@smcder 2. what views would be incompatible with reflexive monism?
The view that the mind is made of a different substance than the rest of the natural world and thus can't be explained to arise/originate via natural processes.
@smcder Other than parsimony, what principle says we shouldn't suspect this claim as being philosophical convenient? Why not 33 things?
For me it
does boil down to parsimony: 1) I see no reason for there to be more than one substance, and 2) I'm not sure how two different substances would interact unless they had a common origin. For example, information may have the dual properties of physicalness (mass) and mentalness (experience).
@smcder How are you using the word "mystify" here? We may have another problem of terminology ...
One of the ideas that I've suggested is that the mental-self doesn't
experience Greenish, but that the mental-self
is Greenish.
I think that's from where some of the confusion and mysteriousness arises. "How does my mental-self experience Greenish?" That's the wrong question. Your mental-self isn't experiencing Greenish, your mental-self is
composed of Greenish.
Now, there are other "parts" of our conscious mind that can "access" or "look at" the Greenish part of our mind, and this is what I consider our Reflexive Consciousness.
I believe Chalmers once remarked that they real problem isn't Mind-Body but rather Cognition-Phenomenal. That is, how can our cognition interact with our experiences? Back to good old monism for me: if cognitive consciousness and phenomenal consciousness are essentially made of the same stuff, that explains how they can see each other. To me, that's a clue that our mind - while modular - is all made of the same stuff. Currently, I believe the "stuff" is Uniquely Integrated Information which has the ontologically new property of subjective experience.
For all we know, the universe may be awash with systems experiencing subjective phenomenal consciousness who may lack the ability or desire to communicate with other systems.
For me it does boil down to parsimony: 1) I see no reason for there to be more than one substance, and 2) I'm not sure how two different substances would interact unless they had a common origin. For example, information may have the dual properties of physicalness (mass) and mentalness (experience).
This is where my knowledge ends and my questions begin …
Could two different substances
have a common origin? What do we mean by stuff or substance? (see matter below) Why
couldn't two different substances interact? (we have to have a definition of different here - for that matter do any two things actually exist that
don't interact?) And if parsimony is the main thing - one substance with two properties seems … we'll maybe even more complicated than two simple substances … and how do the two different properties co-exist in one substance much less
interact … ? This approach doesn't seem to generate any fewer questions. Again, I think we might be suspicious of parsimony itself as a likely function of an evolved brain rather than a basic principle of
reality. As far as any of us know - reality can be as complex as it wants to be and owes nothing to our convenience - and from at least the popular image of quantum mechanics that I have absorbed, that seems to be the case. I looked up electrons, protons and neutrons:
The
electron (symbol: e−) is a
subatomic particle with a negative
elementary electric charge.
[8] Electrons belong to the first
generation of the
lepton particle family,
[9] and are generally thought to be
elementary particles because they have
no known components or substructure.
[2]
In the modern
Standard Model of particle physics, the proton is a
hadron, and like the
neutron, the other
nucleon (particle present in atomic nuclei), is composed of three
quarks. Prior to that model becoming a consensus in the physics community, the proton was considered a
fundamental particle. In the modern view, a proton is composed of three valence quarks: two
up quarks and one
down quark. The rest masses of the quarks are thought to contribute only about 1% of the proton's mass. The remainder of the proton mass is due to the
kinetic energy of the quarks and to the energy of the
gluon fields that bind the quarks together.
The neutron is a hadron:
In
particle physics, a
hadron
i/ˈhædrɒn/ (
Greek: ἁδρός,
hadrós, "stout, thick") is a
composite particle made of
quarksheld together by the
strong force (in a similar way as
molecules are held together by the
electromagnetic force).
The quark is considered elementary … and the
anti-quark
The photon is also elementary:
A
photon is an
elementary particle, the
quantum of
light and all other forms of
electromagnetic radiation, and the
force carrier for the
electromagnetic force, even when
static via
virtual photons. The effects of this
force are easily observable at both the
microscopic and
macroscopic level, because the photon has zero
rest mass; this allows long distance
interactions. Like all elementary particles, photons are currently best explained by
quantum mechanics and exhibit
wave–particle duality, exhibiting properties of both
waves and
particles. For example, a single photon may be
refracted by a
lens or exhibit
wave interference with itself, but also act as a particle giving a definite result when its
position is measured.
… so now we have duality again - one particle acting like waves and particles …
anti-particles:
The laws of nature are very
nearly symmetrical with respect to particles and antiparticles. For example, an
antiproton and a positron can form an
antihydrogenatom, which has almost exactly the same properties as a
hydrogen atom. This leads to the question of why the
formation of matter after the Big Bang resulted in a universe consisting almost entirely of matter, rather than being a half-and-half mixture of matter and
antimatter. The discovery of
CP violation("CP" denotes "Charge Parity") helped to shed light on this problem by showing that
this symmetry, originally thought to be perfect, was only approximate.
so, now we don't have symmetry …
When I had a look at matter and acceding to wikipedia, it is not a fundamental concept in physics today ...
Before the 20th century, the term
matter included
ordinary matter composed of atoms, and excluded other energy phenomena such as
light or
sound. This concept of matter may be generalized from atoms to include any objects having
mass even when at rest, but this is ambiguous because an object's
mass can arise from its (possibly-massless) constituents' motion and interaction energies.
Thus, matter does not have a universal definition, nor is it a fundamental concept, in physics today. Matter is also used loosely as a general term for the substance that makes up all observable physical objects.[1][2]
…
Different fields of science use the term matter in different, and sometimes incompatible, ways. Some of these ways are based on loose historical meanings, from a time when there was no reason to distinguish mass and matter. As such, there is no single universally agreed scientific meaning of the word "matter." Scientifically, the term "mass" is well-defined, but "matter" is not. Sometimes in the field of physics "matter" is simply equated with particles that exhibit rest mass (i.e., that cannot travel at the speed of light), such as quarks and leptons. However, in both
physics and
chemistry, matter exhibits both
wave-like and
particle-like properties, the so-called
wave–particle duality.
[8][9][10]
… I haven't looked at the rest of this, but there are also forces and fields - how does gravity act on mass? What is gravity?
In the decades after the discovery of general relativity it was realized that general relativity is incompatible with
quantum mechanics.
[18] It is possible to describe gravity in the framework of
quantum field theory like the other
fundamental forces, such that the attractive force of gravity arises due to exchange of
virtual gravitons, in the same way as the electromagnetic force arises from exchange of virtual
photons.
[19][20] This reproduces general relativity in the
classical limit. However, this approach fails at short distances of the order of the
Planck length,
[18] where a more complete theory of
quantum gravity (or a new approach to quantum mechanics) is required.
Quantum Gravity is a whole field of theoretical physics itself:
Quantum gravity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
… so again, where is parsimony? What do we save by folding two different properties into one substance when there doesn't seem to be one substance out there … which elementary particles carry consciousness - Tegmark proposes perceptronium but maybe that's a by product of quantum intuition of thinking as if reality were encompassed by quantum mechanics, and that may be no more right - in fact I wager it won't be any more right than trying to fit everything into a Newtonian framework. QM has pushed us to step outside of the embodied metaphors of cognition and embrace a really weird world … we may have to do that again and again and again … the amazing thing is that we do seem capable of true abstract thought in this sense, as I understand it, there is nothing intuitive about quantum mechanics - we rely on mathematics (and how do we
do mathematics - how does a physical brain do that? I've had not answer to this question but I think there is going to be no escaping it.
