Unfortunately, I have arrived late to this thread, so I hope you'll all forgive me my non-reading of the whole thread. I'll catch up over the next few days, but for now, I want to concern myself with David B's initial starter post, and the question on how 'an immaterial thing can interact with a material thing'?
From my own perspective 'immateriality' cannot interact with anything, let alone materiality. I believe we have to make a shift in our perception and understanding of the meanings we apply to certain conceptual descriptions. By this I am not appealing to semantic argument, but to logical reasoning bordering on the philosophical.
David supplies two candidates for immateriality...maths and musical composition, and I think he is almost right, but is not quite articulating his true meaning. The best candidate for immateriality is that which Chalmers describes as the 'hard problem' of philosophy...the 'experiencing moment' of 'things'. In other words...qualia, and the best and most ideal candidate is mind, because mind is nothing more than the quale experience of perceiving oneself conscious. We do not have a mind that is conscious, but a conscious that is perceived as mind. Mind, is nothing more than a mental mirage and is therefore, truly immaterial.
The post following David B's by Paul C states a requirement where immateriality must in some way interact with materiality through some interactive law, and that he later states the 'essence of music to be sound', which is not quite right. Sound is a quale experience, arising from air disturbance and perturbation where pressure waves impinge upon the outer and inner ear causing electro-chemical signals to be sent to the brain from the cochlea. Once in the brain, the signals somehow transpose into the experience of sound.
This is not the whole story, though, the Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield was able to elicit memories of sound experiences in patients whose brains he was electrically stimulating. Certain areas of the brain electriclly stimulated caused the patients to re-hear music and singing and conversations from their past. Thus, the experience of sound is not wholly contingent upon the presence of air disturbances impinging upon the physical ear.
Qualia are true candidates for the term immateriality, being the end product of a chain of physical cause and effect interactions. I believe that qualia are so tightly interwoven with consciousness that they are not aspects occurring 'in' consciousness but are aspects 'of' consciousness. I do not think you can separate the two, because our experience of being conscious is itself a quale experience, and we term that experience as mind. Qualia are immaterial because there is no further causation leading or arising from them, and thus they are not interactive...they are caused, but not causative.
I must leave it there at this point, but will come back to it later...apologies  | 
01-31-2010, 06:23 PM
