Brains
The following from The Doors of Perception :
Bottom of page 6, top of 7. I was browsing for a good quote to add to the discussion, and this one seems good.
"My experience", if you haven't read it, is Aldous Huxley's use of mescaline. So his use of mescaline made him believe in what I take to be the basic picture of Transcendental Idealism. Empirically real bodies in a transcendentally ideal mind.
To me, I'm like "Yeah, makes perfect sense" -- after reading it a bit, sure, but eventually it clicked. I could put on my "Kant-glasses".
Greatest thing about philosophy is you sometimes feel like you're doing drugs, but, like, straight up just from your mind and imagination. And all you needed was access to some books or the net! So much cheaper.
But, then, I wonder -- while the above comes from a philosopher which Huxley likes and felt had expressed his sentiment, I wonder if we'd call the other parts of Huxley's book, where Aldous himself is relating his experience, nonsense. Those parts seem even more sensible to me than the philosopher's explanation, but I understand those rhythms of thought now well enough that I find them familiar.
Take, for example:
This, too, makes perfect sense to me.
It's pretty much saying what I understand about the world and my perception of it. Which makes me think... hey, we get one another! I know what they mean. I'd say something like "the aesthetic attitude" where you just attend to all of your experience as a whole, and I didn't need to do drugs to feel that connection, but I get this to be a pretty good description of what it feels like to feel beauty -- an abstraction, by all means, but one that fits.
Now, I suppose it depends at what "level" we put consciousness. Say that it's a direct product of the electronic configurations -- for whatever reason, who knows -- then, given our present level of detail and understanding we might infer that everyone kind of lives in a world of their own (or brains, or whatever the mechanism is, down to the pituitary gland and the full-blown thinking subject) creation. Consciousness as virtual reality produced by the brain.
That's kind of Chalmer's point in pointing out the hard problem of consciousness: it makes sense to each of us when we say "our spectrums could be inverted, so my red is your blue", and functionally speaking there's no reason to suppose the feeliness of the world is, in fact, real. Maybe an illusion. Paraphrased, of course. (kinda smushing two of his arguments together there in one sentence for brevity and I think it gets the point across)
But that flies in the face of our experience. Even if experience be epiphenomenal, say, without psycho-physical laws that bridge the epiphenomenon, but rather the brain serves as a sort of "base" upon which consciousness then dwells in its own world as long as the brain is functioning -- the feeliness of the world should be real, even in this most limited sense, because . . . well, we feel it.
Kind of a relationship to the mind-body problem, except Chalmer's insists that this is the only feature of the mind which cannot be explained by the body.
I thought it might be best to start a spin-off thread, since the question of consciousness was kind of lingering and I think it's an interesting one to revisit, in light of some thoughts about language. Basically I find it a fascinating question, but one which I can't sort out really. Searle's thought that the brain is consciousness like water is wet just sound straight up like phenomenology to me, and I'd say it bolsters Chalmer's point. Hume-as-phenomenologist admits of a real mental world of some kind ,and can be interpreted in varying degrees of naturalism. And, as ever, Wittgenstein looks down from his ladder shaking his head in disappointment at my fascination with these puzzles.
Maybe to sum up the thoughts in an unclear question: Is the brain a virtual reality machine?
Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C.D. Broad, "that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful." According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. The various "other worlds," with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary bypasses may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate "spiritual exercises," or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception "of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe" (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above ah something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.
Bottom of page 6, top of 7. I was browsing for a good quote to add to the discussion, and this one seems good.
"My experience", if you haven't read it, is Aldous Huxley's use of mescaline. So his use of mescaline made him believe in what I take to be the basic picture of Transcendental Idealism. Empirically real bodies in a transcendentally ideal mind.
To me, I'm like "Yeah, makes perfect sense" -- after reading it a bit, sure, but eventually it clicked. I could put on my "Kant-glasses".
Greatest thing about philosophy is you sometimes feel like you're doing drugs, but, like, straight up just from your mind and imagination. And all you needed was access to some books or the net! So much cheaper.
But, then, I wonder -- while the above comes from a philosopher which Huxley likes and felt had expressed his sentiment, I wonder if we'd call the other parts of Huxley's book, where Aldous himself is relating his experience, nonsense. Those parts seem even more sensible to me than the philosopher's explanation, but I understand those rhythms of thought now well enough that I find them familiar.
Take, for example:
I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing -but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like "grace" and "transfiguration" came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for. My eyes traveled from the rose to the carnation, and from that feathery incandescence to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which were the iris. The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a
distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to.
This, too, makes perfect sense to me.
It's pretty much saying what I understand about the world and my perception of it. Which makes me think... hey, we get one another! I know what they mean. I'd say something like "the aesthetic attitude" where you just attend to all of your experience as a whole, and I didn't need to do drugs to feel that connection, but I get this to be a pretty good description of what it feels like to feel beauty -- an abstraction, by all means, but one that fits.
Now, I suppose it depends at what "level" we put consciousness. Say that it's a direct product of the electronic configurations -- for whatever reason, who knows -- then, given our present level of detail and understanding we might infer that everyone kind of lives in a world of their own (or brains, or whatever the mechanism is, down to the pituitary gland and the full-blown thinking subject) creation. Consciousness as virtual reality produced by the brain.
That's kind of Chalmer's point in pointing out the hard problem of consciousness: it makes sense to each of us when we say "our spectrums could be inverted, so my red is your blue", and functionally speaking there's no reason to suppose the feeliness of the world is, in fact, real. Maybe an illusion. Paraphrased, of course. (kinda smushing two of his arguments together there in one sentence for brevity and I think it gets the point across)
But that flies in the face of our experience. Even if experience be epiphenomenal, say, without psycho-physical laws that bridge the epiphenomenon, but rather the brain serves as a sort of "base" upon which consciousness then dwells in its own world as long as the brain is functioning -- the feeliness of the world should be real, even in this most limited sense, because . . . well, we feel it.
Kind of a relationship to the mind-body problem, except Chalmer's insists that this is the only feature of the mind which cannot be explained by the body.
I thought it might be best to start a spin-off thread, since the question of consciousness was kind of lingering and I think it's an interesting one to revisit, in light of some thoughts about language. Basically I find it a fascinating question, but one which I can't sort out really. Searle's thought that the brain is consciousness like water is wet just sound straight up like phenomenology to me, and I'd say it bolsters Chalmer's point. Hume-as-phenomenologist admits of a real mental world of some kind ,and can be interpreted in varying degrees of naturalism. And, as ever, Wittgenstein looks down from his ladder shaking his head in disappointment at my fascination with these puzzles.
Maybe to sum up the thoughts in an unclear question: Is the brain a virtual reality machine?
Comments (97)
Yes. The Great Confabulator ...
I hope to respond in other ways but will start with this. My take on what Chalmers is presenting is something like: "can the world we touch through our awareness be caused entirely by agents outside of that experience?" The call for a completely objective account is a kind of mapping more than a finding about the 'body.' The scientific method is an exclusion of certain experiences in order to pin down facts. Can this process, which is designed to avoid the vagaries of consciousness, also completely explain it?
Recently, I was reading some of Timothy Leary's writings, in which he looks at aspects of brain in relation to 'bardo' states. Many people are drawn to experiment with hallucinogens as a form of recreation. It was the ideas of Aldous Huxley and of shamanism which led me to experiment with cannabis, magic mushrooms and acid as a quest as I had already had some intense borderline sleep experiences.
So, the idea of psychedelic experimentation and experience may be for some a pursuit of understanding of the brain, mind and the nature of reality. When I took acid I definitely had some strange experiences in that respect. During the first trip I had the sense of there being no God, which I had not thought previously. Also, for some time afterwards I noticed I was having coordination problems and felt as if I had been out of my body and had not got back into it in an aligned way. This was the reason why I tried it again and during the second trip, in a warehouse dance event, I had a definite experience which felt like it involved a certain dualism. I felt able to walk through people and when I looked in a mirror I saw a reflection of the walls and environment but not myself. That was unnerving and I thought that I had lost my body..
It may be that the psychedelic experiences cannot be taken at face value, like with NDEs. However, for some people, such experiences may lead to a sense of there being other levels of reality beyond the physical perceived in day to day consciousness.
Do you look at those experiences as opening a view that otherwise would have not been shown?
A bit of a stretch wouldn't you say? Even what is happening in one's own body is largely below the thresholds of consciousness.
Quoting Jack Cummins
True enough.
It is hard to know to what extent I would have come to the exact same view if I had not had the particular experimental experiences. Of course, it is possible that the underlying view which I was developing played a factor in the experiences themselves. The ideas which a person comes with may play a significant factor, although I was a bit surprised by what I experienced at the time.
Bold! :D
I suppose the next part is -- ok, can we identify which parts of the virtual reality are confabulations and which aren't?
For instance I could separate out my perceptions of objects, or even just separate out my senses, and name some parts of my mentals-goings-ons as virtual, and other parts of it as real. I suspect that emergence would lead one to believe this to be the case, where because of our scientific knowledge of the brain we can infer that everyone is somewhat in an experiential dome of their own making, and it's only habituation that leads us to believe otherwise, ala Hume.
But I suspect if we are illusionists, then we could reduce the virtual reality to something like dysfunctions, or improper functioning. So only our errors are the illusions, while for the most part we're pretty much in contact with a world, rather than living in an experiential-film island.
So, yes or no?
Yes, definitely a stretch. Part of my fascination with such things is simply trying to understand what brings a rational person to sincerely believe these things, because I'm used to these claims being from the not-rational side.
A Cartesian theatre, then?
More plausible how? More subdued how? Different how?
So, yes or no?
One lives one's normal life in service to that blindness, and makes awareness subservient to it. In this way one makes oneself absent from one's life, and projects oneself through time as nostalgia and fear/desire. It is thus only through the disruption of the discounted normality of awareness as self identity with drug induced sensory confusion, that one begins to become aware of reality at all. Otherwise, there is just a vague feeling of something missing, a loss of 'meaning'.
See also, The Bird of Paradise, by RD Laing. (Not seemingly available online for free).
When you speak of confabulations I am not sure that it is that simple. The day to day shared experiences are often seen as the 'real', but that in itself is a form of constructed perception. This may be where the issue of qualia arises. In many ways, colours are vibrations and it is uncertain if different species see the exact same frequencies as one another, and the whole subtle realm of vibrations.
There is also the question of inner and outer reality although it may be that it is not an absolute division because human beings dip in and out of these modes. Here, the possibility of lucid dreaming arises. This is a spectrum ranging from hypopompic and hypnagogic states as well as meditations states of awareness. It was only as a result of having some diagnosed eye problems that led me to read about the retina, which is actually part of the brain.
At one point last year I developed blurred vision in my right eye. When I had it checked out it was macular oedema, which is completely different from macular degeneration. The problem is stable, although I had to have new glasses with a stronger lens for the right eye. What is important in relation to this thread is that since I developed this problem I sometimes see intense visual images in my right eye when it is closed. This is not unpleasant and sometimes I see gardens with decorative walls and unusual symbols on walls. From what I have researched, this is connected to phosphene activity in the retina.
Oliver Sacks has written on unusual organically based experiences. Often, people expect perception to function identically. The brain is definitely involved but it still means that perception is complex, with the example of the interrelationship between sound and vision of synthasaesia.
By a Cartesian film show?
Yes. So what (if not a Cartesian film show) is intermediate between what (if not a homunculous) and the world?
The notion of a film I'm trying to invoke is more like a bubble-film -- something generated by the mind, and so not just a movie, but the wholeness of experience. The notion would have it that we are in some way in a virtual simulation of the mind's creation, with varying degrees of naturalism. Chalmer's would call that the qualitative aspect of experience -- what it feels like, what-it-is-like.
Basically like a virtual reality of some kind, be it minimal (almost everything we feel is real in the naive realist sense, and only sometimes our mind plays tricks on us), or total (transcendental idealism where we all live within some kind of meta-mind that structures our minds) or even approaching solipsistic (the illusion of the mind is generated by the electric structures within our brain firing, so we can infer that everyone is in a world of their own creation)
And I'd be interested in those reasonings too.
I agree. (hrm, looking back -- typed that in response to your second sentence, but the first one makes sense)
Actually, materially, something that's interesting is how psychoactive substances have similar effects on people, to believe word of mouth at least. (also, something I always like to bring up from the materialist side is -- psychoactive substances have effects! :) )
And I don't think it's even theoretical, from a materialist standpoint. The sense of self -- arises? -- from the interaction between mind and body. Or however we'd like to parse these things.
Yup
Haven't read, and while I can't put it on the homework list at the moment for fear of never completing anything, I'll have it in this thread now to go back to.
One thing I like to note is how this is something commonly felt. Right? So, that's very interesting to me because it seems like people talk about this sort of stuff successfully frequently enough that there's something to it.
But then, error-theory looms.
Maybe the way to get over that is to simply note that it doesn't matter that it's false, in the error-theorist's sense.
I should have replied separately, and if you're still thinking on it no worries -- but if you have an answer, I'd like to hear it: is the brain a virtual reality machine?
I think I'd put this somewhere in-between the minimalism I described above to @bongo fury and Transcendental Idealism. And, probably, that's where most of the consciousness-categories are going to sit, too, I just wanted to give a full lay of the land of possibilities.
Do you agree with that?
To some extent it would probably make some sense to view the brain as being like a virtual reality machine. It generates experience but the idea of a machine may have some limitations. While it is a system, and each human being is a system within many larger ones it may ignore the importance of sentience. Human consciousness may be have evolved or emerged and be imminent, but the question may be whether it can be reduced to its mechanical parts.
This may or not be extremely important. The reason for this may be connected to the current focus on artificial intelligence, which involves an emphasis on simulated forms of consciousness. I read a very unusual book a few weeks ago, by Frank J Tipler, 'The Physics of Immortality', which suggested that the idea of resurrection of the dead is a possibility in the form of simulated reality. It draws upon Teilhard de Chardin's idea of the Omega point, as a way of understanding the creation of information and simulation of brains and consciousness in the future. It is very different from the religious idea of resurrection of the dead but this may be where the idea of seeing the brain as a virtual reality machine may lead. One question which I wonder about is whether this is too concrete and involves some mythical fantasy as a form of literalism almost parallel with the traditional or fundamentalist religious ones.
It looks like you're still thinking through things. I should say "I don't know" is exactly the answer I'd give to the question, at the moment.
Contrast this from Sartre:
Quoting Moliere
Does Sartre make perfect sense, too? Both are interpretations, albeit in opposing directions. What is to be avoided is the mistake of thinking that an experience brings one somehow closer to reality "in the flesh"; using mescaline or existentialism or phenomenology remains an interpretation, just different to our more common or functional interpretations.
So i don't see it helping with the mind-body problem or the hard problem, except perhaps to show how what we deal with is always already filtered through our neural networks, even when they are behaving unconventionally.
When did neural network become the foundation of reality, I think it must have been last night while I was asleep? I have less experience of neural networks than I have of brains, and I have only once tried to cook a pig's brain, and I regretted it. Neural networks sound stringy, and might therefore make quite good filters in principle Pig brains though would make a terrible filter - gelatinous rather than fibrous.
Poor old Sartre clearly had a bad trip, which usually arises from a resistance to the dissolution of self. Shame he had to make a philosophy out of it and impose it on us, though.
So neural networks engender visions of heaven and hell. and neural networks engender visions of neural networks that some people call filters of reality.
[quote=Lao Tzu]Heaven's net spreads wide.
Though its meshes are coarse,
Yet nothing slips through.[/quote]
Whereas everything crashes through the net of hell, presumably.
How is a neural net to make a judgement here?
Nice summary!
http://libgen.rs/search.php?req=r+d+laing+the+bird+of+paradise&open=0&res=25&view=simple&phrase=1&column=def
To proffer what I think is a less loaded locution: I'd say the body is a reality-generator.
Simple: good trip vs bad trip.
Quoting Banno
Just another interpretation...
That entirely depends on your neural network.
So whether or not the contents of consciousness are "real" or "not real" is down to the functioning of the wet-ware robot in daily life. But it's still all a brain process, no? So the real life VR that serves as reference to the metaphorical VR are on different levels: Real world VR is computer generated sensory input for biological perception systems (sensory organs, nerves, brains...). The metaphorical VR is neither input nor output it's just... a flow? It's this disjunction that makes the question hard to answer.
I certainly don't think that brain provides VR as output for a disembodied consciouness. Or at least, I wouldn't know how to make sense of it. This is why I'm with Chalmers: I have no idea how to connect that "experiential flow" with the physical processes. The only reason I know what we're talking about is that I have that sort of flow myself. So, yeah, there's this brain process, "consciousness", and it's part of the total functioning of the wet-ware robot; and there's this first-person experience on top of it.
So to the extent that we can call that VR, it doesn't make sense to differentiate between illusions and reality for the VR status; it's *all* generated. We'd be talking about types of input, rather than the process. But types of input matter, too. Does it travel along the nervous system? Is it generated somewhere else in the brain? People with more insight into the brain might be better fit to talk about this (say, Isaac). But the process itself shouldn't be all that different.
Sartre also makes perfect sense there -- I'd say Sartre and Huxley are expressing themselves in a similar modality(philosophical methodology? similar linguistic-function, but employed by different people?), but feel different things (at least in these contrasting expressions). In a way we might say they are like the parable of the blind men touching an elephant -- they are attending to their experience, interpreting it, and expressing that interpretation. But that's too many metaphors at once to keep things clear. (is "reality" like an object we cannot see perfectly? At this level of abstraction "elephant" seems too concrete to count as a good metaphor... and invoking "imperfect senses" already assumes a lot of mental-goings-on...)
I think that's a win :). Though it could go down some rabbit holes.
At the very least, I'd hope that with such a realization that we might be tempted to at least listen to the great multiplicity of people expressing their interpretations of experience, unless we believe there's some other path -- and I believe I've been arguing against those pretentions of phenomenology, at least. I very much doubt anyone can, through introspection alone, come across a linguistic incantation that will summon some sort of universal experience or whatever which makes everything "click" into place (but it can still be beautiful)
From there, if everything one deals with (and not just everything, an important distinction I think) is interpreted, then that already shifts the mind-body problem to what is and how to distinguish between better or worse interpretations. At least, philosophically, given its preference for using words to express itself -- in activity it's usually not as hard to distinguish between body/mind, because it's always relative to what we're trying to do together, and usually we're not trying to distinguish the verbal relationship between the body and the mind.
Truth still emphasized as an element that's important for philosophy, even with this multiplicity, we throw out false interpretations, first, but then see there's more to it all than an obvious falsity or truth. Such as Sartre and Huxley's emotionally opposite interpretations of reality.
But even so, given they're interpretations (rather than universal statements about experience), they both make sense, upon imagining our own emotional state in different ways. I've felt both, at different times -- also interesting to note how the passages explicit reference to objects isn't even what's important to what the author is expressing, but were just the objects around them at the time. The feelings are far more important.
Though, perhaps this line of thinking just muddles the original question. More straightforward -- would we predict Sartre and Huxley's brain to be in a similar relationship to their respective experiences, or not? Does the human nervous system have anything to do with how Sartre or Huxley are expressing themselves, or even more generally, with their experience? Or, would we say that "experience" here is not related to brains as much as it's related to the environment, and the brain is just putting an emotional "twist" on what we call "experience", which itself is just a catch-all word for "the real, as I see it" as opposed to an epiphenomenal film of the brain's creation?
I'm good with that. Basically brain-in-a-vat where the vat is actually a meaty, mucousy, bio-breathing thing developed by the mad scientist, natural selection.
Makes perfect sense to me.
Maybe we try to reduce the metaphorical VR to inputs-outputs, and consider that an explanation, but that's exactly what's wrong -- the entire metaphor of a virtual reality, since there are no input-outputs (like real world VR, where the programmer creates an input for our wet-ware, which we're trying to talk about through this metaphor), is wrong since what we experience is more of a flow.
The VR is meant to replicate this feeling of a flow while creating something virtual. (and, actually, in relation to dreams, it's interesting to note how dreams really feel very different from both the real world VR and this experience of "flow" which the real world VR is trying to emulate, but with an imagined reality instead)
Quoting Dawnstorm
That's the question I'm trying to parse :). The brain is clearly involved, because as the brain undergoes physical changes so does the sense of flow change. But is that sense of flow a result of brain processes?
Quoting Dawnstorm
Me either. Or, even more so, I wonder if that "experiential flow" is being related to the correct physical processes? Suppose we learn most of our mental habits from our social environment. Then, it'd make sense, in various experiments, to not just measure the electronic structures of a person undergoing some test, but also to measure the electronic structures of the scientists performing the test, and also you'd want to ensure that people underwent similar experiences prior to measuring everyone because the associations we make depends upon what had happened to us, what we are attached to before the experiment begins.
Cool. We're in a similar wheel-house for puzzling, then. Because I think these two things make sense, too.
Right! And I think you've tripped across a good distinction between the real world VR, where inputs from a digital machine are programmed such that our wet-ware gets a sense of reality within an imagined world, and the actual flow which VR is built around to emulate.
The VR machine is mimicking how we sense things in the world to be able to create a fantasy that seems real. So "virtual reality" isn't quite the right metaphor.
So this is interesting to me, because in conjunction with the notion that the mind is what limits, as opposed to what generates, my mind makes the connection to the sense of self counting as part of this filter. In this interpretation then, paths to decrease one's sense of self, one's identity, are paths which lead a person -- as opposed to their identity -- to let go of filters.
I wonder about this notion of "filters" too -- is it filtered, or is it created in interaction between a body-envatted brain representing itself and its representation of the "outside" world? Which as we lose a sense of self we naturally lose the distinction between "inside" and "outside", that being a direct result of the various ways we predicate and enact our identity.
Who needs drugs, when you can have fantastical dreams about anything you desire. Make a wish for a happy dream tonight.
Between us we might ahve the mix about right.
Naturally that means I have to agree here ;) -- and I do. But especially with the mix that you say -- our blend of disagreement with and agreement with seems to bring out things that I wouldn't have thought of on my own, and it's always a pleasure.
Quoting Janus
Self-deception. The flowers and the root are real - not hallucinations. The interpretation is what the body does. If anything the body is a reaction-generator.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Your wetware can't walk through walls. It's the reality of walls that counts, not the reality of "the contents of consciousness", whatever they might be.
By way of pointing out that you are first embedded in the world. You are not sitting in your mind looking out.
*shrugs* I'm a nihilist. Deserts are for the moralists :D
Thumper's mom knew what she was talking about -- and not just morally speaking. Rabbits being a social species too.
(EDIT: Realized that was a very American reference after the fact, and linked to the quote I had in mind "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all")
They wouldn't be real without the perceiving body; at least not in the same way. No reality to speak of without bodies, and no speaking either. A different way of looking at things, but, hey, I forgot you don't like different ways; it's safer in the bottle, even when all the other flies have flown.
Yeah, they would. "The tree is a chestnut" and The flower is a rose" are true even when no one perceives it.
If there were no humans those sentences would not exist, let alone be true. If there were no bodies there would be no tree, no chestnut, no flower, no rose, for they too are bodies.
So what. The tree would still be a chestnut, the rose still a rose.
Quoting Janus
An obvious slide.
How do you, how could you, know that? It's nothing more than your preferred way of talking.
Quoting Banno
From what to what?
They'd be ... whatever they are... without me.
Without our bodies the things which exist would not be real in the same way.
Yup!
But would they be real at all?
I think so.
I think about the world I'm in and how it seems bounded by whatever happened before me, how I wasn't there, and it's not even hard to realize that the real is modified by forces outside of my body. Without all of us this wouldn't be real in the same way.
Sure, we can say all of this would be real in some way without us, but we have no idea what that could mean, since the notion real has its genesis in perception. To say all of this would be real without us is to project our perceptually embodied based notion of reality onto an imagined "situation" where there is no perception or embodiment: I think that qualifies well as "language on holiday".
No idea?
I don't think that's quite right, because we are born into a world which has already been formed. Our notions come from our elders, in various forms, rather than from our perception.
Perception comes after.
Obviously. I'm using a bi-conditional logic. What logic, if any, are you using, and why? Quoting Moliere
So how exactly would they be different?
They would not stand in certain relations to you, sure. Relate that to the word "real" - what will you say, that only what you perceive is real? But that's not right.
Good question.
Yup, that's not right. I think the first sentence gets close to what I'm thinking. As soon as we allow English, then it's always-already interpreted and there's no "origin" of all thought or justification or whatever.
And all distinction which allow an origin are always-already interpreted, being that they are distinctions.
Maybe we can't say how they'd be different just because of that.
Quoting Banno
You are committing the error of applying a dualistic, determinate body based logic beyond its ambit: as I said: "language on holiday".
Quoting Banno
Nice: assertion, ad hominem and aspersion, but no argument. I'm not chasing anything because when it comes to questions about what would be real if there were no humans, there is nothing to chase. It is you imagining that there would be something there; chasing a phantasm of your own precious dualistic "logic".
Its ineffable?
Being interpreted as a chestnut does not mean that unseen, it's no longer a chestnut.
What reason is there to suppose that unseen, it is no longer a chestnut? The question
Quoting Janus
works as well if you ask "How do you, how could you, know the tree is no longer a chestnut?"
Quoting Janus
Balls. You want to treat knowing and being true as the same. The are not. Knowing is a relation between an individual and a proposition. Being true does not require a relation to a speaker.
Quoting Janus
You don't recognise the many, many times this discussion has gone before, and each time your account falls apart. As it does again, here. You can't recognise a decent argument.
If you would raise it again, at least try to say something new.
I agree with that, I think. Not eons, though -- spoken language is much sooner than biological timescales. It seems like eons.
I guess to bring this back to the original question -- to what extent is the brain involved in any of that? Or is it just an organ, like the heart, which is needed but knowledge of it will not shed light on conscious experience?
My apologies for indulging @Janus' off-topic confusion.
That I agree with. My imagination says the scenario is something without me, but like -- in an always kind of way. Very imaginative. As if species didn't exist.
A tree is an interactive reality; so it's not a matter of whether it would be a chestnut if there were no humans. :lol: Banno: the last of the naive realists.
Quoting Banno
In your imagination. We know things via perception; how else? To say that something is true is to say that it has been determined to be true by observation: leaving tautologies and stipulative truths aside. That's not to say that within this human world of embodied perception there are not undiscovered truths, that you lack the imagination to able to see that is the source of your error.
Quoting Banno
My account only falls apart in your dualism afflicted imagination. I'll pay a decent argument from you if you finally get around to presenting one. I won't be holding my breath, because all you can seem to able to manage is repetitive assertion and aspersion.
Quoting Banno
It's not off-topic, either. I'm saying the body-mind interacting with the cosmos, constructs our common empirical reality; it's a collective representation. That empirical reality, which would not exist without us; that is what the notion 'reality' derives from and rightly only refers to.
Humans also imagine there is an absolute reality, independent of our empirical reality, but that is merely an imagining; we just don't know anything beyond the empirical.
[i]eon
???n?, ???n
noun
An indefinitely long period of time; an age.
The longest division of geologic time, containing two or more eras.
The largest divisionof geologic-time: used by J. D. Dana especially in dividing the archan into astral and archæozoic eons.[/i]
I had in mind the first definition not the geological one.
To what extent do you believe brains are involved in the eons of judgments that've been passed down?
So, in a way, I guess I'm asking about homo sapiens brains.
At least, if we believe that's different from other brains with respect to consciousness.
Brain expands the repertoire of an organism's responses to the environment, particularly in cooperation with specialised organs of sense. One way a complex brain can do this is by modelling the result of various responses, in a virtual environment, and for this it can be useful to distinguish things - a chestnut tree from a monkey puzzle, for instance - (trees I can climb from trees I cannot climb).
Some brains get caught up in the modelling process to the extent that they lose the distinction between the model and reality. In particular, they mistake the 'I' of the model for the real organism. Such is the human condition and universal delusion.
I think metaphors are always tricky, and they're never quite right (because if the thing you're comparing it to weren't different, it wouldn't open up a perspective). For example:
Quoting Banno
Part of this response might be due to the metaphor I used: "contents of consciousness". I mean, in that very post I indicated that I thought consciousness was a "flow" - more generally, I think it's a process. It's not literally a container and therefore doesn't acutally have "contents".
We don't always realise why we use one metaphor over another and that can cause confusion. So, on to the whole section:Quoting Banno
There's nothing here I disagree with, but when we're talking about the brain I suppose a wall is - to some degree a wall. If I dream of a wall, the wetware robot is sleeping. My non-brain science take here is that wall is a meaning that can trigger in different circumstances - with walls, with words, with dreams, with illusions... I'm not entirely sure how to talk about this, and I'm no expert in the history of philosophy either.
From the Davidson/Derangement thread I remember we don't disagree about much, but there always comes a point where I can't grasp what you're getting at. Here, for example, I disagree about nothing but I can't figure out what triggered this particular reply.
So the brain is an organ of an organism which somehow spawned some time ago -- and we can see its clear evolutionary advantages. In a way the brain enabled information processing without genes -- where once only wiping out a huge portion of a species or dividing them into different environments was the only way a species could "learn", the brain allows a species to learn and mitigate environmental change to a certain extent and in various capacities without wiping out a large portion of a species -- an obvious selective advantage, however it might've come about.
Some brains are able to model. Human brains that have been socialized in particular. At this level I think we're saying -- the brain somehow enables us to model our environment, and I suspect, at least, that language is what enables us to do that. But perhaps it's best to simply say language is a part of how we model things now, rather than put emphasis on language.
Part of our human model is the "I". There's a relationship here between "I" and organism such that our model of our self isn't our self (as is always the case with models -- they are models of something, not the thing). Which would seem to indicate that we are able to virtualize what we are already in contact with, and also forget what we're in contact with. And it's actually the human condition to lose the distinction between the "I" in the model for an organismic self.
Which, if I've got this right so far, means it's the human condition to lose the distinction between my beliefs about myself and who I am. In a way we're constantly in contact with the real, but because of our mental habits as humans we're constantly creating new virtual explanations to -- maybe prop up our beliefs about ourselves? Or to fulfill desires?
But drugs aren't able to fully dissolve the psyche, as you say -- so there's more to it than the brain, all on its lonesome. Disrupting our normal patterns may make us aware, to an extent, of what is modular in our virtual reality, but given the human condition, we're always uncertain, mistaking the model for the organism.
Which would mean that no matter how detailed our model of the brain is we'd still be uncertain about where the model ends and where the organism begins, just by our condition.
I think @unenlightened has already answered this very well. A complex brain can re-call, re-member and re-imagine events, which better enables learning from past events and preparing for an anticipated future.
How much this is dependent on symbolic language is something to wonder about. Looking at human life in contrast to the lives of "higher" animals it seems undeniable that there is a vast difference in the form of a massively complex human culture, a documented past, and anticipatory enthusiasm-driven momentum for growth and development that we just don't find in other animals.
So, I'd say that it is predominantly symbolic language which is responsible for the greatest difference between us and the other animals. Just what qualities of the homo sapiens brain that make speech and symbolic language possible for humans , but not for other animals I can't say. I don't even know if there have been solid results from research on this, so that would be an area of further investigation.
What unenlightened touches on in his second paragraph I agree with. There are ways in which the discursive mind has diminished our lives, making us in some ways less than the animals. Animals do not suffer delusions, fixations on pet theories, "messianic" complexes and so on; it's a long list of afflictions that come thanks to the great "gift" of symbolic language, of speech and writing. It seems that every "high" has its commensurate "low".
See
Quoting Banno
So this would suggest our language isn't necessarily a brain thing. The brain is involved, of course, so that's not where I'm going here. And, so it seems, kinds of brains are important. Which species the brain belongs to, how it's presently situated within the body, and so forth. There are limited instances of importing language to other species (notably, when they are part of our social structures) but nothing like what humans seem able to do.
And yet, if it's language that separates us from the beasts, and not brains, then an understanding of language would get closer to this notion of the virtual insofar that we are thinking of language as what's virtual. That's an interesting result if we can justify the inference. At the very least I think it suggests, going along with the general scientific picture of the world at least, that there's at least two functions of the brain. There's the original evolutionary adaptation which we see throughout nature -- the ability for a species to adapt to its environment in ways other than genetic modification -- and then there's this language thing that clearly needs a brain to be used, but that's not enough. There's more to it. And there's more to language than our immediate surroundings. So, philosophically at least, that'd be where I'd pin "the virtual". "philosophically" because the empirical story is way more complicated than this clean picture presents.
Right! It's a simple enough inference. There are times before when I've mistaken all of what I experience as reality (dreams), and so I wonder: to what extent is it like a dream? Or the virtual, as I've put it -- dreams being a possible case for exploring what's "virtual" about experience, or generated by myself as opposed to the world I seem to inhabit.
Against dreams counting as virtual is how they are composed of elements of the world. So rather than saying dreams and the brain are virtual, we'd say we're experiencing memories that have been encoded into the brain, that dreams are as real as the world we live in, only under different conditions. Which, since the world is real, you'd actually expect a body which is no longer interacting with the world about it to react differently, including the experiential parts (which are just as much a part of the world, rather than virtual)
:up: :up:
I disagree here because a lion cannot talk, and so we cannot understand him. If I interpret "form of life" in a bio-species sense, then the quote makes sense. But if I interpret language as meaningful outside of our material make-up (down to the organ-tissue-cell-atom-electron), in spite of the obvious necessity for a body to be able to speak language, then if the lion could talk [s]he'd[/s] the lion would already be part of our form of life (whatever that is).
If {If a lion could talk, we could not understand him,} then we cannot possibly know whether or not lions can talk.
Embedded implications always take me a long time to think through.
So I'm saying P, in your P->Q scheme where P stands for the original implication, is false.
But then there's the original quote, which if we assume is true, then we cannot possibly know whether or not lions can talk.
Of course my mind comes up with two different interpretations off the bat. But I believe you're committed to the belief that we cannot possibly know whether or not lions can talk.
And right now I agree. We can't know that, because they don't. Tomorrow may be different, though.
Quoting Banno
Yeah, I could have phrased that better. I do agree with the quote that follows what I've just quoted (and I remember you saying that more than once, too).
But when you said in your reply to my first post:
Quoting Banno
When I'm dreaming of walking through a wall, my wet ware robot isn't even attempting to walk through a wall. It's sleeping. I might be able to walk through a wall in my dream, but the wall isn't a real wall, and the I that walks through it is not my wetware robot (which is sleeping).
On the physical level, a real wall is a wall, and a dream wall is... synapses firing? That seems like a weird comparison to me. We only make that comparison because our phenomenal trees are very similar, I'd say. So, for the present topic, I think the reality of firing synapses is more important than the reality of any walls; that's secondary, I think. Or differently put, wall phenomena connect real walls and dream walls, and they're the only reason I can think of that we can make the connection. Trees and synapses are rather different, otherwise. But since we can connect walls trees and dream walls via wall phenomena, we can compare synapses to sysnapses (well, I don't think we can recognise wall-phenomena-inducing synapses yet, but I hope you see where I'm going with this).
Right, is it just differences in the human brain that enables the development of language, or is it vocal chords or the opposable thumb or a combination? I don't think it makes much sense to consider the brain apart from the whole body, anyway.
As you say , some animals can recognize and respond appropriately to words and phrases,but do they have any notion that the word or phrase represents or refers to anything, or do they merely associate certain sounds with certain activities?
I'm have no definite sense of what you mean by "an understanding of language would get closer to this notion of the virtual insofar that we are thinking of language as what's virtual". Maybe you have in mind an idea that I would agree with: that the world of objects, or as the Buddhists would say "namarupa" or "name and form" is a conceptual overlay to bare perception, where the latter is just sensation; visual, auditory, tactile or whatever. In Buddhist philosophy the state of conceptual-less perception is referred to as Nirvikalpa.
* "Of or pertaining to the absence of conceptual thinking or discursive thought"
* "the state of recognizing reality which is totally freed of the distortions of discursive thought, non-discrimination"
(This ties in with the issues around ineffability).
On this view, the empirical world is not something we directly perceive, but is a conceived abstraction; a world of different kinds of objects and "states of affairs", collectively derived from associating sensory experiences.
Do animals experience such a world? It seems doubtful, since they probably don't name things and conceive of them as kinds, and yet they can function very well, arguably better than we can, although they are not so adaptable to new environments.
That is, the phenomena of a dream wall are not the same as the phenomena of a real wall. They are different, at the phenomenological level.
Hence, it is an error to suppose that what the dream wall and the real wall have in common is phenomenological.
Good points.
Quoting Janus
And, by extension, do we humans do the same while feeling like we do differently? (the epiphenomenal belief, I think, fits here)
Quoting Janus
I'll admit I'm not sure what I mean by that either. Reading it now it's just a tautology.
I don't think I have in mind what you're describing. If I did then I'd have more sympathy for Husserl than I presently do, given I don't think it's possible to attain that state, and even go so far as to say that our conceptualizations can even enhance our experience -- that language and conceptualization can, in addition to obscuring, elucidate. It just depends on how you use it.
Well, we say that we understand words and phrases to represent or refer to things, and animals don't say that, can't say that. Epiphenomenalism makes no sense to me because the idea that we understand ourselves to be doing certain things, like feeling certain emotions or feeling that we understand things in a certain way, but are not really doing them makes no sense. unless it is a case of later coming to understand that we were not doing what we thought, but something else, like 'I wasn't feeling love, but possessiveness'.. But such realizations would need to be phenomenological, not strictly empirical, because these kinds of subjective impressions cannot be supported one way or the other by observations of measurable physical phenomena.
Quoting Moliere
I agree there is a certain, ordinary sense in which conceptualization can enrich our experience. But the state, which you think it impossible to attain, has a very well attested history of being reported, both in the East and the West. Of course that doesn't and cannot demonstrate empirically that such a state is attainable, only your own experience could demonstrate that, if you attained it, and then it would arguably demonstrate it only to you ( although it is said in the East that those who have attained can recognize it when others attain it. I don't know about that, but from my own experience I believe the state is attainable. I don't expect you to think of that as evidence, though; for all you know I might be deluded.
Happens all the time, but the conversation is usually rather dull :
"Hey look what a big claw I've got!"
"Pah! Mine's bigger!"
"What the fuck is that? Looks like a walking coral, hope it's the vegetarian kind, or we're paste."
I find this really hard to talk about, as I'm not that firm with the terminology. Maybe what I'm getting at is more conceptual than phenomenological? The phenomenon of a dream wall is certainly different from the phenomenon of a real wall, but I do think they have things in common (otherwise we couldn't make the connection of both being "walls"), and I think it's because brains are involved in constructing them from accrued baggage, some of which are likely shared. Maybe I should bow out, as I'm feeling out of my depth both with brains stuff and philosophy stuff, here.
And yet . . .
Quoting Changeling
It's a good point. We don't expect the crabs or the lions to talk, but some of us might talk to them. Or even claim to hear them.
So, what's the difference? Without an account, then there is no difference. Rather, we have to accept that some people can talk to the whales, crabs, lions of the world.
Or accept, because our biological forms are so different, that we could not understand one another even if we were talking, and thereby infer the various animal whisperers are misunderstanding how to use language. The lion may already be speaking, but there's no way we'd understand what he's saying because we're different creatures.
With these examples it seems queer. Unless you understand yourself to be nothing but an animal, and realize that language may not have all the import that we assign to it. Rather, like the lion roars, so we have our different patterns of grunting to get along. We're just barking while we feel like it all means something.
Quoting Janus
Let's make sense of it with error theory.
A usual case error theory begins with is astrology. It's an intricate body of propositions with relations to one another that allows people to make inferences (of a very unspecific nature, as that's how it works in the end). People regularly confer on the subject, and it sounds like people are making claims. The only thing is, every single one of the claims is false. So it is possible for us to carry on at length while having no contact with truth -- it doesn't matter that it makes sense to us, because astrology can make sense to us, and it is false.
Further, combining error theory with the post-modern meta-induction...
If the current scientific picture is the true picture of the world, then for the majority of human history human beings have survived by believing false things. Entire generations have been able to manipulate their environment, reproduce, and preserve and pass down culture without knowledge of this picture. So, similar to the dream inference, we might wonder -- what makes our current picture true? If we were wrong so many times before, then wouldn't we predict that we're wrong again now?
And error theory provides the explanation for how that would be possible -- coherence, intelligibility, without truth.
There's a funny assumption with the Post-modern meta-induction, namely that this picture is true and the previous pictures were false. Rather, I'd say given if entire generations before were able to survive successfully then they must have had some true beliefs, even if it was expressed in entirely different ways, and reinforcing entirely different ways of life. But this is all just to make sense of an epiphenomenal account of meaning -- that language means, but meaning drifts beyond any empirical measurement and has no causal connection to the world or brains.
I think it's false, but it does make sense. And the pair of arguments together makes me ask about making distinctions between brains and whatever else. When is it appropriate to reference the brain in relation to a philosophical argument? Do brains have anything to do with the notion of a subject, or are they just an organ like the heart is an organ and the philosophy somehow "sits above" the empirical facts of brains?
No, not ineffable. That's not right.
And I wouldn't endorse that conclusion or form of the argument.
Maybe it's better to say that this is very imaginative -- we're imagining a world without us. And if we believe that our senses are what give us justification to believe, a world without our senses would be a world where we don't have justification to believe. Hell, there'd be no beliefs, from what I can tell, though that may be wrong. (the thought that without us there'd be no minds)
Chestnut trees, though. Yeh, I believe they'd be around. Maybe the difference is exactly what's posited -- whatever it is we contribute to the world wouldn't be there. The tree would get on fine, or that's generally how I think of things, it just wouldn't be enmeshed in language, and I'm not sure if I can say what a world without language would be like. I can kind of imagine it, but it's very speculative.
By all means, I am way out of my depth. That's what makes it interesting. :D Perhaps I'll say some nonsense along the way, but that's all part of the process.
See, I think we're beginning on opposite sides here. Also, I disagree with your take on Chalmers, but that might be better for another thread. (as a hint, I think of his The Conscious Mind as all happening within what he calls "the ontology room")
[s]But I think I agree with[/s] I am inspired by you here:
At least, that's where my thoughts are directed at the moment.
Another way to put the question might be akin to Mary's Room -- but that's what I'm trying to avoid. I don't like the frame which pits propositions/sentences/utterances against experience or vice-versa. Mapping counts as finding out about the body.
By saying, 'mapping the body', I meant to distinguish Chalmer's issue from the question asked by many as to whether 'consciousness is purely physical activity'. In his essay, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, Chalmer says:
Chalmer goes on to say that the 'simple explanation' of functions is reductive, as a rule, because it develops models to show what generates what we encounter through experience. That kind of reduction is an important part of much of the 'scientific' method:
By seeking a 'bridge over the explanatory gap', Chalmers says science can still go forward even if the problem of reduction is acknowledged. We don't know enough to say where the limits are. The approach does bring into question the way we use terms like 'virtual' over against 'actual' and the inner over against the outer. I haven't read much of Chalmers regarding Metametaphysics as it relates to the "ontology room." In terms of establishing a language for science, I did notice AW Carus making the following observation:
Carus is critical of Chalmers' approach (i didn't quote the whole thing) but I presume there is a connection between the third realm of statements" and the search for an 'explanatory bridge' sought for in the first essay. If I understand correctly, the Metametaphysics is not, by itself, the explanatory bridge.
Sorry for the long post.
Perhaps, or they may be deluded.
Quoting Moliere
I don't discount the possibility, and yet I see little reason to believe it. Wittgenstein's statement never made much sense to me. If we hear anyone talking in a foreign language we cannot understand them. So, of course if a lion is speaking we cannot understand her; however if she spoke English or we could speak "lionese" we could. I think it's a trivial point to be honest.
Quoting Moliere
That's not how I see it. If the dogs barking different sounds evoke specific associations reliably in other dogs, and they can self-reflectively represent themselves to themselves as beings who are capable of symbolic representation, then you are right. Do we have any reason to believe that is the case?
Quoting Moliere
You assume that astrological claims are false. Of course, no one denies that we can make sense of pure fiction, so I'm not seeing the point.The idea of fiction only makes sense in contrast to the idea of reality; which is not to say that we know what is real in any absolute sense.
Quoting Moliere
The epiphenomenal account, as I understand it, says that meaning and consciousness are fictions, that they are unreal, that they don't really exist or at least that they are not what we think they are and have no causal efficacy. I can accept that in a kind of Spinozistic sense, where thinking such and such leads to thinking something else, which leads to thinking something else and so on, and at the same time all these thoughts are correlated with neural "acts" which are causally connected, but we cannot successfully merge the two accounts.
This is a kind of "parallelism" (different to Leibniz' though) where the causal account and the semantic account are different accounts of the one thing from different perspectives, which would mean, strictly speaking to say something like " the thought that I will lift my arm caused my arm to lift" is a kind of category error, but "I lifted my arm because I wanted to" is not and "my arm lifted because CNS signals from the brain caused it to lift" is not either.
As far as I know there is no conceivable way of blending accounts given in causal, physical terms with accounts given in terms of subjective reasons. They are simply different kinds of accounts.
"Delusion" is exactly what an account would be. To be able to determine if someone is deluded, you sort of already have to have a notion about determining both the minds of others, and the truth about the world. It's not exactly a one-off explanation as much as a name for a complicated explanation.
Quoting Janus
Since it's in the PI making sense of it will be difficult no matter what. :D
For me, here, I'm using it as a springboard to ask about brains in philosophy. I'm committed to the strange belief that the lion speaking would mean I understand the lion on the basis that I'm committed to the same strange belief with respect to human beings (if, for whatever reason, a human being had a different brain shape and was able to communicate with me, then I'd say they are speaking). Or, at least, I'm calling this a strange belief in light of the mind-body problem (or maybe, here, the mind-brain problem)
While the way we talk about animals and humans is set by this cultural milieu such that crab-whisperers are deluded, I'm not so sure we have a reason or an account which accepts that human beings are more able to talk than crabs. Why is it that when you talk I'm able to deduce things about your beliefs, and when someone hears the crab talk they aren't?
Note that not having a reason isn't the same as things being true or false. It may just be that there is no reason at all. The reason unmarried men are bachelors is because that's the relationship between those locutions. The reason crabs can't talk is because they are not in the class of talking animals.
Quoting Janus
Well, yeah. Exactly why I claimed to be out of my depth -- the mind-body problem has been around for awhile specifically because it's a quagmire of a problem.
I'm not sure what would qualify one to not be out of depth with the mind-body problem.
True, but to entertain the idea that anyone might be deluded all that is required is the notion of a possible difference between human beliefs and conceptions about what is actual and what is actual.
Quoting Moliere
Again true: but having any reason to believe some proposition does not guarantee its untruth. The bachelor example is a tautology, and the truth there is, as you say, a matter of definition, or which is the same, usage. Whether or not crabs can talk, though, seems to have nothing to do with our definitions, beyond the fact that they either satisfy our definition of talking or don't.
Quoting Moliere
I wonder whether the "mind-body" problem is not so much a "quagmire", if the implication there is that it is a real problem so difficult that we get stuck in it at every step, as it is a merely apparent problem contingent on our dualistic mode of thinking; a problem to be dissolved rather than solved.