The Mind-Body Problem

[John_Doe]

Where do you stand on the mind-body problem?

Materialism-only physical phenomenon exists (I'm including pan-psychism, the view that all of the most basic indivisible units of matter are inherently sentient, under materialism even though I tend to lump pan-psychists in with dualists and idealists in my mind. My understanding of the general argument is that the radical emergence that brain activity causing consciousness would require is implausible so a simpler form of consciousness must already be present in less complicated physical objects). The materialist position is that consciousness is an illusion (which I see as incoherent), what's logically implied by it (I would argue) is that consciousness doesn't exist.

Idealism- the polar opposite of materialism. Only consciousness exists, it is the physical world that is an illusion (not just in the sense that it doesn't exist exactly as we perceive it but in that there is no mind-independent physical world to begin with).

Dualism-Both consciousness and physical substance are real (I would argue that property dualism collapses into substance dualism since a substance is defined by its properties).

Neutral monism-The one reality that exists is at its core neither physical or mental, the mental and the physical are just 'expressions' of this third kind of reality.

Without going into detail, I lean toward idealism because it takes care of the problem of radical emergence and interaction (between fundamentally different kinds of realities) even though my intuition lies in emergent dualism (the position that consciousness is caused by brain activity, despite being a fundamentally different, non-physical kind of reality). I'm not convinced that the 'problem' with radical emergence or interaction is 'logical' rather than just being something that's impossible for our minds to conceive so I am open to dualism.

The only position that I'm committed to would be epistemic solipsism (one's own conscious experience is all that one can know) which negates philosophical materialism (first-person subjective experience is self-evidently not the inter-subjectively observable brain activity that it corresponds with. A physical world may or may not exist but my conscious experience must necessarily exist, so regardless of whether or not a physical world exists the fact that I can be justifiably certain about one but not the other, i.e. that one is self-evident and the other is not, demonstrates that they are or would be fundamentally different realities) and allows for either idealism or dualism being true.

I'm also open to the possible existence of some third kind of reality that is neither physical or mental (experienced) but it's meaningless to talk about since we have no reference as to what it could possibly be, and I reject that consciousness can be reduced to that reality-whatever it might be (so I reject neutral monism as well as materialism but it doesn't seem to be a very popular belief to begin with).

Again, this is without detail. Where do you stand?

[Not Forever]

Honestly, I find the materialistic definition you gave quite strange; I’ve never come across that version before.

My position is simple, and as far as I know it should reflect what we understand about the subject up to now: consciousness is a phenomenon that emerges from our brain while it works, something rather delicate since we can lose consciousness even while still alive.

No micro-consciousness, no idea of “illusion” (even physical phenomena in the macroscopic world emerge from the quantum level, but that doesn’t mean they are an illusion. Just like economics isn’t an illusion, even though it’s another phenomenon that emerges from smaller ones and has its own characteristics), and so on.

[PorcelainLark]

I'm a neutral monist (against dualism) and a realist (against solipsism).

I don't know what mind or matter are, so it feels premature to try to derive one from the other. All I know is that separate substances lead to problems; if mind and matter are genuinely separate substances, how can they really interact?

I don't know what it actually means for something to cause another thing, so I reject determinism.

I don't agree with solipsism. I think there's an external reality independent of the mind.

Idealism- the polar opposite of materialism. Only consciousness exists, it is the physical world that is an illusion (not just in the sense that it doesn't exist exactly as we perceive it but in that there is no mind-independent physical world to begin with).

This is misleading. Platonic forms are mind-independent, even though they are immaterial. Objective idealism doesn't say only consciousness exists.

[John_Doe]

Thank you for the replies.


"Honestly, I find the materialistic definition you gave quite strange; I’ve never come across that version before."

That physical phenomenon is all that exists or what I'm claiming is an implication of that idea (that consciousness is an illusion or flat out doesn't exist, which eliminative materialists accept)?

"No micro-consciousness, no idea of “illusion” (even physical phenomena in the macroscopic world emerge from the quantum level, but that doesn’t mean they are an illusion. Just like economics isn’t an illusion, even though it’s another phenomenon that emerges from smaller ones and has its own characteristics), and so on."

We know what red is and we know what blue is. We can see that they are different colors. Someone can be familiar with red but not with blue and vice versa. You can replace that example with one contrasting water and earth, fire and fruit, etc. We know what pain is. The inter-subjectively observable brain activity that corresponds with pain isn't pain. You cannot, through observation of that, understand what someone's pain feels like. In the same way that if you've never seen subjective 'purple' you have no idea what it looks like just by observing brain activity that corresponds with the perception of it or understanding in intricate detail the chemistry that results in 'purple' things. You can dissect someone's brain all day long and you will never find their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, etc. even if you can infer them based on correspondence.

If you're going to maintain that first-person consciousness is physical activity when it doesn't appear to be (there is a reason why dualism has been the default in human cultures up until relatively recently) then you're effectively claiming that consciousness is an illusion (which I believe is incoherent because we're not talking about a mental state that misrepresents something that it simulates, we're talking about whether or not the state itself is as it appears to be).

@PorcelainLark

For the record, I am not an ontological solipsist. I assume that other minds exist and that I interact with them. I just don't claim to know whether or not they or a physical world or anything outside of my mind do or does.

I was thinking yesterday that any given definition of 'idealism' wouldn't necessarily reduce it to consciousness being the only reality (especially if we start talking about 'the sub-conscious mind') but that position would fall under 'idealism' and it seems to be in-line with a lot of what I've come across online.

I was also thinking that I should look into different defenses of dualism. I can't rule out idealism but if my justification for it is wanting to avoid the radical emergence/interaction that dualism requires then I have to deal with how what I do in my mental simulation of a physical world can influence your perception in yours. It could be that we're coincidentally experiencing the same simulated physical world and have avatars of ourselves represented in each other's minds, that's not logically impossible, but it seems very improbable by common sense standards that I have to accept. Or maybe mind-mind communication is really not the same issue I have with mind-body interaction, I don't want to think deeply about this right now but the possibility of switching to dualism is exciting (then again, it's more so the possibility of non-emergent dualism being true that is 'exciting' to me but I don't see how that works with the second law of thermodynamics).

You mentioned determinism. I guess I'm agnostic about whether or not we have free will even though I don't really take the possibility that we do seriously (emotionally). I don't think about the issue much since it has nothing to do with my day to day life (I mean I have to behave as though I have free will regardless).

I'm also agnostic about an afterlife even though I assume that consciousness ends with what appears to be brain death.

I think that pan-psychism could also be a dualist position but the common justification for it is that radical emergence is not possible so consciousness must be already present prior to the development of one's nervous system, so that should apply to mind-body interaction or the idea of a single substance with fundamentally different kinds of properties as well. It seems pretty compelling to me, if you believe that consciousness is physical activity in the brain. I was a pan-psychist around 12 years ago, I can't remember for how long, and it filled me with hope because for the first time since I was a Christian (I left Christianity at 12, I think, I'm 39 now) I took the possibility of eternal consciousness seriously. Who knows what the subjective experience of a quark could be like or what might make one happy but the hope that you might always experience some happiness in the future, quadrillions of years from now, was really beautiful. Anyway, I don't have much hope for an afterlife anymore and there can be no proof one way or the other since it's a hypothesis that's impossible to test (short of it becoming a normal thing for people to talk to ghosts or communicate with those on 'the other side' or to remember past lives well into adulthood etc. probably nothing is going to make me assume that it's 'probable' or take the possibility seriously on an emotional level).

It's possible, however, that there's actually more evidence for reincarnation and NDE's than some materialists would like to admit.

[Not Forever]

(that consciousness is an illusion or flat out doesn't exist, which eliminative materialists accept)

I went to look up the eliminativists’ position for a moment (which apparently is a subcategory), and their stance seems quite different to me: they talk about a naive language. They deny that it’s a private field accessible only to the individual, claiming instead that it’s something investigable. The exact opposite of an illusion, but much more concrete and material than my emergent phenomenon (which is essentially what they deny, this idea of consciousness).

(there is a reason why dualism has been the default in human cultures up until relatively recently)

The same reason why God used to be the default position for many human cultures, or the idea that worms spontaneously generated from rotten food, or that diseases were problems of the humors?

I mean: Someone influential makes a proposal that may sound interesting, and then it passes down through generations in the form of a belief that becomes very hard to detach from. And since these are rather simple ideas, they can also appear in different cultures and historical periods in quite similar ways, which increases their chances of being adopted.

Especially considering that it wasn’t a topic that could in any way be filtered by reality.

We know what red is and we know what blue is. We can see that they are different colors. Someone can be familiar with red but not with blue and vice versa. You can replace that example with one contrasting water and earth, fire and fruit, etc. We know what pain is. The inter-subjectively observable brain activity that corresponds with pain isn't pain. You cannot, through observation of that, understand what someone's pain feels like. In the same way that if you've never seen subjective 'purple' you have no idea what it looks like just by observing brain activity that corresponds with the perception of it or understanding in intricate detail the chemistry that results in 'purple' things. You can dissect someone's brain all day long and you will never find their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, etc. even if you can infer them based on correspondence.

It would be enough to build a monitor.
I mean: Even what you see on your computer screen is an “emergent phenomenon”. We can interact with it easily, we can “see” it, only because there’s something that interprets it for us in a way we can observe.

But if the computer didn’t have that screen and had a way of passing us information in a more “raw” manner, then what the computer gives us would be uncertain—just like the information that other people pass on to us daily. When others talk about “pain”, and therefore pass us some information, are we really talking about the same “pain”? When a computer communicates something in a crude way, what exactly is it communicating to us? If we open its hard drive, we wouldn’t actually find anything inside. There’s no desktop. There are no folders. There are no images.

I don’t know if I’m managing to get across what I mean… but I think people are making things more complicated than they really are, or else they’re pushing to extremes positions that are actually much softer. Or at least: Conceptually they are soft.
Saying that consciousness doesn’t exist doesn’t actually mean much: some people simply redefine the term, find it too loaded with fantasy, and therefore distance themselves from it—but in itself these are proposals that don’t really change our experience.

[John_Doe]

@NotForever,

This is a quick response.

Eliminative materialism seems to me to be materialism taken to its logical conclusion. I understand an 'illusion' to be when something is contrary to what it appears to be. One's consciousness appears to be something that they have an exclusive first-person access to so if the materialist position is that it's actually inter-subjectively observable physical phenomenon then they're either flat out denying that what 'appears' to be subjective consciousness exists or they're claiming that it's illusory. I'm not sure what you mean by 'naive language' but that's not semantics. My consciousness appears to be something that you could never confirm but if it's actually brain activity then you can know as much about it as I can (it's not just that you can know about the nature of presumably shared mental states via introspection but that you could know my specific conscious experience at any given moment).

I think you missed my point. I wasn't making some kind of appeal to tradition or even common sense. My point was that for as much as our ancestors got wrong, the actual reason why they assumed the dualist position is because consciousness appears to be something different than physical phenomenon. Again, without any scientific training I have no idea what mental states your brain activity (or mine) might represent but you know what you're thinking about or feeling or experiencing at this moment. Even with such scientific expertise, I'd be making an inference that I could never confirm (if we're talking about beliefs that I have about your consciousness).

I'm not sure I understand the point about the monitor (did you mean to say that the raw information the computer would give us; which on principle it ultimately couldn't, would be less uncertain? I don't really understand how this supports the rest of your argument) and I don't want to get into the concept of radical emergence in general. It seems indisputable to me that consciousness is not the brain activity it corresponds with and you have to rationalize otherwise contrary to what's immediately obvious (I don't mean intuitively 'obvious,' the 'rationalization' I have in mind is the same 'hyper-abstract' thinking that's completely removed from actual concrete experience that you'd have to engage in to deny that a chair and a laptop are seemingly different things, it's obvious just through experience that our perception of a chair is different than our perception of a laptop).

The information that you seem to have in mind is a representation of what we have no direct access to which is my point. If what you're calling 'pain' isn't what I'm calling 'pain' then we're not talking about the same thing. What I'm calling 'pain' is defined by it feeling inherently bad (feeling bad is what makes 'pain' pain). In no possible universe could pain not feel inherently bad but there are logically conceivable universes where neurological or physiological activity that corresponds with pain in ours wouldn't (I won't get into practical problems that come with inferring emotional stress from measuring physiological 'stress'), in the same way that there are logically coherent universes where light could travel at a different speed or where fire could be purple but none where 2 and 2 could be 57 (if we define mathematical notations in the way that we do). It doesn't matter how we define 'consciousness,' there is a kind of reality that cannot be inter-subjectively investigated.

The materialist position is that what I'm calling 'consciousness' doesn't exist, or it doesn't exist in the way that it appears to which is effectively saying that it doesn't exist.