Comments

  • Consciousness; Quiddity (-Ness)
    I don't know about "spirit" as according to me, any talk about the "spiritual" refers to some sort of metaphysical assumption. I'm more interested in the "mind" and in "consciousness". I think that the latter, "consciousness", implies a strong commitment to subjectivity: this is, so to say, the "I" of every state of alertness, awareness or presence to the world, which means that every aspect, or at least a considerable part, of the physical and psychical makeup of a person is taking part in the thinking or the acting so that there is a sense in which everything that a person says or does implies the person, her history, and the history of her history. it also implies the human and physical world surrounding her, her language, culture and so on. This is the wholeness of the subject which, in some ways, relates to the person's divisibility into (physical, psychical, functional) parts, to the word of hard causality. What sort of relation is there between subjectivity and the causal world? What is the status of "mental states"? Are "mental states" physical states (physicalism), "functional states" (AI model of the mind, for instance), or not reduceable to any of them (Davidson)? I don't know at which point we are nowadays in this debate, but this is certainly most interesting to me.