Saturday, January 17, 2015

InspiringPhilosophy's Position is Still Confusing

It seems that InspiringPhilosophy's position is either incoherent or incomplete. The trouble with his view is that he has devoted so much effort to arguing that the mental cannot be reducible to the physical, and that the mental can influence the physical, but he has yet to offer an intelligible explanation of how the physical is supposed to be emergent from the mental. So far his only explanation of how the physical emerges from the mental is that the physical is contingent on God's thoughts (which are not mental images, but words) about it.
There are at least two problems with this:
1. There doesn't seem to be any reason why physical objects must be contingent on God's thoughts.
2. The fact that God is holding descriptive statements in consciousness doesn't explain why there are physical objects.
The best I can understand IP's position is as follows:
There are objectively real minds, which are nonspatial entities that have awareness, and physical objects, whose properties exist due to the fact that God is thinking of propositions about them. Our minds can influence our brains, which is to say that we are changing (through "focusing" or some kind of mental effort) the propositions in God's mind. Changing the structure of our brains also affects our mental attributes somehow. Presumably brain structure can store memory and personality, and influence conscious experience. Brains aren't illusory or a separate substance, they are fundamentally mental because they are reducible to God's thoughts.
That's what I've gathered anyway. I will leave it to IP to attempt to explain the relationship between God, our minds, and our brains in a future video.
My main question is, why is any of this necessary? What in the world suggests this is what reality is like?
Even conceding IP's arguments that the brain is not sufficient to explain all of the mental, it is clear that he's made some strange moves in an effort to avoid dualism. But his main argument against dualism is ineffective. He incorrectly claims that substances cannot share properties because if they did, one would be reducible to the other. But there is no justification for this. Why would sharing a property make one reducible to the other? He needs to provide an answer.
There is another thing about IP's view that deserves mention. For some reason he admitted that all of the properties of an unobserved object would remain, but he said a "unified perception" of it would not be there. Well of course not, that is tautological and in agreement with everyone's view on the matter.


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