SoS wrote:Other aggravating problems are this business of individual elements of the PW or BMI's.
We have one BM with the master set and we have IM's with subsets. Of ideas? Or experiences?
Anyway. The IM sets must have both overlapping and disjoint elements.
And what would a wrong idea be? An illusion? A dream?
The bottom end up or top end down answer?
Lets do top end down, first.
The 'big mind' BM holds the World Idea (WI) as mental data generated by its thought processes, we can say 'its imagination'.
Within the BM, there are individual minds (IM's), in a similar way to waves in the ocean - the ocean contains the waves and the waves are really part of the ocean. But each wave can be considered as a seratate entity, we could study the dynamics and so on of the wave and forget that it is really a part of the whole ocean.
In this model each of the IM's is a center of awareness, its awareness is a property drawn from BM, but the IM knows only a single first person perspective. The BM, being the source of the awareness in each individual mind includes all IM's but more than the sum, as the ocean includes all the waves but is more than the sum of the waves.
The World Idea (WI) is the thought or idea of the MB but the IM can acess it without contradiction because the IM is also in the BM. The IM can not contain the whole of the WI, and can only hold a reduced image, in a similar way to a hologram being in each piece. So the IM has a partial copy of the WI and this is mental data, thought.
The mental data includes all the information required to form the individual experience, including the physical environment, body brain etc. which are parts of the physical environment.
The IM processes this data and by the process of externalization that which is internal to mind (mental data) appears as-if it is external. It is actually external to the body, but internal to the mind (the body obviously being internal to the mind too). This capacity of the mind to externalize its internal ideas can easily be seen by considering a dream, where an internal imagination (the dream) appears as if it is an external physical environment while in the dream.
The process of externalizing requires the senses so that the body can interact with the environment as external to it. Without the senses the environment can not be known as extrnal to the body, the body needs to reach beyond itself with sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste. These senses give the impression of incoming sense data from the external non-mental environmnet, while infact the sense data is already mental, only appearing as non-mental. Care is needed here; the physical world is external to the body, is physical, but its real nature is mental as it is internal to the individual mind - there is no contradiction between internal to the mind and external to the body.
The CNS and brain process the incoming sense data and it can be traced through the physical mechanism of nerve, brain etc. However it's final destination is as an 'awareness of an experience' which is a mental awareness. There is no change or transition here because the whole physical process is a mental event only appearing as if non-mental. The physical model can not explain the change over from physical brain activity into subjective mental experience.
This is refered to as the thing to thought gap.
We can not rightly deny that we have experience. We must conceed too that we know this by the action of our mind. A physical model can only assert that the brain causes awareness 'somehow' and can never establish how or why certain configurations of matter (brains) produce subjective experience. Some physical models will deny that there is subjective experience, but use the very thing they wish to deny in order to do that!
Now the biggest objection to this model is that it is less parsimonious than assuming a physical only world.
However parsimony only applies when the more complex theory adds nothing to the simpler theory. The mental model does explain the thing to thought gap with ease, which the physical model can never do.
To assume that matter under the right conditions can produce subjective awareness of itself - which is what the most reasonable physical model must do if brains or brain activity produces subjective experience is;
1. actually only a hypothesis, and is unsupported. We simply can not show how 'simple organic chemicals can produce life' nor can we show how 'complex structures produce subjective experience' two fundamental requirements for the physical model of consciousness.
2. actually a lot less parsimonious than the mental model.
In this model, an individual experiences a tree and has his own mental construction of the tree in his mind. His friend seeing the same tree has her own mental construction in her mind.
They can agree upon common features, like the height of the tree, because both constructions come form the same source data (WI) but they can differ (one sees a beautiful tree, the other an infected tree which will spread a disease) due to their own interpretations of the data. This also explains errors, a diferent interpretation which is not a close copy of the 'original data' the WI.
Subjective experience is all each of us knows, we can never escape from our own 'cave' our own mental construction. So called objective experience is simply inter-subjective agreement, where there are few differences between subjective experiences.
This is your overlapping and disjointed elements, I think.
In this model, 'true' is when the subjective experience is close to the WI, 'false' is when the subjective experience is in contradiction of WI.
We can however increase the accuracy of our own mental construction, and move closer to truth by improving the accuracy of our models for understanding the environment, and reducing or removing the error caused by our interpretation and construction - the ego error - the error comes from our IM, and is not 'hard wired' into the system of experience. If we can reduce this error to zero, we can know subjective experience as close to the WI as it is possible to achieve from a single first person perspective.
This is not to say we can experience WI as BM does so, as we are limited to the first person perspective.
An advanced intellect can consider fairly the merits of an idea when the idea is not its own.
An advanced personality considers the ego to be an ugly thing, and none more so that its own.
An advanced mind grows satiated with experience and starts to wonder 'why?'
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