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Originally Posted by
tonyrey
I am not a dualist in the original sense of the term - that ultimate reality is composed of mind and matter. I am a monist, believing that both our minds and bodies owe their existence to a Supreme Mind.
Believing in a Supreme Mind doesn't save you from dualism unless you deny the existence of either mind or matter. Now you appear to affirm the existence of bodies. If you hold that bodies are physical and that the mind is non-physical, then you are a dualist despite your belief that they have the origin of their existence in a Supreme Mind. Most Christians, for instance, believe as you do and are dualists. Descartes comes to mind. Or do you mean to avoid dualism by mentalizing the material a la Berkeley?
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So they are intimately related by virtue of their origin and not so disparate as physicalists contend.
How does their common source in a Supreme Mind solve the problem of interaction? You still don't apear to have any way to account for mental causation.
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I don't claim to understand all the ways in which the mind functions but who does? Kim admits physicalism is defective in at least one respect, i.e. qualia. Bertrand Russell was no fool and he sought refuge in neutral monism precisely because of the formidable difficulties in physicalism, emergent or otherwise.
Kim thinks that consciousness presents the most pressing challenge for physicalism, but he certainly hasn't abandoned physicalism. Far from it. Notice that I have nowhere said that physicalism is unproblematic. (I am not a shill for physicalism as I do not regard myself as a physicalist. Nevertheless, one must respond to it in a way that is intellectually honest.) What I have done is to point out that the sort of dualism you have been advocating appears to have insuperable difficulties. Dualism does considerably worse as a response to the action-theoretic objections you have raised to physicalism than does physicalism itself. That really ought to give you some pause.
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How were conscious, rational, purposeful and autonomous persons produced by random combinations of atomic particles? This is a problem as old as the monism of Leucippus and Democritus. If the mind has emerged from the activity of the brain you owe us some account of the means by which the brain is aware of itself and controls itself.
Why do you suppose that the brain has to be reflectively aware of itself? Why, moreover, do you suppose that physicalism requires an account of the origin of consciousness, et al. After all, the laws of planetary motion don't require an account of the origin of the universe in order to be true.
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If you find the notion of self-determinism intolerably vague I find your notion of the self intolerably nebulous :) What is it exactly? If it has a physical basis where is it located?
In daily life we do not regard other people as biological robots.As I pointed out to Asking, emergent physicalism does not correspond to the belief that persons have the right to life, liberty and happiness. A mechanistic interpretation of reality does not account for the existence of purpose and values. When a theory conflicts with the fundamental tenets of civilised human beings one is entitled to be sceptical.
I haven't offered any notion of the self. I have so far merely been responding to your claims.
I don't see that asking committed herself to the view that we are biological robots. But even if she had, how would that commit her to a mechanistic view of reality? Science hasn't been mechanistic for quite some time. You need to get your picture of science out of the seventeenth century. On the whole, your objections to physicalism have had a strawman quality about them.
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Since our thoughts, emotions and decisions are intangible they are explained more readily in terms of an intangible entity than a physical brain.
You can continue to insist upon this all you like, though you are, of course, begging the question. And if by "intangible entity" you mean "immaterial entity" that's exactly what you're doing.
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Since truth, goodness, freedom, equality and justice are intangible they too correspond more closely to an intangible self than to an observable organ. The relation of the mind to the body is mysterious but the mind directs the body in the literal sense of the term - it introduces direction and purpose into what would otherwise be a purposeless process. Inanimate matter has no goal or end.
We have direct, personal experience of the power of our mind.It is putting the cart before the horse to explain mind in terms of matter.
The things you mention are non-physical. I don't agree that this renders them intangible.
Now when you say that the relation of mind and body is mysterious, is this your conceding that you have absolutely no idea how to deal with the problem of interaction? 'Cause that's how it looks.
We have direct introspective awareness of certain mental properties or states or events (call them what you will). It doesn't at all follow that this is awareness of an immaterial thing or entity. Most physicalists regard mental properties or states or events to be higher-order functional properties of lower-order physical properties (this is what asking argued for earlier in the thread).
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Without a mind we wouldn't even know matter exists.
Okay. So long as you realize that it doesn't follow from this that the mind is itself immaterial. It would be a mistake to attempt to read off from the surface contours of our mental life the deep metaphysical structure of the world. There is no facile inferential path leading from the introspectible features of our mental life to the ontological nature of those states themselves. Now Descartes and others--and perhaps you--were more than happy to take it for granted that the mind is panoptical with regard to itself, that the mind knows not only what it is thinking but what kind of thing that it is. But, of course, the panopticism of the mind has been just absolutely vitiated. I can see no good reason to suppose that from the fact that I do not experience my mental states as physical states of my body I can therefore take it for granted that they are not physical states of my body.
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it indicates that the presumption that matter has emerged from mind is more likely than mind from matter.
How on earth to you get that? This doesn't even have a toe-hold on the canons of logical reasoning.
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The basic flaw in materialism is that it equates temporal priority with ontological priority. To all appearances only matter existed at the Big Bang but since mind cannot be observed there is no evidence that it did not exist. On the contrary, the origin and evolution of life are not adequately explained by a series of fortuitous events. The effect would not be proportionate to the cause.
The increase of complexity and the emergence of organization are characteristic of rational activity.The significance of a process should not be assessed solely by its apparent origin but by its development and outcome.
What you say here gives the impression that you haven't the vaguest notion what materialism's commitments are. Again, a strawman. In particular, materialism isn't committed to the equation of temporal with ontological priority. You have conjured this out of thin air.
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To regard conscious, rational and purposeful persons as the product of purposeless particles is to seek refuge in absurdity and devalue everything we consider precious...
Your appeal to sentiment is, of course, an informal fallacy. Moreover, you have insisted emphatically that physicalism poses a threat to these things, but you have provided no rationally compelling argument. Yet again, you give evidence of having only a very remote and casual acquaintance with physicalism. This might--might--be a problem for reductionists. But most physicalists are not reductionists (as you must know since you've read Kim): they do not take the view that higher-order functional properties can be reduced to, or eliminated in favor of, their lower-order supervenience bases. This is as much as to point out, once again, that you have elected to take aim at a strawman.
But, leaving that aside for a moment, why suppose that our prephilosophical commonsense commitments are unrevisable? Our regarding certain things as precious does not guarantee that they aren't fictive.
