first off, Niels Bohr is a b*tch. .... ok, here we go:)?

Question

1.Mind is a charicteristic of the organizational state of the matter that constitutes the brain.

2.Matter in this particular organizational state is of course subject to the laws of causality, as is all matter.

3.Thoughts, i.e. physical interactions, are governed in a deterministic manner by all matter and qualities of that matter that have direct contact with it.

4.The wonderful illusion of a separate self that is free from causality, is apparently the reason for the persistence of this seemingly strange arrangement of matter.......(life)

i'd love to know what ANYONE thinks. this is "my lifes work" so dont be too harsh. and before you all start hating on cause and effect, i will tell you that i do not buy the copenhegan interpretation. there isnt enough evidence to prove to me cause and effect actually break down on a that level. im with einstien on this one, so spare me the quantum uncertainty dung.


-------Nathaniel B.

Answer 1

I don’t think that mind is reducible to brain states, and if it is not reducible to brain states, then it need no be strictly limited by physical causality. Here some brief thoughts on each idea.

I agree with quite a bit with David Chalmers on the “hard problem of consciousness.” We can’t use third-person/objective concepts to fully explain first-person/subjective experience. Even if we knew everything there is to know about the firing patterns of neurons, we would still never deduce the feeling of what it is like to see red or taste Spaghettios. Why should we experience anything at all? From a purely objective point of view it makes no sense. This does not mean that we have to be ontological dualists, nor does it mean that we have to be idealists. We have another option, namely, rejecting the sort of subject/object dualism that is inherent in representationalism. Representationalism is the thesis that brain activity represents a mind-independent world. It is the idea that we don’t experience reality directly, but rather, we experience brain activity, and this brain activity is correlated with a world “out there.” This inner/outer distinction sets up a subject/object dualism, and forces an epistemological wedge between the subject and the world. All we ever know is our subjective experience – we never know the world directly. I believe that representationalism leads us astray.

We are not trapped in our brains. We are connected with the world in such a way that there is never a true ontological split between subject and object, but rather, there are only differences of perspective. Our brain activity does NOT represent the world to us in such a way that all we directly experience are our own mental states, but rather, our brain activity is a part of world itself PRESENTING another part of the world itself to itself. Since I essentially am the world itself (at least a part of it), there is no ontological gap between me and the world. The patterns in my brain to not constitute a subjective realm that merely correlates with a mind-independent world out there, but rather, the patterns in my brain constitute a process whereby the world itself presents itself to itself. The inner/outer distinction is not a true ontological distinction between inner/subjective and outer/objective essences, but rather, the inner/outer distinction is just a matter of perspective. So the fundamental freedom of Being itself is also our fundamental freedom. Causation is not matter being forced to obey natural laws. Causation is simply Being Itself freely pursuing its own nature. We typically talk about “nature/nurture” when we discuss freedom, but these are not our only options. A third option is agent-causation, i.e., an agent choosing to act beyond either nature or nurture. This can only happen, of course, if the agent’s nature is such that it is fundamentally free. Being Itself has no choice but to be absolutely free. There is nothing beyond Being to give Being its nature, so Being’s nature must be fundamentally self-created, and thus Being must be fundamentally free. We are Being Itself, so Being’s freedom is our freedom, although we typically hide from this fact and refuse to embrace it.

Like it or not, this is what quantum uncertainty is really telling us. If the world were nothing but deterministic matter, there would be no necessity for quantum weirdness. But if, as I am suggesting, Being Itself is fundamentally free, then in the long run determinism simply cannot hold. We would expect to find “weirdness” at some level, so it makes sense that we would eventually discover it at the level of fundamental elements. We seem to find weird connections between observer and observed at the quantum level because there ARE connections – every observation is essentially an act of Being Itself observing Itself, so paradoxes of self-reference are bound to kick in. There are no truly objective or mind-independent events because there is no ontologically basic division between mind and world. There are differences, certainly, but these are only differences of perspective or variations on process – not radically distinct substances or essences. Being is limitation in the sense that most beings can only experience one perspective at a time. This is why we cannot simply wiggle our noses and make the world be just the way we want it to be. We are limited because each of us is Being Itself from a limited perspective. These limitations set up the illusion of the subject/object split. But it is only an illusion.

Answer 2

You may not like my answer (up to you!), but this sort of stuff is exactly why I dropped my Philosophy Major (and I WAS a Philosophy Major, so I certainly understand your enthusiam for this stuff!), and took up LIFE (and Zen!). :-))

All of this over-analysis does not really help. Yes, it is semantically interesting to consider, but what does it MEAN? How does it HELP?

Honey, sometimes, "a poem should not MEAN, but BE." ~Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica, 1926


Just live, learn, feel, and experience. All this semantic crap gets in the way (although it can make one's own personal musings more well-defined, and far more interesting to consider!). :-))

1. 2. & 3. are true. Pretty hard to argue with.

4. is the delightful paradox :-))

Life can sometimes be DEFINED by our thought, but it can NEVER be wholly CONFINED by our thought.

Keep thinkin' :-))