On Tuesday, December 31, 2019 at 5:25:38 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote: > > > > On 12/31/2019 12:06 PM, Philip Thrift wrote: > > > from ‘The Self’ – Galen Strawson, Journal of Consciousness Studies (1997) > <https://www.academia.edu/18112359/_The_Self_> > > *In the 1990s many analytic philosophers were inclined to deny that the > expression ‘the self’ referred to anything at all. Others said that its > meaning was too unclear for it to be used in worthwhile philosophical > discussion. A third group thought that the only legitimate use of ‘I’ and > ‘the self’ was its use to refer to the human being considered as a whole. > This paper rejects these views. It makes a proposal about how to endow ‘the > self’ with sufficiently clear meaning without taking it to refer to the > whole human being. One needs to begin with phenomenology, with > self-experience, with the experience of there being such a thing as the > self. One can then approach the questions about metaphysics of the > self—questions about the existence and nature of the self—in the light of > the discussion of the phenomenology of the self.* > > … > > Genuine, realistic materialism requires acknowledgement that the phenomena > of conscious experience are, considered specifically as such, wholly > physical, as physical as the phenomena of extension and electricity as > studied by physics. This in turn requires the acknowledgement that current > physics, considered as a general account of the nature of the physical, is > like Hamlet without the prince, or at least like Othello without Desdemona. > No one who doubts this is a serious materialist, as far as I can see. > Anyone who has had a standard modern (Western) education is likely to > experience a feeling of deep bewilderment—category-blasting amazement—when > entering into serious materialism, and considering the question ‘What is > the nature of the physical?’ in the context of the thought that the mental > (and in particular the experiential) is physical; followed, perhaps, by a > deep, pragmatic agnosticism. > > Even if we grant that there is a phenomenon that is reasonably picked out > by the phrase ‘mental self’, why should we accept that the right thing to > say about some two-second-long mental-self phenomenon is (a) that it is a > thing or object like a rock or a tiger? Why can’t we insist that the right > thing to say is simply (b) that an enduring (‘physical’) object—Louis—has a > certain property, or (c) that a two-second mental-self phenomenon is just a > matter of a certain process occurring in an object—so that it is not itself > a distinct object existing for two seconds? > > I think that a proper understanding of materialism strips (b) and (c) of > any appearance of superiority to (a). As for (c): any claim to the effect > that a mental self is best thought > of as a process rather than an object can be countered by saying that > there is no sense in which a mental self is a process in which a rock is > not also and equally a process. So if a rock is a paradigm case of a thing > in spite of being a process, we have no good reason not to say the same of > a mental self. > > > This is specious and disingenuous. It's another version of the rock that > computes everything and Strawson must know better. > > But if there is a process, there must be something—an object or > substance—in which it goes on. If something happens, there must be > something to which it happens, something which is not just the happening > itself. This expresses our ordinary understanding of things, but physicists > are increasingly content with the view that physical reality is itself a > kind of pure process—even if it remains hard to know exactly what this idea > amounts to. The view that there is some ultimate stuff to which things > happen has increasingly ceded to the idea that the existence of anything > worthy of the name ‘ultimate stuff’ consists in the existence of fields of > energy — consists, in other words, in the existence of a kind of pure > process which is not usefully thought of as something which is happening to > a thing distinct from it. > > As for (b): the object/property distinction is, as Russell says of the > standard distinction between mental and physical, ‘superficial and unreal’ > (1927: 402). > > And Russell proposed neutral monism in which the world consists of events > which can be ordered into either the mental life of persons (and animals) > or ordered into physical evolutions, i.e. world lines. Matter would a > subset of the physical orderings. It wouldn't be the fundamental ontology > and so the "neutral" in "neutral monism" meant it was neither mentalism nor > materialism. > > Brent > > Chronic philosophical difficulties with the question of how to express the > relation between substance and property provide strong negative support for > this view. However ineluctable it is for us, it seems that the distinction > must be as superficial as we must take the distinction between the wavelike > nature and particlelike nature of fundamental particles to be. > > Obviously more needs to be said, but Kant seems to have got it exactly > right in a single clause: ‘in their relation to substance, [accidents] are > not in fact subordinated to it, but are the manner of existence of the > substance itself’. > ---------- > > > @philipthrift > -- > >
I talk about the dialectics of *language* and matter - but still matter is everything there is, or in the terms it's expressed in Wikipedia in [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism ] ... but *neutral monism* [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_monism ] (however it's presented) has always seemed like complete hogwash to me. Happy New Year! @philipthrift -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/b05ffacc-dbb4-40b2-910a-80e3ad52513e%40googlegroups.com.
