The isolation of mind
So much of metaphysics is focused on the quite unusual isolation of mind. In my own words, I would say that the mind appears to be "a world inside of a world"; in a crude analogy, the world is a "container" and inside of the container are even more containers. Little "black boxes" so to speak, which cannot be accessed from the outside and which subjectivity arises.
This view is basically Cartesian substance dualism. There's the unconscious world of extension and the conscious world of ideas. Somehow these substances interact, perhaps by way of divine intervention. But why? Why would the world be structured as such? Why only two substances? Why not an infinity of substances, a la Spinoza and Leibniz (monads)?
Is it even the case that there actually is an ontological separation going on here? I for one cannot understand how some people, like materialists/physicalists, can believe that mind is literally reduced to non-mind. For some funny reason they want to tell us that the things we are more sensitive and knowledgeable about (our own experiences) are actually reducible/identical to a "something" else that we have very little knowledge of. If we have to choose sides, monism would seem to favor idealism.
Idealism may be coherent, but that doesn't make it right per se. Whereas physicalism suffers from the problem of literally explaining away our own minds, idealism and also substance dualism suffers from an apparent difficulty mentioned above: it's hard to see why the universe would be structured like this. Given what we know about evolution in both the biological and cosmological arenas, it comes across as ad hoc to simply slap a static structure onto reality.
So we have what I see to be the definitive and essential property of mind: subjective isolation, and we also have a tension between the rather strange nature of mind and the surrounding context which it (apparently) emerged. Where does mind come from? Is it really plausible to say that mind has "always been" or is "poofed" into existence by an act of the divine? But if substance monism/dualism is unpersuasive, how else do we account for the subjective isolation of the mind? What else could account for the impossibility of "going into" someone else's mind, except by an actual metaphysical barrier of sorts, the same barrier that makes such theories seem ad hoc?
Because the fact is that we cannot access other people's minds in the way we do our own. They are our property. The universe has made various sorts of containers: fog obscures a landscape, a clam shell protects the organism, a door shuts off a room from the rest of the world. Yet at least conceptually we can open these containers and see their contents. We cannot do this with mind.
This view is basically Cartesian substance dualism. There's the unconscious world of extension and the conscious world of ideas. Somehow these substances interact, perhaps by way of divine intervention. But why? Why would the world be structured as such? Why only two substances? Why not an infinity of substances, a la Spinoza and Leibniz (monads)?
Is it even the case that there actually is an ontological separation going on here? I for one cannot understand how some people, like materialists/physicalists, can believe that mind is literally reduced to non-mind. For some funny reason they want to tell us that the things we are more sensitive and knowledgeable about (our own experiences) are actually reducible/identical to a "something" else that we have very little knowledge of. If we have to choose sides, monism would seem to favor idealism.
Idealism may be coherent, but that doesn't make it right per se. Whereas physicalism suffers from the problem of literally explaining away our own minds, idealism and also substance dualism suffers from an apparent difficulty mentioned above: it's hard to see why the universe would be structured like this. Given what we know about evolution in both the biological and cosmological arenas, it comes across as ad hoc to simply slap a static structure onto reality.
So we have what I see to be the definitive and essential property of mind: subjective isolation, and we also have a tension between the rather strange nature of mind and the surrounding context which it (apparently) emerged. Where does mind come from? Is it really plausible to say that mind has "always been" or is "poofed" into existence by an act of the divine? But if substance monism/dualism is unpersuasive, how else do we account for the subjective isolation of the mind? What else could account for the impossibility of "going into" someone else's mind, except by an actual metaphysical barrier of sorts, the same barrier that makes such theories seem ad hoc?
Because the fact is that we cannot access other people's minds in the way we do our own. They are our property. The universe has made various sorts of containers: fog obscures a landscape, a clam shell protects the organism, a door shuts off a room from the rest of the world. Yet at least conceptually we can open these containers and see their contents. We cannot do this with mind.
Comments (38)
Spinoza does not posit an "infinity of substances" but on the contrary argues that there can be only one.
As a materialist/physicalist, I don't believe that mind is reduced to non-mind. Minds and brains are identical. Brains are not "non-mind."
Quoting darthbarracuda
For the umpteenth time, not all physicalists are eliminative materialists.
Darth, I contend that reality is structured in such a way as to privilege the existence of conscious beings (like yourself) precisely because God loves you and wants to have a personal relationship with you. Eternal fellowship with God demands consciousness because it is not possible for God to share his love with an unconscious thing. You can freely choose to pursue God’s love or you can freely choose to ignore his promptings and continue wallowing in a state of permanent isolation. He is not going to coerce anyone into loving him.
Now that explains why reality is structured to privilege the existence of conscious beings, but what accounts for the isolation? I think it is a form of protection. Protection from what, you ask? In Eastern Orthodox theology, God’s loving presence is experienced as Hell to those who are unprepared to meet him. For those who turn their love inward and worship themselves, for those who reject the freedom Christ offers and embrace their slavery to sin will inevitably experience God's presence as eternal torment. Therefore, it is first necessary to undergo a radical moral transformation (what is called 'divinization' in Orthodoxy) before you can enjoy the unmediated presence of an absolutely just and holy being. I thus contend that God, in his mercy, has erected a ‘veil of perception’ between you and Him as a means for you to complete 'divinization'. I further hypothesis the beatific vision will not only be a vision of God but also somehow include the minds of other people – thus permanently ending the isolation.
Sorry, I meant an infinity of modes.
Easy mistake, man. :)
I don't know what you're saying here.
Right. It's just that if they aren't eliminative materialists, then the definition of material or physical has to be stretched.
I feel like that itself is a form of coercion. Either pick a nice relationship or lonely isolation. God, if he exists, has incentivized our actions.
The point of the question is that the origin of life must mark some kind of causal divergence in your
notion of physicalism. So have you in fact understood the nature of that divergence in a way that says it doesn't also explain the divergence you claim as problematic - that of mind?
If you can quickly say why life and mind are different in ways that make sense, we're good. Otherwise your presumed dualism already founders.
Mind is of life, but life is not mind. It is not a requirement for life to be mind.
OK. That's your claim. Now make sense of it causally. What is the mechanism that underpins your categorical distinction?
The point of the OP was that the phenomenological experience of being a black box is in friction with a universe that is seemingly open to observation, and vice versa. I have no idea how this came to be. But the fact is that I cannot see your mind and you cannot see mine.
Fine. So now try to answer my question.
I'm drawing attention to a presumption your OP embodies. The way to understand it is by considering why you might seem to think that "merely being alive" does not result in phenomenology.
If you have a good causal grounds for making this kind of categorical distinction, then great, wheel it out.
So far as I know, the only reason why you would look conscious to me is that you would look alive to me. If you could explain why and how the two are in fact ontically disconnected in the fashion you appear to presume, then I might think the OP had a better actual point.
Evidently we can, for example, when we talk about the mind, and share insights into the minds of different speakers. Therefore, the mind is not isolated.
You'll have to give me the essential characteristics of "life", then. As far as I can tell, anything lacking a nervous system cannot have a mind.
Unless you're going for some sort of panpsychism or idealism.
So my thoughts on this are that, since mind appears to be so wholly different than ordinary material objects and processes, it is unlikely that it just suddenly "appeared" as if it were an alien to an otherwise material universe. Instead, mind, or at least a derivation of it, would have always been, either in the monism of idealism or the transcendental idealism of Kant and co.
Then there's also the question as to what purpose consciousness actually serves to an organism. Presumably everything necessary to survive could have been done without the use of subjectivity. Why pain, when you could have algae? Why city-scapes, when you could have moss? Why philosophy, when you could have shrubbery? The purposeless-ness of the universe must be taken into account here, then. A decisive, yet accidental, mutation in genetic information created an organism that accidentally happened to live alongside more simple organisms. Complexity was not necessary, yet there was nothing preventing it from happening either. The rise of complex, sentient creatures was entirely unnecessary and accidental, not inevitable, but happened anyway thanks to goldylocks luck.
Quoting jkop
This is merely communication and inference. There's a reason behaviorism was so popular back in the day: mind is literally cut off from observation and thus it was seen as unfit for scientific inquiry.
Well. And why is that? What is causally significant about a nervous system?
There must be something or else why else have you just singled it out?
Quoting darthbarracuda
But now you are immediately back in the weeds because as soon as you mention nervous systems, you just as quickly abandon them to repeat the claim that the mind "appears wholly different" from "ordinary processes".
The nervous system is an "ordinary biological process", no? And yet you agree that nervous systems - on any reasonable view - are at least a necessary condition of phenomenal states.
So how is the nervous system different from other ordinary biological processes in your view? Surely the answer to that should go a long way to solving the dilemma you express?
Quoting darthbarracuda
Why on earth would consciousness serve no purpose? Is that your own experience? You function just as well in a coma or deep sleep? Does paying attention rather than acting on automatic pilot not help you learn and remember?
Quoting darthbarracuda
Again, where is there any scientific or commonsense evidence for these wild assertions? Doesn't everything already point to degrees of consciousness associated with complexity of nervous systems? Can't we tell that just from the way animals of different sized brains behave - their apparent liveliness?
Again, as I said at the outset, the only way we have judge the probability of consciousness in others is the degree to which they seem living. Is their behaviour complex and interesting?
Quoting darthbarracuda
More rambling unfounded assertion I am afraid.
"Merely"? What do you expect? Ability to be someone else?
Apo I don't know all the answers, so stop playing with me and actually start giving me your own answers. I don't go on this board to satisfy some urge to confirm my own superiority, I don't know the answer to this question so do me the service and enlighten me with one instead of treating me like a child.
Quoting apokrisis
I say conceivably everything we do could be done by an unconscious mechanism. Consciousness, even though it works, is not necessary for the sorts of output we have.
Quoting apokrisis
Or just the anthropic principle.
The universe is wide open to observation, but only from one reference point at a time. The big error that's leading to the conceptual mess that you're appealing to is the belief that the one reference point that can be had at a time somehow tells us _everything_ there is to know about the stuff we're observing, as if it's not always just from one reference point at a time.
It in fact seems an important point that consciousness has this character of being a highly particular point of view.
So you are presuming that makes it "inaccessible". But think it through.
Even for ourselves, to be in some particular brain state at this very moment is not to be in a near infinity of states we might also have been in. With a few trillion synapses, there's a lot of potential neural patterns. And yet one brain state is picked from that universe of possible states (or more accurately perhaps, all the other states are suppressed or inhibited by competitive feedback mechanisms).
So being highly located as a particular point of view, a particular mapping of a sensory and intentional state, is what makes even all the alternative states of mind we might have had now inaccessible to us (to go along with the homuncular language that is unfortunately conventional in these kinds of consciousness discussions).
Now following that same logic, I could conceivably be in exactly the same brain state as you right now. I could be accessing your private point of view by exactly mirroring your neural activity. Of course there are all sorts of practical difficulties to do with the fact that I would have to be hallucinating your surroundings and falsely remembering a past that is identical to yours. But given that you are easy going on conceivability, we can say that I could indeed physically access your subjective point of view in these exceptionally unlikely circumstances I've just outlined.
So again, a little biological realism can go a long way to changing the tenor of the questions. If we take a deflationary view of mind - treating it less like an ectoplasmic substance and more like a complex state of world mapping - while also giving rather more credit to the actual biological complexity of a brain with its capacity for picking out highly particular points of view, then the explanatory gap to be bridged should shrink rather a lot. Earlier concerns will start to look redundant as more meaningful questions are revealed.
I disagree. You would be accessing a duplicate copy of my brain state, not my brain state. Both of us can stub our toe and feel pain - perhaps we would be in the same exact state (probably not though). But these are two separate, independent states.
You can have the Mona Lisa, or you can have a duplicate copy of the Mona Lisa. The two may be indistinguishable. And in fact multiple people can simultaneously look upon both Mona Lisa's. But Mona Lisa is a material object and thus it is unsurprising that this can happen. Material objects are public, mental "objects" are private. My mind does not seep into the world, or at least I don't think it does (re: externalism). It doesn't come out of my ears. Mind is the one thing that I am certain about having, yet I cannot locate it in the world I assume surrounds me.
So a better analogy would be that I have my own container filled with stuff only I have seen. You can take an x-ray and get a general idea of what is inside. But you cannot actually see the contents. Only I can see the contents, only I am allowed to. Nobody else is allowed inside. Mind is subjective. Like a Liebnizian monad.
If we look at the brain, we can presumably see the structure of fatty tissue and analyze the various synapses and whatnot going on. We can dig through the whole brain, but we'll never find mind. There's hair, skin, scalp, skull, brain tissue, then skull and scalp and skin and hair again. So where is the elusive mind? Where is it located?
Quoting apokrisis
I don't think the explanatory gap shrinks more than it is just flat-out ignored. It's also telling that you assume alternative views must consist of some sort of ectoplasmic magic goo. That's just silly.
So what makes it yours?
Do you want to point to something material ... like nervous systems and physical locations? Or did you have in mind a soul?
Let's get to the bottom of what you actually think you are claiming. What does "access" even mean in your book?
If I were to suddenly flash into your exact state of mind for a moment - due to some extraordinary brain blurt, say - then how is that not accessing your state of mind?
What else would access look like according to you?
Quoting darthbarracuda
So doesn't that make it more phenomenally accurate to say that the world seeps into your mind? And the same world seeps into my mind? So we both share access to the same world. Thus again, the critical issue is not that I can't access your mind. If our current accessing of the world happens to be indistinguishable at some instant, then we are of one mind.
Quoting darthbarracuda
It is this resort to physicalist conceptions of substance to explain states of mind that seems so muddled. You can't both describe the mind in substantial terms while simultaneously rejecting that same substantialist ontology.
Well, you can. It's called Cartesian dualism. :)
So it is an analogy. But a completely question-begging one.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Again you are thinking like a physicalist and trying to capture the essence of the mental.
You have to start thinking like biologist and see structures as processes. Mind is not located in stuff but in action and organisation.
I mean, you are familiar with Ryle's ghost in the machine category error argument? It's pretty slam dunk.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Do I seem to ignore it? I'm showing you why its importance is greatly exaggerated because people like to bypass the question of whether there is any real metaphysical difference between life and mind.
Dualism depends on the presumption that animals can be dumb automata and humans are inhabited by a witnessing soul.
Great. Everyone loves an interesting hypothesis. Now support it by showing that life is not already mindful from the get-go in any useful definition of mindfulness. Where does this claimed metaphysical duality first arise in nature?
And the question can't even be addressed until you have meaningful definitions of both phenomena so that they may be compared and constrasted in counterfactual fashion. (That's the actual explanatory gap here.)
I am not thinking about a soul, although I suppose there are actually some decent arguments for the existence of a "soul-like" entity of sorts, in the Aristotelian schema for example.
Rather I am saying that there is a distinct difference between the firing a C-fibres firing (an outdated theory nowadays but one that continues to be used out of tradition) and the experience of pain. Whatever is going on in the brain when I experience something is different than the experience itself.
The point being, however, is that a numerically-distinct experience can only be experienced by one subject at a time. A teleporter kills me because the copy of me at time t+1 is not identical to me at time t.
Only one mind can exist in a single perspective at a time, just as how only one object can exist in a single space-time location. Access to the mind would be akin to access of the exact same perspective as another person at the exact same time - impossible. My head cannot co-exist with your head at the same time. The perspective I have is unique. Of course, you can make perfect copies of my mental experience, just as you could make perfect copies of the perspective I inhabit at a certain time. But they would not be identical - it would not be true access, but rather access by "cheating".
Quoting apokrisis
But not at the same time nor place, i.e. perspective.
Quoting apokrisis
So mind just "arises" out of structure/process? This doesn't explain anything really. Just seems all hand-wavy and actually kind of poetic.
Quoting apokrisis
No, this is false.
Yes you use this point to negate any pragmatism / physicality while, the other way around, you will only incorporate you yourself actually being an ape or some other "lower" life form and then relaying such an experience as your everyday darthbarracuda as proof 'for' such pragmatism.
Someone smarter then me should be able to clearly state this is a form of an argumentum ad ignorantiam
Spot on!
Everything here you are arguing to be true per definition. You don't seem to realise that. So that is why I have tried to focus your attention on the issue of definitions. How could we more fruitfully frame the dichotomy so as to not talk past the differences that might actually make a difference?
I of course have repeatedly said that the way to make sense of mind~matter duality is to re-frame your inquiry as one based on the semiotic symbol~matter distinction instead. That then allows you to see how - causally - mind is just life. A more complex version of the same modelling relation. And even material existence can be accounted for pan-semiotically.
So I certainly have my own deflationary answer.
Quoting darthbarracuda
That just ignores the thought experiment I described. I specified that the "perspectives" would indeed be exactly alike. I offered a "plausible" mechanism - you might be having the "real" experience, I might be hallucinating all its features. But that doesn't really matter as you already admit in the OP that your own perspective of the world could be an idealist illusion. So you can't both allow for such disembodiment in your own arguments, yet insist on the facticity of embodiment when it comes to mine.
Well, it is this kind of inconsistency that is indeed rife right from the OP.
Quoting darthbarracuda
That is not what I said, was it? I said rather than talking about the structure - the materials from which brains are composed - let's talk about the processes taking place, the dynamics of the organisation.
Where, according to your pan-semiotic theory, does qualitative experience reside? It doesn't seem like a process, because I can identify specific qualitative feelings.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Of course, jkop's post probably didn't completely answer your initial question. But tossing it out might be a little hasty, imho. It could help us to understand any possible less "physical" types of communication by starting with basic communication. (And i use the word "communication" in its usual general meaning: to give or receive information. Whether such exchanges of information are intentionally directed to a particular person is another matter. For example of indirect, non-particular communication: someone tuning a radio receiver to hear a communication in the form of music or talking.)
Would not a theoretical direct mind-to-mind transmission still be a type of communication?
Yes, that is quite a stretch to posit the existence of direct transmission or telepathy. But i am not the first to posit the possibility of such. Please note that i am merely imagining its theoretical existence, and not claiming it as a fact.
Let us imagine a linear scale of human communication. Say it is a scale of 0-100. At the zero point rating, there would be no communication of any kind. At the 100 point rating, there would be complete mind-reading ability. Ordinary verbal communication would be at about 50 points. In this example, two people engaged in conversation could possibly be at different ratings on the scale. And there are subtler levels of nonverbal communication, of course. Like when you walk into the room with your spouse/SO, and without a word you know exactly how they are feeling, what caused it, and how the rest of the night is going to turn out (while sleeping on the couch). This would be at around 75 points. Much further above that would be getting into psychic territory, about which some might remain unconvinced.
"So we have what I see to be the definitive and essential property of mind: subjective isolation, and we also have a tension between the rather strange nature of mind and the surrounding context which it (apparently) emerged. Where does mind come from? Is it really plausible to say that mind has "always been" or is "poofed" into existence by an act of the divine? But if substance monism/dualism is unpersuasive, how else do we account for the subjective isolation of the mind? What else could account for the impossibility of "going into" someone else's mind, except by an actual metaphysical barrier of sorts, the same barrier that makes such theories seem ad hoc?"
I don't know. Subjective isolation as "the definitive and essential property of mind"? That is really swinging for the fences, which i can appreciate. But that seems like it is prioritizing "subjective isolation" over every other single characteristic of the mind. And that seems subjective, rather than objective. Maybe it happens to be a prominent characteristic of your current state of mind. Or maybe not. But in any case, at least that statement seems to be a reach.
Your effort is most appreciated though, and is very interesting. Otherwise, I'd have no response. For what it is worth, the main philosophical/spiritual question that interests me is how one can transcend their own consciousness and make genuine connections with the world and with others, even if temporarily. The idea of identity seems integral to this. When i identify with everything around as much as possible: the gravel, the people, bugs, the clouds, the litter, the birds; freedom from the prison of the self is experienced. Tat tvam asi, you are that (as the saying goes). So... to identity with everything (and not just sports teams) is the goal. While still paying the bills, brushing my teeth, and obeying the speed limit. Imho, the highest belief in our culture (that on which everything else rests) isn't democracy, or beauty, or truth, or pleasure, or religion, or family, or possessions, or love, or even money, fame and power. It is the Self, endlessly fascinated with itself (what else?). Yet the walls of its palace become a prison. An over-ripe individualism becomes an isolation from which we struggle to escape.
Let's not jump ahead of the game. You have yet to understand why this question doesn't even make good sense in terms of the ontic commitments of pan-semiosis.
I am questioning your use of words like "my experience", or "experience residing". You are simply presuming the dualistic mind~world framing that becomes the locked cage of your thoughts.
My argument is that to start unpicking that paradigm, a good place to start is to seriously address the issue of what might make life and mind actually different in your scheme of things? As a biological process, where does any claimed divergence in terms of causality arise?
You seem at least persuaded consciousness is a biological phenomenon rather than a theistic one. So you should be happy enough that this question is legitimate even within your ontological framework.
So again, what's your own answer? If you understand life according to some notion of causality, is there some essential difference that marks it off from mind? And if so, what is it?
To simply repeat "subjectivity" is to retreat back into Cartesian dualism and abandon your tentative naturalism here. And even in the end to reject naturalism, you would first have to demonstrate understanding of its best case.
Certainly I am supposing the phenomenological experience of being a self of sorts. But I don't really have an ambitious metaphysical structure of the world. I find idealism to be theoretically satisfying but not entirely believable in some sense, while I see a real, external world as probably existing in some form or whatever. A giant abyss of darkness, with matter bouncing into matter on the macro-scale and random events happening on lower levels. But basically I hold a position I suspect most people do: the universe is a spatio-temporal container and we are one of its many contents.
Quoting apokrisis
Well, I said that then existence of a nervous system would be a starter. I mean, unless we have good reasons for believing so, there is no contextual or inferential evidence to support the claim that mind is identical or somehow intrinsically connected to life. And then there's the problem of distinguishing life from non-life. Are viruses life? Apparently not, since they don't die in the normal way organisms do when detached from their host. No sheer cut-off implies vagueness, and vagueness implies cross-over. Or perhaps prior existence, a la idealism/panpsychism.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't see how subjectivity is non-naturalist. And you of all people should know that "naturalism" is such a vague buzzword that it literally is meaningless outside of esoteric circles.
So your ontic commitments amount to a bob each way. Cool. :-}
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yes. But why? What difference does that make?
Quoting darthbarracuda
Did you mean outside philosophical circles? Being immanent and not transcendent, being holist and not atomist, seem to be fairly clearcut and familiar ontic commitments to me.
I never said it was ambitious, in fact I said the opposite. So spare me the pretension.
Quoting apokrisis
Well because the nervous system controls movement and bodily processes, and so does consciousness.
Quoting apokrisis
TO YOU, but perhaps not others. You have given some descriptions of naturalism, but this is not ubiquitous. Defining your terms helps immensely.
What? Do they take turns or something?