My Python code ultimately runs on a circuit, but it feels lacking to say that my program is the circuitry. The program itself only has meaning inside of my mind, and in fact could exist equally well on paper. It exists conceptually even if it never manifests physically. So where do concepts like this exist, given that they don't exist as matter? What do we mean when we say that something like 1+1=2 is true - that that truth exists - and would exist even if there wasn't any matter to have 1 and 1 of?
The more you look at it, the more it looks like truths and ideas are even realer than the material world. After all, the only thing we know of the material world is what we experience of it in our mind. That was Plato's point, that the material world is a shadow of the real, immaterial world of thoughts, ideas, and truths.
Similar argument patterns permeate most ancient philosophies. The meme is that mind is the ultimate reality, of which the materialistic worldview is a surprisingly fragile inverse.
Google embodied cognition - while it is true semantics can be separated from the physicality of the incarnation of the system for simple software things, it seems likely any digital representation of the mind will include a lot of data about the material facts of wet brains, chemicals, diffusion, weird coincidences between same gene pathways affecting multiple systems and all.
> My Python code ultimately runs on a circuit, but it feels lacking to say that my program is the circuitry. The program itself only has meaning inside of my mind, and in fact could exist equally well on paper. It exists conceptually even if it never manifests physically. So where do concepts like this exist, given that they don't exist as matter? What do we mean when we say that something like 1+1=2 is true - that that truth exists - and would exist even if there wasn't any matter to have 1 and 1 of?
You're claiming that these concepts don't exist as matter, but you've actually described how it exists in matter. Moving the program to paper just changes the matter from silicon and metal to paper and ink. You're saying it never manifests physically while describing its physical manifestation.
Even if the program exists only in your mind, all that means is that the physical manifestation is neurons/synapses instead of silicon/metal or paper/ink.
I won't claim to know completely how the human brain works, and I think it's unlikely that anyone completely understands everything. But it's unreasonable to claim that anything we don't completely understand the physical manifestation of must not have a physical manifestation. That's just the God of the Gaps argument[1] repackaged into a "Mind of the Gaps" argument. If you are defining the mind is every thought and mental process that we don't understand, then the mind is an ever-shrinking phenomena that slowly disappears as we apply the scientific method. In that case, I think we have a better word for that than "the mind": we typically call that "ignorance".
> Similar argument patterns permeate most ancient philosophies. The meme is that mind is the ultimate reality, of which the materialistic worldview is a surprisingly fragile inverse.
This is unsurprising, given that ancient philosophers lacked even basic scientific knowledge. The materialistic worldview seems fragile when you know next-to-nothing of the material world. We might draw the same conclusions as them if we only look at the evidence they had, but it would be foolish to only look at the evidence they had, when we have access to, for example, modern neuroscience. It would be extraordinarily improbable for people who believed fire came from phlogiston to come to the same conclusions about the nature of the mind, as people with access to decades of magnetic resonance imaging of the brain.
I like your analogy and do have a similar view in that the total consciousness level of all humans combined, at any given point in time, creates a separate universe of our own. This total consciousness level has its own rules and principles created by us which also evolves over time. It shapes all of our belief systems, actions, behaviors, etc. throughout various human civilizations in history.
It operates almost like a mind of the entire human race just hovering above all of us. This concept is pretty abstract but like you said, at any given point in time this total soul may not exist physically, but it does exist conceptually in our exclusive reality and it too constantly evolves together with us.
How did you come to the conclusion that the phenomenon you are describing is hovering above all of us, instead of resting comfortably inside our brains in the form of neurons?
I was saying that it would be a total level of consciousness from all human individuals combined, and its power is really more than just the sum of each individual. In a sense, this could be considered as the total knowledge that our species has acquired at a given point in time.
The more you look at it, the more it looks like truths and ideas are even realer than the material world. After all, the only thing we know of the material world is what we experience of it in our mind. That was Plato's point, that the material world is a shadow of the real, immaterial world of thoughts, ideas, and truths.
Similar argument patterns permeate most ancient philosophies. The meme is that mind is the ultimate reality, of which the materialistic worldview is a surprisingly fragile inverse.