My views are similar in ways, and different in others. I say consciousness is an irreducible property with the ability to experience and cause. — Patterner

A property cannot have any ability.

So it's a fleeting activity in the mind which can be exported and recalled (if we are lucky). — Jack2848

Correct. We can, however, focus on an idea so we can experience it as long as we wish.

The content of the idea will be some relationship between objects? — Jack2848

Yes. The idea also refers to a single object.

Clubbed to death - Matrix soundtrack

Correct. We/the conscious minds, are living in a simulation.

Yngwie Malmsteen - Icarus' Dream Suite Op. 4

Tomaso Albinoni - Adagio in G Minor

Mental events are not substances, but the mind is? — Patterner

The mind is an irreducible substance with the ability to experience, freely decide, and cause.

The mind is irreducible yet can be omnipresent. I have never had an omnipresent experience, but people who meditate deeply report such an experience.

Unless you are wrong, and mental events within the property dualism do have causal power. — Patterner

Mental events are not substances, so they cannot have any physical properties to affect the brain.

Yes, that's how I see it. — Patterner

Cool! :wink:

(Although I'm on the property dualism side instead of substance dualism.) — Patterner

Mental events within the property dualism do not have causal power, so the property dualism is not acceptable.

Yngwie Malmsteen - Arpeggios From Hell - Tina S Cover



Yngwie Malmsteen - Arpeggios From Hell

I don't think our minds feel. The body feels, and our mind makes us aware of the feeling. — Athena

Feeling is a sort of experience, so that is the mind that experiences that sort of Qualia, so-called feeling.

I think our subconscious fills our consciousness with thoughts — Athena

The subconscious mind constantly fills the memory of the conscious mind with ideas, feelings, etc.

and this is not always helpful because it can be working with a memory that is harmful and draws a person back to a past that is not beneficial to the present. This is why people see a psychiatrist. — Athena

Correct.

I don't know exactly what ideas are, but I think of them as something we're abstracting out of situations. — frank

I already defined an idea, so I repeat: An idea is an irreducible mental event that is meaningful and is distinguishable from other ideas. We have the ability to create new ideas given the situations we are therein. You are correct on saying: "I think of them as something we're abstracting out of situations". So you know what ideas are. :wink:

What do you mean? An AI does not have access to ideas.

Donald Davidson says rationality requires understanding the concept of truth. I don't see how an AI would do that. — frank

AI cannot understand anything since it does not have access to ideas; an idea is an irreducible mental event that is meaningful and is distinguishable from other ideas.

An idea is an irreducible mental event that is meaningful and is distinguishable from other ideas.

Do you have a solution to that problem with substance dualism? — Patterner

There is an interaction between two substances. The mind is a light substance, so it affects the matter slightly. So it is difficult to measure the contribution of the mind in the process in the brain.

"The mind is that which thinks, feels, perceives, imagines, remembers, and wills."
For thinking, you at least need two minds, so-called the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. Feelings belong to the subconscious mind, as the conscious mind has a limited memory. Both the conscious and the subconscious mind experience different sorts of things. Imagination is a process with the aim of creating a new idea. The imagination is the main duty of the conscious mind. Both the conscious mind and the subconscious mind are involved in recalling.

Jeff Beck - Behind The Veil

Jimi Hendrix - Voodoo Child

This certainly isn’t my area of expertise, but it has always struck me it is the mind itself which emerges from the human neurological system. — T Clark

What is the mind to you? The mind, to me, is a substance with the ability to experience and cause. The mind cannot be certainly an emergent thing, given my definition of it.

Lack of a physical explanation isn't evidence that it isn't a physical effect. There's plenty of things not explained, which is why the scientists still have a job. But science presuming supernatural explanations held progress to a crawl, resulting what's been since named the dark ages. Changing their methodology to presume otherwise resulted in the renaissance and all the progress since. — noAxioms

Even if I grant that the experience can one day be explained, then we still have the problem of how the experience can affect physical substance. The second problem is a serious issue since the experience is a mental event only, and it lacks any physical property, so it cannot affect the physical.

Jason Becker - Altitudes - Tina S Cover



Jason Becker - Altitudes

All I am saying is that experience is a mental event, so we cannot perceive it. What we perceive is a substance, so-called object, with the appropriate information. We say that we experience once we perceive the object. I am a perceiver, so we need another substance too, so-called the mind.

The only mental event that comes to mind that is an example of strong emergence is the idea that is created by the conscious mind. The ideas are irreducible yet distinguishable. An AI is a mindless thing, so it does not have access to ideas. The thought process is defined as working on ideas with the aim of creating new ideas. So, an AI cannot think, given the definition of thinking and considering the fact that it is mindless. Therefore, an AI cannot create a new idea. What an AI can do is to produce meaningful sentences only given its database and infrastructure. The sentence refers to an idea, but only in the mind of a human interacting with an AI. The sentence does not even have a meaning for an AI since a meaning is the content of an idea!

What difference would it make if I had not existed? To me, nothing; to others, a lot.

The mental event/experience has no physical properties, so it cannot be detected nor affect reality. We, however, observe a fascinating relationship between mental events and the part of reality that we form them in; for example, I can type my thoughts. You cannot possibly explain this within physicalism or any form of monism, since you need two substances at least, the experiencer and the object of experience, to explain the experience.

Faith Hill - This Kiss



Faith Hill - This Kiss

I think it is the problem of the model, namely, physicalism, which is a monist model. You have this strange phenomenon, so-called the experience, that you cannot explain its existence. You also cannot explain how the experience can be causally efficacious, as well, given the fact that the experience is a mental event and the physical substances are causally closed.

Just WOW. This song is so Dense! I cannot get enough of it.

The Weeknd - Die For You



The Weeknd - Die For You

The physical substance cannot even cause a change in itself. I have a thread on this topic here. Therefore, the Mind sustains the physical substance (I have a thread on what the Mind is here).

By the way, I am wondering how such a thing as a physical substance that has no control over its movement at all, given the first argument in the first thread above, could be the cause of something that is intelligent, something that can freely decide, etc. what you call the mind. This is a bad model to work on since it has tons of problems and anomalies on the first side. Just accept the substance dualism at least, and you can describe how the physical substance moves.

By content, I mean all there is in a mental event. By form, I mean how the mental event appears to us.

Where does the thought come from? — Philosophim

That is a very good question, and it requires a separate thread, but I briefly explain how we create thoughts. There are at least two minds involved in the creation of thoughts, namely, the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. These minds are connected in a complex way by the third substance, the so-called brain. The mind differs from the conscious mind or the subconscious mind. The mind is an irreducible substance with the ability to experience, freely decide, and create. The mind is simple, so it can be conscious of one thing at any given time. Therefore, the mind cannot generate thoughts. The conscious and subconscious mind, however, have memory, which in the case of the conscious mind, is very limited, so-called working memory, and it is huge, basically, most of what you experience in the past, in the case of the subconscious mind. Most of the thoughts that we are aware of are generated by the conscious mind. Learning something is different from creating something. But let's focus on learning first because we cannot possibly create something new if we haven't learn enough material which are necessary. Let's also start from a very simple instance of learning. When I say "cup", you, your conscious mind, can simply understand what we are talking about. You can even understand this with the mind since "cup" represents a single word. However, the mind cannot understand when I say "The cup is on the table" since we are talking about several words here. The conscious mind, however, has limited memory, so it can hold several items in its memory. You need to pay minimal attention when you read the sentence. Each word that you read then is registered in the conscious mind's memory. You understand what the sentence is about shortly after you complete reading the sentence. It is the ability of the conscious mind to generate what the sentence is about since the words are registered in its memory. The subconscious mind becomes important when we are trying to understand a long sentence or a paragraph, a book, etc.. Creating a new thought is, however different task, but it is done through a collaboration between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. The new thought is simply created once there is enough material to generate it. It is similar to the process of learning in a sense, with the difference that in learning, the person (by person I mean both the conscious and subconscious minds) is passive, whereas in creating the thought, the person is active.

Not necessarily. — RussellA

No. See below.

Unless each mental event "is" its content. The content "is" the form. — RussellA

A mental event is the subjective experience we are all familiar with. If the content of a mental event is different, then we have a different experience, so the content of a mental event determines which kind of experience one has.

The Universe is built on fundamental particles which have no parts, yet things still happen. — RussellA

That is not accurate. According to string theory, each particle is a string that has an extension over space. The different modes of vibration of the string determine which kind of particle we are dealing with.

That seems like just a made up view to justify your current line of thought. — flannel jesus

I didn't make up anything. String theory is not my theory. I don't know what is wrong with considering all sorts of physical particles as physical substance. All I am saying is that horizontal causation is not possible, so you cannot have a change in physical substance at all if you the horizontal causation is the only option available.

You think you need multiple substances to interact. — flannel jesus

I am saying that you at least need two different sorts of substances, one physical and another, which is the Mind.

Obviously that doesn't mean there aren't any non physical substances at play, it just means you haven't proven it with your logic here. — flannel jesus

This is off-topic, but I argue it: The vertical causation is the only available option once the horizontal one is ruled out. In this thread, I argue that horizontal causation is not possible when it comes to mental events. I think that the same type of argument applies to physical substance as well. I have another thread on "Physical cannot be cause of its own change" as well. So?

Wouldn't B exist potentially before it is actual? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I have no idea what that means. B either exists or does not. I must say that, within Aristotle's notion of causality, a thing that exists has potentiality. B does not exist before it is caused, so it cannot have any potentiality if it does not exist.

I must say that I disagree with Aristotle's notion of causality for the same reason. If A has the potential to become actual, namely B, and then B becomes actual, namely C, etc., then where does the information about a chain of causality reside? It cannot reside in A.

So A doesn't need to contain B, it just must contain what brings B from potentially into actuality. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Then where does the information about B reside?

We might say that A contains B virtually. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What does virtually mean here?

I consider all physical particles as the physical substance. Different particles are manifestations of different vibration modes of a single string at the end.

No. I just consider linear causality here. Do you think they are relevant?

But the emergence of Consciousness in a material world is more challenging to empirical scientists because Sentient Awareness*2 is not an empirical Property, but a philosophical Quality, that includes the power to generate mental images & ideas. We can't trace a lineage of cause & effect leading up to an entity that not only senses its environment (like a plant), but knows that it knows. That self-knowledge is limited to "higher" animals. And, as far as we know, only homo sapiens is able to both imagine abstract ideas, and to communicate them in language. — Gnomon

Consciousness, to me, is the ability of the mind, namely, the ability to experience, and it cannot be an emergent thing. The quality of the experience, however, whether it is a simple perception or complex thought processes, is an emergent thing, and for that, you need an organism with a complex brain and a mind. There are two reasons why I consider the mind as an extra component: 1) The hard problem of consciousness, and 2) The efficacy of mental events. I am sure you have heard about (1) but not (2). So, we are dealing with (2) as a serious problem in physicalism, even if the hard problem of consciousness could possibly be resolved. But why (2) is a serious problem? The problem is that mental events have no physical property, so they cannot be causally efficacious in the physical world. So, we are dealing with an anomaly that physicalism cannot resolve.

Moreover, Strong Emergence implies that some unpredictable novel property is manifested, not just in localized group behavior, but in the specialized talent of a single species for abstracting ideas (imaginary information) from concrete reality. Emergence of novelty from complexity seems to be inherent in the evolutionary process. But modern science has only recently developed mathematical techniques & computer programs for analyzing & understanding non-linear systems, that defy traditional reductionist methods. — Gnomon

You cannot get consciousness from complexity. You can, however, get complex behavior when the system under investigation is complex enough.

Some say that Consciousness is not produced mechanically, but magically. I suspect that Mind only seems like Magic, due to our inability to comprehend functions & effects that arise from the most complex structure in the universe : the human brain. — Gnomon

The mind, to me, is an irreducible substance with the ability to experience, freely decide, and cause. The mind is not by byproduct of physical processes in the brain.

Do you think we can take your same argument and use it to show that physical to physical causation is not possible if physical events are related? — Leontiskos

That is a very good question! I have a thread on "Physical cannot be the cause of its own change" that you can find here. I, however, think that the same type of argument that is presented here applies to physical events as well. This means that horizontal causation is not possible if the events, whether physical or mental, are related. Therefore, we are left with vertical causation, which requires at least two substances, namely the Mind and matter.