I just want to begin with the disclaimer that you have a more recent and comprehensive sense of philosophy of mind than I do.
I kind of think the entire Western tradition was destroyed by Descartes, whose influence stretches both backwards and forwards so that it is very difficult to approach the mind conceptually without falling into his categories.
One of my major problems is the lack of clarity over what we mean by materialism and immaterialism. People can say that such-and-such is the product of materialistic processes, but can we reduce any process to a pure material cause? It seems to me that materialism either morphs into hylomorphism or collapses into a very odd sort of nihilism. (Actually, if they were not allergic to pre-modern philosophy, the dialectical materialists could probably run with this and look at prime matter as pure potentiality pulling itself into existence.)
I think I understand what you are saying with the morphing into hylomorphism, but what do you mean by the "odd sort of nihilism"?
Here's a fun quote, "...In short, the Marxist position amounts to a formal identification of matter and privation. Dialectical materialism subscribes to the Platonic error" (Connell,
Matter and Becoming, 168). Granted, I hope it doesn't pique your interest too much because I haven't read that book in a long time.
With this in mind, what is Intellect? It seems physical to me in that it can probably be reduced to the way that the brain processes information, but at the same time, information processing in general seems to be strongly immaterial in nature--more so than other processes, certainly.
I probably am a hylomorphist of some shape or form, but the West's tendency to see Intellect as something uniquely immaterial troubles me. I agree with the Vedic tradition that the only thing that is truly immaterial is the light of awareness itself (though I disagree with them that this is the self).
Fair enough. I don't have any big problems with the immateriality of the intellect despite the fact that I probably haven't explored the topic in the same depth that you have. The Cartesian paradigm
is hard to shake, and the pieces don't all fit together perfectly, but I find hylomorphism largely satisfying.
(Relatedly, Feser's most recent
blog post links to a lecture he gave on the immateriality of the mind, but it is largely introductory in nature.)
A kind of dualism, yes, though the ones that I would sign onto are the God/world, God/self, and world/self dualisms, which usually go without saying in the West but are less well regarded in the East. Perhaps this eventually collapses into a mind/body dualism, but I haven't been convinced of that so far.
I should have been more clear: I was referring to a softer mind-body dualism than Cartesian dualism, such as hylomorphism. Some philosophers accuse hylomorphists of dualism. Since it's tricky to untangle that issue completely, I am somewhat comfortable calling it 'soft' dualism--whatever that means!
At times I've wondered if the problematic parallels between reductive idealism and reductive materialism just point to the truth of some kind of dualism (world/self at the least, but probably matter/thought). But having a skeptical inclination myself, I don't often go swimming in the ontological depths.
Actually, the New Mysterians are! Their argument is that the human brain is not evolved enough to solve certain problems, and that consciousness is one of them. It has a nice, neat naturalistic solution, but we may never know what it is!
I'm willing to grant this for the sake of argument, but what percentage of naturalists are New Mysterians?
On the other hand you said:
Though it was actually New Mysterianism that made me stop wondering if I was missing something as far naturalism was concerned--if you're going to simultaneously hold that we are evolutionarily unequipped to tackle the question of consciousness and that it must have a naturalistic explanation, we are clearly into the realm of dogma.
This made me infer that New Mysterianism shied away from a naturalistic explanation being
necessary. If that's so, can they really be called thoroughgoing naturalists?
Fun for me too.
I think you're the only Thomist around here... or at least the only one that ever emerges from the Catholic subforum.
I remembered seeing one a while ago, but I'm pretty sure now that it was you.
There is a lot of casual interest in Thomas on the forum but most of it doesn't reach into foundations. I am happy to be called a Thomist but I am not as strict as some, such as the so-called "Thomists of the Strict Observance." Early in my philosophy courses I was skeptical of the Thomist environment and took up a Scotistic thesis in a formal disputation just to spite the Thomists!
...But yeah, the weathered old-hand Thomists eventually converted me after much wailing and gnashing of tooth.