Galen Strawson - Anything Non-physical About the Mind?

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What is consciousness, our inner experience of private awareness? Can consciousness be explained by only physical activities of the physical world? Because if not, if there is anything else required to explain consciousness in addition to the physical brain, then consciousness would defeat a materialistic or physicalistic worldview.



Galen Strawson holds the President's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin's College of Liberal Arts. He studied at the University of Cambridge before receiving his BPhil and DPhil in philosophy from the University of Oxford.


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It’s a shame Mr. Strawson is not at least a bit more famous, because his biopic starring Liam Neeson would be a must-see.

docdaytona
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Galen Strawson seems to be suggesting that there are rich multi-level degrees of experience in our reality. All things are able to experience at some level.

mickeybrumfield
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Listening to this conversation I wish I had a few more billion neurons so I could fully understand. Totally enjoyable none the less.

phillipdyson
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The Idea that there is only one subject, NOT a self-reflective planning being but, rather simply "that which experiences"(as a unitary spatiotemporally unbound field), is the most parsimonious, self consistent & explanatorily powerful hypothesis currently on the table imo. & it is NOT at all what is meant by solipsism as typically defined. Literally everything is "in" that one mind which exists. That includes ALL matter/energy, spacetime itself & most importantly even all of the seemingly "separate" minds & their associated brains. That is very different from saying that everything "is" aware. The BIG difference is that it does grant individual inner experience to ALL creatures(as proper "parts" of TWE ) as opposed to subatomic particles for instance. The inanimate universe as a whole is what the "rest" of mind/TWE looks like via perception from the perspective of those seemingly separate proper "parts". A modern monistic analytic straight up idealism like "Kastrup's alters" is what currently connects the most dots & by FAR imo. Funny how Robert tends to always shy away from such notions yet much more deeply entertains virtually all other obviously flawed alternative isms like panpsychism. But at least it has finally become "fashionable" to oppose mainstream physicalism bc its so obviously flawed.

realcygnus
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These ideas have been buzzing round my brain for several years now. Strawson’s writing is well-written and has enable me to understanding panpsychism better, but they’re not knock-down definitive. Mind is difficult for a physicalist tending to monism.

jonathansturm
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Mind is a property of brains, materialism explains everything.

rickwyant
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The subject is a social construct. Humans infer its existence as a result of social intuition, which is deeply rooted. Language, which is obviously for socialising, is also heavily presupposed with the subject. I propose that the subject is likely an illusion, meaning its fundamental essence or substance is not what it appears. In this view, the subject _is_ the quale. There are only qualia, including the ones about being someone or having a viewpoint. There is no "you". There is only experience, as one unified happening.

FalseCogs
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This was interesting. He sort of threw a spinball at the end though.

I think it is useful to discern between "organisms" and "aggregates". An organism would be a unified subject, whereas an aggregate is only (or mostly) merely a collection of simpler subjects, including possibly a collection only of the simplest level of all subjects -- be it atoms or fundamental particles, if indeed these things do exist anything like they are currently conceived.

Some centuries of materialism have left us with the illusion that a "particle" can't be a subject.... but I don't see much of a strong argument for that case at all. It can especially be a subject in a pan-experientialist picture even more than in a panpsychist (referencing psyche) picture, literally taken. The "subject" expressing as a subatomic particle need be no more than an ultra-rudimentary experience-to-itself of the small energy differential or behaviour that it is. It clearly does not have to be a tiny "mind" in there. So that problem is not really that "hard", philosophically speaking.

The issue of One Divine Subject versus multiple (or multitudinous) subjects is more thorny. It doesn't seem that that which is multiple could be the ground of being (for what would it be multiplying out of or from?). So perhaps the ground of being is the "ground" of subjectivity that is not yet **actually** a subject until it is expressed as one or another kind of information-energy packages, whether that be as simple as a subatomic particle or as complex as a giraffe, or as "aggregate" as a table or a shoe.

It is also possible that subjects are stacked Russian doll fashion (holonically) rather than just vertically or side by side. So for instance, the atoms in your body may be rudimentary subjects, somewhat in themselves, but also a contributing part of, and in a sense absorbed into, the larger subject that is you (the human) perhaps also with other intermediate layers between. Likewise, we could be subjects (though not necessarily finally independent, absolute subjects) within larger structures, such as species subjectivities, all the way up to the whole of nature, or the whole of cosmos, traditionally called "God" by whatever way one wishes to interpret that term. In that picture, only the top level subject would be truly unconditional. Other subjects would exist by way of it. To take the human "organism" again, you couldn't have a heart or lungs without the atoms of them, to be sure, but you ALSO couldn't have the heart and lungs without the existence of the organism's top-level holon, its "human-ness".

It would also be possible, I guess, to furnish a viewpoint where the ground as the ground of subjectivity only, gives rise to multiple but essentially independent layers of "subjects". In that situation, your subjecthood would not finally be dependent upon your relation to an ultimate or top-level subject (God), but something that exists in you simply as a unified expression from the subject-spawning (but itself subjectless) ground of being (as opposed to an aggregate like a table or shoe, see above).

For my money though, I think it's a peculiar mixture of both.

greensleeves
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It is such an incredibly large leap to go from:

I have a mind (as far as I know, the mind comes only from the brain) which perceives things and I can only detect things if the mind is active.

To:

There is one mind in the universe and our minds are just a mode of that mind or whatever squishy language you wish to choose.

To me, this seems like an excellent case for simply saying "I don't know what the origin in nature of consciousness is". We know we can systematically destroy someone's consciousness by destroying physical parts of the brain until the heart stops beating and the brain no longer has any activity. I don't know how you conclude anything except "the default position is that the brain is the likely origin of the mind in the individual and it remains to be demonstrated that this mind is part of some consciousness or mind outside that body".

bobbabai
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How would a subject produce experience of physical nature? How would physical nature experience a subject?

jamesruscheinski
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Anything works the way it works in accordance with how you make it. Tables and chairs work if they have legs that are all of the same length.

nyworker
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Particles are the jewelry we wear on our energy costume when we go to this carnival. We are God..

knowone-sts
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when causation (subjective) produces physical action, it also produces conscious awareness of both the physical action and the subjective cause? physical action is consciously experienced by subjective cause?

jamesruscheinski
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Does experience produce a subject? Or does a subject have experience?

jamesruscheinski
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This is certainly intersting. I profoundly admire Spinoza too!

What I don’t get is why conciousness emerging from ‘subjective’ particles is any more or less plausible than arguing conciousness emerges from quantitative matter.

In other words, the hard problem is still there - yes, it’s a slightly different hard problem. And we still have no explanation for the nature or thesis to explain emergence.

I don’t see this resolving any of our existing problems?

dhammaboy
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I think we all instinctually know that nothing is as it seems.

tac
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Perhaps Fiona MacPherson correctly sees Galen Strawson endorsing a property dualism of some sort ie:
"This paper is divided into two main sections. The first articulates what I believe Strawson's position to be. I contrast Strawson's usage of 'physicalism' with the mainstream use. I then explain why I think that Strawson's position is one of property dualism and substance monism. In doing this, I outline his view and Locke's view on the nature of substance. I argue that they are similar in many respects and thus it is no surprise that Strawson actually holds a view on the mind much like one plausible interpretation of Locke's position. Strawson's use of terminology cloaks this fact and he does not himself explicitly recognize it in his paper. In the second section, I outline some of Strawson's assumptions that he uses in arguing for his position. I comment on the plausibility of his position concerning the relation of the mind to the body compared with mainstream physicalism and various forms of dualism. Before embarking on the two main sections, in the remainder of this introduction, I very briefly sketch Strawson's view."

Source: MacPherson, F. Property dualism and the merits of solutions to the mind-body problem: A reply to Strawson. Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (10-11):72-89 (2006)


And this does seem to me to jive with Diane O'Leary's view that property dualism is what can help medicine in it's current state of confusion:
"Awais Aftab: Your impressive work on dualism in medicine and psychiatry has forced me and many others in medicine and psychology to reexamine long-standing assumptions. I would refer readers to your papers on medicine’s metaphysical confusion, the biopsychosocial model, and your recorded talk as part of the Philosophy of Psychiatry webinar series to learn about your views in detail.1-3 Can you briefly explain your argument that medicine has misunderstood dualism?...

Source: Aftab, A. The Case for Dualism in Medicine—Philosophical Misunderstandings and Clinical Implications: Diane O’Leary, PhD. Psychiatric Times. July 20, 2023. Vol. 40, No. 7

mikefraumeni
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Subjects, ideas, matter, feelings, energies, forces... It's all the same.

We make up the differences just by context or points of view. We're actually not defining things, we're just contextualizing, and trying to contextualize (define) consciousness can only be a mistake generated by a biased (contextual) understanding of reality. It's like trying to contextualize the contextualizing itself!

MeRetroGamer
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The mind is physical emerging with quantum events. Consciousness is fundamental and predates quantum events and is not subject to anything elemental. When we understand vibration and how the three forces impact and guide it, all will likely become more clear.

ALavin-enkr
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If we could answer the question as to where consciousness "goes" when an anesthetic is administered we would have a better idea of what it actually is (or is not).

jamesnordblom