A tabulation of mind-body possibilities

The Mander article in general has a lot of merit, but I'm not convinced that, ultimately, it successfully accounts for the brain on idealism. For example, its explanation of the brain (as an object of perception) as being a self-representation of one's whole experienc(e|ing) is intelligible, but the brain seems to be a whole lot more than that: to a large extent it seems to direct the body, and it's not clear how the article's narrative takes this aspect of brain function into consideration, let alone the existence of the body and its relationship to experience (as the mind) in the first place.

There are deeper questions too (which the paper has, admittedly, admirably anticipated), for example: if the brain is a (mere) experience, then whose experience is it given that "the" experience - whomever's it is - is intersubjectively shared to a meaningful extent? How is this intersubjective sharing of "an" experience as multiple experiences (that is, from different perspectives) possible?

I don't find its answer to these particular questions - which, it seems to me, amounts to a vague appeal to a shared consciousness - to be particularly edifying. I think that these questions require a deeper (more detailed) response. I could lay out roughly why, but, for brevity, I won't in this post.

Yeah I went back to the Mander article, and I am not sure I could say he really explains the unconscious and even conscious regulatory functions of the brain. Even if the brain is something of a hypersphere type object, where the totality of the experience is represented in its folds as a sort of map of experiential territory, it doesn't explain why we need the brain to move our limbs or take care of numerous internal aspects of the body.

I am not overly troubled by the question of the brain being an experiential object that belongs either to God or the Collective Unconscious. I can see the brain as a kind of bottle neck that arises due to beginning rules place[d] on the design of this universe, that in turn leads to biological life and eventually our own human bodies.

As the Idealist Scott Roberts notes:

There is conscious activity (thinking, feeling, sensing, hallucinating, dreaming, and so on). Idealism is the claim that there is only conscious activity. Given idealism, one then has to provide a scenario or two that would explain why it seems to us that there is non-conscious activity, like water flowing down a river. One scenario is to say that we could all be sharing a dream. Another is to say we are avatars in a virtual-reality-like simulation, albeit one produced by superior spirit beings, not running on a computer. It should be noted that these scenarios are not additional assumptions, rather just ways to imagine how it could be that water flowing down a river could be understood as being within consciousness. On the other hand, those who assume there is something other than conscious activity are faced with either the intractable problem of how conscious and non-conscious actvity interact (dualism) or the hard problem of consciousness (materialists). So idealism simplifies by not having an intractable problem.

However, I do think this seems to add certain causal powers to experience that we normally would attribute to something beyond experience whose existence is mediated through the First Person PoV. We don't think of redness as having a causal impact on a rose, and we know someone can be burned without experience the pain of extreme heat.

OTOH we do have our experiences of using our will to resist fatigue/hunger/etc. The importance of said will on bodily function is especially prominent when rushing to the bathroom! So that would be a case of consciousness having a causal impact that seems to be more than just the brain acting as mediator for our will to move a limb.

Roberts extends that will-ing to all causality ->

All things are thoughts. What we call objective is simply the subjective thinking of a mind or minds outside of our subjectivity. I can't walk through a brick wall because the mind that is thinking the electro-magnetic force into existence is stronger than my thought of passing through that force.

- Mathematical systems are thoughts. Hence there can be many mathematical systems -- one is a Euclidean structure, another non-Euclidean.

- Physical reality is a language, its words being sense perceptions which, alas, we don't know how to read. Science studies its syntax, but not its semantics.

- There is an Absolute Origin, and it is that which creates systems of thoughts and languages. There is no reality independent of these thoughts and languages. As local subjects, what we do is play around within these systems, perhaps learning to create our own. (Since reference to any Absolute will raise the hackles of a postmodernist, I should state that as I think of it (or It), it is inseparable from its creations. It is its creations, its creations are it. The trick is to learn to think about this without sounding like a pantheist in one's effort to avoid sounding like a theist. My way of doing so is described in the Tetralemmic Polarity essay -- see menu.)

I think this would explain, to a degree, why there are brains at all. Someone, or Something, has created this reality and its rules - as suggested by evidence of Cosmic Fine Tuning - in such a way as to necessitate a certain causal journey that goes from single celled organisms to human brains.

If we reject Idealism, but embrace Fine Tuning, we have to try an explain how this universe was made. If God or some other entities made the physical...what did they make it from? Is this "stuff" that responds to Mind, so that the Fine Tuner(s) willed this universe into being?

I think there remains some issues for the Idealist though. One of which is the functional dualism introduced by having the brain as ultimately dependent on some greater entity's experience, even if said greater entity includes my own being. However one could argue that at least this functional dualism avoids the Interaction Problem, if we're inclined to question how two unalike substances such as Matter & Mind would ever have the kind of relationship our brains have with our minds.

But if the brain is a sort of virtual reality apparatus, in the same way we can interact with a game world through a monitor and a joystick/keyboard/mouse, why does the brain also reveal so much about our minds?

All to say I don't think the idea of a brain as a separate mental object is incoherent, but I do think there remain questions about how such a relationship between my mind and this brain-from-another-mind works...

edit: Will reply to the final part of your post in a bit...

I think this holds for Mander's conception of what the brain is under Idealism, but not Hoffman's.

The way I understand Hoffman is that the brain is an object whose correlations may only show us a deceptive veneer over the actual causal relationships.

I guess the question is does Hoffman's view actually provide a good reason for the brain to exist under his Conscious Realism, which AFAICTell is an Idealist stance. (Hoffman I think has tried to argue it's different, but IIRC he was saying it's not akin to the kind of Absolute Idealism we get from Kastrup.)

I can sorta see how this would work, with the brain being an icon that provides some representation along with a means of causal influence. A thermostat isn't capturing the indeterministic movement of particles making up vibrating molecules, nor is it capturing the actual feeling of warmth/cold, but nevertheless you can get a sense of both. In fact to some degree this idea of the brain as an icon is true even in - if not especially - in Physicalism, since the brain has to generate the image of the brain along with providing qualia to the rest of observed reality ->



Credit to Lehar for the image.

So no matter one's metaphysical position, the brain as an object is seen as an image...This arguably, however, is where Idealism goes off the rails a bit because Idealism is trying to say qualia are real and they make up everything...but the brain's involvement suggests these qualia are not exactly aligned with reality. There is a way around this by noting that the brain really does allow us to perceive qualia that make up the world we see but only a portion of it.

Will reply to your specific critiques of Mander, among other things, in my next post. I don't think we're that far apart in our views on where Idealism falters, though I don't seem to feel the criticisms hurt the Idealist advocate as much as you do. Really I'm not sure if the Dualist can simply say the Mind escapes Physical Closure while the Brain doesn't, this also seems like a position that will run into problems...though admittedly I don't believe there is a reality that is physically closed + I don't believe there are "natural laws" unless there is a Mind...

But we'll get there, just give me some time to reply to the rest of your post.

Thanks for the post.  I have followed Lehar and Gestalt Isomorphism for years.

I think it's only fair to point out that probably most of us here don't hold to the causal closure of the physical anyhow, so that such notions are not as radical and unintuitive as they might otherwise have been. Still, I think that the article presents us with a false dichotomy, with the other - rejected - option being "our experience of the brain as in a certain condition is to be accounted for by the regularities we have noted within our wider experience of neurophysiology, which themselves align with the regularities we have observed within nature more widely, in which case we must deem our conscious experiences but a redundant epiphenomenalist shadow of whatever neurophysiology reveals to us."

As a dualist, a third option is readily apparent to me: that the brain (along with the rest of the natural world) generally follows the laws of nature, but it interfaces with a mind which also affects it, and which it in turn affects. This is, to me, by far the most intuitive and plausible of the three options, although there is definitely a very seductive allure to the article's notion of a creative experiential external reality moulding itself to one's personal experience: in its words, "analogous to that of a semi-autobiographical novelist who crafts an entire novel so as to fit in with just a handful of incidents which really did take place. To be sure, the whole plot is dictated by a few real-life episodes, but when the thing is intelligently done with a careful eye to the integrity of the whole, this fact is neither noticeable nor important."

I don't agree with the epiphenomenalist take but I do admit I think I might have the same issue as Mander when it comes to Dualism, namely it's hard to see how the brain is obeying the laws of physics but the mind somehow manages to be more than that.

I assume that the idea here is that even when the mind does things beyond the constraints of physical law, the brain captures some limited aspect of this and perhaps even helps facilitate such mental activity?

Goff's argument is a good one. Physicalism though is nonsense (and it seems we agree on that) in the strict sense before even getting to arguments like this.

Yeah I think Goff shows that no matter the structural reality of the brain, some aspect of mind will not be captured. It seems to me that this shows the brain is not every going to fully represent the mind.

And, in a sense, you object to both (indeterminism and God's willing reality into existence), at least on typical interpretations, on the same grounds - that they amount to creation ex nihilo, right?

Well I think even indeterminism (as well as determinism) that happen "just because" end up being creation ex nihilo. I think if some thing happens there should be a reason, but the only causation whose inner working I can try to claim intimate knowledge of is that of my own mind...

I see better what you were getting at now. I'm perhaps more content than you to simply leave that unspecified without finding that particularly troublesome: at this point I don't see a strong reason to believe that there aren't unproblematic answers (that's an unwieldy triple-negative but it's hard to put it another way).

I think this question of what Natural Laws are is a key to this question of coherence. If laws by their nature must be mental then it helps the Idealist immensely.

Fair enough - all I can say is that that physics is well above my current level.

I don't think it takes an in-depth knowledge of physics. Really Aaronson is just noting that in the history of science we get hints about Nature through early work that is further built upon in later work. But this railing against indeterminism makes it seem Nature has given us an "anti-clue", a bizarre red herring that has to be falsified for what seem like metaphysical reasons over scientific ones.

Okay, I think I finally finished replying to you!

[Laird]

Okay, I think I finally finished replying to you!

I hope to respond in turn more quickly than I did last time!

[Laird]

I think this holds for Mander's conception of what the brain is under Idealism, but not Hoffman's.

The way I understand Hoffman is that the brain is an object whose correlations may only show us a deceptive veneer over the actual causal relationships.

Hmm. I want to make sure I'm understanding you correctly. Hoffman has said that the dichotomy made in his ITP is roughly the same as that made by Kant between the noumenal and the phenomenal. I think that those terms of Kant's are helpful here, so I'm going to use them to paraphrase what I think you're asserting, and you can then let me know whether or not my paraphrasing is correct:

"On Hoffman's view, the noumenal entity corresponding to a person's (phenomenal) brain is not the same (noumenal) entity as that which is that person's (noumenal) mind."

Yes? Is that what you're saying?

I guess the question is does Hoffman's view actually provide a good reason for the brain to exist under his Conscious Realism, which AFAICTell is an Idealist stance. (Hoffman I think has tried to argue it's different, but IIRC he was saying it's not akin to the kind of Absolute Idealism we get from Kastrup.)

I can sorta see how this would work, with the brain being an icon that provides some representation along with a means of causal influence.

[Emphasis added, and some subsequent comments snipped for brevity and to maintain focus. --Laird]

Hmm, but as implied by my question above, my concern is with the noumenal entity which the phenomenal brain - the "icon" - represents, not the phenomenal brain (icon) as such. Why? Because, for the purposes of my tabulation, (I stipulate that) the brain and mind under consideration are only taken to be entities in their own right to the extent that they are in some reasonably meaningful sense ontologically basic. A brain-as-icon, it seems to me, is not an ontologically basic entity in the necessary (stipulated) sense; it is merely a stand-in for that entity.

With that clarified, would you still say that Hoffman's view corresponds to the row at issue in my tabulation, in which both brain and mind are "mental" and non-identical, and states of mind fully determine brain states, or do you think I'm misrepresenting the brain on his view as not being properly basic?

So no matter one's metaphysical position, the brain as an object is seen as an image...This arguably, however, is where Idealism goes off the rails a bit because Idealism is trying to say qualia are real and they make up everything...but the brain's involvement suggests these qualia are not exactly aligned with reality. There is a way around this by noting that the brain really does allow us to perceive qualia that make up the world we see but only a portion of it.

[Emphasis added --Laird]

It looks like you're saying something really interesting here (the emphasised), but I'm not 100% sure what it is, nor whether it's along the same lines as my own critique. It'd be really helpful if you elaborated in some depth.

This is a good point at which to elaborate on my own critique which might be similar to what you're saying here. It's not new and you'll have seen it before, but I've managed to clarify it in a way that I think is useful, based on taking note of two possible relationships that a mind can have to experience(s): (1) to undergo (to "have") experience(s), and (2) to be comprised of or constituted of (to "be") experience(s).

All minds are necessarily in the first relationship to (their own) experience(s). An everyday dualistic understanding doesn't generally entail the second relationship except in a loose or metaphorical sense: we generally think of ourselves as "having" experiences rather than as "being" (comprised of) our experience(s). It turns out to be different on idealism though, at least on certain interpretations, and recognising that helps to draw out and clarify my critique.

Let's take a broad definition of idealism as the position that all that exists is/are the experience(s) of mind.

Let's start then - as many idealists do, especially those who refer to themselves as nondualists - with the existence of only one, universal mind (we'll get to individuated minds immediately afterwards).

Now, as it necessarily must be, this universal mind is in the first relationship to its experiences (which are all that exist): it undergoes or "has" them.

However, in the process of personal minds dissociating (to use a term popular with some idealists, and at least meaningful to others) from the universal mind, the question arises: what is it that dissociates?

It needs to be noted at this point that the only candidates - because they are the only things that exist - are "mind" and "experience", but that those idealists who take this dissociating-universal-mind view tend to consider the two to be synonymous: mind is nothing above and beyond experience, and this mind-as-experience is, as one of them affirms, "emptiness dancing".

So, here we see that, as distinct from commonsense dualism, mind is not just in the necessary first relationship to experience, but it is in the second too: (the universal) mind is not just having experiences; it is constituted of them. It has to be for there to be something to dissociate - there is nothing alternative that can dissociate.

OK, so, the universal mind is both having and being (constituted of) experience(s), and that or those experience(s) - a subset of them - is what dissociates into a personal mind.

It gets strange here though, but to see how, we have to make another observation, which is that an experience entails an experiencer (mind): that experiencer (mind) - and only that mind - is the mind that undergoes (or "has") the experience in question. We can say then that in this sense, that experience "belongs to" that mind.

Here's the start of the strangeness then: the dissociated mind, too, is in both types of relationship with experience(s); it is both undergoing (having) and being (comprised of) experiences, however, unlike the universal mind, for each relationship type (undergoing versus being comprised of), the experiences belong to different minds. The dissociated mind is comprised of experiences belonging to (being undergone by) the universal mind - it has to be, because, as we have seen, there is nothing else for it to have dissociated with - yet it is undergoing (having) experiences belonging to its own (dissociated) mind.

The culminating force of the strangeness here is apparent via this framing via restatement: here, it is the case that (the dissociated) experiences being undergone by the universal mind are themselves (as the dissociated mind) having experiences of their own: experiences having experiences!

If that doesn't strike you as strange, then let me put it in the most extreme (uncharitable) of terms to drive the point home (before applying the principle of charity), those terms on which we take experiences strictly to be qualia: say, the redness of a rose as that redness occurs in one's consciousness. Does it seem at all possible for the quale that is the redness of a rose to have experiences (qualia) of its own; for that quale to be conscious?

To me, it does not seem to be. Do I have a knock-down argument to prove as much? No, I simply point out that this seems obviously to be a category error: a quale is not in the category of ontological entities which could be conscious (and thus have qualia of their own). That this is both semantically and conceptually true seems at least to be a powerful intuition: qualia are undergone by conscious minds; they cannot become (constitute) new conscious minds undergoing their own qualia themselves - new in the sense of being a mind to which they do not belong (the mind to which they do belong being that which is undergoing them).

Sci, I'm going to pause here to make a few meta comments:

Firstly, I have suggested to you before that certain forms of idealism entail "experiences having experiences", and you have always expressed a strong degree of skepticism or at least puzzlement at that suggestion. In a sense, then, all of the foregoing is nothing new, but I am hoping that by laying my case out in the way that I have just done, especially in the light of the insight I had to be explicit about two of the possible types of relationship of mind to experience - "having" and "being constituted of" experience - the reasoning behind my suggestion is clear enough that you are at least no longer puzzled as to why I make it. So, to ask the question explicitly: does my suggestion now make sense; do you see the reasoning behind it? If so, do you now agree with it? If you disagree with it, then why?

Secondly, I want to flag that insight - that of the two types of mind-experience relationship - as also of use later.

Thirdly, I'm going to skip over considerations of certain applications of the principle of charity, namely those which entail consideration of more complex types of experiences than simple redness-of-a-rose type qualia - those more like structured, conceptual thought. I'm simply going to note that although it's more plausible that those types of experiences could themselves be conscious, I don't think it's plausible enough; I think it remains a category error.

This interpretation of idealism, then, does not, it seems to me, work (and not solely for this reason, but this message is already too long to consider others). Let's return then to the question, "What is it that dissociates?", and try to answer it in another way that avoids the "experiences having experiences" absurdity.

I think we are forced here to propose one of two things.

The first is, "It remains the case that mind 'is' experience, and that it is experience(s) that dissociate(s), but here the subjective sense of experience as qualia-like is mirrored by an objective, structured sense, and it is in this objective, structured sense that it dissociates."

I don't think that this approach works either, and I've gone over why in part on my personal website on the pages An analysis of Bernardo Kastrup's semantic model of Analytic Idealism and especially the page that follows on from that, The argument against Analytic Idealism from conflicting perspectives, with which you're already (I think) familiar.

The second is, "It is mind as a structured, dimensional substrate - a substrate that 'has' experiences - that dissociates". This approach is perhaps not as amenable to the analysis+argument to which I've just linked, but they otherwise amount to much the same thing, and that which follows applies pretty well to both of them:

We are forced, then, in a sense to "materialise mind". On these approaches, matter is essentially as real and fundamental as on physicalism - some sort of ontologically basic substance that tends to follow the laws of physics - we just refer to it as "mental" instead of "physical", and add on the qualifier that it has hidden (mental) depths beyond its appearance as a law-abiding physical substance. We are, on this view, essentially minds within a mind, directly perceiving as though physical objects the experiences belonging to the mind within which we exist.

I think that this is similarly as absurd as the "experiences having experiences" interpretation which it replaces.

Based on that which you wrote in this post in a different thread back in March, I get the sense that you make a roughly similar critique of your own:

I think Kastrup's Absolute Idealism is both wrong and really a sort of Physicalism with some mental dressing

In any case, I want to again drive the absurdity home, this time using the "mind-experience relationship types" insight, in particular the first type of relationship, the "having" ("belonging") one: on these "material mind" interpretations of idealism, when we look out at the world, we are essentially seeing the experiences being had by and thus belonging to the universal mind. Why is this absurd? For two reasons:

1. Because they are not our own; they belong to and are being had by another mind. What sense does it make that we are having the experiences already being had by (and thus belonging to) another mind (and thus not belonging to ours)?!
   
2. Because as we have those experiences already belonging to (being had by) that other mind (e.g., visual scenes) - as if that wasn't absurd enough - we have them from our own perspectives, and yet as experiences being had by a singular mind (the non-dissociated, universal mind), they rightly have only a singular perspective - that of the universal mind which is having them. What sense does it make for an experience with a singular perspective to be experienced from multiple perspectives?
   

The question then becomes: what alternative idealistic interpretations are we left with, and can we make any better sense of them?

I think we have exhausted the possibilities for sense in a "reality is a singular mind in which we all subsist" type of interpretation, but maybe you don't, and can suggest a possibility which is sensible.

Otherwise, the alternative interpretations that I can think of that make some kind of sense are those to which I referred in an earlier post in this thread: those in which a bunch of separate but connected minds exist, where the connections are of either a P2P or a client-server arrangement (or a combination of the two), with the "server" being in some sense (a) God.

Even these interpretations though seem to me to be implausible compared to dualism, implausible in the sense that they are much more convoluted than dualism: why propose a virtual mimicry - created and propagated amongst this network of minds - of a physical reality when you don't need to, and can just accept physical reality (more or less) as it appears to be?

Note that my parenthetical "more or less" is important: we have to recognise, as you point out via your thread Deep Weird, Damned Facts, that all is not entirely as it seems when it comes to physical reality. Some strange things go on in it. Arguably, that doesn't require us to reject a straightforward realism about physical reality, just to recognise that the ordinary rules of that physical reality can be radically contravened - presumably by minds - in various circumstances.

We should, I think, though - especially in the light of the fact that the worlds of our dreams can be very much like physical reality - be open to the possibility that physical reality is some sort of projection by God or by a higher mind into which our minds (souls) incarnate as avatars, and that at least some of our dreams are essentially mental projections of this same sort, whether by our own minds or by some higher mind, into which, similarly, but much more briefly, we incarnate as avatars (with there thus being - remaining - a genuine distinction between mind and mental projection aka physical reality).

This possibility retains the main advantage of idealism - that of recognising the importance of mind in the construction of reality - without the defects of idealism covered above (with more to be covered below).

I don't think we're that far apart in our views on where Idealism falters

Good to know.

though I don't seem to feel the criticisms hurt the Idealist advocate as much as you do.

Let's dig deeper then, because I didn't develop my critique fully in my previous post.

Really I'm not sure if the Dualist can simply say the Mind escapes Physical Closure while the Brain doesn't, this also seems like a position that will run into problems...

Oh, as a dualist, I'm not saying that the brain doesn't escape physical closure, i.e., to correct the double negative, I'm not saying that the brain is subject to physical closure; I'm explicitly saying the opposite: that it is not subject to physical closure, precisely because there are (also) mental causes (acting upon it).

Yeah I went back to the Mander article, and I am not sure I could say he really explains the unconscious and even conscious regulatory functions of the brain. Even if the brain is something of a hypersphere type object, where the totality of the experience is represented in its folds as a sort of map of experiential territory, it doesn't explain why we need the brain to move our limbs or take care of numerous internal aspects of the body.

Yep, and I neglected to mention too in my last post that it doesn't explain either the problem we started with: why the brain appears to (generally) obey the laws of physics, despite being a self-representation of the (full set of experiences of the) mind, which, presumably, is not bound by the laws of physics.

I am not overly troubled by the question of the brain being an experiential object that belongs either to God or the Collective Unconscious. I can see the brain as a kind of bottle neck that arises due to beginning rules place[d] on the design of this universe, that in turn leads to biological life and eventually our own human bodies.

Oh, but I think you should be (troubled by this)! This is the same absurdity covered above: if it is God or the Collective Unconscious that is having the experience of the brain, then it makes no sense for us distinct minds to be having that same experience (of the brain) too, much less from multiple different perspectives: an experience belongs to and thus can be had by only one mind at a time, and only from one perspective - that mind's perspective.

As the Idealist Scott Roberts notes:

[I'm breaking up this quote to better response to it --Laird]

There is conscious activity (thinking, feeling, sensing, hallucinating, dreaming, and so on). Idealism is the claim that there is only conscious activity. Given idealism, one then has to provide a scenario or two that would explain why it seems to us that there is non-conscious activity, like water flowing down a river. One scenario is to say that we could all be sharing a dream.

As I wrote above, this scenario can make sense if the dream reality is a projection by a mind. I don't think it makes sense if the dream reality "is" that mind, or "is" that mind's experience(s).

It also, though, doesn't clearly explain what the point of the (dreamt-up) brain is and what relationships that (dreamt-up) brain has both with(in) the dream reality and with our personal minds. Why does it exist in this dream, and why does it seem to be necessary in the dream for coordinating movement, sensation, etc?

Another is to say we are avatars in a virtual-reality-like simulation, albeit one produced by superior spirit beings, not running on a computer.

Again, this can make sense as a projection by mind. The main problem it needs to avoid is stipulating that we, ourselves - as minds - are being simulated, and/or that the simulation is "in" the mind of one of these superior spirit beings, because then we're back to the sort of absurdity of the "materialised mind whose experiences we are having" scenarios above. Unfortunately (emphasis added)...

It should be noted that these scenarios are not additional assumptions, rather just ways to imagine how it could be that water flowing down a river could be understood as being within consciousness.

...it seems that that's exactly what is being stipulated here.

On the other hand, those who assume there is something other than conscious activity are faced with either the intractable problem of how conscious and non-conscious actvity interact (dualism)

Far from being "intractable", it's a pseudo-problem. What reason beyond personal incredulity is there why mind and matter could not interact?

or the hard problem of consciousness (materialists).

Yep, that one I agree with him is a genuine problem.

So idealism simplifies by not having an intractable problem.

Ah, no, he's wrong: idealism has its own intractable problems - its absurdities - as expressed above.

However, I do think this seems to add certain causal powers to experience that we normally would attribute to something beyond experience whose existence is mediated through the First Person PoV.

Nicely put. The problem again is: whose PoV? An experience can only be had by one mind with one PoV; here, the same experience seems to be had by multiple minds.

We don't think of redness as having a causal impact on a rose, and we know someone can be burned without experience the pain of extreme heat.

Nicely put again. This seems to be somewhat related to the critique I made near the start of this post: the absurd entailment of "experiences having experiences"; here it is in the form of (the similar absurdity of) "experiences exercising intrinsic causal power".

OTOH we do have our experiences of using our will to resist fatigue/hunger/etc. The importance of said will on bodily function is especially prominent when rushing to the bathroom! So that would be a case of consciousness having a causal impact that seems to be more than just the brain acting as mediator for our will to move a limb.

Let's take a moment to consider further the absurdity of the idealist model in this scenario:

Here, a universal mind is having the experience of a phenomenal brain (yours), which somehow (it's not specified how or why) reflects and represents (the state of) your noumenal mind. Somehow, at the same time, you experience the universal mind's experience which is your phenomenal brain. How you can be experiencing its experience (that of your phenomenal brain) is also left unspecified. Similarly, the universal mind is having the experience of a phenomenal body (yours) with a full bladder, and, somehow, you are having its experience in that respect too.

Now, to further explore this strangeness, let's recall the distinction between "having" and "being (constituted of)" experience(s). Which is it here? Are you "having" the experience of a body, or are you "constituted of" that experience? And whose experience is it? Yours or the universal mind's? If it's yours, then how do others (presumably, mediated by the universal mind) have access to it? If it's the universal mind's, then why do you seem to be in control of it (at least to a meaningful extent)?

At this point it's all too confusing for me to even know what the potential answers to those questions are, and whether there even are any potentially meaningful answers.

Roberts extends that will-ing to all causality ->

[Snipped --Laird]

[Comments of Sci's snipped --Laird]

Snipped (for brevity) because I don't think it adds anything that addresses the problems I've raised already.

If we reject Idealism, but embrace Fine Tuning, we have to try an explain how this universe was made. If God or some other entities made the physical...what did they make it from?

I don't think we need to know or even stipulate the answer to that; I don't see it as problematic in the first place that the physical - whatever its true nature - was projected/extruded by (a powerful enough) mind.

Is this "stuff" that responds to Mind, so that the Fine Tuner(s) willed this universe into being?

It has to be, yes, because (brain) matter clearly does respond to (its inhabiting) mind.

I think there remains some issues for the Idealist though. One of which is the functional dualism introduced by having the brain as ultimately dependent on some greater entity's experience, even if said greater entity includes my own being.

Right - I think you're alluding to the sort of absurdities I've tried to explicate in more detail above.

However one could argue that at least this functional dualism avoids the Interaction Problem, if we're inclined to question how two unalike substances such as Matter & Mind would ever have the kind of relationship our brains have with our minds.

And I'm not (inclined to question that).

But if the brain is a sort of virtual reality apparatus, in the same way we can interact with a game world through a monitor and a joystick/keyboard/mouse, why does the brain also reveal so much about our minds?

All to say I don't think the idea of a brain as a separate mental object is incoherent, but I do think there remain questions about how such a relationship between my mind and this brain-from-another-mind works...

...whereas I'm inclined to think that it is incoherent, whether or not I've succeeded above in making that case.

I don't agree with the epiphenomenalist take but I do admit I think I might have the same issue as Mander when it comes to Dualism, namely it's hard to see how the brain is obeying the laws of physics but the mind somehow manages to be more than that.

I assume that the idea here is that even when the mind does things beyond the constraints of physical law, the brain captures some limited aspect of this and perhaps even helps facilitate such mental activity?

I think that's roughly correct, however, it's not so much that the mind "somehow manages" to be more than physically law-abiding; it's that it never in the first place had any tendency to follow physical laws; it is mental in its basic nature. Yes, the brain "captures some limited aspect of this" in (as I see it) two senses: (1) the general sense in which it was designed in the first place to be the vehicle for a mind, so it has to "fit" and to some meaningful extent "reflect" or "mirror" that mind, and (2) the specific sense in which it is in a constant interactive relationship with its inhabiting mind, and so at any given instant it to some meaningful extent reflects or mirrors the instantaneous contents of that inhabiting mind.

Well I think even indeterminism (as well as determinism) that happen "just because" end up being creation ex nihilo. I think if some thing happens there should be a reason, but the only causation whose inner working I can try to claim intimate knowledge of is that of my own mind...

I think there can be a middle path where there are "contingent reasons" - i.e., reasons, but not necessary reasons - as we've discussed in the context of free will. I also think that "just because" can be turned into "because complete freedom (true randomness) in this context was permitted". In short: I don't see the same "creation ex nihilo" problem that you do, but I do respect your view here; I think I see why you hold it and it's not obviously unsound let alone absurd.

I think this question of what Natural Laws are is a key to this question of coherence. If laws by their nature must be mental then it helps the Idealist immensely.

Well, as a dualist, I see mind (consciousness) as at least as fundamental as matter, such that there's always on my view a mind to create/enforce/etc any laws - so idealism has no advantage in this respect even if you're right about the nature of laws necessarily being mental.

I don't think it takes an in-depth knowledge of physics. Really Aaronson is just noting that in the history of science we get hints about Nature through early work that is further built upon in later work. But this railing against indeterminism makes it seem Nature has given us an "anti-clue", a bizarre red herring that has to be falsified for what seem like metaphysical reasons over scientific ones.

Well, I watched Sabine's video, and I read some of the comments under his article, including one (the only one?) of hers, and I quickly became lost and confused. I wouldn't want to take a position on any of this without at the very least understanding (1) what Bell's Inequality is, (2) how to derive it from first principles, (3) what it implies and why, (4) what the experiment to confirm it was and how it succeeded, (and 5, 6, 7, etc, etc...).

Okay, I think I finally finished replying to you!

I can imagine your reaction at this point. "OMG. I've created a monster."

You really didn't realise what you were getting yourself into, did you?

"On Hoffman's view, the noumenal entity corresponding to a person's (phenomenal) brain is not the same (noumenal) entity as that which is that person's (noumenal) mind."

Yes? Is that what you're saying?

I think Hoffman is just saying that the brain we observe is not necessarily the same as reality.

Is he saying that the noumenal brain is different from the noumenal mind? That I think is less clear but I would venture that he at least leaves the possibility open.

Hmm, but as implied by my question above, my concern is with the noumenal entity which the phenomenal brain - the "icon" - represents, not the phenomenal brain (icon) as such. Why? Because, for the purposes of my tabulation, (I stipulate that) the brain and mind under consideration are only taken to be entities in their own right to the extent that they are in some reasonably meaningful sense ontologically basic. A brain-as-icon, it seems to me, is not an ontologically basic entity in the necessary (stipulated) sense; it is merely a stand-in for that entity.

With that clarified, would you still say that Hoffman's view corresponds to the row at issue in my tabulation, in which both brain and mind are "mental" and non-identical, and states of mind fully determine brain states, or do you think I'm misrepresenting the brain on his view as not being properly basic?

He definitely doesn't think the brain-as-icon is basic, but rather what he calls the "relational brain" in his essay.

"If it’s true that your brain creates all your conscious  experiences, then it must be your relational brain, not your phenomenal brain, which is the creator.

But what is your relational brain? Does it resemble your phenomenal brain? There’s no reason to suppose it does. In fact, as we saw with the volleyball, there’s no reason to suppose that the nature of the phenomenal brain in any way constrains the nature of the relational brain. Your phenomenal brain is simply a graphical interface that allows you to interact with your relational brain, whatever that relational brain might be. And all that’s required of a graphical interface is that it be systematically related to what it
represents. The relation can be as arbitrary as you wish, as long as it’s systematic."

Later on he notes that the findings of science - which he regards as the study of icons and their relations if I understand him correctly - are compatible with Physicalism, Dualism, and Idealism.

It looks like you're saying something really interesting here (the emphasised), but I'm not 100% sure what it is, nor whether it's along the same lines as my own critique. It'd be really helpful if you elaborated in some depth.

I guess another way of saying this would be that the Idealist is potentially arguing for direct realism - what we see is really out there - while also accepting the brain as observed is not the Noumenal but rather just the Phenomenal.

Of course the Idealist can argue that direct realism isn't true, but in that case it isn't clear why consciousness is the "stuff" of reality. After all if our consciousness is mediating, presenting a user interface, to what is really out there then why should the "really out there" stuff be made of consciousness?

. So, to ask the question explicitly: does my suggestion now make sense; do you see the reasoning behind it? If so, do you now agree with it? If you disagree with it, then why?

I have to admit I don't recall my exact prior object[ion]...but If there is only One Mind that is the only True Subject, then I think your criticism makes sense. But I do suspect the argument hinges on the Idealist insisting that the minds of the illusory Many are just experiences of the One.

We might need to invite an Idealist like Scott Roberts or Peter Sas, who last I checked thought the Many were real and not illusory. IIRC Amit Goswami also rejects the idea that the Many are illusory, but I also suspect it would be harder to get him here...

I think we have exhausted the possibilities for sense in a "reality is a singular mind in which we all subsist" type of interpretation, but maybe you don't, and can suggest a possibility which is sensible.

I think this very much depends on the nature of the One and the Many. From what some patients who have DID have said there is a place within the mind in which alters can meet, and so it seems to me that this world could also have a similar nature?

Admittedly I don't think this is exactly true, I don't think "consciousness" or "matter" are the right descriptors for whatever underlies all reality.

But I think that outside of the One True Subject problem - which has shown up in certain varieties of panpsychism as well - that Idealism could still be possible.

Even these interpretations though seem to me to be implausible compared to dualism, implausible in the sense that they are much more convoluted than dualism: why propose a virtual mimicry - created and propagated amongst this network of minds - of a physical reality when you don't need to, and can just accept physical reality (more or less) as it appears to be?

So is Dualism then by its nature proposing a direct realism, or does the brain present/construct the world to the mind? Because if the brain is the physical object that determines how the physical reality looks to the mind, then we have a mimicry regardless right?

Note that my parenthetical "more or less" is important: we have to recognise, as you point out via your thread Deep Weird, Damned Facts, that all is not entirely as it seems when it comes to physical reality. Some strange things go on in it. Arguably, that doesn't require us to reject a straightforward realism about physical reality, just to recognise that the ordinary rules of that physical reality can be radically contravened - presumably by minds - in various circumstances.

What is physical about physical reality if it can be radically contravened by the influence of minds?

Recall this physical reality seems to have been designed and at its quantum level has an odd relationship to the "observer" which may mean the universe is participatory if observers must be conscious entities.

We should, I think, though - especially in the light of the fact that the worlds of our dreams can be very much like physical reality - be open to the possibility that physical reality is some sort of projection by God or by a higher mind into which our minds (souls) incarnate as avatars, and that at least some of our dreams are essentially mental projections of this same sort, whether by our own minds or by some higher mind, into which, similarly, but much more briefly, we incarnate as avatars (with there thus being - remaining - a genuine distinction between mind and mental projection aka physical reality).

This possibility retains the main advantage of idealism - that of recognising the importance of mind in the construction of reality - without the defects of idealism covered above (with more to be covered below).

Yeah I think this is probably among the strongest arguments for Idealism, though I agree with you about the defects of believing there is just One True Subject.

I'm explicitly saying the opposite: that it is not subject to physical closure, precisely because there are (also) mental causes (acting upon it)...

...Yep, and I neglected to mention too in my last post that it doesn't explain either the problem we started with: why the brain appears to (generally) obey the laws of physics, despite being a self-representation of the (full set of experiences of the) mind, which, presumably, is not bound by the laws of physics.

Do you think this mental-physical interaction is at the quantum level?

Oh, but I think you should be (troubled by this)! This is the same absurdity covered above: if it is God or the Collective Unconscious that is having the experience of the brain, then it makes no sense for us distinct minds to be having that same experience (of the brain) too, much less from multiple different perspectives: an experience belongs to and thus can be had by only one mind at a time, and only from one perspective - that mind's perspective.

I think this goes back to the question of whether this is only One True Subject. DID patients don't necessarily, AFAIK, regard alters as merely illusions after all..

It also, though, doesn't clearly explain what the point of the (dreamt-up) brain is and what relationships that (dreamt-up) brain has both with(in) the dream reality and with our personal minds. Why does it exist in this dream, and why does it seem to be necessary in the dream for coordinating movement, sensation, etc?

The question of why are there corporeal brains in corporeal bodies utilized by immaterial minds seems to be a mystery under dualism as well?

Far from being "intractable", it's a pseudo-problem. What reason beyond personal incredulity is there why mind and matter could not interact?

I think the issue, historically, was raised by Descartes claim that the mental "stuff" was extensionless where as the physical was extended. This led to the question of how a non-spatial "stuff" was interacting with stuff that was extended.

Dualists proponents however seem to be saying either that mental "stuff" is extended, as per the spatial extension in afterlife realms OR that the "stuff" that makes up afterlife realities is different from the physical but still also different from mind.

The latter option seems to make Dualists into Pluralists though?

Also, if the physical and mental can interact *and* we only know the physical through the mental...on what grounds are we saying the physical and mental are distinct substances?

What are the criteria for demarcating substances?

I don't think we need to know or even stipulate the answer to that; I don't see it as problematic in the first place that the physical - whatever its true nature - was projected/extruded by (a powerful enough) mind.

So a powerful enough mind can make a substance that is wholly distinct from itself?

Isn't that running into a Something From Nothing problem?

I think that's roughly correct, however, it's not so much that the mind "somehow manages" to be more than physically law-abiding; it's that it never in the first place had any tendency to follow physical laws; it is mental in its basic nature. Yes, the brain "captures some limited aspect of this" in (as I see it) two senses: (1) the general sense in which it was designed in the first place to be the vehicle for a mind, so it has to "fit" and to some meaningful extent "reflect" or "mirror" that mind, and (2) the specific sense in which it is in a constant interactive relationship with its inhabiting mind, and so at any given instant it to some meaningful extent reflects or mirrors the instantaneous contents of that inhabiting mind.

I think this can capture the correlations that go from mind to brain, but what about the ways in which physical stuff affects the mind?

Admittedly I think this is the same issue Manders runs into with his argument that the brain is a map. It seems whether one is Dualist or Idealist this question ultimately comes down to the brain as a sort of user interface by which to affect the correlated mind. While we can dismiss Physicalism for its Something from Nothing issue, I don't think Dualism has an advantage over Idealism here?

I think there can be a middle path where there are "contingent reasons" - i.e., reasons, but not necessary reasons - as we've discussed in the context of free will. I also think that "just because" can be turned into "because complete freedom (true randomness) in this context was permitted". In short: I don't see the same "creation ex nihilo" problem that you do, but I do respect your view here; I think I see why you hold it and it's not obviously unsound let alone absurd.

Not quite sure what you mean here? Do you think the cause-effect relations can hold even without a Mind, once a Mind has established said relations?

To me this is quite difficult to grasp, as it seems with physical "stuff" there is always some possible indeterminism that cannot be settled upon. For everything that happens in the physical world, something *else* could have happened. Part of why I think all causation is mental causation.

Well, as a dualist, I see mind (consciousness) as at least as fundamental as matter, such that there's always on my view a mind to create/enforce/etc any laws - so idealism has no advantage in this respect even if you're right about the nature of laws necessarily being mental.

I guess this would depend on the degree to which one thinks there is an Interaction Problem. I am not sure this is a pseudo-problem, though I also agree it isn't a fatal problem like the "mind is what the brain does" nonsense of Physicalism.

Well, I watched Sabine's video, and I read some of the comments under his article, including one (the only one?) of hers, and I quickly became lost and confused. I wouldn't want to take a position on any of this without at the very least understanding (1) what Bell's Inequality is, (2) how to derive it from first principles, (3) what it implies and why, (4) what the experiment to confirm it was and how it succeeded, (and 5, 6, 7, etc, etc...).

Fair enough. I think when physicists try to convince the public of their position - as Sabine has done - we can take their public facing arguments and evaluate them.

I can imagine your reaction at this point. "OMG. I've created a monster."

You really didn't realise what you were getting yourself into, did you? Big Grin

Heh I actually feel bad because I don't think this reply is fully answering you, but I figured I should post something to at least get the ball rolling.

[Laird]

Is [Donald Hoffman --Laird] saying that the noumenal brain is different from the noumenal mind? That I think is less clear but I would venture that he at least leaves the possibility open.

Does he though? After all, in the quote you provide from him...

"If it’s true that your brain creates all your conscious  experiences, then it must be your relational brain, not your phenomenal brain, which is the creator. [...]"

...what alternative interpretation of "that which creates all your conscious experiences" is there to "the noumenal mind"?

I don't see one, and that's how he describes the "relational" brain, which seems to be synonymous with the "noumenal" brain.

Unless you can suggest a plausible alternative interpretation, then, it seems that he is saying that the noumenal brain and the noumenal mind are identical.

...doesn't "that which creates all your conscious experiences" perfectly describe the noumenal mind?

Given that that's (also) how he describes the "relational" brain, which on our terminology is synonymous with the "noumenal" brain, then isn't it the case that he is saying that the noumenal brain and the noumenal mind are identical?

[Original (struck out) edited to the above for clarity.]

I guess another way of saying this would be that the Idealist is potentially arguing for direct realism - what we see is really out there - while also accepting the brain as observed is not the Noumenal but rather just the Phenomenal.

Got it. Good point.

Of course the Idealist can argue that direct realism isn't true, but in that case it isn't clear why consciousness is the "stuff" of reality. After all if our consciousness is mediating, presenting a user interface, to what is really out there then why should the "really out there" stuff be made of consciousness?

Another good point (in the form of what I take to be a rhetorical question).

To both of those good points, I think it's important to add that (in my view) it doesn't even make sense anyway to directly perceive consciousness as though it were "stuff". Depending on what is meant by "consciousness stuff", one would be either (1) directly perceiving the experience of another mind as though it were one's own experience and despite that one's (perceptual) perspective differs from that of the mind whose experience one is directly perceiving, or (2) directly perceiving another mind itself (as opposed to the experiences which that mind is having) as though that mind was a physical structure, thus objectifying, mechanising, and materialising consciousness: mind is the materialiser, not the material.

I have to admit I don't recall my exact prior object[ion]...

I don't think you ever fleshed it out; you simply expressed that you objected. I've looked back over the private (group) conversation in which you (several times) expressed it, but I won't share the exact quotes in this public thread unless you'd like me to.

but If there is only One Mind that is the only True Subject, then I think your criticism makes sense.

Phew. I'm glad to have been able to express it in a way that you find sensible given your prior objections.

But I do suspect the argument hinges on the Idealist insisting that the minds of the illusory Many are just experiences of the One.

Yes, it pretty much explicitly does, and, arguably, there are other ways to conceive of the situation: I addressed two of them immediately afterwards, arguing that they don't work either.

We might need to invite an Idealist like Scott Roberts or Peter Sas, who last I checked thought the Many were real and not illusory. IIRC Amit Goswami also rejects the idea that the Many are illusory, but I also suspect it would be harder to get him here...

I'd be interested to know what relationship they think the real Many have to the (also real) singular origin Mind if, indeed, they endorse a singular origin Mind, and, in particular, whether they consider that the Many are "in" that Mind, which doesn't make sense to me even for a real rather than an illusory Many: again, this is to materialise and even mechanise mind. Thus...

I think this very much depends on the nature of the One and the Many. From what some patients who have DID have said there is a place within the mind in which alters can meet, and so it seems to me that this world could also have a similar nature?

...I suggest that this place's being "within" the mind is best understood as figurative and not literal, and that, at best, as an analogy for idealism, DID demonstrates that multiple persons (selves or even souls by another name) can share the resources of, or at least communicate or commune via, a single mind or at least a single brain. I don't see any proof - nor even any sense in the idea - that they can literally exist within a single mind, and it seems most likely to me that it is the (physical) brain rather than the mind that is the locus of their communion, by which there is more sense in the idea that they exist "within" it.

But I think that outside of the One True Subject problem - which has shown up in certain varieties of panpsychism as well - that Idealism could still be possible.

Can you sketch out the possibilities? Are they any different than the P2P and client-server network-of-mind scenarios that I sketched out myself?

So is Dualism then by its nature proposing a direct realism, or does the brain present/construct the world to the mind? Because if the brain is the physical object that determines how the physical reality looks to the mind, then we have a mimicry regardless right?

Yes, but the situations are still meaningfully different: the one involves a model with lots of precise information associated with it (locations, velocities, wavelengths, etc etc) that needs to be maintained and shared in and by one or more minds, whereas the other is the real thing, not a model, and doesn't need any mental maintenance, merely sensory apprehension.

The latter is still by far less convoluted and more plausible - at least to me.

What is physical about physical reality if it can be radically contravened by the influence of minds?

I don't share the implied premise of the question: that mental influence precludes physicality.

Recall this physical reality seems to have been designed and at its quantum level has an odd relationship to the "observer" which may mean the universe is participatory if observers must be conscious entities.

Yep, but I'm not sure what you're getting at here (re the physicality of the physical).

Do you think this mental-physical interaction is at the quantum level?

I don't know enough physics to have informed enough thoughts on the matter. I wouldn't want to rule anything in or out, but, given the deep weird stuff, mental-physical interactions seem at least at times to occur on a very macro level (too).

I think this goes back to the question of whether this is only One True Subject. DID patients don't necessarily, AFAIK, regard alters as merely illusions after all..

Nor do I, but, again, I also don't think that (it makes sense to say that) alters are "in" a mind except in a figurative sense.

The question of why are there corporeal brains in corporeal bodies utilized by immaterial minds seems to be a mystery under dualism as well?

That's a fair point. Dualism has a more plausible explanation though: that brains mediate between the mental and the physical. On idealism, there is nothing to be mediated between because there is only one substance.

I think the issue, historically, was raised by Descartes claim that the mental "stuff" was extensionless where as the physical was extended. This led to the question of how a non-spatial "stuff" was interacting with stuff that was extended.

Yep, because - at least according to a cogent video interview you shared a while ago - back then the only causality known to physics was proximal contact: billiard-ball-hitting-billiard-ball type stuff. Nowadays, physics has the notion of action at a distance, so there is no longer a problem with extensionless stuff acting on extended stuff ("from a distance").

Dualists proponents however seem to be saying either that mental "stuff" is extended, as per the spatial extension in afterlife realms OR that the "stuff" that makes up afterlife realities is different from the physical but still also different from mind.

The latter option seems to make Dualists into Pluralists though?

I can't claim to know what the right way to conceive of mental "stuff" is, although I've explored some working thoughts in other threads (with some of which @nbtruthman has expressed dissatisfaction; a dissatisfaction that might well be warranted). Re pluralism, I guess it's a question of semantics, and, given your sentiments, I'd be a pluralist regardless, in the sense that I think that there is anyway at least one ontological category beyond the mental and the physical: the conceptual.

Also, if the physical and mental can interact *and* we only know the physical through the mental...on what grounds are we saying the physical and mental are distinct substances?

On the grounds that the properties of physical substances (mass, velocity, wavelength, etc) are different than the properties of mental substances (phenomenal experience aka qualia, reason, intentionality, etc).

What are the criteria for demarcating substances?

As above.

So a powerful enough mind can make a substance that is wholly distinct from itself?

Yep. It can project reality. Arguably, that projected reality need not be considered as "wholly" distinct from itself.

Isn't that running into a Something From Nothing problem?

No, by definition it's not: a mind is a something, not a nothing. It's a case of something from something.

I think this can capture the correlations that go from mind to brain, but what about the ways in which physical stuff affects the mind?

I'm not sure what you're asking. What is it about them that you find problematic?

Admittedly I think this is the same issue Manders runs into with his argument that the brain is a map. It seems whether one is Dualist or Idealist this question ultimately comes down to the brain as a sort of user interface by which to affect the correlated mind. While we can dismiss Physicalism for its Something from Nothing issue, I don't think Dualism has an advantage over Idealism here?

I refer to my suggestion above that dualism has the better explanation in terms of the brain mediating between two substances.

Not quite sure what you mean here?

Well, my reference to "contingent reasons" might not have been all that on point, but otherwise:

Do you think the cause-effect relations can hold even without a Mind, once a Mind has established said relations?

Yes, I do. I think causality is a function of the basic nature of entities (to behave in certain ways), and I don't see a reason to deny that physical entities could have basic natures in this sense (i.e., even without ongoing mental oversight).

To me this is quite difficult to grasp, as it seems with physical "stuff" there is always some possible indeterminism that cannot be settled upon. For everything that happens in the physical world, something *else* could have happened. Part of why I think all causation is mental causation.

I don't see a problem with limited indeterminism: that there is a small domain (certain quantum-mechanical behaviour) in which there is a range of options from which one occurs at random, without the need for a mind to choose which one.

Heh I actually feel bad because I don't think this reply is fully answering you, but I figured I should post something to at least get the ball rolling.

And I actually think that your reply was perfectly responsive: it was in the Goldilocks zone between addressing in depth every single sentence I wrote and responding with a single sentence to the entirety of what I wrote.

I don't think you ever fleshed it out; you simply expressed that you objected. I've looked back over the private (group) conversation in which you (several times) expressed it, but I won't share the exact quotes in this public thread unless you'd like me to.

Phew. I'm glad to have been able to express it in a way that you find sensible given your prior objections.

Feel free to post it if you think it's relevant, though I think we're at least in agreement here that there cannot be One True Subject since you cannot have an experience and *be* an experience.

Or, to put it another way, the Many have to be as real as the One. Arguably more real since we experience the Many in our consensus dealings whereas the One is either a mystical experience or a philosophical conjecture.

Will reply to the other parts later, hopefully sooner than later...

[Laird]

Feel free to post it if you think it's relevant

I'm not sure how relevant they are, except as a demonstration that at that time you objected, and that you didn't go into detail as to why, but anyhow, here are the quotes, from three separate messages (temporal order preserved) in a private conversation in August 2021 (in which others were involved too):

"That stuff about qualia having qualia seems quite off"

"I've never thought he [Bernardo Kastrup --Laird] was saying there are qualia are experiencing qualia."

"Yeah I think you make a leap from the idea that Mind@Large is the Ground to the idea each alter is an experience having experiences."

That's pretty much all you said on this.

I think we're at least in agreement here that there cannot be One True Subject since you cannot have an experience and *be* an experience.

Or, to put it another way, the Many have to be as real as the One. Arguably more real since we experience the Many in our consensus dealings whereas the One is either a mystical experience or a philosophical conjecture.

Excellent.

Will reply to the other parts later, hopefully sooner than later...

I look forward to it!

Yes, I do. I think causality is a function of the basic nature of entities (to behave in certain ways), and I don't see a reason to deny that physical entities could have basic natures in this sense (i.e., even without ongoing mental oversight).

I don't see a problem with limited indeterminism: that there is a small domain (certain quantum-mechanical behaviour) in which there is a range of options from which one occurs at random, without the need for a mind to choose which one.

I guess for me it isn't clear why the basic nature doesn't change.

Additionally, for something to happen that was truly random seems to involve a Something from Nothing issue, as noted by Thomas Nail ->

I am open to hearing evidence for an outside to the universe, but I have no idea what that would even look like. In part, because the universe is not a whole but an expanding and open process—just as Lucretius described in De Rerum Natura. I believe there is genuine novelty in the universe but we do not need to posit randomness to get that novelty. Lucretius says that matter is always in the habit [solerent] of swerving. There are at least two typical ideas of randomness neither of which Lucretius’ view could support. The first one is a radical randomness, or what Quentin Meillassoux calls “hyperchaos,” which is complete ex nihilo creation from nothing. Lucreitus is explicit that “nil posse creari de nihilo” [nothing can be created from nothing]. The second kind of randomness is the constrained definition randomness where there is a closed domain of objects and matter moves randomly within that. Again, Lucretius is explicit that nature is not a finite closed system—and so there cannot be randomness in this sense either. Something always comes from something relationally but creatively and non-deterministically.

Now, to me, the problem for determinism is how to distinguish it from Meillassoux's Hyper Chaos, as he has noted that Hyper Chaos could lead to a seemingly deterministic universe for all time. It just wouldn't be a matter of necessity but rather luck, though not a measurable kind as true randomness doesn't hold to measurable probability distributions like QM does.

Attempts to explain the necessity of causation, as we've longed discussed and agreed upon, fall flat.

So if determinism is really a special case of randomness, and randomness at least feels illogical, what is left? Nail thinks we have to ascribe the indeterminism that is not random as a brute fact of matter, but I think the alternative is to look at the one good case (IMO anyway) of possibility selection as seen from the inside. Namely our own mental causation.

Philosophers ranging from Whitehead to Bertrand Russell to Aquinas have also remarked, in different ways, on how to [gain] understanding causation one has to look to mental causation.

Frederico Faggin seems to be saying something similar recently, that you start with the free willed conscious agent and then attempt to grasp QM and its relation to the classical world.

Sorry to belabor all this, but I think this question of whether all causation is mental causation is one of the big reasons I think Dualism - which supposes a non-mental physical stuff - is flawed. This isn't related to the Interaction Problem which I agree isn't that strong of an argument and certainly not fatal to Dualism.

And of course like everyone sane I concede the functional dualism that exists between the conscious agent and the environment that exists around said agent.