On 12/31/2019 4:37 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
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
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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.
A strongly worded opinion...but not a reason.
Brent
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