Is mind a spiritual (non-material) entity?

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Is mind a spiritual (non-material) entity?

Idealism is a label for the philosophical position that rejects realism. Realism is the view that the world is only matter and that objects are independent of mind and can be known as they really are. Idealism stresses the spiritual (other worldly) characteristic of mind, which is different in kind from body.

Idealism has many definitions but all focus on the assumption that consciousness is detached from its concrete socially situated subjects. Such an assumption leads to the isolation of ideas from the concrete body. Theories, beliefs, human conduct and other products can be understood and analyzed in isolation from the historical subject. A giant unbridgeable gap develops between mind and body.

Idealism holds the twin principles nature or matter on one hand and spirit, God, ego, etc. on the other. Man and woman are creatures harboring two distinctly different realities within one structure. We are bipartite beings. Thought, especially theoretical thought is a substance of the spirit thus intellectual, moral, artistic and such are activities of the spirit.

Consciousness is the property of the spirit and because spirit transcends the world of matter then philosophers surmise consciousness is autonomous and independent, governed by non-material principles.

This tradition of an autonomous reason began long before evolutionary theory and has held strongly since then without consideration, it seems to me, of the theories of Darwin and of biological science. Cognitive science has in the last three decades developed considerable empirical evidence supporting Darwin and not supporting the traditional theories of philosophy and psychology regarding the autonomy of reason. Cognitive science has focused a great deal of empirical science toward discovering the nature of the embodied mind.

The three major findings of cognitive science are:
The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

These findings of cognitive science are profoundly disquieting for traditional thinking in two respects. “First, they tell us that human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains. Second, these results tell us that our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real.”

I hold the view that there is no body/mind dichotomy (division into two mutually exclusive or contradictory groups or entities). It seems to me that one must be an idealist to believe that a person has a soul. Do you have a different view and does that view agree with Darwin’s view of natural selection?

Quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh”.

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See my post to Dunamis in the categorical imperative thread. What does not emerge from what is physical is unknowable.

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I have a slight issue with your use of the word idealism. The first paragraph quoted above is fine, but in the next two paragraphs, you seemed to be describing dualism.

Idealism is the view that reality is composed of mental stuff, in contrast to materialism, the view that reality is composed of physical stuff. Both, however, are examples of monism, because they hold that reality is ultimately made of one thing only. Monism in turn is contrasted with dualism, which stresses that mind and matter are distinct and neither can be explained by, or reduced to, the other.

So it seems that your post is about the debate between dualism (“a giant unbridgeable gap develops between mind and body”) and the more common form of monism, materialism. Just a minor point about definitions. Carry on :slight_smile: .

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Rocky,
Check out Spinoza’s monism in which monistic holism is inclusive of physical and mental experience.

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For an oversimplified explanation:

The brain, the neurons, the electrical impulses, etc., are things we can measure. They are facts, statistics, and physical properties. Memories, emotions, etc., are side effects of these statistics, and have no material or factual properties. They exist, but only as we define them since we are obviously partial to experiencing them.

I agree with your post.

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Thanks for that, I checked out Spinoza’s “Neutral Monism” and it’s quite interesting. Actually it’s similar to the kind of ideas I believe in, heh heh. Anyway, it all gets kind of complicated, with so many forms of monism and dualism possible, especially when we add spiritual perpectives to the mix.

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Material is the nature of all life, including God.

Spiritual, in our experience, is what is created when tens of trillions of these little living cells here on earth get together so closely and so interdependently in a “community” that an axiomatic phenomenon occurs: life that close together creates a new being at the next “level”.

So the material neurons and all their support cells etc in the brain and central nervous system create our “spiritual” experience of heart, mind and soul, about which we have written for eons.

Spirituality, from our perspective is our various states of being a being and of our being’s awareness, thoughts and feelings respectively.

The living components of our spirituality, each of the tens of trillions of living cells, won’t ever “know” as an individual in the community that spiritual experience of the entity they combine to create … just like we will never “know” the spirituality of any entity we might create, should we humans ever become “Borg” or “Matrix” packed so close together that we create a new life at the next level, a spiritual entity.

And hey, for all we know, we are parts in a greater spiritual whole of some kind right now!

Indeed, though God is composed of material, all of the universal material combines to create the “spiritual” being of God … and spirits who are compatible can relate with each other, if one’s heart-based relationship with God is any indication.

Regardless, though God is imminent and transcendent and the name of the universe all at the same instant, without the material, even God wouldn’t be spiritual.

The spiritual depends on the material, for sure.

And the material likely draws its life from the spiritual as “God” of that material community.

But regardless, if a significant number and selection of the material living entities that are a component of that next-level spiritual entity die, so does that spiritual entity die, and such a death, is forever.

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“In physics, there is no broad consensus as to an exact definition of matter. Physicists generally do not use the word when precision is needed, prefering instead to speak of the more clearly defined concepts of mass, energy and particles.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter

Energy and mass are really the same, as energy is mass multiplied by the squared speed of light in vacuum. Particles are relatively durable relative unities, which means they are not really particles (absolutely durable absolute unities) at all. However, where Newtonian physics worked with the concept of particles, quantum physics works with the concept of quanta:

“In physics, a quantum (plural: quanta) refers to an indivisible and perhaps elementary entity. For instance, a “light quantum”, being a unit of light (that is, a photon).”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum

This is the concept of the particle once again, as a quantum presupposes a definite quantum. Like the particle, the quantum is, to speak with Nietzsche, yet another example of “the soul superstition”.

This belief, from which derives our idea of “substance”, is the idea of the subject. It is the idea that “I” am something absolutely durable and indivisible, separate from my body (which, after all, is neither durable nor indivisible). Grammar - our Indo-European grammar, at any rate -, being founded on this belief, tends to strengthen this belief. But it is still a belief, and not knowledge.

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The idea of definiteness implies the idea of equality: for if there could be one exact quantum, why couldn’t there be two? Two equal quanta? Two identical photons, for instance? But two identical photons would have to have identical histories, i.e.: they would have to be the same. “Identity” presupposes sameness, and “something” (supposing there is such a thing as a “thing”) can only be identical with itself - can only be equal to itself. Therefore, no two things can be identical; they can, at most, be similar. But similarity is, of course, a relative concept: all things are similar, in so far as they are “things”, and no two things are equal, so long as they’re not - the same.

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Interesting, I came home today with the idea that I should reverse my way of thought - from idealistic to practical. By idealistic I mean seeing things in from an overacrching perspective, seeing the interconnectedness of things and the things that happen as necessary. Another word for such an outlook could be fatalistic - it suggests a ‘truth’ beyond what physically is - something superiorily ‘real’ to the often arbitrary-seeming reality of day to day life.

This thread adresses this issue directly; I did believe that reality originates from an intention, which is as metaphysical as it gets. Of course an intention can arise from a physical state, but I chose to overlook that. What’s worse - I did not consider that intention to be necessarily my own intention - I figured I had to attune myself to that intention. I think I was the perfect example of a non-atomic, non centralized set of vectors, like the model Sauwelios suggests.

JennyHeart provides the opposite model; that atomistic entities do exist, even if they are comprised of other entities. A human being is in fact a being, not reducible to particles as such, because when it will be reduced to them physically, t it ceases to be a human being.
Sauwelios - you aim at reducing things to their particles and these elements to their elements until you reach the point where everything becomes nothing and vice versa - All is One, and entities within the All do not exist by themselves. I can deduce that as well as you, but all I know is that they do exist. I exist, and you know who I am. And ‘things’ do exist, I need a glass or a cup to drink my tea - regardless whether or not tea or a glass are one with each other and me or not.

So what ‘really’ is my operative model for reality? I hold that reality is forged out of this great sea of mass. A cloud of simple atoms is not reality, as it does not experience itself. Reality becomes increasingly real not as it is explained with more exactitude, but as different perspectives experience themselves increasingly separate from each other until they feel they ‘know’ themselves in the midst of the sea of impersonal becoming.

When this boat of the I is fully established as sea-worthy and floating - then it may be tipped over to experience tragedy, as the consummation of reality. But when, to continue in the sense of this metaphor of a being as a boat at sea, a couple of loose planks are swallowed by the sea, there is noone to experience anything, so there is no reality - even though these planks might have been used to make a boat.

In short, I think that the contention that experience is all stands directly opposite to the idea that there is no I or subject. Experience is subjective and defines the experience as an I.

I think that’s when what we call ‘mind’ arises. That’s probably why the greatest minds are solitary figures, hermits. A member of a stampede is mindless. So - experience is built of substance, subject is built of experience and mind comes into being when a subject is established. And only when mind is operational does the possibility of metaphysicality arise. Metaphysicality is so defined as mental. But the mind as having a physical basis - so all metaphysics are rooted in the physically built illusion of separateness which is true reality. Quite possibly, the metaphysical can lead to an even realer reality, precisely because it is an illusion. The perfect mind, then, is metaphysical - the rudimentary physical.

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This all leads me to argue that it actually takes work to exist. Not all people exist. When you’re primal identification is with a tribe or herd, you don’t exist as an entity, you doesn’t exist., There is no you, you’re just more of the same stuff that exist with or without you. Only when you’re a fully developped boat floating on the impersonal ocean of becoming have you created your own existence.
The world is not random, love or will to power, but will to existence.
Of course ‘society at large’, in cooperation with the forces of decay, pressure an existing entity to dissolve into the great sea. Civil life is one great struggle to remain in existence - and in order to do that you have to force your existence on society.
I did not really understand that up until this point.

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Well Chuck, did you get your answer? I read all the posts and I saw only one obvious “no”, thus no consensus. To be honest most of what was written is just a painful reminder of my philosophical deficiency so I couldn’t really tell. In the absence of a comprehensible agreement that might convince me to change my view, I offer my concept of mind again.

So I can explain what’s happening I define mind as an integration of realized potential mental capacity, mental activity and mental knowledge. It is neither material nor spiritual and I have not yet been convinced it matters that mind is designated as one or the other. For me, mind is just a collection of words that allows me to talk about reaching out to the limits of our mental capacity, the mental end of the physical/mental continuum of becoming what we are capable of being, which as I see it, should be the essence of life.

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Jenny,
This is the you I like!

Consider which will allow me to exist in order to philosophize–an abstract idea or a ham sandwich? First things first.

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The mind/body dichotomy, or Idealism, is a very important concept and it, in my opinion, causes great difficulties that I wish did not exist. I copied several paragraphs from an Atlantic article that spells out the far reaching effects of this matter.

“Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe. Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this phenomenon. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry. Which leads to the question Is God an Accident?”

“Enthusiasm is building among scientists for the view that religion emerged not to serve a purpose—not as an opiate or a social glue—but by accident. It is a by-product of biological adaptations gone awry.”

“We see the world of objects as separate from the world of minds, allowing us to envision souls and an afterlife; and our system of social understanding infers goals and desires, where none exist, making us animists and creationists.”

“The theory of natural selection is an empirically supported account of our existence. But almost nobody believes it. We may intellectually grasp it, but it will never feel right. Our gut feeling is that design requires a designer.”

This is an article in the December issue of “The Atlantic” theatlantic.com/doc/200512/god-accident

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I would call such an outlook “metaphysical”.

I do not need to reduce things to their particles. I can regard things as particles - relatively durable relative unities - in themselves.

You may believe things exist.

You are right: it does stand in opposition:

“imagining postulates precisely the opposite of Being [“Being” here means “Becoming”. So imagining/experiencing postulates precisely the opposite of Becoming, namely, “Being” (in the sense of “remaining-the-same”)]! But that does not mean that it is true! But maybe this postulation of the opposite is only a condition of the existence of this kind of Being, of the imagining kind! That is to say: thinking would be impossible, if it did not fundamentally mistake the essence of esse [das Wesen des esse]: it must postulate substance and that which is identical [das Gleiche], because a cognition [ein Erkennen] of the completely fluent is impossible, it must impute properties to Being in order to exist. There need not be a subject or an object for imagination to be possible, but imagination must believe in both. - In short: that which thinking considers, must consider, to be the real, may be the opposite of that which is!”
[Nietzsche, Nachlass.]

Likewise, one need not be free in order to feel free, but one must believe to be.

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Unless we heal from the effects of imagining a mind/body dichotomy, we cannot expect peaceful coexistence among our global neighbors. The Atlantic article is right on the mark, 'though I would disgree that religion is an evolutionary fluke. It is one of our evolutionary growing pains. We will not get beyond dividing people into good and evil until we outgrow our need for a skydaddy (Nobodaddy or nobody’s daddy, as Blake called him). The mind/body dichotomy pits our longing for static completion against any happiness or good we might find in being creatures in and of matter, carers of our planet, carers about each other.

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As relevant as this is, I think you’ve not entirely caught my point: I mean that this ‘truth’ that is spoken of here, does not exist by itself, it is a function of the illusion of an entity. Existence is defined by experience, and experience requires an I.
To walk ahead; To an entity, the Dionysian is the supreme reality - because it is the supreme experience. The entity realizes in this state that ‘it’ is not, but that only the All is. Yet this would not be realized if the entiry had not been realized first.
This truth of becoming is attained, much like the illusion of the I is attained. In other words, neither is truer than the other.

If experience is all, to feel free is to be free. There is no difference.
If you’d objectify freedom, it would not exist, because existence = experience = bound to conditions.

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It seems to me that one must enter into pure conjecture to entertain this question. It isn’t that we can’t create constructs to see ‘logically’ and find temporarily satisfying answers, but ultimately, we not only do not know, we can’t know.

This much we do know: that all “things” return to the ebb and flow of the process of creation. What are things bring with them a particular timeline which can be nanoseconds or billions of years.

We see patterns, images from within the field, but that isn’t knowing with any specificity. We may construct any model we like, but mind as a separate entity from the material world? It is a question without an answer.

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Not an I, but a Being.

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What’s more, as long as we can neither define matter nor mind, it is not even a real question.

In our mind, mind and matter may be separated. But can we separate our mind from the mind that contemplates this? If not, matter is part of that same mind - if perhaps not of the other but that one isn’t real anyway.

Which is aware of itself because it experiences. I call that an I. What’s the difference to you?