Dualistic Reflections

I was thinking today how dualists used to think about the universe being split in two very different substances, the matter and the mental stuff - and as I usually do when I find quite an untenable position, I tried to imagine how I could argue for dualism. In fact I tried to imagine how I could argue for the mental essence being a fundamentally different substance, and why.

Here it goes:

Let’s take the symbol for number 3. It’s 3 physical? Well yes and no. Yes because if u just imagined a written number 3, you definitely imagined something that had a physical representation.

But there is no 3 in the 3. There is nothing to prove its 3-ness, except what it means for us.

So yes, 3 has a physical basis – but as a concept is mostly in our head. As a concept, 3 is not contained in its symbol, it’s just suggested. So where is 3? 3 is in our head – 3 is mental stuff!

But surely – you will say – in someone’s head, 3 has a physical basis as well! So 3 is as physical as it gets.

Well yes and no. 3 might be symbolised in our head in the same way in which it is symbolised on paper: there is this phenomenal image that we have of three – or mental representation in you prefer. And it has, of course, neural correlates that activate to bring about the concept or image of number 3 in our minds. But there is nothing to say that the neural correlates of our representation contain the concept of 3 more than the trace of pen on the paper.

One thinking like that, you might say, only keeps moving the Interpreter of subjects deeper and deeper within, until it becomes unapproachable and irreducible to matter.

But I think it’s simpler than that. I think meaning is learned.

What do I think 3-ness is then? I think 3-ness is spread around the network, and it takes a specifical network activation to experience it.

I think concepts like one or two (or maybe even none) are the hardest to learn, after which we keep on going with adding one to what we already have, having learned the concept of more.

I think in fact that one is all around us, in the plethora of unique objects that we encounter. I think revolution starts with two. And I have a particular experience in mind, that of encountering two similar objects. What experiences exactly does one need to understand two? Two things of the same kind in our visual field, perhaps repeated a number of times – perhaps one’s own hands, can make one thinking. A collection of this experiences must be necessary in order to abstract away the quality of two-ness.

It is my start-level hunch that it helps if we understand and can abstract away two-ness from two things of the same kind before having to apply the concept of two to different objects. Because that already refers to counting the belonging of those objects to a specific category, so it involves one level of abstraction – you must understand “toys” as a category before you can go on and count the toys.

Anyway, back to three. I think most people would agree that some of the basic properties of intelligence are abstraction and synthesis, to which I would probably add filling in and removal.

What three is all about as a concept, to start with, is abstraction. In fact many of the things that we discuss are one or multiple levels of abstraction from their reality counterparts.

One cannot encounter 3 in the nature that surrounds humans. One can encounter 3 objects, but 3-ness is an abstraction, a case of our mother or father (and later our nursery teachers) having presented to our initially untrained mind’s eye enough examples of 3-ness for it to stick in our head.

Why holding abstract concepts is so useful? Abstraction in general is useful for information processing. As we don’t hold reality in our heads, but abstract concepts about it, we do need reality to perform actions on, and to feed our concepts further. However, some of us thrive on just playing around with those mental stuff.

Hitting the point of this entire post here: are mental things different enough to be considered a different substance than matter? Mental things are, in a certain sense, not matter – not the matter that they represent that is. They are abstractions from that matter. That doesn’t mean they are not jotted down in neural tissue. It mainly means that the organisation of that type of matter has particular properties – of emerging a concept out of similar (actually encountered) cases. One could call it an ability to extract features, but I like staying away from that, as that implies somehow that the features where there somehow preformed to be extracted. Out of that similarity emerges a concept which can be stored and projected further unto different objects. This acts in a very creative way, as in the mental drawing board many cases can be instantiated without them being actually experimented in real life. Or they can be instantiated on a material reflection of a mental drawing board – sand on a beach, pen and paper, an LCD screen.

Are these mental properties in any way transcendent of material ones? One can see why one could regard them as such. Abstraction can be seen as transcendence from many cases. Though it’s worth noting again that abstraction is only better than the objects it abstracts only in terms of being easier to process. Abstraction doesn’t contain the objects it refers to. So in a sense it doesn’t actually contain a material object.

One could push it even further and say that “I”, the sense of being someone, is actually a very useful high-level abstraction that represents that totality of problems a system might encounter and brings together the most important information the system needs to deal with.

As long as we are unitary systems, it is to be expected that we will represent this unity somehow internally – it is, after all, a logical unit. The fact that this unity is phenomenally experienced as an “I” and a presence in this “I” is probably an abstraction masterpiece - but about consciousness and zombies in a different post.