Mind/matter duality

[bennyboy]

You can't have an idea or a mind without a physical organism.

This is a common assumption. It's a very sensible assumption. But you can't use this particular assumption to make the claim you're making, because it begs the question. How do you go about collecting information about the universe, including the structure of brains, including the experience of doing scientific experiments, etc? You think, you experience, and you interact with your sense perceptions-- and all these are mental experiences by definition.

This is why I've said I think the universe always comes down to ambiguity which is resolved not by proof or rationale, but by selecting a perspective.

I will say mind precedes all. I'll show that all learning, including the experience of doing science in a lab, is exactly that-- experience. It is provable only to be mental in nature. I'll demand that mind must be accepted as brute fact, since I know for sure that I see red, feel love, and enjoy Beethoven's 5th, but I cannot prove that these are not piped in from the Matrix, or created by my brain in a jar, or symbolic representations of the mind of God. I'll argue that whatever (ultimately unknowable) reality may lie behind the mind isn't even that important-- it is the consistency of our experiences, i.e. our mental function, which allows us to build ideas and act meaningfully. So if we're in the Matrix, no matter-- it is what it is, we are what we are, and that is the context in which we live our lives.

You will say that all is physics, that we know that the brain creates the mind, and that all our apparent mental experiences are really just manifestations of complex data processing in a physical system, the brain. You may even argue that the mind is an illusion, and that it doesn't "exist" in any meaningful way, because all ideas and experiences it "has" can theoretically be mapped directly to the brain functions which they represent, making the idea of mind redundant and therefore worth discarding.

To this, I would respond that the universe we know about is not directly manipulable in the way that physical monism is usually thought of. When the building blocks of a "solid" reality come down to statistical functions, which are clearly conceptual in nature, then you have to ask yourself what this physicalism which you are holding to even means anymore.

But at any rate, there's a simpler point to be made, in the form of a challenge: prove that anything you think about the universe, or about the mechanism of the brain, is true, without making assumptions that obviously arrive at that conclusion. Hint: you can't start with "Everything is physical. . ." because that is breaking the rules. You have to prove it.