Nice! It's an interesting journey. Would wish to contribute some things:
a) It seems to me that your physicalist/idealist distinction is focused on the public/private, but I don't see why see it that way. There's no issue with a public mental realm. This is usually the distinction made by the abstract, but this seems quite arbitrary to me. Why posit a third ontological substance as opposed to just not reducing the mental to the merely private? What we refer to the universals/abstract can be reconciled with the mental without any issue at all.
b) An issue with the pointing aspect is that in my dreams I can point to objects, and even within a seemingly public sphere. In my dreams there are characters and a reality external to my immanent subjectivity. This would not be non-subjective, even if in my dream I can point to things, things can even be atomic, have mass, be forms of energy, and so on within my draem. The physicalist cannot get beyond this without validating the content of dreams as physical or being unduly arbitrary(any category chosen to define the "physical" could apply to the dream world, and so there would need to be an ad hoc characterization of the "physical" so that it excludes the dream).
c) Would referencing thought in such a similar way as you did with consciousness be problematic? What does the intellect think about? Well, the intellect thinks of thoughts or mental objects, but then this would fall into the same circularity you are pointing with the consciousness, but that would not imply that we ought to discard the intellective and a solution in that order can solve the consciousness: consciousness would be self-aware through consciousness objects. This self-relationality need not be an issue, or as many proponents do, the self could in itself be relational(that's the the Trinitarian ontology). Per a Heideggerean account I would point to consciousness being aware of Meaning, and consciousness itself be a form of Meaning but the Meaningful requires to be perceived to be meaningful. So we have a self-perceived Mind that becomes aware of itself through the Meaning of it, even through forms of meaning(that is, after all, what the intellect does: perceives the meaning of things. The essence and the relations). This would lead to a wholeness of the meaningful through the harmonization of all possible meanings within a singular Mind that relates to itself also in these meanings, creating the modes of perception of the immanent, the transcendental and what Heidegger calls Dasein.
d) I think that one cannot get outside subjectivism. We are fundamentally subjects. All your reasoning and knowledge seem to just narratives, way to organize and structure your own mental content. This, of course, does not entail a mere reduction to the immanent subjectivity, but gives rise to the transcendental subjectivity. But the Absolute identity of our own subjectivity would logically entail a "closed system".
Take knowledge as an example. I cannot know "outside" my own self and outside my own faculty for this knowledge. Knowledge is the act of using my inherent faculties to derive a narrative that is validated by other faculties(usually logic) and it's internal to me. This entails that either the ontological substance is fundamentally unknowable(fundamentally an Other to our very core subjectivity) or knowable and so minimally analogical to our subjectivity.
A possible solution to this closed system of utter self-referential subjectivity, is through the analogical. Through the partial and analogical knowledge of the Other through a commonality in the subjective do we experience aspects of the subjective closed to our self-reference. This opens the closed self unto a reality only possible if shared by the Other and entails a larger ontology, but also focused on the subjectivity. Each subjectivity represents their own ontology, but it's not a closed ontology, a communal form of ontology.
Have you considered Husserl/Heidegger? They speak of some of this stuff and it seems that it may be a step forward in your analysis. Ultimately all analysis ends up with a projection of the transcendental through the meaningful, which is already immmersed in the theological. As such, I think all philosophy that is true to itself, deals in religious themes and ends up being coherent only within a theological frame(in a general sense). Themes like incompleteness, transcendence, subjectivity, meaning, perception, immanent, exile, appropriation, value, unfaithfulness, authenticity, essences, and so on, because it all is a form of the subjectivity of relating itself through itself and Beyond itself.
The parallelist idea is that when wind blows the leaves off of trees, the logical relation of the ideas of the objects involved will mirror the causal relation of the physical objects. So it logically follows from the idea of wind blowing that the idea of leaves fall on the idea of the ground, and so on. When we think about the event, we are thinking about our imperfect conceptions of those ideas, as we would through Newtonian physics, for example. But this way we don’t have to pretend that the mathematical formulas of physics are themselves physical somehow.
Both the physical and thought correlates are regarded as different expressions of the same thing, but the thing in itself is not physical before mental, or mental before physical. There’s simply the thing itself as understood through two different attributes. The thing in itself is self-sufficient substance, Spinoza’s God/nature.
For what it’s worth, I do think it allows us to see things in a way that’s fairly similar to physicalism, and that’s a large part of its appeal-it allows for a fairly common sense view of the world without any spooky stuff. We’re just talking about everyday facts of experience, the causal relations of objects and the logical relation of ideas, but arranging them in such a way that they don’t conflict with each other.
Some time ago, I was struggling with the same problem of trying to determine whether the physical world or world of ideas is fundamental. I'm particular, even energy in physics is a mathematical quantity that doesn't always have a location, and when you get very deep into something like M-theory, space-time itself is thought to be derived from some non-special matrix—nothing to point at. And then, there's subjective experience: if a physicist invents a brain scanner and a neurologist uses it to study the physicist's brain, which is more fundamental? The signals from the brain-scanner can't be interpreted without the physicist's ideas and the physicist's brain is interpreted by the brain-scanner.
I eventually came to the conclusion that neither is more fundamental, as you have above. In fact, I think that physical reality and mathematical/logical reality are not just different aspects of reality, but the word "reality" is overloaded, the same letters and patterns of sound used to express two unrelated ideas—a homophone.
Then I went further—there's more than two. There are a number of different kinds of things that are all considered real, but I'm fundamentally different ways. Subjective experience can't be put in the same box as mathematical ideas—mathematical ideas are deductive and can be expressed as symbol manipulations that a machine can verify. Subjective experience/consciousness is different from that.
"The problem is that, for this to get up off the ground, we need something for consciousness (a relational property of subjects to objects) to relate to, something for consciousness to experience, and it must be something which is not consciousness itself. "
Consciousness is the stream of experience, and this stream of experiences relates to physical and metaphysical entities. These entities aren't consciousness, and neither is the experience alone, but consciousness is what we call the stream itself, the act of experiencing through a mind.
Parallelism has the problem of how the ideational and physical connect. The problem of parts/wholes, internal/external, and nothing/something is created when assigning a primacy of one over the other. Here, your parallelism avoids this by establishing a dual ontology where neither remains supreme. So far we’ve caught up to the end of your article, where you’ve decided to allow the problem of parallelism (two ontologies) over the quagmires of the traditional reductionist arguments.
A third way exists which dissolves all the above, and this is new materialism or phenomenalism. I call my own version liminal theory. It goes like this: There are no mental or physical things which exist prior to both of them existing as a co-constituting phenomenon. The world is not an independent reality separate from an independent mental observer. The world, before observation, is indeterminate. Indeterminacy is the important concept to embrace, because it asserts the reality and existence of nothing as co-constituting the reality and existence of something. Something can only be if it is also not. Talk about unintuitive! In short, the law of contradiction must be transcended for a both-and, mutually co-constitutive logic in which difference implies inseparability. Difference does not imply separability. It precludes it. Difference is only possible precisely because reality is not inherently separate. There is absolutely no ontological distinction between here and there, me and you, past and future, word and object.
Because any attempt to explain the mental through the physical is bidirectional. That is, you could just as well say the mental is causing the physical, and arguably this would make even more sense, because you experience everything through conscious perception. It’s only because of your mind that you believe the physical world exists in the first place. In essence, the physical could supervene on the mental, and our perception of the physical world could just be an evolutionary strategy for minds to thrive.
For the same reason, you could say the physical world follows from mathematical formulas that are not themselves physical, the same way physicalists say the opposite. There has to be some reason to prefer one view over the other.
I don't really follow. If everything is physical then we aren't experiencing anything we aren't supposed to. I guess what I mean is that there is nothing about consciousness that isn't physical. When people pull consciousness away from the physical there is always something added to make consciousness "special".
Our thoughts can't just be electrical impulses and grey matter because when I see a pink elephant I don't see electrical impulses and grey matter, I could imagine someone saying.
But why our brains aren't seen simply as a parser/interpreter of the physical world along with some added attribute of reflection and that being good enough still doesn't make sense to me.
I don't think anyone says the physical world falls out of mathematical formulas, pretty sure people understand that math is a description of the world, not the world in itself.
It’s good enough-I’m certainly not saying you can’t have a plausible physicalist worldview, at least so long as we don’t fully understand the brain. You just can’t have a plausible physicalist worldview that’s rationally more compelling than an idealist worldview. I believe the parallelist view I’ve offered just has fewer gaps than either. That doesn’t mean it can’t be wrong, but all else being equal, we want the simplest theory which explains the most about the world. I think parallelism defeats both physicalism and idealism in these respects.
As it happens, the view that mathematical objects are real and ontologically independent of matter is very popular in both philosophy and mathematics, for good reasons in my opinion. I’d go so far as to say that most great philosophers have ascribed to this view, including the most modern ones. I don’t really want to get into it, nor am I qualified to, but the Stanford Encyclopedia has an excellent entry on it. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/
So thoughts are some kind of attribute of nature that exist in parallel with action. But neither are causative of each other, it just so happens that they mirror each other perfectly? Doesn't neuroscience claim that thoughts arise in the body before our conscious experience of them?
It seems that you can get rid of the idea that nature feeds two attributes so to speak in order to display the same outcome.
And your argument against physicalism is pretty weak. You just say that it's weird and obviously wrong, point out that we could accept that there is physicalism behind the scenes, but for some odd reason ask us to believe that we admit that thoughts aren't physical.
And your objection against Sean Carroll just assumes that mental phenomena isn't physical phenomena but you don't say why.
Why can't thoughts be physical or emerge from physical systems? There are plenty of examples of abstract complexity emerging from physical systems, computers for example or symbiotic relationships in ecosystems.
And what is so special about thoughts that they can escape the chains of physicalism?
It doesn't. Everything I know about the "physical" is a product and expression of my subjectivity. "Physical" and "stuff", for example, are ideas within ideas, and beyond the ideas are experiences. What without ideas and experience is this "physical"? Again, I cannot even say "stuff" because "stuff" is a concept and that's mental, so I cannot use that to describe it, so I'm unsure as to how even apprehend this non-mental reality you are talking me about.
Imagine thoughts don't exist. This doesn't eliminate the reality of stuff. Your subjective experience of material things doesn't cause those material things to exist. If life on earth all of a sudden flames out, the material world doesn't stop being material. To me it feels pretty intuitive, then, that our thoughts spring forth from a foundation of material reality.
Here's another way to think about it. You have material reality (MR) and the reality formed by thoughts (TR). Both are important to form a view of consciousness or explain our thoughts. MR + TR = Human experience of some kind. Which one of these is necessary? And which one is sufficient?
From my perspective, what is necessary would have more explanatory power about what is the case. Say I have a cake. My thinking about the cake, my experience of the cake, and so on, don't change the material properties of the cake. To have a cake means I have the necessary parts of a cake. To enjoy the delicious experience of eating a cake and reflect on it, I need my thoughts. But my thoughts don't come first.
I can imagine how delicious a cake would be and the experience of eating it, but my stomach remains empty, my mouth does not chew anything, and my hunger is not satiated. But to even have this imagined experience, I would at least need some kind of necessary interaction with cake.
In the view of parallelism, it sounds like nature filters things simultaneously, for some reason, into mental and physical. Which honestly I still don't quite understand because the idea sounds overly complicated.
What do you mean by "material"? To me "material" is mental. That's why I can know it mentally and through my mental faculties. All knowledge is essentially mental and all knowledge requires to correspond essentially to reality, hence all that's known is essentially real and mental.
>Imagine thoughts don't exist. This doesn't eliminate the reality of stuff.
That begs the question. It's precisely what I don't accept.
> If life on earth all of a sudden flames out, the material world doesn't stop being material.
What would this material world be? Given that all I know about the material is through the ideas and experiences and hence subjective, I'm unsure how you would say that the objective reality would be "material" and what precisely would that entail? I know what you call material through my senses(subjective) and my rational faculties(subjective) to derive a coherent mental structure(ideas) which I also project unto reality and call it knowledge(subjective).
I would agree that without my subjectivity there would be a reality. This reality would still be perceived by other subjectivities. But if you remove all subjectivity, what would reality be? It cannot even be conceived because the act of conception is subjective. Imagination is a subjective faculty.
If reality itself is objective, then our subjectivity would not give us such knowledge and all knowledge we have is a self-creation which would disappear without us. Reality may persist, but it would not be the reality we have known or could know. On the other hand, if reality is subjective, then our subjectivity could know some of it accurately, and what is known through us may very well persist in a more reliable way.
> My thinking about the cake, my experience of the cake, and so on, don't change the material properties of the cake.
What would those be? I can only conceive of the properties that I conceive through my subjectivity. "Cake" is already an idea. "Properties" are mental constructs. I don't deny the reality of cake, I'm denying the possibility of subjectivity to know the objective if the objective is also not essentially subjective. I'm saying that given that I can know Cake-ness through my subjectivity, Cake-ness is analogically subjective and so what I hold in my mind can correspond to the external, because both are modes of being of the external: subjective reality. I can in my mind hold a representation of reality because reality is essentially represent-able, its symbolic and mental and so my representations, 100% mental, can correspond to reality.
I am not a parallelist. I come from an idealist perspective.
Your mind does not filter the truth of reality. It just projects onto what is already there. If you were blind, had neuropathy, a stroke, yadda yadda, essentially a diminishing of faculties which enable you to receive physical data to impact your mental states, the data from the world does not stop existing, nor does it stop being physical or named or animate.
Say you were born. And as soon as you were born, they hooked you up to a feeding tube and locked you away in a room for the rest of your life. There are no lights. The temperature of the room is ambient and never changes. All smells are masked. White noise is pumped into the cell masking all sounds. You have no education. You essentially have nothing other than nutritive sustenance and touch.
What kind of mental states do you think would arise? Obviously some would.
Now one day you are released into the world. What happens? Do your mental thoughts all of a sudden start making a map and defining everything you see around you? Or do your senses become bombarded with data and overload? Do you have a panic attack? Do you have a seizure? Probably...but if everything is mental, couldn't you just draw back and ignore the data?
I am not sure why you say the mind does not filter. If reality is impersonal, then it is logically necessary that the mind(which is subjective and personal) filters the impersonal reality.
What do you mean by "projects onto what is already there"? Projects where? Internally? That would not be a projection per se. If you mean that the subjectivity projects itself "onto reality" and back, to me that just means that the subjectivity is distorting the projection unto itself. It's "fitting" reality into itself.
I am not sure what you mean by "data". To me there is no data, there's significance. There are semantic packages that are always interpreted(hence they are semantic), and relate to each other. "Data" is already interpreted in various ways by you(existing, real, data, material, not-interpreted, and so on). So it's not a neutral data, it's an interpreted meaningful information.
BTW, I believe in the external reality. I just think it's subjective. So even if reality persists "objectively", it would not be "data", it would also be a subjective reality conceived in a transcendental mind that holds the intrinsic meaning of things precisely because there's no unconnected or uninterpreted "data". That's just to me meaningless.
> but if everything is mental, couldn't you just draw back and ignore the data?
I'm not sure that follows. I'm not denying sense data. There's an obvious connection between our mental private states and sense data. The sense data is already semantic packages that your brain interprets and then you interpret within it, maybe even adding it to the mental experience in your given previous state(to me, it would just free your imagination, it would not be "black" nothing, but would maybe free your consciousness from exploring the imaginative realities(out of which this particular semantic order is just one aspect). When there's a sensory overload that would be communicated to the consciousness as its particular meaning as already an "urgent" meaning, just like when you are dreaming and your body wakes up to a larger sound. Because the brain constructs meaning in relation to its own limited context oriented towards survival but consciousness in a more broader sense doesn't. Yet they relate.
I don't see the issue or how this entails materialism(however that's defined). It seems a frequent misunderstanding on the view that idealism entails solipsism or a denial of the external or something like that. For me, our private constructed reality is constructed IN RELATION to the external reality, and that is possible precisely because there's a formal unity between the two: the "objective" reality is mental, and the internal reality is ALSO mental. One is a representation of the other, but because both are "virtual", the representation apprehends the Real through precisely the abstract symbolism of it. That to me is the foundational reality, an abstract symbolic reality and that is precisely what makes our abstract representations truth-preserving. In your view, how is this even possible?
Nice! It's an interesting journey. Would wish to contribute some things:
a) It seems to me that your physicalist/idealist distinction is focused on the public/private, but I don't see why see it that way. There's no issue with a public mental realm. This is usually the distinction made by the abstract, but this seems quite arbitrary to me. Why posit a third ontological substance as opposed to just not reducing the mental to the merely private? What we refer to the universals/abstract can be reconciled with the mental without any issue at all.
b) An issue with the pointing aspect is that in my dreams I can point to objects, and even within a seemingly public sphere. In my dreams there are characters and a reality external to my immanent subjectivity. This would not be non-subjective, even if in my dream I can point to things, things can even be atomic, have mass, be forms of energy, and so on within my draem. The physicalist cannot get beyond this without validating the content of dreams as physical or being unduly arbitrary(any category chosen to define the "physical" could apply to the dream world, and so there would need to be an ad hoc characterization of the "physical" so that it excludes the dream).
c) Would referencing thought in such a similar way as you did with consciousness be problematic? What does the intellect think about? Well, the intellect thinks of thoughts or mental objects, but then this would fall into the same circularity you are pointing with the consciousness, but that would not imply that we ought to discard the intellective and a solution in that order can solve the consciousness: consciousness would be self-aware through consciousness objects. This self-relationality need not be an issue, or as many proponents do, the self could in itself be relational(that's the the Trinitarian ontology). Per a Heideggerean account I would point to consciousness being aware of Meaning, and consciousness itself be a form of Meaning but the Meaningful requires to be perceived to be meaningful. So we have a self-perceived Mind that becomes aware of itself through the Meaning of it, even through forms of meaning(that is, after all, what the intellect does: perceives the meaning of things. The essence and the relations). This would lead to a wholeness of the meaningful through the harmonization of all possible meanings within a singular Mind that relates to itself also in these meanings, creating the modes of perception of the immanent, the transcendental and what Heidegger calls Dasein.
d) I think that one cannot get outside subjectivism. We are fundamentally subjects. All your reasoning and knowledge seem to just narratives, way to organize and structure your own mental content. This, of course, does not entail a mere reduction to the immanent subjectivity, but gives rise to the transcendental subjectivity. But the Absolute identity of our own subjectivity would logically entail a "closed system".
Take knowledge as an example. I cannot know "outside" my own self and outside my own faculty for this knowledge. Knowledge is the act of using my inherent faculties to derive a narrative that is validated by other faculties(usually logic) and it's internal to me. This entails that either the ontological substance is fundamentally unknowable(fundamentally an Other to our very core subjectivity) or knowable and so minimally analogical to our subjectivity.
A possible solution to this closed system of utter self-referential subjectivity, is through the analogical. Through the partial and analogical knowledge of the Other through a commonality in the subjective do we experience aspects of the subjective closed to our self-reference. This opens the closed self unto a reality only possible if shared by the Other and entails a larger ontology, but also focused on the subjectivity. Each subjectivity represents their own ontology, but it's not a closed ontology, a communal form of ontology.
Have you considered Husserl/Heidegger? They speak of some of this stuff and it seems that it may be a step forward in your analysis. Ultimately all analysis ends up with a projection of the transcendental through the meaningful, which is already immmersed in the theological. As such, I think all philosophy that is true to itself, deals in religious themes and ends up being coherent only within a theological frame(in a general sense). Themes like incompleteness, transcendence, subjectivity, meaning, perception, immanent, exile, appropriation, value, unfaithfulness, authenticity, essences, and so on, because it all is a form of the subjectivity of relating itself through itself and Beyond itself.
So if the wind blows the leaves of the trees shake and so do the branches. The parallelism argument still seems to imply physicalism.
The parallelist idea is that when wind blows the leaves off of trees, the logical relation of the ideas of the objects involved will mirror the causal relation of the physical objects. So it logically follows from the idea of wind blowing that the idea of leaves fall on the idea of the ground, and so on. When we think about the event, we are thinking about our imperfect conceptions of those ideas, as we would through Newtonian physics, for example. But this way we don’t have to pretend that the mathematical formulas of physics are themselves physical somehow.
Both the physical and thought correlates are regarded as different expressions of the same thing, but the thing in itself is not physical before mental, or mental before physical. There’s simply the thing itself as understood through two different attributes. The thing in itself is self-sufficient substance, Spinoza’s God/nature.
For what it’s worth, I do think it allows us to see things in a way that’s fairly similar to physicalism, and that’s a large part of its appeal-it allows for a fairly common sense view of the world without any spooky stuff. We’re just talking about everyday facts of experience, the causal relations of objects and the logical relation of ideas, but arranging them in such a way that they don’t conflict with each other.
Nice!
Some time ago, I was struggling with the same problem of trying to determine whether the physical world or world of ideas is fundamental. I'm particular, even energy in physics is a mathematical quantity that doesn't always have a location, and when you get very deep into something like M-theory, space-time itself is thought to be derived from some non-special matrix—nothing to point at. And then, there's subjective experience: if a physicist invents a brain scanner and a neurologist uses it to study the physicist's brain, which is more fundamental? The signals from the brain-scanner can't be interpreted without the physicist's ideas and the physicist's brain is interpreted by the brain-scanner.
I eventually came to the conclusion that neither is more fundamental, as you have above. In fact, I think that physical reality and mathematical/logical reality are not just different aspects of reality, but the word "reality" is overloaded, the same letters and patterns of sound used to express two unrelated ideas—a homophone.
Then I went further—there's more than two. There are a number of different kinds of things that are all considered real, but I'm fundamentally different ways. Subjective experience can't be put in the same box as mathematical ideas—mathematical ideas are deductive and can be expressed as symbol manipulations that a machine can verify. Subjective experience/consciousness is different from that.
I attempted to write this up in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i8C9KSryDFj4EENvx/reality-and-reality-boxes as a general statement of the idea. An earlier attempt, https://github.com/jpivarski/could-have-would-have-should-have, was written soon after it occurred to me that there was a third box beyond physical and mathematical—that causality is neither of these two.
I enjoyed reading your essay and wanted to share these because I think this anti-foundationalism is a way out of the fly-bottle.
Fantastic, looking forward to reading this.
"The problem is that, for this to get up off the ground, we need something for consciousness (a relational property of subjects to objects) to relate to, something for consciousness to experience, and it must be something which is not consciousness itself. "
Consciousness is the stream of experience, and this stream of experiences relates to physical and metaphysical entities. These entities aren't consciousness, and neither is the experience alone, but consciousness is what we call the stream itself, the act of experiencing through a mind.
Parallelism has the problem of how the ideational and physical connect. The problem of parts/wholes, internal/external, and nothing/something is created when assigning a primacy of one over the other. Here, your parallelism avoids this by establishing a dual ontology where neither remains supreme. So far we’ve caught up to the end of your article, where you’ve decided to allow the problem of parallelism (two ontologies) over the quagmires of the traditional reductionist arguments.
A third way exists which dissolves all the above, and this is new materialism or phenomenalism. I call my own version liminal theory. It goes like this: There are no mental or physical things which exist prior to both of them existing as a co-constituting phenomenon. The world is not an independent reality separate from an independent mental observer. The world, before observation, is indeterminate. Indeterminacy is the important concept to embrace, because it asserts the reality and existence of nothing as co-constituting the reality and existence of something. Something can only be if it is also not. Talk about unintuitive! In short, the law of contradiction must be transcended for a both-and, mutually co-constitutive logic in which difference implies inseparability. Difference does not imply separability. It precludes it. Difference is only possible precisely because reality is not inherently separate. There is absolutely no ontological distinction between here and there, me and you, past and future, word and object.
Okay but why worry about the idea stuff and just focus on the physical stuff. It seems sufficiently explanatory.
Because any attempt to explain the mental through the physical is bidirectional. That is, you could just as well say the mental is causing the physical, and arguably this would make even more sense, because you experience everything through conscious perception. It’s only because of your mind that you believe the physical world exists in the first place. In essence, the physical could supervene on the mental, and our perception of the physical world could just be an evolutionary strategy for minds to thrive.
For the same reason, you could say the physical world follows from mathematical formulas that are not themselves physical, the same way physicalists say the opposite. There has to be some reason to prefer one view over the other.
I don't really follow. If everything is physical then we aren't experiencing anything we aren't supposed to. I guess what I mean is that there is nothing about consciousness that isn't physical. When people pull consciousness away from the physical there is always something added to make consciousness "special".
Our thoughts can't just be electrical impulses and grey matter because when I see a pink elephant I don't see electrical impulses and grey matter, I could imagine someone saying.
But why our brains aren't seen simply as a parser/interpreter of the physical world along with some added attribute of reflection and that being good enough still doesn't make sense to me.
I don't think anyone says the physical world falls out of mathematical formulas, pretty sure people understand that math is a description of the world, not the world in itself.
It’s good enough-I’m certainly not saying you can’t have a plausible physicalist worldview, at least so long as we don’t fully understand the brain. You just can’t have a plausible physicalist worldview that’s rationally more compelling than an idealist worldview. I believe the parallelist view I’ve offered just has fewer gaps than either. That doesn’t mean it can’t be wrong, but all else being equal, we want the simplest theory which explains the most about the world. I think parallelism defeats both physicalism and idealism in these respects.
As it happens, the view that mathematical objects are real and ontologically independent of matter is very popular in both philosophy and mathematics, for good reasons in my opinion. I’d go so far as to say that most great philosophers have ascribed to this view, including the most modern ones. I don’t really want to get into it, nor am I qualified to, but the Stanford Encyclopedia has an excellent entry on it. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/
So thoughts are some kind of attribute of nature that exist in parallel with action. But neither are causative of each other, it just so happens that they mirror each other perfectly? Doesn't neuroscience claim that thoughts arise in the body before our conscious experience of them?
It seems that you can get rid of the idea that nature feeds two attributes so to speak in order to display the same outcome.
And your argument against physicalism is pretty weak. You just say that it's weird and obviously wrong, point out that we could accept that there is physicalism behind the scenes, but for some odd reason ask us to believe that we admit that thoughts aren't physical.
And your objection against Sean Carroll just assumes that mental phenomena isn't physical phenomena but you don't say why.
Why can't thoughts be physical or emerge from physical systems? There are plenty of examples of abstract complexity emerging from physical systems, computers for example or symbiotic relationships in ecosystems.
And what is so special about thoughts that they can escape the chains of physicalism?
It doesn't. Everything I know about the "physical" is a product and expression of my subjectivity. "Physical" and "stuff", for example, are ideas within ideas, and beyond the ideas are experiences. What without ideas and experience is this "physical"? Again, I cannot even say "stuff" because "stuff" is a concept and that's mental, so I cannot use that to describe it, so I'm unsure as to how even apprehend this non-mental reality you are talking me about.
What doesn't?
Imagine thoughts don't exist. This doesn't eliminate the reality of stuff. Your subjective experience of material things doesn't cause those material things to exist. If life on earth all of a sudden flames out, the material world doesn't stop being material. To me it feels pretty intuitive, then, that our thoughts spring forth from a foundation of material reality.
Here's another way to think about it. You have material reality (MR) and the reality formed by thoughts (TR). Both are important to form a view of consciousness or explain our thoughts. MR + TR = Human experience of some kind. Which one of these is necessary? And which one is sufficient?
From my perspective, what is necessary would have more explanatory power about what is the case. Say I have a cake. My thinking about the cake, my experience of the cake, and so on, don't change the material properties of the cake. To have a cake means I have the necessary parts of a cake. To enjoy the delicious experience of eating a cake and reflect on it, I need my thoughts. But my thoughts don't come first.
I can imagine how delicious a cake would be and the experience of eating it, but my stomach remains empty, my mouth does not chew anything, and my hunger is not satiated. But to even have this imagined experience, I would at least need some kind of necessary interaction with cake.
In the view of parallelism, it sounds like nature filters things simultaneously, for some reason, into mental and physical. Which honestly I still don't quite understand because the idea sounds overly complicated.
What do you mean by "material"? To me "material" is mental. That's why I can know it mentally and through my mental faculties. All knowledge is essentially mental and all knowledge requires to correspond essentially to reality, hence all that's known is essentially real and mental.
>Imagine thoughts don't exist. This doesn't eliminate the reality of stuff.
That begs the question. It's precisely what I don't accept.
> If life on earth all of a sudden flames out, the material world doesn't stop being material.
What would this material world be? Given that all I know about the material is through the ideas and experiences and hence subjective, I'm unsure how you would say that the objective reality would be "material" and what precisely would that entail? I know what you call material through my senses(subjective) and my rational faculties(subjective) to derive a coherent mental structure(ideas) which I also project unto reality and call it knowledge(subjective).
I would agree that without my subjectivity there would be a reality. This reality would still be perceived by other subjectivities. But if you remove all subjectivity, what would reality be? It cannot even be conceived because the act of conception is subjective. Imagination is a subjective faculty.
If reality itself is objective, then our subjectivity would not give us such knowledge and all knowledge we have is a self-creation which would disappear without us. Reality may persist, but it would not be the reality we have known or could know. On the other hand, if reality is subjective, then our subjectivity could know some of it accurately, and what is known through us may very well persist in a more reliable way.
> My thinking about the cake, my experience of the cake, and so on, don't change the material properties of the cake.
What would those be? I can only conceive of the properties that I conceive through my subjectivity. "Cake" is already an idea. "Properties" are mental constructs. I don't deny the reality of cake, I'm denying the possibility of subjectivity to know the objective if the objective is also not essentially subjective. I'm saying that given that I can know Cake-ness through my subjectivity, Cake-ness is analogically subjective and so what I hold in my mind can correspond to the external, because both are modes of being of the external: subjective reality. I can in my mind hold a representation of reality because reality is essentially represent-able, its symbolic and mental and so my representations, 100% mental, can correspond to reality.
I am not a parallelist. I come from an idealist perspective.
Your mind does not filter the truth of reality. It just projects onto what is already there. If you were blind, had neuropathy, a stroke, yadda yadda, essentially a diminishing of faculties which enable you to receive physical data to impact your mental states, the data from the world does not stop existing, nor does it stop being physical or named or animate.
Say you were born. And as soon as you were born, they hooked you up to a feeding tube and locked you away in a room for the rest of your life. There are no lights. The temperature of the room is ambient and never changes. All smells are masked. White noise is pumped into the cell masking all sounds. You have no education. You essentially have nothing other than nutritive sustenance and touch.
What kind of mental states do you think would arise? Obviously some would.
Now one day you are released into the world. What happens? Do your mental thoughts all of a sudden start making a map and defining everything you see around you? Or do your senses become bombarded with data and overload? Do you have a panic attack? Do you have a seizure? Probably...but if everything is mental, couldn't you just draw back and ignore the data?
I am not sure why you say the mind does not filter. If reality is impersonal, then it is logically necessary that the mind(which is subjective and personal) filters the impersonal reality.
What do you mean by "projects onto what is already there"? Projects where? Internally? That would not be a projection per se. If you mean that the subjectivity projects itself "onto reality" and back, to me that just means that the subjectivity is distorting the projection unto itself. It's "fitting" reality into itself.
I am not sure what you mean by "data". To me there is no data, there's significance. There are semantic packages that are always interpreted(hence they are semantic), and relate to each other. "Data" is already interpreted in various ways by you(existing, real, data, material, not-interpreted, and so on). So it's not a neutral data, it's an interpreted meaningful information.
BTW, I believe in the external reality. I just think it's subjective. So even if reality persists "objectively", it would not be "data", it would also be a subjective reality conceived in a transcendental mind that holds the intrinsic meaning of things precisely because there's no unconnected or uninterpreted "data". That's just to me meaningless.
> but if everything is mental, couldn't you just draw back and ignore the data?
I'm not sure that follows. I'm not denying sense data. There's an obvious connection between our mental private states and sense data. The sense data is already semantic packages that your brain interprets and then you interpret within it, maybe even adding it to the mental experience in your given previous state(to me, it would just free your imagination, it would not be "black" nothing, but would maybe free your consciousness from exploring the imaginative realities(out of which this particular semantic order is just one aspect). When there's a sensory overload that would be communicated to the consciousness as its particular meaning as already an "urgent" meaning, just like when you are dreaming and your body wakes up to a larger sound. Because the brain constructs meaning in relation to its own limited context oriented towards survival but consciousness in a more broader sense doesn't. Yet they relate.
I don't see the issue or how this entails materialism(however that's defined). It seems a frequent misunderstanding on the view that idealism entails solipsism or a denial of the external or something like that. For me, our private constructed reality is constructed IN RELATION to the external reality, and that is possible precisely because there's a formal unity between the two: the "objective" reality is mental, and the internal reality is ALSO mental. One is a representation of the other, but because both are "virtual", the representation apprehends the Real through precisely the abstract symbolism of it. That to me is the foundational reality, an abstract symbolic reality and that is precisely what makes our abstract representations truth-preserving. In your view, how is this even possible?