Gertie wrote: ↑
39 minutes ago
Well our biggest clue is neural correlation, so clearly there is some mind-matter relationship in functioning brains, but yes it's leap from observing that correlation to explaining it, and extrapolating to make assumptions about different material systems.
Wherever we find fish there is water, but fish are not (just) water. Take away water, the fish dies. Might not be the best analogy but I hope my point is clear. The fact that there is even a total correlation - when A is present B is also always present - does not mean that A and B are the same.
Right. But we have to work with what we've got, and it's a reasonable approach to trying to explain the correlation. And we do have material examples of the same material stuff having different properties, like water can be solid, liquid or gas, and ocean waves can be described differently to individual H2O molecules. So you can see why people hypothesise something conceptually similar could be going on with experiential states. It's people's confidence in such speculative hypotheses which gets me!
Truth is I am not particularly a dualist. I black box that. It is not clear to me that everything now considered physical is the same substance. Or what is real is perhaps a wide range of things, so wide it is like a Wittgensteinien set, where members may even not share any qualities with each other - like he described in relation to words, his example being play, I think.
If medieval theologians had had neutrinos described to them and fields, perhaps they were have felt like the dualism vs. monism issue was moot, a matter of preference in description.
I'm with the medieval theologians. We construct categories and sub-sub-sub categories based on what seems reasonable or useful. But often there could be other ways of categorising, and often edges are blurry (not so much crisp tidy boxes as radial structures with a central archetypal example and fuzzy edges). So a cod is a fish but a whale isn't (to every child's surprise - well mine!), because somebody once decided what counts as a fish and what doesn't.
So for me the terminology isn't a big deal, as long as we know what eachother are talking about.