Z. M., “my” monads aren’t much like Leibniz’s. For one thing, they interact. It could even be called a psychophysical identity theory, it’s just that the mind is identified with a single elementary entity (one monad with many degrees of freedom) rather than with a spatial aggregate of elementary entities (a monadic self will still have “parts” in some sense, but they won’t be spatial parts). I suppose my insistence that physical ontology should be derived from phenomenological ontology, rather than vice versa, might also seem anti-materialist. (What I mean by this: In fundamental physics, the states of things are known by sets of numerical labels whose meaning is totally relative. All we know from the equation is that cause X turns state A into state B. It tells us nothing about state A in itself. But phenomenology offers us a direct glimpse of something, as Psy-Kosh struggles to express, a few comments back. At some level, it is what we have to work with and it is all we have to work with.) But the main thing is to get away from the assumptions of the neurophysical apriori, because they are inhibiting and distorting what passes for phenomenology today. The description of consciousness is probably best pursued in the almost-solipsistic frame of mind described by Husserl, in which one suspends the question of whether things actually exist, and focuses on the states of consciousness which somehow constitute their appearance. Being able to entertain the possibility of idealism is very conducive to this.
If (let us say) the brain really does have a functionally consequential coherent quantum subsystem, a sharply defined physical entity which really-and-truly is the self, and whose states are literally our states of consciousness, I would expect materialistically pursued neuroscience to eventually figure it out, because neuroscience does include the search for correlations between subjective experience and the physical reality. (Though if it were true, it might save a few years to have the hypothesis already out there in the literature, rather than having to wait for it to become screamingly obvious.) The same may go for whatever other unorthodox possibilities I haven’t thought of. It is true that I am ready to give up right now on all existing materialist theories of consciousness; they are manifestly unable to explain even what color is.
So scientifically, I make a noise in favor of metaphysics because I think that will get us to the truth faster. Unfortunately, I doubt I can do the argument justice in off-the-cuff blog comments. I will just have to make an effort and write something longer. The other thing that worries me is the conjunction of information technology with antimetaphysical theories of the mind. There’s even less of a reality check there than in neuroscience, when it comes to the attribution of mental properties. But that’s a whole other topic.
Z. M., “my” monads aren’t much like Leibniz’s. For one thing, they interact. It could even be called a psychophysical identity theory, it’s just that the mind is identified with a single elementary entity (one monad with many degrees of freedom) rather than with a spatial aggregate of elementary entities (a monadic self will still have “parts” in some sense, but they won’t be spatial parts). I suppose my insistence that physical ontology should be derived from phenomenological ontology, rather than vice versa, might also seem anti-materialist. (What I mean by this: In fundamental physics, the states of things are known by sets of numerical labels whose meaning is totally relative. All we know from the equation is that cause X turns state A into state B. It tells us nothing about state A in itself. But phenomenology offers us a direct glimpse of something, as Psy-Kosh struggles to express, a few comments back. At some level, it is what we have to work with and it is all we have to work with.) But the main thing is to get away from the assumptions of the neurophysical apriori, because they are inhibiting and distorting what passes for phenomenology today. The description of consciousness is probably best pursued in the almost-solipsistic frame of mind described by Husserl, in which one suspends the question of whether things actually exist, and focuses on the states of consciousness which somehow constitute their appearance. Being able to entertain the possibility of idealism is very conducive to this.
If (let us say) the brain really does have a functionally consequential coherent quantum subsystem, a sharply defined physical entity which really-and-truly is the self, and whose states are literally our states of consciousness, I would expect materialistically pursued neuroscience to eventually figure it out, because neuroscience does include the search for correlations between subjective experience and the physical reality. (Though if it were true, it might save a few years to have the hypothesis already out there in the literature, rather than having to wait for it to become screamingly obvious.) The same may go for whatever other unorthodox possibilities I haven’t thought of. It is true that I am ready to give up right now on all existing materialist theories of consciousness; they are manifestly unable to explain even what color is.
So scientifically, I make a noise in favor of metaphysics because I think that will get us to the truth faster. Unfortunately, I doubt I can do the argument justice in off-the-cuff blog comments. I will just have to make an effort and write something longer. The other thing that worries me is the conjunction of information technology with antimetaphysical theories of the mind. There’s even less of a reality check there than in neuroscience, when it comes to the attribution of mental properties. But that’s a whole other topic.