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.

  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
    hexagon
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    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

    • sagarmatha [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      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