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[sophiaserpentia]

I want to clarify something regarding my post from yesterday on the "Neoplatonist Fallacy."

Of late I feel forced by the evidence I have read into the conclusion that the materialist arguments regarding the workings of mind have more weight than non-materialist arguments. However, this does not mean I am a reductionist.

The difference is that a reductionist thinks that brain is all there is, that mind is either an illusion or an "emergent property" from the physiological workings of the brain. I am not convinced of this; in fact even if the materialist position holds, this does not necessarily or sufficiently argue for the reductionist view.

Logic and scientific examination is not the only means by which we can examine the universe; and the fact that logic alone cannot account for something we "feel" to be there, does not give us sufficient grounds to insist it is not there. Emotions and intuitions originate in something; to insist that mind, or God, or what have you, doesn't exist solely because logic cannot account for them, is to declare that emotion and instinct are simply and solely delusion.

Comments

[anosognosia.livejournal.com]

There are a few problems with the standard scientific materialism.

Firstly, no matter how strong a correlation between mind and brain we find, we remain unequipped to judge whether mind comes from brain (materialism), brain from mind (idealism), or both from something else (neutral monism). In short, that oft-forgotten scientific axoim applies here: correlation is not causation.

For causation we need more: we need to demonstrate how changing one changes the other. This is problematic because it sometimes seems like changing the brain changes the mind (which would imply causal materialism) and sometimes like changing the mind changes the brain (which would imply causal idealism).

There's a couple potential solutions to this.

First, you can deny free will in even its weakest sense: you can claim that "changing the mind" simply never happens (in the same way that changing the rainbow lights coming from a prism never happens - you can't go in there and change them, you can only change the prism or its input). In this case, you reject the second of the above observations and confidently conclude causal materialism. This is unpersuasive insofar as it seems utterly foreign to our actual experience.

The second solution is to assume neutral monism, in which case it's entirely unsurprising for it to seem like both changing the mind changes the brain and vice versa.

This is one of many reasons I find neutral monism to be the most persuasive account of the mind/body problem.

The second problem with the standard scientific materialism is that neuropsychology and its related movements unwittingly often fail entirely at saying anything at all about the mind. An example is the neuropsychological account of dreaming which claims that a dream is chronic excitation of a pontine region ending up in activity in visual centers (PGO wave during REM). This is a useful and important observation, but it says nothing about the mind: because the element "PGO wave" isn't something that ever exists in the system we call "mind." We don't sit around experiencing occipital excitation, we sit around experiencing vivid and emotional narratives. Thus, until neuropsychological accounts can make the leap from "neural excitation" to "vivid and emotion narrative", they fail to say anything about the mind. They may take us closer to such an explanation, and even eventually get there, but this important inadequacy should inform how we judge universal worldviews (such as materialism) arising from science.

Universal worldviews have always been better suited to the work of philosophy anyway (though certainly a philosophy heavily informed by science); and science better suited to useful things like curing people from illness and getting us to the bottom of the ocean (both cases where ultimate truth is entirely inconsequential, so long as we can get the job done).

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

Have you examined the "quantum consciousness" theory? It may have its limitations, but I think therein lies a solution to some of the materialist dilemmas. I am drawn to it for the same reasons you are drawn to "neutral monism" (which, come to think of it, might describe quantum consciousness).

Jeffrey M. Schwartz, a Buddhist and neurologist, has had some amazing results which suggest that the mind may in fact be able to affect the "wiring" of the brain. He discovered that focused awareness is key in consciously guiding the brain's 'neuroplastic' redevelopment. His analysis of these results has led him to causal idealism, but I don't think he explored the possible solution offered by quantum consciousness.