Jamsque

Jamsque

@Jamsque

He's just this guy, you know?

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Jamsque
@Jamsque

Contrasting realities

The human body exists in physical reality, in the realm of space-time and mass-energy. Physical reality is persistent, operates uniformly, and is constrained by locality. Physical reality is discrete and quantifiable, and it resists subjectivity.

Human consciousness exists in metaphysical reality, in the realm of thought and imagination. Metaphysical reality is evanescent and variegated, it is malleable without restriction and responsive without delay. Unlike the countable infinity of physical reality, metaphysical reality is endlessly, continuously infinite. There is no entity in metaphysical reality so singular that it cannot be infinitely expanded and complicated. There is no distance in metaphysical reality so small that it cannot be endlessly and recursively pried apart to reveal further infinities of distinction.

The contrast between our interactions with physical reality and metaphysical reality is core to our experience of being. To be human is to be simultaneously frustrated by the inertial resistance and claustrophobic locality of physical reality, and the intransigence and weakness to subjectivity of metaphysical reality. To be human is to desire that physical reality respond to one’s whims as readily and completely as metaphysical reality, and to desire that metaphysical reality persist and persuade as stubbornly as physical reality.

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bilgerat
@bilgerat

dualism 🤧 consciousness is not only grounded in the physical, it is physical; all processes of thought are processes of matter, the conceptual/abstract exists within the limitations of the brain and the information held within it, and thereby within the limitations of what can be experienced, what information can enter - the conceptual apparatus is not transcendent but is produced within a social and phenomenological environment, it is immanent to experience which proceeds on a wholly physical basis: sense-perception carried out through signal-transmissions (sound, light, particulates, etc) which, entering the nervous system, constitute a given experience distributed between the body's many parts, lighting up the nervous system to produce a neural response from which qualia is produced.
the mind is not metaphysical, nor is it [physical but dwelling in a metaphysical realm of abstract, transcendent thought]; the mind is immanent to the nervous system and the physical processes which produce its activity and experience

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Jamsque
@Jamsque

Listen, I get it, I truly do. Dualism is icky in the extreme and it has been deployed to a lot of nefarious ends. Unfortunately, pure physicalism is not as comprehensive in its explanatory power as you assert.

For starters, it just isn't a complete end-to-end description of all of the phenomena of consciousness. I could give you an infinite amount of time with an infinite-resolution FMRI machine and an infinite number of test subjects and I don't think you could produce an answer to the questions "how does Modus Ponens manifest neurobiologically?" or "what pattern of neural links represents people's feelings about their grandmother's cooking?" This doesn't mean that it is impossible to represent such concepts physically, but it does mean that our physical models of consciousness are at best severely lacking in detail.

In addition, while I agree with your statement that the conceptual apparatus is produced within a social and phenomenological environment, I think that a purely physicalist approach makes this fact less obvious and more difficult to work with. It is almost ludicrous to think of things like the Nation State and compound interest and post-modern film criticism as physical phenomena that we come to understand conceptually because of the ways they impinge on our senses. Far better to follow Hegel and see these as inhabiting a shared metaphysical space that we may label 'geist' or 'society' or 'culture'. The process of exchange between the metaphysical world of an individual and that of the society they inhabit is the (I will grant, physically mediated) experience of subjectivity, and as Butler and others have observed, it is the sum of these experiences of subjectivity that produce the subject.

Ultimately what has led me to this position is the idea that nation states are real, that compound interest is real, that post-modern film criticism is real, for any useful/meaningful definition of what 'real' is, but crucially and I think obviously, they are real in fundamentally different ways than the ways that the ground under your feet is real, or the rain drop on your outstretched hand is real, or Proxima Centauri is real. This is not a magical or mystical dualism, it is one grounded in the universal phenomenology of consciousness, and it is one that I find vastly more philosophically productive and illuminating than pure physicalism.

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