The article which you provided a link to is a good overview. I certainly don't dismiss neuroscience as it does provide such a useful perspective. The article does bring in varying approaches because it is likely that these may be all useful. I am actually fairly interested in neurolinguistic programming because it may not explain consciousness itself but my help work with the subliminal aspects which affect the experiences of consciousness.

Yes, Skinner's perspective is complex, because although he did deny reflective consciousness, he did come up with potential modifications for life, in, 'Beyond Freedom and Dignity'.

I didn't think that you would reduce consciousness to information, but there are probably some people who do.

I don't undrrstand the question. It seems you've mixed different points I've made from a number of our exchanges.

Yes, I may have mixed up various post discussions which I have had with you. However, I do believe that the philosophy of Spinoza has been particularly influential in your thinking, and thought that was in connection with substance dualism. I did read some of the thread on substance dualism about a year or two ago. It is interesting and, at some point, I would like to read further on the topic of substance dualism, as it may be important in connection with the materialism vs idealism spectrum.

In his Ethics, Spinoza demonstrates that "substance dualism" is conceptually incoherent. He argues for what I have many times referred to as property dualism. I don't know if this is the thread on "substance dualism" you mean, Jack, but here's the link to a debate on differences with property dualism, in particular a post which illustrustrates my point:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/561804

The cognitive neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error and Looking for Spinoza are quite good at demonstrating how "mind & body" by conceived by Descartes as separate "substances" is completely inconsistent with what experimental sciences of the human brain show thereby vindicating much of Spinoza's insight.

Skinner did not deny it existed, he said it did not cause change.

I only brought it up because you mentioned it. The theory is as dumb as a bag of rocks.

Ryle points out that the foreigner's puzzle arose from his inability to understand how to use the concept of 'the University'
— Andrew M

But Ryle is creating a straw man because no one thinks like that. — Andrew4Handel

Ryle's purpose there was to illustrate what is meant by the phrase "category mistake". Not to argue that people make that mistake with respect to universities.

In the UK we have The Open University where you study from home.

I think most people understand that a University is more than just a collection of buildings and that it is not just one building but a learning institution with a wide reach. — Andrew4Handel

Of course.

It is not synonymous with the problem of squaring mental states with brain states and physicality with non physicality. — Andrew4Handel

Well, that's the issue at hand. As you note, we are unlikely to be confused about universities. But, as Ryle says:

There is a doctrine about the nature and place of minds which is so prevalent among theorists and even among laymen that it deserves to be described as the official theory. — The Concept of Mind - Gilbert Ryle

After giving an outline, he goes on to say:

Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as ‘the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine’. I hope to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle. It is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind. It is, namely, a category-mistake. — The Concept of Mind - Gilbert Ryle

That is, the university is something we can see by virtue of being creatures with minds.
— Andrew M

I think Ryle, (and certainly I,) would prefer to say that the university is something that we do together; if the building is lost, and the library burns, we can meet under a tree for a tutorial on whatever we can remember of the course. — unenlightened

Ryle says "the University has been seen". But yes, if the university didn't have buildings, then one would say something different, as you have done.

Ryle's purpose there was to illustrate what is meant by the phrase "category mistake". — Andrew M

My usual example is "three ducks in a row"

duck, duck, duck.

There are the ducks, and there is the row. When you have seen the ducks, you have seen the row. But there are not four things. Yet the row is no ghost.

There are the ducks, and there is the row. When you have seen the ducks, you have seen the row. But there are not four things. Yet the row is no ghost. — unenlightened

Nice example. There can be three ducks in a row, in a pond, in danger. All recognizable, yet categorically different, ways for things to be.

After giving an outline, he goes on to say:

Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as ‘the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine’. I hope to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle. It is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind. It is, namely, a category-mistake.
— The Concept of Mind - Gilbert Ryle — Andrew M

Just refresh my memory about what Ryle said was the correct view of the matter, if this is the incorrect view?

what Ryle said was the correct view of the matter — Wayfarer

Mind is not a thing but a relation, a pattern, an interaction, an event, a movement.

You only exist in relationship. — J.Krishnamurti

Not a brain state, but a(n embodied, active) brain's relation to the environment. The university is what the people do in the buildings. If people are not studying, the university has died, or is asleep at least.

The difficulty, as I see it, is that we tend to fall into, is that even starting with this clarity, that consciousness is the relationship between an embodied brain, and the environment, taken as two 'things', even as I lay out the categories of things and relations, I am establishing a new relation between consciousness and itself, the understanding of which tends to establish it as another thing. And I am back where I started with the wretched thinking thing. Hence meditation, to try and stop that circle of self-concern.

I’ve been a long-time reader of Krishnamurti and value his teaching. But here I’m trying to get an analysis specific to recent Western philosophy in particular. I never particularly warmed to Gilbert Ryle, but he was hugely influential and it’s an opportunity to learn something more about him. Incidentally a very perceptive essay about Gilbert Ryle’s ascendancy and his role in the so-called ‘Anglo-american - Continental divide in philosophy can be found here.

Ryle gave a paper called “Phenomenology versus ‘The Concept of Mind,’” the latter being the title of his most famous book. That “versus” captured his pugnacious mood. In this paper, Ryle outlined what he regarded as the superiority of British (“Anglo-Saxon,” as he put it) analytic philosophers over their continental counterparts, and dismissed Husserl’s phenomenology as an attempt to “puff philosophy up into the Science of the sciences.” British philosophers were not tempted to such delusions of grandeur, he suggested, because of the Oxbridge rituals of High Table: “I guess that our thinkers have been immunised against the idea of philosophy as the Mistress Science by the fact that their daily lives in Cambridge and Oxford colleges have kept them in personal contact with real scientists. Claims to Führership vanish when postprandial joking begins. Husserl wrote as if he had never met a scientist—or a joke.”

The reference to ‘fuhrership’ was particularly odious, considering the way Edmund Husserl was treated by the Nazi regime, and his onetime student Heidegger. But it’s an accurate reflection of Ryle’s personality, according to the article, by the biographer of Wittgenstein. (He comes across as a bit of a prick, to express it in the vernacular.)

But here I’m trying to get an analysis specific to recent Western philosophy in particular. I never particularly warmed to Gilbert Ryle — Wayfarer

He was a prick. And it is the nature of a prick to misunderstand himself when right as supporting himself when wrong. He was right about category errors, and the notion is important for disentangling some of the muddles of philosophy. But in characterising mind as the 'ghost in the machine' he paved the way for a reductionist mechanistic thesis that still permeates much of the West.

Because nobody believes in ghosts, right? And philosophy runs on slogans more than arguments.
But we believe in 'measurements' like anything, don't we? And measurements are relations between the thing measured and the thing measuring. So the mind of man is the measure of all things, we might better say.

Perhaps a reconsideration of Ryle might even bear some fruit in the way of a rapprochement between the analytic and continental schools?

Spot on.

Just refresh my memory about what Ryle said was the correct view of the matter, if this is the incorrect view? — Wayfarer

In the Introduction, Ryle says:

This book offers what may with reservations be described as a theory of the mind. But it does not give new information about minds. We possess already a wealth of information about minds, information which is neither derived from, nor upset by, the arguments of philosophers. The philosophical arguments which constitute this book are intended not to increase what we know about minds, but to rectify the logical geography of the knowledge which we already possess. — The Concept of Mind - Gilbert Ryle

While Ryle's anti-Cartesian goal is obvious, his theory cuts across both dualist and behaviorist theories. For example, to act intelligently doesn't necessitate internal processes (per dualism), but doesn't preclude them either (per behaviorism). Activities such as thinking and imagining, while private in a conventional sense are not private in the radical Cartesian sense. We can give voice to our thoughts, identify the motives and intentions of others, and so on.

So for Ryle, the dogma that we're ghosts in machines is in error. But so is the symbiotic dogma that we're machines. That is, to reflexively reallocate mind terms to the brain (or eliminate them altogether) is just to veer from Scylla to Charybdis. As Ryle notes in a later essay:

There have always existed in the breasts of philosophers, including our own breasts, two conflicting tempers. I nickname them the "Reductionist" and the "Duplicationist" tempers, or the "Deflationary" and the "Inflationary" tempers. The slogan of the first temper is "Nothing But ..."; that of the other "Something Else as Well ..." — Thinking and Saying - Gilbert Ryle

Ryle's positive goal is to direct our attention to the contexts that our language and activities arise in. As he says:

Descartes left as one of his main philosophical legacies a myth which continues to distort the continental geography of the subject.

A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them. And this is what I am trying to do.

To determine the logical geography of concepts is to reveal the logic of the propositions in which they are wielded, that is to say, to show with what other propositions they are consistent and inconsistent, what propositions follow from them and from what propositions they follow. The logical type or category to which a concept belongs is the set of ways in which it is logically legitimate to operate with it. The key arguments employed in this book are therefore intended to show why certain sorts of operations with the concepts of mental powers and processes are breaches of logical rules. — The Concept of Mind - Gilbert Ryle

I had never thought of it as information until I read a couple of threads on this site on consciousness and information. To some extent, that perspective works, but what seems to be missing is both sentience and narrative identity in the construction of an autobiographical sense of self identity. — Jack Cummins

Yes. Some theories of Consciousness as a form of Information (e.g. Integrated Information Theory) attempt to construct Self-Awareness by adding-up bits of encompassing environmental information until the aggregate seems to automatically point inward toward the Observer. This is a Holistic concept, but reductive analysis will miss the essential element that binds isolated parts into functioning wholes : a complete circuit. Metaphorically, the light goes-on when the circuit is complete.

Self identity is relative to the larger system of which one is a component. So the missing element is what causes material objects to integrate into a hierarchy of systems within systems (entanglement). I call that Causal Cybernetic*1 Information : EnFormAction (Energy + regulation + feedback). It's the internal feedback loops that provide self-knowledge back up to the observing Mind. The whole system is not just internally integrated, but globally coherent. In other words, both independent Whole and interdependent Holon*2.

Yet, to be useful, the Self must be distinguishable from Other, as-if a thing-unto-itself. And that's a whole 'nother story. :smile:


*1. Cybernetic :
A communication system in which Information flows both top-down and bottom-up. Like a program with a circular flow of data, beginning with original intention and enhanced via feedback (metaphorically, self-knowledge)

*2. Holon :
An individual is autonomous, but also part of a family, which is part of an extended family, which is part of a community, etc.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/holon
Note : a Holon is a whole/part : it is linked upward & downward within the system

Thank you Andrew M very informative

The mind-body problem could be renamed the mind-science problem. We are very familiar with our minds and bodies but science is best at explaining the body. Science is stuck on how to account for mind within its current paradigm.

Our naive concepts of physics are more folk than folk psychology. We feel that we know a lot about the external world through experience prior to science. But scientific discoveries have revealed a hidden physical world like cells and DNA and sub atomic particles not perceived through naive perception.

I think Ryle was trying to reduce or dilute mind to naive physical behaviours not to particle physics which is a bit ridiculous when you think about.

He puts a lot of emphasis on observing behaviours as some how replacing the need to access a mind. But observation requires a mind (which is unexplained) and behaviour requires interpretation (which is unexplained and takes place in a mind)

I think people often take for granted how much information is transmitted in language (which is symbolic) and that far less is transmitted via observation. Science is communicated by language and symbols.

That is not to say observation isn't a rich source of information. But I think we mistakenly think of science as shoring up our naive "physical" perceptions and undermining our hidden mental states.

Maybe Science itself is stuck in this paradigm (naive realism?).

I had a read of your debate with Hanover. It showed how intricate the distinction is between substance dualism and property dualism. I think that it may be because the various historical figures, Spinoza, Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein had different underlying frames of reference. At least, in the twentieth first century there is at least a common frames of the neuroscience of the brain which gives some underlying basis for clarity about the nature of 'mind'.

I believe that I read something by Damascio, but not sure if it was the one you mentioned. I will look out for the one on Descartes, especially as Descartes' shaped so much of current thinking of the mind body/relationship. I had a friend who told me that Pink Floyd's,'The Division Bell', concept is based on the mind/body connection, but I don't know if this is true, or whether it was my friend's personal interpretation.

Thanks for your thoughts on information and it does lead me to think of systems theory. I can remember how when I was studying biology, it made so much sense of everything by seeing the integral links. This did involve the connections between the mind and body, such as how the vague nerve, in response to stress leads to an increase in blood pressure, as well as the whole process of homeostasis in the body. The whole processes of minds or minds also make sense in the cybernetic theory of Gregory Bateson.

I will look out for the one on Descartes, especially as Descartes' shaped so much of current thinking of the mind body/relationship. — Jack Cummins

Descartes proposes substance dualism and Spinoza a few of decades later countered with, for all intents and purposes, property dualism. Remember: Spinozism was almost completely suppressed for over two centuries after Spinoza's death while Cartesianism (via Kantianism) has been all but celebrated since the mid-17th c. I guess most contemporary neuroscientists like Damasio find experimental agreement with property dualism and reject substance dualism (which has become a Cartesian-folk philosophy that thinkers from Witty, Dewey, Ryle, Dennett, Churchland & Churchland ... to the Buddhist neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger refute).

It is indeed interesting that Spinoza's ideas were suppressed, while Descartes ideas were mainstream. I wonder if it has a political aspect with Descartes' dualism being more compatible in the way in which life after death could be backed up according to Cartesian dualism.

Cartesian dualism is more compatible with Christian theology (even Catholic trinitarianism) than Spinozist acosmism which is why Descartes' confusions are still so commonplace. (NB: It's always been fashionable to equate Spinozism with "pantheism" or "neutral monism" but, paying critical attention to the text of the Ethics, clearly neither follows; rather 'ontological holism + property dualism' is a much more consistent description, IMO.)

Thanks for your thoughts on information and it does lead me to think of systems theory. I can remember how when I was studying biology, it made so much sense of everything by seeing the integral links. This did involve the connections between the mind and body, such as how the vague nerve, in response to stress leads to an increase in blood pressure, as well as the whole process of homeostasis in the body. The whole processes of minds or minds also make sense in the cybernetic theory of Gregory Bateson. — Jack Cummins

Unfortunately, when I refer to the feedback loops in Mind & Nature, in terms of "Holism", I get negative feedback -- as-if the notion is anti-scientific. Even when I switch to "Systems Theory" the scent of New Age Consciousness theories remains. Bateson's ideas and terminology were quickly adopted by New Agers, so he is also sometimes tarred with the feather of pseudo-science. Yet Consciousness has always lingered just beyond the reach of Reductive Science. So, I'm willing to give Holistic (Systems) Science a shot at understanding the "difference that makes a difference", along with the connections that make a conception. Bateson referred to his Holistic worldview as an "Ecology of Mind". :smile: