Everything I read about it says there just has to be an alternate universe where your mind exists, is that the idea? Forgive me I'm an idiot.
The simplest explanation imo is to work backwards: some jerks a long time ago believed in souls and wanted to rationalize how this could be, given that bodies are clearly material and and you can sense things with them and send instructions to your body. The natural conclusion from people that really want to believe in souls is that your soul is basically sitting in a little cockpit somewhere, impervious to the material world but still able to interact with it via whatever series of logic ensures that you don't have to think too much about it.
Then add centuries of philosophical window dressing.
soul is literally psyche in ancient greek, so it isn't so much that people try to rationalize souls but that the concept of soul/mind/psyche coincide/overlap from the beginning, now you can go the analytical route and say that it is all just semantic confusion and that we should do hard categories but i think the contrary is better, soul evolved as the mind/psyche specialized to a religious context, recentering it makes it lose its specialness, there is no such thing as the invented (one might say god given) concept of soul; if there is something special to the mind, following this enlarged concept it is (your) uniqueness as tracked by (your) soul (essence)/mind (consciousness)/psyche (yourself as shaped by material conditions)
It doesn't. It's medieval nonsense dreamed up by people who had no understanding of how the brain works. About as useful to worry about as whether you can divine the future from the entrails of a goat.
Also, if you want to have nightmares for a couple of days read Blindsight, which posits that there is no mind, and consciousness is a post-hoc illusion.
it would work just like neon gas allows the neon lamp to be lit, the external world (here electricity), interacting with the mind, produces an effect on the body (the light), you could have the neon gas light up even if not in the lamp as long as it interacts with the external world (electricity) but the lamp would never light up if not full of neon gas
Yeah, that analogy doesn't track to me as making much sense, but correct me if I'm wrong. The illuminated neon gas would be like a living, conscious person right? The lamp is our bodies. A lit gas tube would be a normal everyday living person with a physical body. But your analogy gives the possibility of lit neon gas outside the lamp (body) which would be analogous to a living, thinking person who has no physical existence. I don't know of any examples of a thinking, living entity with a mind that has no physical form unless accounting for experiences with psychics who talk to ghosts, or prophets, or maybe near death experiences.
Which is fine and good and I'm not against it if a person is religious or spiritual, but if that's the idea and the only way it makes sense, I just wanna know
i think some dualisms imply that the geist/soul/psyche can exist without the body, yes, you can substitute it to uranium in a power plant though which then necessarily needs the body (graphic crayons) to get catalyzed, but those are only analogies, the mind doesn't have to be physical, it only has to be more than the straightforward continuity of the body (the physical brain), for instance if there is an assymetric relationship in the direction of information. In reality of course things are much more complicated (autonomous nervous system, sympathic system...) but i am skeptical of straight up eliminative materialism as consciousness is, in my mind, an emergent entity, so that it is not reducible to its parts, i think it's also counting animals short and oversimplifying them as automatons (which is a typical western attitude rooted ironically in the dualist tradition), but in the end, like most philosophy, it really is a question of definition of what counts as mind and what is physical
It starts with Descartes locking himself in a room and doubting everything until he comes to a few conclusions, he can imagine himself existing as a mind without a body (like a ghost or something) but not as a body without a mind and that the only thing he could know with any certainty was that he had thoughts - cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am, something's doing the thinking). Descartes figured the mind and minds in general existed in another parallel realm that interacted with the material reality of the world through your pineal gland, the mental realm not really having any "space" but being a realm of thoughts and epiphenomena.
Other mind-body dualists have reserved this other mental/spiritual realm and said there is no interaction but God keeps them in harmony (or that they coincided at some earlier point and are merely playing out exactly the same and just happen to be aligned).
Mind-body dualism is, like, the default belief of the average westerner for many thousands of years so I imagine for a lot of people it was never seriously questioned - even by really deep thinkers or philosophers or people who decide to lock themselves in a room and doubt everything until they are certain about what they can know.
Am I silly for thinking a belief in God and even a spiritual realm doesn't require mind-body dualism? God and the soul could very well be things in the same realm as us, but I don't know how well explored that is in philosophy/theology.
Because I'm just not convinced Descartes made a lot of sense with his assertion that he could imagine himself thinking without also having a body to go along with it. I think Hegel also pointed out that Descartes couldn't ever be a mind without also having access to other thinking beings to confirm his own identity as a thinking being.
The Epicureans had an atomistic / materialist concept of the mind. They even sort of deduced the concept of neurons.
There are definitely Christian materialists and there are definitely Futurama-style religions that believe in a real, physical creator God somewhere present in the world. In terms of strict materialism, we "know" stuff like elementary particles have no internal states because they must be simple according to all of our current understanding of physics and all observations we have made, this rules out any actual interaction from the soul-realm to material (it would have to be one way the other way if mind-body duality is right) and would also rule out any material "soul" (there's nothing to support a material soul, you're body isn't any lighter when you die for example so "souls" must be massless and so on). Maybe it 's all a one-way recording to the spirit-realm, who knows.
Descartes definitely fucked up by leaping from "something is thinking" to "I am thinking" and yes, it was basically assuming there is something called I. The most he could have come up with is that "thinking is occuring." From whence thinking came, we can't really say from a radical doubt perspective.
"you’re body isn’t any lighter when you die for example" Hey son, no one told you you shit the bed when you hit the deck? 💨 💩 :pigpoop:
It doesn't, and also you can have a "soft" or "informational" mind/body dualism, where the soul is really just the patternist conception of the self, but time-independent. The Noosphere and stuff like that come from Catholic Modernists work on this. Teilhard de Chardin is probably the best theorist about that since he's now been mostly reformed by the church and he's not as odd or esoteric as some.
Alternately you can have a dualism where the mind is a way of "down-gearing" the soul, which is this incredibly abstract, near god-like thing, into a point where it can interact with reality at all. This is taken from Jewish Kabbalah where God has to do the same thing a bunch of times just to be able to fit into the concept of, say, time.
The advantage of both models is that they explain things like brain damage influencing personality.
the way it was explained to me as a kid is that you feel different from your body, right? like you can step outside your body and inhabit other spaces in your mind. this separation must be real because it's self-evidently true.
idk I agreed on the surface at the time but I was like 8. it seemed pretty obvious by 13 that that was circular reasoning and that the hindu/buddhist monism - the material world is the illusion - doesn't actually answer the question. that we perceive an illusion constructed by our minds is true but that doesn't make the physical world unreal. it only means that our understanding of the world, the sense that reality is coherent, is something we actively construct. the phenomenal world is at least as real as we are. and the noumenal world... well that only seems to exist in our minds too, but it's unconstrained, free to shift with what we imagine and feel.
I have the same response to the idea that consciousness might be an illusion that I do about determinism in general, or for that matter “simulation theory.”
It’s useless.
Attempts to put those concepts into practice are atomizing and invalidating for people, whether those people are experiencing an “illusion” or not, and so far any attempts to put such theories to practical application, as far as I’ve heard so far, come to rather ghoulish conclusions about the value of lived experience and life itself. There seem to be no practical applications proposed so far for such propositions except to invalidate and atomize people even more than our neoliberal world already has.
Pretty much everything we see, think, experience, and remember could conceivably be illusory, but because we all live a strictly subjective experience and lack the means or ability to escape that perspective, denying the existence of the very first thing we seem to be aware of when we wake up, and and become aware that we are awake (consciousness itself), is just as easy as declaring pretty much anything else that we can conceive is also illusory, from what we see and what we hear to what words say on a screen, even what the meters say on scientific instruments. All of these things are measured and compiled and recorded by people living the same subjective limited-perspective lives, “illusory” or not. Even the best peer-reviewed scientific journals ultimately have to be read and comprehended and understood from our inescapably subjective lived experience. If consciousness is an illusion, everything experience by the conscious mind, including denials of consciousness itself, can also be illusions.
Telling someone that is suffering and in pain that they’re just post-hoc experiencing an “illusion” of being aware of that pain does nothing to mitigate that pain. Sure, one could say that the suffering person is not a sufficiently authentic free-willed non-illusory consciousness, that it’s just a blob of meat experiencing a post-hoc illusion of experiencing pain, but none of us have the privilege of existing or thinking outside of this current subjective reality, be it “illusion” or otherwise, to truly know for sure. The “we are just meat computers” reductionism seems a self-serving and even self-congratulatory statement that doesn’t really release the speaker from the same corporal limitations that the rest of us also live in, “illusion” or otherwise.
To put it a simpler cruder way, shouting “God’s not real!” at a funeral might conceivably be a correct declaration, but the shouter is still making grieving people miserable and hasn’t done anything helpful for anyone.
yeah, a lot of philosophy doesn't really go anywhere and I don't tend to bring it up much unless I have a question or it seems like something interesting to think about
