Exhibit a
> Nagel begins by assuming that "conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon" present in many animals (particularly mammals), even though it is "difficult to say [...] what provides evidence of it".
If one drops the assumption that physical reality is nothing more than a bunch of particles, the mind stops being so utterly weird and unique, and the mind-body problem is more tractable. Pre-17th century, philosophers weren't so troubled by it.
Another is that the propositions "the thought 2+2=4 is correct" and "the thought 2+2=5 is wrong" can only be true with regard to the content of a thought. If thought can be reduced to neurons firing, then describing a thought as correct or wrong is absurd. Since this is not the case, it must be impossible to reduce thought to neurons firing.
(Btw, the first paragraph of my previous comment is not my position. I am giving a three-sentence summary of Descartes' contribution to the mind-body problem.)
I promise I'm not being dense or rhetorical, I truly don't understand that line of thought.
It seems to me like begging the question, almost like saying "experience cannot be this, because it'd be absurd, because it cannot be this."
It is wrong to claim that brain states (neurons firing) are the same as mental states (thoughts). There are several reasons for this. One is that reducing thoughts to brain states means a thought cannot be correct or incorrect. For example, one series of mental states leads to the thought "2+2=4"; another series leads to the thought "2+2=5". The correctness of the former and the wrongness of the latter refers only to the thought's content, not the physical brain state. If thoughts are nothing more than brain states, it's meaningless to say that one thought is correct -- that is to say, it's a thought that conforms to reality -- and that the other is incorrect. A particular state of neurons and chemicals cannot per se be incorrect or incorrect. If one thought is right (about reality) and another thought is wrong (not about reality), then there must be aspects of thought that are distinct from the physical state of the brain.
If it's meaningless to say that one thought is correct and another is incorrect, then of course nothing we think or say has any connection to reality. Hence the existence of this disagreement, along with the belief that one of us is right and the other wrong, presupposes that the physicalist position is wrong.
I agree with this: the physical configuration of neurons, their firings, the atoms that make them, etc, cannot be "right" or "wrong". This wouldn't make sense in reality; it either is or isn't, and "right" or "wrong" are human values. The universe is neither right nor wrong, it just is.
What about the thoughts those neuron firings mean to us? Well, a good argument can be made that they are also not "right" or "wrong" in isolation, they are just phenomena. Trivially, a thought of "2+2=4" is neither right nor wrong, it's only other thoughts that consider it "right" or "wrong" (often with additional context). So the values themselves can be a physical manifestation.
So it seems to me your problem can be resolved like this: in response to a physical configuration we call a "thought", other "thoughts" can be formed in physical configurations we call "right" or "wrong".
The qualities of "right" or "wrong" only exist as physical configurations in the minds of humans.
And voila! There's no incompatibility between the physical world and thoughts, emotions, "right" or "wrong".
Even without getting into the body-mind duality we are discussing here, it's understood that the string "2+2=4" requires additional context to have meaning, it's just that this context is often implicit (i.e. we're talking about arabic digits in base 10 notation, + is sum as defined in ..., etc).
Thanks, I greatly appreciate your politeness and goodwill. Everything I say is in good faith too. I appreciate my ideas can seem odd, and sometimes I write in haste so do not take the time to explain things properly.
> it's understood that the string "2+2=4" requires additional context to have meaning, it's just that this context is often implicit (i.e. we're talking about arabic digits in base 10 notation, + is sum as defined in ..., etc).
I would distinguish the symbols from the concepts they represent. The string (or words, or handwritten notes) "2+2=4" is one thing; the concepts that it refers to are another. I could use binary instead of base-10, and write "10+10=100". The string would be different, but the concepts that the string referred to would be the same.
Everything I say, unless otherwise stated, refers to the concepts, not to the string.
>> Would 2+2=4 be correct, and 2+2=5 be incorrect, only if there were a human being to say so? > I think it's a question that only makes sense if there's a human asking it. "Correct" is always relative to something
This is true: correct is always relative to something (or, better, measured against something).
> in this case, the meaning a human attaches to that string, a string that only exists as a physical configuration of neurons.
But I disagree here. I would say it must be measured against something outside the mind, not the meaning a person gives something. If the correctness of arithmetic is measured against something inside the person's mind, then a madman who thought that 2+2=5 would be just as right as someone who thought that 2+2=4. Because there would be nothing outside the mind to measure against. One person can only be correct, and the other wrong, if there is something independent of both people to measure against. So if we say that arithmetic describes reality (which it clearly does: all physics, chemistry, engineering, computer science, etc etc assumes the reality of arithmetic), then we must say that there is something extra-mental to measure people's ideas against. It is this extra-mental measure that makes them correct or incorrect.
This is true not just of math, but of the empirical sciences. For example, somebody who thinks that a hammer and a feather will fall at different velocities in a vacuum is wrong, and somebody who thinks they fall at the same velocity is right. But these judgements can only be made by comparing against an extra-mental reality
So it seems to me when you say that
> the qualities of "right" or "wrong" only exist as physical configurations in the minds of humans.
you imply that arithmetic (and by extension, any subject) cannot describe reality, which must be false. It's also self-contradictory, because in this conversation each of us claims to be describing reality.