Substack latest.
Strawson is right against Humphrey, but his own theory is worthless.
See also: The Problem of Consciousness and Galen Strawson's Non-Solution
UPDATE (10/3). A friend referred me to this article which I judge to be very bad indeed. See if you can make out what is wrong with it.
Top o' the Stack.
Thomas Beale writes,
Getting back to the topic of consciousness . . . . I think you will find this Royal Institution lecture by British neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey of interest.He provides an outline of subjective phenomenal consciousness and how it could have evolved. One very interesting claim is that sentience could not have arrived prior to the evolution of mammals, since a) their neural transmission speed is much greater than cold-blooded animals and b) mammals are not tied to specific environments since they have inbuilt thermoregulation.I interpret his claims as being a candidate for what Nagel seeks in his monograph Mind and Consciousness (2012) (a naturalistic theory of subjective consciousness) and also as refuting the general position of Dennett, i.e. that consciousness, qualia etc are just an illusion. Personally I think Dennett has failed to understand what he himself is saying when he claims that conscious experience is an 'illusion', as if calling it such makes it unreal.Anyway, I believe you may find this an hour well spent.
Substack latest.
Substack latest.
Is it my brain that feels and thinks when I feel and think?
Both of the following arguments are valid, but only one is sound. Which one is it?
Argument A. Meat can't think. My brain is meat. Therefore, what thinks in me when I think is not my brain.
A in Reverse: What thinks in me when I think is my brain. My brain is meat. Therefore, meat can think.
Top o' the Stack
What are they? Where do they come from? What good are they?
Ed Buckner writes,
Here is another problem that needs to be carefully phrased.
I want to say that the pitch of a musical note is continuous through time. I mean, at any point in continuous time, i.e. time as specified by the real numbers, the pitch of the note (e.g. middle C) is the same.
However, the “physical” property that grounds the pitch is not continuous, but rather a cycle of different events.
That strikes me as a problem for the kind of physicalism according to which qualities “as we perceive them” are identical with the properties that ground them. For pitch is temporally continuous, the oscillation that grounds it is not temporally continuous, ergo etc.
It is a problem indeed, Ed, although I have questions about your formulation of it.
The problem is known in the trade as the Grain Problem. Whether it surfaces before Sir Arthur Eddington, I don't know, but he raises it, or at least anticipates it with his question about the 'two tables.' A lot of work was done on the Grain Problem by the great American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, son of the rather less distinguished Roy Wood Sellars, but nonetheless a quantity to be reckoned with in his day.
Here is Sellars fils in his seminal essay, "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man," reprinted in his Science, Perception, and Reality (Routledge, 1963). The portion I am about to quote is from pp. 35-37. I take the text from Chrucky's online version.
It is worth noting that we have here a recurrence of the essential features of Eddington's 'two tables' problem — the two tables being, in our terminology, the table of the manifest image and the table of the scientific image. There the problem was to 'fit together' the manifest table with the scientific table. Here the problem is to fit together the manifest sensation with its neurophysiological counterpart. And, interestingly enough, the problem in both cases is essentially the same: how to reconcile the ultimate homogeneity of the manifest image with the ultimate non-homogeneity of the system of scientific objects.
BV: Whether we are discussing colors with Sellars or sounds with Buckner, it is the same problem, that of reconciling the homogeneity of the manifest or phenomenal sensory quality with the non-homogeneity of the underlying scientific explanatory posits. For Sellars, of course, these posits are not mere posits but ultimately real, as you will see if you read below the fold.
Buckner's formulation above leaves something to be desired, however. He cites the continuous perception over time of the same note, middle C, let us say. But then in the very next sentence he reverts to a rarefied mathematical concept of continuity, thereby mixing phenomenological description with a mathematico-scientific construct. He thereby conflates phenomenal continuity with mathematical continuity. When I hear middle C sounding from an organ, say, over a non-zero interval of time, five seconds say, do I hear a series of points of time — a series of temporally extension-less moments — the cardinality of which is 2-to-the-aleph-nought? No. (The cardinality of the set of real numbers (cardinality of the continuum) is)
And then Ed goes on to say that "the 'physical' property that grounds the pitch is not continuous, but rather a cycle of different events." But that is not right either. Middle C depicted on an oscilloscope shows up as a sine wave:
Obviously the sine wave is continuous. What Ed wants to say, of course, is that the heard sound, the phenomenal sound, does not fluctuate as does the physical reality does, the physical reality that "grounds the pitch." Ed is equivocating on 'continuous.'
But I know what he is getting at, and it is a genuine problem. I am merely complaining about his formulation of it. Now back to Sellars, whose solution to the problem is not clear to me.
. . . but truth is not? An inconsistency in Dennett.
Over at the Stack.
Top o' the Stack. Dennett debunked!
Ed Buckner sends this:
“If there sensibly appears to a subject to be something which possesses a particular sensible quality then there is something of which the subject is aware which does possess that sensible quality”. (Howard Robinson, Perception, 1994, London: Routledge, p. 32)
That is the question. If it sensibly appears to Jake that there is a green after-image, does it follow that there is something green of which Jake is aware?
I’m inclined to answer yes. But then we have the problem that there is nothing green and physical outside Jake’s brain, nor inside Jake’s brain. So what is it that is green? We agree that it can’t be a physical item, if Robinson’s Principle is true.
I recommend Robinson’s 1994 book, and also his November 2022 book Perception and Idealism.
Ed seems to be coming around. Robinson is asking the right question, and Ed answers in the affirmative or at least is so inclined. (By the way, I read Robinson's excellent Matter and Sense: A Critique of Contemporary Materialism, Cambridge UP, 1982, when it first came out. I expect his later work, which I haven't read, is equally good.)
It is best to approach the question from the first-person point of view. A green after-image sensibly appears to me. (It appears visually and so sensibly.) Does something appear or does nothing appear? The datum is not nothing, so it is something. It is indubitably something. And it is a describable, definite something: green, pulsating, etc. The green item is not outside my head. But it is not inside my head either. (As Bill Lycan says, if I have something green inside my head, then I am in big trouble.)
It follows that the indubitable phenomenal datum cannot be a physical item that is green, pulsating, etc. The inference is correct and the conclusion is true. What Ed should do is simply admit that there are sensory qualia. But he appears loathe to do so. He needs to explain why. Is he ideologically committed to materialism? I don't think that's it.
We know that Ed reasonably rejects the characteristic Meinongian thesis that (i) some of the items to which we refer both in thought and in language have no being (Sein) whatsoever (not Dasein, not Bestehen, not intentionales QuasiSein, not any Seinsmodus) but nevertheless (ii) are mind-independent Soseine that actually (not merely possibly) instantiate properties. But this rejection of Meinong cannot be a good reason for Ed to refuse to countenance the green after-image, and this for two reasons. First, the sensory quale in question is not mind-independent. Second, it exists. In its case, esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived. The green after-image is perceived, and by the same stroke, it is/exists.
But it may be that Ed is confusing the green after-image with the green unicorn. And we did catch him in that confusion in an earlier thread. Suppose I am thinking about a green unicorn. Let's use 'thinking' in the broad Cartesian way to refer to any object-directed act of awareness, including imagining. Imagining a green unicorn, I am not imagining an image since a unicorn is an animal, not an image; I am imagining a unicorn. The object-directed act of mind purports to display a mind-independent animal, not a mind-dependent image.
But of course there are/exist no unicorns! For that very reason, a sensory quale such as a green after-image cannot be assimilated to a green unicorn. What's more, unicorns are not mind-dependent. Qualia are; ergo, etc.
Your move, Ed. Give us some good reasons why you will not admit qualia. If your reasons are neither pro-materialist not anti-Meinongian, what are they?
Tony Flood writes:
Hard to imagine Hitchens at almost 73, had he lived. Great post, but I have a question.
Briefly, why do you refer to the soul as one's "true self"? Genesis 2:7 reports that from the dust of the ground (ha-adamah) God created ha-adam, i.e., "the man." The man became a living soul (le-nephesh hayyah) when God breathed the breath of life (nishmat hayyim) into him. The pre-animated ha-adamah was neither dead nor a "less-than-true" or incomplete human being; the animating nephesh is not the man's self or ego. When God withdraws the breath of life from a soul, that soul dies. I think know your non-Genesis source, but I want to hear it from you. Your passing comment reminded me that I had written quite a bit about this earlier this year.Also interested in knowing whether there's anything you want to share from your retreat.
(A) I am (identical to) a substance the form of which is my soul and the matter of which is my body. Anima forma corporis: the soul is the form of the body.(P) I am (identical to) a purely mental substance that contingently possesses a living human body.
This just over the trans0m from Edward Buckner. I have added my comments in blue.
Aristotle: Even if all animals were eliminated and thereby all perceptions (since only animals perceive), “there will still be something perceptible—a body, for example, or something warm, or sweet, or bitter, or anything else perceptible.”
BV: Evaluation of the above requires that we get clear about the sense of 'perceptible.' There are at least the following three senses:
1) X is perceptible1 =df it is logically possible that x be perceived.
2) X is perceptible2 =df it is nomologically possible that x be perceived.
3) X is perceptible3 =df x is able to be perceived by some sentient being.
I suggest that (3) is what we normally mean by 'perceptible.' What (3) says is that for a thing to be perceptible, there must be at least one existing perceiver with the ability to perceive the thing. On (3), then, Aristotle is mistaken. So on a charitable interpretation, he probably means something like (2): many if not most natural things are such that, if there were an able-facultied perceiver on the scene, one or more natural things would be perceived, and would be perceived as having in themselves such qualities as being warm, bitter, or sweet. Aristotle is a realist about what we now call secondary qualities.
Galileo: “tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.”
BV: Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) belongs to the modern period which he helped inaugurate, along with Rene Descartes (1596-1650). The main point to note for present purposes is that Galileo reduces the sensory qualities that Aristotle viewed as properties of things themselves to perceiver-relative 'secondary qualities.' So if "living creatures were removed," then at least the secondary qualities would be "removed" along with them. That's quite the contrast with Aristotle. The Stagirite is a realist about warmth, etc,; the Italian is an idealist about warmth, etc.
What would Kant’s view be? Does he think that if all perceiving beings ceased to exist, then appearances would cease to exist? But appearances, according to him, are things like trees and rocks. Does he then think that if all perceiving beings ceased to exist, trees and rocks, and all other non-sentient things, would cease to exist? We should be told.
BV: Underlying Ed's questions is the question: Who or what is the knowing subject for Kant? For Aristotle, the knowing subject is the concrete man embedded in nature, a hylomorphic composite in which anima forma corporis. For Kant, however, the concrete man, the man of flesh and blood embedded in nature, with both animal body and animal soul, is blosse Erscheinung, a mere appearance or phenomenon, and thus an object of knowledge, but not the subject of knowledge, i.e., not the knowing subject. For Kant, the knowing subject is transcendental. This is Kant's view whatever you think of it. It is undoubtedly fraught with difficulties, but my sketch is accurate albeit superficial.
And so the answer to both of Ed's questions is in the negative.
David K. writes,
I need some help. I have been exploring the concept of the 'soul' over the last few months. I've meant it to be a fairly wide open review. I have 'rounded up the usual suspects' philosophically and worked my way through a great deal of the biomedical writings. Presently, I am in the middle of two works: The Soul of the Embryo by David Albert Jones and Soul Machine by George Makari. I am looking for a contemporary philosophical treatment of the topic. I have searched the categories on both your blogs but wonder if there is a direction you can point me to as well.
With pleasure, David.
For a high-level contemporary treatment by a distinguished philosopher of religion, I recommend Richard Swinburne, Are We Bodies or Souls? Oxford UP, 2019. The Soul Hypothesis, eds. Baker and Goetz, Continuum 2011, is a collection of essays by analytic philosophers. For a hard-core old-time Thomist treatment, one that is probably not quite in line with your current interests as a medical doctor, but still highly relevant given your Catholic upbringing, take a gander at Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Life Everlasting and the Immensity of the Soul (no bibliographical details in my copy!). More relevant to your biomedical interests is Norman M. Ford, When Did I Begin? Cambridge UP, 1988.
Directly relevant to your concerns is the mercifully short Were You a Zygote? by G. E. M. Anscombe. Also of interest is Erich Klawonn, Mind and Death: A Metaphysical Investigation, University Press of Southern Denmark, 2009.
I'll add further titles if they occur to me. Comments are enabled if anyone wants to make suggestions.
Finally, here is a review by Thomas Nagel, no slouch of a philosopher, of the Swinburne volume mentioned supra.
Hi Dr. Vallicella,
I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts, if it interests you to write about it on your blog, on Strawson's intriguing 2021 paper "Oh you materialist!", in which he argues for a materialistic monism and a deflation of the hard problem.Here is a link to the paper: https://philarchive.org/archive/STROYMBest,Chandler
The problem can be set forth in a nice neat way as an aporetic triad:
1) Consciousness is real; it is not an illusion.
2) Consciousness is wholly natural, a material process in the brain.
3) It is impossible that conscious states, whether object-directed or merely qualitative, be material in nature.
It is easy to see that the members of this triad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. Any two of the propositions, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining proposition.
And yet each limb of the triad has brilliant defenders and brilliant opponents. So not only is consciousness itself a mighty goad to inquiry; the wild diversity of opinions about it is as well. (The second goad is an instance of what I call the Moorean motive for doing philosophy: G. E. Moore did not get his problems from the world, but from the strange and mutually contradictory things philosophers said about the world, e.g., that time is unreal (McTaggart) or that nothing is really related (Bradley).)
The above problem is soluble if a compelling case can be made for the rejection of one of the limbs. But which one? Eliminativists and illusionists reject (1); dualists of all types, and not just substance dualists, reject (2); materialists reject (3). Three prominent rejectors, respectively: Dennett, Swinburne. Strawson.
I agree with Strawson that eliminativism has zero credibility. (1) is self-evident and the attempts to deny it are easily convicted of incoherence. So no solution is to be had by rejecting (1).
As for (2), it is overwhelmingly credible to most at the present time. We live in a secular age. 'Surely' — the secularist will assure us — there is nothing concrete that is supernatural. God and the soul are just comforting fictions from a bygone era. The natural exhausts the real. Materialism about the mind is just logical fallout from naturalism. If all that (concretely) exists is space-time and its contents, then the same goes for minds and their states.
Strawson, accepting both (1) and (2) must reject (3). But the arguments against (3), one of which I will sketch below, are formidable. The upshot of these arguments is that it is unintelligible how either qualia or intentional states of consciousness could be wholly material in nature. Suppose I told you that there is a man who is both fully human and fully divine. You would say that that makes no sense, is unintelligible, and is impossible for that very reason. Well, it is no less unintelligible that a felt sensation such as my present blogger's euphoria be identical to a state of my brain.
What could a materialist such as Strawson say in response? He has to make a mysterian move.
He could say that our understanding of matter at present does not allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature, but that it is nevertheless wholly material in nature! Some matter is sentient and some matter thinks. My euphoria is literally inside my skull and so are my thoughts about Boston. These 'mental' items are made of the same stuff as what we are wont to call 'material' items.
(Compare the orthodox Chalcedonian Incarnationalist who says that the man Jesus of Nazareth is identical to the Second Person of the Trinity despite the violation of the Indiscernibility of Identicals. Put the Incarnationalist under dialectical pressure and he might say, "Look it is true! We know it by divine revelation. And what is true is true whether or not we can understand how it is possible that it be true. It must remain a mystery to us here below.)
Or a materialist mysterian can say that our understanding of matter will never allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature. Either way, conscious experience, whether intentional or non-intentional, is wholly material in nature, and falls entirely within the subject-matter of physics, whether a future physics achievable by us, or a physics which, though not achievable by us, is perhaps achievable by organisms of a different constitution who study us.
If I understand Galen Strawson's mysterianism, it is of the first type. Conscious experience is fully real but wholly material in nature despite the fact that on current physics we cannot account for its reality: we cannot understand how it is possible for qualia and thoughts to be wholly material. Here is a characteristic passage from Strawson:
Serious materialists have to be outright realists about the experiential. So they are obliged to hold that experiential phenomena just are physical phenomena, although current physics cannot account for them. As an acting materialist, I accept this, and assume that experiential phenomena are "based in" or "realized in" the brain (to stick to the human case). But this assumption does not solve any problems for materialists. Instead it obliges them to admit ignorance of the nature of the physical, to admit that they don't have a fully adequate idea of what the physical is, and hence of what the brain is. ("The Experiential and the Non-Experiential" in Warner and Szubka, eds. The Mind-Body Problem, Blackwell, 1994, p. 77)
Strawson and I agree on two important points. One is that what he calls experiential phenomena are as real as anything and cannot be eliminated or reduced to anything non-experiential. Dennett denied! The other is that there is no accounting for experiential items in terms of current physics.
I disagree on whether his mysterian solution is a genuine solution to the problem. What he is saying is that, given the obvious reality of conscious states, and given the truth of naturalism, experiential phenomena must be material in nature, and that this is so whether or not we are able to understand how it could be so. At present we cannot understand how it could be so. It is at present a mystery. But the mystery will dissipate when we have a better understanding of matter.
This strikes me as (metaphysical) bluster.
An experiential item such as a twinge of pain or a rush of elation is essentially subjective; it is something whose appearing just is its reality. For qualia, esse = percipi. If I am told that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as objects of physics, I have no idea what this means. The very notion strikes me as absurd. We are being told in effect that what is essentially subjective will one day be exhaustively understood as both essentially subjective and wholly objective. And that makes no sense. If you tell me that understanding in physics need not be objectifying understanding, I don't know what that means either.
As Strawson clearly appreciates, one cannot reduce a twinge of pain to a pattern of neuron firings, for such a reduction eliminates the what-it-is-like-ness of the experience. And so he inflates the concept of the physical to cover both the physical and the mental. But by doing this he drains the physical of definite meaning. His materialism is a vacuous materialism. We no longer have any idea of what 'physical' means if it no longer contrasts with 'mental.'
If we are told that sensations and thoughts are wholly material, we have a definite proposition only if 'material' contrasts with 'mental.' But if we are told that sensations and thoughts are material, but that matter in reality has mental properties and powers, then I say we are being fed nonsense. We are being served grammatically correct sentences that do not express a coherent thought.
Besides, if some matter in reality senses and thinks, surely some matter doesn't; hence we are back to dualism.
Why is Strawson's mysterianism any better than Dennett's eliminativism? Both are materialists. And both are keenly aware of the problem that qualia pose. This is known in the trade as the 'hard problem.' (What? The other problems in the vicinity are easy?) The eliminativist simply denies the troublesome data. Qualia don't exist! They are illusory! The mysterian materialist cannot bring himself to say something so manifestly silly. But, unwilling to question his materialism, he says something that is not much better. He tells us that qualia are real, and wholly material, but we don't understand how because we don't know enough about matter. But this 'theological' solution is also worthless because no definite proposition is being advanced.
Strawson frankly confesses, "I am by faith a materialist." (p. 69) Given this faith, experiential items, precisely as experiential, must be wholly material in nature. This faith engenders the hope that future science will unlock the secret. Strawson must pin his hopes on future science because of his clear recognition that experiential items are incomprehensible in terms of current physics.
But what do the theological virtues of faith and hope have to do with sober inquiry? It doesn't strike me as particularly intellectually honest to insist that materialism just has to be true and to uphold it by widening the concept of the physical to embrace what is mental. It would be more honest just to admit that the problem of consciousness is insoluble.
And that is my 'solution.' The problem is real, but insoluble.
Strawson's latest banging on his mysterian materialist drum is to be found in The Consciousness Deniers in The New York Review of Books.
For Bradley Schneider.
…………………………………..
It is a simple point of logic that if propositions p and q are both true, then they are collectively logically consistent, though not conversely. So if God exists and Evil exists are both (objectively) true, then they are collectively logically consistent, whence it follows that it is possible that they be collectively logically consistent. This is so whether or not anyone, any finite or ectypal intellect, is in a position to explain how it is possible that they be logically consistent. It is presumably otherwise with the intellectus archetypus.
For if such-and-such is the case, then, by the time-honored principle ab esse ad posse valet illatio, it is possible that it be the case, and my inability, or any mortal's inability, to explain how it is possible that it be the case cannot count as a good reason for thinking that it is not the case. There is no valid move from ignorance as to how something is possible to its not being possible. Such an inferential move would be tantamount to the ad ignorantiam fallacy. So if it is the case that God exists and Evil exists are collectively logically consistent, then this is possibly the case, and a theist's inability to explain how God and evil can coexist is not a good reason for him to abandon his theism — or his belief in the existence of objective evil.
The logical point I have just made is rock-solid. I now apply it to two disparate subject-matters. The one is the well-known problem of evil faced by theists, the problem of reconciling the belief that God exists with the belief that evil exists. The other is the equally well-known 'problem of mind' that materialists face, namely, the problem of reconciling the existence of the phenomena of mind with the belief that everything concrete is material.
The theist is rationally entitled to stand pat in the face of the 'problem of evil' and point to his array of arguments for the existence of God whose cumulative force renders rational his belief that God exists. Of course, he should try to answer the atheist who urges the inconsistency of God exists and Evil exists; but his failure to provide a satisfactory answer is not a reason for him to abandon his theism. A defensible attitude would be: "This is something we theists need to work on." Or he could simply repeat (something like) what I said above, namely, "True propositions are (collectively) logically consistent; this is so whether or not a mortal man can explain how they are jointly true; I have good grounds for believing both that God exists and that evil exists; I am therefore under no doxastic obligation to surrender my theism."
Atheists and materialists ought not object to this standing pat since they do the same. What materialist about the mind abandons his materialism in the face of the various arguments (from intentionality, from qualia, from the unity of consciousness, from the psychological relevance of logical laws, etc.) that we anti-materialists marshal? Does the materialist give in? Hell no, he stands pat, pointing to his array of arguments and considerations in favor of materialism, and when you try to budge him with the irreconcilability of intentionality and materialism, or qualia and materialism, or the unity of consciousness with materialism, he replies, "This is something we materialists need to work on."
Or he could proffer a structural analog of what I put in the mouth of theist: "True propositions are (collectively) logically consistent; this is so whether or not a mortal man can explain how they are jointly true; I have good grounds for believing both that intrinsic intentionality exists and that everything concrete is material in nature; I am therefore under no doxastic obligation to surrender either my belief that there are genuine intentional states or my materialism about the mental."
Both theist and materialist could take a more extreme tack. They could 'go mysterian.' They could say, "Look, it's just beyond our ken and will remain so. Our cognitive architecture is such as to disallow insight into how apparently contradictory propositions are in reality non-contradictory."
The theist might say that is is not given to us to understand how God and evil are both real; it's a mystery! The materialist about the mind might say that it is not possible for us to understand how intentionality (and the other phenomena of mind) are real given that everything concrete is physical. It's a mystery!
The ultimate extreme would be to 'go dialetheic' and embrace true contradictions. Some argue that the Incarnation is a true contradiction. If so, why couldn't the incarnation of mind in matter be a true contradiction? I myself fight shy of this extreme. I cleave to the law of non-contradiction and embrace solubility skepticism — not warmly but coolly, tentatively and skeptically. And therefore self-consistently.
Objectively viewed, an individual human life is next-to-nothing: a fleeting occurrence in the natural world. But we know this, and we know it as subjects for whom there is a world of nature. If objectively we are next-to-nothing, subjectively we are everything.
"When I die, the world ends."
The thought expressed by this sentence is not the absurdity that when a measly specimen of an animal species dies, the whole of nature collapses into nonbeing. The thought is that when I as subject die, assuming that I as subject will cease to exist, the entire universe ceases to be for me: it ceases to appear, this appearing being a necessary condition of anything having meaning for me and of anything being objectively knowable by me. (Note that while it is objectively certain that the animal that I am will die and thereby cease to exist, it is not objectively certain that I precisely as subject will cease to exist.)
Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung wrote Arthur Schopenhauer in the first sentence of his magnum opus. "The world is my representation." He means by 'world' the world as object, the world as phenomenon in Immanuel Kant's sense, the world that appears to the subject and is knowable by the subject and is knowable only to a subject. No object without a subject. Herein lies the perennial, if partial, truth of idealism. It runs like the proverbial red thread (roter Faden) though the entire history of philosophy.
But the idealistic motif is partial and wants completion. The aporetician in me doubts that this completion is achievable here below. What do I mean?
One cannot reduce object to subject or subject to object; nor can one eliminate either. The objective point of view (POV) is a POV — so it seems that the (transcendental) subject takes priority both in the order of being and in the order of knowing. But this subject, despite its transcendental spectator function, is undeniably a factical subject embedded in the natural and social worlds.
And so there is a strong temptation to say that the thinking and knowing subject 'emerges' — to avail myself of that weasel word — from the natural and social orders and can be understood only in terms of them. Thus is the priority reversed, at least in the order of being. If we adopt the objective POV, then the ontological prius is nature, the material universe splayed out in space-time. In the fullness of objective time certain highly advanced critters evolve with the power to know things, including themselves, and the power to pose the questions now being posed. This power 'emerges.' The weasel word papers over the how of the process of 'emergence' and is essentially only a naming of the puzzle as opposed to a solution it. It explains nothing.
So on the one hand you have the ontic and epistemic priority of the thinking and knowing subject while on the other you have the ontic. if not the epistemic, priority of the object which, as ontically prior, is not a mere object for a subject, but an independent real. (Note that if thinking and knowing could be adequately accounted for in terms of brain functioning, then the objective POV would enjoy both ontic and epistemic priority. That would consummate the marriage of realism with physicalism/materialism.)
The idealistic motif counters and is countered by the realistic motif. My natural tendency is to give the palm to the former. It has always seemed to me easier to get matter out of mind, than mind out of matter. Why? Well, I have the power to fictionalize and imagine. I can imagine material things that do not exist. Imagining them I imagine them to exist. Flying horses, talking donkeys. of course, I cannot make them exist by imagining them, but perhaps a divine intellect could. It makes sense — whether or not it is true — to say, as ome distinguished philosophers have said, that God is to creatures as fiction author to (wholly fictional) characters.
But I can attach no sense to the conceit that mind is a 'creation' of matter.
For now I end on an aporetic note. Despite what I just wrote, how do we integrate transcendental mind with the brain and CNS of this stinking animal that I am? The great Husserl sweated over a version of this puzzle but he could not solve it. It was questions like this one that made me appreciate the limits of phenomenology and convinced me that I had to come to grips with the bracing currents of the analytic-Anglophonic mainstream.
) 