How Do Our Eyes Know What's In Front of Us?

This is a common enough type of question for people who know little or nothing of the 'simple level' cognitive mechanics of the mind, the kind that might be called in college "Cognition 101". The eyes don't "know" anything; but lets use this question as a metaphor.

Our eyes don't know until our mind figures it out. Our mind doesn't figure it out until it has enough prior examples in the memory from which to make inferences and draw conclusions. The mind doesn't have any prior (a priori) examples at birth.

"As far as can be ascertained, an infant’s sensory experience is an undifferentiated chaos. Discriminated awareness begins on the level of percepts.

"A percept is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism. It is in the form of percepts that man grasps the evidence of his senses and apprehends reality. When we speak of “direct perception” or “direct awareness,” we mean the perceptual level." http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/percep…

We must go from that state of undifferentiated chaos, to a mental state whereby we can begin to makes sense of the world. We can only do that by using the hard-wired system of the brain that is like an empty thumb drive--empty except for the operating software called "logic"; a thumb drive which gets filled by life's experiences--like seeing and touching a tree for the first time. You don't know what it is. You parents or a sibling or someone tells you.

("Logic" has two connotations. The one we think of first and most often is that of an induction, deduction, argument, etc., that demonstrates a thought that is in accord with reason; in other words, it appears rational, whether or not we detect a mistake in it, such as a fallacy. The second connotation is the processes of the mind by which thought would be impossible without, like a car without an engine.

(The second form of logic is built in to our brains. If it was not, then Aristotle could not have deduced that there are exactly 256 forms of categorical syllogism, no more no less, that the mind has at its disposal. These 256 are identical in every culture and language on earth. But they are devoid of content, i.e., of metaphysical measurement, until we gain experience from which to form percepts using that system of logic.)

Just as your lungs know how to breath, and your stomach knows how to digest, your mind knows how to perform the functions of logic. But an empty stomach can't digest; and an empty mind can't make inductions.

Until your mind knows whatever basic percepts it requires for survival in its specific environment, your eyes "know" nothing that is front of you--neither things of empirical content, nor the things of conceptual content that you can "see" even with your eyes closed.

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Identity of the Knower and the Known: The 'I'

The question is often asked, "What is the 'I'?"

The "I" is the identity of the human consciousness, called the "knower", as it distinguishes itself from that which not part of its identity.  It comes down to something called the "ego-centric predicament":

"The epistemological predicament of a knowing mind which, confined to the circle of its own ideas, finds it difficult, if not impossible, to escape to a knowledge of an external world..." http://www.ditext.com/runes/e.html 

When it escapes to the knowledge of that external world, what is left is the identity of the knower, and the knower calls itself "I".

 This is concomitant to the "subject-object problem", [1] [2] which arises from the premise that the world consists of objects, things which are observed through perception and become the "known". Consciousness is defined by its awareness of these objects; a consciousness with no awareness of objects cannot be said to be consciousness at all since consciousness is consciousness "of something". The "subject" of knowledge is the individual knower considered as an act of awareness of an "object". 

Thus, the contents of consciousness come to be known to the consciousness as different from the objects themselves. The subject is not the apple nor any other thing of which it is conscious: that is the object. The subject is the knower.

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On Earth There Is Nothing Great But Mind

I just read something I've heard before, written by William Hamilton: 

On earth there is nothing great but man; in man there is nothing great but mind.

On earth there is nothing greater than man when man is at his greatest, and that is when he chooses to use his mind. But it is a choice. Our description as "the rational animal" doesn't mean we are infallibly rational. It means we have the capacity to reason unlimitedly. After all, by the rules of logic we know which deductions are fallacies, because they break the rules. But TV commercials use such fallacies to sell their wares and often they are upfront, blatant, about it, sometimes to prove a point, sometimes to make us laugh.

Shysters know the rules of logic and break every one they can get away with, so long as you believe them and don't know they have broken a rule of logic.

But even knowing all the rules we can sometimes make the mistake of missing one of them, or we become unwilling to do what is rational because it would hurt too bad. I think that most mothers who kill their children in post-partum depression know they are doing wrong; but the alternative of doing the rational thing, of giving up their kids, would hurt them unbearably so that they could not live with it.

Well, of course they could live with it if they were given immediate help, put on suicide watch, and coached back into the world of sanity. But moments of insanity are often only moments of refusing to live according to reason because it would cause insanity.

And yet, without mind, there is nothing greater in man than in any animal on earth. The mind helps others in their time of need, during earthquakes and typhoons and hurricanes; through the death of loved ones; with soup kitchens, food banks, and food stamps; and even going to war to save others from tyrants.


There is nothing on Earth that is worth having without mind, because to have known "mind" is to know all that is great in Man.

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Reviewing the Terminology of Naturalism's Classifications

I made some additions a few days ago to the Wikipedia page "Naturalism (Philosophy)". One editor was not pleased, immediately deleted all my comments, and said he detected that I had an "agenda".

He was correct; I do have an agenda. It is to correct definitional differences between various pages of Wikipedia on the subject of naturalism; but more than that, to discover whether or not there exists a class of naturalists who are not "pluralists" or "dualists" yet who accept the natural first-person experiences of such "mental states" as mind, consciousness, ego, soul, volition (free will), and emotions.

After the deletion of my material in Wikipedia because of arguments I later thought might have some merit, not in terms of "agenda" but in the possibility that what I had written was incomprehensible or its purpose was incomprehensible, I began some investigating to see whether any other author was already "on to" the same subject of reviewing the terminology used in the science and in the metaphysics.

I immediately discovered "The Rediscovery of the Mind" by John R. Searle (MIT). When I read, "How is it that so many philosophers and cognitive scientists can say so many things that, to me at least, seem obviously false?", then I knew I was at least (and at last!) reading an author who thought like me. Whether or not I would agree with his review of the terminology and with his conclusions and professional recommendations for altering the terminology would have to be determined after I read the book. I'm only a little way into the book, but it seems I am not the only one who does not see "materialism vs. dualism" as the only way out of the morass.

Please read the Journal entry titled "Journal of the Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism" for the mission statement of this newly titled url, and then feel free to make serious and relevant comments. All points of view are welcomed.

Curtis Edward Clark

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Naturalism, Mind, Pluralism

Question: Is it possible to accept a materialistic naturalism, ("a 'monistic' form of naturalism in that it maintains that only one basic kind of stuff exists--physical stuff" [1]), while maintaining at the same time that the existence of nonphysical abstract objects are not "transcendent Platonic forms beyond nature"? [1]

In other words, isn't it possible that the "mind" (for example), typically rejected by naturalists as being "beyond natural" and therefore categorized as a species within supernaturalism, is instead the natural quality of the physiology of the brain, expressing the nature of the brain and without which the purpose of the brain would be unthinkable?

To restate it: is it not possible that "mind" is the ever-present but immediate and momentary phenomenon created by the physiology of the brain, and which is elusive as a defined quality as is the phenomenon of "life"? Is it possible to accept the metaphysical definition of "mind" while accpting that the existence of such abstract objects is the direct result of transient yet enduring qualities of the physiology of the brain itself, without reverting to calling such metaphysical evaluations "pluralistic"? [1]

If the mind can be so described, and be as physically real while being qualitatively transient, as is the form of lightening or of a thunderclap or of the "strings" in string theory, then why does naturalism deny the existence of "mind" while not denying "consciousness"?

Answers will be gratefully accepted below.

[1] Internet Infidels http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/nontheism/naturalism/pluralistic.html

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The Brain, the Mind, and Metaphysics

To suggest that somehow the mind is independent of the organ that gives it its existence is nonsense.

In the January-February newsletter from the Center for Naturalism, the case is made for the rise of physicalism, the doctrine"calling into question the notion that we need appeal to anything beyond or above the brain and body – an immaterial soul, for instance – to explain behavior and experience, whether normal or abnormal. [ ]

"This isn’t to say that physicalist explanations are anywhere near complete," the newsletter goes on, "nor does it conclusively disprove the existence of the soul or some other immaterial aspect of ourselves – nothing could do that. But it is to say that as physicalism makes headway, the dualist hypothesis that the mind is categorically independent of the brain in some respect has less and less going for it."

Inherent in scientific naturalism, that form of naturalism that seems to be prevalent in today's moral marketplace, is the idea that others somehow believe the mind is independent of the brain.

I wish to set something straight here and now: the mind is a process of the brain, just as digestion is a process of the bowels. Without the bowels there would be no ability to digest. Without the brain there would be no ability to have a mind.

No one disputes the scientific idea that neurons firing in the brain, that chemicals and electricity must be active in the brain, that synapses must be created, and that other processes must be in effect for the mind to work properly, or to work at all.

To suggest that somehow the mind is independent of the organ that gives it its existence is nonsense. But when scientism suggests that the organ and its functions were "once considered categorically immaterial mental phenomena [but] are now shown to have a material basis in the nervous system," a straw man is being set up.

Scientific naturalism loves that straw man. They use it against the immaterialism of the soul.

The sum of the parts is greater than the parts alone. Ink, paper, and glue alone do not make a postage stamp. But the idea that when properly put together those things are not an immaterial metaphysical phenomena is wrong.

A postage stamp, or anything else that is metaphysical and therefore greater than the sum of its parts, is definitively immaterial. The material is the ink, paper, and glue. The immaterial is the "idea" that when properly put together those things can create a postage stamp. Ideas are immaterial.

Yet no one disputes that a postage stamp is made of material. Objectively, however, a "stamp" is immaterial when it is considered to be the idea of an object made legal only by the production and acceptance of its existence by the proper authority.

No such stamp ever has to be produced. A stamp not produced yet definable is metaphysical, not physical. What is metaphysical is immaterial.

The mind is the metaphysical description of the events of the brain which, when analyzed, are greater than the sum of the physical parts that make it.

The "idea" of a light bulb, for instance, or of that postage stamp, is greater than the forces which create the synapse. It takes the metaphysical mind to put concepts together in the proper order in order to make sense of existence, to create stamps and light bulbs and space shuttles. It isn't the physical workings of the brain that do that. It is the mental workings of the mind, which of course do not and cannot exist without the brain, any more than sight can exist without the eyes.

But the recognition that what the eyes see is a tree or a bird or a newborn human being is greater than the sight unrecognized.

The "notion that we need appeal to anything beyond or above the brain and body" is not the straw man scientific naturalism makes it out to be.

Instead, it is a notion that metaphysical naturalism takes for granted, because metaphysical existence is properly a matter of the mind, not of the brain.

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