Stillwater:
"Are you doing something similar to what Searle did, and arguing for another ontological substance called mind, but which is dependent on phsyical states, or are you going further in scope? "
Jeff:
Thanks for your input Stillwater,
Well,at this point there's enough evidence IMHO to at least justify substance dualism ,which goes further than John Searle I think.If there is a physical world that is independent of mind then I'd say that the mind can be a separate entity while having a functional relationship with the brain.
Alter the brain and you alter the mind's input.An example might be that you can interact with your computer and it's response depends on your input, it's output has an effect on you.You can destroy the computer and you will still exist and vice versa.Of course,as the brain is altered or destroyed our mental experience would necessarily be very different.There could be other worlds that mind interacts with,maybe a quantum mechanical or multiverse type of situation....
If some form of idealism is true,which I think I'd prefer,then the problems above would be alittle different.There would be no need to explain how 'substances' interact,how things are 'represented' or how subjective first person experience can 'arise' from objective lumps of matter or be reduced to it. Perception could be fundamental -the 'basic furniture of existence' as cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman puts forward.There would still be plenty to explain though, like apparent objectivity and how the 'meta' level of mind organises content seemingly outside of our sense of ownership..lots of things...
I was mostly aiming to take back the derogatory term 'illusion' that materialists use when referring to things like consciousness,NDEs,OBEs,lucid dreams ,astral and such.I started from a materialist premise to try and show the absurdity of eliminative materialism specifically because the other forms of materialism actually reduce to it.For instance Daniel Dennett claims that consciousness and qualia are "illusions" which commonly means unreal or false. This is a contradiction because if they didn't exist he would have nothing to try and explain away.And if conscious mental states,like qualia involved with an optical illusion, are identical to material brain states and only material exists, then either conscious experiences of "illusions" (or free will?) are real (because they are identical to matter ); or material brain states are unreal and false. So the word 'illusion' seems to make no sense to me.The events we call illusions happen,but they are experiences and experiences are real.Our subjective experience is all that we can say is real.
Stillwater:
"I would also argue that we have no contact with or experience of any quality of what we perceive to be an external world; all we have are what we perceive to be representations of one. Because there is ultimately no way for us to apprehend a possible physical world external to our minds that our senses seem to tell us about ( the Cartesian fear), if we want to declare anything "real", our perceptions are the only candidate. We can't visit this supposed objective external world in any way, so perception must be the true object of anything we would predicate of it.And as I think you also are arguing, there is no legitimate way for us to separate perceptions we percieve to be about an external world, and perceptions our current scientific school of thought tell us are completely non-representational (dreams, hallucinations, etc). If we want to declare our perceptions we consider to be about the world real, we are obligated to call all of our personal perceptions and thoughts real. I think that is where our arguments agree."
Jeff:
Well put,I agree with you totally. You explain it much better than me.
Stillwater:
"To play devil's advocate here, the usual criticism of this sort of argument is that you have played a Platonic trick (in this case with the defintion of real). We start with a claim to refute (here in this argument that dreams and astral perceptions and the like are not real), and rather than assail the claim directly, we actually challenge and change a defintion of an essential word ("real" in this case), and with the new defintion in place, declare that the original statement is false. What the opponent of this type of reasoning is obligated to say, is that the word (real) described a consesus concept as you put it, and that by changing what the word was talking about, you merely diverted the argument onto grounds more suitable to you; it would be argued that it is all well and good to change the defintion of real to something more logical, but that the concept itself still remains, even if it is now disenfranchised from a word- those perceptions and things which are real are those which are ultimately caused by primary qualities outside of ourselves, and which are nearest representations of those externals; that is clearly the sense of real that people would be concerned about when it comes to dreams and astral perceptions, not rather a semantic case of the word real (even if you and I seem to share a similar one).
When people say real in this case, they are concerned about whether what they are experiencing in an astral experience here is really something which is objective, or a product of their mind. I agree with your version of real, but it does not address this particular concern which is at the heart of why people ask this question ("is what I am seeing real?").
But nevertheless, I appreciate your argument and well thought-out post!"
Jeff:
This criticism seems valid to me and thanks for the complement.I guess it's a matter of wrestling back the word 'real' and 'illusion' or at least neutralizing it...
"Are you doing something similar to what Searle did, and arguing for another ontological substance called mind, but which is dependent on phsyical states, or are you going further in scope? "
Jeff:
Thanks for your input Stillwater,
Well,at this point there's enough evidence IMHO to at least justify substance dualism ,which goes further than John Searle I think.If there is a physical world that is independent of mind then I'd say that the mind can be a separate entity while having a functional relationship with the brain.
Alter the brain and you alter the mind's input.An example might be that you can interact with your computer and it's response depends on your input, it's output has an effect on you.You can destroy the computer and you will still exist and vice versa.Of course,as the brain is altered or destroyed our mental experience would necessarily be very different.There could be other worlds that mind interacts with,maybe a quantum mechanical or multiverse type of situation....
If some form of idealism is true,which I think I'd prefer,then the problems above would be alittle different.There would be no need to explain how 'substances' interact,how things are 'represented' or how subjective first person experience can 'arise' from objective lumps of matter or be reduced to it. Perception could be fundamental -the 'basic furniture of existence' as cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman puts forward.There would still be plenty to explain though, like apparent objectivity and how the 'meta' level of mind organises content seemingly outside of our sense of ownership..lots of things...
I was mostly aiming to take back the derogatory term 'illusion' that materialists use when referring to things like consciousness,NDEs,OBEs,lucid dreams ,astral and such.I started from a materialist premise to try and show the absurdity of eliminative materialism specifically because the other forms of materialism actually reduce to it.For instance Daniel Dennett claims that consciousness and qualia are "illusions" which commonly means unreal or false. This is a contradiction because if they didn't exist he would have nothing to try and explain away.And if conscious mental states,like qualia involved with an optical illusion, are identical to material brain states and only material exists, then either conscious experiences of "illusions" (or free will?) are real (because they are identical to matter ); or material brain states are unreal and false. So the word 'illusion' seems to make no sense to me.The events we call illusions happen,but they are experiences and experiences are real.Our subjective experience is all that we can say is real.
Stillwater:
"I would also argue that we have no contact with or experience of any quality of what we perceive to be an external world; all we have are what we perceive to be representations of one. Because there is ultimately no way for us to apprehend a possible physical world external to our minds that our senses seem to tell us about ( the Cartesian fear), if we want to declare anything "real", our perceptions are the only candidate. We can't visit this supposed objective external world in any way, so perception must be the true object of anything we would predicate of it.And as I think you also are arguing, there is no legitimate way for us to separate perceptions we percieve to be about an external world, and perceptions our current scientific school of thought tell us are completely non-representational (dreams, hallucinations, etc). If we want to declare our perceptions we consider to be about the world real, we are obligated to call all of our personal perceptions and thoughts real. I think that is where our arguments agree."
Jeff:
Well put,I agree with you totally. You explain it much better than me.
Stillwater:
"To play devil's advocate here, the usual criticism of this sort of argument is that you have played a Platonic trick (in this case with the defintion of real). We start with a claim to refute (here in this argument that dreams and astral perceptions and the like are not real), and rather than assail the claim directly, we actually challenge and change a defintion of an essential word ("real" in this case), and with the new defintion in place, declare that the original statement is false. What the opponent of this type of reasoning is obligated to say, is that the word (real) described a consesus concept as you put it, and that by changing what the word was talking about, you merely diverted the argument onto grounds more suitable to you; it would be argued that it is all well and good to change the defintion of real to something more logical, but that the concept itself still remains, even if it is now disenfranchised from a word- those perceptions and things which are real are those which are ultimately caused by primary qualities outside of ourselves, and which are nearest representations of those externals; that is clearly the sense of real that people would be concerned about when it comes to dreams and astral perceptions, not rather a semantic case of the word real (even if you and I seem to share a similar one).
When people say real in this case, they are concerned about whether what they are experiencing in an astral experience here is really something which is objective, or a product of their mind. I agree with your version of real, but it does not address this particular concern which is at the heart of why people ask this question ("is what I am seeing real?").
But nevertheless, I appreciate your argument and well thought-out post!"
Jeff:
This criticism seems valid to me and thanks for the complement.I guess it's a matter of wrestling back the word 'real' and 'illusion' or at least neutralizing it...