Charlatan & Wolly Green's fascinating philosophy fair

[charlatan]

Would you have prima facie objections to the idea of experience being just emergence within a nonreductive neutral monist framework

OK just remind me what you meant by this again

Do you mean experiential properties are just emergent properties of the neutral i.e. all higher order properties? If so, that's an interesting idea! I've often considered how mind seems to relate to emergence, since there's a sense in which a thought, etc that's comprised of many smaller pieces really seems to become a single coherent thing in the mind. This is why we feel concepts are understood in the mind, even if *represented* in 0s and 1s in a computer -- the holism needed to apparently intuit the concept.

 

[charlatan]

I realize you could probably say there are non-mental emergent properties like certain higher order mathematical properties of the physical (which would be higher order / emergent properties of the neutral if the neutral grounds the physical).

But in a strict sense, maybe one might take seriously the idea that minds are needed to make sense of the concept of higher order properties/ground it in some way.


IDK I sense you meant something maybe different but I'm just messing around for fun!

 

[charlatan]

OK probably didn't respond to these parts

The first (and I’ll probably repeat myself here, so apologies for that) is that in my understanding of strong emergence as preserving all the properties of the substrate, neutral fares better if we accept that certain experiences do not have physical properties stricto sensu.

I guess just to remind me, I think what I usually say to things like this is the physicalist wants to say all there is would be physical, and the physical has mental and physical properties. What's the disadvantage to that -- it seems to me it addresses this particular issue, just fails to you for other reasons, such as that brains intrinsically having mental properties (which physicalism holds) would probably be absurd to you.

In your world, you think of mind as mental+neutral. In the physicalist picture the view is physical brains are thought of as mental + physical. There's nothing further to say about mind having physical properties, precisely because minds aren't substances -- there are mental properties but the only substances, if any, are physical.
This way, you don't seem to run into the thing about mental properties entailing any physical properties -- I doubt all physicalists hold to that, honestly.

I'm not using the word strong emergence, just want to state the view independent of terminology so it's precise/we're not guessing based on apparently differing definitions.

Physical, by comparison, does not seem like such an open field, in the sense that I don’t know how “the gap” to experience could be bridged without redefining physical in such a way as to legitimately ask whether we might not call it something else than ‘physical’.

I think for something to qualify as physical in any recognizable sense it must have mathematically quantifiable properties.
Of course, the brain has those kinds of properties, so the above view strikes me as coherent even if mistaken.

The real issue to me is whether mind isn't best viewed as a substance. Again, one really good reason to think this might be that mind without any brain/anything else seems it might well be coherent. If so, you simply couldn't avoid that the mental properties would modify some non-physical substance, since there would be no physical substance in sight in such a world.

This seems the strongest case I can think of to bail out your intuition that brains don't intrinsically have experiences, and that experiences must be had by something like a subject.

 

[Ren]

@charlatan Sorry very busy last two days, I’ll answer everything tonight. Looking forward!

 

[charlatan]

@Ren

take yer time

I think by now I've got the sense we generally get each other quite well which really helps move past the basics and speculate on the cool stuff!

 

[Ren]

I've thought of things like this -- I think maybe you could say *some* neutral substances don't give rise to mental, and only to physical. Maybe others give rise only to mental. And others might give rise to both.

The point being, if you wanted your 2 possible worlds, you might want to stick one of each of the kinds of neutral substances detailed above in each world so that one world doesn't have mental/the other doesn't have physical, but there's one of each.

Yes, that would work fine. The reason why I rejected this in my previous post is because I was working from the assumption that emergence is “just experience”, i.e. in your formulation that “experiential properties are just emergent properties of the neutral”. I agree that it’s an interesting idea and an attractive picture. The thing is, Possible World 1 then suddenly appeared unintelligible to me because I couldn’t make sense of the concept of “purely experiencing the physical, without the mental”. But I think I was too quick in my assessment. I can think of examples in which the physical is experienced without the ‘agency’ of the mental as such. Earlier I was enjoying a can of coke after vacuum cleaning and I don’t think there was much that was mental about the experience.

But the reason why I got confused is in itself quite interesting. I thought something like this: “But surely, in order to experience the physical and report on it, we must mentally do something too!” – back to the old anti-physicalist argument that experience is in some sense mental. But why would I need to worry about that since I’m precisely working under the assumption that neutral is the base stuff, and mental/physical experientially emerge from it as higher order properties? It’s like I brought mental back into the picture for no reason.

But then it might still be interesting to wonder about specific cases when the higher order experiential properties emerge; when they emerge physically, mentally, or both. I’m thinking here of giving a specific account of what emergence as higher order experiential property could look like.

I've often considered how mind seems to relate to emergence, since there's a sense in which a thought, etc that's comprised of many smaller pieces really seems to become a single coherent thing in the mind. This is why we feel concepts are understood in the mind, even if *represented* in 0s and 1s in a computer -- the holism needed to apparently intuit the concept.

Yes, that’s what I was getting at with my example of Proust’s madeleine. In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein also provides lots of examples of situations where concepts don’t seem to coalesce ‘physically’. Say you’re looking at the bark of a tree and you suddenly ‘see’ a face in it, or the shape of a bird. From this moment the concept stays with you, and there will always be times when while looking at the tree bark you’ll see the face, the bird or any other emergent ‘aspect’ of that picture. Others might not see a face or a bird at all, but other aspects instead - say a cloud or a house.

Wittgenstein says that in this kind of experience the imagination plays an important role, and develops a thought experiment to show that it cannot be a purely physiological affair. In brief the physiological account stops short at a mere description rather than a complete explanation of how the concept is formed – say the concept of a face, a bird, a cloud or a house when you’re looking at a given tree trunk. Again, there is a "something else".

The real issue to me is whether mind isn't best viewed as a substance. Again, one really good reason to think this might be that mind without any brain/anything else seems it might well be coherent. If so, you simply couldn't avoid that the mental properties would modify some non-physical substance, since there would be no physical substance in sight in such a world.

Unless neutral + mental as in Possible World 2

 

[charlatan]

Unless neutral + mental as in Possible World 2

Well I was just saying mind without neutral seems coherent -- Possible World 2 existing is still compatible with a world with just mind, no neutral, right? At least, unless you mean strong versions of neutral monism (but I think the basic idea of possible world 2 can be replicated with non-strong versions i.e. worlds with neutral giving rise to mental, without treating mental as inherently neutral).

There are strong versions of neutral monism that would not just say neutral can give rise to mind, but that mind *can't* arise without neutral, but those are strong versions rather than the only option -- fair enough?

There's obviously a chance you mean strong, just because of how I understand your use of emergence -- when you mention emergence (particularly the way you seem to use 'strong' emergence), you seem to do so in a way that mind would basically be a combo of mental and neutral properties. In this case, you mean the strong neutral view where once you instantiate mind you've instantiated neutral.

But obviously when I envision mind without neutral, I'm saying that in light of the possibility of a weaker neutral monism, where neutral can instantiate mind but isn't inherently involved in mind.

 

[Ren]

Well I was just saying mind without neutral seems coherent -- Possible World 2 existing is still compatible with a world with just mind, no neutral, right? At least, unless you mean strong versions of neutral monism (but I think the basic idea of possible world 2 can be replicated with non-strong versions i.e. worlds with neutral giving rise to mental, without treating mental as inherently neutral).

There are strong versions of neutral monism that would not just say neutral can give rise to mind, but that mind *can't* arise without neutral, but those are strong versions rather than the only option -- fair enough?

There's obviously a chance you mean strong, just because of how I understand your use of emergence -- when you mention emergence (particularly the way you seem to use 'strong' emergence), you seem to do so in a way that mind would basically be a combo of mental and neutral properties. In this case, you mean the strong neutral view where once you instantiate mind you've instantiated neutral.

But obviously when I envision mind without neutral, I'm saying that in light of the possibility of a weaker neutral monism, where neutral can instantiate mind but isn't inherently involved in mind.

Yeah, the Chalmersian understanding of the concept of strong emergence requires that the emergent entity preserve all of the properties of the substrate it emerges from. I’m not saying this is at all the common conception of strong emergence, but it is the one I’ve been using. I think what I like about it is that it seems to place a certain ‘limit’ on how one may conceive of emergence. Because otherwise emergence could easily become a sort of cop-out for any attempt at avoiding dualism at any cost – even when the attempt itself is neither very convincing nor very inspired.

I have no problem with the concept of a world with just mind, but I think I would have an issue with the human world – ‘our’ world – having just mind. In other words I’m reticent about accepting pure Idealism as regards our world. What about you? If you’d like to start a new discussion about the concept of the “purely mental” in our world, I could detail the reasons why I’m inclined to reject it.

But another topic could also (or in parallel) rejuvenate our discussion. I’m thinking here of your concept of reductive neutral monism with information as neutral substance. Do you think that – just for the sake of giving this discussion a start – you could begin to detail that position a little bit? I’d be interested in a few things. To begin with, how would you define that substance in simple terms? What could you say about its properties? I’d like to get a better idea of your understanding of information. Are we talking about events, logical propositions, code, or something else entirely?

The floor is yours, Charlie.

 

[charlatan]

requires that the emergent entity preserve all of the properties of the substrate it emerges from.

Yeah, so if you want this in a physicalist framework, you have to think of a brain as having physical + mental properties or something. It wouldn't work to say there's such a thing as mind by itself, because mind doesn't have physical properties as you've pointed out.


I've been over it for a while, and I really think there are two options, broadly. First, accept one of these property-dualist-esque nonreductive physicalisms -- especially appealing to someone deflationist about stuff like substances (and more generally deflationary about 'privileged' collections of properties, ie if they think there are just a zillion ways of forming bunches of properties with none of them corresponding to special things called substances or special kinds of properties or whatever).

If someone is NOT deflationist in this sense, it seems to me the existence of a mind by itself in a world would greatly slant one to substance dualism, precisely because the mental properties in such a world wouldn't have anything to modify but some nonphysical substance you might as well call a 'mind.'
So, to physicalists who want to say mental properties are properties of the brain in our world, this would be an argument against, as it would basically say those properties instantiate a nonphysical substance.

(you can rinse/repeat this by talking not of substances and instead talking of privileged bunchings of properties -- which a substance probably involves, among other things.....ie.. not every collection of properties constitutes a substance so marking a substance involves choosing such a privileged bunching.)

I have no problem with the concept of a world with just mind, but I think I would have an issue with the human world – ‘our’ world – having just mind.

I'm not an idealist, though I don't think the idea seems incoherent or anything. Why are you inclined not to accept it? That's a cool discussion to have.

I’d like to get a better idea of your understanding of information. Are we talking about events, logical propositions, code, or something else entirely?

I guess this is part of the thing -- information seems to be the kind of thing qualifying as neutral monism precisely because it's so general.
I don't mean here zeros and ones, though of course if all one thinks exists is some kind of code/binary/mathematical reality, there would be a very easy solution to all the issues.....you'd not have to bridge the mental and physical if you don't think either is more than code.

But of course, I'm not deflationist about stuff like consciousness or the physical. I tend to think it's not just code, so I'm thinking of information as bridging mental/physical really because it's general enough to encompass both.

I think in a weird way, as surprising as this may sound, the neutral view sounds a bit like a Deutsch or Popper view in some ways, however different it may be in others, because his view seems to conceive of reason as quite general and resists things like saying we learn through experience, and it's this sort of view that seems to be compatible with the idea that we'll learn stuff about the neutral. Not surprising, I guess, given Deutsch is regarded as helping father quantum computation....that his view would have information-theoretic suggestions.

The problem is I'm not quite on board with that kind of optimism yet and I have my skepticism about how much we can come to know of such a colossally general thing like neutral information. I wonder if we aren't more stuck in seeking 'experience' and/or mathematical knowledge than we might otherwise realize.


Here's another thought. Our very concept of gaining 'knowledge' seems kind of subject-object centric -- that there's this thing out there that we here are processing. Perhaps that kind of paradigm isn't suited to getting at the intrinsic nature of the neutral --- I have in mind views like the Buddhist about transcending the subject-object dichotomy, which is quite similar to the mind-body one.

 

[Ren]

Here's another thought. Our very concept of gaining 'knowledge' seems kind of subject-object centric -- that there's this thing out there that we here are processing. Perhaps that kind of paradigm isn't suited to getting at the intrinsic nature of the neutral --- I have in mind views like the Buddhist about transcending the subject-object dichotomy, which is quite similar to the mind-body one.

That's a very good point actually. The subject-object paradigm is very difficult to think beyond when you're an heir to the western tradition. Often trying to rethink the subject just ends up creating another ghost in the machine in disguise. But I mean, doesn't monism by its very nature oblige one to think beyond that dichotomy in some way ?

The problem is that if you're not deflationist about consciousness, what exactly do you mean? Just like the subject-object dichotomy (to which it's obviously related), I find consciousness to be an extremely slippery concept. From the moment that one says « conscious of » one thinks « subject conscious of an object ». The transitivity of consciousness almost creates the relation by itself. So I really think consciousness is also a concept that has to be rethought to allow the rethinking of the dichotomy. I'm not sure you can do one without the other. The shift of perspective would have to be quite radical I think.

Speaking of which, I'm re-reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus at the moment and I find that sections 5.6 to 5.614 show a very interesting way of trying to think beyond the subject-object relation. I'm not saying I agree with it but I think it goes in the right direction in terms of how radical the departure has to be. For this reason I will reproduce the passage in its entirety here – beginning with the contentious §5.6 which created a bit of hubbub on this very forum earlier in the year (copying @Lurk here in case she's interested).

(Sometimes I even wonder whether logical atomism might not have a kinship with some kind of reductive neutral monism. I suppose Russell embraced it for a while.)

------------------------------------------------

5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

5.61 Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits.

We cannot therefore say in logic: This and this there is in the world, that there is not.

For that would apparently presuppose that we exclude certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case since otherwise logic must get outside the limits of the world: that is, if it could consider these limits from the other side also. What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think.

5.62 This remark provides a key to the question, to what extent solipsism is a truth.

In fact what solipsism means, is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself.

That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world.

5.621 The world and life are one.

5.63 I am my world. (The microcosm.)

5.631 The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing.

If I wrote a book "The world as I found it", I should also have therein to report on my body and say which members obey my will and which do not, etc. This then would be a method of isolating the subject or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject: that is to say, of it alone in this book mention could not be made.

5.632 The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world.

5.633 Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be noted?

You say that this case is altogether like that of the eye and the field of sight. But you do not really see the eye.

And from nothing in the field of sight can it be concluded that it is seen from an eye.

5.6331 For the field of sight has not a form like this:

5.634 This is connected with the fact that no part of our experience is also a priori.

Everything we see could also be otherwise.

Everything we can describe at all could also be otherwise.

There is no order of things a priori.

5.64 Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.

5.641 There is therefore really a sense in which in philosophy we can talk of a non-psychological I.

The I occurs in philosophy through the fact that the "world is my world".

The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit—not a part of the world.

--------------------------------------------------

I'm not an idealist, though I don't think the idea seems incoherent or anything. Why are you inclined not to accept it? That's a cool discussion to have.

I'm still thinking of how to coherently articulate my answer to this. I mean I have the answer but I'm struggling to express it. Sorry, it's an Ni thing

But the gist of it is: I don't think it's possible to develop self-consciousness outside of an implicit limitation of the self provided by the outside world. This would dispose of solipsism. But how can we be sure that Idealism is not solipsistic?

 

[charlatan]

The problem is that if you're not deflationist about consciousness, what exactly do you mean?

Here, I mean something like I don't tend to take very seriously the views of the more 'traditional' physicalist monists that say consciousness is more or less illusory and that our fundamental physics is all that needs to be explained.

I tend to say nope, there does seem to be a fact of the matter that some brain states have consciousness/not others. Getting rid of those experiential properties seems to render the physical world itself little more than a mathematical plaything.

But I mean, doesn't monism by its very nature oblige one to think beyond that dichotomy in some way ?

Yes, and I think we already have in this thread -- in very abstract, general terms I think it's easy to say what it would be like to have a nonphysical neutral substance give rise to the mental: A substance that, when instantiated in a world, also entails the instantiation of mental properties, but which has no quantifiable properties comparable to physical substances.

The only question is can we go any more specific than that. I think there, here's the issue. It seems likely that the nature of the neutral is discovered a posteriori in some sense, not a priori. The biggest reason for this is why would the nature of the physical be known only a posteriori if it's entailed by the nature of the neutral if the latter is knowable a priori?

if the neutral can only be known a posteriori, that introduces the plausibility of limitation with regards to how much we can know of the specifics, even if we can deduce somehow that the nature of reality isn't plausibly physical at the ground. After all, the fact that our minds happen to be able to observe the world following the laws of physics seems about as accidental as the laws of physics themselves. Obviously one is free to deny anything is ever accidental, but it's easy to see why it would seem strongly that some things are.

As to what the neutral MIGHT look like whether or not we can know stuff a posteriori about it in our world, in a way to separate it from the physical, mental, etc, maybe to separate from the former, it can be described in language, kind of like the taste of strawberry, but not quantified. To separate from the latter, it just has to have an objective/not purely subjective existence, i.e. multiple different subjects can perceive it (possibly differently). This combines the qualities of the mental and physical in a way neither seems to have individually.

As for the subject-object dichotomy, and recasting it significantly, one way to think of it is maybe to say mental states are just objects -- they have experiential properties that we can call "what it's like to taste chocolate" and such.

This relates to your thread here i think

But the gist of it is: I don't think it's possible to develop self-consciousness outside of an implicit limitation of the self provided by the outside world. This would dispose of solipsism. But how can we be sure that Idealism is not solipsistic?

I think you're saying something like the self might be empty independent of something of it to become aware of, ie it being aware of 'itself' only happens when 'itself' already has some content. So for instance, you can be aware of your awareness of chocolate -- there can be richness to the awareness, but if there's just nothing there period, then maybe awareness itself can't happen.

I think if the self had a nature, it might be existence and nothing else intrinsically. Existence might not be a property/this is probably controversial.



Anyway, the relation to your thread is that thinking of mental states as just objects, ie things with experiential properties, deflates the idea of a self independent of any properties. This is a little similar to saying there is no time without change -- time isn't what's there when nothing else is going on, it's rather that something is going on that tells us there is time.

One reason this appeals to me is that brain-in-vat scenarios seem pretty reasonable, because dreams are already reasonable. This suggests that experiential properties aren't really properties about objects outside the mental state, but of the mental state. Perhaps we can say sometimes, when the experience really conveys a truth about a car or whatever, it is in fact about the car. But it needn't be intrinsically so.

I liken this to saying a mathematical structure *might* be modifying a physical object, given certain relations between the structure and the physical object. But it isn't intrinsically about a physical object.

 

[charlatan]

as for the dualism v nonreductive physicalism stuff, I think my present thought is if nonreductive physicalism, perhaps it's very deflated. Like, I think it may be similarly likely to have physical necessitate experiences as having it be possible that there exists in some world a nonphysical substance necessitates the existence of the physical in that world even if our world has no nonphysical substance in it.

Here's the gist. Say minds alone are coherent, which I tend to lean is plausible.
Then minds in that world with only mind/nothing else are as fundamental as physical objects are in our world if physicalism is true -- i.e. they're the most fundamental layer.

So if you think physical can necessitate mind, you should be willing to consider that some other type of property can necessitate physical, even if in our world the physical is the bottom layer. Obviously none of this has any bearing if physical ain't the bottom layer/neutral is -- it's just saying IF physicalism is true of our world, it seems to be a deflated kind.

Whether the bottommost layer in one world can become not-bottom-most in another world is an interesting question but you'd at least think there's a case that it can't.

I guess whether this is possible rides on things like whether you think a LOTR world is possible. That is, could physical objects ever be manipulated with magic? If so you could easily imagine the bottommost layer in some world may be the mind of a magical demon, whose thoughts can conjure up physical facts into existence, and where his mind is the bottom-most layer and the physical facts all ride on top of his thoughts.
You might well think, however, that if physical objects truly are at the bottom-most layer of our world, that the fact there are no such demon-physical interactions in our world suggests probably there is no such capacity.


Notice this deflationism doesn't do anything to experiential properties *of the physical* -- that is, those being necessitated by the existence of the physical is obvious. That is, it will always be like something to taste a tomato -- but whether there's an experience itself (not just the experiential property) to witness the property is separate.

 

[Ren]

Here, I mean something like I don't tend to take very seriously the views of the more 'traditional' physicalist monists that say consciousness is more or less illusory and that our fundamental physics is all that needs to be explained.

I tend to say nope, there does seem to be a fact of the matter that some brain states have consciousness/not others. Getting rid of those experiential properties seems to render the physical world itself little more than a mathematical plaything.

Just out of curiosity, how prevalent would you say (reductive) physicalist monists are today? Just in terms of even a rough percentage. I'm curious – I don't imagine very prevalent. Also by the way, if you're comfortable with that, could you tell me what kind of academic background you have? Not that this will box you in or anything, but it might be useful to know just as a kind of context.

In terms of the world itself being more than a mathematical plaything: it is one of those things that I would take experience to show directly. I have to make those kinds of decisions if I want to build some kind of system myself. Maybe this recalls what you said about Ni users functioning by building pictures rather than laying out exactly what kinds of pictures there can be? I'm wondering.

The only question is can we go any more specific than that. I think there, here's the issue. It seems likely that the nature of the neutral is discovered a posteriori in some sense, not a priori. The biggest reason for this is why would the nature of the physical be known only a posteriori if it's entailed by the nature of the neutral if the latter is knowable a priori?

Here's a suggestion that comes to mind. If experience is just emergence, i.e. experiential properties are in some sense higher-order properties of the neutral, then it seems reasonable to assume physical and mental properties can only be discovered a posteriori. This is because in the a priori realm experience has not emerged yet and so mental and physical are 'absent'. But neutral could inhabit that realm, since it is what physical and mental emerge from a posteriori, 'as experiences'.

Wouldn't this be plausible?

I think you're saying something like the self might be empty independent of something of it to become aware of, ie it being aware of 'itself' only happens when 'itself' already has some content. So for instance, you can be aware of your awareness of chocolate -- there can be richness to the awareness, but if there's just nothing there period, then maybe awareness itself can't happen.

Essentially yes, that's what I'm saying. And I think this is a potential challenge for any kind of monism – a challenge serious enough as not to be possibly ignored. Let's look at the questions of consciousness and the self briefly to illustrate my point.

Consciousness, I think, can be made room for within (let's say) nonreductive neutral monism with experience-as-emergence – on the condition that it is clearly understood as not having 'content', like thoughts that somehow exist inside consciousness. Because from the moment that consciousness is understood in that way (and I think many tacitly understand it in that way) you are kind of giving mind genuine substance and falling back into dualism.

But alternatively, speaking about 'consciousness' could just be a way of saying “when mental emerges from neutral in situation A” in different words: “I am conscious of A”.

But here we can already see the self creeping in the “I” - which brings me to self-consciousness. What is it that allows me to speak from the stance of an I? I'm not sure that the self can be made room for within (say) nonreductive neutral monism. At least this deserves scrutiny, some kind of account. And this would probably be the case with other monisms as well. From what I can remember, Fichte said that the Idealist framework depends on the arbitrary positing of the “pure I”. I have tried for fun to work around this in the past and have usually failed.

This provides a sketch of what I mean by the challenge of self-consciousness to monism. (You'll notice that in the process I extended my challenge beyond simply Idealism). A pluralist might say it's just a separate substance. But how would the monist accommodate it? It's a fascinating question.

I think if the self had a nature, it might be existence and nothing else intrinsically. Existence might not be a property/this is probably controversial.

I've two reservations about this. The first is that as you know, I am reticent about accepting existence as a property. The second is that I'm not sure the property of existence would be enough to individuate the self into an I.

 

[charlatan]

how prevalent would you say (reductive) physicalist monists are today?

Well, I get the sense that a pretty fair number of scientifically minded and AI-oriented folk hate the very idea of consciousness being something to explain in addition to fundamental physics. They would MUCH rather find a way to show it's a silly idea. A lot of the Singularity people basically want to say mind is just a computer program, which is precisely the opposite of saying it's a *fact* about nature and precisely saying it's just an *interpretation* of how the brain particles move around. Essentially one motivation here would be that it's a hell of a lot harder to 'upload' our minds onto a computer if the mind is not itself just a computational pattern and there are certain brute facts about when consciousness emerges an when it doesn't that need to be discovered.

My main problem with this, even if I didn't reject it outright, is I don't think they can give any other account of why they think the physical world is something to be explained in addition to mathematics. Some of them (rarely) don't, and would bite the bullet and say there is LITERALLY nothing to physics but mathematics.
There is no "concrete' physical world, to them, in addition to abstract mathematical equations describing it.

Experiential properties that mark the physical world as something other than pure mathematics seem essential to provide any case that the physical world is something more.

Just to explain this further, their account of the physical world becomes akin to saying *every aspect of physics* is like the wavefunction of quantum mechanics. Usually people may have problems with the wavefunction because it seems a purely mathematical construct. Apart from our merely saying it is physical, there seems nothing to mark it as such apart from that it leaves certain experiential markers.

Here's a suggestion that comes to mind. If experience is just emergence, i.e. experiential properties are in some sense higher-order properties of the neutral, then it seems reasonable to assume physical and mental properties can only be discovered a posteriori. This is because in the a priori realm experience has not emerged yet and so mental and physical are 'absent'. But neutral could inhabit that realm, since it is what physical and mental emerge from a posteriori, 'as experiences'.

Wouldn't this be plausible?

Well I have a feeling I see what you're saying -- you're probably thinking of when mental phenomena have mental+neutral properties and similarly with physical. In this case, we could come to know neutral properties a priori without being able to do so with the physical ones.
This is the whole strong emergence type situation. That's totally reasonable, though I'd basically say in my language, this means some properties of the neutral are only knowable a posteriori (in particular, the mental ones/physical ones)

I was probably thinking of the reductive neutral situation: there, if all neutral properties can be known a priori, and mental-physical can be known only a posteriori, that's weird -- in this case if anything, you should be able to deduce all the mental/physical facts purely logically from the neutral ones, and since the latter are knowable a priori, so are the former.

Consciousness, I think, can be made room for within (let's say) nonreductive neutral monism with experience-as-emergence – on the condition that it is clearly understood as not having 'content', like thoughts that somehow exist inside consciousness. Because from the moment that consciousness is understood in that way (and I think many tacitly understand it in that way) you are kind of giving mind genuine substance and falling back into dualism.

Hmmm, I guess the thing is this seems to depend on whether we believe in 'substance' theory or not. If we do, honestly I think dualism beckons quite strongly. The very idea that experiential properties seem to make sense independent of any others is a huge threat, because if they exist in some possible world independent of any other properties, AND you believe in substances, they must modify some 'Self' substance as there's nothing else they could modify!
That is, a substance with no properties but experiential ones.

If we don't take substances too seriously/mainly care about properties, as some philosophers do, I think we're safer in monism, because you can always say neutral or physical properties just entail experiential ones. That is, if the former exist the latter must.

Notice this still involves SOME admission to non-monist flavors, as you certainly say the experiential properties don't equal any physical property. They're just determined. It's kinda like the mathematical properties of a physical object are determined by the physical .... but are not identical the physical properties. But basically I think given this analogy, you can see how the admission isn't too great, because if you can admit even independent of mind's existence that physical objects have nonphysical properties, you don't have to worry much about the mental properties.

rom what I can remember, Fichte said that the Idealist framework depends on the arbitrary positing of the “pure I”. I have tried for fun to work around this in the past and have usually failed.

I guess I'm not sure why you'd need to posit a 'pure I' to have just mental experience by itself independent of anything else, if by that we mean something which exists INDEPENDENT of any experience. Rather, why not say for any given experience, say of pain, we say there is an object, call it "I" with a property "feeling pain"?

An object doesn't exist 'independent' of its properties -- e.g. grass doesn't exist independent of green-ness? Similarly, it's not that "I" exists in any pure sense, independent of its experiential properties.

In a weird way, I almost think this picture of idealist monism feels more akin to saying "I" is not something that can exist without content. In the dualist picture, where you need an additional substance to make "I" get content, i.e. for instance you need something like a physical object for "I" to have an experience of, it almost feels like you're saying the "I" is this thing independent of the physical object, and it can come into relation with the object by way of experience.

Whereas in the picture of "I" as just a substance with mental properties, you basically are saying there is no "I" if there are no actual experiential contents -- that is, a contentless "I" doesn't exist.

Note that you can have a dualist picture without admitting of contentless I's, by saying there are I's with experiential properties in our physical world. But I guess the idea of a contentless "I" seems to me to scream dualism more than idealist monism?

The only thing to get on board with is that experiences can happen independent of the objects they appear to refer to (eg I can have experiences of a car without actually being in front of a car) ... that seems not just coherent but really standard, say through dreams of cars or hallucinations.



As for my background, sadly I have no formal training in philosophy, it's all by interest/my own reading/thinking. I have more training in mathematical subjects.
However, I have a feeling I'm pretty naturally a philosopher by temperament, but it just was the type of subject I prefer to learn independently if that makes sense.
So I can pursue my whim.

 

[Ren]

Hmmm, I guess the thing is this seems to depend on whether we believe in 'substance' theory or not. If we do, honestly I think dualism beckons quite strongly. The very idea that experiential properties seem to make sense independent of any others is a huge threat, because if they exist in some possible world independent of any other properties, AND you believe in substances, they must modify some 'Self' substance as there's nothing else they could modify!
That is, a substance with no properties but experiential ones.

I must say I'm not super comfortable with the concept of a subtance with no properties but experiential ones. What is an 'experiential property' on its own? Is it really a coherent thing? A possible world with only experiential properties is one that I can't make sense of. For if there were such a world, then surely there would be experiences of stuff, not experiences by themselves, hanging in the air.

I think this is why I prefer the idea that experience is emergence in the sense that experiential 'properties' are really higher-order properties of neutral and divide into two broad categories: physical and mental. From this point of view a possible world with only experiential properties seems implausbible since the former emerge from neutral as physical and/or mental.

If we don't take substances too seriously/mainly care about properties, as some philosophers do, I think we're safer in monism, because you can always say neutral or physical properties just entail experiential ones. That is, if the former exist the latter must.

Would higher-order properties ('experiential' properties) simply be entailed by neutral properties in the common sense of entailment, though? Would you conflate emergence and entailment?

Because if a thought is in some sense the expression of a higher-order property of the neutral, I am not sure that saying « consciousness contains thoughts » makes sense as anything more than a (potentially misleading) image. If anything such a conception of consciousness seems almost inseparable from susbtance theory. A perhaps more appropriate way of putting it might be : « Thoughts emerge from consciousness. »

I guess I'm not sure why you'd need to posit a 'pure I' to have just mental experience by itself independent of anything else, if by that we mean something which exists INDEPENDENT of any experience. Rather, why not say for any given experience, say of pain, we say there is an object, call it "I" with a property "feeling pain"?

An object doesn't exist 'independent' of its properties -- e.g. grass doesn't exist independent of green-ness? Similarly, it's not that "I" exists in any pure sense, independent of its experiential properties.

I think the issue might be that « mental experience by itself independent of anything else » is not sufficient to account for the individuation of consciousness. (Maybe we're veering into epistemological territory here, but this might be useful.) What I understand by « pure I » is not just the independent mental experience, it is self-consciousness - the ability of the I to refer to itself and recognize itself as an I, that is, as an individual (rather than just a singularity).

When you, charlatan, are having certain thoughts, you're not just having them ; you also know that you yourself are having them, you-as-charlatan. A sense of identity comes with having all these experiences, mental, physical, or both. So the « I » can reflect back into itself : it is a sign of individuation. That's why you can say such things as « from my point of view », etc.

The only thing to get on board with is that experiences can happen independent of the objects they appear to refer to (eg I can have experiences of a car without actually being in front of a car) ... that seems not just coherent but really standard, say through dreams of cars or hallucinations.

I think neutral+emergence (or reductive neutral) might accommodate this better than physical, precisely because you don't need to physically be in contact with a car to dream of a car or hallucinate about it. But to me the next big challenge is really the self-conscious I in neutral monism. To me all your versions of the contentless I and the I with content were simply those of a singular I, not an individual self-conscious I. When you dream about a car, you know that it was your own dream, and you can report it to other people as your dream.

But let's see first if we understand each other before I propose ideas of my own in that regard.

 

[charlatan]

For if there were such a world, then surely there would be experiences of stuff, not experiences by themselves, hanging in the air.

Good! This hits at the main issue. I think the purest Descartes-esque view of consciousness precisely is this -- experiences hanging in the air. The idea behind it is the brain-in-the-vat view, i.e. that we could stimulate your brain with electrodes and produce all sorts of experiences that don't really correspond to the external physical reality you'd think they do.

And that the extreme version of this is simply having a substance with no properties but experiential properties.
I think this is the strongest argument, if it succeeds, that I've ever seen for dualism (it may seem monist, i.e. idealist, but actually that would be if i said OUR world is just mental.... if I say our world has physical stuff and simply say a world with just mental stuff is coherent, that's more saying the mental stuff seems to have its own individuality and is thus separate enough from the physical stuff to warrant a new metaphysical category)-- and it hinges on the analogy to mathematics: having experiences independent of an external world is kind of like having a mathematical model independent of something not equal to it that it describes.

To put this in sharp focus note that maybe your experiences are simply not sharp enough to distinguish identical things. So maybe your experience of two different substances is the same, and thus your experience is kind of an abstraction/model, rather than directly about any given substance.

This is similar to saying the same mathematical model could describe two different substances...which is easily conceivable again because it may be too abstract to really uncover the concrete differences between the substances.

To me, the strongest case that experience sort of is independent of the experienced is that it's a toy model, a caricature, of the real thing, and thus might be quite far from the thing itself.

I think neutral+emergence (or reductive neutral) might accommodate this better than physical, precisely because you don't need to physically be in contact with a car to dream of a car or hallucinate about it.

Or you could say the brain can cause experiences without those experiences conveying any information about the 'real' world -- kind of like the matrix. presumably in the matrix scenario, it's still physical brain events causing the experiences, but they aren't ABOUT any physical world, they're more about a virtual world.

I think the issue might be that « mental experience by itself independent of anything else » is not sufficient to account for the individuation of consciousness.

Great, so you're right that this whole self-reflective issue of consciousness is one of the mysterious things, and I agree it poses an interesting question for our discussion/how much it makes sense to think of an isolated consciousness.

There are two things to say.

First, is self-consciousness needed for experience? If not, the idea of a substance with experiential properties alone wouldn't be threatened by it not being capable of grounding self-consciousness.

Now on self-consciousness: I think the main way I think about this is via the concept of memory. I can remember myself eating ice cream at age 6. This is an experience I have of myself having an experience. Can the substance-with-just-experiential-properties view accommodate this? Really at the end of the day, this seems to me kind of like asking can we speak of a logical structure which models itself. In the same sense, can an experience contain a model of another experience? If so, the model of the other experience would simply be another experiential property which the substance in question possesses.

I certainly am open to the idea that there's something incoherent about this, but I think it's a hard question. For one thing, I like the example of memory, because it's a case where you're actually experiencing your experience of something from a VERY long time ago .... to the point where it seems tough to imagine the I-of-present is really interacting with an I-of-past, and it's more like the I-of-present just has an experiential property which is an experiential model of the I-of-past.

To put it differently, in brain-in-vat spirit, can you produce the experience of having had an experience of something when age 5 without the person ever TRULY having had such an experience, just by stimulating the brain right? I tend to think so. This idea that in a way you're not really reflecting on yourself, you just have an experiential model which may or may not correspond to anything ... is the kind of thing that leans me to thinking the mind-in-isolation makes sense.

Would higher-order properties ('experiential' properties) simply be entailed by neutral properties in the common sense of entailment, though? Would you conflate emergence and entailment?

I'm going to go ahead and say that for purposes of discussion, I'm just refraining from even using the word emergence just because I'm nervous if we're using either emergence or strong emergence differently -- instead, just spelling out what I mean directly! The reason I speak of entailment is one common way of thinking about physicalism is simply that the physical facts of the universe automatically logically imply the mental ones, EVEN if the mental ones are not identical to any particular physical ones..

If instantiating all neutral properties in the universe means you already have all the mental ones and physical ones, I'd say that's a good case for a neutral metaphysical view.

 

[charlatan]

A possible question for you @Ren would be how do you propose to make sense of self-consciousness, independently of how it might or might not relate to our discussion? I'm really enjoying the discussion BTW you have really fun thoughts.

What metaphysical view do you think best helps ground the idea of self-consciousness?

One of my comments is I'm probably a bit confused by how dualism of a sort where I interact with something non-mental helps self-consciousness. Isn't self-consciousness, if anything, more a matter of mind interacting with itself? I.e. say I have an experience, and then I somehow become aware of myself having that experience. That sounds like mind interacting with mind.

Which admittedly is still very different from the substance-with-just-experiential properties view where it's almost like THERE IS NO INTERACTION GOING ON -- just a substance with a bunch of properties....vs something like one mental substance interacting with another.

It occurs to me, though, to possibly address my own confusion ...that if you think experiences intrinsically involve self-consciousness, you might be uncomfortable with this view, since it still would be one substance with purely experiential properties interacting with another substance with purely experiential properties.....and you might be inclined to say there's nothing called a substance with purely experiential properties.

However, if so, it seems to me maybe you'd be inclined to see mind as more like a pattern of interaction between things like neutral substances than like a substance of its own right. After all, if not a substance with purely mental/experiential properties what other substance could mind be?

(You might be interested to know that this sounds very similar to why some uber-orthodox physicalists reject that mental properties are over and above physical....because they think this Descartes ghost with experiential properties floating by itself doesn't make sense, and that mind seems like it arises out of genuine interactions, and isn't a thing-in-itself as it would have to be to have the autonomy needed for dualism...and it's not an accident that the interaction-among-neutral substances sounds like these AI-physicalists' view, because both seem to reek of mind being a kind of information processing.)

I do have some sympathy for that kind of view/do think about your self-reflection issue.


I think I have to get clear on something though -- my understanding of your views suggests you don't need there to be 2 metaphysically distinct categories interacting.... it seems like you'd be happy with 2 distinct instances of the SAME kind of substance interacting, and that would be enough 'difference' to ground self-consciousness.

And my understanding of why you'd say the 2 distinct instances can't be ones of a mental substance interacting with another mental substance is precisely that you don't think a substance with mental properties only is something you can be comfortable with easily as it doesn't involve enough interaction between distinct entities.

In fact, it is on this view that there would be a problem with having to posit a pure-I -- i.e. if you're uncomfortable with a substance with only experiential properties, the only way to ground mind as an independent substance would obviously be something like a pure-I, a substance with NO properties (roughly like abstract Hinduism).



On an abstract level, though, perhaps what's really going on is that you're looking for 'distinctness' in the substances, not the properties. That is, you seem to prefer either 2 metaphysically distinct things to interact or at least 2 distinct instances of the same metaphysical substance to interact.

Whereas notice I get the 'distinctness' needed for an "I" to supposedly have awareness of itself experiencing things simply by saying there's one substance, and it has distinct properties, one property of which is given by a model of itself having experiences. This is how I think of experiences of experiences in a world with just mental properties, nothing else.

I think this difference in our formulations is consistent with my thinking of mental experience as a kind of model. This would be why all the 'distinctness' needed for my view occurs on the level of properties of a single substance.

 

[Ren]

Good! This hits at the main issue. I think the purest Descartes-esque view of consciousness precisely is this -- experiences hanging in the air. The idea behind it is the brain-in-the-vat view, i.e. that we could stimulate your brain with electrodes and produce all sorts of experiences that don't really correspond to the external physical reality you'd think they do.

And that the extreme version of this is simply having a substance with no properties but experiential properties.
I think this is the strongest argument, if it succeeds, that I've ever seen for dualism (it may seem monist, i.e. idealist, but actually that would be if i said OUR world is just mental.... if I say our world has physical stuff and simply say a world with just mental stuff is coherent, that's more saying the mental stuff seems to have its own individuality and is thus separate enough from the physical stuff to warrant a new metaphysical category)-- and it hinges on the analogy to mathematics: having experiences independent of an external world is kind of like having a mathematical model independent of something not equal to it that it describes.

To put this in sharp focus note that maybe your experiences are simply not sharp enough to distinguish identical things. So maybe your experience of two different substances is the same, and thus your experience is kind of an abstraction/model, rather than directly about any given substance.

The brain-in-the-vat thought experiment asks interesting questions about the nature of knowledge, consciousness, truth etc. but I am not convinced that it offers a good argument for dualism. I'm basically not convinced that producing “all sorts of experiences” is enough to give mental separate reality as a substance. For it to have real separate reality the simulation would have to be complete, i.e. leading to the suggestion that you and I might actually be brain-in-vats, and would have no way of ascertaining that we really are brain-in-skulls. If this is what the brain-in-vat thought experiment plausibly proves then I agree it makes a good case for dualism. But I don't find this completeness hypothesis plausible, and hence I don't find the dualist backup plausible either.

In essence I think the brain-in-vat experiment, insofar as it purports to support the idea of a complete independence of mind from an outside world, begs the question. It presupposes the existence of an outside world which provides the experiences with data which can then be virtually stimulated. Because otherwise what kind of experiences are we talking about? The very term simulation contains in itself the presupposition of an outside world. I think the argument is circular.

Or you could say the brain can cause experiences without those experiences conveying any information about the 'real' world -- kind of like the matrix. presumably in the matrix scenario, it's still physical brain events causing the experiences, but they aren't ABOUT any physical world, they're more about a virtual world.

A virtual world of which (suspiciously enough) nothing could be said other than it has different states of affairs than the physical world. Yet the states of affairs would presumably contain the same objects, only combined differently. If not, what other objects? And would people speak in that virtual world – would there be language? Plausibly language is always intersubjective and presupposes a vast context of rules and references grounding the speaking person's “point of view”. This is also a case for the non-independence of mental, I think.

First, is self-consciousness needed for experience? If not, the idea of a substance with experiential properties alone wouldn't be threatened by it not being capable of grounding self-consciousness.

Maybe self-consciousness is not necessarily needed for experience, but it might be a prerequisite for speaking about experiences, reporting on them. But as long as experiences are not reported on it seems difficult to be able to falsify anything about “them”.

Now on self-consciousness: I think the main way I think about this is via the concept of memory. I can remember myself eating ice cream at age 6. This is an experience I have of myself having an experience. Can the substance-with-just-experiential-properties view accommodate this? Really at the end of the day, this seems to me kind of like asking can we speak of a logical structure which models itself. In the same sense, can an experience contain a model of another experience? If so, the model of the other experience would simply be another experiential property which the substance in question possesses.

It's interesting that you thought about memory for the grounding or trigger of self-consciousness. I have tried to use it in the past for the same purposes. I think I have come to the conclusion that it doesn't work in the end... again for kind of begging the question, or signalling infinite regress. Let's take your memory of yourself eating ice cream at age 6. How do you know it is a memory of yourself? Based on that memory alone, how can you arrive at the conclusion: “This is a memory of myself eating ice cream at age 6”? I think you can only arrive at it by presupposing the I in the experience of the memory itself. It is the I that recognizes itself in the memory, it seems to me.

And by infinite regress I just mean this: that every time one thinks he has identified something to ground memory, it turns out that something already has an I hiding inside it. It is incredibly difficult to think “outside” of this I. And I think that's what Fichte meant by “We have to posit the pure I”. It's a way of admitting that nothing short of a pure I posited from the start can be accommodated - even within Idealism.

A possible question for you @Ren would be how do you propose to make sense of self-consciousness, independently of how it might or might not relate to our discussion? I'm really enjoying the discussion BTW you have really fun thoughts.

Thanks, so do you!!! I'm also enjoying this – very much. And always keep in mind that when I appear to be rejecting something I am most often just admitting that I had these thoughts too and that they led me into an impasse... or so I believe. I hope you can prove me wrong, it would be great.

Regarding what could be my positive contribution for grounding self-consciousness, as well as the rest of your second post... I'll answer tomorrow, if you don't mind. I need to think about it a little more. (My notebook is keeping me busy too, and I'm actually using insights from our discussion which is cool!) Feel free to answer this post in the mean time of course.

 

[charlatan]

edited this to be more targeted! Just to make sure the discussion doesn't get lost

I'm basically not convinced that producing “all sorts of experiences” is enough to give mental separate reality as a substance. For it to have real separate reality the simulation would have to be complete, i.e. leading to the suggestion that you and I might actually be brain-in-vats, and would have no way of ascertaining that we really are brain-in-skulls. If this is what the brain-in-vat thought experiment plausibly proves then I agree it makes a good case for dualism.

OK so I think personally there's nothing to discuss here. Because how I'm using brain-in-vat is exactly this way, i.e. the whole point of the thought experiment is you can't tell you're a brain-in-vat vs brain-in-skull.

So really it seems to come down to whether you think such a scenario and/or idealism is coherent, so let's focus on that since it seems the real issue. I obviously haven't found something wrong with those scenarios.

It's interesting that you thought about memory for the grounding or trigger of self-consciousness

There may be a misunderstanding -- I'm saying to have a memory, there must be self-consciousness--that is, I'm using it as an example of self-consciousness, that's all. Not as an explanation.

Here are my main thoughts, though, just to plant the flags:

(1) Mainly, I want to know what adding substances apart from mind does to help ground experientiality in the way you want it. In my picture of a substance with just mental properties, you do away with a contentless "I" by saying an object cannot have no-properties. The question is what more do you think we need?

(2) If you reject the idea of a substance with just mental properties, it seems to me you're rejecting any kind of dualism where mind is a metaphysical category of its own. Or at least, if mind were its own metaphysical category it would surely have to be a substance characterized completely by mental properties -- once you instantiate all the mental properties, the substance is fully instantiated.
Perhaps what you mean is to instantiate all the mental properties, you must instantiate non-mental properties -- so even if mind is characterized fully by mental properties, if you've managed to make a mind, you've necessarily added in other stuff (maybe neutral stuff).

Or, maybe you don't want even this view and simply reject mind as a substance of its own right, and instead think mental properties modify some other substance (such as a neutral one). The question is what does THAT do for self-consciousness that the mental view does not.

(3) I want to be sure of this -- it seems to me even with self-consciousness as involving experience of oneself, the property of self-consciousness is a mental property.
So it seems to me the controversy is just if such can exist without any non-mental properties in the world, not whether the properties used to convey self-consciousness are themselves mental properties.

The only other option would be some kind of more radical thesis that the concept of experience itself is flawed. But in such a case we should stop talking of mental properties altogether and simply give an alternate metaphysical grounding for what mistaken-folk think is experience. This would be more like the eliminativist materialist program. I don't think you want this, as you advocated strong emergence with mental properties.

(4) I often like to note that it's a little odd to talk of consciousness and self-consciousness truly being different. After all, if I'm feeling pain, and I'm not aware of feeling pain, that seems like we're saying I'm not feeling pain truly at the end of the day.

Note that even if this were true, if you ask me to describe my pain, it may be that I have to reflect on it to have the time to formulate my answer. But the self-consciousness that I am in pain may still precede this reflection that more has to do with my wish to communicate something to you.

(5) Are you sure the issue is self-consciousness, and not ultimately that you think experiences need to be about something?


The options (2/3) and (5) are two different ways you might worry you need something besides pure mental experience. (2/3) are saying maybe for experiential properties to come into existence there must be non-experiential properties. (5) is saying maybe the real issue is you think having an experience is meaningless without something it is about.

To (5) I usually respond with the claim of vagueness: I think my experience of Jack and his clone may be identical, even if the persons are different. This suggests I could do away with both Jack and his clone, and simply talk of the experience, since it doesn't intrinsically correspond to either.
That is, it is not about anything specific -- it's rather what it feels like to see someone who looks like Jack, his clone, or any infinity of identical looking people.

To (2/3), I basically have to ask how you need non-experiential properties to have experiential ones exist, EVEN IF the experiential ones themselves don't reference the non-experiential ones directly.

And always keep in mind that when I appear to be rejecting something I am most often just admitting that I had these thoughts too and that they led me into an impasse... or so I believe. I hope you can prove me wrong, it would be great.

Well here's the thing -- mostly I'm not saying I get how consciousness actually works, so much as I don't see how the mind-by-itself view is any more incoherent than any other. That is, what does having alternate substances besides mind give you, exactly?
How does having experiential properties entail the existence of non-mental substances in your world?

I much more easily see why you need distinctness, not just a homogeneous contentless "I" --but once you have experiential properties of a substance, I fail to see what other non-mental substances do to help!

Obviously I'm open to cool arguments for that from you or from anyone.

It's also worth noting I don't claim to have a good picture of self-consciousness. Maybe my picture is too fuzzy or abstract or whatever. Still, my point is whatever a self-conscious experience is, its properties seem experiential--after all, that's what being an experience means. So the question is why those experiential properties require some non-mental substance to exist or make sense or what have you.

And by infinite regress I just mean this: that every time one thinks he has identified something to ground memory, it turns out that something already has an I hiding inside it. It is incredibly difficult to think “outside” of this I. And I think that's what Fichte meant by “We have to posit the pure I”. It's a way of admitting that nothing short of a pure I posited from the start can be accommodated - even within Idealism.

A few thoughts:

- first, I wasn't attempting to do away with the thoughts always having a self-referential character/involving the concept "I" -- this corresponds to my comment memory was just an example of self-consciousness, and I wasn't using the idea of memory to try to get rid of an "I"

- however, why is the "I" thought pure? That is, just because every aware experience involves "I", why did the "I" have to exist independent of that experience rather than simultaneous to it? If it didn't exist independent of the experience, it isn't pure.
Rather, it is decidedly modified by the contents of the experience.

Basically, if there is no such thing as a feeling of pain or a feeling of anything without a feeling of self, that just says a feeling of self is a requisite of any experiential property, not that it is a property that can occur by itself.
What you probably want to say is you can't have a mental substance with no property but the feeling of self. That is a version of your claim that there can be no self-consciousness without something 'else'. But it's a considerably more idealist-friendly version of that claim.
You probably want to make a bolder version of this claim, but that's probably where I'm not sure.

edited to add, @Ren:
Basically, to me the 'something else' IS the fact that the feeling of I-ness is accompanied by some other experiential content -- that is, something like the taste of garlic.
you seem to want another substance that is metaphysically distinct -- that might be a core metaphysical intuition of yours, but I feel at least on a technical level, my solution is doing a version of the same thing, just I'm saying additional properties, not additional substances. I don't claim mine is intrinsically more plausible than the distinct substance view, but at this point I'm not sure why it's less!
(Although there's a part of me which wants to wait to see where the I-ness fits into your picture -- how you either account for it or do away with it, or whatever you wish to do. I'm excited to hear your account of self-consciousness.)

 

[charlatan]

As a separate post, I want to note that even if mental properties can exist independent of any others, that does not prove dualism to me without the further idea that there must be a substance those properties modify....and this gets into what I call metaphysically murky territory whether we want to accept such a thing.

Otherwise, you could just say the physical facts of our world entail the mental facts, and that's a reasonable physicalist thesis. The mental facts would not be instantiating a separate substance in this case, so they'd just be riding on top of the physical facts.

So it's not that I'm convinced of dualism. It's just that I feel a need to approach with extreme caution the idea that we can really do away with the possibility of mind-by-itself.