As many Westerners, i was indoctrinated from every angle, from birth, into materialism/physicalism. And I was aggressive in defending and arguing for it. The more I learn about logic and truth and ontology, the less probably it seems. Now it seems just ridiculous to me. Qualia are the only thing certainly known (incl the qualia of having a thought if you will), but supposedly they don’t exist. Also, propositional truths, or for that matter propositions, cannot exist. Thoughts can; ideas can’t. Math can’t. And more. I could accept that perhaps selves and free will and evil and purpose may not exist, although Id lean toward them existing. Having read them extensively as a layman, I could not accept any physicalist theory of truth. For example correspondence theory, where it takes presuming a correspondence and a pre-existing outside view as if from a cartesian theater (neither of which seem physical) just to get a chair. How is the correspondence itself made of matter? Theories that it is or is not both fail for different reasons. And an entire ontology springing-up from the first-person subjective side wouldn’t happen if all was matter. Adding complexity can add function but cannot create raw, stand-alone, existent qualia. Saying they only seem real and actually have a material explanation doesn’t answer it, seem to whom? And these qualia are how we know the whole world, matter included. Well then we can’t and don’t know anything, including knowing physicalism to be true. (Note that Im being a bit loose with qualia and mean the fact of awareness of phenomena, including awareness of ideas. Meditating will lead one to realize there is no line between the sight and one’s awareness of it, or of a thought etc.)
@@Khuno2 That's my concern with panpsychism, too. It seeks to solve the issues with physicalism but postulates something that seems so inconceivable, or even prima facie implausible, that it's hard to accept. Not to mention, the combination problem looms large and seems like a massive hurdle that panpsychism can't quite get over. Again, I don't think it can disproven or shown to be nonsense, at least it hasn't so far, but I don't think it puts us in any better position than physicalism does. I'm certainly not physicalist, either, but that's already beside the point.
Fodor's point is that the mind-body problem is a mind-brain problem. And so far what we know, there's nothing more basic than, let says, cell structure or neurons that make up what the mind and its process consist of. So put the mind problematic in the level of quarks or whatsoever the physics of particles says is a err.
