On 30 July, 23:55, David Nyman <david.ny....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> 2009/7/30 1Z <peterdjo....domain.name.hidden>:
>
> > Cart before the horse:
> > Why should anyone believe in an ontological gap that isn't backed by
> > an explanatory gap?
>
> Why indeed?
Weren't you arguing for one?
> > The mere existence of the mental implies nothing whatsoever
> > about any dualism any more than the simultaneous existence
> > of cabbages and kings.
>
> Well, I don't disagree with that, although I'm not quite sure what you
> intend by the dismissive 'mere'. Our disagreements haven't usually
> been about the necessity of dualism, which I think we both abjure, but
> rather whether mind is an abstraction from from matter or vice versa.
> I'm not sure we'll ever agree on that.
>
> > Dualism requires an ontological divide--not
> > a mere difference of kind--and an ontological divide requires
> > explanatory irreducibility.
>
> Couldn't agree more. However, my starting point is that the existence
> of the mental (not to struggle over terminology) is indubitable, which
> makes the direction of abstraction mandatory if we want to save
> monism.
That doesn't follow at all. The epistemic fact that we are more sure
of A than B doesn't imply any metaphysical fact that B is reducible to
A rather
than vice versa. The epistemic arrow and the metaphysical arrow are
two different arrows. Since we are macroscopic, we are constructed to
have
better access to high-level phenomena such as chairs and rocks than
the
fundamental particles that comprise them.
> Unless one denies reality to the mental (i.e. eliminativism)
> I'm saying that further insistence on a material ontology in the usual
> sense is an implicit commitment to dualism.
THat doesn't follow either. For dualism you need materalism AND the
mental AND an unbridgeable gap. You keep leaving the gap out.
> Specious relationship
> terms such as 'functional equivalence', 'identical to', 'inside of'
> and the like just mask this, IMO, and under examination can be seen to
> imply two-ness, not one-ness.
Those positions have thei critics, but calling them
'specious' is not criticism
> Further, in addition to its obvious (at
> least to me) merit of 'saving the appearances',
Idealism does not save appearances. It cannot explain
how there was a mindless universe for millions of years before
life evolved, for instance. Idealists usually have to flatly deny that
particular
appearance.
> this narrative seems
> to serve the rest of the story at least as handily as the
> 'externalised reality' version. But I don't imagine we'll ever agree
> on this either.
>
> BTW, perhaps I should clarify what I mean by 'the usual sense' of
> materialism, because it may be that this is part of any confusion.
> This sense is, I take it, the doctrine that reality is 'nothing but'
> the material. Stating it this way of course commits you, under
> monism, to a purely abstract conception of the mental.
I am not sure what you mean by abstract. Since the mental
is uncontroversially not a fundamental item in physics. it has to be
higher-level
or emergent in some way, like shoes and ships and sealing-wax.
But you haven't said what the problem is in the emergence of the
mental
from the physical
>The
> unsatisfactory nature of this conception feeds the intuition of a
> 'neutral' (perhaps not the best term) monism which could instantiate a
> spectrum of states spanning a mental-material 'dichotomy' now more
> apparent than real. Any better?
>
> David
>
>
>
> > On 28 July, 01:30, David Nyman <david.ny....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> >> 2009/7/27 Brent Meeker <meeke....domain.name.hidden>:
>
> >> >>> So the brain (i.e. what the eye can see) can't be the mind; but the
> >> >>> intuition remains that mind and brain might be correlated by some
> >> >>> inclusive conception that would constitute our ontology: Kant's great
> >> >>> insight stands.
>
> >> > It's more than an intuition. There's lots of evidence the mind and brain are
> >> > correlated: from getting drunk, concusions, neurosurgery, mrfi,...
>
> >> Yes, sorry - am I REALLY being so unclear? Obviously, as you say, it
> >> is all too easy to see that mind and brain are *correlated*: my point
> >> was that such correlation can't be conceived as a simple one-to-one
> >> mind-material identity of any sort without doing violence to mind as
> >> an uneliminable primary reality. I think the problem here is with the
> >> all too easy - but flatly wrong - analogy of 'the same thing under two
> >> different descriptions', because here we need to be concerned not with
> >> mere description but with apparently incommensurable modes of
> >> existence: nobody, I take it, could seriously claim that the
> >> manifestly radical ontological dichotomy between 'material-existence'
> >> and 'mind-existence' is exhausted merely by description.
>
> > Cart before the horse:
> > Why should anyone believe in an ontological gap that isn't backed by
> > an explanatory gap?
>
> >> Because - and with justification - for many quotidian and scientific
> >> purposes we focus on the 'material' characterisation of our shared
> >> 'externalised' reality, it is fatally easy to lose sight of the fact
> >> that any reification of the material description ineluctably invokes
> >> dualism in the face of the indubitable existence of the mental realm.
>
> > The mere existence of the mental implies nothing whatsoever
> > about any dualism. any more than the simultaneous existence
> > of cabbages and kings. Dualism requires an ontological divide--not
> > a mere difference of kind--and an ontological divide requires
> > explanatory irreducibility.
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Received on Fri Jul 31 2009 - 01:32:19 PDT