Academician, what you are explicitly not saying is that the aspects of reality that give rise to consciousness can be described mathematically. Well, parts of your post seem to imply that the mathematically describable functions are what matter, but other parts deny it. So it’s confusing, rather than enlightening. But I’ll take you at your word that you are not just a reductionist.
So you are a “monist” but, as David Chalmers has described such positions, in the spirit of dualism. As far as I am concerned, you are a dualist, because the only interesting distinction I see is between mathematically describable reality vs. non-MD reality—and your “monism” has aspects of both.
Your argument seems to be that monism is simpler than dualism, so Occam’s Razor prefers it, so we should believe it. Hence, you define the stuff the world is made of as “whatever I am” and call it one kind of stuff.
I don’t see that as a useful approach, because what I want to know is whether MD stuff is enough, or whether we need something more, where ‘something more’ is explicitly mental-related. Remember, we want the simplest explanation that fits the evidence. So the question reduces to “Does an MD-only world fit the evidence from subjective experience?” That’s a hard question.
I am planning to write a post on the hard problem at some point, which I’ll post on my blog and here.
Academician, what you are explicitly not saying is that the aspects of reality that give rise to consciousness can be described mathematically. Well, parts of your post seem to imply that the mathematically describable functions are what matter, but other parts deny it. So it’s confusing, rather than enlightening. But I’ll take you at your word that you are not just a reductionist.
So you are a “monist” but, as David Chalmers has described such positions, in the spirit of dualism. As far as I am concerned, you are a dualist, because the only interesting distinction I see is between mathematically describable reality vs. non-MD reality—and your “monism” has aspects of both.
Your argument seems to be that monism is simpler than dualism, so Occam’s Razor prefers it, so we should believe it. Hence, you define the stuff the world is made of as “whatever I am” and call it one kind of stuff.
I don’t see that as a useful approach, because what I want to know is whether MD stuff is enough, or whether we need something more, where ‘something more’ is explicitly mental-related. Remember, we want the simplest explanation that fits the evidence. So the question reduces to “Does an MD-only world fit the evidence from subjective experience?” That’s a hard question.
I am planning to write a post on the hard problem at some point, which I’ll post on my blog and here.
Correct. I just wrote a follow up to acknowledge this. In short, I can only defend so much at one time :)