On Aug 21, 10:31 pm, "Stathis Papaioannou" <stath....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
> Well, return to a concrete example. Yesterday, I thought red was the
> best colour for my new car, but today I think blue is better. My
> aesthetic values would seem to have changed. There must be some reason
> for this, of course. At one level, the reason may be something such as
> "I now realise that blue is a better colour", or "I don't want my car
> to be the same colour as half the other cars in the street". But at a
> more fundamental level than this, the reason is that physical changes
> in my brain have caused me to change my mind. Perhaps there is an even
> more fundamental level than this, such as mathematical Idealism, which
> underpins physics, but this seems to me if anything yet another step
> removed from calling the aesthetic values themselves fundamental.
>
> --
> Stathis Papaioannou- Hide quoted text -
Here you are implicitly assuming that there is ONE fundamental level
of reality only. Why do you keep making this assumption? Property
Dualism says that there is more than one way to describe reality, and
each way is no more or less fundamental than the other.
Your motivations are not *caused* by the physical processes in your
brain. Instead, I think it's more accurate to say that your
motivations are *super-imposed* on top of these physical processes.
But motivations, not being physical, can't cause physical changes
(indeed they can exert no causal influence on the physical world at
all). Nor are physical processes in any sense *causing* changes in
your motivations. Of course since we know that our minds are
dependent on the physical world, motivational states have to be
*correlated* with the physical states. But correlation is not
causation.
Physics only describes physical properties. Physics can give a
complete explanation of the state changes in the *physical* properties
of your brain, but these properties are all about particles, energy
and fields. They are not about aesthetic preferences. The physical
explanations cannot explain your aesthetic preferences. Where in the
particles, energy and fields in your brain can you find aesthetic
preferences? ;)
I postulate a three-fold property dualism - my proposed three ways to
describe reality are *Physical, *Teleological and *Mathematical. You
could describe the same reality in any one of these three ways, but I
think its a mistake to say that any one of these ways is more or less
fundmental than the others. It helps if you look at the diagram I
posted - the physical concepts are all displayed in the left column ,
the teleological concepts are all in the middle column, and the
mathematical concepts are all in the right column (concepts classified
by subject area). The idea is that the concepts in one row are all on
the same level- none is more or less fundamental than the others.
Here's the diagram:
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list/web/mcrt-domain-model-eternity
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Received on Tue Aug 21 2007 - 07:23:23 PDT