Atla wrote: ↑Wed Feb 06, 2019 5:45 pmThe default view is that they are one the same.
No, the default view was initially to ignore the mind altogether. Reality was the material world as mediated by perception. People only very gradually realised they were essentially a soul, hence religion, spiritualism and the like. Even now, children recapitulate this evolution, starting with a naive view, i.e. naive realism, which is to naively take your percept of the tree to be the tree. Then you learn to put some distance. Most people don't really go much further simply because of the demands of material life. What you call the "default view" is merely the official dogma of the materialist establishment. This is as good as make-believe. Dualism is intrinsic to any cognitive system: outside world v. internal representation of the outside world. The default mode is naive realism where you naively take the representation for what is represented. But dualism is the essential characteristic of the human mind as a cognitive system and rationality leads you inevitably to accept it as the most basic fact you know.
Atla wrote: ↑Wed Feb 06, 2019 5:45 pm
As far as we can tell, the
additional and completely unsupported assumption of any kind of dualism is metaphysics on par with Flat Earth ideas. That's the realistic assessment of our situation, which is bad knews for people who like Descartes, possibly one of the most destructive humans in history.
It's not metaphysics. It's epistemology. We
know our qualia but we can only
believe there's a material world, although it is an instinctive and therefore unshakeable belief.
Descartes came very late. Plato and Catholicism had already started to rationalise dualism. Descartes only turned it into a potential personal inquiry for all of us. I think, therefore I am. Who can rationally object?
Atla wrote: ↑Wed Feb 06, 2019 5:45 pm
You can even show in physics how the "contents of the mind" correlate with the "physical experiment carried out there", in other words the mind simply seems to be a part of the world like everything else.
And we better believe that the actual physical world somehow correlates with our own mind. As a matter of fact, we can only perceive the material world, if at all, through our subjective experience. We don't even know what it is to be a physical thing. All we know it this subjective thing we call our mind. We take our subjective experience of our brain's representation of a tree to be the actual, physical tree. The physical world is a metaphysical construct. The only thing you know is your own mind.
Atla wrote: ↑Wed Feb 06, 2019 5:45 pm
"Cogito ergo sum" is misleading when we take the "I" too seriously, Eastern philosophy has already realized its illusory nature like 3000 years ago
Descartes very carefully explained what was the "I" of the Cogito: the thinking thing. So, you have to take that seriously. If you have the illusion of a ghost, then the illusory ghost doesn't exist but the illusion of ghost itself exists. That's also ancient wisdom. No big deal.
EB