Z. M., let me answer you indirectly. The working hypothesis I arrived at, after a long period of time, was a sort of monadology. Most monads have simple states, but there is (one hypothesizes) a physics of monadic interaction which can bring a monad into a highly complex state. From the perspective of our current physics, an individual monad is something like an irreducible tensor factor in an entangled quantum state. The conscious self is a single monad; conscious experience is showing us something of its actual nature; any purely mathematical description, such as physics presently provides, is just formal and falls short of the truth.
Now all that may or may not be true. As far as I am concerned, thinking in terms of monads has one enormous advantage, and that is that there is no need to falsify one’s own phenomenology in order to fit it to a neurophysical apriori the way that, say, Dennett does. Dennett dismisses phenomenal color and the subjective unity of experience as “figment” and “the Cartesian theater”, respectively, and I’m sure he does so because there is indeed no color in a billiard-ball materialism, and no Cartesian theater in a connectionist network. But for the neo-monadologist, because consciousness is being mapped onto the state of a single monad, the ontological mismatch does not arise. We will have a formal physics of monads, described mathematically, and then the fully enriched ontology of the individual monad, to be inferred from conscious phenomenology, and there is no need to convince yourself that you are actually a collection of atoms or a collection of neurons.
The downside is that there had better be a very high-dimensional coherent quantum subsystem of the brain which is physically and functionally situated so as to play the role of Cartesian theater, or else it’s back to the theoretical drawing board.
But having dreamed up all of that, what do I see when I look at current attempts to understand the mind? The subjective facts are only crudely understood; and then they are further falsified and dumbed-down to fit the neurophysical apriori; but people believe this because they think the only alternative is superstition and dualism. It’s certainly a lot easier to see it so starkly, when you have an alternative, but nonetheless it is possible to sense that something is going wrong even when you don’t have the alternative. And that is why I object to this happy process of dissolving one’s metaphysical questions in cognitive materialism. It is simply an invitation to deceive oneself in all those areas where physics-as-we-know-it is inherently incapable of giving an answer. Better to maintain the tension of not knowing, and maybe think of something new as a result.
Z. M., let me answer you indirectly. The working hypothesis I arrived at, after a long period of time, was a sort of monadology. Most monads have simple states, but there is (one hypothesizes) a physics of monadic interaction which can bring a monad into a highly complex state. From the perspective of our current physics, an individual monad is something like an irreducible tensor factor in an entangled quantum state. The conscious self is a single monad; conscious experience is showing us something of its actual nature; any purely mathematical description, such as physics presently provides, is just formal and falls short of the truth.
Now all that may or may not be true. As far as I am concerned, thinking in terms of monads has one enormous advantage, and that is that there is no need to falsify one’s own phenomenology in order to fit it to a neurophysical apriori the way that, say, Dennett does. Dennett dismisses phenomenal color and the subjective unity of experience as “figment” and “the Cartesian theater”, respectively, and I’m sure he does so because there is indeed no color in a billiard-ball materialism, and no Cartesian theater in a connectionist network. But for the neo-monadologist, because consciousness is being mapped onto the state of a single monad, the ontological mismatch does not arise. We will have a formal physics of monads, described mathematically, and then the fully enriched ontology of the individual monad, to be inferred from conscious phenomenology, and there is no need to convince yourself that you are actually a collection of atoms or a collection of neurons.
The downside is that there had better be a very high-dimensional coherent quantum subsystem of the brain which is physically and functionally situated so as to play the role of Cartesian theater, or else it’s back to the theoretical drawing board.
But having dreamed up all of that, what do I see when I look at current attempts to understand the mind? The subjective facts are only crudely understood; and then they are further falsified and dumbed-down to fit the neurophysical apriori; but people believe this because they think the only alternative is superstition and dualism. It’s certainly a lot easier to see it so starkly, when you have an alternative, but nonetheless it is possible to sense that something is going wrong even when you don’t have the alternative. And that is why I object to this happy process of dissolving one’s metaphysical questions in cognitive materialism. It is simply an invitation to deceive oneself in all those areas where physics-as-we-know-it is inherently incapable of giving an answer. Better to maintain the tension of not knowing, and maybe think of something new as a result.