(June 5, 2013 at 8:30 pm)bennyboy Wrote: 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.
You can't have an idea or a mind without a physical organism. This tells me that a mind or concept must have a relational existence with my body and behavior and that it is my body/behavior that is the determining entity of mind/idea, not the other way around. I still end up with a duality, but it increasingly becomes unnecessary to say mind exists. Because if mind/idea is not the determining factor than it also isn't an explanation for anything, including itself.
I'm not trying to play dumb here. I understand the problem of universals. But I think you are mixing an ontological question with an epistemological one.
Quote: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.
It's also more easily abused. What I'm suggesting is that whatever speculation or revision of reality we might come up with can be reduced to our physical existence which gives primacy to that model of existence. With that particular understanding, I can actually do something to modify how I am experiencing, which in turn revises my modeling of reality. That also describes why I experience the way I do.
Quote: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.
If mind has no objective existence, it is not something you have, nor is it a fact. It is a belief that you hold or, if you prefer, an assumption about how you work. If anything, mind is a label for what we have assumed for centuries to be the free agency within humans: the self-causing cause on a minor scale. But it simply doesn't exist, no matter how it appears or how we may want to believe we are free agents.
Our own awareness of ourselves is a feedback system that is entirely dedicated to our survival and reproduction. If we take that self-awareness and turn it into a separate entity called mind or consciousness or whatever then it appears that mind is what creates the physical organism and wills that organism to behave. However if mind is not a separate entity, but rather a mirror image of the physical organism in real-time then to optimize experience would be to perceive the mind as nothing more than the physical being it represents.
Quote: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.
We can agree to disagree. To me, the mind is to us what God is to the universe. Who has ever perceived a mind? Perhaps we perceive through it, but then what is the necessity in even having a mind? Why not just perceive?
