Consul wrote: ↑May 28th, 2019, 1:40 pm
Tamminen wrote: ↑May 28th, 2019, 1:17 pmI thought I said clearly enough that I do not believe in soul-substances any more than material substances. Consciousness is not a property of soul any more than it is a property of matter. It is the subject's way of being in the world. And if there were no subjects, there could be no consciousness, because there is no soul-substance floating around independent of matter and the subject. As I said, we need no other substance than the triadic structure 'the subject's consciousness of the world'. The subject alone, consciousness alone, and matter alone, are mere abstractions of this "holy trinity", and this triadic structure can be found in everything real. This is also the reason why the idea of a possible world without subjects is a mere abstraction without a real correlate even in imagination.
What you haven't said clearly enough is what you think subjects are. You say they are neither souls nor bodies, and I don't understand what it means to say that they are "mere abstractions of this 'holy trinity'." Of course, an (actual) subject and its consciousness are interdependent in the sense that there cannot be one without the other: A(n actual) subject necessarily has consciousness, and consciousness necessarily has a subject.
We can say that the subject is what carries subjective time from moment to moment. It is the present abstracted from its content. It is the eternal reference point of existence. It is Wittgenstein's limit of the world. In this sense it is an abstraction, but its consciousness of the world is concrete and real. This is the transcendental subject, and as you see I have used many metaphorical expressions to describe it so that people can hopefully get an idea of what I mean. So the subject is something that is common to all "animals", as you call them, i.e. all individual subjects. I think memory connects the succesive presents of subjective time so that we can speak of individual subjects, but I have not a clear picture of how those "projects" like Tamminen and Consul are constituted.
But a/the world doesn't necessarily have subjects in it that are conscious of it!
There is only one world,
the world, and therefore, as I said, a possible alternate world cannot exist without subjects. This is the crucial point that makes a difference between materialism and the kind of idealism I represent. I have showed this very clearly in several posts during our discussions, but it seems that you and others have missed the point completely. The key in my argument is understanding that although logic is transcendental, it is not
transcendent: it cannot be applied to anything that lies outside of its scope of usage, i.e. outside of
our world, the world of subjects. To posit the possibility of
the world without subjects is to posit an abstraction, not a possible concrete and real world.