suit the overall purpose. All he needed to do in justifying a systemic conclusion (the possibility for human empirical knowledge), is demonstrate the necessity of a certain set of antecedent conditions. It’s just a simple “if this then that” logical construct.

I am just hesitant to say that our minds interpret the mentality in hypothetical judgments. I am not saying it is wrong, I just don’t see what the proof is of that. Could you elaborate on the proof?

Bob

Hello Alkis Piskas,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

I launched a discussion "You are not your body!"

I see: are you an idealist?

he talks so much about "in consciousness" and I have never found a piece of information about what he thinks/believes consciousness is.

This is fair: idealism’s weak point prima facea is that it doesn’t give an incredibly detailed depiction of consciousness, which it is positing as fundamental. However, the important thing to note is that it is being posited as fundamental and thusly necessary. Every metaphysical must stop its explanation at something which is metaphysically necessary, and for idealism it is mind. So there’s going to be a bit of obscurity in how it works not only because we have been living in a physicalist world so long that we haven’t bother to try and look for explanations in mind but also because we are trying to understand the bedrock of reality (which is certainly much harder to understand than entities within phenomenal experience).

With that being said, I can elaborate on his distinction between being “in consciousness” and “having consciousness”: the latter is when a being exists fundamentally as matter and has the property of consciousness (i.e., qualia), whereas the former is when the being is within fundamentally conscious activity (i.e., me and you has alters in one universal mind that it having conscious activity in a primal sense).

I don’t think Kastrup claims to know exactly how all of consciousness works, but I think he would say that consciousness is, at its base, mental events “interacting” with each other (like how when you vividly dream the entire world is representation from your dream character’s perspective of the environment that is within your real mind that is dreaming). We, like your dream character in a vivid dream you may have, are perceiving what that mental activity (in the mind) looks like from our perspective: it is our faculties representing as best it can that mentality.

Likewise, he stresses that “consciousness proper”, under analytic idealism, is not to be confused with physicalist usages of the term “consciousness”: the latter is just an emergent “add-on” to the organism (as it is the surface of awareness as a subject), whereas the former is the entirety of the organism. Under analytic idealism, consciousness can be attributed to the entirety of your being, including your organic processes that you don’t directly control, and the aspects that are within your every day-to-day experience is what “bubble up” to the tip of the iceberg: your ego (in the psychological sense of the term). Under analytic idealism, the involuntary processes of your stomach, for example, when viewed from our perception, is the extrinsic representation of mental processes that are attributed largely to your mind as a conscious being (albeit can be manipulated or altered by external influences). Physicalism doesn’t use the term the same way at all as idealism.

Then, he maintains that the "self" is an illusion. But then he connects it to the "ego", i.e. the "constructed self", which of course is an illusion. But then I have never heard from him describe what the individual himself, as a unit of awareness, i.e. the "I" or "YOU", stripped from any additives, is. This is certainly not an illusion!

I agree. I am also not convinced that the entirety of myself is an illusion, but can get on board with the ego being an illusion. I would say that we, as dissociated alters (or perhaps more vaguely dream characters), are concretely separate from each other and are not illusions. We are concretely separate from others and the universal mind in the sense that two whirlpools in the same body of water are distinct but yet made of the same water.

The disassociated boundary (or dream character boundary if you like) is conscious experience. Unlike non-conscious objects, it is very clear (in a non-arbitrary way) where my conscious experience ends and yours begins if we were to touch hands. There is no illusion here.

I think, to be fair, Kastrup is more claiming it is an illusion in the sense that the whirlpool thinks it is concretely distinct but, in fact, when it dies down will reassimilate into the body of water: our minds (as dream characters or disassociated alters) are distinct but when they die off reassimilate into the universal mind. To me, this just means that we reassimilate into nature, which is what I would expect and not that we are illusions.

Bob

Hello TheMadMan,

So a metaphysical theory can never be wholly because of the nature of "theory".

I agree that metaphysics is meant as an good general theory, and not absolute truth.

The way our mind works is materialistic which means dualistic

I don’t think our mind works materialistic: I think that the modernist era has produced a predominant metaphysical view in favor of materialism. Also, why would our mind working materialistically entail duality? Are you saying materialism entails irreductive materialism?

and it can only explain something within space-time meanwhile the fundamental reality must be beyond space-time /or spaceless-timeless

I agree. It is hard to explain eternity with our temporal nature for sure.

The truth that is spoken is no longer the truth.

Do you mean that metaphysical theories evolve? Or that they don’t give absolute truth?

Bob

Hello Sime,

I appreciate your response!

I had a hard time understanding what you were conveying, as I think we just use terminology differently, so let me ask some questions pertaining thereto.

Subjective Idealism and solipsism aren't ideas

By “idea”, I was meaning it in the colloquial sense of the term. Technically, those are metaphysical theories. One is a sub-type of idealism that does not hold there is an objective reality but, rather, that all that exists is to perceive or to be perceived (e.g., the tree doesn’t exist other than an image within your perception). The other is the theory that all that exists is one’s own mind, or, epistemically speaking, one can only know the existence of their own mind.

but a tautological understanding that the meaning of all propositions is ultimately reducible to whatever is perceived or thought in the first-person at the end of the day.

I don’t see how this is an accurate representation of what the two theories purport, but, again, I don’t think I fully followed what you mean by them being ‘tautological understanding’. Could you elaborate more?

Naturalism isn't an idea

Just to clarify, again, I was using “idea” in the colloquial sense and not idealist sense.

Naturalism isn't an idea, but an understanding that the meaning of inter-subjectively valid propositions, such as those concerning the properties of natural kinds, cannot be identified with particular thoughts and experiences of the first person.

I don’t agree with this (assuming I am understanding you correctly): naturalism is the view that either everything can only be explained by reduction to natural properties (i.e., methodological naturalism) or that natural properties is all that exists (i.e., ontological naturalism). The latter can be interpreted as strictly a materialist or physicalist metaphysical worldview, or more loosely as simply any metaphysical view that holds properties in the world as naturalistic (such as potentially analytic idealism).

Why would it be the “understanding [of] the meaning of inter-subjectively valid propositions”?--and why would it be anything that holds there is an objective world (“cannot be identified with particular thoughts and experiences of the first person”)? Supernaturalism also meets that criteria as far as I am understanding you currently (but correct me if I am misunderstanding).

So i don't consider Naturalism and solipsism or idealism to be incompatible per-se

I agree with you here.

"Being is perception" is an unavoidable tautology of non-representational idealism that is necessarily appealed to whenever an observer interprets a physical proposition in terms of his personal experiences

I don’t see how this is true. For example, both physicalists and analytic idealists hold that being is more than perception. No one inevitably speaking in terms of their experiences forcing “being” to be perception. Why would that be the case?

"perception is representation" is an unavoidable tautology of naturalism

It just depends on how you are using the terms. For me, regardless of naturalism, it is (essentially) a tautology because they are synonymous.

for universalising intersubjective semantics in an abstract fashion that isn't dependent upon the perceptual judgements of any particular observer.

Could you elaborate on this? I did not understand this part.

Taken together, "Being is Perception" and "Perception is Representation" don't necessarily imply that "Being is Representation", as is often naively assumed by materialists, if one understands these principles as referring to different and non-overlapping aspects of semantics.

To me, this is logically invalid. You are arguing for using a proposition X has both X and another proposition Y (i.e., that ‘perception’ refers to two different semantical meanings in the different statements you made), which is against the rules of formal logic because then one cannot formulate anything with it coherently. Thusly, to me, you are arguing that:

(X == Y) [being is perception] && (Y == Z) [perception is representation] && (Z != X) [representation is not being]

Which has a logical contradiction in it. I get that you wouldn’t hold the words “perception” and “perception” in your sentences as equivalent, but this just doesn’t make any sense to me to argue that. Why would one use the same word differently in the same argument? Doesn’t that make the argument harder to convey?

Bob

Hello Janus,

If there are many minds and many mental states, and they are not connected with one another, then how to explain the unarguable fact that we experience the same things in the same environments?

If I am understanding you correctly, then I would answer that they are ‘connected’ in the sense that they are perceiving the same objective world: it just isn’t fundamentally a physical world.

I don't deny that the way we perceive things is peculiar to humans because our brains and perceptual organs are constituted in the same ways, and in ways more or less similar to animals. But other animals, judging from their behavior, perceive the same things we do in the same locations that we do, which suggests that there are real structures there, which are independent of being perceived.

Firstly, I agree that all conscious beings capable of perception are perceiving the same world, even in the case that they can only perceive it as well as their faculties allow them.

Secondly, from an analytic idealist perspective, the fact that our perceptions converge on an objective world does not entail that the objective world in-itself (of which we are representing on our perceptions) is physical. Instead, it is argued that it is mental.

Think of it this way: think of a video game. In the video game, let’s say there’s a tree that the character can view if they go walk over to it. This tree is objectively there in the video game, and the character should expect for other characters, all else being equal, to see the tree where it is if they were to go view it. He would likewise expect that the tree will still be there, all else being equal, if nothing changes when it takes a stroll and re-visits it later. Likewise, he would expect the lower perceptive creatures, like his pet dog, to also have a perception of that tree. However, that character would be gravely mistaken to think that the tree thereby exists in-itself like he is visualizing it as, in fact, it is actually a bunch of 0s and 1s on the hard drive of the computer. The information about the tree is being represented in the tree that the character sees, but it doesn’t exist as the tall brown and green thing that he perceives in virtue of that. Likewise, if we posit that the video game has been coded to mimick real life, then it would also be true that the more capable a creature (in the game) is to perceiving, the more accurate, in terms of the information, will be represented. Thusly, it may be the case that that the tree is has green leaves, and that is objectively coded into the source code in 0s and 1s, but the color blind character, having not the ability to represent color, will mis-sight of its green leaves.

The hard problem is only a problem for physicalists if they presume that consciousness is not physical

Perhaps you are referring to property dualism (i.e., irreductive physicalism)? Personally, I don’t think it is a valid position in itself and thusly would argue that it either dissolved into substance dualism or reductive physicalism. In the case of the former, it has the hard problem of interaction; in the case of the latter, it has the hard problem of consciousness.

The subjective "feel" of conscious experience is not available to third person observation, so it is not the business of science to explain it.

I agree that science will not explain, nor is it its business to, but a reductive physicalism is required, by their own view, to expect neuroscience to explain it one day.

Why should we think that everything whatsoever can be explained in terms of physical models?

I think that this is exactly why science is about creating a map (i.e., quantifying the qualitative), and says nothing about the territory.

Bob

Hello Creativesoul,

Could you put the "hard problem" in question form please? The question needs to have an acceptable answer, by my lights. So, if you could formulate a question that has a potential/possible answer that you would find satisfactory, it would be super helpful. I want to make sure we're on the same page.

Fair enough my friend! To formulate the question in a manner to avoid any anticipated misunderstandings, I would like to clarify some terminology first (that will to utilized therein). Otherwise, I find that physicalists and idealists tend to both talk passed each other with vague questions (e.g., “physicalism can’t account for awareness”, “physicalism can’t account for why I see the color red”, etc.). Without proper explication of the terms, it isn’t self apparent (at least to me) that there is is a hard problem being expressed (in a question form).

For intents and purposes hereon, I will deploy a distinction between mechanical awareness (or ‘awareness’ for short) and qualitative experience (or ‘experience’ for short): the former is an account of how a mechanical (or otherwise mind-independent: consciousness-independent) being can acquire information of its environment that ultimately allow it to navigate (e.g., mimicking the brain, we can reverse engineer AIs that are increasingly becoming aware in this sense, as they can interpret their surroundings), whereas the latter is how a conscious being has qualitative, subjective experience of its surroundings (e.g., subjectively experiencing redness, feeling pain, hearing sounds, seeing objects, etc.).

With a lot of the discussion on the hard problem, the same sentence, depending on if the person is targeting contextually ‘awareness’ or ‘experience’, can be interpreting as expressing a soft problem, solved problem, or the actual hard problem. For example, the question “how does one see greeness?” could be interpreted two ways: “how does one acquire the information of the greeness?” or “how does one qualitatively experience greeness?”. A physicalist can explain easily how a brain mechanically interprets the world to acquire the information that such and such is green, but this doesn’t explain in-itself why a subject also qualitatively experiences the greeness: the qualia is an over an beyond, unexpected, phenomena when viewed from a physicalist’s metaphysical perspective. So, it is incredibly important not to get hung up on how physicalism accounts for ‘awareness’, because even if there is an aspect that we don’t fully understand yet, it is theoretically possible for one to explain it someday under physicalism: not so much for ‘experience’.

Now, to get to the question you asked for: “can physicalism possibly account for qualia under its reductive physicalist methodological approach without appeal to an obscurity?”. That is essentially the question that expresses the hard problem of consciousness. If one answers not, then it is a hard problem; however, if they answer yes, then it is a soft problem.

Bob