On naturalism and consciousness

[bennyboy]

I didn't say the mind uses the brain to express itself. I said the mind, if it is supervenient on the brain, is a transcendental property-- i.e. that it is not specific to that particular medium.

My complaint is the term transcendental. It implies an existence on it's own volition, i.e. no medium required. I have no problem a mind arising on another medium.

It's not an implication. That's exactly what I'm saying. IF mind can be created by different mechanisms functioning differently, then it is transcendent-- "mind-ness," the capacity for mind, should not be said to be in the brain, but in the brain's logical parents: maybe the universe, maybe organic chemistry, maybe any mechanism capable of certain kinds of data function. Whatever physical arrangement is minimally responsible for consciousness is the actual "creator," not specifically the brain.

Let's take an .mp3 song. It can be translated from medium to medium, can be processed by various processes; and has only the requirement that a recorded song can be reproduced eventually on a sound-creating device. So what is the true nature of an .mp3 song? Is it now-silicon, now-optics, now-magnetic? No. While you need some kind of medium to carry it, the essential nature of the .mp3 song has nothing to do with those media: it is about the relationships of digitized sound waves to each other. The .mp3 is not best seen an expression of the media being decoded and converted to sound, but of the interaction between encoding ideas and sound waves.

There's no good evidence for any kind of mind except the ones we've already accepted for philosophical reasons.

There is no single piece of evidence, but there are lots of little bits of evidence that suggest it to be so.

No, there aren't. There are lots of little assumptions that allow us to accept it to be so.