A Conscious Universe

[The Grand Nudger]

The only difference is that in an idealism, as you start peeling off the layers, you will end up with a reality that loses all the qualities we call "physical," and require more and more abstract descriptions (or more and more refined math) to express. In other words, I think modern science is revealing the abstract and idealistic nature of the universe.

The concept of the thing is not the thing. When I say bird, when I imagine a bird...that's little bits of stuff in my head, not an actual bird. Our descriptions become more abstract because, at it's core, description is abstract, leaning on variables defined between two people by culture, language, etc. These things change from one person to the next or one point in time to the next - but just because we describe a bird differently in spanish or english, that doesn't mean that -the bird- is different, that -the bird- is abstraction.

Okay, there is one more difference: mind. There is nothing about a so-called physical universe which is poorly represented as an idea. I know this, because ALL our experiences, and our linguistic expression of them, are naturally represented as ideas.

How else could they be represented? We cannot manifest an -actual- mountain in our heads or in the air between us when we speak. There's no room and we lack the ability to do so even if there were.

However, I do not think that mind is well described or explained in physical monist terms at all, except by equivocation: "Scientists say mind is brain function. Okay, I found some brain function. Yay, I have located mind."

That's not actually equivocation....but I'll run with it. We see brain, we observe mind. We see no brain, we observe -no mind-. When we experience things it is our brains that "light up"....and in a predictable way, enough that we can isolate portions of our brain which appear to be handling specific types of thought, specific experiences of mind across a wide range of individual subjects.

What isn't well explained is how our minds, in particular, accomplish this (though we do have some explanation - we don't have a complete picture), but not how it -can- be accomplished in a physical monism. Mind in the general is well described, well explained. Mind is the expression of logical functions performed by a physical system on discrete bits of data which are handled by and comprised of physical things. We know that this works, but we also recognize that there are many ways to implement this sort of system, so there's no reason to demand that the implementation between systems be identical. We can say, for example "my mind is not a digital computer!" and we'd be right, of course......however, it does appear to be performing the same functions using the same principles to the same effect. It's just our experience, and our observation, that our "mind" is a more capable (in some ways, not all) implementation of that type of system. That a thought is not something generated, but that it is actually the physical thing, the pieces of physical stuff - same as it would be in any computational system.

That every indicator we have says human mind is brain, brain is human mind - and that no indicator says otherwise is strong evidence of that statement, and since physical monism poses -absolutely no challenge- to such a statement, and in fact provides a framework in which the statement is sensible and the mechanics can be actualized is, to me, strong evidence that there isn't some extraneous and hidden variable somewhere beyond our grasp. That for all of the things that we -do not- know about mind, how it can be accounted for within the framework of physical monism is a non-issue. I think that the issue between us, in these conversations, has always been that you feel that I'm proposing experience as somehow a seperate thing made by mind (which, obviously, I call brain), but I'm not, I'm proposing that experience -is- mind (that I call brain), not a product, not an additional step - not some nebulous non-thing "made" by mind (which I call brain). Does that help you understand why I don't see monism as an issue?

Now, this is in no way offered as evidence in favor of my position, merely as an exercise in craft.....account for mind otherwise. Lets say it's not a bunch of physical stuff, or that it's physical stuff -plus-. How might we accomplish mind without physical stuff, or what stuff isn't physical stuff - and what does that stuff do, in our minds....but also, how does it interact with the physical stuff? I offer this, again, not as a means of providing support for my position but as an effort to try and communicate the difficulties I see in proposing (as you essentially have) mind-body independence. How would we even go about demonstrating that, if it were true - what evidence could we point to? Whats means could this be accomplished by? We both desire a robust explanation for mind....what I'm asking, boiled down to simplicity, is this. Is your proposal even -capable- of generating such an explanation?