Causative Dualism

[Uccisore]

There’s nothing new under the sun, so the first thing I’d like to know is which philosopher I’m accidentally plagiarizing with these ideas. Other comments and criticisms are welcome, too.

Materialism and Dualism as I see them, and as they were originally conceived, are both quite dead. The universe is not composed of little indestructible spheres colliding with each other. There are forces and waves and currents and laws and all sorts of weird things going on which transcend the limitations of ‘materialism’ so called, though of course the definition of materialism has been expanded and loosened over the years to try to keep up with all the new discoveries.
This expansion of definition has vicariously destroyed substance dualism, as well. Were an angel to land in Times Square and begin performing miracles, the mere fact that it can be seen, heard, and perform actions upon the world around it would be sufficient to render it ‘material’- scientists would propose the existence of an ‘a-particle’ with a few qualities based on the angel’s nature and activities, and that would be that.
All materialism really says, now, is that everything is connected through the same set of physical laws- all the strange forces, particles, waves and so on in the universe are unified through the fact that they act on each other in regular ways that math can describe. That’s the beginning and end of materialism- the ‘substance’ of it is gone, all that’s left is the idea of a unified process.

Causative Dualism, as I'm calling it then, is my proposal that there is, in fact, more than one such process.  We can call all the laws of physics that describe how things move and react with each other 'physical causation'.  There is another process, I would claim, which is closely related to questions of free will and such, which I will call here 'volitional causation'. 

One important note about volitional causation is that it is non-deterministic, while still being appropriately called 'process', and even causative. This is a tough idea to understand for people that are used to thinking in terms of causative monism (materialism), which is most of us. But loosely, the idea here is that there is a connection between "P desires X" and "P acts to acquire X" which is non-random and understandable without being deterministic. If one asks "What other alternative is there between random and determined?" the answer is that volition IS the alternative.  The only way to understand volition is to simply reflect on one's only experience of acting with respect to one's desires- the non-determined, non-random nature of volition is there to be seen. It resists description because

1.) The only words we have to describe it are either synonymous, or else borrowed from deterministic vernacular and thus wrong.
2.) For the same reason that the precise nature of deterministic causation resists description- whatever that reason may be, we are stuck with an intuition that there is a difference between ‘cause’ and ‘constant conjunction’, but that intuition cannot be made explicit, only directly understood. Material and Volitional causation are alike in this respect.

Causative Dualism has it’s biggest impact in how we imagine brain/mind interaction. This is best shown with a diagram, which I’m not net-savvy enough here to reproduce, but I think I can describe the diagram well enough for any reader to imagine.

Picture a string of numbers - 1, 2 3, 4, 5, 6 … on as far as you need. Call this a series of brain events.

Picture, above it, a string of letters- A, B, C, D, E… and so on. Call this be a series of mental events appropriately related to the brain events.

Now imagine arrows connecting the letters to the numbers (and to each other) according to what causes what.

Ordinary materialism (when it bothers to acknowledge mental events at all) follows this pattern: 1 causes 2 and A, 2 causes 3 and B, 3 causes 4 and C, etc.

If you draw this out, you’ll have a string of causes going through the numbers, and vertical lines shooting up to the letters. The mental events cause nothing, they are merely caused in addition to the physical events- this is epiphenominalism.

Supervenience and Property Dualism are a little different. In this case, you have a set up like this: 1 and A cause 2 and B. 2 and B cause 3 and C. 3 and C cause 4 and D.

IF you draw it out, you’ll have a string of causes running through the brain events, another running through the mental events, and criss-crosses connecting each sort of event to the next one in the series of the opposite line. The idea here is that EITHER the brain events and the mental events are two descriptions of the same phenomenon, or that the brain events and the mental events are different, but must always be considered together- they always exist together, and always cause the next pair in the chain together.

Here’s where Causative Dualism is different from Property Dualism. In Causative Dualism, the chain goes like this- 1 causes A. A causes B. B causes 2. 2 causes 3. 3 causes C, C causes D, D causes 4.

Draw it out, and you have a single line that threads up and down through the brain and mental events, looking rather like the edge of a castle wall.

As you can see (I hope), this means that some mental events are purely caused by other mental events - through the process of volitional causation- while at the same time, every mental event still has a physical event in the chain that it corresponds to- either causing it, or caused by it. With this system, no mental event need go without physical representation, but that representation need not be causative.

One of the benefits of this system is that it frees mental life from very specific embodiment. That is- we can easily see how there can be meat minds and machine minds and energy minds and…I dunno, ghost minds or whatever, because volitional causation has it’s own identity independent of how matter works. We already sense this to be true anyway- if there is a volitional rule that goes something like “I want it so I try to get it”, we can see the sensibleness of that rule without adding “because my brain is made of meat”. If there’s angels or true A.I. robots, we would expect them to try and get the things they want.

At the same time, causative dualism doesn't force us to propose some kind of stuff that we can't perceive or understand.   There need not be any such thing as mental substance- since all we're talking about are a unique set of rules of causation, these rules can play out in the medium of meat as easily as some other medium. 

Lastly, interaction between different sets of rules is much easier to understand than interaction between different types of substances. It’s a classic problem of dualism that it seems to make no sense that purely mental stuff could act on a physical world without being in some way physical itself. Laws don’t have this problem- consider the statement,

“If it doesn’t rain, I will be the short stop in tomorrow’s baseball game”.

The laws that govern whether or not it will rain are completely different than the laws of baseball- nobody writing a book about baseball would include a section on climatology- and yet, it is perfectly reasonable to us that the outcome of a system operating on one set of laws can impact a system operating on another.

[James_S_Saint]

@Uccisore

the brain events and the mental events are two descriptions of the same phenomenon

…end of story.

[d63]

I’ll to probably have to read this again. But yeah, I could jump on the causative train. The model you use makes sense and I’m sure it would be something I can use. I’m not sure I would abandoned the property dualism concept just yet since what you are doing seems like a revision and articulation on it. Once again, I would have to go through it and think about it more.

Not to over shadow your point, but I’ve been arriving at something that may or may not be compatible. I’ve been studying Deleuze. And one of the things that came up in Brian Massumi’s User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia is the attraction/repulsion of two types of Bodies without Organs: that between the limitative BwO (that dominated by deterministic whole attractors) and the nonlimitative BwO (that dominated by chance ridden fractal attractors). Now this, of course, is a lot of conceptual poetics common to continentals. However, if we translate them into the more practical and approximate terms of the determined and the random, we have a model for the formation of our limited free will (the participating self) in the clash and interaction of these two. This may deal with the fact that neither a deterministic model or a random one could accommodate free will at any level. However, it could be in an interaction between the two that we could find the source of an emergent property: that which becomes a participating self: one that could easily work under the model you describe.

That said, one of the problems I have with mind/body causation issue is that you have to ask then how it would be that anything would move by the ghostly substance we refer to as energy. I just don’t see how the idea of mind would be any more a violation of natural laws than any other bodily phenomenon. It certainly doesn’t violate the law of conservation. Nothing is created out a vacuum. As we all know, if the body doesn’t eat and breath (take in energy) the body dies, and with it, the mind.

I truly believe that chaotics may be our greatest hope for maintaining the participating self.

But good point Ucci.

[anon]

Uccisore,

We didn’t get off to a good start recently, so I should probably point out up front that I’m very receptive to your ideas here, and that I’m not responding with any feeling of ill will.

@Uccisore

There’s nothing new under the sun, so the first thing I’d like to know is which philosopher I’m accidentally plagiarizing with these ideas. Other comments and criticisms are welcome, too.

Materialism and Dualism as I see them, and as they were originally conceived, are both quite dead. The universe is not composed of little indestructible spheres colliding with each other. There are forces and waves and currents and laws and all sorts of weird things going on which transcend the limitations of ‘materialism’ so called, though of course the definition of materialism has been expanded and loosened over the years to try to keep up with all the new discoveries.
This expansion of definition has vicariously destroyed substance dualism, as well. Were an angel to land in Times Square and begin performing miracles, the mere fact that it can be seen, heard, and perform actions upon the world around it would be sufficient to render it ‘material’- scientists would propose the existence of an ‘a-particle’ with a few qualities based on the angel’s nature and activities, and that would be that.

Seems pretty straightforward – I basically agree.

All materialism really says, now, is that everything is connected through the same set of physical laws- all the strange forces, particles, waves and so on in the universe are unified through the fact that they act on each other in regular ways that math can describe. That’s the beginning and end of materialism- the ‘substance’ of it is gone, all that’s left is the idea of a unified process.

I think most people, wittingly or not, substantialize the laws of nature. I don’t think it’s necessary to do so, though, and I think Hume can help here.

Causative Dualism, as I’m calling it then, is my proposal that there is, in fact, more than one such process. We can call all the laws of physics that describe how things move and react with each other ‘physical causation’. There is another process, I would claim, which is closely related to questions of free will and such, which I will call here ‘volitional causation’.

I think you may be substantializing the laws of nature, here. In other words, rather than working to achieve the best kinds of description, which would best serve our interests in a variety of ways (for instance, in a more robust form as predictive models), you seem to me to be accepting certain categories (“physical”, “volitional”, etc.) at face value and then applying rational thought to try to figure out how two such different kinds of things could conceivably go together. But the conceptual problem is based on the premise of having certain kinds of initial conceptions.

One important note about volitional causation is that it is non-deterministic, while still being appropriately called ‘process’, and even causative. This is a tough idea to understand for people that are used to thinking in terms of causative monism (materialism), which is most of us. But loosely, the idea here is that there is a connection between “P desires X” and “P acts to acquire X” which is non-random and understandable without being deterministic. If one asks “What other alternative is there between random and determined?” the answer is that volition IS the alternative. The only way to understand volition is to simply reflect on one’s only experience of acting with respect to one’s desires- the non-determined, non-random nature of volition is there to be seen. It resists description because

1.) The only words we have to describe it are either synonymous, or else borrowed from deterministic vernacular and thus wrong.
2.) For the same reason that the precise nature of deterministic causation resists description- whatever that reason may be, we are stuck with an intuition that there is a difference between ‘cause’ and ‘constant conjunction’, but that intuition cannot be made explicit, only directly understood. Material and Volitional causation are alike in this respect.

The actions of sentient creatures are neither predictable nor random. This is certainly the case, though it can be argued that the unpredictability is a matter of subtlety and complexity, not a matter of something different than physical causation occurring. Either way though, I don’t think “it’s self-evident” ever counts as an explanation. An explanation always requires putting the phenomenon in question into a framework of some kind – it requires relating the phenomenon to things external to it. Spatially, temporally, conceptually, etc. Don’t get me wrong - I think a statement like “volition resists materialistic explanation” is fine. It’s a subtle point I’m trying to make, and I can’t say with any confidence that I fully understand what I’m saying.

Causative Dualism has its biggest impact in how we imagine brain/mind interaction. This is best shown with a diagram, which I’m not net-savvy enough here to reproduce, but I think I can describe the diagram well enough for any reader to imagine.

Picture a string of numbers - 1, 2 3, 4, 5, 6 … on as far as you need. Call this a series of brain events.

Picture, above it, a string of letters- A, B, C, D, E… and so on. Call this be a series of mental events appropriately related to the brain events.

Now imagine arrows connecting the letters to the numbers (and to each other) according to what causes what.

Ordinary materialism (when it bothers to acknowledge mental events at all) follows this pattern: 1 causes 2 and A, 2 causes 3 and B, 3 causes 4 and C, etc.

If you draw this out, you’ll have a string of causes going through the numbers, and vertical lines shooting up to the letters. The mental events cause nothing, they are merely caused in addition to the physical events- this is epiphenominalism.

Supervenience and Property Dualism are a little different. In this case, you have a set up like this: 1 and A cause 2 and B. 2 and B cause 3 and C. 3 and C cause 4 and D.

IF you draw it out, you’ll have a string of causes running through the brain events, another running through the mental events, and criss-crosses connecting each sort of event to the next one in the series of the opposite line. The idea here is that EITHER the brain events and the mental events are two descriptions of the same phenomenon, or that the brain events and the mental events are different, but must always be considered together- they always exist together, and always cause the next pair in the chain together.

I think both explanations have plenty of power, and it’s not necessary to choose between them. Explanations, after all, are only instrumentally true. They aren’t written in the stars.

Here’s where Causative Dualism is different from Property Dualism. In Causative Dualism, the chain goes like this- 1 causes A. A causes B. B causes 2. 2 causes 3. 3 causes C, C causes D, D causes 4.

Draw it out, and you have a single line that threads up and down through the brain and mental events, looking rather like the edge of a castle wall.

As you can see (I hope), this means that some mental events are purely caused by other mental events - through the process of volitional causation- while at the same time, every mental event still has a physical event in the chain that it corresponds to- either causing it, or caused by it. With this system, no mental event need go without physical representation, but that representation need not be causative.

My own theory is the same. I used to talk about it on Dawkins’s old forum (you can imagine how well that was received). Anyway, I think it’s an excellent point (of course, right? – it’s my point as well, haha).

One of the benefits of this system is that it frees mental life from very specific embodiment. That is- we can easily see how there can be meat minds and machine minds and energy minds and…I dunno, ghost minds or whatever, because volitional causation has its own identity independent of how matter works. We already sense this to be true anyway- if there is a volitional rule that goes something like “I want it so I try to get it”, we can see the sensibleness of that rule without adding “because my brain is made of meat”. If there’s angels or true A.I. robots, we would expect them to try and get the things they want.

Great points.

At the same time, causative dualism doesn’t force us to propose some kind of stuff that we can’t perceive or understand. There need not be any such thing as mental substance- since all we’re talking about are a unique set of rules of causation, these rules can play out in the medium of meat as easily as some other medium.

I don’t think we have to propose substance at all.

Lastly, interaction between different sets of rules is much easier to understand than interaction between different types of substances.

Again, rules don’t interact with each other. Different ways of describing things co-exist with each other.

It’s a classic problem of dualism that it seems to make no sense that purely mental stuff could act on a physical world without being in some way physical itself. Laws don’t have this problem- consider the statement,

“If it doesn’t rain, I will be the short stop in tomorrow’s baseball game”.

The laws that govern whether or not it will rain are completely different than the laws of baseball- nobody writing a book about baseball would include a section on climatology- and yet, it is perfectly reasonable to us that the outcome of a system operating on one set of laws can impact a system operating on another.

We talk about things in different contexts. Many kinds of explanation can overlap with many other kinds of explanation. I’ve said a few times here lately that the entire visual spectrum can be described as shades of grey. But this doesn’t account for color, at all. Dennett’s assertion that there is no new information in the perception of color is really just a restatement of an ideology.

[anon]

Also, Ucci, it seems to me like your views, like my own, are firmly within a lineage whose forbears include substance interactionism and dual-aspect theory. Not sure if you’d agree…

[Uccisore]

Anon, the main reason why I avoid the idea of ‘different descriptions of the same thing’ as being how my dualism works is that I really think the operations of volition -say, the process that goes from wanting a beer to realizing there’s a beer in the fridge to getting up and getting a beer- are something altogether different than a rock bouncing down a mountain, hitting another rock, and hitting another rock. It seems to me that if we say volition is a different way of describing a physical process, we have to be saying that one description is an analogy for the other, and I don’t think that’s the case. I’m closer to a substance dualist than a property dualist, because I really believe that volition is an altogether different sort of thing…I just don’t think you need a different ‘kind’ of matter for that to be the case.
Also, you say something about creature’s actions being neither predictable nor random. Predictability isn’t really a part of my thesis. Both determined actions and random actions can be predictable (the latter if only when considered on a massive scale against some rule of even distribution). Volitional actions can be predictable too- we can know a person well enough to know what they will choose sometimes. The real issue is to point out that volitional actions are neither determined (results of physical causation) or random (results of no coherent process at all).

[Uccisore]

@d63

That said, one of the problems I have with mind/body causation issue is that you have to ask then how it would be that anything would move by the ghostly substance we refer to as energy. I just don’t see how the idea of mind would be any more a violation of natural laws than any other bodily phenomenon. It certainly doesn’t violate the law of conservation. Nothing is created out a vacuum. As we all know, if the body doesn’t eat and breath (take in energy) the body dies, and with it, the

Well, the whole 'mind/body interaction violates the law of conservation of energy' thing is a pretty useless argument. There is NO system that exhibits energy equilibrium, not even the entire universe considered as a whole, so why is it so important that a brain do so?

[anon]

@Uccisore

Anon, the main reason why I avoid the idea of ‘different descriptions of the same thing’ as being how my dualism works is that I really think the operations of volition -say, the process that goes from wanting a beer to realizing there’s a beer in the fridge to getting up and getting a beer- are something altogether different than a rock bouncing down a mountain, hitting another rock, and hitting another rock. It seems to me that if we say volition is a different way of describing a physical process, we have to be saying that one description is an analogy for the other, and I don’t think that’s the case.

I agree, but I think you’ve misunderstood my comments. We create descriptions and explanations of various kinds to make sense of phenomena. We can push boundaries, but it doesn’t seem to make much sense to talk about a rock’s volition. Still though, seeing rocks as material, and seeing material as fundamentally not mind, is simply a product of our everyday experience, which is certainly crude.

I’m closer to a substance dualist than a property dualist, because I really believe that volition is an altogether different sort of thing…I just don’t think you need a different ‘kind’ of matter for that to be the case.
Also, you say something about creature’s actions being neither predictable nor random. Predictability isn’t really a part of my thesis. Both determined actions and random actions can be predictable (the latter if only when considered on a massive scale against some rule of even distribution). Volitional actions can be predictable too- we can know a person well enough to know what they will choose sometimes. The real issue is to point out that volitional actions are neither determined (results of physical causation) or random (results of no coherent process at all).

I’ll think more on this and come back.

[anon]

@Uccisore

@d63

That said, one of the problems I have with mind/body causation issue is that you have to ask then how it would be that anything would move by the ghostly substance we refer to as energy. I just don’t see how the idea of mind would be any more a violation of natural laws than any other bodily phenomenon. It certainly doesn’t violate the law of conservation. Nothing is created out a vacuum. As we all know, if the body doesn’t eat and breath (take in energy) the body dies, and with it, the

Well, the whole 'mind/body interaction violates the law of conservation of energy' thing is a pretty useless argument. There is NO system that exhibits energy equilibrium, not even the entire universe considered as a whole, so why is it so important that a brain do so?

Also, if it makes sense to think of an infinite universe as an open system…

[gib]

This is why I like idealism: one causal chain between mental events the whole way.

Uccisore,

I understand the argument of different causal systems being compatible with each other, but in your diagram of a castle wall, you still seem to be bringing in mental objects (the A, B, C) which are contrasted with physical objects (the 1, 2, 3). There still seems to be a substance dualism lingering.

[Uccisore]

@gib

This is why I like idealism: one causal chain between mental events the whole way.

Uccisore,

I understand the argument of different causal systems being compatible with each other, but in your diagram of a castle wall, you still seem to be bringing in mental objects (the A, B, C) which are contrasted with physical objects (the 1, 2, 3). There still seems to be a substance dualism lingering.

Well, I’m distinguishing between what we call mental events, and what we call physical events, yeah. A thought and a neuron firing are different descriptively and experientially at the very least. I don’t think my system necessarily implies that there’s another kind of stuff that the thoughts are composed of, though. At least, my intention is for it not to. I think you could diagram my system with one line - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and have alternating solid and dotted lines to indicate the different kinds of causation if you needed to understand it from a physicalist point of view. For me it was more about how what we consider to be mental can correspond to the physical without being determined by it.

I may as well bring up at this point that causative dualism is, in fact, compatible with substance dualism OR substance materialism. I happen to think both are kind of silly as I stated, but if I’m wrong, I think the broad strokes of my idea still work.

I should also add that I’m with you on idealism- if I was forced to become a monist, I’d be an idealist in a heartbeat. It’s far more plausible, and there’s far greater evidence for it than physicalism.

[Orbie]

@gib

This is why I like idealism: one causal chain between mental events the whole way.

Uccisore,

I understand the argument of different causal systems being compatible with each other, but in your diagram of a castle wall, you still seem to be bringing in mental objects (the A, B, C) which are contrasted with physical objects (the 1, 2, 3). There still seems to be a substance dualism lingering.

Gib: he did say that he is closer to substance dualism then property dualism, which seems to indicate a precllavity toward a more ideal volitionally causitive duality. (If I understand him right.).

[Moreno]

Your version of dualism reminds me a bit of anomalous monism - ironically enough.

plato.stanford.edu/entries/anomalous-monism/

I’ll come back and add something from my own little mind when I have more time.

[Orbie]

From an even smaller- the irony is not lost on me.

   I apologise.

[Diekon]

I think mental events and brain events are referring to the same thing, but looked at from a different perspective. They are mental events when observed from the inside by the person having the thoughts, and they are brain events observed form the outside by somebody else, a scientist for example. Both are ‘correct’, but partial descriptions of the same phenomena from a different angle. Referring to the same thing, one doesn’t ‘cause’ the other.

OP calls this property dualism, and represent this in the numbers and letters as, 1 and A, cause 2 and B, 2 and B cause 3 and C… .

I’d represent it as 1 causes 2, 2 causes 3,… and A causes B, B causes C,… as two seperate lines not connected, eventhough they are describing the same thing. That’s because we don’t draw causal lines between the thing in itself (what mental and brain events refer to), but between descriptions of the thing, and those the two discriptions are very different and not interchangable. It’s like mixing up a descriptions of chocolade according to how it tastes, and what its molecular composition is. Both use very different concepts in their descriptions that are not necessarily interchangeable.

On materialism… If materialism is a monoism that seeks to describe everything with a particular set of physical building blocks, then i’m not necessarily a materialist because i believe those are not allways the best tools for describing everything… though materialism has proven to be very useful in a number of ways.

On causation… Causation is not necessarily an universal law of nature, but a way in which we try to make sense of the world. It’s a certain language we use, that can be usefull, but not allways and everywhere. It might be usefull when describing in brain events, but not be the most usefull in mental event-descriptions.

I’m not sure if this is similar to OP views, i think that it is to some extend,… but this is the way i look at it now.

[gib]

@Uccisore

Well, I’m distinguishing between what we call mental events, and what we call physical events, yeah. A thought and a neuron firing are different descriptively and experientially at the very least. I don’t think my system necessarily implies that there’s another kind of stuff that the thoughts are composed of, though. At least, my intention is for it not to. I think you could diagram my system with one line - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and have alternating solid and dotted lines to indicate the different kinds of causation if you needed to understand it from a physicalist point of view. For me it was more about how what we consider to be mental can correspond to the physical without being determined by it.

I may as well bring up at this point that causative dualism is, in fact, compatible with substance dualism OR substance materialism. I happen to think both are kind of silly as I stated, but if I’m wrong, I think the broad strokes of my idea still work.

I should also add that I’m with you on idealism- if I was forced to become a monist, I’d be an idealist in a heartbeat. It’s far more plausible, and there’s far greater evidence for it than physicalism.

Fair enough, Uccisore, but again I must pester you on another point: a neurotransmitter is released from a synapse of a neuron, travels across the synaptic gap, and binds to a receptor on the recipient neuron. Assuming this site is excitatory, and putting aside the neuron’s threshold level for firing, this neurotransmitter binding to the receptor will cause the neuron to fire. If it does so according to a physical law, then it must fire. Paralleling this, you say, is another causal flow which you call volitionary. According to this causal flow, the recipient neuron may or may not fire depending on the subject’s choice (although I don’t think we can talk about the subject making decisions about his own neurons firing or not–free will tends to play out on a much higher level–but we can put that aside for now). But if the neuron must fire according to a physical law, how does volition ever get a say in what happens?

@Diekon

I think mental events and brain events are referring to the same thing, but looked at from a different perspective. They are mental events when observed from the inside by the person having the thoughts, and they are brain events observed form the outside by somebody else, a scientist for example. Both are ‘correct’, but partial descriptions of the same phenomena from a different angle. Referring to the same thing, one doesn’t ‘cause’ the other.

I’m in full agreement with this. In fact, I’m inclined to say that the inner description is the more true description–it’s the “stuff” that’s really going on. It’s not so much a subject looking at her inner world, but being her inner world.

[Orbie]

I think volitional dualism is a deconstrution of a one dimensional map into a pre cognative level of self consciousness, where the subject has not even been self defined This basic volitional state leads to higher level dualisms of process, and substance finally of causality.It is still a subject to it"self at thiis level, thogh, a pre conscious, pre logical one, perhaps.

[Diekon]

@gib

@Diekon

I think mental events and brain events are referring to the same thing, but looked at from a different perspective. They are mental events when observed from the inside by the person having the thoughts, and they are brain events observed form the outside by somebody else, a scientist for example. Both are ‘correct’, but partial descriptions of the same phenomena from a different angle. Referring to the same thing, one doesn’t ‘cause’ the other.

I’m in full agreement with this. In fact, I’m inclined to say that the inner description is the more true description–it’s the “stuff” that’s really going on. It’s not so much a subject looking at her inner world, but being her inner world.

More true is maybe a bit to loaded for me, but i agree with what you are getting at. For a brainsurgeon doing brain surgery it might be more usefull to look at it from an outside observer viewpoint, for the average person going about his life, probably not.

[Stuart]

@Diekon

I think mental events and brain events are referring to the same thing, but looked at from a different perspective. They are mental events when observed from the inside by the person having the thoughts, and they are brain events observed form the outside by somebody else, a scientist for example. Both are ‘correct’, but partial descriptions of the same phenomena from a different angle. Referring to the same thing, one doesn’t ‘cause’ the other.

@Gib

I’m in full agreement with this. In fact, I’m inclined to say that the inner description is the more true description–it’s the “stuff” that’s really going on. It’s not so much a subject looking at her inner world, but being her inner world.

@obe

I think volitional dualism is a deconstrution of a one dimensional map into a pre cognative level of self consciousness, where the subject has not even been self defined This basic volitional state leads to higher level dualisms of process, and substance finally of causality.It is still a subject to it"self at thiis level, though, a pre conscious, pre logical one, perhaps.

I think you’re right obe, as soon as ‘it’ (I assume the body/brain) becomes fully conscious of being a subject the 1d map is created. But, it has no true validity. While it obviously manifests itself as a subject virtually everytime, there is nothing saying that it has to. I hope I understood you right. Earlier today Diekon’s post motivated me to make a thread (Our mind and the minds of others, also in the phil. subforum) that speaks on these issues more.

[Stuart]

@Diekon

I think mental events and brain events are referring to the same thing, but looked at from a different perspective. They are mental events when observed from the inside by the person having the thoughts, and they are brain events observed form the outside by somebody else, a scientist for example. Both are ‘correct’, but partial descriptions of the same phenomena from a different angle. Referring to the same thing, one doesn’t ‘cause’ the other.

@Gib

I’m in full agreement with this. In fact, I’m inclined to say that the inner description is the more true description–it’s the “stuff” that’s really going on. It’s not so much a subject looking at her inner world, but being her inner world.

@obe

I think volitional dualism is a deconstrution of a one dimensional map into a pre cognative level of self consciousness, where the subject has not even been self defined This basic volitional state leads to higher level dualisms of process, and substance finally of causality.It is still a subject to it"self at thiis level, though, a pre conscious, pre logical one, perhaps.

I think you’re right obe, as soon as ‘it’ (I assume the body/brain) becomes fully conscious of being a subject the 1d map is created. But, it has no true validity. While obviously it manefests itself as a subject virtually everytime, there is nothing saying that it has to. I hope I understood you right. Earlier today Diekon’s post motivated me to make a thread (Our mind and the minds of others, also in the phil. subforum) that speaks on these issues more.