"The mind is material" seems like a funny hypothesis to me, given the massive unknowns in quantum theory --- we don't even know what "material" is fundamentally.
But really that's just arguing over words and definitions. We know what we mean when we say material (certain properties and behaviors), and as far as I know, we have just as much reason to think that a brick is material as that a mind if material. We don't need to understand literally everything to be able to make predictions about how things behave.
Note that this definition allows you to predict a lot of things:
1. You can predict that you'll have the same experience when eating other things which are not sugar, but which you know cause the same experience in you.
2. You can predict, at least in broad outlines, whether people will find this experience pleasurable or not (again, on average, broad outline, but still better than chance).
3. You can predict that someone without a sense of taste won't experience anything when eating sugar.
That's why this definition is meaningful. Of course I can play word games all day about "can you show me 'sweet'???". But those are word games that are trying to hide the idea of what a definition is and what we use it for.
Precisely my point. Saying "the mind is material" is like saying "the soul is ether"
Explain to me what exactly it means to show you a mind, and I'll tell you whether I can show you one. If you can't explain what you mean by "show you a mind", then I'm not sure how this question is different than "can you show me a gefadfij" - questions are only meaningful if we agree on what we're talking about.
Note: by default to your question of "can you show me a mind", I plan to show you a brain, plus lots of reasons to think this constitutes a mind (e.g., changing something in the brain changes how someone behaves, touching parts of the brain with electricity can reliably cause sensations to people, etc).
>If you can't explain what you mean by "show you a mind", then I'm not sure how this question is different than "can you show me a gefadfij"
This is basically my point, the mind is an undefinable concept.
Many people arbitrarily assume the mind is constrained to the brain, which is provably false.
For example, gut bacteria have a powerful influence on the mind.
Do you think it would be possible to completely separate the brain from the rest of the body and it's environment and still keep the persons conscious mind "alive" and in the same state?
Keep in mind we're only letting "intelligent" people contribute to this conversation and that in itself is biased. Why aren't we trying to identify why schizophrenic or people with split personalities chime in on why they perceive things differently and manage to survive.
We say they're unsuccessful in life but by our standards and that's not much different than a servant of a faith, no?
That's all your minds looking for. Things that change with a pattern it can differentiate. Bricks don't change unless something you understand changes it. Like inertas definition or Murphy's law, an obersavation of change from a perspective.
What's good or bad? You can't compare anything too distant or you loose sight of the differentiation.
That stone is mater just like my brain but one was assembled molecularly a long time ago and the other evolved and was likely billions of molecules from around the planet at the time the stone formed.
I have info in my brain that's really only useful to me from a distance but truely only useful to my cortex, but my boss likes what I do with it for him. He says I do a good job but his competitors think it's all bad and some of my employees also attribute my success as a bad thing. But is that thing they consider bad me or something relative to them and not apples to apples to what my boss considers good?
1) Whatever physics studies is material.
2) Whatever makes something material, atoms, quarks, and those other subatomic particles are material. By "material", we just mean whatever the ultimate theory of those things says they have in common.
Neither of these responses guarantees that "material" is a meaningful concept. If panpsychism is true[0], then everything is somehow conscious, and you may no longer have a reasonable criterion for materiality.
For more context, you might try the Stanford encyclopedia article on physicalism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/.
[0] Sadly, there are very talented contemporary philosophers who believe in panpsychism.
No one ever goes and actually finds the teapot, they just try to come up with more esoteric ways of defining it. I think that’s sad too.
By the way, if you ever want to prove to yourself that the world is round, it’s quite easy. On a clear day, look to the horizon. Now climb the tallest tree or structure near you and look again. You can see further than before! Ergo the earth is spheroid and not flat.
What does "science" say about our lives and our place in the universe?
That being said, the concept of panpsychism has merit insofar as it generalizes the idea that "consciousness may simply be what computation feels like from the inside". This, in my opinion, is an idea worth exploring – you don't need to take "conscious rock" woo-woo literally to wonder about substrate independence, different types of physicalism and emergence, etc. If the apparent absurdity of panpsychism can shock people into questioning our human gatekeeping tendencies around what consciousness is, then perhaps panpsychism is doing it's job fine.
Your comment implies philosophers think panpsychism is true because it brings them "comfort" (i.e. your example "I want to be loved by a god and live forever"), which is a ridiculous claim you haven't provided any evidence for. If you are going to accuse someone, especially a professional philosopher, of basing their views on pure wishful thinking, you better be damn sure you can back that up.
Your comment also claims panpsychism is "injecting the same old beliefs (?) with new language (?) into whatever narrowing gaps (?) exist in current theories". What is this even supposed to mean?
What saddens you about this?
To clarify, panpsychism is still a very small minority position.
Why do you believe panpsychism deserves less time than it receives?
From my limited understanding of the brain, my concept of the mind is this:
- The brain is a computer and the computer is material
- The brain executes software, and the software is grown/encoded as neural networks
- The state of the running instance(s) of the software is the current action potential of every neuron
- Both the software and the state encode information
- The information can represent things that are real, unreal, consistent, inconsistent, etc.
- The information is abstract and immaterial, but stored in a physical and dynamic system
- The flow of information is tolerant of faults and noise in the underlying physical neural network. A failure of a small percentage of connections does not prevent the information from flowing through the system
- The information is not dependent on the precise physical network, but rather on the virtual network composed of many redundant connections
- information
- encoded in a virtual network
- built on many redundant physical neural connections
- produced and supported by the brainHow about dark matter and social dynamics?
Social dynamics: Give me a sufficiently powerful computer and complete information about the starting state and I can probably give you a pretty good approximation what happens.
This is a strawman often thrown up when the blind spots of science are pointed out.
Magic is a fancy word for something that we have no provable explanation of. Asserting "mind is material" seems like a hubristic explanation of an imaginary thing.
As to social dynamics, well, that's like trying to explain the behavior of bulk matter or ensembles of things generally. The tools we use are quite different from explaining the behavior of atoms, but we're pretty sure that one way or another, the behavior of a rod of steel is determined more or less entirely by the fundamental particles/fields/stuff that make it up. There's nothing spooky about a bar of steel even though it behaves completely differently than the quarks and electrons it's made of.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains it better: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/
Newtonian physics fail to explain quantum phenomenon.
Materialism is essentially a philosophical stance, that everything in the world is physical. It's not something that is likely to be solved empirically and it's not clear how you would even prove it one way or another. Anything as-yet unexplained might yet yield to a physical explanation, and insofar as physics is well-understood, skeptics can retreat into talking about mental states and so on.
Interesting. From a philosophical standpoint I see no quarrel. You could replace "physical" with "god" in your definition and it would read true to many religions. It's when dogmatism overrides doubt, questioning, and humility that people are misguided, in scientific theory and religion.
The difference is that the concept of physical minimally satisfies the required features to fill the conceptual role implied by science. If you replace physical with god, you are either eliminating the necessary properties of god or you're assuming more than is warranted.
"God, therefore, is the one most simple essence of the entire universe"
-Nicholas de Cusa
"We shall find God in everything alike, and find God always alike in everything."
-Meister Eckhart
"The superior devotee sees that God alone has become everything...He finds that everything, above and below, is filled with God."
-Ramakrishna
"In order to attain perfect union, we must divest ourselves of God...The common belief about God, that He is a great Taskmaster, whose function is to reward or punish, is cast out by perfect love; and in this sense the spiritual man does divest himself of God as conceived of by most people."
-Henry Suso
Are you hypothesizing the mind is entirely self contained within the brain and independent from the rest of the body and it's environment?
Materialism, as I have encountered it as a philosophical position, has been a position that takes Cartesian dualism and drops the immaterial mind from it, leaving us with only the Cartesian account of matter. This position has been shown to be unworkable because now it is impossible to account for all of those things that have been swept under the rug of the immaterial mind. That's why Dennett takes an eliminativist position that simply denies that those things we've been sweeping under the rug exist at all. It's a cop out move because it denies the existence of those things it cannot explain. The sounder move is to revise one's presuppositions.
For this reason, I don't think these are really the best books on the subject, esp. for someone interested in getting a lay of the land and a rudimentary understanding of the subject matter. The best introductory book I've come across in this regard is E. Feser's "The Philosophy of Mind"[0].
[0] https://books.google.com/books/about/Philosophy_of_Mind.html...
The mind consists of atoms and molecules. All of the physics relevant to chemistry is known [0].
[0] 10.1021/cr200042e
This is a type error. It's like saying the number 3 is made of atoms and molecules, or Wednesday is made of atoms and molecules.
Mistaking our own internal representation of our own mind (our consciousness) for our actual mind is what Dennit is arguing against.
Quantum theory has little to do with how neurons behave - they work at different levels. Current evidence would suggest it doesn't play any role other than tiny random fluctuations in computations, just like in any other micro-system.