Grames, I’m interested in your thoughts on Binswanger’s position,
Binswanger is wrong. In what follows I’m dependent on Diana Hsieh’s retelling of Binswanger’s thoughts because I don’t have the course mentioned.
Where he goes wrong is his analysis of what it means for something to be a philosophical primary. He keys off the word reducible such as in the definition “a primary is not reducible” and then commits himself to a view consciousness that cannot be physical lest it be found to have parts and be reducible after all. His general description of what it means to reduce something is correct but not appropriate to a logical analysis. A philosophical primary is an epistemological designation meaning that it is at the bottom of the knowledge hierarchy, a first level concept known directly and defined ostensively.
We can analyze consciousness into its parts, but it requires a scientific context and a third-person perspective. We cannot reach the scientific level without first learning to be logical. We cannot learn to be logical without relying at least implicitly (and preferably explicitly) upon the axiomatic concepts existence, identity and consciousness and the axioms employing them. We don’t need to look deeper because the referents of existence, identity and consciousness are givens.
Binswanger is in error to argue that an epistemological primary must also be an existential primary that cannot be analyzed scientifically. His statement that connsciousness “can never be shown to exist—at any scale—of subactions that are themselves non-conscious” commits the fallacy of division. All sorts of things are composed of other things of a radically different type: chairs are composed of atoms, mammals are composed of cells. Consciousness is the action and relationship of awareness and is composed of both the body and the object it is aware of.
Reductionism, when it results in denying that the thing reduced still exists, is an error. Binswanger seems particularly interested in refuting reductionism that would deny the mind exists. His method of going about it is wrong. Binswanger really should have checked himself when he was led to the conclusion that “a new force of nature”, i.e. “the physical force exerted by consciousness on its own brain” will eventually be discovered by scientists. That’s just plain embarrassing. This is the kind of thing appropriate to the Coast to Coast AM radio show.
Mind is an attribute of a brain, attributes are existents, so mind and brain are distinguishable but not separable existents. That much is right. His claim to being a dualist could be chalked up to rhetorical “cuteness” if he had not also posited novel physics.
The Binswanger/Searle argument against AI is that consciousness assigns the meanings to the 1s and 0s of computers. It has nothing to say about an AI technique which is a non-computational awareness, where there is no a priori assignment of meaning to certain bits.
I agree that it is not made of physical matter, the spiritual is non-material, but it could be made from physical matter or energies. Either way, it is of this universe, and a property of it.
Concepts are NOT material things, they are mental things that require a physical substrate in order to exist. Patterns of thought MUST be reflected in the material body, but, just as a river etches a path through dirt but is not that path, so concepts etch patterns in the brain’s dendrites, but are not those patterns – no more than the vibrating electrons in a radio wire are the message that is being projected.
Concepts are eternally re-callable into one’s mind without loss of detail, so in a sense, they are eternal – they can be discovered and applied independently by minds all over the Universe without loss of generality. But concepts are NOT the experiences they represent. Concepts are IDEALIZATIONS of experience, and a conceptual archetype is not necessarily (maybe not ever?) observable by direct experience.
For example, has anyone actually experienced a real example of a perfectly balanced triangle? I don’t think so … every real instance of inter-related three-ness is not some static, symmetrical arrangement, but a vibrating, interacting, buzzing around that may approximate symmetry, but never stops/settles there for any finite amount of time. Your eyes may take a snapshot at just the correct moment of perspective on a twirling triangle, but even then, the triangle itself must be made of material, and it is not possible to manufacture triangular symmetry to such perfection that every single atom on one side-tube has a correspondent on the other two sides.
“Mind is the weightless and uniquely human faculty that surveys the ever larger inventory of special-case experiences stored in the brain bank and, seeking to identify their intercomplementary significance, from time to time discovers one of the rare scientifically generalizable principles running consistently through all the relevant experience set. The thoughts that discover these principles are weightless and tentative and may also be eternal. They suggest eternity but do not prove it, even though there have been no experiences thus far that imply exceptions to their persistence. It seems also to follow that the more experiences we have, the more chances there are that the mind may discover, on the one hand, additional generalized principles or, on the other hand, exceptions that disqualify one or another of the already catalogued principles that, having heretofore held “true” without contradiction for a long time, had been tentatively conceded to be demonstrating eternal persistence of behavior. Mind’s relentless reviewing of the comprehensive brain bank’s storage of all our special-case experiences tends both to progressive enlargement and definitive refinement of the catalogue of generalized principles that interaccommodatively govern all transactions of Universe.”