edited this to be more targeted! Just to make sure the discussion doesn't get lost
Ren said:
I'm basically not convinced that producing “all sorts of experiences” is enough to give mental separate reality as a substance. For it to have real separate reality the simulation would have to be complete, i.e. leading to the suggestion that you and I might actually be brain-in-vats, and would have no way of ascertaining that we really are brain-in-skulls. If this is what the brain-in-vat thought experiment plausibly proves then I agree it makes a good case for dualism.
OK so I think personally there's nothing to discuss here. Because how I'm using brain-in-vat is exactly this way, i.e. the whole point of the thought experiment is you can't tell you're a brain-in-vat vs brain-in-skull.
So really it seems to come down to whether you think such a scenario and/or idealism is coherent, so let's focus on that since it seems the real issue. I obviously haven't found something wrong with those scenarios.
It's interesting that you thought about memory for the grounding or trigger of self-consciousness
There may be a misunderstanding -- I'm saying to have a memory, there must be self-consciousness--that is, I'm using it as an example of self-consciousness, that's all. Not as an explanation.
Here are my main thoughts, though, just to plant the flags:
(1) Mainly, I want to know what adding substances apart from mind does to help ground experientiality in the way you want it. In my picture of a substance with just mental properties, you do away with a contentless "I" by saying an object cannot have no-properties. The question is what more do you think we need?
(2) If you reject the idea of a substance with just mental properties, it seems to me you're rejecting any kind of dualism where mind is a metaphysical category of its own. Or at least, if mind were its own metaphysical category it would surely have to be a substance characterized completely by mental properties -- once you instantiate all the mental properties, the substance is fully instantiated.
Perhaps what you mean is to instantiate all the mental properties, you must instantiate non-mental properties -- so even if mind is characterized fully by mental properties, if you've managed to make a mind, you've necessarily added in other stuff (maybe neutral stuff).
Or, maybe you don't want even this view and simply reject mind as a substance of its own right, and instead think mental properties modify some other substance (such as a neutral one). The question is what does THAT do for self-consciousness that the mental view does not.
(3) I want to be sure of this -- it seems to me even with self-consciousness as involving experience of oneself, the property of self-consciousness is a mental property.
So it seems to me the controversy is just if such can exist without any non-mental properties in the world, not whether the properties used to convey self-consciousness are themselves mental properties.
The only other option would be some kind of more radical thesis that the concept of experience itself is flawed. But in such a case we should stop talking of mental properties altogether and simply give an alternate metaphysical grounding for what mistaken-folk think is experience. This would be more like the eliminativist materialist program. I don't think you want this, as you advocated strong emergence with mental properties.
(4) I often like to note that it's a little odd to talk of consciousness and self-consciousness truly being different. After all, if I'm feeling pain, and I'm not aware of feeling pain, that seems like we're saying I'm not feeling pain truly at the end of the day.
Note that even if this were true, if you ask me to describe my pain, it may be that I have to reflect on it to have the time to formulate my answer. But the self-consciousness that I am in pain may still precede this reflection that more has to do with my wish to communicate something to you.
(5) Are you sure the issue is self-consciousness, and not ultimately that you think experiences need to be about something?
The options (2/3) and (5) are two different ways you might worry you need something besides pure mental experience. (2/3) are saying maybe for experiential properties to come into existence there must be non-experiential properties. (5) is saying maybe the real issue is you think having an experience is meaningless without something it is about.
To (5) I usually respond with the claim of vagueness: I think my experience of Jack and his clone may be identical, even if the persons are different. This suggests I could do away with both Jack and his clone, and simply talk of the experience, since it doesn't intrinsically correspond to either.
That is, it is not about anything specific -- it's rather what it feels like to see someone who looks like Jack, his clone, or any infinity of identical looking people.
To (2/3), I basically have to ask how you need non-experiential properties to have experiential ones exist, EVEN IF the experiential ones themselves don't reference the non-experiential ones directly.
And always keep in mind that when I appear to be rejecting something I am most often just admitting that I had these thoughts too and that they led me into an impasse... or so I believe. I hope you can prove me wrong, it would be great.
Well here's the thing -- mostly I'm not saying I get how consciousness actually works, so much as I don't see how the mind-by-itself view is any more incoherent than any other. That is, what does having alternate substances besides mind give you, exactly?
How does having experiential properties entail the existence of non-mental substances in your world?
I much more easily see why you need distinctness, not just a homogeneous contentless "I" --but once you have experiential properties of a substance, I fail to see what other non-mental substances do to help!
Obviously I'm open to cool arguments for that from you or from anyone.
It's also worth noting I don't claim to have a good picture of self-consciousness. Maybe my picture is too fuzzy or abstract or whatever. Still, my point is whatever a self-conscious experience is, its properties seem experiential--after all, that's what being an experience means. So the question is why those experiential properties require some non-mental substance to exist or make sense or what have you.
And by infinite regress I just mean this: that every time one thinks he has identified something to ground memory, it turns out that something already has an I hiding inside it. It is incredibly difficult to think “outside” of this I. And I think that's what Fichte meant by “We have to posit the pure I”. It's a way of admitting that nothing short of a pure I posited from the start can be accommodated - even within Idealism.
A few thoughts:
- first, I wasn't attempting to do away with the thoughts always having a self-referential character/involving the concept "I" -- this corresponds to my comment memory was just an example of self-consciousness, and I wasn't using the idea of memory to try to get rid of an "I"
- however, why is the "I" thought pure? That is, just because every aware experience involves "I", why did the "I" have to exist independent of that experience rather than simultaneous to it? If it didn't exist independent of the experience, it isn't pure.
Rather, it is decidedly modified by the contents of the experience.
Basically, if there is no such thing as a feeling of pain or a feeling of anything without a feeling of self, that just says a feeling of self is a requisite of any experiential property, not that it is a property that can occur by itself.
What you probably want to say is you can't have a mental substance with no property but the feeling of self. That is a version of your claim that there can be no self-consciousness without something 'else'. But it's a considerably more idealist-friendly version of that claim.
You probably want to make a bolder version of this claim, but that's probably where I'm not sure.
edited to add,
@Ren:
Basically, to me the 'something else' IS the fact that the feeling of I-ness is accompanied by some other experiential content -- that is, something like the taste of garlic.
you seem to want another
substance that is metaphysically distinct -- that might be a core metaphysical intuition of yours, but I feel at least on a technical level, my solution is doing a version of the same thing, just I'm saying additional properties, not additional substances. I don't claim mine is intrinsically more plausible than the distinct substance view, but at this point I'm not sure why it's less!
(Although there's a part of me which wants to wait to see where the I-ness fits into your picture -- how you either account for it or do away with it, or whatever you wish to do. I'm excited to hear your account of self-consciousness.)