A Material World?

Is it time to reconcile materialism and dualism?

More than 50 years ago Wilfrid Sellars challenged philosophers to explain how to reconcile the universe as we ordinarily experience it with what issues from the sciences, especially physics. In 1963’s Science, Perception, and Reality, he wrote:

The philosopher is confronted not by one complex many-dimensional picture, the unity of which, such as it is, he must come to appreciate; but by two pictures of essentially the same order of complexity, each of which purports to be a complete picture of man-in-the-world, and which, after separate scrutiny, he must fuse into one vision. Let me refer to these two perspectives, respectively, as the manifest and the scientific images of man-in-the-world.

Sellars’ exhortation echoes the physicist A. S. Eddington who, in his 1927 Gifford Lectures (subsequently published as The Nature of the Physical World, 1928) had spoken of setting out to write his lectures by drawing up two chairs to two tables.

Two tables! Yes; there are duplicates of every object about me – two tables, two chairs, two pens.

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Joel Bright 2 January 2024

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tracy berge 1 June 2023

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Abraham Joseph 24 July 2017

The only way to end the confusion is to totally reject the old dichotomy of Newtonic times, and try to look at consciousness ( or simply the SELF) and the material universe in a new dichotomy, ie, the 'substance and structure.'. If one can look at the material universe simply the STRUCTURE of an organization where as a hidden substance rules its momentum, the issue is solved!
Would love to share the following link, wherein this issue is elaborated:http://patternsofapproachtodiscoverreality.blogspot.com/2014/06/rethinking-ultimate-stuff-of-universe.html

Regarding the birth of the self, this link may help:http://unrecognizedobjectsofthemind.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-physics-behind-birth-of-human-self-i.html

Plain SENSE demands that, just like the plan of nature behind the structure of an atom, a similar plan should have been there behind the structure and dynamics of human self too!

Dingo Dongo 28 March 2017

Since when does materialism state that "consciousness is an illusion promoted by philosophers and theologians"? Virtually every materialist around accepts the reality of consciousness: they just think consciousness is material/physical in nature. I'm not even sure if Daniel Dennett thinks consciousness is an illusion.

What an odd definition of 'materialism'!

David Morey 3 February 2017

For me consciouness is a feeling, involved, causal activity. We face choices from a set of immaterial possibilities due to causal openness, we actualise one of the possibilities, forsaking the rest, in all its material reality. Such is fully conscious process. Other processes may be more or less conscious, more or less causally open or closed, we only know in a manifest way what human processes are like to act out in human causal activity. But other processes can be open, have an active aspect, such as electrons jumping between different states in atomic orbits and omitting photons. No openness means no immaterial possibilities involved in the process, clearly such processes have no need for consciousness to assess which possibilities are good or worth repeating.

Adam Hibbert 31 January 2017

Useful, but perhaps over simple. 'When you put the particles together in the right way' suggests a fairly straightforward reductionism between consciousness and physics, which risks missing the exotic quantity involved - the semantic entity, the one that sees the world as 'this-sided', the one that has, not just information, objective and universal, but *meaning*, the world encoded according to that entity's partisan perspective.

I think it would be immensely helpful achieving the desired reconciliation if we could more frequently keep in mind those semantic qualities, which are part of a system, historical, sociological *and* biological, which does not readily reduce to a bounded, individual body. The particular arrangement of particles encodes what it means for this semantic entity to be a part of that web, and can't be interpreted without a better grip on both entity and web.

I propose that we begin by recognising that we are artificial intelligences, ourselves - our parents and our society cultivates an AI in each new human body, which is a hardware. We will not find ourselves (the self of the hard problem) through a microscope trained on our bodies. What's needed to achieve true reconciliation is a better theory of how this software functions, altering our bodies in the process. Neuroscience has an important role to play, but perhaps no more than, say, Axel Honneth's inter-subjective architecture of Recognition.

Tue Pho 14 December 2015

Bình luận ngắn. Nhị nguyên là một trạng thái và khả năng của ý thức. " Quả cà chua" đã có là do ý thức đã dừng trên một đối tượng của nó. Và sau đó là các nhận dạng riêng, mô tả, phân tích. màu đỏ, bên trong là hạt. Tiến trình này thực chất là một sự " âm " vào bản thể. Nếu không định vị, và có nghĩa là không mắt kẹt trong một đối tượng, ý thức nằm trong một trạng thái hòa đồng với chung quanh nó. Tức rằng, cái tôi quan sát cũng chính là cái cà chua, một ngọn đèn, một con người " đối diện" trước nó.. Tại thời điểm xác định nảy sinh hai tình huống. Hoặc nó tiếp tục phân tích, và rơi vào một tiến trình cô lập, nảy sinh của nhị nguyên. Hay nữa nó trượt qua điểm dính và tiếp tục vận hành trong một chuyển động toàn thể, tức là thần. Ý thức, tức khả năng nhận thức vẫn còn đó nhưng nó đã vươn đến một cấp độ khác, trực tuyến, không có bất kỳ mâu thuẩn. Trái cà chua không bị chẻ ra...Sự hòa giải nằm trong trạng thái xuất thần, và chuyển động. Tôi di chuyển với tốc độ bình thường, lập tức phát sinh các đối tượng và trở kháng: một con người:, một chiếc xe...Khi di chuyển với tốc độ ánh sáng, không có bất ký trở kháng trong nó. ...Nhìn cách khác, con người chính là một sự rơi rớt từ ánh sáng.