Supervenience, Transcendence, and Mind

[Mudhammam]

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?

Something like that. Although brain is itself in this case a phenomenal object that exists as it does only in the mind. I suppose a fair criticism of the physicalism injected into my idealistic speculation is why we should ever consider ANY amount of conceptual data applying to something that is "outside of the mind," even abstractions such as mathematics. To avoid solipsism, I suppose we would have to assume something objective to exist outside of the mind, physical or non, and this might be where idealists posit the "Dinge-an-sich," which is utterly unknowable. To the degree that we can distinguish a difference between the internal structure and mechanisms of thoughts and things, however, I suppose it's sensible to hold onto something like the physical as distinct from the mental.

Quite a bit of this is admittedly just bullshit abstractionism on my part...so my apologies for distracting from the topic. :-)
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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.

That's interesting and something I've wondered about as well. I hope you'll get around to those additional 1000 words!