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It all fits together

 


Ah, the mind-body problem. As regular readers of this blog may know, it has kept my mind twirling for decades. 

Sometimes I'm a dualist interactionist, something like Descartes but with aspirations to empiricism. 

Sometimes I'm an emergentist, seeing mind as something on an ontological level higher than mindless life, as life is on a higher level than lifeless chemistry. 

Sometimes, I'm a vitalist, seeing life -- even insect life -- as inherently mindful.  

Sometimes I believe in the earthsoul of which we are all expressions. Relatedly: sometimes, I am a panpsychic, finding mindfulness everywhere, not merely in life, even in the rocks. These four (or five) views have seemed very different from each other, and I haven't been able to reconcile them to my own satisfaction. 

Now I believe I have achieved a reflective equilibrium. Happy day.

I'm an emergentist, and specifically one who embraces downward causation and a planetary mereology. 

Huh? Well, as noted above, an emergentist believes that reality is layered by value. A more valuable level comes into existence by emerging as a semi-independent realm from an older more complicated value. The wrinkles in space begat matter; the wrinkles in matter begat life; those in life, mind; those in mind ... who knows? 

"Downward causation" (not to be confused with the downward dog) is a big issue for emergence. As applied to the mind-body problem, emergentism without downward causation is epiphenomenalism. But I embrace downward causation: the mind can have consequences for the body/the level of life. 

"Mereology" is any philosophical inquiry into parts of a whole. My view is that the emergence of mind is a planetary phenomenon. We have one mind, the Earth Soul, and we are each different expressions of that mind in the way the same sunlight passes with very different consequences through different stained glass mirrors. We (self-aware beings) are each part of the process by which the Earth-Soul becomes aware of itself. 

I think the sentence italicized above captures what is valuable in each of the positions I have been toggling among. 

To go back to the ants portrayed above: I hereby abandon the hypothesis of their mindfulness. The most likely guess is that the Earth-Soul's self-awareness thus far turns on a smallish number of species. Likely a number larger than one, though. 

Reality is still unfolding.



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  1. HenryMay 24, 2022 at 5:59 AM

    Christopher, the mind-body problem is not an issue I think about a lot, so I'll just respond with off-the-cuff comments.
    First, reality can't be layered by value, because value isn't part of reality outside our minds. Ontological levels don't exist. Things exist, and we value them as we wish.
    Second, the Earth Soul, like God, is something that people make up because it makes them feel good to believe it exists. There is no evidence for it.

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  2. ChristopherMay 24, 2022 at 11:04 AM

    If value isn't a reality outside of our minds, then value became a reality because there came to be minds in the world capable of valuing. So reality CAN be layered by value after all, although only in a binary way (0/1).

    I think, though, that the layering gets more than binary. After all, all living things pursue ends. They seek to preserve themselves through nutrition and the evasion of predators. The mindless pursuit of goals may well be considered a layer of valuing, and so a layer of value, in between our initial 0 and 1.

    My belief in Gaia arises in large part because of the difficulty of making sense of mind-body interaction on an individual level. The difficulties seem less if we raise the issue to the planetary level.

    (I deleted the earlier version of this comment because its typos were too gnarly even by my relaxed standards. Gaia help me.)

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    Replies
    1. HenryMay 24, 2022 at 12:08 PM

      I don't know what you mean by layering reality by value in a binary way or more than a binary way. I do believe, however -- and perhaps this is related -- that moral and aesthetic values have a degree of objectivity to them. It derives from the way we use the terms "moral" and "aesthetic." If Hitler believed that the Holocaust was moral, then he was objectively wrong. As Lincoln said, "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." As for aesthetics, if something, such as vomit, naturally revolts or disgusts almost all people, then it is by definition not beautiful. If someone said that he finds it beautiful, then, in the unlikely event that he is sincere, we would be entitled to say that he finds something objectively ugly to be beautiful, and we could attribute it to the wiring of his brain being abnormal.

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