Consul wrote:If subjects aren't animal organisms, what (kind of thing) are they?
There are no subjects, there is only one transcendental subject and its various ways of being related to the world, and these ways of being in the world is what we call consciousness, as I have tried to argue as my ontological position.
Consul wrote:There are metaphysical views which I reject for some reason or other without regarding them as nonsense (such as Aristotelian realism about universals). Substance dualism isn't one of them. The concept of an immaterial soul seems intuitively comprehensible and acceptable only as long as you don't subject it to critical logico-rational analysis.
My view is not substance dualism, because consciousness is not substance, Descartes was wrong on this. Consciousness consists of intentional relations, meanings, qualia and so on, but it is not any kind of spiritual substance. However, as I said, it is on a different ontological level than the material organism.
-- Updated May 4th, 2017, 9:59 am to add the following --
To be precise: I have used the terms 'individual' or 'empirical' subject to mean the way the subject is related to the world in each case. Therefore the sentence “There are no subjects” was perhaps a bit too provocative. How the identity of an individual gets constituted is another question and from my point of view not very easy one, I guess from the materialistic perspective it may be easier.
A sidekick into language: Proper names denote individual or empirical subjects, but the word 'I' denotes both empirical subjects and the transcendental subject. When we talk to each other, we say “I think”, not “Tamminen thinks” or “Consul” thinks. If I want to ensure the other that I mean “Tamminen”, if for instance the other is blind, I can use the words “I, Tamminen”. The 'I' in itself denotes, perhaps first of all, the transcendental subject, because it does not tell which particular 'I' is in question. Perhaps an indirect evidence and perhaps not so convincing, but a point worth mentioning. Language is clever, wiser than many philosophers.
A professor of astrophysics once started thinking deep, and said he has wondered why the universe has had the big trouble of beginning to exist. And it is a good question, especially for philosophers. For most cosmologists and other scientists the universe needs no reason or cause for its being, and after beginning to exist for no reason, it just evolves accident by accident, according to the “laws” of probabilistic wave functions. And even consciousness is a side product of maintaining some genetic structures that compete with each other.
It is for the solution of these kinds of impossibilities that I have introduced the concepts of transcendental subject and causa formalis.