Fascinating!
Thanks for posting this, Sci.
Here are a few thoughts of my own on the affair:
In my view, metaphysical positions such as those referenced, attacked, and defended in this talk - "idealism", "panpsychism", "dualism", and "physicalism" - being essentially those positions which attempt to resolve the mind-body problem - can be characterised as "semantic models"; that is, as "models of meaning". There are, in my view, two key questions with respect to a semantic model:
- How "clear" is it? That is, how good is it - divorced from reality - as a model of meaning in and of itself - really: as a set of interrelated component concepts unified by an essential concept. I describe my own criteria for clear semantic models here but no doubt other criteria are possible.
- How well does it correspond to, and reflect, reality, if, indeed, it is intended to do so (as opposed to being "merely" a self-referential semantic model, such as a set of abstract mathematical axioms and their implications)?
I
sense that Max's reaction put into my own framing as expressed above is something like this:
"There is very little to differentiate the semantic models under consideration from the perspective of correspondence with reality - they all well enough account for the known facts - and
this question of correspondence with reality is the crucial one, because it is where we make the most
useful discoveries. The protagonists in this debate are, instead, mostly contesting the value of their semantic models on the criterion of
clarity as semantic models, but even here there is very little to differentiate them, and the debate over clarity is particularly fraught because it is very prone to influence by subjective perspectives and opinions".
Please, though, feel free to correct me if I am wrong, or to otherwise clarify, Max, in which case I will simply claim ownership of this perspective as original to me.
I think it is especially fascinating that Philip and Bernardo are contrasting their perspectives antagonistically in the first place, because they are both monistic ontologies in which matter
is consciousness. The differences from there seem, to me at least, to be rather quibbling. In other words, we might ask: how, as semantic models, do Philip's and Bernardo's positions even differ from one another in a significant or at least meaningful way?
Yes, Bernardo talks about psyches "dissociating", but how is this essentially different to Philip's (presumed) idea (which I haven't read into) of a field of consciousness splitting into different psyches based on natural laws? Don't get me wrong, there probably are differences, and they may well be subtle, but: are they at all significant to either of the key questions I suggested above, that is, of how clear a semantic model is and of how well it corresponds to reality? Is there much if anything here by which to answer those questions differently for either model?
To elaborate a little further: for any given set of facts about reality, there are multiple semantic models; there may well even be multiple
clear semantic models which
equally clearly account for the facts. I am not (yet) convinced that there is much (if anything) to distinguish the clarity and correspondence-with-reality (especially the latter) of Bernardo's and Philip's models.
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