All minds are external objects to my mind save my mind. If someone sees red in China in some room where no one sees him. And if he subsequently forgets that in fact at that time he did see red, the fact remains. However, there is a difference between an objective fact and a subjective fact. The objective fact - let's pretend color was objective - could have been seen by others. But the seeing cannot be seen by others. You cannot see my seeing. That does not mean that my seeing is not a feature of the world. And if my seeing and all of the billions of other seeings, and hearings, etc are occurring external to your mind and if each of them is causally connected to a different brain - shooting this brain effects this seeing - shooting that brain affects that seeing - and if whenever you look in a mirror directly you see the same body then it is reasonable to believe that your seeing too is an external fact in the world independent of the fact that for you it is not.Londoner wrote: ... I do not think we can use it in the other direction, (not without begging the question by first turning the mind into an external object like the brain).
My experience of anesthesia is that you are not conscious at all. WIth respect to the others what do you mean by "directly conscious"? I am unaware of any direct consciousness of the world. Perhaps you mean consciousness of our own brains phenomenally? Not sure what you mean.I do not imagine that I am ever clearly and directly conscious of the world, under anesthetic, when drunk, asleep or otherwise.
Let's say that any causal pathway that results in a mechanism that thinks contributes to that mechanisms thinking. Some pathways, however, provide no information about the external world. By information I mean Shannon information. For example food is converted to energy and without it you can't think. But food contains no information. But some pathways contain information - both the genetic pathway and the sensory do. It is not out of the question, that we will be able to use the food pathway to convey information in the future. In the future you may go to school by taking the right pill.My sensations are always filtered through my sensory organs, then translated into ideas via a mental architecture that is partly innate and partly learnt.
Your mind need not be distinct from the brain for its sensations to be filtered through the senses and translated into learned or innate ideas. That's a non-sequitorSo my mind must be something distinct from any particular sensation, let alone the claim that a particular sensation is 'real' in the sense of representing the world, or being shared by others.
The reason I think I have a mind....
We are not discussing whether you have a mind but rather whether the brain you have is doing the thinking. What is the difference between having a mind and your brain thinking. You will experience the same. The difference can only be found by finding differences in your experiences that are not reflected by differences in your brain. We cannot exclude this possibility so agnosticism is the scientific answer. Scientifically we don't know yet because we don't yet have the techniques required to map the brain in detail. However given the brain's structure and given all we know so far I think that the most probably hypothesis is that those differences do not exist. This is part of the "no ghost/no zombie" hypothesis.
That's exactly right. Doesn't that make her mind external to yours and yours external to hers?... I can accept that what the nurse describes as what happened during the operation is 'true', yet also that it was not what happened to 'me', me meaning 'my mind'..
"World". There are different meanings. If by "world" you mean the universe the mapping is provided by the causal brain. Line ten people up and let them each see a different color. Anesthetize one and the color seeing that stops is the one associated with the brain that was anesthetized. So we have the mapping. Of course we could just ask "Who is seeing red?" and see who says "Me!" and we again get the mapping.].because this suggests that the mind is somehow mapped onto the world.
If by "world" you mean Being then the notion of mapping onto is more difficult. The separation between the seen and the seer is not a necessary property of experiencing. When it is not there no mapping is possible because nothing separates the experiencing from the experienced. Still "walking around in it" was "walking around in it" and so while the Oneness is still present the experiencing can still be spatial. You sort of have the whole content being spatial. It is not quite true that Mystical experience is not spatial. It is certainly not spatial in the normal sense. But you can walk around, garden, do things while experiencing non-objectively.
The best idea is to equate the word "information" with Shannon information and treat the sensory pathway as a signal pathway. No information is created in the brain. Rather information that was deposited into the signal, say when light struck a rock and reflected, is communicated and possibly stored in the brain. Also the experiencing that occurs reflects this information and we can tell from our experiencing facts about the world external to our brains. That encoding into the brain of this information and the encoding into experiencing are not the same encoding. But it is a non sequitor to say that it is not the brain thinking and that there needs to be another something called the mind in order for these two encodings to occur. The seeing that the brain does encodes the same information that is in the light even before it strikes the eye, and the fact that the brains encodes this in the seeing it does and in the motion or alignment of its atoms is not a reason to posit anything other than the fact that the brains seeing is not just the motion of its atoms - it does not mean that the brain is the atoms and the seeing is something else.To describe the senses as preserving 'external information' rather begs the question. Cells in my eye respond to light in a mechanical way; my brain may turn this into what we are calling information,....
Right. Nor does a computer that stores these letters think. But the information encoded in these letters does exist in the computer. Information has nothing to do with meaning. Look at the Rosetta stone. There is information there. But no meaning in the stone. Look at Claude Shannon's paper on information theory. He says explicitly it has nothing to do with meaning.....but that is different from the electrical signal in the optic nerve, let alone the photons themselves or the origin of those photons. After all, a tree also responds to light, (which confers survival advantage) but we do not imagine that the tree sees the world.
Yea. Except that we create the information internally I agree. The information exists in the environment and it get's in mainly through the sensory pathway - also through instinct....I would suggest that the 'information' is something we create, internally. The map is in our heads. We interpret the signals from our optic nerve by reference to that map. Thus, if we get discordant signals we do not immediately make a new map. When things do not fit in, we first think; 'I must be dreaming/drunk/under anesthetic etc.' Only reluctantly, if there is no other way, will we readjust our map (as minimally as possible) to adapt to disruption. (I see God. I will go with 'I'm drunk' or 'somebody is playing a trick' or even 'an alien!' before abandoning all of science.)
There may be differences between color experiencing and thinking about color experiencing. Is that what you mean? Both may be something our brains do though.I think we can only do this because we (our minds) stand at a remove from any given sensation, or piece of information.
Right. But trees don't have brains. That is why they don't experience. At least that's plausible. Also that is why trees don't think. They have no brains.... The tree responds to light, we respond to light, but unlike the tree we are aware we are responding to light, thus we have the ability to think about light as a general phenomenon, and thus we know that our eyes can deceive us.
But you can also say that the brain thinks and realizes the difference, separateness. The only difference between the two is whether what happens is the "creation" of some noun called a "mind" or whether the brain doesn't create something called a "mind" but rather just thinks. We agree basically on the facts. What will decide this is if we find that there are two thoughts that occur without a corresponding change in the brain. If that happens then you are right. But if they are one to on onto then you are wrong by Occam's razor....Its mind is created through realising difference, separateness..
Heidegger has good stuff on this. Temporality is fundamental to being. It get's very complicated.I would have said that what characterises our minds is a continual awareness of the present.
You can think that way. But there are other ways you can think. For example you can think that rocks are not fluid but solid. Whereas water is fluid. The whole notion of fluidity can be objective.I would disagree that I am the same 'me' as I was an hour ago. If I was, then I could not know it; I would not be aware that an hour had passed, since no change would have occurred.
As I live in the moment, everything is fluid. But in the past, everything is fixed. That in itself is a fundamental difference between 'me an hour ago' and 'me now'. I can only connect the two if I think of myself now as if I was an object, if I view myself from outside, imagine myself as a cinema film where a series of slightly changing images connects 'then' to 'now'. Yet at the same time, I am aware this is a falsification; a construction. The me that was is gone absolutely.
What will help is if you divide your thinking into two categories. When you consider what is and try to describe and then think about it you are considering its nature. Then the descriptions of science are invaluable. The describe solids, gases, liquids, etc. It's very accurate and does a bang up job of describing what we experience. But if you consider that it is, if you consider existence itself then the descriptions you are using are better. For there is no meaning to a solid fact that it is vs a liquid fact that it is. But temporality does seem to be fundamental to being of mind. It is hard to, maybe impossible to think of our existence without involving time. Numbers come to mind as non temporal. Eternal existence it is called. It can be done but not for the mind. Some call it the mind of God. But that temporalizes God. It get's very technical and I surely can't parse it right now.
Now this is where you can see it for finally we have science on this. Science has determined that short term memory occurs in changes in the chemistry in the synapse but long term memory has to do with making additional connections between nerve cells. So a mapping has at least partially been made.I think that making memory into a noun does what I wrote about earlier, turn it into an object, one that can be lost or found.
So how do you explain the effect of a stroke on memory. Can you show me how to remember if I get a stroke? I could surely use that if there is a way. But you can't. Once that stroke occurs it wipes out the function of those neurons and memory is destroyed. Its not something you *can* do. Look, you can use your will to try to remember. But you need more than your effort for the memory to occur. There are times when your will is unsuccessful. I suspect that that "trying" is the same "trying" that we do to move an arm and that is why "thinking" can tire you just like exercise does.But I would say that there is something we do called 'remember', in which we try to make sense of the present, place it in our metal map. We need to create patterns, discern cause and effect relationships. When doing this, I think it works both ways. We are quite capable of creating, or adjusting, our memory to fit in with how things are now. I understand that this is something readily observed in life; the witness to an accident will 'remember' details that create a narrative that makes sense, and so on. It is not difficult to implant memories or 'lose' them.
Why can we not modify our notion of matter such that arranging it in some way causes it to think? Then we can learn the rules and even tell what it is thinking by how its molecules move.Once again, to be clear, I do not dispute that our ability to have thoughts depends on our brains and body.
OK, you have more than one point here. First causality does not mean identity. I don't claim it does. If you define "a brain" as just the physical structure where "physical structure" is limited to the current physical science then brains in fact do not think. Because there is nothing in physical science that says that they do and we are limiting the term to what the current science says. But our definitions can evolve. We can define matter as something which if arranged in a certain way will think and we can define which ways matter must be arranged for which thoughts. So for me it is not that brains cause thinking, I am saying that brains are thinking. But the fact that brains can be thinking means that brains are not just describable with the current physical laws. But there is no other object, nor no other subject required. The brain can serve both as the object of the impulses of the senses and the subject of experiencing. There is nothing wrong with that definition provided we continue not to find two difference experiencings, two subjective experiences to use your terms that correlate with the same physical configuration. Even if one of those experiencings is null - a zombie - then it is better to say that there is a mind. But absent zombies or ghosts it is better to change our notion of matter and realize that object not only can be subjects but that they are.I would say that the question of causality is different. Causality is something we create in order to make the world predictable. If I say 'A caused B' I am selecting two features of the world and pointing out a connection between them, because I find it useful to do so. But the causality only arises because I did that selecting; in reality B is caused by the state of the entire universe, (as was A).
So by trying to explain the mind in terms of causality, we are using a technique that is created in the mind. It is like trying to show that hallucinations are not real through the medium of hallucinations.