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Comment by silent_cal | Hacker News Reader

One day we are all going to come full circle and realize that the ancients were right: the mind is immaterial.

Then why do injuries to the brain directly impact the parts of selfhood we hold most sacred, like feelings memories and attitudes?

You can still say that many of those things (memories, feelings) are material impressions or tendencies in the brain. But cognition itself must have an immaterial component, because it deals with immaterial realities (justice, truth, abstracted quantities and shapes, etc.) That's the Aristotelian and Thomistic theory.

That doesn't follow from your premise. You could justify any number of absurd theories with similar reasoning.

What do you mean? We couldn't know anything immaterial if all we are is material. That's all I'm saying.

Then why posit the existence of the immaterial?

What I'm getting at is I could use your reasoning to posit insane things that you would heartily disagree with, using your reasoning without twisting or bending it. Because your reasoning is baseless, or rather it rests on its own conclusion.

Even to just stick to the realm you're suggesting - why would anything about us need to be immaterial to have concepts like justice? I don't see the necessity of an unprovable, nebulous, unnecessary immaterial reality to explain anything.

I grant that I'm assuming you also think justice exists. But if you do, I think that you'd have to grant that justice itself is not material. The fact that you can know it, even though it's not material, suggests that your mind is also immaterial.

Perhaps a stretch, but maybe like a color filter (injury) affects the perception of a rainbow (immaterial).

What about a rainbow is immaterial?

Or we will realise the conclusions of the 17th century philosophers, that there is no coherent notion of physical/material. Anything we can reason about is a construction of the mind on the occasion of sense.

Yes it starts with the senses, but at a certain point the mind abstracts immaterial notions from physical reality, such as justice, truth, point, line, and so on. So the mind must be immaterial.

If there is no coherent notion of physical or material, there is no notion of immaterial either. Chomsky talks about this at length in "The Machine, The Ghost and the Limits of Understanding" (previously discussed on HN here [1]).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26448901

If there were no coherent notion of physical & material, then we wouldn't have words for them.

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