Atla wrote: ↑June 4th, 2019, 1:30 pmConsul wrote: ↑June 4th, 2019, 1:13 pm"We have a tendency to read 'nonphysical' when we see the word 'mental', and think 'nonmental' when we see the word 'physical'. This has the effect of making the idea of physical reduction of the mental a simple verbal contradiction, abetting the misguided idea that physical reduction of something we cherish as a mental item, like thought or feeling, would turn it into something other than what it is. But this would be the case only if by 'physical' we meant 'nonmental'. We should not prejudge the issue of mind-body reduction by building irreducibility into the meanings of our words. When we consider the question whether the mental can be physically reduced, it is not necessary—even if this could be done—to begin with general definitions of 'mental' and 'physical'; rather, the substantive question that we are asking, or should be asking, is whether or not things like belief, desire, emotion, and sensation are reducible to physical properties and processes. We can understand this question and intelligently debate it, without subsuming these items under some general conception of what it is for something to be mental. If 'mental' is understood to imply 'nonphysical', it would then be an open question whether or not belief, desire, sensation, perception, and the rest are mental in that sense. And this question would replace the original question of their physical reducibility. We cannot evade or trivialize this question by a simple verbal ploy."
(Kim, Jaegwon. "The Mind-Body Problem at Century's Turn." In The Future of Philosophy, edited by Brian Leiter, 129-152. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. p. 138)
It's a perfectly justified prediction. Your quote talks about mental content and not phenomenal consciousness itself, so it's off topic.
No, it's not! Kim talks about all sorts of mental phenomena. Experiential or (phenomenally) conscious phenomena are paradigmatic cases of "mental contents". Whether there are also nonexperiential, (phenomenally) nonconscious mental phenomena, i.e. whether the mind is larger than consciousness, is another question.
In any case, the point is that materialists can't and don't accept any definition that equates the mental/experiential/conscious with the nonmaterial/nonphysical, such that we have two mutually exclusive and irreconcilable ontological categories per definitionem.
Atla wrote: ↑June 4th, 2019, 1:30 pmPhenomenal consciousness, mental content, the subjective world were given to idealism. Matter, the objective world were given to materialism. Since then we pretty much realized that mental content / subjective world can be equated with matter / objective world. Phenomenal consciousness itself was still left out though from the unification. So even today, matter is still inherently defined as not-phenomenal consciousness.
No, contemporary materialists certainly don't define material/physical properties or events/states as nonexperiential/nonphenomenal ones!
The neuroscience of consciousness is beginning to close the explanatory gap between "matter and mind" and to complete the physicalist unification of the world, including phenomenal consciousness as a physical phenomenon.
Atla wrote: ↑June 4th, 2019, 1:30 pm(I don't know what "antimaterialist dualism" is, but it is all dualism that is unjustified.)
It's either
substance dualism or
substance spiritualism (spiritualist substance monism), or only an
attribute dualism according to which mental/experiential properties are neither (compositionally) constituted by nor (causally) emergent from (and supervenient upon) physical properties.