Gertie wrote: ↑August 20th, 2020, 6:37 am
Angel Trismegistus wrote: ↑August 19th, 2020, 2:37 am
Hear, hear.
The mind is not in the brain -- the brain is in the mind. Along with everything else in the so-called material world.
Heh. That's a bit bold for me.
Two separate issues there really - all we can know directly for certain is our mental experience. But materialism might still be true.
Then there's the issue that even if material stuff exists, we still don't have a handle on how it could explain mental experience. There are speculations - for example mental experience might be a novel emergent property of complex material processes which we find in brains. Or the monist notion that mental experience is physical brain processes.
But then again we might be living in a panpsychic world, or a dualist world, or an Idealist world, or something we haven't thought of. And nobody knows how to test such hypotheses.
Nothing is going to "explain" the world of experience, ever. All we can do is describe it and show where it comes from. Why would you think otherwise?
Since we can only have our world of experience to understand our world of experience we are the photographed, the photo and the photographer. Its an endless cycle that it is impossible to break out of.
All we know right now, is that damage and changes to the brain make equal and compensurate changes to aspect of the mind, indivisibly. Physical forces, drugs traumas, all have their effects.
Describing these things in detail has given us amazing insights into the working of the brain/mind.
But like all science, it is fundementally descriptive.
Dualism is an outdated and empty theory, based on ancient notions of soul. It's not helpful.