Right you are. This is what was trying to get at when I said the tool the neurosurgeon uses to tamper with your brain is itself a material representation of God’s mind. A part of God knocks out a part of your mind. This part of God gets represented as the tool (and its action on your mind gets represented as the tool’s tampering with your brain), and it simultaneously has a direct effect on your mind which you experience subjectively and immediately.
I think Descartes might have had a container-plus-content view of the mind. He seemed to believe that nothing in the mind had any inherent reality (which is what permitted him to undertake his wholesale skepticism in meditation 1) but that the mind itself was nevertheless real (otherwise he couldn’t posit it as a substance). This, to me, implies a container-plus-content view of the mind. The mind’s contents (i.e. what we perceive) may not be real, but the mind qua substance (i.e. as container) is most definitely real. Descartes could do this because he wasn’t a Berkeleian idealist and therefore did not subscribe to the motto esse es percepi, which meant that he could posit the existence of un-experienced things outside perception (which may include mind itself as container).
What you’ve shown here is that you can reason against those who believe in the reality of things outside our minds that can maintain their existence independently of our minds, but what needs to be addressed first is what to say of this belief before it comes up against your reasoning.
Keep in mind the following: believing in the continued existence of things even after we stop looking at them isn’t just materialism. It isn’t even necessarily a philosophical position of any kind. Infants, after approximately 4 months old, grasp the concept of a things continued existence even after he/she stops looking at it. Given how early in life this belief gets formed, how natural, and how basic, I’m reluctant to even call it a belief. It’s an inherent part of how we experience the material world. I don’t think we can call it sensory, but it isn’t abstract philosophical speculation either. It’s a “sense” for lack of a better word.
Now, what you say about this “sense” all depends on what your idealism says about mental experiences that aren’t sensory. Does everything in the mind have to have a stake in defining reality for the subject, or is this the case only for pure sensation? (note that the answer to this will carry over to my question about the reality of the materialist’s belief).
Come on, PG, even Berkeley did better than that. Berkeley accounted for our perceptions and experiences with God, the ultimate spirit beyond the human sphere of experience, and from which all our perceptions and experiences were given.
But this is where Berkeley’s account ended. In his time, this was often sufficient. Falling back on religion was still a respectable way for philosophy to give its accounts on this or that subject matter. Hume put an end to this. One of Hume’s greatest contributions to philosophy was to unveil how sloppy and “unphilosophical” this maneuver was, and not just in regards to religion. Hume showed that if you’re going to give a rigorous account of some philosophical subject matter, you really need to avoid relying on premises that will be accepted just because it’s fashionable (like “God is magical, and therefore He takes care of everything I can’t explain with reason”). You really do, Hume insisted, need to be thorough and meticulous in always applying rationality and evidence to your philosophical accounts if it’s going to count as “quality” philosophy.
I think we have to do the same here. It’s all good and wonderful to say that God provides us with all our perceptions and experiences, but what we really want to know, if we are going to give a thorough and intelligible account of this “mind-stuff,” is how God, as this very stuff, does this. What is the nature of this substance we call “mind” such that it can constitute the very fabric of all existence and flow from one form to another on its own, one of these forms being human perception and experience (and from there, thought, emotion, and all other forms of inner human experience).
There is a difference between knowing in particular and experiencing in general. There’s a difference, for example, between feeling pain and knowing that I’m in pain. It is conceivable that one could be in pain without knowing it. This needn’t mean that the pain isn’t being felt, it just means you can’t think “I’m feeling pain” and believe it.
I would further propose that any dissociation between an experience and knowledge of that experience is the grounds for a separation of minds–that is to say that if an experience is being felt but is not known, then the “knowing” part of the mind is a different mind than the “feeling” part. This is what makes us individuals–different “persons” from God–we can only know about those of our experiences which are immediately presented to us, and all other experience (belonging to God supposedly) are unknown to us and therefore not a part of us. This also implies that any unconscious material we may be harboring in the recesses of our minds aren’t really “our” minds at all.
i mean… is not thought aspected by the ability to foresee? With limited accuracy perhaps due to the paradox of the future changing (to some degree) the future when it informs the past.
on another not… perhaps irrelevant: if what is physical is created by conscious thinking… or in other words belief, then by believing that the physical is real it is real…
Here’s where we enter into the subtleties of my brand of idealism. Although I believe that all mental states and artifacts are real (I call this “projection”), I believe that each one is real in its own unique way (depending on how it feels).
It’s sensory perception that “projects” and becomes real material objects, but beliefs and knowledge project and become facts or truths. If you believe that the physical world is real, that becomes a “fact” for you–it doesn’t instantiate the material world for you (that’s done via your sensory perceptions), it just makes it true for you that the physical world is real.
If you want to get even more subtle, you might consider the difference between the way belief projects and the way concepts project. Concepts by themselves don’t have a truth value. Therefore, they can’t project as truth or fact. Bring the concept of a butterfly to mind. Is it true or false? It’s neither. It’s just an apprehension of what a butterfly is.
Concepts project as “essences”. The essence of a thing is just what that thing “is”. It’s the is-ness of the thing. We project concepts as essences into the things we sense. The things we sense, thereby, acquire essences–they become “things” as opposed to a smattering of sensory properties or data. They become “objects” as opposed to a sea of colors and shapes and forms. They acquire a particular identity. But concepts don’t need a sensory world in order to project. One can just as easily bring to mind the concept of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and it too will project as an essence–the essence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster–it just won’t have a home in the physical world. Concepts are also what beliefs refer to. You can make a statement about the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and the term “Flying Spaghetti Monster” in that statement will refer to the concept of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. When the concept being referred to by a statement/belief is projected into a material object in the world, it’s that object, in virtue of acquiring an essence, that the statement/belief refers to. Without being infused with an essence, the object wouldn’t really “be” anything (except maybe a melange of qualities, forms, properties, etc.) and therefore it would be difficult, maybe impossible, for us to refer to it at all.
I think that in the end, any attempt to “demonstrate” that the brain causes or creates experience, if one attempts to conceptually demonstrate it through the creation-methods of creation ex nihilo (of course) or even transformative causation—if the individual holds that a non-perceived brain in the external world (the true source of experience in this context) is composed of something that is essentially something that is not experience or made up of experience itself—that this non-mental causation of experience ultimately fails by the sheer incoherence between something having a part in the existence of a completely different type of existence. The OP is, in the end, a derailment of Non-Mental Psychophysicalism: the view that consciousness or subjective experience can be created–granted existence–and controlled by that which isn’t consciousness or subjective experience at all.
A Phenomenalist and Idealist, on the other hand, can rationally posit that a phenomenal brain could exist and function as a symbolic nexus of subjective experience, as well as a built-in reductio ad absurdum when thought is turned to how the brain could produce subjective experience from neurons—including mental neurons. Aside from the “Pandora’s Box” method in which every experience one will ever have from birth to death is squeezed, so to speak, inside every phenomenal neuron (or one could say that neurons are actually nothing but these experiences, and when seen “from the third person” they absurdly appear in the form of neurons), even phenomenal brains cannot rationally pre-contain experiences. It follows then, that the source of experience is not the brain, but the external world.
And the conundrum, I think, is ultimately reduced to Descartes’ notions of “real” v.s. “unreal”. He divides mind-as-substance from mind-as-perceived/experienced-content but (as you describe it) performs a bit of magical thinking in which mind-as-perceived-content is somehow “hallucinatory” or “illusory” as opposed to mind-as-substance, which is “truly real or actual”.
Simply noting that any form of “there-ness” (that is, anything experienced by an actual person regardless of whether or not the thing experienced is in the form of Berkeleyian “sense or reflection”), by reason of its very presence (or “there-ness”) is real. In light of this, Descartes’ division of mind into container/content seems rather nonsensical. In light of whether or not this inanity spread to Berkeley, and if it can be revealed in his writings, I will leave the jury out. Suffice it to say that Berkeley does not ultimately stand or fall in a misperception of perceptual mind as “unreal” (if he deliberately or unconsciously meant it as such), but in defiance of the truth of “unperceived matter” or the existence of non-mentality or non-experience: that which isn’t experience or mentality at all. This is his (and my) central philosophical and ontological “beef”.
The “sense” that things exist even after we stop looking at them is “common” sense, even in those of us that deny that these things exist as they are when we no longer perceive them. Descartes (this guy again!) even went so far as to say that there must be external analogs to perceived objects because God wouldn’t deceive the senses.
However, at the end of the day, this “sense” is an experience emerging from and an aspect of oneself: it is not (necessarily) a revelatory connection to the external world (in such a way that one can rationally state that the very existence of the sense reveals the existence of external, un-perceived analogs of objects in perception).
It is to be understood that this “sense” is distinct (not one and the same thing) as these external analogs (if they exist), so there is at least (presumably) no constructive-participation relation between an un-perceived chair and the chair as it is to a person looking upon it (i.e. the un-perceived chair does not actively and immediately create the person’s perception of it).
Given the absence (or presumed absence) of a creative or causal connection or relation between perceived objects and objects in the absence of anyone’s observation of them (if these even exist), then the only connection between one’s “sense” that these objects continue exist when no one perceives them and one’s perception of objects is the fiction of revelatory knowledge: a fiction that states that because one has a belief or even a “sense” of something, the sense’s very existence indicates the reality of the (imagined) external state of affair.
The reason for the “sense”? Aside from meaningless absurdity, it may function as an instinctual and subconscious “stage” (one that ties past to present, instructs memory, and grounds us in this mental reality through a sense of “realness” of objects that in actuality are aspects of and extensions of oneself) for the particular mental reality that we are in and experience, despite the fact that the external world is something other than the objects and environments we experience. Like the brain, the “sense” also functions as a reductio ad absurdum—negatively pointing (upon reflection) to the “otherness” of the external world (particularly in light of consideration of the distinction and lack of creation or causation of perceived objects by external objects).
Sensation or sensory experience, more than or as opposed to non-sensory experience, ultimately has a stake in defining and revealing the true nature of reality. The material that is actually experienced to exist is the material of oneself and one’s experience, and the objects surrounding our perception of a centralized body are, upon inspection, ultimately composed of one’s experience (“one’s experience” being a real substance and the actual substance making up one’s existence).
The materialist, it seems, confuses “one’s experience” for “experience of something beyond oneself.” or (worse) “something beyond oneself”.
(This is easy to do, given that one has sensory perception of a body one feels is one’s own, surrounded by objects and an environment that are distinct from/not a part of this central body. Nevertheless, these non-body objects and the environment itself are composed, upon inspection, of one’s experience of them)
I charge that this is only possible, and rational, if the external actively and immediately creates the perception, and to do this it must use a pre-existing substance–not one that must be magically conjured from a previous and total nonexistence. This pre-existing substance must be (because it is experienced to be) the experience of oneself or one’s experience (in the pertinent case of one’s experience of a chair supposedly being immediately created by the external chair itself).
When it comes to existence, to which I referred above, one has no choice but to accept the premise that things exist for no other reason than that they happen, by chance, to existsimply do. One can be thorough and meticulous in defining or fleshing out the procedure behind one’s philosophy when it comes to how things that are constructions or that are constructed come to be, but one cannot do this when it comes to brute existence itself. Thus my statement stands: perceptual objects, for example, existing independent of external analogs of perception exist without external analogs because they simply do. There is no procedure or process that can meticulously and thoroughly explain pure existence.
We definitely should work to produce a detailed and procedural account of the nature of “mind-stuff” and how it flows from one form to another independent of something necessarily accompanying it and causing it to do so, but when it comes to the notion that mind-stuff exists, and happens to exist without something that is not just more mind-stuff preceeding it so that this non-mind-stuff can then cause mind-stuff to exist (let alone itself forming the objects mind-stuff mimics in visual form)—one has no choice but to go “quasi-religious” and admit that this stuff exists and independently exists for no other reason than that it does.
Seems odd, but I would think that this “non-painful pain” is pain at a threshold so low that the subject feels it, but thinks it is something other than pain itself. But the important thing is that is is felt, thus it is not unconscious. This association between knowledge of experience and experience itself, then, is in effect a “knowing” (a pseudo-knowledge) of pain as something other than what it truly is. The notion of the unconscious mind, following Freud and others, seems to be the notion of something going on within the individual that the person does not experience nor knows occurred.
But there is a point, if our experiences are granted to us by the external world, that another experience becomes “one’s” experience. It seems that we exist in a way that reality can only manifest (as far as oneself is concerned) in the form of oneself (composed of the substance of one’s experience). If Berkeley’s esse est percipi can be bastardized to also mean : “to be is to perceive”, then existence can transparently be described to be a single entity (experience) experiencing itself as it must do in order to be experience, but having an identity or sense of personhood in only two of these manifestations. These experiences/manifestations are:
One’s experience
Another’s experience distinct from oneself (as that other is a different person)
Experience that experiences without knowledge, thought, or sense that it is a “person” (believe it or not, while I resisted this in interest of an insistence of an inifinite Person–I found that non-person experience is probably quite necessary for my theology, which proposes that God also possesses a Freudian unconscious mind).
The conceptual validity of Freud’s notion of the unconscious then, turns upon whether or not there exists “another’s experience” that is remarkably exists within oneself. Freud’s psychoanalytic foundation for dreams, which are aspects of the unconscious that transform into dreaming consciousness, seems to rely upon the strange but true (?) existence of non-intersubjective consciousness within subjective consciousness, or an inner dimension within each of us that we cannot experience until it ‘decides’ to become part of our experience.
The opposite of this, I think, is the absence or impossibility of un-experienced experience within someone, such that there is no unconscious mind, but only total consciousness of a transitory type. There’s more to be said on this matter, as the issue of whether or not a Freudian unconsciousness exists is significant (but not fatal) to my theology.
How does the believer come into existence? You first have to be able to be a discrete entity, distinct or separate from and surrounded by other things.
This is an area of obscurity for me too. I can’t say that I know Berkeley ever agreed or disagreed with Descartes–it isn’t in his writing (except for the rejection of dualism obviously). All I can say is that he never openly disagreed with Descartes on the nature of mind. I am left to assume that he took Descartes for granted. This is the thing–even the layman, who may have never even heard the name “Rene Descartes,” takes Descartes for granted, even the laymen before Descartes took him for granted. To quote from my website:
This is how much of an influence Descartes had on philosophy and society in general. He essentially tapped into something we all believe anyway and refined it in terms that were worthy of philosophical discourse. But the catch is that even when philosophers after Descartes rejected his views, they didn’t necessarily, in the same stroke, reject this basic and intuitive human (mis?)-understanding of the relation between the mind and the body. Berkeley rejected Cartesianian dualism–that is for sure–but I don’t think he rejected this more basic, intuitive understanding of the nature of mind.
I’m going to take this as an answer to my question. I asked whether anything other than sensory perception could define reality for a subject (for example, thought, emotion, this “sense” of really existing external objects when we aren’t looking, etc.). You’re essentially saying “no”. If we perceive a physical object, that makes the object real. But if we have a “sense” that the object continues to exist when we aren’t looking, the very notion that this sense could be onto something is a reductio ad absurdum. That’s what you’re saying, right?
OK, but the only thing we’re really forced to admit “exists for no other reason than that it does” is perception and experience. It doesn’t follow that nothing else exists. The materialist could still be right. If you want to say the materialist position is a reductio as absurdum, that’s a different argument than that perception and experience “exists for no other reason than that it does”.
You’re misunderstanding me. Imagine someone on the other side of the planet incurring a broken arm. She’s in extreme pain. Now imagine me, on this side of the planet, completely oblivious to this person and her pain. Here you have an example of an extremely intense experience of pain without any knowledge (in my mind) of the pain. I know she as knowledge of the pain, but what I’m saying is that it’s possible for the kind of relation between her pain and my knowledge of it (or lack thereof) to exist not only between two people but within a single person. Actually, I feel more comfortable talking about a single brain (as I’m reluctant to say it would be a single united person if there’s this dissociation between the pain and the knowledge). I don’t really have a problem talking about “brains” even if brains are only a sensory representation of the mind–as representations, they can still be talked about as if this is where all the activity is really going on. Imagine the pain centers in a person’s brain. Imagine the knowledge centers. Imagine that the nerves that connected these two centers were severed so that activity in the pain centers couldn’t stimulate any activity in the knowledge centers, essentially meaning that the person who was “in pain” could not know about it.
This wouldn’t be a Freudian kind of unconsciousness. A Freudian unconscious would be one in which psychic material were being deliberately repressed or denied, but again, it still comes down to knowledge. One willingly blocks out knowledge of one’s other experiences.
In the case of the Freudian unconscious, there is a sense in which the unconscious experience is still a part of the same person. It is that the experience isn’t really unconscious, but rather transformed. The knowledge that “I am angry,” for example, might still be denied, but the knowledge that “George is an evil, evil person and deserves to be punished!” takes its place. So you deny that you’re angry but you still believe that George deserves punishment. It’s too bad you don’t quite attribute the same reality-defining power to inner mental states (such as thought and emotion) as you do sensation, because if you did, we could talk about the projection of an emotion like anger onto reality. We could say that although one is in denial about being angry, one still is very much aware of, and experiences, the anger in its projected form–namely, as the state of George’s deserving punishment.
My argument is that even if this is so (as I don’t have any knowledge of the actual mind of Berkeley as evidence that he didn’t possess this basic intuition about mind–that it is “illusory” and therefore transitory as compared to the “physical”), the existence of this misperception seems to exist only in Berkeley’s own reductio ad absurdum when he takes the concept of “unperceived, senseless matter” (the physical) to task. The thing is that Berkeley ceased to believe in the existence of the physical (that which is not experience at all): any talk about the physical, and its relation to mind, is thereby tongue-in-cheek. Any dualism remaining exists only in his facetious adoption of the physical, not in his serious proposition of the exclusiveness of experience and mind. Thus the dualism, if any, exists only within something he discounts in the first place—making the stuff he takes seriously (the solitary existence of experience and perception) impervious and thus not an unfortunate consequence of any residual dualism he may retain—as this dualism is ultimately held fictional.
Sort of. Now that you stated the question in the way you have above, I can readily admit that something other than sensory perception–in the relevant case the “sense” that an object continues to exist when no one perceives it—can define reality for a person (in the negative sense, in this case). My view that the very notion that this sense is onto something is a pseudo-induction, with the falsity of the induction being revealed by substantial, creative, and causal reason.
For example, one perceives a chair in a room. One leaves the room, leaves the house in which the chair sat, and drives to the other side of town. One no longer perceives a chair in a house, but a river, perhaps, or a nightclub scene. The question remains, then, whether or not the chair continues to exist when no one is perceiving the chair (only you and anyone who has entered the house and seen the chair knows it exists, so there is this added weight of lack of knowledge of the chair’s existence by every other being on the planet never setting foot in the house to observe the chair).
But does it continue to exist, and if so, what is it made of–given that in its un-perceived form it is not made up of the substance of one’s experience (or anyone’s experience for that matter).
Whatever you try to imagine, you will only imagine the chair in thought-form, and this thought-form is made up of your experience of thinking of a chair. But the actual chair, if it exists, cannot be made up (barring Phenomenalism and Idealism) any experience at all, whether in thought-form or not? Why? Because in reality as we actually experience it, experience is always accompanied by someone experiencing it. Thus the chair, if it continues to exist—is unimaginable in its true form precisely because it is not the experience or the imagination of anyone, and it is thus not made out of the substance of one’s experience or imagination.
Given this, can we confidently state with unquestionable, unerring certainty that it definitely exists? That it (choke) must exist? That it has anything at all to do with the existence of our perception (given that it, in its true form, is not made out of perception or has nothing in its substance that has anything related to perceiving at all)? That we perceive it? Shown in this light, it is revealed that an un-perceived chair not made out of the perception or personal experience of anyone is ultimately a fictional creature, something made up as a natural consequence of an incredulity and disbelief that perception or experience can exist without something behind it (whose appearance must mimic the content of visual experience or perception) that is not just more experience and perception.
If the unperceived is not just more unperceived perception and experience (i.e. the unperceived perceptions of another person or even brute experience independent of personhood), then it simply is not experience or perception at all. If it is not experience and perception, then the existence of experience and perception cannot be found in it, nor can it emerge from it—save through magic. In our unnecessary need to posit the existence of something other than experience or perception, we continue inventing fictions that force that which isn’t experience or perception to produce experience or perception or to become experience and perception. It’s all comic book make-believe, stuff that cannot be demonstrated by experiment (because the only thing that can be demonstrated by experiment, given that we are all nothing but experiences made out of one’s experience is just more experience) but never mind that—it must exist and worse, it must have something to do with experience and perception.
How can it not follow that nothing else exists besides perception and experience—the conceptual (albeit unimaginable) notion that something other than perception and experience could, for all we know, exist (that a human cannot determine what can exist or not)? In the extreme, one could concede to the latter based solely on principle and the fact that one cannot know that perception and experience are the only things that exist—but this would merely be concession to a principle, not evidence of the existence of things beyond perception and experience. Why? Because the materialist cannot demonstrate that he or she is right, simply because the materialist can do nothing but experience things that are made up only of the materialist’s experience (we cannot experience something that is not experience at all, thus validating an objection to the term “only” in this sentence).
Even if the materialist is right, and things other than perception and experience exist, given that these things aren’t experience and perception we cannot rationally or logically state that they have anything to do with the existence and appearance of experience and perception.
I would really like, in a morbidly curious way, to know what it could be like to feel actual pain but not know you were in pain, despite the hypothetical process described above.
That aside, having no knowledge of another person’s pain because you do not see the person behave in such a way as to infer the individual is in pain may be besides the point when it comes to the notion of the unconscious mind as I use it (relevant to my theology). For example:
This is an example of Freud’s notion of repression (and suppression), but the unconscious mind, according to Freud, is the storehouse of all unknown and forgotten events, as it is (in concert with the British Empiricists) the storehouse of sensory memory from which dreams are built. Thus this portion of the unconscious mind, absent consciously repressed events and concepts, is the propositional center of mind that exists apart from the conscious mind and its experiences. In this regard, I am attracted to the notion (for the sake of my theology) that, as you say: “it’s possible for the kind of relation between her pain and my knowledge of it (or lack thereof) to exist not only between two people but within a single person”. The unconscious mind is (conceptually) like that: it is conceived, by Freud and others, to be an aspect of oneself, within oneself, with which one has as much access as one does to the personal, private experience of another person.
This is a form of conscious experience (given that one can actually feel the emotion of anger even if one is in denial of it in its projected form), and the transformation is merely an explanatory (even if inwardly and privately to oneself) style that ultimately does not but shy away from the fact that one is, well, angry. The notion of the unconscious mind, however, is simply the notion that there is mentality “within” oneself that is not accessible (save in dreams, slips of the tongue, or sudden inspiration) to the self. The notion of the unconscious mind in psychoanalysis (and anywhere else) is necessary–for the opposite of this is the admission that forgotten but suddenly remembered memory does not exist–but absurdly springs into existence out of nothing regardless of its significant, appropriate, and rationally sequenced and referential content.
I wasn’t talking about Descartes’ dualism, I was talking about how he conceptualized “mind-stuff” itself. We can both agree that Berkeley most definitely rejected dualism, but the “mind-stuff” that remains is (I suspect) the same “mind-stuff” that Descartes believed in. This is what I’m unclear about though. There’s nothing to indicate in his writing that Berkeley rejected this Cartesian “mind-stuff,” only Cartesian dualism (but he may not have subscribed to Cartesian “mind-stuff” after all). What I’m saying is that whether we accept Cartesian dualism or a brand of idealism that still holds onto Cartesian “mind-stuff” (but without Cartesian “matter-stuff”), we’re usually still dealing with the same old intuitive pre-Cartesian concepts of “mind” and “matter” (or just “mind” in any case).
There is the Berkeleian response: the chair always exists because God is always perceicing it.
But putting that aside, I wonder if it could be fair to say that the same reasoning we use to justify the reality of perceived objects could be used to justify the reality of the “sense” we have that those same objects continue to exist when not perceived. I mean, don’t we say that the perceived chair is real because the perception of the chair is itself real? Then why can’t we say that the “sense” that the chair continues to exist even unperceived is real because the “sense” is real?
I won’t debate this. I’ll just say that this is still a different argument than an appeal to a thing’s existence sheerly on the fact that we observe its existence. You can reject materialism on some account other than self-evident existence (and you did) but you need to put something else in its place that also depends on an account other than self-evident existence. All the self-evident existence card gets you is that experiences/perceptions exist (even materialists agree with this even if they say such experiences/perceptions are ultimately brain processes). What lies beyond these perceptions and experiences such that we can have our own (personal) ones? And how?
I can’t answer that question. Just the thought experiment alone would presuppose knowing about the existence of the pain. You just have to think about pain and knowledge being represented by different brain centers. Knock out the latter, and the rest just follows.
Could we not, then, conceive of it as another person? Who says being in the same body means having to be part of the same person?
Perhaps I’m not understanding what is meant by “Freudian”–but I’m sure the content of the unconscious must be repressed there, or put there by way of some spychoanalytic defense mechanism, for that always seems to figure into the case studies that Freud dealt with. So are we talking about the repression of the knowledge of one’s mental state (like anger) or the repression even of that very mental state itself (so that, as it were, one doesn’t even feel angry anymore)?
The only thing I can say about this is that in the final analysis, objective reality trumps subjective imagination and belief. Regardless of what Descartes, or possibly Berkeley, considered “mind”—the fact remains that existence as it actually presents itself, regardless of what we label it, appears only in the form of what you below dubbed: self-evident existence. Self-evident existence is only nothing but one’s experience. In the end, the concept that experience isn’t “real” but is only an “illusion” when compared to something that is truly “real” (a conceit, I suppose, of Descartes when considering the external world) is an unfortunate delusion or misperception.
The “there-ness” of things, I hope we can agree, indicates that whatever is “there” (in our case, whatever one experiences even if it is believed not to have an analog in the external world) is absolutely real. There is probably no such thing as something being “there” while simultaneously being “not there” (unless we’re talking about an experience that is believed to have no analog in the external world).
Point being, if the objective trumps the subjective and if Berkeley’s reasoning bears out in every part of his philosophy despite his holding on to the concept of Cartesian “mind-stuff”–this cognitive mistake on his part does not change the fact that objectively, non-Cartesian mind (to which he unknowingly refers) possesses the properties and exists in the external world in just the way he imagines it does, having just the relation to our consciousness he theorizes.
His mistaken belief in its “ephemeral-ness” or his thinking of mind as something over and beyond mere experience [mind=(universally or generally)=experience; mind=(specifically or particularly)=mental experience or thought)] does not, by that fact that he thinks of mind this way, alter or negate the truth about actual, objective mind (experience) in the external world and how it creates and interacts with personal experience. At this point, I can only shrug at speculation of whether or not Berkeley holds to the conception of Cartesian “mind stuff”, as his idealistic equation of how experience (which is what it is objectively) exists in the external world and forms the warehouse from which our experience arises or emerges is nevertheless “spot on” (within conceptual reason).
But even in the case of God always perceiving the chair, the ‘external’ chair in this sense is nevertheless composed of perception itself (God’s perception), and is not something that isn’t perception and experience at all.
But what in the perception of the chair (the percept) makes the “perceived” chair (the distal object) real? The perception of the chair and the chair that is “perceived” are two entirely different things (as the chair can exist in the absence of the perceiver, for the sake of argument). How does the existence of one cause the existence of the other? For those who believe that the brain causes or creates perception and experience, there is the tale of a transference of force (in the form of light, sound waves, pressure, etc.) from the distal object to the body in which the brain is encased. The forces impinge upon nerve cells of the PNS or the facial organs (particularly the eyes), with the sole import of this impingement being that these forces must somehow cause electrical signal(s) that will excite neurons of the cerebral cortex. If this is not done, why, we will have no percept or perception of the distal object at all!
But even here, the distal object, the forces exerted by or the force-carrying particles emitted from the distal object, the body itself or its nervous passages to the brain themselves do nothing and play no role in the creation of the percept (perception of the distal object): only the part of the cerebral cortex (or its function) corresponding to the actual appearance of the percept is responsible for completion of the causal chain of experience and perception. Every other object taking part in the causal chain outside the actual neural circuit bringing for the perception? Nothing more than the finger of the hand flipping the switch. Thus the “perceived” object, does not, itself, create perception “of” the object. Thus we can throw out the logic that the perceived object must exist because there is perception of the object on the basis that perception of the object results from its being directly created by the object itself.
Therefore, if there is to be any logic or reason behind the supposition that because there is perception of a chair an “actual” chair must exist (one that still exists when no one perceives it), a middleman that is neither perception of the chair nor the chair itself must autonomously come between them to create the relationship. The cerebral cortex usually plays this role, but in its absence (or impotence for the sake of any type of idealism) the substance making up the external chair and the substance making up perception of the chair must be identical. Non-experience can rationally have nothing to do with experience, for from whence does non-experience derive something that it, itself, is not? It follows then, that the perceived chair and perception of the chair are both composed of experience. The “middleman”, itself, must also be composed of experience–for again, from whence doth non-experience–that which isn’t experience or perception at all—come up with experience or perception?
But this reveals that the phenomenal chair truly has nothing to do with the existence and presence of “perception” of the chair in principle, and in practice it has nothing to do with the existence of someone perceiving something that they call “a chair” without the timely and autonomously behaving aid of the interloper, the phenomenal middleman. But why should the middleman automatically and instantaneously produce, out of all the things it could produce, someone’s visual experience of an object that is called a “chair” because the phenomenal chair exists? Why does the presence of the one necessitate the presence of the other, if the one directly or “personally” cannot or does not create the other?
Finally, the “sense” that objects continue to exist when no one perceives them, the reasoning we use to justify the existence of objects that continue to exist when no one perceives them, and the notion that we actually perceive objects in the external world are ultimately just experiences. Their truth value (the actual existence of the distal objects to whom they refer) ultimately relies upon the magic of revelatory knowledge. There is no logical or rational tie between them save for this magical belief that because there is one, there must be the other, even if the other has nothing to do with the existence of the one (and vice versa). It’s ultimately a matter of faith. My final point, I suppose, is that external analogs to perception are not ontologically necessary to the existence of perception. Purportedly “perceived” chairs, for example, certainly do not require perception of them in order to exist (save perhaps, in their creation [for the sake of argument]: my argument is that the reverse is true as well.
We observe the existence of our perceptual experience of something, but this “something”, again, is upon introspection an aspect of ourselves (as it emits from oneself, and not whatever supposedly exists outside or is not part of oneself). We only mistakenly believe that the percept is one and the same thing as the distal object, or that we can observe distal objects as opposed to an experiential projection that emerges from the self.
It is absolutely necessary to create an account that rejects materialism that is something other than self-evident existence (for no other reason, I think, than to avoid solipsism), but in order to rationally explain the presence of self-evident existence (without pulling it from non-existence, the only alternative) in relation to this “other”, self-evident existence must transparently “come from” or emerge from this “other” without the hocus-pocus of creation ex nihilo or even brute transformation from one type of existence to another. Given this, what lies beyond our perception and experience can only rationally be just more perception and experience, and it is from the substance of these that we derive personal experience. As for how? Imaginatively, it must be a case of a being’s experience “trading places”, so to speak, so as to become the experience of another, or there must needs be a micro-to-macro collocation, akin to the thought of atoms aggregating into macroscopic objects. I think we’re all (those of us daring to scrape against the glass of Phenomenalism or Idealism) standing before an empty board concerning the how at this point.
But in the pertinent case, the external world, rather than the brain itself, is behind the correlative effects, if the brain and its “dysfunction” is not behind the loss in knowledge of pain.
That’s interesting. I suppose whether or not one wishes to believe in the above would depend upon their intentions, or whether or not one is prepared to accept the fact of persons-within-persons. I’ve always wondered whether or not the fictional characters we invent in our minds or the people we dream in dreams are philosophical zombieshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombies, or do they have actual, “sub-dimensional” consciousness within a holistic “overlapping” consciousness (oneself)?
A concession and clarification here:
By “Freudian”, I mean referred to by Freud or thought by Freud to be. In response to your question, I quote David L. Rosenhan’s and Martin E.P. Seligman’s Abnormal Psychology (pg. 69, 74) 1989:
Modern psychodynamic theory is concerned with the introcosm (Jaynes, 1977), the vast subjective psychological space that is the storehouse of personal experience within each of us.
Freud (1923) proposed that there are three levels of consciousness. The first is perceptual consciousness, consisting of the very small number of mental events to which the individual is presently attending. Being aware of reading a book and of the meaning of a passage would exemplify this kind of consciousness.
The second level of consciousness is pre-conscious. It consists of information and impulses that are not at the center of attention but that can be retrieved more or less easily. Though not now part of one’s central awareness, last night’s dinner can be recalled with little difficulty.
The large mass of memory, experience, and impulse lies at the third level of consciousness: the unconscious. Two kinds of memories become unconscious: (1) those that are forgotten, and (2) those that, because of conflict are repressed, or actively barred from consciousness. Ordinary forgotten events, such as the cost of a loaf of bread last year, gradually decay and exert no subsequent influence on personality. But repressed events live on, and all the more vigorously, because they are not subject to rational control. They reveal their potent identities in normal fantasies and dreams, in slips of the tongue and “motivated” forgetting, under hypnosis and in a variety of abnormal psychological conditions. By far, unconscious forces are the dominant ones in personality.
Turns out, then, that repressed memories are the most numerous inhabitants of the unconscious mind, as you said (with forgotten memories second). This agrees, interestingly enough, with Empiricism in the sense that the unconscious mind in man seems to be inhabited by mental events that were once conscious but that then became unconscious. My theology, conversely, invokes an unconscious mind in God which, unlike the unconscious in man, is largely and primordially unconscious, having never entered the conscious mind of God but simply exists unconsciously by fiat. This would necessitate (?) the notion of “other-consciousness” being a part of or existing within “one’s” consciousness from the start (which makes the aforementioned statement of ‘another person’ being within the same body all the more compelling.
Agreed. I think this is what Berkeley was trying to do.
So you believe that the objects we perceive are real because they are one and the same as our perceptions of them, and the latter are most definitely real, ergo so are the objects. But you’re also saying that the logic of our thoughts may be false even if they are perceived by us to be true. This latter point seems to imply that there is indeed a division between thought and truth (much like the division between perception and perceived that most people believe in). Is there such a thing as unexperienced truth? If so, then there is such a thing as a non-experience.
Good answer.
This would only be a concern if you believed the phenomenal brain was not a faithful representation of the mind and any extraneous experiences local to it. If it is a faithful representation, then you could use brain-talk and mind-talk interchangeably, understanding that when you say the one, you’re really talking about the other (that’s what representations or good for, after all). If knocking out the thought centers of one’s brain results in (aparent) obliviousness to pain, then this tells us something about the mind. You might have to appeal to certain extraneous experience, such as those that would correspond to the instruments the neurosergeon uses to tamper with the brain, and these would be said to belong more to God than the subject’s mind, but the logic does fall into place in the end.
I don’t really think of the unconscious as something “within” the individual, but more like “attached.” There would be channels of communication between the two, of course. Not all parts of the brain are conscious (in the epistemic sense), but they all come with experience (in my theory of idealism). They are all attached–some are attached directly to the epistemically conscious centers, some to the experiential centers of which we are epistemically conscious, and some have no direct attachment to either of the latter (though they might be able to communicate with either of the latter in indirect ways).
I will leave this alone (after this response), because as stated before if the objective trumps the subjective, the external result postulated by Berkeley obtains regardless of his Cartesian view of mind (if indeed his view of mind was Cartesian). The charge that his view of mind is residually Cartesian due to the period of time (in relation to Descartes) in which Berkeley formed his philosophy is ultimately, I think, mere speculation and supposition about what was in Berkeley’s mind—a supposition perhaps not revealed in his writings.
(“Object! Speculation! If it pleases the court, is the government’s counsel honestly asking this witness to testify as to what Berkeley thought in regard to the underlying nature of mind?”).
As before, Berkeley’s true achievement and aim is the logical “demonstration” of the non-existence of substantial and material non-experience, or at least the non-existence of any relation it can have with experience.
The objects we perceive are aspects of and emanate from ourselves: they are not one and the same things as the distal objects to which they (propositionally) refer (assuming the existence of distal objects for the sake of argument). They are as much a part of ourselves as our bodies. There is one’s perception or experience of internal experience and a centralized ‘body’ (proprioception), and experience or perception of something other than one’s internal experience and a central ‘body’ (exteroception). But unless one is unconscious (if unconsciousness truly exists), exteroceptive experience “morphs” and alters all the time, as the “objects” of exteroception continually appear and disappear, and alter even in the slightest sense and perspective (at one time one perceives oneself in a room in a house; at another time one perceives oneself downtown, or standing at the shore of an ocean). Perceived “objects” appear and disappear, and are inseparable from the perceiver as they appear only to the perceiver in the form of how they are to the perceiver’s point of view. This is a self-oriented representation of a mental reality. Reality as it truly is and “appears” when the person is not around is unknown and entirely speculative (as the question of whether or not an object continues to be the object it is when no one “perceives” it logically indicates that the “perception” of the object and the object itself are two different things, as one can exist without the other).
If we cannot experience that which lies beyond ourselves, then we cannot establish the truth of its existence using ourselves to establish that truth. We have, ultimately, no rational basis upon which to know with certainty any truth about the external world (as the only thing we can experience is our proprioceptive and exteroceptive self). It is, however, more ‘reasonable’ to believe that there is something beyond oneself, and it is from this ‘beyond’ one came, but we cannot establish the true nature of this outer world using ourselves to know it (in terms of its content, despite the rationality of our suspicion about its substance based on the substance of ourselves). The most we can honestly come up with is rational supposition of the substance of which this world is (wholly? partially?) composed, if we do not wish to think or believe that we pop into existence from a previous non-existence.
The logic of our thoughts, then, when it pertains to that which lies beyond oneself, may be false even if one perceives them as true precisely because one cannot experience or perceive that which is not oneself, thus using oneself one cannot know with certainty if the other exists: the suspicion or “sense” that the other exists is merely an emanation of the self, not a divining rod indicating the content of the external world. This is particularly revealing if there is no creative or causal connection between a “perceived” object that supposedly continues to exist in the form in which it is perceived even when no one perceives it and one’s ‘perception’ of the object.
If there is a truth that is unexperienced, how do we know it is truth independent of experience? We only believe it is true. Everything we suppose the external world is and what it does in regard to verifying our beliefs about it, is ultimately make-believe believed to be truth. The make-believe may coincidentally be true, but one can argue that there is not a magical connection between belief and reality that automatically or lawfully exists simply on the basis of the existence of the belief itself (ergo: “the very fact that I believe x must mean that y [y being a state of affairs or object existing in the external world, for example] is true”*).
[Note: This does not preclude the fact that y is true: it means only that y is not or cannot be known to be true just because one believes that y. Thus y, if true, is only coincidentally true, and the truth of y is not a result of nor indicated by one’s belief that y.]
[Note 2: This seems especially true if no gods exist. How can the external world know that it exists, much less know that there are beliefs about it that must be invisibly established as true because such beliefs exist?]
By “non-experience” I do not mean that which isn’t experienced but that may nevertheless still exist, but that which isn’t experience qua experience at all (even if it nevertheless exists).
But the relevance of such correlation is implication of causality: correlations between brain-states and consciousness-states can be read as the appearance of conscious state because of the action of brain-state (as opposed to the action of something that is not the brain at all in the external world). Absent Phenomenalism and Idealism, the problems of Psychophysicalism emerge with consideration of the brain as originator or cause of conscious or unconscious state. With Phenomenalism and Idealism, these problems are avoided, and the representation that is the brain can boast causality in Phenomenalism due to the sameness of substance of brain and consciousness, or have relevance in Idealism as a representation or symbol of conscious state, or transcending this, a representation or symbol of God’s intelligence in the form of the correlation (negatively demonstrated by brain/consciousness dysfunction or malfunction). Within the rubric of Idealism, I am not adverse to the brain’s representation of consciousness, nor the correlations between brain-state and consciousness-state, knowing (or believing, in respect to the “big talk” above) their ultimate source and what they ultimately symbolize and represent.
My ultimate beef with psychophysicalism is against Non-Mental or Non-Experiential Psychophysicalism.
The notion of the unconscious being “attached” rather than “within” the individual seems to be another manifestation of the necessity for an external arena that supports and “feeds” the self, as the unconscious being “within” the person implies that there are areas within a person that function in the same non-intersubjective way as the consciousness of another person. It’s all speculative in the end, and the world could be so strange a place that either view (perhaps not both) may be true. For my part, the notion that the unconscious is “outside” a person rather than a non-intersubjective area within the person works in my ontology in regard to man (and animal) and his relation to God (the external Person as opposed to external world, in my view). I believe, however, that the unconscious is necessarily “interior” when it comes to the External Person, but it is not out of the realm of possiblity that there can be an ‘external’ attachment to this Being in the form of separate spaces of conscious and unconscious mind that nevertheless connect and communicate–with this connection/communication (due to their connection and communication) forming two disparate aspects of a single Person.
So beliefs can be wrong. So too can perceptions, it would appear. If my perception of a chair is not really the chair it appears to be (i.e. it’s not really “distal” from me, as you put it), then my perception of it as being distal is wrong. Are we now going to pick apart perceptions themselves and scrutinize their components? The spatial position of the chair, as given in my perception of it, is wrong, but are we still to say that the chair itself is real (as a component of my perception)?
If Berkeley’s argument is that there is definitively a “something” there which we are experiencing (call it “matter,” call it “mind,” whatever), then this same argument can be carried over to anything we are experiencing–truth, the spatial positions of objects, etc. You can argue all you want that the belief in outer, independent, material objects is incoherent and fallible, but all you’re doing is changing the way this belief feels to you–from ‘true’ to ‘false’–and by this Berkeleian argument, it is false for you. For someone who hasn’t gone through your argument (or has but rejects it), this idea will seem true to him, and therefore will be true for him. Likewise, if an object appears to be distal from us, and we call that “distance,” then by the Berkeleian argument, we must say that distance has always been real and it just refers to that aspect in our perception that we call “distance”.
No, like I said before: whatever happens to the brain is a representation of what happens in the greater mental universe beyond our minds. If a doctor uses an instrument to knock out a part of the brain, and this results in some kind of change in subjective experience, we don’t have to say that the doctor’s manipulation of the brain cause the change in subjective experience, but we could say instead that whatever the doctor’s manipulation represents (namely, God’s interference) caused the change in subjective experience (through non-physical means).
