I am not convinced that this qualifies as “an at all decent description of what the vast majority of smart people mean when they talk about souls.”
The point of saying something like “mental states are not ontologically fundamental” is: you are a brain. Your consciousness, your self, requires your brain (or maybe something that emulates it or its functions) to exist. That is what all the evidence tells us.
Yes, I realize that responding to a neo-Platonistic description by talking about the evidence doesn’t seem like the most relevant course. But here’s the thing: in this universe, the one in which we exist, the “Form” that our minds take is one that includes brains. No brains, no minds, as far as we can tell. Maybe there’s some universe where minds can exist without brains—but we don’t have any reason to believe that it’s ours.
I don’t think you’re responding to anything I wrote. Nothing you’re saying conflicts with anything I said, except you totally misused the word “Form”, though you did that on purpose so I guess it’s okay. On a different note, I apologize for turning out little discussion into this whole other distracting thing. If you look at my other comments in this thread you’ll see some of the points of my actual original argument. My apologies for the big tangent.
I was really responding to what you failed to write, i.e. a relevant response to my comment. The point is that it doesn’t matter if you use the words “eternal soul,” “ontologically basic mental state,” or “minds are Forms”; none of those ideas matches up with reality. The position most strongly supported by the evidence is that minds, mental states, etc. are produced by physical brains interacting with physical phenomena. We dismiss those other ideas because they’re unsupported and holding them prevents the realization that you are a brain, and the universe is physical.
It seems like you’re arguing that we ought to take ideas seriously simply because people believe them. The fact of someone’s belief in an idea is only weak Bayesian evidence by itself, though. What has more weight is why ey believes it, and the empirical evidence just doesn’t back up any concept of souls.
I am not convinced that this qualifies as “an at all decent description of what the vast majority of smart people mean when they talk about souls.”
The point of saying something like “mental states are not ontologically fundamental” is: you are a brain. Your consciousness, your self, requires your brain (or maybe something that emulates it or its functions) to exist. That is what all the evidence tells us.
Yes, I realize that responding to a neo-Platonistic description by talking about the evidence doesn’t seem like the most relevant course. But here’s the thing: in this universe, the one in which we exist, the “Form” that our minds take is one that includes brains. No brains, no minds, as far as we can tell. Maybe there’s some universe where minds can exist without brains—but we don’t have any reason to believe that it’s ours.
I don’t think you’re responding to anything I wrote. Nothing you’re saying conflicts with anything I said, except you totally misused the word “Form”, though you did that on purpose so I guess it’s okay. On a different note, I apologize for turning out little discussion into this whole other distracting thing. If you look at my other comments in this thread you’ll see some of the points of my actual original argument. My apologies for the big tangent.
I was really responding to what you failed to write, i.e. a relevant response to my comment. The point is that it doesn’t matter if you use the words “eternal soul,” “ontologically basic mental state,” or “minds are Forms”; none of those ideas matches up with reality. The position most strongly supported by the evidence is that minds, mental states, etc. are produced by physical brains interacting with physical phenomena. We dismiss those other ideas because they’re unsupported and holding them prevents the realization that you are a brain, and the universe is physical.
It seems like you’re arguing that we ought to take ideas seriously simply because people believe them. The fact of someone’s belief in an idea is only weak Bayesian evidence by itself, though. What has more weight is why ey believes it, and the empirical evidence just doesn’t back up any concept of souls.