On 1/1/2020 2:50 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:
On Wednesday, January 1, 2020 at 2:30:27 AM UTC-6, 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. There is only physical reality - no alternative,
separate, mental reality - just in the way Strawson writes.
/
/
You've seen me refer to that Rorty chapter for 20 years now. (If
you were paying attention.)
I don't know what more you want to convince you that neural monism
is woo woo.
* 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/
<https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neutral-monism/>
@philipthfit
Where to people get the idea that there are any *non-material things*?
It's baffled me to see that people believe in that all my life (or
since high school days anyway). It's just plain weird.
Perhaps it's because there are predicates and relations of material things.
Brent
I guess I will go through 2020 seeing more of that kind of thing.
@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]
<mailto:[email protected]>.
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/b25ea8bd-b22b-4696-86fe-30eb1e1c4ce3%40googlegroups.com
<https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/b25ea8bd-b22b-4696-86fe-30eb1e1c4ce3%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.
--
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/9c43cf9e-2d3e-0f35-6902-a909e9cf73ec%40verizon.net.
