Aaron,

Your interpretation of superconductivity as an identical feature of some quantity of oxides is total nonsense that no physicist would endorse. Superconductivity is the absence of electrical resistance; it is an emergent property of certain materials under special conditions. The superconductivity of the material cannot exist apart from the material, but it is wrong to conclude from this that the superconducting state is equal to the material itself. Likewise, consciousness is an emergent subsystem of the body under certain conditions.

The terms used to describe qnything is just arguing over semantics. The point is that conscious mental states can be physically distinct, and still physical (ie. subject to energetic constraints in one way or another).

They somehow emerged from the physical brain during the course of evolution. Consciousness itself is not so mysterious. What is mysterious is just how the brain creates it. — George Cobau

Why must the Brain create consciousness?
This is homocentric, neurocentric and egocentric. There is absolutely not one shred of evidence for this commonly held and entirely self serving belief. It is a rather weak attempt at preserving the notion of self against the realities of will and determinism. It is a delusion of modernity and yet is medieval in its origins. Why must Galileo continually be compelled to recant; the Universe is outside our heads not inside!

Let it go, let it go... can't hold it back anymore! (Queen Elsa:Frozen)

The Brain (it appears to me at least) merely participates in 'thought' and its participation in or engagement with exogenous thought, gives rise to this thing we refer to as consciousness, and we subsequently or simultaneously manifest as' being'.... or that which Heidegger referred to as 'Dasein'



M

You have no idea what you are talking about. You don't seem to want to learn anything new. You are a waste of my time. Don't reply to me as I will no longer reply to you.

I think your view of history is a little off. I don't believe that science was formed within a materialistic mindset as you claim. It appears to me that modern science began with Copernicus, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and others of that time, which was well before materialism became ascendant in the twentieth century. Some have thought of Newtonian mechanics as being materialistic but this appears to be a overreach. (At least it is an overreach to think that it can be applied to absolutely everything, although admittedly many did.) Nonetheless, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, idealism was the dominant philosophy. It was only in the twentieth century that materialism became ascendant and got to be associated with science. — George Cobau

Agree, George, and also welcome. As one of the resident anti-materialists it's great to see your posts. However, I probably would go further than yourself, in that I think even naturalism is bound to be problematical. And this is because naturalism is ultimately claiming that any genuine knowledge or even insight is ultimately scientific or 'left-brain rational' in orientation. One effect of this, is that the human scientist is really the only perceptible rational intelligence in the universe. 'The world' is still essentially matter-energy, simply unfolding as a consequence of what happened to occur at the time of the big bang, but other than the intelligence of us human observers, it is, as far as we can empirically discern, all simply dumb stuff.

Now, I hasten to add, I'm not about to pitch any form of ID here. My argument against materialism is traditionalist: that the nature of meaning, and therefore reason, inference, mathematics and so even science itself, cannot be understood as a consequence of the kinds of forces and empirically observable entities that naturalism studies, because reason, meaning, intentionality, and so forth, are required and assumed, before science itself can even be established. This is the sense in which reason (and so on) transcends the naturalist description, as reason is essentially prior to the empirical sciences as such. Reason dictates what to consider, what to study, and so on, prior to any actual observation being made.

So in the current cultural idiom, 'the mind' is simply an evolved product, arrived on the scene in the blink of an eye, in geological and evolutionary terms, and is the product of the same forces which produced flatworms and cockroaches, albeit elaborated over vastly longer periods of time. But my argument is, that once h. sapiens evolves to the point of being a language-using, story-making being, then she is no longer simply a biological specimen, but a being. (This is why our designation as 'beings' has overlooked significance.)

This view is often accused of being anthropomorphic, but materialism is much more so. Why? Because it attributes to the human faculties, a universal significance, which it then immediately denies by reducing such faculties to being of the same order as peacock's tails. (Richard Dawkins has gone in to bat for the exact argument.) By viewing reason in terms of evolutionary biology, 'naturalism' reduces everything to the level of what the theory of evolution explains, which is 'why species survive and propagate'. This is then mistaken for a philosophy - which it is not.

And you can make that argument without any reference to ID whatever.

Incidentally, if you haven't discovered it, there's quite a useful resources website with the same name as your thread - http://www.newdualism.org/

I think you misunderstand my position. I don't see mind and brain as being different independent substances with the mind being supernatural. That's the old dualism. Clearly, mind and brain are different, and yet the mind depends on the brain in a naturalistic way. I believe in naturalism but not materialism. I don't get how Uber cannot understand this, but that's his problem.

You say the brain does information processing. How could it do that without a mind?

I also have to add, that there’s an underlying issue in many of these debates as to the meaning of ‘substance’. The word has a very different meaning in philosophy than in everyday usage. Etymollogically it comes from the Latin translation of the Greek word ‘ouisia’ which is much nearer in meaning to what we would call ‘being’ than to what we now think of as ‘stuff’. So it might be useful to consider ‘mind’ in terms of the word ‘being’ than the word ‘substance’, as the mind certainly doesn’t exist as an object of perception in the way that we understand ‘substances’ to do.

My argument against materialism is traditionalist: that the nature of meaning, and therefore reason, inference, mathematics and so even science itself, cannot be understood as a consequence of the kinds of forces and empirically observable entities that naturalism studies, because reason, meaning, intentionality, and so forth, are required and assumed, before science itself can even be established. This is the sense in which reason (and so on) transcends the naturalist description, as reason is essentially prior to the empirical sciences as such. Reason dictates what to consider, what to study, and so on, prior to any actual observation being made — Wayfarer

You seem to be conflating reason and sentience here.

The Hard Problem is that thinking should feel like something (when allegedly it could feel like nothing). How humans can develop the linguistic habits involved in reasoning would be one of those "easy problems" already answered by neurobiology, social science and philosophy of science.

So you want to focus on the mystery of "creative insight". But what part of that is not explained by neurobiological habits of induction and generalisation? Where is the evidence that there is something else going on beyond some kind of materially-grounded information process?

You appear to be a beacon of light in a sea of ignorance. You make some good points about the difference between the mental and physical. One point I would quibble with is when you say the mind is apparently indivisible. To me it appears that the mind can be divided into feeling, thought, memory, imagination, consciousness, etc. Still your other points appear to ring true. Of course, it is unknow just how brain and mind interact, but it appears to be beyond all reasonable doubt that they do in fact interact. To think that they could not possibly interact because they are so different is reading too much into our ignorance. It would be like saying that because you don't know why the sun is hot, it could not possibly be hot.

I think you misunderstand my position. ... I believe in naturalism but not materialism ... I don't get how Uber cannot understand this, but that's his problem. — George Cobau

Maybe you haven't presented a position that is understandable as yet.

You said your naturalism is dualistic in terms of believing in two kinds of substance - material substance and ... immaterial substance???

You also said you have ruled out some kind of panpsychism or dual aspect monism.

So I struggle to see what is "new" about your new dualism. It seems the regular kind so far.

You say the brain does information processing. How could it do that without a mind? — George Cobau

Are you claiming that the brain doesn't do information processing? On what grounds? Why did neuroscience look and find this going on?

Sure, you can be an old school dualist and say this ain't enough for you. But you can't question that information processing happens, and so mainstream science is already "dualistic" in accepting that physicalism includes more than just materialism. It now includes information as a second kind of thing.

Do you think that the state of superconductivity is something over and above the concrete material substrates that exemplify it? If yes, then you're not a materialist. If no, then your use the term "emergence" is essentially vacuous.

I think you are right that we have pre-ordered templates that should be challenged. It appears to be human nature to overreach, and I believe that is what materialists have done. What theory do you believe is violating Occam's razor, and why? That appears unclear to me from your post.

You seem to be conflating reason and sentience here. — apokrisis

Emphatically not. Animals are sentient, but not rational - they are not capable of philosophy or science because they don't possess the faculty of reason, the ability to abstract, compare - in short, to reason.

I agree that there are coherent evolutionary accounts of how linguistic capacity and reason evolved, but that doesn't explain the horizons that these faculties open up - which include the ability to devise such explanations! The attempt to explain reason in those terms is precisely where it becomes reductionist.

what the empiricist speaks of and describes as sense-knowledge is not exactly sense-knowledge, but sense-knowledge plus unconsciously-introduced intellective ingredients, - sense-knowledge in which he has made room for reason without recognizing it. A confusion which comes about all the more easily as, on the one hand, the senses are, in actual fact, more or less permeated with reason in man, and, on the other, the merely sensory psychology of animals, especially of the higher vertebrates, goes very far in its own realm and imitates intellectual knowledge to a considerable extent.¹ — Maritain

Oh, and I forgot to mention - you still haven't addressed the problem, which is the disanalogy between superconductivity and consciousness. The former is quite obviously a property of materials, whereas the properties of the latter are manifestly not.

I believe that I have a pretty good idea of what I know and what I don't know, but of course I am fallible. I don't know exactly how the brain creates conscious experience, but it appears beyond all reasonable doubt that it really does this. To me this implies a new kind of dualism. This is obviously "softer" than the old Cartesian dualism. Perhaps it is conceptually similar to nonreductive physicalism, but to me nrp appears to be contradictory. If the mind does not reduce to the brain, then it appears not to really be physicalism.

"Something and above" is philosopher's talk that means nothing. I have told you that superconductivity is an emergent physical state, and that emergent states result from the collective interactions of microscopic or mesoscopic parts.

Vacuous.

It is quite manifestly obvious by now, after a century of empirical research, that consciousness is absolutely a physical product of material entities.

Emphatically not. Animals are sentient, but not rational — Wayfarer

Yeah. And isn't the physicalist problem allegedly to do with that sentience rather than that rationality?

I agree that there are coherent evolutionary accounts of how linguistic capacity and reason evolved, but that doesn't explain the horizons that these faculties open up — Wayfarer

So you are saying that consciousness isn't an issue. What is causally surprising is that reality has an intelligible structure?

Can't you see that you are mixing up two questions in your haste to make this about Platonic form?

Repeating an assertion doesn't make it true.

Do you have a point to make, or are you just going to repeat yourself?

Your Platonic nonsense certainly isn't true.

By "indivisibility" I simply meant that you couldn't take someone's consciousness and split it into pieces. At least, I am not aware of any phenomenological descriptions of such a thing. I'd consider things like thought, feeling and imagination to be more akin to categories or features of consciousness.

Wow, you've really changed. I thought you're earlier post was interesting, but now you appear to have totally lost it. Are you drunk, or do you have another explanation?

However, you did ask why I think that the brain creates consciousness. First, a correlation between mind and brain has been established by the effects of brain injuries as well as by brain scanners. For example, when someone imagines playing tennis, this corresponds to certain activity in a particular part of the brain. Given this reality, it appears that either mind and brain must be identical or the brain causes conscious experience. I have already argued against identity--not as much as I could, but that would take too long. Suffice it to say, causation is far more likely than identity. It is the only realistic option. Thus, in all likelihood, the brain causes, creates, produces, and generates conscious mental experience.

the brain causes, creates, produces, and generates conscious mental experience. — George Cobau

Which is basically what materialism says.

I'm going to reply here and then get back to Wayfarer.

Much like Uber, you don't appreciate what is new about my new dualism, and so I'll try to spell it out here. The point is that it is very different from the traditional dualism of Descartes for at least four reasons. (Of course, it is possible that someone could have proposed something similar recently, but I am not aware of this, and it certainly does not appear to be well known. Although intuitively obvious, I think that not many people have wanted to believe in it because dualism has such a bad reputation, but this reputation is unfair.)

Reason 1. Descartes believed that mind and brain were totally independent substances. I believe that the mind depends on the brain, and thus it is not independent. Also, I don't really like the term, substance, which appears to be vague and not well defined.

Reason 2. Descartes held that the mind had no location in space. I believe that the mind must be located within the brain. Where else could it be?

Reason 3. Descartes believed that mind and brain interact through the pineal gland. This is clearly wrong. Mind and brain appear to interact somehow although we don't really know how.

Reason 4. Descartes believe that the soul could outlive the body. This appears extremely unlikely. In all likelihood, consciousness dies when the brain dies.

I hope I have made myself more clear.

You seem to equate information with the mind, but I am not really sure what to make of that. (I wouldn't rely on neuroscientists. To me, they appear to be very biased and confused.) It appears like the mind consists of internal experience. Are you really claiming that internal experiences such as feelings do not exist?

Thus, in all likelihood, the brain causes, creates, produces, and generates conscious mental experience. — George Cobau

How is this not a general physicalist presumption? The only real dualism here is a certain semantic slipperiness that arises in the gap between some notion of the nature of the cause and some notion of the nature of the effect.

Which is basically what materialism says. — Wayfarer

Yep. George, your problem is that you are speaking dualistically of two kinds of substances - Descartes res cogitans and res extensa. Or mental substance and corporeal substance. And yet then accepting some type of material connection between the two - the corporeal substance of brain "somehow" creating the mental substance of experience.

So you are giving a confused presentation of the familiar explanatory issues. This is not a new dualism but a mash-up.

As I say, the reasonable working hypothesis of neuroscience is then that it is the structure of the brain - its information processing structure - that is going to be the cause of minds with experiential states. And this hypothesis stands against some actually materialist account, such as would see the mind as some kind of emergent macro-property - like liquidity or superconductivity. Or even - another popular one - that the brain is a complex antenna for tuning into a universal mind field.

So if you accept that brains create minds, that is not dualism, except to the extent that it tries to make some explanatory separation in terms of causes and their effects.

It is the next step of "how" brains could create minds that is the usual problem for a naturalistic and physicalist account. And information processing seems a reasonable starting point for most physicalists.

Materialism - as more strictly defined by emergentists - would be the other naturalistic-seeming alternative. But there is no good evidence for it. Whereas there is a ton of evidence for some form of information processing paradigm.

You really need to look up property dualism. That's pretty much what you're describing, and as I and a few others have noted, your position here is very difficult to distinguish from certain versions of materialism. At least you're not an eliminativist, which I always think is a big hurdle to clear in this minefield of a subject, but you're still basically describing a materialist, naturalist solution to the mind-body problem. Congratulations George, you're finally waking up from the Matrix.

Also, I don't really like the term, substance, which appears to be vague and not well defined. — George Cobau

LOL. Aristotle did a decent job surely?

(I wouldn't rely on neuroscientists. To me, they appear to be very biased and confused.) — George Cobau

OK George. It's great that you might be interested in these issues. But it is really lame that you seem to think you have something new to tell everyone when you have next to no background in everything that has already been said.

The replies here should have given you some quick pointers as to what you need to explore. It's over to you now to get up to speed.

the traditional dualism of Descartes — George Cobau

Descartes' dualism is definitely not traditional. My first undergraduate philosophy unit was Descartes: The First Modern.

Indeed, it was the combination of Descartes' 'substance dualism' with the other foundations of modern scientific method, that gave rise to the very problem that needs to be solved:

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatio-temporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.

Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False pp. 35-36

Whereas, I'm now more persuaded by the hylomorphic dualism of the Aristotelian-Thomistic variety.

EVERYTHING in the cosmic universe is composed of matter and form. Everything is concrete and individual. Hence the forms of cosmic entities must also be concrete and individual. Now, the process of knowledge is immediately concerned with the separation of form from matter, since a thing is known precisely because its form is received in the knower. But, whatever is received is in the recipient according to the mode of being that the recipient possesses. If, then, the senses are material powers, they receive the forms of objects in a material manner; and if the intellect is an immaterial power, it receives the forms of objects in an immaterial manner. This means that in the case of sense knowledge, the form is still encompassed with the concrete characters which make it particular; and that, in the case of intellectual knowledge, the form is disengaged from all such characters. To understand is to free form completely from matter.

Moreover, if the proper knowledge of the senses is of accidents, through forms that are individualized, the proper knowledge of intellect is of essences, through forms that are universalized. Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge so far forth as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality.

The separation of form from matter requires two stages if the idea is to be elaborated: first, the sensitive stage, wherein the external and internal senses operate upon the material object, accepting its form without matter, but not without the appendages of matter; second the intellectual stage, wherein agent intellect operates upon the phantasmal datum, divesting the form of every character that marks and indentifies it as a particular something.

Abstraction, which is the proper task of active intellect, is essentially a liberating function in which the essence of the sensible object, potentially understandable as it lies beneath its accidents, is liberated from the elements that individualize it and is thus made actually understandable. The product of abstraction is a species of an intelligible order. Now possible intellect is supplied with an adequate stimulus to which it responds by producing a concept.

~From Thomistic Psychology: A Philosophical Analysis of the Nature of Man by Robert E. Brennan, O.P.; Macmillan Co., 1941.

I believe that the mind must be located within the brain. Where else could it be? — George Cobau

But this is a category error. Where is 'the number 7'? Where is 'the law of the excluded middle'? Where, for that matter, is the drama you watched last night on television? Is it 'in the television'? Abstractions don't exist in a spatio-temporal location - that's precisely the sense in which they're 'transcendent'. And if the rational intelligence is anything, it is precisely 'the ability to grasp abstractions'. That is what I am arguing precedes even the definition of 'the physical'.

information processing seems a reasonable starting point for most physicalists. — apokrisis

That's because of the obvious comparison with computation. But this overlooks the fact that computers are, in fact, extensions of the human faculties, and would not exist without them. For the same reason, many are prepared to entertain the possibility that the Universe could be a computer simulation because it sounds like a scientifically reasonable thing to believe - except for the fact that all the computers that are known to us, are manufactured artefacts and don't occur naturally.

I think you are reading too much into the term "naturalism". By naturalism, I simply mean that I do not believe in the supernatural or spiritual. I do believe that there is a lot that science has not explained yet, and whether it can ever explain everything even in principle is still an open question.

You, like Uber, appear to be conflating naturalism with materialism. The things you mention are incompatible with materialism, but not naturalism when you realize that the mind is actually natural.

I agree with you that the evolution of language had a huge effect. Also, I wouldn't put too much stock in anything Richard Dawkins has to say. (For one thing, his concept of a "meme" is clearly wrong.) Although I believe that minds evolved in conjunction with the brain, the evolution of our current culture cannot be reduced simply to survival and reproduction. it is much too complex for that. By the way, I'm going to check out that website you mentioned. It will be interesting to see how the ideas there compare to mine.