consciousness?

[Neo-Scholastic]

What makes you think that you'd have to give up on them if you accept that your mental existence was rooted in biology…You start your discussion talking about brain-states and mind-states and from there you go about positing causal links between them. Which means you are starting by considering them as two distinct entities.

You’re reading too much into my posts. Descriptions of mind-states and descriptions of brain-states are clearly distinct. This says nothing about whether that means there are actually two different substantial entities, two entities of which one is material and the other immaterial, two distinct aspects of a single thing, or a single thing differently described.

And why can’t they be mutually dependant and co-existent in a meaningful way?

Because the current evidence suggests otherwise.

You forget that one can interpret evidence to support multiple conclusions. Using neuro-physical evidence to support physical theories denies that qualitiative experiences have any influence over the causal chain. External stimulation of the brain generating feelings of love does not automatically exclude the possibility that feelings of love influence physical changes in the brain. Clearly, reality consists of both observable third-person facts and first-person qualitative experiences. This allows us to describe reality with in two distinct ways, such as:

Example A: Stimulation of the olfactory cortex activates the hippocampus which stimulates the release of dopamine.

Example B: The smell of perfume sparks my memory of grandmother and I have feelings of love.

Example C: Burning pain is followed by the taste of vinegar leading to a lust for power.

Now without mutual interaction, it doesn’t’ matter what felt experiences accompany the physical events. The physical events of A could just as easily generate the subjective experience of C as those of B. That would be absurd, but no physical theory can exclude it.

Moreover, if only physical processes are causal, then thinking, feeling and willing would have no significance and ‘you’ are just along for the ride, slavishly following a blind electro-chemical reaction that churns along deterministicly. There can be no room for free will, moral values, true understanding, or meaningful contemplation. It makes much more sense to believe that mental-properties really do have some over influence physical processes, even if the current scientific model cannot explain how.

The functionalist position, which you favor, already concedes a mutual dependence between material and immaterial properties. Translating every mental-property into a ‘function’ only gives the appearance of reducing mental properties to physical ones. The difference between ‘loving’ and the ‘function of loving’ is purely semantic. Thus a causal chain that reads, “The function of remembering a beloved leads to the function of feeling loved” is merely a complicated way of saying, “Remembering a beloved leads to feeling loved.” Nothing is added to the meaning of the description by adding the word ‘function’. Changing the description does not alter whether or not the chain of events is composed of mental events versus purely physical ones.