User talk:Mel Etitis/Mind and body

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gladly! but, before you start, I should say that as a physicist, I take a quite modern view of the term matter. Obviously, materialism does not refer to the restricted meaning of fermionic fields, but to all elements involved in the Standard Model, i.e. Spacetime and Gauge fields as well as fermionic fields, and, in principle, also all hitherto undiscovered fields, supersymmetry, m-branes, what have you, just anything we'll come up with in order to describe the physical world. Since we are forced to assume such abstract concepts to describe the "material" world, similar concepts that would describe the mind, as long as they are consistent and causal, should also fall under materialism, or the distinction between the two will appear arbitrary. I would only grant truly metaphysical status to suggestions that reject consistency or causality for descriptions of the dualistic 'other'. Personally, I believe that a dualistic position may be correct effectively, the phenomena of 'mind' being explained by Emergence from underlying 'material' laws. So I'll grant that it is possible to be an effective theist and a materialist at the same time. dab (ᛏ) 13:24, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I agree that the definition of the term 'matter' in physics has become broad, not to say vague, but of course dualists (such as Popper, Eccles, Ayer, Foster, Robinson, and me) are or have been (in the case of the dead ones) aware of that. The distinction, however, is clear, and involves the first person and consciousness (it's not a matter of abstraction, which in any case concernes the ways in which we talk about things, not the natures of the things themselves.

The view you mention (mind as emergent) is known as epiphenomenalism, usually involving the claim that matter can affect mind but not vice versa (though I'm not sure why that should be; it doesn't seem to be an essential part of the view).

Te notion of deity simply can't be identified with or taken to subsume the notion of non-material minds though; aside from anything else, theists typically distinguish very clearly between god or the gods and human minds or souls (not to mention other non-material beings such as angels). Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 14:02, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I would not say the term has become vague or broad. It is better defined and understood than ever. I consider these advances towards the realization that mind-body dualism is superficial, not fundamental. I'm not sure if epiphenomenalism is really consistent with what I mean. I am talking of a purely materialist (mind is material just like everything else) position that holds that while mind is completely consistent with physis, it exhibits peculiar properties so that it may be meaningfully categorized as a special class of phenomena. Anyway, I would contest your final statement, the clear distinction between gods, souls and angels etc.: Such classification schemes typically come rather late, with a sophisticated theology. Basic polytheism often holds that it is possible for humans to become gods. See the Hellenistic cult of Heroes, but also Vedic and Ancient Near Eastern religion. It seems that typical human souls end up in some kind of shadowy netherworld, but exceptionally powerful or venerable humans may ascend to godhead after death. The boundary is permeable, in any case. I am genuinely uncertain if this opens the possibility of 'materialist theism', but this would require dropping the 'supernatural' from the definition of deity (as we both know, the gods are subject to Fate, i.e. to consequence or consistency). dab (ᛏ) 14:40, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)