Dualism vs Materialism or Mind vs Soul

[Sal]

Your post is both ridiculous and intellectually dishonest. You deny the "I" of your personal identity yet refer to yourself repeatedly. You simultaneously assert that you lack mental properties then use those same metal properties to express your opinion. It is pathetic that you would advocate such an absurd philosophy, knowing full well that you are incapable of living in accordance with it.

(emphasis mine)

That's because you're, I reckon, unable to realize that the self is an illusion.

Tell me, if I was to say "square circles exist" do you think that makes it so?

Now, how is that different from claiming that the self exists? I've yet to encounter a coherent definition of self that isn't just tricks of language the same way that saying that square circles exists.

That you're unable to see this distinction makes me believe that you think that dualism is correct and that numbers and letters exist apart of our minds. I do not think that, and my views most align with naturalism and I reject any form of dualism.

A way to illustrate my point is this: what you're seeing now, I reckon, are just black configurations of pixels onto a gray background of pixels in a digital device that emits visible light. If you had never encountered English or even text, you would not be able to read any of this. it would be just eccentric light out of a screen. But since you have, I reckon, learned English and to decipher letters into words and words into sentences, makes me think that you're entrapped into that thinking that this has some sort of special meaning apart of seeing visible light on a screen.

It's not that difficult a concept.

---

OK, thought is most assuredly neural activity. But those are my thoughts, not some other persons. It is, after all my brain they are occurring in. Whatever one may think of Descartes, he was right about “Cogito Ergo Sum”. If we did not think then we would not really be, not in any meaningful sense. It is one thing to posit that each of us is yet another way for the Universe to know itself and collectively add to the reality. I could go along with that. But to say that “I am just one of the ways” doesn't work so well. We are all better than that.

Descartes meant that by denying it, you're effectively using the basis of it (the concept that thought exists) to deny it. I have no problem realizing it, I just have a more fundamental basis for thinking why that is correct.

I have no problem saying that thought exists. I just see it as neural activity that is able to be probed by means not usually assigned to it.

I mean here that, for example, with a fMRI we can see where thought arises in someones brain. But I'm doubly aware that since that can be viewed and is most decidedly part of reality, why should thought or the accumulation of experiences, the Self, be any different?