Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Philosophy Club

[Consul]

Materialism and ontological idealism have different metaphysical interpretations of the same material universe.

The materialists' universe is not "the same material universe" as the idealists' one. Berkeley's universe is totally immaterial, with apparently material things really being nothing but groups of mental "ideas". His immaterialistic universe may be empirically, phenomenologically indistinguishable from the materialistic one, but there is a radical ontological difference between them.

[Atla]

Since all options of Western philosophy are unsupported or directly contradicted by evidence, all we can do is unlearn fantastical ideas like: dualism, substance theory, thing-ness, subject/object, emergence, fundamental separateness, separate I (and some others). Not really possible to see the other 2-3 options before that.

It would be helpful if you tried to describe those alleged other (metaphysical/ontological) options!

Well it's the options within Eastern nondualism, that is the shared essence of Advaita, Buddhism especially Zen, Taoism and perhaps some others.

Personally I think the best approach is Advaita, but with Advaita we usually run into the "wrong" nondualism. I don't think these options or categories have proper names, but I'd call the "wrong" one monistic nondualism (all is one, and the Absolute is sort of one literal being). And the "correct" and much rarer one I'd call non-monistic nondualism (where we drop this crap about the Absolute being sort of one literal being, and return to the world of apparent diversity while still realizing that all is fundamentally non-separate).

Those who understand modern science well enough btw will have noticed that non-monistic nondualism is the only worldview left consistent with evidence.

[Tamminen]

Materialism and ontological idealism have different metaphysical interpretations of the same material universe.

The materialists' universe is not "the same material universe" as the idealists' one. Berkeley's universe is totally immaterial, with apparently material things really being nothing but groups of mental "ideas". His immaterialistic universe may be empirically, phenomenologically indistinguishable from the materialistic one, but there is a radical ontological difference between them.

I am not speaking about Berkeley's idealism. Thinking that material things are just groups of ideas makes no sense to me. There is genuine otherness. But I have also an ontological interpretation of matter that is totally different from the materialists' interpretation of matter as the fundamental reality. The fundamental reality is more like a triadic structure, as I suggested, and matter is the medium of existence between members of the community of subjects. Nevertheless, matter behaves in the same way in both interpretations, I just try to go beyond the scenes and see what really goes on.

[Consul]

I ask the question what is it that is conscious? To be conscious is to be self aware, but the only self awareness, is knowledge of the idea of self, an imagined idea. And ideas are only some combination of past sensations, they don't go beyond that. Beyond passing sensations there isn't anything, so the only thing to be aware of are passing sensations, but awareness itself is a passing sensation, so what is it that is conscious? Wouldn't it need to be beyond passing sensations?

Consciousness—I mean first-order, primary, phenomenal consciousness (aka subjective experience)—is not the same as (introspective/reflective) self-consciousness, which is second-/higher-order consciousness that only few animal species have. Arguably, full-blown, personal self-consciousness requires the capacity for linguistic thought, which (on Earth) only humans have.

Subjective sensations are the (internal) content of perception and not its (external) object. There is a difference between being (first-order) perceptually conscious of something (my own body or things in my environment) through a sensation (sensory appearance/impression) and being (second-order) perceptually (introspectively) conscious of the sensation itself. The basic mistake of idealism is to suppose that the sensory contents of perception are also its objects, such that I never perceive anything but the subjective content of my consciousness.

Of course, where there is consciousness or experience there must be a subject of it that is different from it. In my view, all natural subjects are material objects called animals.

Don't lump me in with solipsists or dualists, because I don't believe in a mind. A mind requires stability, it requires that a thing remains the same and yet also changes.

If a mind is a mental substance, then I don't believe in minds either; but if it is a nonsubstantial complex of mental attributes or occurrences (states/events/processes), then I do believe in minds, because I'm not an eliminative materialist with regard to psychological phenomena.

You can't say I'm a dualist, because matter only comes in the form of another sensation.

I'm not sure what you mean by "comes" here. If you mean to say that we perceive the material/physical world through our sensations (and in science with the help of microscopes, telescopes, and other perception-expanding devices), then this is certainly true. But if you mean to say that we never perceive material things but only sensory appearances or impressions of them, or that material things are (in themselves) nothing but collections of sensory ideas or impressions, or sense-data, then I strongly disagree with you.

Second, when did materialism, naturalism, and physicalism become the same thing? They certainly are not perfect substitutes for one another, their meanings being completely different, and each one entailing different consequences.

Materialism is the same as physicalism, but it needn't be equated with naturalism. However, (ontological) naturalism is materialistic about objects/substances at least; that is, it denies the existence of nonphysical (immaterial/spiritual) objects/substances. So naturalism is substance-materialistic at least, but it needn't be attribute-materialistic. A non-materialistic naturalist is a materialistic substance monist endorsing an attribute/property dualism or pluralism that postulates non-/hyperphysical, physically irreducible (kinds of) natural attributes/properties in addition to the physical ones.
(The question is how it's naturally possible for a material object/substance to have nonphysical, physically irreducible properties.)

Fourth, the materialism you mentioned that ignores the imagined concept of causality, becomes a contradiction because it cannot handle the very real idea or the directly experienced change or temporality being applied to it.

I'm sorry, but I don't see the (alleged) problem and don't get your point. As I told you already, materialism isn't wedded to a particular conception of causality.

That's a violation of the entropic principle, that there would be a uniform existence that always remains. It's the same idea of a constant as the self, soul or God, but I've said this already and you completely ignored it only to blindly and aggressively post a bunch of sources that don't deal with any real problems.
Materialism is obviously absurd if it cannot handle temporality or entropy.

I cannot follow you. What exactly are the "real problems" of the materialistic worldview which you think it cannot solve? Why should causality, temporality or entropy pose a threat to it? According to it, there is nothing over and above the matter-energy-space-time (MEST) world as studied by natural/physical science, but it doesn't depend on any particular theory of matter, energy, space, or time. (But physical theories which are well-established scientific facts are integrated into the materialistic worldview.)

Fifth, I am guessing that if there is a materialism that ignores causality there is probably a physicalism that ignores causality, and attributes change to spontaneity.

The Spinozean one-substance world as described by Heil, in which causation isn't real, is just one cosmological possibility among others.

By the way, Heil doesn't draw a distinction between transeunt causation and immanent causation. If he had done so, he would have had to say that it is not causation simpliciter which is absent from that world but only transeunt causation. For the qualitative changes of the one world-substance resulting from its spontaneous inner activity or dynamics can be called cases of immanent causation.

"W. E. Johnson…drew a distinction between two types of cause. He called the one transeunt causation (going across), and the other immanent (remaining within). Transeunt causation is the more ordinary sort of causation, when one thing brings about something in another particular (or sustains something, as when supporting something or keeping it in existence) and it can be argued that it is the only sort of causation there is. But I think that immanent causation is also actual. Spontaneous emission from an atom of uranium 235, radioactive decay, might be such a case. It is spontaneous because not produced by causal action from outside the atom. It doesn't matter that probability rules in this emission case. Probabilistic causation is causation when the law 'fires'. Does the 'spontaneous' suggest that there is no causation here? Well, it obeys a probabilistic law so why should it not count as a case of the uranium atom causing one of its constituent electrons, say, to be emitted?"

(Armstrong, D. M. Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. p. 57)

Cause is attributed with subjectivity, meaning it posits a do-er, a thing that remains unchanged, but that is obviously false and any theory that makes use of causality has an imaginary foundation.

???
There is nothing inherently psychological or subjectivistic about the concept of causality. Doers or makers, causers or producers needn't be conscious agents or intentionally acting subjects. Anyway, there is a distinction between agent causation and event causation, and a corresponding metaphysical debate over the relata of causal relations.

"[M]any philosophers, particularly those concerned with the philosophy of action, consider that a further important species of causation is agent causation, in which the cause of some event or state of affairs is not (or not only) some other event or state of affairs, but is, rather, an agent of some kind. An 'agent', in the sense intended here, is a persisting object (or 'substance') possessing various properties, including, most importantly, certain causal powers and liabilities. A paradigm example of an agent would be a human being or other conscious creature capable of performing intentional actions."

(Lowe, E. J. A Survey of Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. p. 195)

The Metaphysics of Causation: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/caus ... taphysics/

Materialism is so obviously absurd. To be honest, these are the objections I first raised, and almost all of them are unanswered, the only attemot at answering them was the idea of Heil doing away with causality completely, but since substance then does not answer for change what does it matter?

(Again, Heil merely describes one possible physical world among others without affirming its actuality.)

I wish you had substantive objections to materialism that are really troubling to it!

[Consul]

It would be helpful if you tried to describe those alleged other (metaphysical/ontological) options!

Well it's the options within Eastern nondualism, that is the shared essence of Advaita, Buddhism especially Zen, Taoism and perhaps some others.

Personally I think the best approach is Advaita, but with Advaita we usually run into the "wrong" nondualism. I don't think these options or categories have proper names, but I'd call the "wrong" one monistic nondualism (all is one, and the Absolute is sort of one literal being). And the "correct" and much rarer one I'd call non-monistic nondualism (where we drop this crap about the Absolute being sort of one literal being, and return to the world of apparent diversity while still realizing that all is fundamentally non-separate).

Those who understand modern science well enough btw will have noticed that non-monistic nondualism is the only worldview left consistent with evidence.

"There are many monisms. What they share is that they attribute oneness. Where they differ is in what they target and how they count.
This entry focuses on two of the more historically important monisms: existence monism and priority monism. Existence monism targets concrete objects and counts by tokens. This is the doctrine that exactly one concrete object token exists. Priority monism also targets concrete objects but counts by basic tokens. This is the doctrine that exactly one concrete object token is basic, and is equivalent to the classical doctrine that the whole is prior to its (proper) parts."

Monism: See: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/monism/

Does what you call "non-monistic nondualism" correspond to priority monism?

Anyway, we don't have additional options here with regard to question as to whether reality is fundamentally (only) mental, fundamentally (only) physical, both fundamentally mental and fundamentally physical, or neither fundamentally mental nor fundamentally physical, because these four are jointly exhaustive.

[Consul]

@Consul

The existence of subjects isn't a "transcendental condition" of the possibility of a world of objects. There is absolutely nothing illogical about a subjectless or subject-independent ontology (set of entities).

I challenge you, and everybody, to take a critical, reflective attitude to this. It is so easy to think superficially, to be satisfied with the first image that comes to mind, and say that there is no problem with a possible world without subjects: it would be like a desert, except that it would be the whole world. But all deserts are our deserts, whether they are such as Sahara or such as the early stages of our universe. I respect your ability to analyze things and make distinctions, but I am not sure if you have understood the revolutionary ontological impact of Descartes, Kant and Husserl. We must go beyond matter. Matter belongs to the structure of reality, but is not reality itself. The concrete reality is the subject's existence in the world, or consciousness of the world. And, as should be obvious, my consciousness of the world cannot be reduced to what I am conscious of.

My consciousness is part of me, and I am part of the world; so my consciousness is part of the world too. Of course, consciousness is different from and irreducible to its intentional or perceptual objects. (In the case of inner perception or introspection the intentional or perceptual object is itself part of (the content of) my consciousness, but there is still a difference between the act of introspecting and the introspected object.)

The actual world contains subjects, but not necessarily. A subject is simply a conscious, experiencing object; and all natural subjects are zoological objects = animals. The actual material/natural world surely doesn't depend on the existence of conscious animals, since we know that animals haven't always existed therein. And, once again, there just is no plausible reason to believe that worlds which never contain any subjects (be they animals or nonanimals) are ontologically impossible.

[Atla]

"There are many monisms. What they share is that they attribute oneness. Where they differ is in what they target and how they count.
This entry focuses on two of the more historically important monisms: existence monism and priority monism. Existence monism targets concrete objects and counts by tokens. This is the doctrine that exactly one concrete object token exists. Priority monism also targets concrete objects but counts by basic tokens. This is the doctrine that exactly one concrete object token is basic, and is equivalent to the classical doctrine that the whole is prior to its (proper) parts."

Monism: See: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/monism/

Does what you call "non-monistic nondualism" correspond to priority monism?

It's a contradiction to talk about oneness and objects/parts at the same time.

Anyway, we don't have additional options here with regard to question as to whether reality is fundamentally (only) mental, fundamentally (only) physical, both fundamentally mental and fundamentally physical, or neither fundamentally mental nor fundamentally physical, because these four are jointly exhaustive.

As I said, reality is neither fundamentally physical nor mental, but you can't just throw them out either and come up with a neutral one. The two are one and the same so they need to be unified, collapsed into one thinking.

You get the above four options from dual thinking. And there are infinitely many ways how you can try to reconcile the irreconcileble mental and material (or even several ways how you can handle the lack of them), that's why Western philosophy is stuck since centuries.

But basically there is only one way of thinking left when you unify and collapse them. From there the remaining options are variations on this kind of nondualism.

[Tamminen]

My consciousness is part of me, and I am part of the world; so my consciousness is part of the world too.

This is the basic mistake of materialism.

My consciousness is not part of me, it is my way of being in the world. We can say that in my concrete existence, at every moment, I am my consciousness of the world. As my body, I am part of the world, but as my "mind", i.e. consciousness, I am in the world, in the sense Heidegger uses that expression. I meet the world and its material objects by means of the material object I know as my body, and my consciousness of the world has its necessary correlates in my body, but it would be a fatal mistake to identify consciousness with its material correlates. Being part of the world as a body is a secondary phenomenon in my existence in the world, something that science is interested in, but it also shows itself in my everyday doings as I use my body as an instrument. However, my immediate existence in the world is not bodily existence although I use my body all the time: I must find my body and learn how to use it.

So we cannot reduce what is immediate to something ontologically secondary.

The actual world contains subjects, but not necessarily. A subject is simply a conscious, experiencing object; and all natural subjects are zoological objects = animals. The actual material/natural world surely doesn't depend on the existence of conscious animals, since we know that animals haven't always existed therein. And, once again, there just is no plausible reason to believe that worlds which never contain any subjects (be they animals or nonanimals) are ontologically impossible.

I think I have made it clear in my earlier posts why this cannot be the case, and also showed the logical impossibility of the world without subjects. What I wrote above only confirms this.

Why do you always appeal to the fact that animals have not been around all the time, although I have said many times that it is not a valid argument?

[Sculptor1]

My consciousness is part of me, and I am part of the world; so my consciousness is part of the world too.

This is the basic mistake of materialism.

But this is empirically verified every day. There is no mistake here.
I not go so far as to say that my consciousness is part of the world, though. In a literal sense all consciousness is A part of the world. And that I am A part of the world. But only in the sense that I am also a part of it.
There is no case where consciousness has been witnessed in the absence of neural matter. Consciousness is a property of neural matter in the same way hardness is a property of granite.
There is no consciousness without it.
I do not see anyone saying materialism is absurd because no one has seen pure hardness, or softness, or blueness.
Matter has properties and materialism is a recognition of that and provides the methodology to investigate it.

Materialism has transformed our world; and the car you drove in.
What have you got in its place?

[Atla]

This is the basic mistake of materialism.

But this is empirically verified every day. There is no mistake here.
I not go so far as to say that my consciousness is part of the world, though. In a literal sense all consciousness is A part of the world. And that I am A part of the world. But only in the sense that I am also a part of it.
There is no case where consciousness has been witnessed in the absence of neural matter. Consciousness is a property of neural matter in the same way hardness is a property of granite.
There is no consciousness without it.
I do not see anyone saying materialism is absurd because no one has seen pure hardness, or softness, or blueness.
Matter has properties and materialism is a recognition of that and provides the methodology to investigate it.

Materialism has transformed our world; and the car you drove in.
What have you got in its place?

The "human mind" part of consciousness is in the head, but why should consciousness fundamentally stop there? The rest of the universe for example is made of the same atoms and EM fields etc. as the human head, it's just a different configuration.

Why should, according to materialism, even be any fundamental consciousness in the head in the first place? Why isn't everything just going on "in the dark"?

[Tamminen]

There is no case where consciousness has been witnessed in the absence of neural matter.

Right.

Consciousness is a property of neural matter in the same way hardness is a property of granite.

No. This is the fatal mistake.

The "human mind" part of consciousness is in the head

I did not expect this same old mistake from you, localising something that cannot be localised.

[Atla]

I did not expect this same old mistake from you, localising something that cannot be localised.

All evidence shows that the "human mind" part of consciousness can be localised, correlated to the head in some way. How do you even ignore that?

[Tamminen]

I did not expect this same old mistake from you, localising something that cannot be localised.

All evidence shows that the "human mind" part of consciousness can be localised, correlated to the head in some way. How do you even ignore that?

I do not deny the correlations of course, but to say that the physiological correlate of my consciousness is in my head does not mean that my consciousness is in my head, or that my experiences are in my head or in my brain. A thought experiment: if my eyes were on the Moon and the rest of my body on Earth, where would I be? The answer is of course: nowhere, but I would look at the world from the Moon. So I, as a subject, and the physiological correlate of my consciousness are totally different things, and saying that they are identical is exactly the fatal mistake that materialism makes.

[Atla]

I do not deny the correlations of course, but to say that the physiological correlate of my consciousness is in my head does not mean that my consciousness is in my head, or that my experiences are in my head or in my brain.

That's exactly what it means.

A thought experiment: if my eyes were on the Moon and the rest of my body on Earth, where would I be?

"You" would be in those two places at once. There would be a dead pair of eyes on the Moon and there would a blind you on Earth.

The answer is of course: nowhere, but I would look at the world from the Moon. So I, as a subject, and the physiological correlate of my consciousness are totally different things, and saying that they are identical is exactly the fatal mistake that materialism makes.

I already told you that there is no such thing as an actual subject, you are just hallucinating, which part of that don't you understand?

[Tamminen]

I already told you that there is no such thing as an actual subject, you are just hallucinating, which part of that don't you understand?

Perhaps I don't understand anything of what you say. But the actual subject is the one who is just now writing these words. I mean that is what I mean by 'actual subject'.