Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[GrandizerII]

@emjay appreciate the charitable take on my position. FTR, I'm still epiphenomenalist to an extent, just not in the strict sense; it's one of those things I'm wavering over, though. Even property dualism is something I hold to tentatively, which I did say earlier.

It's an interesting topic, whichever side one adopts, they have something interesting to say about it. And whether there is a hard problem or not, the discussion about the topic can be quite hard because, as you said earlier, everyone is using relevant words differently.

[emjay]

@emjay appreciate the charitable take on my position. FTR, I'm still epiphenomenalist to an extent, just not in the strict sense; it's one of those things I'm wavering over, though. Even property dualism is something I hold to tentatively, which I did say earlier.

It's an interesting topic, whichever side one adopts, they have something interesting to say about it. And whether there is a hard problem or not, the discussion about the topic can be quite hard because, as you said earlier, everyone is using relevant words differently.

No worries, man... I appreciate your input in this topic, or anyone elses, whatever the perspective... it's all good and all leads to potential insight. It's the one subject where there are both no experts and all experts... where everybody's equal because we all have an intimate acquaintance with the subject of discussion and just want to understand our own consciousness. So it's one of the few subjects where we can just enjoy a purely intellectual discussion, that never needs to get heated or divisive in my opinion. That's part of why I enjoy it so much... completely different from arguing about politics or whatever. So yeah, though you and me didn't directly interact much in this conversation, I still appreciate your input, and I'm sure we will in the future, but as for now I can fully understand why you're knackered in the thread, cos I was/am too

[The Grand Nudger]

There's a chapter in brief history of time where a discussion about m theory begins with a comment on relation by duality. Where many theories seem to be describing the same things, as it suggests that some transformation of one theory renders it indistinguishable from another. Materialism as an observation on interactions. Property dualism in general as something like the difference between science and earth science, earth science and life science, etc. Epiphenomenalism an explanation for why we don't have "mental abilities" like telekinesis.

It's not hard to work control theories, property dualism in general, and epiphenomenalism in specific into a single coherent statement about consciousness. We could say that the mind is a model of attention meaningfully unalike straightforward analog processing, isolated in some sense from the exterior world. When I close my eyes and imagine flying - I'm doing something that a rock isn't doing...but..thankfully, because my mind can't actually make me fly, my body won't have to deal with the consequences of losing my concentration at altitude.

[polymath257]

In property dualism, everything is made of just one substance, reducible to just one substance.  If a person thinks that there is more than one substance required, that there are things that don't reduce to substance a alone, that's not property dualism - it's substance dualism. 

I'm curious why so many people go to either 'substance monism' or 'substance dualism'.

At this point, we have a number of 'fundamental particles' which, string theory aside, seem to not be 'made of' anything more basic: electrons, quarks, photons, W and Z particles, gluons, etc.

Does each type of fundamental particle give a different 'substance'? It seems to me that by most definitions of 'substance', they do.

If they do, then aren't there a whole host of different 'substances'? So why just limit to dualism?

[The Grand Nudger]

There's no particular reason (once we begin multiplying substances) to stop at two. The same can be said of property dualism. Why just two properties - I lead in a little with that.

Traditionally, no, all of the fundamental particles are material. If they explain every interaction, effect, and observation, that would be material monism. I've heard a similar thought expressed as dissatisfaction with materialism. That it is (or has become) too inclusive. That if we detected some new thing x that's just like their other substance...we would declare it to be material, or natural...essentially, just one more representative of the set. I think that's true. We probably would...and we certainly have. It's a long way from "everything is made of rock stuff" to quantum mechanics.

You do bring up a good question, though, if the many fundamental things should be considered different substances, and someone is arguing for some other substance..is there anything already contained in the material that should have been..more accurately, grouped with the immaterial or the mental (or whatever other substances or properties we come up with)? This is a bit of a pickle for property dualism by the way. There's no consensus on where the line between material properties of the brain and mental properties of consciousness are. In most conceptions, everything but qualia is or can be negotiated away without abandoning the position.

---

-and, to add..when or if we reach that point - for all of the valid and informative comments and observations about consciousness a multiplicative substance theory might have leading to that point - it's been reduced to a pretty severe case of special pleading. The same thing happens to all sorts of good criticism and questions. Inarguably legitimate concerns about the incompleteness of a theory can sometimes turn into a base argument from ignorance.

[polymath257]

And if we allow for multiple 'substances', is it clear that all 'mental substances' are the same? Why not many different physical substances and many different mental substances? maybe, the distinction into 'physical substances' and 'mental substances' is, itself, problematic.

[The Grand Nudger]

No, it's not at all clear that all potential mental substances (or mental properties) belong in the same set. In my experience, people tend to have ideological preferences for asserting a world of many substances. A valued x is (or seems to some person to be) excluded by a monist theory and is the reason that a person takes such a stance.

The same can be said for people who insist that only a monist theory, and only their monist theory, could explain something like mind. I prefer multiple realizability. There is more than one mind, and more than one way to make a mind, and that's even if we limit ourselves to things within materialism, for example. It's not difficult to conceive of a different world where there are no material properties or substance but..instead, immaterial properties or substance. That these other properties or substances can also achieve the effects we note when we speak about consciousness. If we lived in a world of both (and hell, why not both and then some) we might notice alot of different consciousnesses - all very different from each other, and even different from others in the same set - the things that explain one set offering no explanation of the others. Trouble is, we don't seem to be living in that world ourselves.

[emjay]

Sorry for the delay in replying... I'm completely out of sync and a bit of a/total zombie atm and wasn't sure if I was going to reply, but figured no point in hurriedly replying until/unless I'd fully digested the material and had something to say, rather than whatever first came to mind... but in any case, by the rate that you post on this site, and in every conceivable subject, I figured you have a somewhat Buddhist/Zen approach to posting; without expectations?... ie if someone replies, great, if they don't reply, great, if they reply a long time down the line, great? You just live in the moment with the posts? Is that a fair assessment? If so, it's refreshing from my POV, both to reply to... meaning less pressure/unhurried... and as something to aspire to be like myself, but as much as I'm interested in Buddhist philosophy (not saying yours comes from that perspective, but it seems similar in practice), multitasking and letting go, is not my strong suit, as much as I wish it was.

In property dualism, everything is made of just one substance, reducible to just one substance.  If a person thinks that there is more than one substance required, that there are things that don't reduce to substance a alone, that's not property dualism - it's substance dualism.  Physicalism is or could be consistent with property dualism. That's the reason I don't see property dualism as a competing explanation to physicalism.  It's not so much criticism, as a "yes, but".

The hard problem, imo, fits better with substance dualism - since it's supposed to be something no explanation of the physical mechanism(s), however complete, however predictive, however accurate - is contended to be able to answer.  It's difficult to see how or why that would be the case if there is just the one type of substance, and "science substance"..no less.

That science or physicalism doesn't or can't address the hard problem - is a contention..not a fact of physicalism.  I don't personally think it's incoherent - it certainly could have been the case that some other stuff, or some irreducible other property x, lead to our mind.  That there was no way to produce a 1st person experience physically, for example.  It just doesn't appear to be the case in actuality.

In that case I still don't think I'm fully understanding what you're saying here. In that whether we're talking about substance (and like poly later, I was also curious what exactly what was meant by that in a world of multiple types of particles, but just assumed it meant any material; the physical world... we can get onto that later maybe) or properties, the reason I think there's only two... as in dual... on the table, as opposed to many, is that there is, or at least seems to be, something fundamentally different in an overarching sense, between having/experiencing a perspective at all, whatever form it takes (ie 1st, 2nd, 3rd person or whatever else), and the mind-independent reality beyond it (ie the physical world) that we and science, examine from the outside. Ie any other properties that we could possibly examine in the universe, be they burger properties, wind properties etc, as per your example, we examine from the outside... from a perpective, but actually having/experiencing a perspective seems something completely different.

Ie for instance, the fact that the brain and computers (in the case of video games etc) can and do computationally model environments and perpectives, has never been in dispute for me. Indeed, I think dreams are a prime example of how there must be an internal model of the world represented in our brains. But having that model and experiencing it are two different things, or seem so to me. In a similar way to the question I posed earlier of what sort of existence the different levels of processing/description in a running computer have... not quite the same, in the sense that those processes are not - necessarily - deemed to have an internal perpsective, but maybe still the same ballpark.

As an aside though, I fully agree about the undesirability of the 2nd person perspective. It reminds me of Astroneer, the game I recommended before; it is usually played in 3rd person perspective, like Fortnite, but you can manipulate the external camera to some extent, which unfortunately you have to do often because it's very easy to accidentally pick something big up, and the way it holds it is kind of like a lassoo, at a radius from yourself that you can extend or reduce, and rotate around yourself... so you accidentally pick it up, accidentally end up swinging it behind yourself out of view, and have to change the camera angle to zoomed out and looking at you in the centre of the screen, to have any real hope of figuring out how to put the object back where it came from, all the while having to deal with the unintuitive effect that has on the controls and your perspective when you have to move around and act in that 2nd person perspective. The devs did deal with that problem to some extent by allowing platforms to be locked to the ground so that they couldn't be accidentally picked up, but that doesn't affect what's on them and I think a better overall solution would be just not to allow held items to be swung round behind you out of view in the first place, just have a valid arc of influence in front of you so to speak.

Anyway, as to your real life experiences of the 2nd person perspective, I assume you mean an out-of-body experience/dissociation... maybe on the battlefield, or somewhere else? Is that something you're happy/comfortable talking about? From a computational modelling point of view it's particularly interesting in our case because we don't actually have a 2nd person external sense looking at ourselves, so the model of our own body in that view would seem to have be entirely indirectly constructed, by inference more than observation so to speak, and/or constructed from our tactile body model rather than a visual one etc. I have no doubt that happens, but the level of detail is the most interesting part for me... but then in dreams for instance we have the perception that things are real, yet if we looked in detail, I don't think we'd 'see' individual blades of grass for instance, just a simpler, more general representation of whatever we're looking at... but it wouldn't matter, because we perceive it as real nonetheless in dreams. Relatedly, I have a vague recollection of reading about this in the past, that such a model would from a computational complexity point of view, always be not-moving... ie your body from that perspective would always be still, because to calculate its 'animation' would be too computationally demanding. I don't know about that one - the brain is incredibly powerful - but in your experience, or anyone elses, of dissociation, does yourself-as-subject ever move, or is it more like a snapshot, frozen in time, where maybe or maybe not you can move the perpective around, as per moving the camera around in that Astroneer example, but the actual subject in it, remains static?

Epiphenomenalism, I think, could also be true - though I'd wonder in what sense mental events were incapable of having physical effects on other mental events - at least-  which are themselves contended to be physical in at least some sense.  Here, I think we're out of our depth.  To what extent (if any) does the mind have control or effect on itself, let alone the rest of the physical world.  I don't personally think it evolved to control itself, rather, as a model to control the system.  It's capable of producing 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person views.  This is no different fundamentally from one camera looking out from a subject, one camera looking at the same subject, and many cameras internal and external to the subject looking in all directions and creating a map from their combined input.  Try playing a video game in 2nd at an odd angle - you'll see why living creatures might not favor that view for their normal operation.  3rd is better (mmo view) - but much more difficult to create purely from a hardware perspective, let alone the processing.

If I pay attention, and close my eyes, I can put together a rudimentary 3rd.  I had a prolonged experience of the 2nd, very compelling, but, for the most part, I waddle around in 1st - the natural arrangement of my sensory organs.

(I always think you've got a handle on the convo, emjay, always )

As to mental events effecting other mental events in epiphenomenalism, I guess I just look at that through having to trace it through the physical side. Ultimately I don't think there's much difference between epiphenomenalism and physicalism on that score; if the physical side is determined by physics and the mental side in one way or another mirrors that/is identical with that, then the mental side should have an at least apparent correlatable causal flow... so whether you see mental events as actually causing other mental events, as per physicalism because of identity, or apparently/indirectly through the underlying physical causality, doesn't make any practical difference that I can see. Either way you could in theory look at the causal flow from either side; of mental states causing other mental states in consciousness vs the correlated physical events causing other physical events in the correlated neural circuits of the brain. I anticipate the question, if there is no practical difference, why have these different positions? To which I can only answer, I don't know for sure, just that that's what we're trying to get to the bottom of.

[Angrboda]

And if we allow for multiple 'substances', is it clear that all 'mental substances' are the same? Why not many different physical substances and many different mental substances? maybe, the distinction into 'physical substances' and 'mental substances' is, itself, problematic.

The problem with multiple substances is that you quickly run into questions of how the particles manage to interact with each other if they aren't all the same substance.

These three "Worlds" are not proposed as isolated universes but rather are realms or levels within the known universe.

Their numbering reflects Popper's view (a) of their temporal order within the known universe, and (b) that each later realm emerged from developments within the preceding realm. A one-word description of each realm is that World 1 is the physical realm, World 2 is the mental realm, and World 3 is the cultural realm - though, in the detail of Popper's theory, each "World" or realm transcends what might be typically understood by the respective terms "physical", "mental" and "cultural".

In Popper's theory, there is at points direct interaction between World 1 and World 2 (at the point of mind-brain liaison), and between World 2 and World 3 (at the point where mental states are engaged with World 3 content), but there is no direct interaction at any point between World 1 and World 3 - World 3 does affect World 1 but only indirectly, through the workings of World 2 with World 3 content and then World 2's subsequent interaction with World 1.

Wikipedia || Popper's three worlds

Patricia Churchland has an elegant criticism of such three world hypotheses which I'll have to lookup. I believe that it's in Neurophilosophy in the context of talking about dualistic theories of consciousness and how they explain the interaction between the two if they don't otherwise interact with other things. Plato's Phaedrus also contains some acute reasoning on this which leads to similar conclusions in the context of whether the gods can understand man and vice versa, with the seeming conclusion that once you start postulating separate substances, a whole host of problems appear. Though to be sure, substance as a term in philosophy is sufficiently ambiguous that I suppose you could postulate any number of Rube Goldberg like solutions. Perhaps at the bottom it's more of a semantic problem than a real one, that once you have commitments to the meaning of substance, anything beyond a monism presents issues.

[polymath257]

And if we allow for multiple 'substances', is it clear that all 'mental substances' are the same? Why not many different physical substances and many different mental substances? maybe, the distinction into 'physical substances' and 'mental substances' is, itself, problematic.

The problem with multiple substances is that you quickly run into questions of how the particles manage to interact with each other if they aren't all the same substance.

I don't see a problem. Why would things have to be the same 'substance' in order to interact?