I of course have repeatedly said that the way to make sense of mind~matter duality is to re-frame your inquiry as one based on the semiotic symbol~matter distinction instead. That then allows you to see how - causally - mind is just life. A more complex version of the same modelling relation. And even material existence can be accounted for pan-semiotically. — apokrisis
So much of metaphysics is focused on the quite unusual isolation of mind. In my own words, I would say that the mind appears to be "a world inside of a world"; in a crude analogy, the world is a "container" and inside of the container are even more containers. Little "black boxes" so to speak, which cannot be accessed from the outside and which subjectivity arises.
This view is basically Cartesian substance dualism. There's the unconscious world of extension and the conscious world of ideas. Somehow these substances interact, perhaps by way of divine intervention. But why? Why would the world be structured as such? Why only two substances? Why not an infinity of substances, a la Spinoza and Leibniz (monads)?
Is it even the case that there actually is an ontological separation going on here? I for one cannot understand how some people, like materialists/physicalists, can believe that mind is literally reduced to non-mind. For some funny reason they want to tell us that the things we are more sensitive and knowledgeable about (our own experiences) are actually reducible/identical to a "something" else that we have very little knowledge of. If we have to choose sides, monism would seem to favor idealism.
Idealism may be coherent, but that doesn't make it right per se. Whereas physicalism suffers from the problem of literally explaining away our own minds, idealism and also substance dualism suffers from an apparent difficulty mentioned above: it's hard to see why the universe would be structured like this. Given what we know about evolution in both the biological and cosmological arenas, it comes across as ad hoc to simply slap a static structure onto reality.
So we have what I see to be the definitive and essential property of mind: subjective isolation, and we also have a tension between the rather strange nature of mind and the surrounding context which it (apparently) emerged. Where does mind come from? Is it really plausible to say that mind has "always been" or is "poofed" into existence by an act of the divine? But if substance monism/dualism is unpersuasive, how else do we account for the subjective isolation of the mind? What else could account for the impossibility of "going into" someone else's mind, except by an actual metaphysical barrier of sorts, the same barrier that makes such theories seem ad hoc?
Because the fact is that we cannot access other people's minds in the way we do our own. They are our property. The universe has made various sorts of containers: fog obscures a landscape, a clam shell protects the organism, a door shuts off a room from the rest of the world. Yet at least conceptually we can open these containers and see their contents. We cannot do this with mind. — darthbarracuda
Evidently we can, for example, when we talk about the mind, and share insights into the minds of different speakers. Therefore, the mind is not isolated.
— jkop
This is merely communication and inference. There's a reason behaviorism was so popular back in the day: mind is literally cut off from observation and thus it was seen as unfit for scientific inquiry. — darthbarracuda
Where, according to your pan-semiotic theory, does qualitative experience reside? — darthbarracuda
I am questioning your use of words like "my experience", or "experience residing". You are simply presuming the dualistic mind~world framing that becomes the locked cage of your thoughts. — apokrisis
My argument is that to start unpicking that paradigm, a good place to start is to seriously address the issue of what might make life and mind actually different in your scheme of things? As a biological process, where does any claimed divergence in terms of causality arise? — apokrisis
To simply repeat "subjectivity" is to retreat back into Cartesian dualism and abandon your tentative naturalism here. And even in the end to reject naturalism, you would first have to demonstrate understanding of its best case. — apokrisis
Certainly I am supposing the phenomenological experience of being a self of sorts. But I don't really have an ambitious metaphysical structure of the world. I find idealism to be theoretically satisfying but not entirely believable in some sense, while I see a real, external world as probably existing in some form or whatever. A giant abyss of darkness, with matter bouncing into matter on the macro-scale and random events happening on lower levels. But basically I hold a position I suspect most people do: the universe is a spatio-temporal container and we are one of its many contents. — darthbarracuda
Well, I said that then existence of a nervous system would be a starter. — darthbarracuda
And you of all people should know that "naturalism" is such a vague buzzword that it literally is meaningless outside of esoteric circles. — darthbarracuda
So your ontic commitments amount to a bob each way. Cool. :-} — apokrisis
es. But why? What difference does that make? — apokrisis
Did you mean outside philosophical circles? Being immanent and not transcendent, being holist and not atomist, seem to be fairly clearcut and familiar ontic commitments to me. — apokrisis
Well because the nervous system controls movement and bodily processes, and so does consciousness. — darthbarracuda
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