NewRotIck wrote:
I doubt the mind-body problem can ever be "solved" in the sense that we'd get a tidy little theory that explains the entirety of consciousness, including the subjective. It's just too complex. The best we can do is model its components in ever-increasing detail, approaching, but never quite reaching, complete understanding.
I favour some type of emergence (panpsychism seems too much of a stretch and panprotopsychism is kind of tautological and doesn't tell us much) but it seems like a vastly different type of emergence than any other type of emergence, perhaps because there's something missing from the microstuff (physics not completed) that is absolutely necessary to make sense of how the brain spits out mental/experiential stuff as per Jussi Jylkkä's argument:
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It is indeed the case that mind cannot emerge from scientifically described extrinsic properties like mass, charge, and spin, but do we know that mind could not emerge from the intrinsic properties that underlie these scientifically observable properties? It might be argued that since we know absolutely nothing about the intrinsic nature of mass, charge, and spin, we simply cannot tell whether they could be something non-mental and still constitute mentality when organised properly.
Moreover, physics/science is not completed and nobody can predict what a future physics/science will tell us about the more fundamental stuff but I still can't see how one can possibly made headway into the mind-body problem, particularly because some philosophers like Strawson demand quite a bit:
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My claim is not that non-experiential or N properties cannot in fact be paired with experiential or E properties in correlation statements of the form ‘[N1→E1]’. It consists of two main points.
1. Even if we attempted to put forward correlation statements of the form ‘[N1→E1]’, we could never hope to verify such statements across a human population by checking independently on E1 and N1 and thereby establishing the correlations, because we could never check independently on E1. If we somehow knew some of the correlation statements to hold true in the case of a single individual, we could perhaps take their general truth to be guaranteed by the truth of the supervenience thesis, but it is unclear whether even this would be acceptable, given the extent of our ignorance of the nature of the physical. Further, even if some statement of the form ‘[N1→E1]’ were somehow known to be true, the only people who could know for sure what ‘E1’ referred to would be those who had been shown to have N1 and had been told which of their experiences was specially correlated with, or realized by, N1 (‘It’s whatever visual experience you are having...wait...now’).
2. We could never make a start on testing interpersonally applicable correlation statements of the form ‘[E1→N1]’, because we could never be sure that we had distinguished the same experiential property in the case of two different people, even if they fully agreed in language about what experiences they were having. It is plausible that ‘[E1→N1]’ correlation statements would have to be of the form ‘[E1→ N1∨ N2∨ N3∨ ... ]’: they would have to be disjunctive and open-ended on the righthand side, because of the possible “variable physical realization” of any experiential property. The present point, however, is that even if one could identify exactly which nonexperiential neural goings-on were involved in the occurrence of a particular type of experience in one’s own case, and at a given time, one could never fill out the disjunctive right-hand side of the correlation statement by including other people, because one could never know that one was really dealing with the same type of experience in their case.
(see "The Impossibility of an Objective Phenomenology" on p. 62-65):
25 Feb 2013, 10:42 am
