While I appreciate DaveW's historical ensconcing, I think there's a different answer to EricS' question. When/if I feel generous to people who talk about the mind and thinking, I liken it to computation, in the trans-computer sense of portability ... the idea that you can run the same computation on different machines. The essentialist tendency, in that seemingly small domain, is well-exhibited by Turing's universal machines and, I think also, the conception that reality is information (another monism, I guess). I even see this in DaveW's attempt to reframe N=1 experimentation (scientific introspection), as an attempt to discover just how *expressive* that computation (someone's mind) can be. It's essentialism because it is a feature of all possible worlds. Even if our universe had no humans or animals, computation is still present. It's the only essence because it's the only feature present in all possible worlds.
My hitch, which prevents me from authentically playing that game, is that semantics requires full grounding. There is no such thing as pure portability. The same computation *cannot* occur on different machines. At best, you can shoe horn equivalence classes, like "for all intents and purposes, the DaveW computation is similar enough to the EricS computation", whereas "the Scooter computation (my cat's thinking) is similar to the Dorian computation (my other cat's thinking)". Of course, this all hinges on some particular, maybe perverse, understanding of "computation". But it's a much more wranglable word than "mind". On 2/20/23 04:10, Santafe wrote:
So there are things in DaveW’s very helpful post below about which I am genuinely curious. My tendency is to analyze them, though I have a certain habitual fear that asking a question in an analytic mode will come across as somehow disrespectful, and that is not my intent. The description below sounds to me very much like “essentialism”. If we have long human experience that water is wet, and if after many hundreds of millenia being human (and longer bring primates etc.) we take on some good reasons to describe water as being made of H2O molecules, the essentialist habit is to suppose (to take as a philosophical premise?) that there must be some attribute of wetness about each molecule, which is then amplified when many such molecules make the bulk that even ordinary people experience as water. (One could go on a branch and argue that special people also experience each individual molecule as itself and can attest to its wetness, and one could try to push the analogy that far, but I want to focus above on the essentialist premise as a kind of “mind-set background”.) One could be essentialist about really anything. The wetness of water, the hardness of rock, the warmness of air, the loyalty of friends, or pretty much anything that has syntax making such a construction possible. In the Mind community, is the central orientation a commitment to essentialism as a posture, or is essentialism only to be applied to whatever specifically comes under the scope of “mind”? If only mind is to be framed in this kind of essentialist ontology, why does it become the only attribute thus deserving to be framed as an essence? Of course, for me to ask that already expresses the point of view that the Mind community are arguing against: that people are a tiny and late corner in a large universe, and that all this conversation about Mind didn’t come into existence until they were there to generate it, which seems almost as tiny and niche as any particular one of Shakespeare’s plays. But to put the question that way is the only way I know to use language.
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