The brain produces the mind

Exactly. So here's the thing. We know consciousness exists, so physicalism must be false. But we know substance dualism is also false given the mind-body problem. So if consciousness is real, irreducible, and has causal powers, and monism is true, then of course monistic idealism would have to be true.

Cognito ergo sum

>But we know substance dualism is also false given the mind-body problem
Alternative: Mental substance interacts with material substance.

Your consciousness (and, for that matter, unconsciousness) are an energy state produced by the functioning of the brain. There is no reason to think otherwise.

Why this happens, who knows. It just does.

What do you mean personality is an illusion? How did you even reach that conclusion?

Proof your “self” is nonphysical?

>fuck with parts of the mind
>different aspects of the brain and body are directly and visibly affected
>disorders or the body linked to abnormalities in the mind
>"I dunno guys, looks like the mind must just be a product of the brain or something"

lol we've just proven that substance dualism is false and that monism is true. Yes the mind effects the body and vice versa, so yeah monism. But the mind is irreducible (see the hard problem of consciousness). And since that's true and dualism is false, then monistic idealism is true

That's impossible

>"nuh uh!"
Great argument

He's saying if the mind is a product of the brain then personality is just an illusion. That's correct. If physicalism is true there is no first-person subjective awareness, there is only third-person objective physical matter.

Did you not see pic related in the very post you responded to? There's a deductive argument laid out right there...

You haven’t really proven the mind affects the body

it does though

It’s real in that it’s existence creates your real physical actions, I just don’t see why that matters or what the alternative would even be.

>IF "mind is independent of matter" THEN "matter cannot cause changes in mind"
>IF "matter is independent of mind" THEN "mind cannot cause changes in matter"
This does not follow. They can be independent and capable of interaction if they are designed to be.

Are you denying mental causation? lol

Nobody is denying personality except maybe the eliminativists/physicalists around here. The alternative would be monistic idealism given the reasons outlined here:

I honestly don’t get these arguments. Do these people think the brain is just an inert body controlling device? That thinking doesn’t even come from the brain that is thinking? It’s like being baffled that cars move and denying the engine has something to do with it. It’s absurd.

Chemistry as physics affect the body. What seems like fucking with the mind and affecting the body is actually fucking with the body’s chemistry which affects the body

first of all, it's cogito, not cognito, secondly that doesn't prove the soul exists, only that you exist

So people think the brain is not doing anything? Not responsible for thought? That’s fucking stupid.

It does indeed follow. If they existed independently then their existence would be preserved if one were to not exist. However this isn't what happens. A handicap in the body can handicap the mind and vice versa. This shouldn't be possible if they existed independently

I don't know of anyone who said that but monistic idealism as alternative embraces the interactions of mind-body since they're all ultimately the same substance. They do all this without the problems physicalist monists would have (hard problem of consciousness, mental causation, zombies, etc.)

Mind does not damage matter and matter does not damage mind. What is damaged is the connection between them. Madness is essentially a messed up connection, not an actual defect in the mind, otherwise, it would be automatically incurable.

Monism is the philosophical equivalent of flipping the table. Instead of dealing with the problem, it dismisses the difficult data.

>I honestly don’t get these arguments.
I appreciate your honesty.
Let me give you a quote from Jaegwon Kim, a prolific philosopher of mind:

"If nonreductive physicalists accept the causal closure of the physical domain, therefore, they have no visible way of accounting for the possibility of psychophysical causation. This means that they must either give up their antireductionism or else reject the possibility of psychophysical causal relations.The denial of psychophysical causation can come about in two ways: first, you make such a denial because you don't believe there are mental events; or second, you keep faith with mental events even though you acknowledge that they never enter into causal transactions with physical processes, constituting their own autonomous causal world. So either you have espoused eliminativism, or else you are moving further in the direction of dualism, a dualism that posits a realm of the mental in total causal isolation from the physical realm. This doesn't look to me much like materialism. Is the abandonment of the causal closure of the physical domain an option for the materialist? I think not: to reject the closure principle is to embrace irreducible nonphysical causes of physical phenomena. It would be a retrogression to Cartesian interactionist dualism, something that is definitive of the denial of materialism. Our conclusion, therefore, has to be this: nonreductive materialism is not a stable position. There are pressures of various sorts that push it either in the direction of outright eliminativism or in the direction of an explicit form of dualism."

Source: Kim, Jaegwon (1989). The myth of non-reductive materialism. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 63 (3):31-47.

From here I infer that since consciousness is irreducible, and there is mind-body interaction, but dualism is false, then the single substance of existence is mental. Everything is mental, including the brain.

God dude it is amazing how confident you are about this when you know nothing about neuroplastcity.

Actually OP fit all those criteria in his first post.

Then you're espousing eliminativism. You're denying consciousness. You're saying there's no mind-body, there's only body. The problem is, there is mind and we know mind exists more than we can say there exists the body. If we're going away from substance dualism then you should stick with idealism since it actually keeps consciousness, which is contradictory to deny.

If everything is mental then doesn’t that mean the universe popped into existence as soon as the first brain evolved?

What problem? With monistic idealism there is no hard problem of consciousness, no mind-body problem, no problems with mental causation or any of that stuff

This is not a problem for philosophers, this is a question for people who study the brain and nervous system. In your own words, are you saying that the brain is not the source of consciousness?

No that’s not what I’m saying, sorry no “gotcha” for you

No. I would say since consciousness is first-person, subjective, and unified, then the universe and existence itself is ultimately grounded in one cosmic mind. We would be macro-minds grounded in an ultimate cosmic mind.

That’s what he’s saying, it dismisses it

That’s literally just something you’ve thought up without evidence. It has no grounding outside of your own thoughts.

of course it's a problem for philosophers which does indeed mean it's a problem for scientists as well:
iep.utm.edu/hard-con/
plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-causation/

>In your own words, are you saying that the brain is not the source of consciousness?
Yes. The brain is not the source of consciousness. Consciousness is irreducible and fundamental to reality itself.

STOP BELIEVING IN REAL THINGS

I’m not sure how that logically follows or how you can be certain that our minds are the ones that happen to mirror this cosmic one.

I'm afraid it is what you said. You said, and I quote directly:
>What seems like fucking with the mind and affecting the body is actually fucking with the body’s chemistry which affects the body
So it's just the body interacting with the body. There is no mental causation or mind in the picture here, it's just body. What else could you be saying? Epiphenomenalism? Are you saying the mind does exist but has no causal powers?

If you believe this, you need to explain why all it takes to shut off consciousness is a punch to the head.

But what problem is he talking about? If you're a substance dualist and you're ignoring the mind-body problem I'd get what he's saying but idealism is a whole other ball game. What problems could he be talking about?

>What problem?
That's exactly my point, it's a childish unscholarly resolution to real problems by just dismissing their existence. But there are problems with idealism even if you don't encounter them. The logical conclusion of idealism is solipsism, since idealism, like how physicalism holds that the internal is illusory, must hold that the external is illusory. The only way to hold that matter is actually mental in any meaningful sense of the word is to hold that objects are equivalent to thoughts. But a physical thought is simply an imagined thing that does not actually exist in any way. Consistent with this, it would be reasonable to assume that other minds are also illusory, like people in dreams, mental machines. After all, we do not experience them, only interact with them just as we do matter.

How about this: all philosophers are

No, it's a conclusion derived deductively. Are you denying that consciousness is first-person, subjective, and unified?? If not then you would have to agree that if reality is mental then existence would have to be unified in a mind with first-person subjective experience. This follows logically and necessarily.

Full of shit

Get your (((science))) the fuck out of my metaphysics

Nope I never denied the existence of the min

>Get your (((science))) the fuck out of my metaphysics

Which is like saying a program hooked up to a camera, that the computer program is creating the subject matter instead of just observing and processing. It’s so delusional that I’m genuinely having trouble even replicating your thought process. Like I understood this as a child.

>get your facts out of my delusions

I have a question for myself; Do I experience all things? The answer is no. Conclusion: I am not the great cosmic mind. Since I am not the great cosmic mind, there are two possibilities: 1. The great cosmic mind does not exist, 2. I do not exist. 2. is false (cognito ergo sum), therefore substance monism is false.

You're thinking of substance dualism.
Given that monism is true there is indeed interaction between mind-body since they're the same thing. The physicalist thinks they've won here, but they face the hard problem of consciousness and mental causation at this point which leads them to a contradictory worldview. But monistic idealists can account for this without those wacky contradictions.

How does monistic idealism handle the distinction between imagined things and real things?

If you look at a dog and watch what he does, what do you think is controlling his actions and dictating it’s movements? When you are training it and it’s making conscious choices, what is controlling your dog?

I’ll let you know. It’s that network of cables connected to a grey mass inside its skull. If you take out that structure, the dog immediately becomes a pile of guts, bones and meat without action, movement or decision making abilities. The same thing applies to humans.

Your brain is the source of your consciousness.

>That's exactly my point
Can you answer the question or just name call...?What problems are you talking about?

>it's a childish unscholarly resolution to real problems by just dismissing their existence
How is it childish to drop contradictory beliefs? Physicalism and substance dualism are contradictory, they are false. We know there is this interaction yet we know consciousness is irreducible and has causal powers. Deductively we can infer that monistic idealism must be true give this.

>The logical conclusion of idealism is solipsism
Nope:
How To Avoid Solipsism While Remaining An Idealist: philpapers.org/rec/HENHTA

We have arguments for other minds, just as we always have if we were substance dualists or physicalists.

>The only way to hold that matter is actually mental in any meaningful sense of the word is to hold that objects are equivalent to thoughts
Not at all. You hold them for what they are: experience. Describe to me an object without referring to your sense experience, go ahead I'll wait... you can't describe an object without telling me what it looks like, feels like, sounds like, tastes like etc. These are all phenomenal properties. All of science is based on observation which is our experience. We make constructs based on our experience but we wouldn't consider it concrete unless observation could falsify them. So it's experience that really defines what is real, not this hypothetical abstract idea of "the physical" that fundamentally would lie outside of experience.

>I’m genuinely having trouble even replicating your thought process
Because you're clearly not grasping what's being said to you. Notice how you completely dodged my question... Are you saying consciousness is not subjective, first-person, and unified? Stop dodging please

So if you're not the cosmic mind there is no cosmic mind? wtf lol

What follows is that since you exist, and you know you're not the cosmic mind, then some other mind is the cosmic mind. So cosmic idealism is still true and you would just know that you're not the cosmic mind.

It is subjective and first person yes. So what conclusion are you drawing from that?

"Berkeley replies that the distinction between real things and imaginary things like chimeras retains its full force on his view. [...] Berkeley notes that the ideas that constitute real things exhibit a steadiness, vivacity, and distinctness that chimerical ideas do not."

Source: plato.stanford.edu/entries/berkeley/#3.2.1

No shit, but the question still stands.

The mind. If the dog lost all consciousness you couldn't get the dog to do any of that.

Same goes for humans. This is how you infer the very existence of other minds. This is how you make the distinction between puppets and people. People are agents with a mind that grants them causal powers to perform all sorts of actions. If they weren't conscious and their actions were like that of puppets then they wouldn't be said to be responsible for anything or causing anything.

Your mistake is in thinking that you've won simply because you've established monism. The idealist accepts monism. They accept messing with the brain effects the mind and vice versa. But they beat you when it comes to the hard problem of consciousness, mental causation, and all that stuff

>It is subjective and first person yes.
okay then it is perfectly within reason to infer that if reality is mental then reality ultimately takes place in a single mind that given the mental is subjective and first-person. That's what I was getting at before. If idealism is true, then this is what follows. David Chalmers calls this view Cosmic Idealism:
consc.net/papers/idealism.pdf

How does saying the consciousness is from the brain in any way exclusive from mental causation?

I just answered the question...if you stop and read what was said, you'll actually realize this answer is no different than the answer a physicalist or substance dualist would give. How do you know you're not dreaming right now...? Well the world is a lot more consistent, and steady, and repeatable, and has a clearness and vivacity to it in a way dreams don't have. Your answer to how you know this is real vs. imagined is the same answer the idealist would give.

The jump in logic between “your experience is subjective” to “everything is the result of some cosmic mind” is insane. There is nothing about the former that leads to the latter. There are physical things regardless of whether any mind is observing them at the time.

There is no evidence for reality being created by some cosmic god mind

As the prolific philosopher of mind Jaegwon Kim puts it:

"If nonreductive physicalists accept the causal closure of the physical domain, therefore, they have no visible way of accounting for the possibility of psychophysical causation. This means that they must either give up their antireductionism or else reject the possibility of psychophysical causal relations.The denial of psychophysical causation can come about in two ways: first, you make such a denial because you don't believe there are mental events; or second, you keep faith with mental events even though you acknowledge that they never enter into causal transactions with physical processes, constituting their own autonomous causal world. So either you have espoused eliminativism, or else you are moving further in the direction of dualism, a dualism that posits a realm of the mental in total causal isolation from the physical realm. This doesn't look to me much like materialism. Is the abandonment of the causal closure of the physical domain an option for the materialist? I think not: to reject the closure principle is to embrace irreducible nonphysical causes of physical phenomena. It would be a retrogression to Cartesian interactionist dualism, something that is definitive of the denial of materialism. Our conclusion, therefore, has to be this: nonreductive materialism is not a stable position. There are pressures of various sorts that push it either in the direction of outright eliminativism or in the direction of an explicit form of dualism."

Source: Kim, Jaegwon (1989). The myth of non-reductive materialism. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 63 (3):31-47.

Okay then why are they different? Everything is the same (mental) and yet imagined things and real things are different. Where does this difference come from?

>The jump in logic between “your experience is subjective” to “everything is the result of some cosmic mind” is insane.
way to straw man my argument completely. I argue that reality itself is mental, and I arrive at this from considerations regarding the irreducibility of consciousness and mental causation, from this it would follow logically and necessarily that there is one mind given the mental is subjective and first person by your own admission...

>There are physical things
What the heck is a "physical" thing? Can you describe to me a "physical" objective without just describing phenomenal properties of experience? Can you describe to me a chair without just talking about what it looks like, feels like, etc.? You're just reifying experience. Of course there is an objective reality apart from your experience, and that reality is grounded in a cosmic mind that grounds all of reality.

The same way you've always distinguished them: experience. If you and all your friends are in a room and someone starts shouting about a flying pink elephant in the room you'd say he's hallucinating given you're not experiencing it. You would say he's hallucinating and nobody has experienced a flying pink elephant other than in say a dream.

>can you describe a chair without describing a chair?

Are you fucking kidding me

You didn’t answer my question. I didn’t ask how you distinguish them, I asked why are they fundamentally different under monistic idealism.

A chair takes up actual physical space, ideas and abstract things do not.

>fuck, I can't even define what a physical object is. better just straw man the hell out of the idealist\
hahahah!

>Can you answer the question or just name call...?What problems are you talking about?
I don't know if you're intentionally dense or just truly daft. I'm saying that substance dualism is the natural assumption of mankind and the natural conclusion from the plain immediate reality, that all men believed in it before the development of monism, that like all higher truths this position is met with a number of (solvable yet difficult) philosophical problems, and that the monists were frustrated with the problems, and instead of solving them, got rid of them by dismissing the relevant data.
>How is it childish to drop contradictory beliefs?
Substance dualism is not internally inconsistent, it is just difficult.
>We know there is this interaction yet we know consciousness is irreducible and has causal powers
You have failed to consider the possibility that there is an explanation for interaction between real objectivity and real subjects.
>We have arguments for other minds
How do multiple subjects interact without an objective thing?
>Not at all
The only alternative is to hold that they are objective (not dependent on the mind for their existence) which would be dualism, not monism. Thoughts are the only thing minds produce. If it proceeds from mind, it is equivalent to thought.
>You hold them for what they are: experience
Experience without reality is illusion.
>you can't describe an object without telling me what it looks like, feels like, sounds like, tastes like
I see, feel, hear and taste things the way I do because they actually are that way.
>So it's experience that really defines what is real
No it is not. Are dreams real? You experience them. Whether a thing is real or not is determined by objective grounding. Let us apply this to abstract objects, like truth. Does truth exist subjectively or objectively?

>So if you're not the cosmic mind there is no cosmic mind? wtf lol
If both exist than there are multiple separate subjects, in which case my existence is not grounded in it.
>What follows is that since you exist, and you know you're not the cosmic mind, then some other mind is the cosmic mind
If everything is actually a grand overarching subject, then the fact I do not experience being that subject shows either I am not a real subject or it is not a real subject.
It does not solve the problem. It is like if a substance dualist were to solve the mind-body problem by saying "mind and body both exist". It is a statement of part of the relevant data that creates the problem, not a solution to the problem.

It's the same answer: experience. It's really the same answer that you would give to this very question were it posed to you.

A physical object takes up space, it is actually made out of matter. It exists even if you get rid of all consciousness.

What distinguishes an illusory experience and a real experience?

The brain acts an an antenna to receive from the Aether

And how are you describing space...? Experience! You describe spatial locations through phenomenal properties. If you couldn't see, or feel, or taste, or have any sensations of experience at all, you'd have nothing to do describe. Describe to me an object devoid of all phenomenal properties and you'll be describing an object that is indistinguishable from nothing.

That doesn’t answer the question and merely answers how you distinguish them. Unless you can prove experience directly affects whether something manifests as real or imagined under monistic idealism

I am and , and I would not explain the difference between real and illusion by "experience", but the fact that one has objective grounding and the other does not.

Matter vs. an idea. Children understand this, you’ve tied your brain in so many knots through your pseudo intellectual rabbit holes that you can’t even tell the difference between a table and an idea.

see: The same way you always have: experience. If a crowd of people are in a room and only one of them is experiencing a flying pink elephant you'd all dismiss it as a hallucination given you're not experiencing it yourself. But if everyone did see it and others could experience it with you like say you took a video of it then yeah we would say it's real. The way you do this is the same way the monistic idealist does this. George Berkeley noted long ago that monistic idealism is really just common sense

There’s no such thing as an object without any physical properties you fedora queen.

He means under the framework we’re discussing you brainlet

but physical space is just an abstract idea.

>I would not explain the difference between real and illusion by "experience", but the fact that one has objective grounding and the other does not.

How do you establish anything as being "objective"? It would be through your experience. You look at the table, you look away, then you look back at it and go "ah it's still there, must have been objective". That's just reifying experience. You've used experience this entire time and merely fell into this reification of it and labeled it "objective"

I dare you to describe to me a physical object without describing phenomenal properties. An object that looks like nothing, feels like nothing, smells like nothing, and never enters experience in any shape or form is something that is indiscernable from nothing.