[Wittrs] Re: Stuart on the unity of self
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2010 01:13:03 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "BruceD" <blroadies@...> wrote:
> --- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "SWM" <SWMirsky@> wrote:
>
> > The point I was making, though, was that the unified field, in the
> case that represents dualism, is conceived as an irreducible,
> > the self or observer in the mix to which any further breakdown to
> something that is NOT the unified field, isn't possible.
>
> Thank you Stuart. With some correction, you have stated my position. The
> unity of the self doesn't suggest that the person is all of one piece,
> that he is aware of all his aspects or dispositions, but, rather, the
> self can't be broken down, reduced, into something not self, and surely
> not physical.
>
> > It is that commitment to irreducibility that constitutes the dualism.
>
> For you, but not for me.
So you have said and yet you persistently speak as if this were about two
"substances", e.g., as when you tell us that the brain can't be said to cause
consciousness because a physical thing (a brain) can't cause a mental thing (a
mind), as if there were two competing and totally separate phenomena here! That
IS dualistic, Bruce, no matter how many times you deny it. And when you
constantly insist that there is a mind-body problem, note that this, too, is
dualistic thinking.
>Since you start with the assumption that you
> know of a physical world other than self, then the self, as it emerges,
> is either physical (more of the same), i.e., monism or it is something
> other, mental, and hence Dualism. But I don't start with your assumption
> of a known physical world other than me.
>
So you don't think you credit science and what it has to say about the world
through physics, chemistry, biology and so forth? Really?
> I start with the person making sense out of his experiences. There are
> all sorts of experiences. Some are called physical, others spiritual,
> aesthetic, abstract (logic, numbers) and so on. These judgments don't
> require the positing of any underlying substance. Hence, the
> dualism/monism distinction has no application.
>
Except that you continuously fall into ideas that reflect a dualist picture of
things. Denying a terminology or even a particular ideology or theory about
things is not the same as avoiding the dualist implications that are part and
parcel with such terminology, ideologies, theories, etc.
> > or some mysterious irreducible property that some physical things...
> have and some don't?
>
> Since I don't see the world as consisting only of chunks of the
> physical, I wouldn't dream of attributing consciousness as a property to
> some of these physical chunks.
Don't you see that to describe the world in terms of "physical chunks" is to be
trapped in this very dualistic picture ("physical chunks" vs. something else)?
In fact, modern physics is not premised on explaining the universe in terms of
"physical chunks" at all. Modern physics includes notions of energy and quantum
fields and so forth. It is not a science of gazillions of atoms qua micro
"physical chunks" flying around in empty space. But that it isn't doesn't imply
that what we know of as consciousness is something beyond physics at all.
> Rather I experience all sorts of objects,
> some alive, some alive in different ways, and, of course people.
And this subjectivism is completely irrelevant to the idea that one can find
out how brains work and replicate that on other physical platforms (which are
manifestly, according to modern physics, not made up of "physical chunks").
> But a
> person's consciousness, for me, isn't a property of his physical body,
> even though having a physical body is a condition for being human.
>
Depends what one means by "consciousness", "person", "property" and "physical"
doesn't it? Here I think you are just continuing a long running effort that
tradies on meaning slippage in the relevant terms in order to avoid having to
come to grips with the question of whether we can speak of brains as existing
in a causal relation to minds or not.
> To conclude: Your view, what Nagel calls the "view from nowhere" that
> pretends that we can know of a physical world not us, as it is, and try
> to say how the physical makes the mental, suppresses that this view is
> still a view.
>
My view doesn't pretend to suppose we can finally free ourselves from the
subjective conditions of knowing but that doesn't mean that, within those
conditions, we cannot have scientific knowledge of the sort we already have
within a wide range of study areas from the stars to atoms and quanta, from
biological organisms to chemical interactions. And that, of course, is all that
this is about in the end, i.e., what do brains do and how do they do it?
Your effort, which mashes the meanings of the relevant terms in multiple ways
in order to prevent their use for the perfectly reasonable scientific question
of what brains can do and how they do it, is merely to pour sand into the cogs
of the linguistic machinery we rely on. I think you take this approach because
you don't want the idea that brains have a causal relation to minds to obtain
under any circumstances. But that is not a good reason for deciding what is
true and what is not.
> Simply put, you divide the physical from the mental
Simply put, YOU are the one who constantly puts this in such terms. It is a
function of your inability to come to grips with the idea that what we think of
as "mental" may just be another outome of some of the things we think of as
"physical".
> and then try to
> imagine how the physical can do this, all the time forgetting that you
> have only imagined the physical apparent from the mental.
>
Simply put, there is no denying that there are physical phenomena in the
universe that are conscious and physical phenomena that aren't. So what is it
that enables some to be conscious and some not to be? Is being conscious some
special mental phenomenon that has no part in the physics of the rest of the
universe or is it just a part of the same underlying dynamics that give us what
we call "physical" things?
> And I'm not suggesting Idealism. I didn't say mind generated the
> physical. I'm just trying to start at the beginning, account giving, and
> before the beginning, i.e., some state of absolute materiality.
>
> bruce
>
>
> =========================================
What is "absolute materiality"? Where did this come from? And how does one get
to it if that's what you are hoping to do?
What you are actually doing, I think, is seeking a way to be able to deny the
notion that minds are a function of brains (some brains in certain states) in
the way science and even our old pal Searle asserts they are. And in doing that
you are twisting the shared terms we use for this sort of discussion into
pretzels.
Philosophy, at the least, can hope to untwist some of the pretzels that you
(and others in pursuit of a similar aim) want to leave us with.
SWM
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