Hi Stephen P. King He left out Spinoza and Leibniz, and didn't do a very good job on Descartes. The inconsistencies with Cartesian mind and body theory didn't bother the materialists, but stimulated Leibniz to create his Idealistic metaphysics, where mind and body are both mind, so no firewall between.
It is enlightening to understand all three solutions to the mind/body problem: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091010010606AAaFv8o "Substance is whatever is essentially underlying types of things. Descartes: Mind (spirit, soul, thinking) is one subject that is distinguished by its non-spatial ability to think. The other is bodies, being spatial and non-thinking. Flaw: substances are such that they do not share common features, thus how is the body to be presented to thought (non-spatial to grasp the spatial?) Spinoza: Single substance. If substance has nothing to do with another substance, then it can only find its limits within itself (to limit is to have something to do with). if substance can only be limited by itself, then it must be infinite (the limit of the substance is itself part of the substance, which in turn must keep going or be limited by another of the same substance to infinite). If infinite, it cannot be limited to any other substance, thus only one infinite substance. Problem: freedom is lost. Leibniz: Simplicity defines substance. Substances only have one part. Thus ever complex (many parts) is itself made up of multiple substances (think atoms)*. God, being perfect, created the most amount of diversity in substances while creating the best possible world. Problem: Subs. are self coherent meaning they need no other contact except for God and themselves. They thus never contact the other substances. A lot of steps skipped and even more ignored but it was a quick brief answer." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *In my view, since atoms are divisible they cannot be substances. That leaves the fundamental particles as candidates, but I class them not to be (specifiable) substances by the uncertainy principle of Heisenberg. So nothing extended can be a substance, leaving the inextended to be the only substances, and hence complete concepts, and if singular, then they are monads. Treating both mind and body thusly as substances, monads (substances wiuthout parts) can act on each other (eg as mind and body) indirectly through gthe Supreme monad. You might call that Cosmic Mind. Fine, I secretly think of it as God. Roger Clough, [email protected] 9/8/2012 Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function." ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: Stephen P. King Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-08, 06:37:06 Subject: Re: The All On 9/8/2012 3:50 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: > On 07.09.2012 22:22 Stephen P. King said the following: > > ... > >> Hi Evgenii, >> >> Consider the mental image that a person suffering from anorexia has >> of themselves. It is distorted and false. How does this happen? >> Consider the Placebo effect and its complement, the Nocebo effect. >> Are they not examples of mental states acting on physical states? How >> does this happen if the mental states are just illusions (ala >> materialism) or the physical states are just illusions (ala >> Immaterialism)? Somehow they must be correlated with each other in >> some way and which ever way that is it is one that is not always a >> one to one and onto map. >> > > Hi Stephen, > > I am taking place right now in a discussion in a Russian forum on > philosophy. There was a good point there that when we say that > Descartes was a dualist (res cogitans and res extensa), it is actually > wrong. By Descartes there was also God and as a result everything was > quite consistent by him. Problems start when we consider res cogitans > and res extensa without God. Just FYI, I personally have enjoyed such > a comment. > > I have to read Pratt yet, sorry. Just a small note now. I do not see > how res cogitans and res extensa allow us to explain a > three-dimensional world that I observe. When we say ideas, then it > could work but it is unclear to me what to do with a visual world. > > Say I see my image behind the mirror (I have written behind instead of > in the mirror just to better describe my experience). How could you > describe this phenomenon by means of res cogitans and res extensa? > > Evgenii > -- > http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/05/brain-and-world.html > Hi Evgenii, I would not, and neither Pratt, use the notion of substance as did Descartes. Pratt explains himself well: http://boole.stanford.edu/pub/ratmech.pdf From the abstract: "This paper addresses the chief stumbling block for Descartes? 17thcentury philosophy of mind-body dualism, how can the fundamentally dissimilar mental and physical planes causally interact with each other? We apply Cartesian logic to reject not only divine intervention, preordained synchronization, and the eventual mass retreat to monism, but also an assumption Descartes himself somehow neglected to reject, that causal interaction within these planes is an easier problem than between. We use Chu spaces and residuation to derive all causal interaction, both between and within the two planes, from a uniform and algebraically rich theory of between-plane interaction alone. Lifting the two-valued Boolean logic of binary relations to the complex-valued fuzzy logic of quantum mechanics transforms residuation into a natural generalization of the inner product operation of a Hilbert space and demonstrates that this account of causal interaction is of essentially the same form as the Heisenberg-Schr+dinger quantum-mechanical solution to analogous problems of causal interaction in physics." The duality between mind in body is defined in terms of the relation that is known in mathematics to exist between Boolean algebras and certain topological spaces. Pratt presents a step-wise variational calculus to model both body -body and mind-mind interactions. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
