On 1/1/2020 12:30 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:
On Tuesday, December 31, 2019 at 6:58:45 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote:
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
--
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
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism> ] ...
but *neutral monism* [
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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
As you have seen, I've been writing on this on Vic's blog and its
continuation for 20 years.
(If you were paying attention.)
*There is no such thing as mind* (in the way* it is represented in
neutral dualism) - just as Rorty wrote in "Persons Without Minds" in
/Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. /You must have read that chapter
by now.
No, I haven't. Perhaps you can make the relevant argument?
There is only physical reality - no alternative, separate, mental
reality - just in the way Strawson writes.
Assertion is not an argument. Conscious thoughts seem to me to be the
only thing immediately known. The physical world is an inference, a
theoretical model. Which is not to say it's separate; but which it
takes some explanation to unify with the world of consciousness. Is
Rorty an advocate of protopanpsychism?
/
/
You've seen me refer to that Rorty chapter for 20 years now. (If you
were paying attention.)
I guess I wasn't paying attention.
I don't know what more you want to convince you that neural monism is
woo woo.
More? You haven't presented anything except mockery and assertion.
* Neutral monism is a monistic metaphysics. It holds that ultimate
reality is all of one kind. To this extent neutral monism is in
agreement with the more familiar versions of monism: idealism and
materialism. What distinguishes neutral monism from its monistic
rivals is the claim that the intrinsic nature of ultimate reality is
neither mental nor physical. This negative claim also captures the
idea of neutrality: being intrinsically neither mental nor physical in
nature ultimate reality is said to be neutral between the two.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neutral-monism/
Why are you quoting that? Why not quote Rorty or whatever you say makes
neutral-monism "woo-woo".
Brent
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