Physicalism Redux

That's the idea it puts in my mind ~ a line is extended in one dimension, where a point is (by definition?) extensionless. It's theoretical ~ in that it occupies no space, and is basically imaginary. Even the dots we create in a physical or mental sense have extension by virtue of being circular.


A zero-dimensional point isn't spatial, I think ~ it occupies no space at all. Even an electron has extension ~ it occupies space... of some amount, even if moves stupidly fast.

A point existing is merely a circle or sphere, as we always experience. An extensionless point cannot exist within space nor influence or be influenced, I think.


Indeed, it does.

A field must be spatially extensible ~ and if we can sense our body as transparently as we do, from hand to hand, back to front, head to toe, then our mind must be a field that is extended. Not a physical field, obviously, but more in the sense that perhaps Sheldrake and / or Faggin suggest.

Yeah Brady, in that Monadology essay, warns us about thinking "simple" means an infinitely small point:

... monads cannot have any shape, and thus have no size, teeny-tiny or otherwise. Why? If a monad had a shape (which it would need to have in order for it to have a relative size to other shaped things) then it would, by rights, have constituent parts — a ‘left half’ and a ‘right half’, for example, or a ‘surface’ and an ‘inside’. The problem is not that a thing with a shape is always in fact divisible into components, because this is not true, but rather that it is de jure divisible into components, and thus we can entertain the idea of ‘half a monad’ which contradicts the idea we started out with: absolute simplicity.

Of course this criticism seems to at least potentially apply to souls that are infinite in size as well.

I accept there may just not be a good way to resolve this question about Mind and Its immaterial qualities being only correlated with any structure.

This seems to almost force an acceptance of Idealism as the only valid possibility, but I can't help but feel Idealism has a variety of issues as well. I'm also not sure how even God could have thoughts about extension without experiencing genuine extension. We could say God just has all the possible experiences within Its Mind but I dislike this sort of convenience...though I suspect this sort of convenience ends up being necessary for any coherent metaphysics...

Faggin's option, if we take it as Mind + Extension = Seities, may be a solution. Though Faggin seems happy to call his solution an Idealism, a (non- or semi-constitutive) Panpsychism, or possibly even a Property Dualism. 

Another is Michael Pelczar's Phenomenalism:

In the phenomenalist worldview, there are experiences, and there are possibilities for experience—and that’s all. Later, I’ll argue that the possibilities are best understood as conditional probabilities for various experiences to occur given the occurrence of other experiences. So, in my view, reality consists of experiences, and probabilities related to experience. The probabilities are the physical part of the world.

If this sounds like an invitation to external world skepticism, that’s not how it’s intended. As I see it, once we’ve concluded that certain experiences are apt to occur in certain ways conditional on the occurrence of certain other experiences, we’ve already arrived at an external world. Physical things just are propensities for experiences to occur in certain ways. They are, as Mill puts it, “permanent possibilities of sensation."