Supervenience, Transcendence, and Mind

[bennyboy]

Please elaborate if you could. I don't understand what you're trying to say.

Well, if mind is a superveniening property of brain--I take that to be your suggestion--and mind is responsible for all of our phenomenal experiences (objects and their primary properties such as size, shape, etc. and secondary properties such as liquidity, solidity, etc.), then aren't we really saying something to the effect that colored, Euclidean-geometrical reality and all its apparently given sensations are actually an effect of a supervenient property rather than a cause (the cause being whatever physicists mean by "cosmic music resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace")?

These statements are making me a little dizzy, but I won't let that stop me from trying to answer!

I think what you are doing is kind of an interesting mix of idealism and physicalism. I believe you're saying that the mind creates the universe as we experience it, even though it itself may be dependent on the brain, and the raw data it is processing may come from a non-idealistic source. So "redness," shapes, and all the qualia are supervenient ONLY the interpretations of the mind, and not really on any properties that the objects themselves possess. Am I reading you right?

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This thread is kind of an "EVEN IF" position, given Rhythm's view: 1) the existence of brains pretty much as real objects with minds; 2) that there's nothing magispecial about the brain's specific makeup that would allow it to have a mind, and any other data processing structure not to. If these are true then what would that mean?

The position I'm taking in this thread is that the properties of objects we perceive are expressions of the interactions between principles underlying the objects, rather than on the objects themselves. So IF we are looking at mind as a supervenient property, it would be supervenient on principles embedded in reality at a deeper level than the brain. I'm tempted to write another 1000 words to explain it all in great detail, but I realize my posts have already become too long and pedantic, so I'll wait for some feedback from you before I say more.