(January 29, 2022 at 10:38 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: Substance is not a concept of physics. It comes from Scholasticism. So IMO at least some of the mind-body problem stems from mixing the nomenclature of two very different conceptual frameworks.
Personally I can't conceive of the mind being made of... as in composed or constructed of... like an object in the physical universe... any kind of material/substance. Obviously what I can conceive and what's possible are not necessarily the same thing, but it does mean that that is not a question I think I can ask, let alone answer, so just have to take its existence, in whatever sense that is, as a brute fact.
So I think at the very least this rules out substance dualism for me as a position... I'm not entirely sure given what GN said earlier that talk of immaterial comes under substance dualism, but I'm assuming that means inasmuch as proposing an immaterial substance such as spirit or whatever as an explanation of what mind is composed of, but since that's not what I'm doing - since I'm not trying to address the issue of its composition at all in that sense - any reference to immaterial on my part I think is just a poor choice of words or a bad comparison/metaphor, but in any case not meant in the sense of immaterial substance of composition... so yeah, I think that rules out substance dualism for me.
