Mind/matter duality

[bennyboy]

Well, fortunately, I don't really care if people subscribe to whatever it is I'm thinking. I'm also not suggesting any Eastern metaphysics. The existence of consciousness or mind or soul is a microcosmic version of the question of God's existence. We think there must be a cause that transcends the organism or the universe as it is. Just as the more we understand about the universe the less we need a creator, similarly the more we understand about the human organism the less we need consciousness as a filler.

Any thought or behavior that you have can be attributed to your own genetics and conditioning. The more you come to recognize that fact and let go of some transcendent cause, the more control you have over your own experience. That is my answer to your question as to why you are self-aware in the first place. If you don't apply that understanding, someone else will in order to control you for their interests.

I disagree that an idealistic monism is easier to uphold because you will quickly run into physical reality (literally) and have to provide some extensive explanation as to why it appears that we are physical organisms in a material universe or that all of our experience has a natural (physical) cause.

We intellectuals are quick to draw from heady theories like QM to defend a position, when the reasoning is much more local, such as physiology. In answer to the question, "Where did that idea come from?" I would say, "Your organism. Where else would it come from?"

Here's the thing with monism. Mind is not normally considered an objective thing, and yet it exists. To have a physical monism, you have to have to explain why ideas, which cannot be touched, or have force exerted on them, or be measured with any objective means. exist. You can say they are just brain function, but that's not the question-- the question is why brain function creates an experienceable subjective perspective.

An idealistic monism is more flexible, because all the physical traits that we attribute to objects are processed by us as ideas anyway. Solidity, force, predictability, etc. are concepts. So are uncertainty, ambiguity, and unpredictability. All of this is easily brought under the umbrella of idealism, but each of these requires a new re-write of what "physical" is supposed to mean. To take a model which is always changing, and assert that as the single candidate for the representation of reality, is really to say that there's no reality. After all, we're not just talking about Grammy's bouncing billiard balls anymore.

As for the mind/God syllogism, I disagree. Mind is a brute fact. Whether it's a byproduct of a specific collection of organs, or an emergent property of high-level self-referential information processing, or a little spark of God, doesn't matter that much: it is what it is, and I have it. It is true on a definitional level: "mind" is just a label, not a theory or an assertion.

God is not true on a definitional level, because while each of us MUST experience mind, the same does not follow for God. Even God would have to be perceived by the mind-- and clearly, there are many minds who do not believe they've perceived any such thing.