Rather that materialism can be defined by more than the mind-body problem, as can philosophy. Marx was, after all, a philosopher. — Moliere

You're saying there are multiple meanings to "materialism." That's cool.

What does 'mental substance' mean? — Wayfarer

Descartes, however infamously, wanted mental substance to be that to which certain attributes are known to belong, in order to distinguish from extended substances to which very different kinds of attributes are known to belong.

See P.P. 1. #51-55 or so. You know….philosophy done in an orderly way. In 1644. Which is some cause for concern in itself.

The why’s and wherefore’s don’t matter, but if he’d thought a little more about it, he might have said attributes known to belong to a certain thing are themselves mental substances.

Six of one, half dozen of the other: attributes of a certain kind are mental substances, or, mental substance is that to which certain attributes belong.

I did a thread on that! — frank

And a good thread it was, too. But perhaps inconclusive. And certainly folk hereabouts missed it.

And certainly folk hereabouts missed it. — Banno

Link?

And a good thread it was, too. But perhaps inconclusive. And certainly folk hereabouts missed it. — Banno

I was just trying to understand the term. I still am.

I think a little more than that. Not only that it has multiple meanings, but that this meaning is better than the one set out by the mind-body problem, which is basically intractable from my sights. I don't think there's a good argument to be had for materialism if you begin with the mind-body problem.

I was just trying to understand the term. I still am. — frank

What aspect(s) are you still trying to understand?

but that this meaning is better than the one set out by the mind-body problem — Moliere

Ok. What is the meaning you're referring to? Can it be spelled out?

What aspect(s) are you still trying to understand? — wonderer1

The whole thing. :razz:

The material is the social, and the social is the economic. So the material is the economic. Whether you conceive of that like Marx does or whether you conceive of it like USians do that's the core idea I'm putting forward. It makes sense as a better priority for the real because it cannot be ignored in the same way that the mind-body problem can.

I was just trying to understand the term. I still am. — frank

Me too.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14613/philosophical-jargon-supervenience/

The material is the social, and the social is the economic. So the material is the economic. Whether you conceive of that like Marx does or whether you conceive of it like USians do that's the core idea I'm putting forward. It makes sense as a better priority for the real because it cannot be ignored in the same way that the mind-body problem can. — Moliere

So if I go to Alaska, build a hut and live by hunting moose for ten years, did I lift off from reality?

Thanks.

Nope. Reality changed, but that's not a lift off from reality.

Or the other way to read it would be more Marxist -- that you moving to Alaska to be a hunter-gatherer changes nothing about the economic form that allowed you to move to Alaska to become a hunter-gatherer which continues on.

This notion of the mind not have effects, of the spiritual being reduced to cash-exchanges -- that's what makes this a kind of materialism, I think. Marx wants to reduce these things to the economic form, too.

Or the other way to read it would be more Marxist -- that you moving to Alaska to be a hunter-gatherer changes nothing about the economic form that allowed you to move to Alaska to become a hunter-gatherer which continues on. — Moliere

What about our ancestors who all lived in huts and hunted moose? I'm not trying to be a smart ass, I just don't understand what you're saying.

No worries, it's a weird idea to wrap your head around.

The economic form was different then so reality was different then.

The part that gets weird is before humanity, if you want to think of this in a common-sense way. For Marx I'd say that the dialectic plays out in nature as well, or at least this what I think is consistent in reading him. The economic is invoked because of our species-being.

The notion of a species-being is something which I think separates Darwin from Marx, though they also have some similar parallels. But come to think of the titular question Darwin is a good justification for materialism, I think: what was formally thought to have a spiritual force was reduced to the mechanisms of nature.

'Before there were any minds' is an idea that only a mind can entertain. — Wayfarer

So what? It certainly doesn't follow from that obvious truism that nothing existed prior to the advent of mind. It might follow that nothing was experienced, but that is not the same thing.

I think that's a good way to characterise it. I think the clearest dividing line is between emergentist and non-emergentists regarding mind. When materialists or physicalists identify as such, what they usually end up meaning is that they don't think any consciousness or intentionality was there at the start.

Galen Strawson possibly bucks this trend as he claims to be a physicalist panpsychist. — bert1

Yes, I think that's right—the idea is that the Universe was not planned or intentionally created and that mind emerged much later in the picture.

It certainly doesn't follow from that obvious truism that nothing existed prior to the advent of mind. — Janus

It's a philosophical point, not an empirical hypothesis, although I grant it might be a difficult distinction.

It's a philosophical point, not an empirical hypothesis, although I grant it might be a difficult distinction. — Wayfarer

My point was only that it does not logically follow. We are well outside of anything that could be empirically tested with this topic. Consequently, I see it as being merely an imaginable possibility that there was nothing prior to mind, but in the face of everything we experience and know, it seems implausible—to me at least.

That's a bit misleading I think. I agree with you that Kastrup, while interesting in some areas, goes off the wall with attributing "dissociated boundaries" to objects, this is an extreme extrapolation. — Manuel

Yes, I agree.

But I think we have a pretty decent idea of what mental substance, if one wants to use that term is, we have it with us all the time, it's what we are best acquainted out of anything. Which is why we can read novel, participate as jurors, pass laws, create art, etc. — Manuel

All those 'mental' things are not independent of the physical, whereas there seem to be many physical things which are independent of the mental, and it's on account of that that it seems (to me anyway) more plausible to think that the physical is fundamental than that the mental is. And I think that's what substance in the philosophical context, at least, means "that which stands under" or something like that.

The nature of the non-mental physical, is rather stranger. We only understand 5% of it, from a theoretical standpoint, even here, we have plenty of problems understanding this 5%, it's the other 95% of the universe, that we know almost nothing about, save that it needs to be postulated in order to make the 5% we do know, work. — Manuel

Yes, we posit dark energy and dark matter to make our theories about what is actually observed consistent with the math. But I'm really not referencing cosmological or physics theory, I'm just going with the more basic fact that everything seems to be constructed of energy in its manifold configurations and conditioned by energy exchange and entropy. We don't know of anything that escapes those conditions.

I think we have a pretty decent idea of what mental substance, if one wants to use that term is.... — Manuel

If one does. I'm saying that 'substance' is a poor choice of words, for the reasons I gave. I'm not denying the reality of the mind.

the idea is that the Universe was not planned or intentionally created and that mind emerged much later in the picture — Janus

That seems to me to be a uniting theme on materialism -- something, be it qualia, intentionality, mind, or spiritual things, is somehow reduced to or explained away as a physical, material, or natural process of things. (I'd include supervenience as a kind of reduction, so I mean that term broadly)

I'm saying that 'substance' is a poor choice of words, for the reasons I gave. — Wayfarer

Aristotle himself made use of the term ὑποκείμενον (hypokeimenon) and demarcated it in the following way:

Aristotle defined a hypokeimenon in narrowly and purely grammatical terms, as something which cannot be a predicate of other things, but which can carry other things as its predicates.[1] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypokeimenon#Overview

The term "hypokeimenon" can well translate into fundamental, or else metaphysical, “substrate” - which could be interpreted to be synonymous to “substance” as it's now commonly used but avoids the issues which you’ve addressed in regard to the latter term’s technical philosophical meanings.

Of additional note: the Wikipedia page specifies "material substrate" but, going by Aristotle's definition alone, one could also conceive of a mental substrate - or else some other type of metaphysical substrate as might be the case with neutral monism.

As to usage (this as most will commonly interpret things nowadays): Mind - or else, maybe, something mental, such as consciousness - is the metaphysical substrate in idealism; matter is the metaphysical substrate in materialism; and both are metaphysical substrates of equal importance in Cartesian dualism.

Do you see any flaw with the term “metaphysical substrate” as it’s just been made use of?

Edit: in my haste, I replaced "substratum" with "substrate". But they are synonymous, and the second does sound better to my ears (so far at least).

Mind - or else, maybe, something mental, such as consciousness - is the metaphysical substrate in idealism; matter is the metaphysical substrate in materialism; and both are metaphysical substrates of equal importance in Cartesian dualism.

Do you see any flaw with the term “metaphysical substrate” as it’s just been made use of? — javra

Seems fine to me. I'm just calling out what I see as the obvious difficulties posed by the idea of 'mental substance' or saying that the world is 'made of something mental'. I'm not claiming any expertise in Aristotle, metaphysics, or Greek (none of which I have. The article I linked to was the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Aristotle's Metaphysics, by Joe Sachs, who is apparently well-regarded, specifically on the meaning of 'ouisia' which is what became translated as 'substance'.)

That seems to me to be a uniting theme on materialism -- something, be it qualia, intentionality, mind, or spiritual things, is somehow reduced to or explained away as a physical, material, or natural process of things. — Moliere

It's pretty clear isn't it? Evolutionary biology replaced the Biblical creation mythology, but it also elbowed aside a great deal of philosophy which had become attached to it as part of the cultural milieu. So it seems obvious to anyone here that mind evolves as part of the same overall process through which everything else evolves. And it's then easy to take the step that the human mind is a product of evolutionary processes in just the same way as are claws and teeth. Easy! What could be wrong with that? (That's why I'm an advocate of 'the argument from reason', although it's about as popular on this forum as a parachute in a submarine.)

The alternative is to avoid holding to substance ontologies altogether, which is my way of dealing with the issue. — Janus

Nice. Can I borrow this?

I'm more interested in whether we can get an idea of how the definitive argument from physicalism would work with which it could be demonstrated to be true.

But more than an argument it would actually be an operation. The operation would consist of an effective reduction of all the contents of the world objectified by the sciences [biology, economics, psychology, sociology, logic, mathematics, phenomenology, philosophy, etc.] to phenomena, terms, relations, correlations, operations and demonstrations of that specific science that is physics.

For example, a physical theory of supply and demand that reduces it to relationships between, so to speak, their masses and their covalent bonds. A physical theory of the Pythagorean theorem that reduces it to relationships between atoms of some element, etc.

Is that something impossible? If it is impossible then we need another ontology. A more pluralistic ontology that can identify genres and irreducible categories. But also an ontology that identifies how these genres and categories of what exists are related to each other.

I wonder if there isn't some merit to the concept, if reframed in terms of us being elements of a social species, whose thoughts are very much a function of of our encounters with conspecifics. — wonderer1

There's an element of that, it's hard to think so otherwise, but even taking this to account, I don't see how this expands to objects being "disassociated boundaries", with people you could say that, but I don't see how this entails creates Kastrup's idealism.

And I think that's what substance in the philosophical context, at least, means "that which stands under" or something like that. — Janus

Ah - ok. Yes, this is reasonable. I believe that the mental is another aspect of the physical though, so it's not an opposition, but your point is well taken.

But I'm really not referencing cosmological or physics theory, I'm just going with the more basic fact that everything seems to be constructed of energy in its manifold configurations and conditioned by energy exchange and entropy. We don't know of anything that escapes those conditions. — Janus

Energy yes - as far as I know, I think this applies. Entropy is tricky though, is the universe an open or closed system? What is order and what is disorder? Ben-Naim has written about this, it's quite interesting.

If one does. I'm saying that 'substance' is a poor choice of words, for the reasons I gave. I'm not denying the reality of the mind. — Wayfarer

Yes, substance is problematic and dated. But if qualified, it can be used, though it can lead to confusions.