That depends. It’s not naive/traditional materialism, because you are talking about minds correlating with brains. It is compatible with modern forms of materialism which claim causal reducibility, but as far as I am concerned that is a deterministic sort of dualism, not materialism. It’s also compatible with substance dualism and neutral monism.
For me, the key claim of “modern materialism” is that all pattern of connection and influence can be reduced to physical patterns of connection and influence. It is actually a claim about causality - the claim that all causality is physical causality. Traditional or naive materialism is about realms of existence.
It’s not, dorky, unless you start with some mysterio-mysticalistic-metaphysicalist-rationalist definition of consciousness to begin with.
Rationalists are sneaky.
This one (whoever it is being quoted) wants to be defeated by a “better” logical argument. But the premises are where the action is.
“All first person subjective experiences” means almost anything you want to.
Well, that’s an exaggeration. But what the writer is doing is using a definition that looks precise enough, but isn’t.
But the real problem is that it is presented as a foundational assumption, as if materialism (or any other view) hinges upon this one issue. It doesn’t. Or needn’t. Metaphysics allows for an explanation of just about anything, if you can call it an explanation.
We use our brains to decide these things - we all do. To remove this as an assumption would necessarily lead to something other than our brains. So…mind! Voifuckingla!
He says he is a deductivist, BTW. A person without much philosophical background but very good at pure logic and mathematics.
He was trying to understand the argument I was having with somebody else. The first bit of the quote in the third post was his attempt to guess what argument I was going to provide him with. The second bit was the argument I ended up providing, and the premises are indeed where the action is. Premise (5) is a deliberate red flag to anyone who agrees with Wittgenstein’s private language argument. You could view the whole argument as an example of the sort of philosophical problem Wittgenstein claimed he was “dissolving.” If you allow people to make private ostensive definitions then you end up with problems like this one. However, since most people think they can use a POD to define consciousness, and happily accept the premise even when warned about Wittgenstein…
The problem with materialism is how it accounts for qualia. Which is to say, how do physical things account for the feeling or thought or whatever that I experience. There are kinds of ingenious explanations for it, some outright deny this “inner feeling”, while others go around it and say that the mental supervene on the physical, and others say that the “inner feeling” is actually just outward behavior. It’s kind of like the rationalists and there attempt to reconcile determinism with free-will. It’s not very convincing, and what’s more, it’s a poor excuse for philosophy.
Take geoff’s type of “Modern materialism”, reductionism, for example. Does it actually do what we’ve asked it to do? Sure, it’s gone around the ontological distinction between mind and body, a distinction that no one wants, but has it told us what the mental is, or how the physical accounts for it? I certainly don’t think it has. It’s told us that the physical is the generative cause of the mental, but it hasn’t told us how…it hasn’t even told us what the mental is. The problem remains, and what’s more, goes untouched.
I think first thing we would all benefit from a cessation in the endless arguments against archetyped classifications of belief - all it does is attempt to define the other persons beliefs for them and then identify the weaknesses in those self-spun definitions - you inevitably end up bickering with a strawman. The mere fact that there is so much confusion and so little consensus about what the “materialist” does and doesn’t believe should be a red flag that we are approaching the argument from entirely the wrong direction . . .
Faust, does it feel like anything to have consciousness?
Indeed, PODs do bring up problems like this - and I’m skeptical they can even be solved.
However, like you said, the great majority of people do accept PODs, myself included, and among us, the problem of whether one can identify consciousness and verify its existence is really a non-issue. We do have to be wary that what I call a ‘thought’ or a ‘memory’ or ‘anger’ may not be anything like what you call a ‘thought’, a ‘memory’, ‘anger’, and so on. But so long as we both agree that we have thoughts, memories, anger, etc. we can go forward with discussions about them. These discussions should root out any differences by way of bringing disagreements to the surface, disagreements about what we say about our minds. The less disagreement, the more we can be sure that our minds are at least isomorphic if not the same class of thing.
Frankly, I have a difficult time imagining another type of definition for consciousness at this point - science has yet to come to the rescue with anything possesed of enough consensual acceptability to allow for the type of proof you’re trying to make . . .
I’m no logician, but this seems to beg the question.
“He says he is a deductivist, BTW. A person without much philosophical background but very good at pure logic and mathematics.”
It shows.
Sitt - I do it differently - “mind” is, for me, a metaphor. There is really only brain function. But we use metaphors all the time, without it being troubling. There is nothing troubling about feeling what our bodies do. What else would we expect?
Ugly - I agree, and have said so. But it is also true that “materialist” is also a vague term, yes.
Gib - it’s a problem of language - one that i just exemplified. My body - a useful phrase in common parlance, but a trap in philosophy. The word “my” should always be read in italics - it’s only for emphasis. I am my body and nothing more. English inserts the ego and so requires the possessive. Not that it’s anyone else’s. But it’s just me. Strictly speaking, only a dualist can say “my body”.
I think there is a latent tendency to make mentality a type of afterthought to the physical, an add on. I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding to the point that it is just as incoherent to talk about the brain without the mind as it is to talk about the mind without the brain. And it is incoherent to talk about either without considering it in terms of a concrete individual human. There is a scientific bias in materialism that takes the brain as simply a part of the human organism, an organ that can be separated physically, thus conceptually. However, if you ask me, the brain separated from the human and his lived experience loses it’s braininess. It can be separated physically, but then it is just a lump of tissue and no longer holds the attributes that are relevant to the philosophic consideration of brain. The same goes for the brain considered independent of the mind…it may work for medicine, but it is conceptual nonsense for philosophy.
When you tell me that the mind is a metaphor, I ask myself how does this metaphor work unless the brain qua physical is also a metaphor, that same metaphor. There can be no distinction between the brain and the mind for philosophy, you either have both or you have neither. And they are both incoherent unless considered as constituting a human totality.
Which is to say, Materialism never actually talks about the brain or the mind philosophically, but is subject to a scientific bias that it neither recognizes nor overcomes.
You’re still assuming that the mind issomething. I merely meant that the word “mind” is a metaphor - for several things, depending on its use. You can weigh a brain. You can’t weigh a mind.
A very simple point.
Philsophy is full of nonsense - I don’t see your point there at all.
my response would be that thought you cannot weigh a mind, you can definitely exierience it.
It is that fact that what we have is what we have, illusion or no. not being pragmatic about things would be highly illogical.
you can refer to the mind as a metaphor if you are talking about the materials which create and dictate the mind, but there is stilll such a thing as a self, conciousness, and a steady stream of thought; a mind. Think about it for your self for a second… And you will instantly have the evidence you need…
What’s the difference between free will and a robot who doesn’t understand his programming?
That’s what I am getting at, W. “Mind” is a catchall for those things you mention - it’s an abstraction. Abstractions are very useful, but they aren’t literally real.
I mean that brains can be measured, that they exist on the spatio-temporal plane. They have height, depth and length. Mass. Density. They exist. They take up space in skulls. Where are minds?
Wait, are you saying that the metaphor isn’t “something” or that the several things this metaphor stands for aren’t something. I don’t like this stepping back to consider the words as words rather than the words as stand ins for referents, it’s silly.
