Theistic Inclinations

[Neo-Scholastic]

… I'm saying that each has their own domain and that the domain of internal experiences is the world of our shared psychology… The internal world of math and logic is mapped to the external world. That's taking a piece of math or logic and using it to model the external world. That is using math and logic as descriptors. You won't find math or logic themselves in the external world…How do you know that math and logic aren't a part of our common psychology?

First there is a danger of falling into a semantic argument about the meaning and scope of psychology. If you mean a science that studies the qualities and characteristics of the human mind then we are in agreement at least as far as that goes. But the topic is deeper than mere psychology in the same way that the study of being-as-such is a more fundamental inquiry than the study of particular beings – not individual features of minds but the nature of mind itself. The attempt to reduce everything to psychology ignores the vital distinction between the essence of cognition, its intentionality (in the Brentano/Sartre sense), and the various contents of that intentionality.

In part we seem destined to talk past one another. You seem to believe mathematical and logical truths only manipulate symbols according to rules devoid of reference to any actual objects. I say, if math and logic have no objects then they are essentially meaningless curiosities. To my mind, your kind of post-Fregean approach cannot in any way account for the central mystery of mathematics which is how consistently abstract principles model external phenomena. If math and logic do in fact describe phenomena then what is it about reality that they are describing? I do not have a full answer but neither will I ignore the question.

My rudimentary thinking on the matter is that logic and mathematics are indeed symbolic systems but that those symbols passively describe actual prescriptive principles that actively impose order. Such appear necessary to bridge the link between first-person conscious experience and third-person phenomena. For example, the Principle of Non-Contradiction is the antidote to solipsism since it is self-evidently true that whatever the PNC encodes linguistically would govern reality even in the absence of any finite minds to contemplate it. As such at least one immaterial object apparently exists apart from the mind that conceives it. My guess is that a radical skeptic could argue that what seems self-evident may not be so to which I would reply with respect to the PNC that position is self-defeating.

…And I feel that you're applying insight from one domain into a domain it has a track record of error within. It may "ring true" to you, but the multiplicity of incompatible first person insights into the divine suggest that it is highly unreliable, as well as our knowledge of how error prone the mind is on its own.

The mind-body problem is all about gaining insight about the relationship between the two domains. If you say that it is inappropriate to find areas of overlap then you have closed off all possible solutions. I agree there are differences between various first-person accounts when it comes to the contents of consciousness. However, focusing on the contents of consciousness and not its essential intentionality is the grand mistake of reductive monism, be it idealist or materialist. We should not look to the areas of mental experience that are prone to error; but, rather those acts of cognition that have proven impervious to it and the objects they reveal.