Posted by Miguel  6/25/2018 1:27 pm | #1 |
You know, a classical objection to materialism/reductionism because we !!!!!!!HAVE A LITTLE GHOST IN THE MACHINE!!!!! aka have an experience of an indivisible "self". Thoughts? Book recommendations?
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Posted by DanielCC 6/25/2018 2:09 pm | #2 |
If you mean the argument from the unity of consciousnesses then great argument, also tells against Aristotelian accounts (like C.B. Martin's?) which hold phenomenal consciousness can be adequately accounted for on a materialist basis with addition of immanent teleology. I believe William Hasker discusses it somewhere.
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Posted by Miguel 6/25/2018 3:33 pm | #3 |
DanielCC wrote:
If you mean the argument from the unity of consciousnesses then great argument, also tells against Aristotelian accounts (like C.B. Martin's?) which hold phenomenal consciousness can be adequately accounted for on a materialist basis with addition of immanent teleology. I believe William Hasker discusses it somewhere.
I thhnk it's related to the unity of consciousness, but maybe it's more than that. I kinda see it as a link between unified consciousness and private access. *I* exist, there is something we call the "self" who experiences consciousness in a unified way, and I am not my brain, or my arms, or something else like that. I am a full indivisible person.
As a hylemorphist I could say I am the unity of my form and matter; I am a singular existing unit of a "human being". This unit accounts for the unity of conscious experience and for the private access argument - in the sense that I am not any part of my body and I am not just the matter, I am the informed unity.
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Posted by Noble_monkey 6/25/2018 5:37 pm | #4 |
Mind: A brief introduction by John Searle is not bad.
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Posted by Greg 6/25/2018 9:33 pm | #5 |
If you mean the argument from the unity of consciousnesses then great argument, also tells against Aristotelian accounts (like C.B. Martin's?) which hold phenomenal consciousness can be adequately accounted for on a materialist basis with addition of immanent teleology. I believe William Hasker discusses it somewhere.
Hasker has a paper on the topic in the Koon and Bealer collection The Waning of Materialism. It defends the Leibnizian-Kantian argument for the conception of humans as persons / unified selves, argues that this conception is consistent with empirical data which might seem to contradict it, and defends Hasker's emergent dualism.
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Posted by DanielCC 6/26/2018 5:11 am | #6 |
If you mean the argument from the unity of consciousnesses then great argument, also tells against Aristotelian accounts (like C.B. Martin's?) which hold phenomenal consciousness can be adequately accounted for on a materialist basis with addition of immanent teleology. I believe William Hasker discusses it somewhere.
I thhnk it's related to the unity of consciousness, but maybe it's more than that. I kinda see it as a link between unified consciousness and private access. *I* exist, there is something we call the "self" who experiences consciousness in a unified way, and I am not my brain, or my arms, or something else like that. I am a full indivisible person.
As a hylemorphist I could say I am the unity of my form and matter; I am a singular existing unit of a "human being". This unit accounts for the unity of conscious experience and for the private access argument - in the sense that I am not any part of my body and I am not just the matter, I am the informed unity.
Unless one accepts the matter/form account of substance (and this includes a robust metaphysical understanding of form not the paired down structuralist variant some philosophers are keen on) I don't see how this view doesn't slide towards property dualism. My criticism is not intended as an objection to hylemorphic dualism though - if that view's coherent then it can handle unity of consciousnesses - only the related Aristotelian claim that phenomenal consciousness, with or without rationality, can be accounted for on a materialist basis.
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Posted by Hypatia 6/26/2018 6:24 pm | #7 |
I lean more in the direction of nondualism, so I've been most strongly influenced by the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and various writings from within Advaita Vedanta. I've been moving away from it recently because ironically, it seems to ultimately run into some of the same problems that materialism does: there's no room there for free will or the individual self, so I suspect that something is off in the analysis.
Dualism is dead to me, though, so I suppose I'm some sort of non-naturalistic, non-reductionist materialist right now. Or perhaps just a fullblown Mysterian. I would like to wrap my head around hylomorphism about mind at some point, but I'm honestly more optimistic about a workable conception of mind coming out of Eastern than Western thought.
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Posted by John West 6/27/2018 3:25 pm | #8 |
Dualism is dead to me
I would be interesting in hearing why some time. Not necessarily right now.
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Posted by Hypatia 6/27/2018 8:29 pm | #9 |
Dualism is dead to me
I would be interesting in hearing why some time. Not necessarily right now.
Mostly for conceptual reasons. My intuitions are somehow simultaneously materialistic and idealistic, and it was a Vedantic framework that made the most sense of that, at least for a little while. One of the things that I found most interesting about the Indian approach to consciousness is that they don't really draw a distinction between mind and body in the same way that we do in the West--the mind is viewed as the sensory organ through which the material world is experienced; it's the pure light of awareness beyond conscious thought which is immaterial, but this doesn't seem to be the sort of active, causal substance that screams for a dualistic explanation.
I don't believe that consciousness can be adequately accounted for on a naturalistic basis, but a lot of the empirical evidence out there leads me to see personal identity itself as materialistic, and I feel like I would be running counter to both cognitive science and personal experience to start appealing to dualism. I do not think it makes much sense that combinations of matter can be aware, but I also don't think it makes much sense that anything exists at all, so I end up skipping dualism and immediately ending up in theological waters.
I am interested in hylomorphism, since I do usually end up making concessions to Aristotelianism, but I haven't really been able to figure out what's meant by "material" and "immaterial" or even "dualism" at all in this context.
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Posted by Miguel 6/27/2018 11:19 pm | #10 |
I feel like idealism, or more generally a denial of matter, doesn't make much sense as a view. And that's simply because of our experience and even concepts of matter. I mean, there are such things as bodies, rocks, hands and flowers, which is why we can even talk about them and share pretty much the same common understanding of the words. Someone could perhaps try to argue that all we have access to are bundles of phenomenal experiences of what we call "rocks", "hands" and so on, but I feel like this completely misses the point. Maybe my view is simplistic, but the point is that one way or another we have a basic experience and understanding of these things we call "material objects", and with that in mind we also have a basic comprehension of how these "material objects" differ from what we call "mental objects", "dreams", "imaginary objects", "propositions", "abstractions", etc. And this will still be the case whether or not what some idealists say is true or not. And surely, isn't this distinction the one that actually makes a difference when we're discussing the mind against matter? And that's what really seems to matter to me. In a sense, I am very much like the rock and very unlike the abstract and the dream. But in another sense I also transcend objjects like rocks into the realm of the abstract, by thought. But this doesn't change the fact that I am still very much like rocks in the sense of being (at least partly) "material"
And taking into account this basic experience and understanding we have of "material objects" X "abstractions", "dreams" and "mental objects", I also cannot help but accept hylemorphism. It makes sense of this basic experience and understanding, which to me is at the root of idealism x materialism controversies.
Last edited by Miguel (6/27/2018 11:23 pm)
