Why Did it Take So Long to Formulate the Mind-Body Problem?

Reply to RogueAI

Perhaps the ancient philosophers didn't see the mind and body as split in exactly the same way as those of Western thinkers. It was probably Descartes who began the whole tradition of splitting mind and body. I am sure that there are some benefits of identifying the mind/body problem. However, it may not be the only possible way of seeing.

Reply to Jack Cummins But how could they not have made those distinctions? Again, as soon as you posit the world is made of mindless non-conscious atoms, doesn't the objection immediately arise: My mind isn't made of atoms! Which would have started the whole mind-body problem going. Socrates briefly alludes to this:

"It may be said, indeed, that without bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I cannot execute my purposes. But to say that I do as I do because of them, and that this is the way in which mind acts, and not from the choice of the best, is a very careless and idle mode of speaking."

But that's only hinting at the problem. They weren't all panpsychists and they weren't all dualists, so this should have been quite the dilemma for at least a few of them.

Reply to RogueAI

I am sure that some of them were aware of the problem on some level, as you have pointed out about Socrates. However, we have developed all the language and concepts to formulate these ideas, and our whole frames of reference are different. I also think we have to avoid seeing our ways of thinking as being superior necessarily. Okay, we have all the facts of science to help us but we may identify more problems, and it may be that the ancient people had a more holistic approach, and may have been more attuned to living with, rather than exploiting the natural world.

The ancients made the distinction between body and soul. According to Aristotle man has a rational soul. Descartes used the terms mind and soul interchangeably

Reply to Fooloso4
So what you seem to be concluding is that they were aware of a problem. I just think that there awareness was different, on a subtle level. They did not have Darwin, Galileo and Wikipedia to assist them with information like we do. We can find words like panpsychism to express our ideas, so it is probably more about understanding basic worldviews which were so different from our own.

Apparently a Greek guy named Democritus already argued that we are made up of tiny particles. However, it was Aristotle who dismissed it. He argued that we are made up of four elements: fire, water, air and earth. Modern-day shamans replace fire with sun. Therefore I believe both philosophers were right.

Atomic theory is under development 24/7. Thanks to microscopes we can verify our theories. The periodic table of elements seems pretty accurate to me.

To me consciousness is like attraction between atoms. A strong desire to bond in an otherwise empty space.

Quoting Jack Cummins

So what you seem to be concluding is that they were aware of a problem. I just think that there awareness was different, on a subtle level. They did not have Darwin, Galileo and Wikipedia to assist them with information like we do. We can find words like panpsychism to express our ideas, so it is probably more about understanding basic worldviews which were so different from our own.

You underestimate the ancients. Panpsychism is an ancient concept. Even the term itself if from the Greek

From the SEP article on panpsychism:

What is striking about these early attempts to formulate an integrated theory of reality is that the mind and particularly consciousness keep arising as special problems. It is sometimes said that the mind-body problem is not an ancient philosophical worry (see Matson 1966), but it does seem that the problem of consciousness was vexing philosophers 2500 years ago, and in a form redolent of contemporary worries.

Reply to Fooloso4
I am trying to say that we should not underestimate the ancients really. I am sure that they thought in very sophisticated ways and that they had thought out many of the concepts which we are really struggling with so desperately.

Reply to Jack Cummins
I'd say Descartes is the beginning of modern mind -body dualism, but Aristotle and Medieval philosophers distinguish the intellect, that function capable of observing and understanding mathematics, logic, etc., from the sensations of the body, emotions, and passions, all of which Descartes puts on the mind side of the divide.

This is somewhat in line with Hindu thought, where Atman is only that which observes, and Prakrati encompasses emotions and qualia as much as it does external material objects, such as a rock.

Looking further back, Homer's shades and Hebrew Sheol posit a unity of mind and body, with the animating soul, or breath being what divides life and death. That is, man is not sperate from his body, even in the afterlife. Indeed, this is more the view of Heaven we get in Revaluations than the folk Heaven of immaterial bodies popular today.

Reply to RogueAI
More "religious" Platonists and Gnostics got around this problem by seeing the entire material world as illusory. Only the internal world and forms were real.

The hylomorphism of Aristotle also addresses the mind-body problem, and modified hylomorphic views are still popular today.

I think it's not so much that they didn't recognize the problem, they just hadn't defined its edges as well, something modern science has done for us.

They also had bigger fish to fry, considering you had philosophers variously contending that any change was impossible, while others argued everything was flux. You need to agree on some building blocks of reality before you can even make it to mind body problems.

Reply to Count Timothy von Icarus
I think that you offer a very good summary of various ideas previous to the the time of Descartes.

Reply to RogueAI

The mind-body problem was (seems to me) made possible by a theoretical invention with serious flaws that tends to be taken for granted, rather than as a (flawed) theoretical posit. As Ryle says, lots of such posits are useful at first but then ossify.

Ryle:
THERE is a doctrine about the nature and place of minds which is so prevalent among theorists and even among laymen that it deserves to be described as the official theory. Most philosophers, psychologists and religious teachers subscribe, with minor reservations, to its main articles and, although they admit certain theoretical difficulties in it, they tend to assume that these can be overcome without serious modifications being made to the architecture of the theory. It will be argued here that the central principles of the doctrine are unsound and conflict with the whole body of what we know about minds when we are not speculating about them.
One of the chief intellectual origins of what I have yet to prove to be the Cartesian category-mistake seems to be this. When Galileo showed that his methods of scientific discovery were competent to provide a mechanical theory which should cover every occupant of space, Descartes found in himself two conflicting motives. As a man of scientific genius he could not but endorse the claims of mechanics, yet as a religious and moral man he could not accept, as Hobbes accepted, the discouraging rider to those claims, namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork. The mental could not be just a variety of the mechanical.

...

He and subsequent philosophers naturally but erroneously availed themselves of the following escape-route. Since mental-conduct words are not to be construed as signifying the occurrence of mechanical processes, they must be construed as signifying the occurrence of non-mechanical processes; since mechanical laws explain movements in space as the effects of other movements in space, other laws must explain some of the non-spatial workings of minds as the effects of other non-spatial workings of minds. The difference between the human behaviours which we describe as intelligent and those which we describe as unintelligent must be a difference in their causation; so, while some movements of human tongues and limbs are the effects of mechanical causes, others must be the effects of non-mechanical causes, i.e. some issue from movements of particles of matter, others from workings of the mind.

The differences between the physical and the mental were thus represented as differences inside the common framework of the categories of 'thing', 'stuff', 'attribute', 'state', 'process', 'change', 'cause' and 'effect'. Minds are things, but different sorts of things from bodies; mental processes are causes and effects, but different sorts of causes and effects from bodily movements. And so on. Somewhat as the foreigner expected the University to be an extra edifice, rather like a college but also considerably different, so the repudiators of mechanism represented minds as extra centres of causal processes, rather like machines but also considerably different from them. Their theory was a para-mechanical hypothesis.

That this assumption was at the heart of the doctrine is shown by the fact that there was from the beginning felt to be a major theoretical difficulty in explaining how minds can influence and be influenced by bodies. How can a mental process, such as willing, cause spatial movements like the movements of the tongue? How can a physical change in the optic nerve have among its effects a mind's perception of a flash of light? This notorious crux by itself shows the logical mould into which Descartes pressed his theory of the mind. It was the self-same mould into which he and Galileo set their mechanics. Still unwittingly adhering to the grammar of mechanics, he tried to avert disaster by describing minds in what was merely an obverse vocabulary. The workings of minds had to be described by the mere negatives of the specific descriptions given to bodies; they are not in space, they are not motions, they are not modifications of matter, they are not accessible to public observation. Minds are not bits of clockwork, they are just bits of not-clockwork.

https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/ryle/descartes_myth.html

I'm not saying that Ryle is 100% right, but his essay in worth checking out.

https://www.phil.uu.nl/~joel/3027/GilbertRyleDescartesMyth.pdf

Ryle:Minds are things.

There's the problem.

Reply to Wayfarer

What do you make of this?

Ryle:
It is an historical curiosity that it was not noticed that the entire argument was broken-backed. Theorists correctly assumed that any sane man could already recognise the differences between, say, rational and non-rational utterances or between purposive and automatic behaviour. Else there would have been nothing requiring to be salved from mechanism. Yet the explanation given presupposed that one person could in principle never recognise the difference between the rational and the irrational utterances issuing from other human bodies, since he could never get access to the postulated immaterial causes of some of their utterances. Save for the doubtful exception of himself, he could never tell the difference between a man and a Robot. It would have to be conceded, for example, that, for all that we can tell, the inner lives of persons who are classed as idiots or lunatics are as rational as those of anyone else. Perhaps only their overt behaviour is disappointing; that is to say, perhaps `idiots' are not really idiotic, or 'lunatics' lunatic. Perhaps, too, some of those who are classed as sane are really idiots. According to the theory, external observers could never know how the overt behaviour of others is correlated with their mental powers and processes and so they could never know or even plausibly conjecture whether their applications of mental-conduct concepts to these other people were correct or incorrect. It would then be hazardous or impossible for a man to claim sanity or logical consistency even for himself, since he would be debarred from comparing his own performances with those of others. In short, our characterisations of 'persons and their performances as intelligent, prudent and virtuous or as stupid, hypocritical and cowardly could never have been made, so the problem of providing a special causal hypothesis to serve as the basis of such diagnoses would never have arisen. The question, 'How do persons differ from machines? arose just because everyone already knew how to apply mental-conduct concepts before the new causal hypothesis was introduced, This causal hypothesis could not therefore be the source of the criteria used in those applications. Nor, of course, has the causal hypothesis in any degree improved our handling of those criteria. We still distinguish good from bad arithmetic, politic from impolitic conduct and fertile from infertile imaginations in the ways in which Descartes himself distinguished them before and after he speculated how the applicability of these criteria was compatible with the principle of mechanical causation.

The ghost in the machine is an absurd or an insane posit, yet it looked plausible, because we ignored how much it depended on our unthematized social skills.

Ryle:Minds are not bits of clockwork, they are just bits of not-clockwork.

It's an acute criticism. My interpretation is that Descartes wished to differentiate himself from earlier philosophy so as to harmonize his views with the emerging mechanical philosophy of the early modern period. So instead of the duality of matter and form (hylomorphism), he introduced the duality of extended matter and mind. But it's more an interpretive model, a hermeneutic, than an hypothesis in the modern sense. That's one aspect of the problem.

The other problem was, as Ryle is pointing out, that Descartes treated mind or spirit as an object, or at least as something objectively real. I think Husserl went on to point out the difficulties that this introduces - he remarks that although Descartes was a genius in recognising the foundational role of the thinking subject, he made the mistake of 'objectifying' the 'thinking subject', as a 'little tag-end' of the world. This had the effect of 'naturalising' the transcendent ego, by making it continuous with the natural world - except for the embarrasing fact that how it 'interacted' with matter couldn't really be explained. One of the consequences was to that 'God became a ghost in his own machine', as some critic said.

(And then this culminated in eliminativism with the argument that, therefore, the mind does not really exist. You know that Dennett was a student of Ryle's, right? See this important essay on Ryle's (possibly destructive) influence on modern philosophy.)

I have a way of addressing that whole issue, although it's outside the domain of analytical philosophy. It's more in line with e.g. Michel Bitbol's recapitulation of the unknown knower.

Quoting Wayfarer

One of the consequences was to that 'God became a ghost in his own machine', as some critic said.

:up:

link:
Ryle outlined what he regarded as the superiority of British (“Anglo-Saxon,” as he put it) analytic philosophers over their continental counterparts, and dismissed Husserl’s phenomenology as an attempt to “puff philosophy up into the Science of the sciences.” British philosophers were not tempted to such delusions of grandeur, he suggested, because of the Oxbridge rituals of High Table: “I guess that our thinkers have been immunised against the idea of philosophy as the Mistress Science by the fact that their daily lives in Cambridge and Oxford colleges have kept them in personal contact with real scientists. Claims to Führership vanish when postprandial joking begins. Husserl wrote as if he had never met a scientist—or a joke.”

Wow. Tribalism. Not pleasant.

SEP:
His [Husserl's] mathematics teachers there included Leopold Kronecker and Karl Weierstrass, whose scientific ethos Husserl was particularly impressed with. However, he took his PhD in mathematics in Vienna (January 1883), with a thesis on the theory of variations (Variationstheorie). After that he returned to Berlin, to become Weierstrass’ assistant.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/husserl/

Husserl was taught by mathematical greats, had a PhD in math.

Quoting Wayfarer

This had the effect of 'naturalising' the transcendent ego, by making it continuous with the natural world - except for the embarrasing fact that how it 'interacted' with matter couldn't really be explained.

Half-naturalized? I take something like a holist, 'continuous' view.

Quoting Wayfarer

You know that Dennett was a student of Ryle's, right?

Didn't know, but I know Dennett talks about Wittgenstein.

Quoting Wayfarer

I think Husserl went on to point out the difficulties that this introduces

I'm partial to his Crisis-era views, which aren't far from my interpretation of Wittgenstein.

Quoting j0e

This had the effect of 'naturalising' the transcendent ego, by making it continuous with the natural world - except for the embarrasing fact that how it 'interacted' with matter couldn't really be explained.
— Wayfarer

Half-naturalized? I take something like a holist, 'continuous' view.

It's not so much that. It's taking 'the mind', which is the condition of any statement about anything whatever, and depicting it as part of the landscape.

Dermot Moran:In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role.

Routledge Intro to Phenomenology, P44

So, Husserl says that Descartes in some sense discovered this fundamental fact, but failed to elucidate it properly, due to the tendency to 'objectification' of the 'res cogitans' - treating it as a 'that', which it can never be. Hence the centrality of 'epoche', suspension of judgement (which in some basic sense is 'un-knowing'.)

Reply to Wayfarer

I can understand a theory of the 'pure witness.' We can imagine that when humans (puppies) are born the a new perspective on the shared world is created. We can even imagine that 'consciousness' and 'the world' are two sides of the same coin. Consciousness of what? Right?

We might call this 'opening up' the world, but as we move onto 'made meaningful,' we get to the social-linguistic aspect of consciousness. IMV, this social-linguistic aspect is (primarily) 'between' us. I assume that learning a language involves changes of the brain, but that's secondary.

It's the synchronization of signs and actions that's essential, like the conventions that make it safe for us all to be on the road together. Apart from the 'pure witness' and perhaps some 'hard-wired' aspects, it looks like human consciousness (the mind) is largely distributed (in lots of skulls and/or ways of living at once) and historical. I think of a dance. The dancers come and go. There's no dance without the dancers, but the dance depends on no particular dancer.

Reply to j0e Quoting j0e

The dancers come and go. There's no dance without the dancers, but the dance depends on no particular dancer.

Where does the perspective come from that identifies the dance which transcends the dancers? A view from nowhere, everywhere?

Quoting Joshs

Where does the perspective come from that identifies the dance which transcends the dancers? A view from nowhere, everywhere?

For me the dance is a metaphor for language. As thinkers, we're aren't IMV primarily individuals (see Feuerbach quote.) In the same way, a good driver is not primarily an individual. We 'take up' the dance as we learn to speak. With practice, some dancers add flourishes that are imitated and become part of the basic dance. But who sees all this, says all this? It's talk about talk, a metaphor for the source of metaphor, the self-investigation (self-invention?) of dialectical, creative reason. Hegel comes to mind with the journey of self-recognition. That which knows itself is not some lonely ghost in the machine (indeed knowledge doesn't make sense in such a context.)

Reply to j0e The key question. for me is is how you understand the flow of experience moment moment to moment , both yours and your interpretation of the ongoing behavior of others. If you view meaning as socially languaged before it is that of any one experiencer , then it sounds to me like it is also fairly in the way that its sense changes from context to context. Why do the people around you get angry, feel guilty , get anxious i’m your everyday encounters with them.Is it merely their changing positing within discursive contexts, or is there a more intricate, intimate and effective way to anticipate the others attitudes and moods than via this linguistic ping pong game?

From a paper I wrote :

While our experience as individuals is characterized by stable relations of relative belonging or alienation with respect to other individuals and groups, the site of this interactivity, whether we find ourselves in greater or lesser agreement with a world within which we are enmeshed, has a character of peculiar within-person continuity. It also has a character of relentless creative activity that undermines and overflows attempts to understand human action based on between-person configurations or fields. We may identify to a greater or
lesser extent with various larger paradigmatic communities, delicately united by intertwining
values. But the contribution of each member of a community to the whole would not originate at
the level of spoken or bodily language interchange among voices; such constructs repress as
much as they reveal. Even in a community of five individuals in a room, I, as participant, can
perceive a locus of integrity undergirding the participation of each of the others to the responsive
conversation. To find common ground in a polarized political environment is not to find an intersect among combatants, a centrifugal ground of commonality, but to find as many intersects as there are participants. Each person perceives the basis of the commonality in the terms of their own construct system.

In my dealings with other persons, I would be able to discern a thread of continuity organizing their participation in dialogue with me, dictating the manner and extent to which I can be said to influence their thinking and they mine. My thinking can not properly be seen as `determined' by his response, and his ideas are not simply `shaped' by my contribution to our correspondence. The extent to which I could be said to be embedded within a particular set of cultural practices
would be a function of how closely other persons I encounter resonate with my own ongoing experiential process. I can only shape my action to fit socially legitimate goals or permitted institutionalized forms to the extent that those goals or forms are already implicated in my ongoing experiential movement. Even then, what is implicated for me is not `the' social forms, but aspects hidden within these so-called forms which are unique to the organizational structure of my
construct system; what I perceive as socially `permitted' rhetorical argumentation is already stylistically distinctive in relation to what other participants perceive as permitted. Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history, even when they believe that in moving forward in life their behavior is guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their community.

Quoting Joshs

is there a more intricate, intimate and effective way to anticipate the others attitudes and moods than via this linguistic ping pong game?

I think skill that can't be articulated plays a huge role. We learn to be with others as we learn to ride a bike. On the explicit level we have practical psychology, including folk psychology.

Quoting Joshs

If you view meaning as socially languaged before it is that of any one experiencer

There's no dance without dancers, without embodied individual participants.

link:
The species has no existence apart form these individual organisms, and yet the perpetuation of the species involves the perpetual generation and destruction of the particular individuals of which it is composed.
...
...individual thinking subjects, while able to participate in the life of spirit, do not cease in doing so to exist as corporeally distinct entities who remain part of nature, and are thus not pure spirit.
...
Unlike sense experience, thought is essentially communicable. Thinking is not an activity performed by the individual person qua individual. It is the activity of spirit, to which Hegel famously referred in the Phenomenology as “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’” (Hegel [1807] 1977: 110).

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/

Reply to j0e

From a paper I wrote :

While our experience as individuals is characterized by stable relations of relative belonging or alienation with respect to other individuals and groups, the site of this interactivity, whether we find ourselves in greater or lesser agreement with a world within which we are enmeshed, has a character of peculiar within-person continuity. It also has a character of relentless creative activity that undermines and overflows attempts to understand human action based on between-person configurations or fields. We may identify to a greater or
lesser extent with various larger paradigmatic communities, delicately united by intertwining
values. But the contribution of each member of a community to the whole would not originate at
the level of spoken or bodily language interchange among voices; such constructs repress as
much as they reveal. Even in a community of five individuals in a room, I, as participant, can
perceive a locus of integrity undergirding the participation of each of the others to the responsive
conversation. To find common ground in a polarized political environment is not to find an intersect among combatants, a centrifugal ground of commonality, but to find as many intersects as there are participants. Each person perceives the basis of the commonality in the terms of their own construct system.

In my dealings with other persons, I would be able to discern a thread of continuity organizing their participation in dialogue with me, dictating the manner and extent to which I can be said to influence their thinking and they mine. My thinking can not properly be seen as `determined' by his response, and his ideas are not simply `shaped' by my contribution to our correspondence. The extent to which I could be said to be embedded within a particular set of cultural practices
would be a function of how closely other persons I encounter resonate with my own ongoing experiential process. I can only shape my action to fit socially legitimate goals or permitted institutionalized forms to the extent that those goals or forms are already implicated in my ongoing experiential movement. Even then, what is implicated for me is not `the' social forms, but aspects hidden within these so-called forms which are unique to the organizational structure of my
construct system; what I perceive as socially `permitted' rhetorical argumentation is already stylistically distinctive in relation to what other participants perceive as permitted. Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history, even when they believe that in moving forward in life their behavior is guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their community.

Quoting Joshs

Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history, even when they believe that in moving forward in life their behavior is guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their community.

:up:

I think I agree with you. Individuality isn't nothing, isn't worthless. We're all snowflakes, albeit with sufficient similarity to relate to one another. The 'other' is (fortunately) potentially full of surprises for us, as we are (hopefully) for them. I used the metaphor of a flame leaping from melting candle to melting candle. What this metaphor lacks is the way that each candle changes the flame a little, the flame it passes on, and how the flame burns slightly differently the varying wax of the candles. In the dance metaphor, we might consider how different bodies affect the 'same' (same enough) dance.

Reply to j0e Quoting j0e

In the dance metaphor, we might consider how different bodies affect the 'same' (same enough) dance.

We could say that there are as many dances as there are dancers, but each dancer is attempting to mesh and intertwine their dance as harmoniously as possible or with each of the others, each from their own vantage. The result wouldn’t be one overarching harmonious dance but multiple achievements of harmonies. Peace could reign throughout the land, but only as proceeding from one to the next to the next dancer.

Quoting Joshs

We could say that there are as many dances as there are dancers, but each dancer is attempting to mesh and intertwine their dance as harmoniously as possible or with each of the others, each from their own vantage.

I think that's reasonable. The 'single dance' is a kind of point-at-infinity. We could say that there are billions of idiolects of the English language. The dancer strives toward the center of the dance, toward an ideal community. Rationality is always 'to come.' We're on the way and our joy is perhaps a sense of moving in the right direction or a right direction.

Quoting Fooloso4

Descartes used the terms mind and soul interchangeably

Yes, perhaps you are right (I am not a judge of that), but WHICH of the two, soul or mind, is more redolent according to Descartes?

Quoting god must be atheist

Descartes used the terms mind and soul interchangeably
— Fooloso4

Yes, perhaps you are right (I am not a judge of that), but WHICH of the two, soul or mind, is more redolent according to Descartes?

One thing that should be kept in mind is the constraints under which Descartes was forced to write. He took as his motto Ovid's saying:

He who lived well hid himself well

I will not go into what I think Descartes is saying behind the rhetoric, it would take us too far off topic and would no doubt cause a revolt by those who accept "official" interpretations (which is not to imply that my interpretation is original).

One with a nose can can catch a whiff of the old and musty in Descartes fresh bouquet.

Quoting Joshs

The key question. for me is is how you understand the flow of experience moment moment to moment

I wrote about this recently in the Blue Book thread:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/10703/wittgensteins-blue-brown-books-open-discussion/p2

I'm interested in the movement/delay of 'meaning' in general and as we hear/read a sentence in particular. Also interested in the 'materiality' of the signifier and in challenging the assumption that speech encodes material-independent 'meanings.' It's a 'continuous' approach both temporally, semantically, and in terms of "mind" and "matter." Speech is a kind of metaphorical music, profoundly in time or even as time.

Reply to j0e You may recall our brief digression the other day into the concept of meaning in the example of a meaningful proposition that is translated into different languages or media, or both - an example being a formula or a recipe, that can be represented in English, French or German, or written in pencil, or converted into digital form, without loosing its essential meaning.

I noticed an article on Feser's blog about Frege's essay The Thought. In the article, he notes:

Propositions, their truth values, and their logical interrelationships stand apart from human minds and language, and even apart from matter. All the same, it is through the medium of language that we “grasp” them, as Frege puts it. He writes: “The thought, in itself immaterial, clothes itself in the material garment of a sentence and thereby becomes comprehensible to us. We say a sentence expresses a thought”. Because sentences function as the means by which propositions are grasped, and because we grasp them in particular psychological episodes that may have various contingent causes, people sometimes fall into the trap of supposing that truth, falsity, and logic are artifacts of human psychology or language. Frege is keen to emphasize the fallaciousness of this inference.

That is very much the point I was wishing to drive home. It is consistent with the Platonist-Augustinian view of 'the immaterial nature of intelligible objects'.

Feser's post is here.

Frege's essay here (articles on JSTOR can be read online by registering. This article has been mentioned previously on the forum, it's considered a very significant essay in logic.)

Reply to Wayfarer

Here's a bit from the post I mentioned, tweaked for context. I'm largely influenced by Saussure in what's expressed here. You might like his notion that language is form rather than substance.

link:
For Saussure, both the signifier and the signified were purely 'psychological' (Saussure 1983, 12, 14-15, 66; Saussure 1974, 12, 15, 65-66). Both were form rather than substance:

A linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern. The sound pattern is not actually a sound; for a sound is something physical. A sound pattern is the hearer's psychological impression of a sound, as given to him by the evidence of his senses. This sound pattern may be called a 'material' element only in that it is the representation of our sensory impressions. The sound pattern may thus be distinguished from the other element associated with it in a linguistic sign. This other element is generally of a more abstract kind: the concept.

Thus, for Saussure the linguistic sign is wholly immaterial - although he disliked referring to it as 'abstract' (Saussure 1983, 15; Saussure 1974, 15). The immateriality of the Saussurean sign is a feature which tends to be neglected in many popular commentaries.

But Saussure thought in terms of a system of differences.


We trade signs as if they encoded a 'meaning' or 'plaintext' that for us is infinitely intimate. You hear only the code that I am forced to use, but I gaze on pure 'intention' or crystalline meaning-stuff. In other words, the speaker is supposed (under normal or at least ideal conditions) to understand exactly what he means. Let's call this a mostly tacit default ontology. Perhaps we find this plausible because we can usually offer a replacement expression that does the same-enough job. 'It's raining.' 'Little drops of water are falling from the sky.' Those sentences (roughly) have the same 'meaning.' But some are tempted to leap from this use of the word to a mysterious ineffable meaning-stuff as its referent. We could instead use the metaphor of equivalence classes.

wiki:
In mathematics, when the elements of some set S have a notion of equivalence (formalized as an equivalence relation) defined on them, then one may naturally split the set S into equivalence classes. These equivalence classes are constructed so that elements a and b belong to the same equivalence class if, and only if, they are equivalent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_class

link:
Saussure noted that his choice of the terms signifier and signified helped to indicate 'the distinction which separates each from the other' (Saussure 1983, 67; Saussure 1974, 67). Saussure stressed that sound and thought (or the signifier and the signified) were as inseparable as the two sides of a piece of paper (Saussure 1983, 111; Saussure 1974, 113). They were 'intimately linked' in the mind 'by an associative link' - 'each triggers the other' (Saussure 1983, 66; Saussure 1974, 66). Saussure presented these elements as wholly interdependent, neither pre-existing the other (Silverman 1983, 103). Within the context of spoken language, a sign could not consist of sound without sense or of sense without sound.
....
Louis Hjelmslev used the terms 'expression' and 'content' to refer to the signifier and signified respectively (Hjelmslev 1961, 47ff). The distinction between signifier and signified has sometimes been equated to the familiar dualism of 'form and content'. Within such a framework the signifier is seen as the form of the sign and the signified as the content. However, the metaphor of form as a 'container' is problematic, tending to support the equation of content with meaning, implying that meaning can be 'extracted' without an active process of interpretation and that form is not in itself meaningful (Chandler 1995 104-6).

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/courses/BIB/semio2.htm
This is where equivalence classes become useful as a replacement for the container or encryption metaphor.

The most familiar equivalence class is Q. 1/2 ~ 2/4 ~ 4/8 ~ ... There is nothing 'behind' all these numbers that shines through them. Each is just as good a representative of the class as any of the others.

He writes: “The thought, in itself immaterial, clothes itself in the material garment of a sentence and thereby becomes comprehensible to us.

This is the metaphor of 'naked' thought in the 'clothing' of words, a tempting and dominant metaphor. But I see no necessity in this metaphor. Rather something like the reification of a equivalence class. Because one text is a translation of another, we imagine a third thing 'behind' both translations, the 'universal meaning' stripped of everything contingent.

I'm trying to get some passages from Culler's book on Saussure which drive home 'form rather than substance.' Cultures divide both the sound and concept 'continuums' into a system of differences differently. The 'ideal' universal culture is something like a fiction or goal.

Reply to j0e :up: Fabulous post. It's going to take me a while to take all that in.

Reply to Wayfarer
Thanks! I just returned and finished starting a thread on this. I hope to see you there.

Interesting discussion and topic here. I was always interested to find out clear explanations and opinion about mind-body connection. During my searches, I found a new concept "mind connectivity" that defines the individual mind structure and its link with the brain and body. I encourage you to have a look to see if you find more clarity for yourself here.

Descartes is often misread. It is even debatable whether he endorsed mind-body dualism. Here's some thoughts from an essay by Robert Pepperell - (I cannot find the title right now)

"The uncertain relationship between mind and world has of course generated countless finely nuanced philosophical arguments. But, put starkly, it seems there are three options:

That the mind and world are distinct.

That the mind and world are unified.

That the mind and world are both distinct and unified.

… While there are many powerful arguments in favour of the first two options, it is the third which I explore here, and the one I will suggest is most plausible.

René Descartes (1596-1650) is often credited with formalising the dualistic distinction between thinking substance (res cognitans) and material substance (res extensa); that is, between ideas attributable to the mind on the one hand and the material world of bodies and objects on the other.

… Descartes’ reputation as the prototypical dualist, however, does not fairly convey the complexity, some would say confusion, of his view on the distinction between mind and world. In the synopsis of the Meditations, we read:

… the human mind is shown to be really distinct from the body, and, nevertheless, to be so closely conjoined therewith as together to form, as it were, a unity.

And again in Mediation VI itself:

Nature teaches me … that I am not only lodged in my body as a pilot in a vessel, but that I am besides so intimately conjoined, as it were intermixed with it, that my mind and body compose a certain unity.

Despite the hint of qualification, Descartes is quite explicit: The mind and body are both ‘really distinct’ and united – they are two and one."

This line of Descartes' thought is often missed.

It may also be relevant that the introductory exercise given by Sadhguru, perhaps the most famous living Indian guru right now and a youtube star, is to sit quietly and repeat, as one breaths in an out, 'I am not the body, I am not even the mind'. This suggests that the mind-body distinction is superficial. By reduction all such distinctions are transcended in Unity and Consciousness, as is discovered in meditation.

The problem is that we reify matter and assume it is substantial. Then we have to separate it from mind. But Meister Eckhart is clear. By reduction matter is literally nothing!

Just throwing in some thoughts and sticking up for Descartes, He saw the need for a third term in his theory to unify mind and matter. .

(Found the article title. 'Screen consciousness - cinema, mind and world')

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