Good question. Sorry if I made it seem like using "mental" as a name for an equivalence
class is bad. I don't intend to say it's bad. I do intend to assert that most people (in my
experience) who use the term do mean to distinguish between mind and body. And that would be OK
*if* they gave some clear method for differentiating ... or at least a handful of examples of each
class (mostly mental, mostly body, close to the fuzzy boundary). What's bad is the assumption that
when they speak the word, the concept evoked in the audience is anything at all similar to the
speaker's concept. That assumption is what's bad, like EricC (seemingly) making the assumption I
know what he means by "mental stuff".
The same problem rears its head in the ambiguity of "dualism". Nick and EricC seem to use it to
mean "2 things". Dave and Stephen seem to mean "2 Janus-like faces of the same thing".
SteveS seems to use both meanings, luckily peppering each usage with plenty of context, which helps determine
which meaning he's using at the time.
If we all used "dualism" in the latter sense, then I might shut up, because there'd be no need to clarify.
Accusing someone of that kind of dualism isn't much of an accusation. I can imagine a "triplism" that would
appeal to Catholics and graphics programmers ... maybe "pentalism" for some witches? Personally, I'm a
"pluralist". There are many ways you can cut the ambience into aspects. But that doesn't preclude me being, a
monist, because I rely on parallax and aspect-orientation.
But when some of us use the word "dualist" to mean "not monist", that requires
an intervention.
On 2/21/23 06:02, Santafe wrote:
On Feb 20, 2023, at 10:46 AM, glen <geprope...@gmail.com> wrote:
By even using the phrases "mental stuff" or "mental life", *you* are implicitly
asserting there are 2 things: mental and non-mental. There is no such difference, in my opinion.
Now, while I am often a moron, I don't deny that people *think* there's a difference. E.g. when you
finally get that snap of understanding while running, or taking a shower or whatever, about some
concept you've been working on, it *feels* like pure mentation. The shift just feels cognitive, not
bodily. But I would maintain my stance that this is an abstraction, a sloughing off of the bodily
details. (The illusion is a byproduct of focus and attention, which are mechanical implementations
of abstraction.) My stance is that, however cognitive such things feel, they aren't. You wouldn't,
*could not*, have arrived at that state without your body, or if you had a different body.
Why is it bad to give “mental” a term, to refer to patterns of activity in
bodies that can be distinguished by some criteria?
Surely there are cognitive activities I can engage in, that depend in essential
ways on the particular human cortex in context, that are not produced by nerve
nets in jellyfish. To say that the classes of patterns are distinguishable is
not to suggest that they are non-bodily at all.
The fact that all this is rendered in language, which is pervasively structured
around the subject perspective (whether in relation to linguistic constructs
for objects, or as a reporter of “introspection”) contextualizes “mental”
references within other stuff that offers less flexibility of stance than our
language for some other inter-object relations. But if we see our language as
an un-fully-seen thing, and thus a place of hazards, this doesn’t seem worse
than any other unfinished business. Were it not for the philosphers, I am not
sure “mental” would even have got its distracting connotation of
“non-corporeal”. Maybe it would, and I’m just being obtuse.
Eric
Yes, as long as your body is *similar* to others' bodies, you could arrive at a
*similar* understanding, but not the same.
On 2/18/23 05:29, Eric Charles wrote:
On 2/16/23 23:35, ⛧ glen wrote:
I don't know what you mean by "mental stuff", of course.
Well... In this context, I mean whatever the "psyche" part of panpsychism
entails.
Given that I don't believe in disembodied minds, I'm with you 100% on everything you do being
"body stuff". Which, presumably, leads to the empirical question of what types of bodies
do "psyche", and where those types of bodies can be found.
You say further that: 'No. Neither the dirt nor I do "mental stuff"'.
Well, now we have something to actually talk about then! Dave West,
unsurprisingly, stepped in strongly on the side of dirt having psyche in at
least a rudimentary form, I presume he would assert that you (Glen) do mental
stuff too. Dave also asserts that his belief in panpsychism /does/ affect how
he lives in the world. Exactly to the extent that his way of living in the
world is made different by the belief, panpsychism /_is_/ more than just
something he says.
Steve's discussion about what it would feel like to be the bit of dirt trampled
beneath a particular foot is a bit of a tangent - potentially interesting in
its own right. His discussion of when he, personally, starts to attribute
identity - and potentially psyche - to clumps of inanimate stuff seems directly
on topic, especially as he too has listed some ways his behaviors change when
he becomes engaged in those habits.
--
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