Possible it is so. But Mind is only a part of the World's Low and Order.

Do you mean that the mind is an emergent phenomenon in a physical universe, or that both the physical and the mental are part of some "higher order"?

Well, in order to do so (contemplate it as a metaphysical puzzle), we would need to support instances of mind in metaphysical theories. Idealistically, we ARE able to conceive concepts and morals. Dualistically, our physical experiences are sorted and interpreted by the mind, but as far as its relation, or rather interaction, to the ideal, there still remains philosophical debate. Of course, materialistically, mind doesn’t quite matter. So, perhaps the *phenomenology of mind* rather than *mind as a phenomenon* may give rise to the interconnectedness of metaphysical theories or states in that ‘mind’ does not exist separately or in addition to reality states but rather its ‘description’ – and yes, it does seem to come down, again, to *language*.

"our physical experiences are sorted and interpreted by the mind"

Petitio principii, petitio principii - I'll tell teacher on you!

Unfortunately, much of metaphysics is the confusion of not clarified until the end of words. The world order, God and the anthropic principle, limit the base of science, culture - all of this correlates and intersect with each other. I was more impressed by "the natural coordinate system of nature", which is formed by self-organization based on the limit of relative equilibrium. The metaphysical problem of course is very important, but every such problem should sift through the positivist criteria and provision of analytical philosophy. Or perceive phenomenologically - for art, literature (many areas), etc. For some reason I come to the same message three times a day. I am a beginner and do not know all the orders of communication in the network.

ouch! (hides head in shame)

Having published papers on the operational analysis and measurement of scientific terms in such fields as psychoanalysis and psychoneuroimmunological research, I agree in principle with the aim of developing a consensual linguistic currency in various disciplines. Philosophers of science can be of immense assistance in helping to "make our ideas clear" in this sense and about which Herbert Feigl and other members of the Vienna Circle and more recently Karl Popper have published much "enlightening material. I began my early paper "Ego defences and affects in women with breast symptoms: a Preliminary Measurement Paradigm", published in The British Journal of Medical Psychology", (1978), 51(2), 177-189 with precisely this point about definition and measurement. This paper was among the first to demonstrate that hypotheses derived from psychoanalytic theory could be empirically tested, while satisfying the “falsifiability criterion” and running Karl Popper’s gauntlet of scientific criticism.

In the contemporary field of Neuro-psychoanalysis discussed in a recent forum (Solms & Turnbull, Cortex, 2007) mentalistic terms are shown to be capable of generating robust and useful scientific predictions rather than being dismissed as mere epiphenomenal by-products of brain processes.

Such empirical research aims to contribute to the completion of Sigmund Freud’s “Project for a Scientific Psychology”.

As for such concepts as spacetime, the relationship of complementarity of mind and matter and the mind/brain connection, may I suggest that contributors have a look at the publications of such eminent contributors as Hans Primas author of the paper, "Time-Entanglement Between Mind and Matter" in which he distinguishes between a tensed and tenseless time. Primas draws upon the work of Physicist Wolfgang Pauli and his idea that mind and matter are complementary aspects of the same reality. Primas' paper was published in Volume 1(1), pp 81-119 of the "Mind and Matter" journal (2004).

This is one of several dual aspect positions on the relationship between mind and matter which avoids the perils of lapsing into an implicit reductionist idealism (solipsism) or eliminative materialism in which mentalistic terms are simply either epiphenomenal or a linguistic shorthand for neurophysiological processes.

Otherwise, I have found the published contributions of neuroscientist Karl Pribram, physicist/philosopher Patrick Heelan,(2004) and physicist Basil Hiley(2005) in the same journal excellent contemplative material for scientific researchers and philosophers of science alike. Similarly, the book "The Self and its Brain: an Argument for Interactionism" co-authored by Karl Popper and John Eccles seems to me to have been useful in refuting crude physicalism while clarifying the mind/brain relationship. I have discussed these contributions in detail in my recent (2009) paper published in Volume 6, Issue 2 of the interdisciplinary ‘mind and Matter” journal.

Pribram, in his paper “Consciousness Re-Assessed”, regarded mind and matter as having a common ontological foundation which transcends spacetime, commenting that his position was “hostile to an eliminative materialist approach” or as he put it pithily, “the more reflex the reflex, the less does mind accompany it”. In Pribram’s view, Popper’s “three worlds” of brain, culture and mind are indispensably necessary for the achievement of consciousness , interacting in a feedback loop so that consciousness or mind program the brain to evolve culture which in turn stimulates mental development.

Physicist/philosopher Patrick Heelan’s thesis in his paper, “The Phenomenological Role of Consciousness in Measurement”, was that on phenomenological grounds, consciousness possesses a structure isomorphic with or analogous to quantum mechanics (2004, p81). Phenomenology, in Heelan’s framework, is to be regarded as a tool for exploring mind and matter. This idea is central to the psychoanalytically oriented research to which I have referred. The physicists Pauli and Hiley both argue for a relationship of complementarity between mind and matter and for a notion of extended mind, whether in the form of archetypes as cosmic ordering and regulating principles or active quantum information forming a bridging function. Mind construed as active information in such contributions, is not conflated with the emergent consciousness considered in Popper’s three worlds.

This requires serious consideration (David rolls up his hands and spits on his sleeves)

If I am not mistaken, your question "is (whether) there is anything except objective reality which cannot be explained through physics"? However, it implicitly denies the role of the observer especially in quantum physics, for instance in the Copenhagen Interpretation. My posting on the operational analysis and measurement of mentalistic terms, for example, in psychoanalysis and including the unconscious, and the derivation of robust and useful scientific predictions implies the rejection of crude physicalism. Such physicalism would be a doctrine about what nature must be like, rather than an explanation of it.

Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli as well as such physicists as Neils Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, David Bohm and Basil Hiley all regard the "personal equation" and consciousness of the observer as needing to be integrated into quantum physics rather than ousted, as mind in its conscious and unconscious aspects was in classical, mechanistic, Newtonian physics. Hiley (2005) even writes of a rudimentary "mind" at the level of quantum information, though devoid of consciousness. These physicists, as I have already suggested, argue for a relationship of complementarity between mind and matter in what is known as a "dual aspect" position.

If, as physicist/philosopher Patrick Heelan suggests, "consciousness possesses a structure isomorphic with quantum mechanics" with phenomenology being a "tool for exploring mind and matter", it becomes difficult to dismiss the role of the observer in science ( e.g., in physics or depth psychology) or to embrace a purely physicalist (or metaphysical materialist) epistemology.

However, perhaps you did not intend to adopt such a physicalist position or to suggest that the whole of "objective reality", including biological and mental phenomena can be reduced to explanation through physics?

Further logical considerations concerning the mental, the self and time.

Many published contributions to the philosophical and scientific understanding of the mental, consciousness and time seem to me to conflate such terms as mind with the self while omitting consideration of the unconscious explored in depth psychology and psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and their cultural evolutionary descendants. However, the Freudian revolution exposed the conceit of confining mind to rational consciousness (the res cogitans of Descartes) while Freud together with Jung, identified dimensions of mind and of the self which seemed to be both timeless and beyond the finite ego-consciousness which was clearly spatiotemporally bound.

The dual aspect concept of a relationship of complementarity between mind and matter which emerged in both quantum physics and depth psychology represents, I believe, an important contribution to the project of moving beyond the mind-trap of the Cartesian split and many of the pseudoproblems which resulted from it. Including the so-called “psychophysical problem” itself and tortured attempts to confer scientific status upon conscious and unconscious mental concepts, defined a priori as mere epiphenomenal and causally inefficacious by-products of neurophysiological processes in the brain.

In contrast such neuroscientists as John Eccles and Karl Pribram have rejected eliminative materialism, while creating room for concepts of both mind and the self as irreducible aspects of the human observer whose psychological process, mathematics describes empirical scientific laws. As Pribram (2004) has put it, “In a non-trivial sense, current physics is rooted in both matter and mind”, while “consciousness relates sentient bodies just as gravity relates physical bodies” (p11).

Physicist Basil Hiley (2005) has addressed criticisms of the Popper/Eccles concept of the self acting upon the brain, by showing how mind might act upon matter via quantum information without violating the conservation of energy law. Both David Bohm and Basil Hiley have argued for rudimentary mind-like qualities at the quantum level which are nevertheless devoid of consciousness. This formulation avoids the peril of panpsychism.

I found David Hirst’s comments on the relationships between mind and time extremely illuminating. However, I thought that he might consider these views in the light of the insights of contemporary psychoanalytic explorations into the self and of the timelessness of the unconsciousness noted early in the 20th century by both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The emerging field of neuropsychoanalysis is enhancing such insights using sophisticated brain imaging techniques such as fMRI scanning, without succumbing to the temptation of mindless reductionism.

The status of time and the nature of causality expressed in decades of psychosomatic and psychoneuroimmunological research as well as recent contributions from neuroscientists such as Eccles and Pribram might help to shift discussion of the nature of mind, matter and time into the realm of empirical science in a way which complements philosophy and metaphysics. The “classical dualist position” can be abandoned as can the eliminative materialism of Churchland (1995) and others and replaced by the dual aspect complementarity position which I have outlined.

Incidentally, apropos the notiions of timelessness and continuity, it may be a meaningful coincidence that the word "self" has the same German root as "soul", specifically "seele"!

According to Pribram just as the operation of the fMRI apparatus occurs in the quantum holographic domain while the resulting pictures emerge in spacetime, in psychoanalysis, "timeless" unconscious, symbolic material is manifest in the spatiotemporally bound conscious mind or to ego consciousness. As insights acquired in the so-called "individuation process".

After each yours message I have turniig off Internet and E-mail.

I made a pause some days

Are you sure it's not all in your mind, Nikolay?

(I'll try and get back to this debate tomorrow)

It was five times one after other. Accidently coincidence probably.

Nikolay, I suggest that you read the literature and address substantive philosophical and scientific propositions rather than engaging in ad hominem argumentation.

Not at all, Peter: it was me all along - since David Lewis, the Mastery of Mystical Powers has become a requirement in analytic philosophy...

I'll try and get back to your points ASAP - I returned to work after a prolonged absence today, so I'm a bit under water!

David, I shall look forward to your comments on my points in previous postings. You may note from my profile why the mind/matter relationship has such significance for my work in the fields of psychosomatic and psychoneuroimmunological research.

In the era of radical behaviourism in psychology, I was well schooled in the contributions of the so-called "Vienna Circle" of philosophers including Herbert Feigl and in the necessity for the operational analysis and measurement of terms.

Even those from psychoanalysis which had been previously been considered inaccessible to operational definition (though not by Feigl himself) as noted in my 1978 paper together with an acknowledgement of Percy Bridgman's critique of the concepts of Newtonian mechanics and concepts such as "absolute time".

As you are probably aware, in recent years, the scientific status of mentalistic concepts has been re-habilitated, especially in neuropsychoanalysis, cognitive neuroscience and PNI research. The main criterion has been the derivation of robust and useful scientific predictions.

Peter

I'm afraid that I'm still under water (I've decided to launch my own professional activity - "applied epistemology for corporate world")... nonetheless, I recently posted elsewhere a few comments on "the problem of knowledge" :

"As we're talking about "the problem of mind", we should perhaps clarify what the problem actually is - or rather, what the problems are.

Firstly, there is the problem of first-person experience, awareness, and self-identity. To cut a long story short, the problem here is that the "mind" is a black box which happens to have a beetle in it... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations#Wittgenstein.27s_beetle, in the unlikely case that you've forgotten)

The "Mary's room" thought experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary%27s_Room) shows that however complete our theoretical accounts of the pathways between input and output, we sill can't "display our beetle". Nonetheless, and according to what would seem to be our deepest philosophical intuitions, the evidence for our first-person experience is the most direct evidence we can possibly have: the experience of having an experience is tautologous (and distinct from the experience of ***reflecting on*** having an experience). The tautology of "experiencing experience" is unsurprising, as such experience is supposedly pre-linguistic – if we try and talk about it, we're reduced to saying things like "it's that experience I'm having right now while I'm having the experience of writing this", which reintroduces the problem of "inscrutable token reflexives" we mentioned elsewhere.

Given that our general talk about experience provides a lot of scope for the expression of "individual perspective", and that it is generally held that "there is such a thing as" first-person experience, I can feel justified in accepting the "evidence" of my "experience of having experience" as substantiating my belief that my experience is "first-person experience".

We can see here that the problem is not so much one of "having an experience", but is rather a problem of knowing "which" experience we're having. Even my identification of my first-person experience as being "first-person experience" depends on the evidence I have that the term "first-person experience" can be applied to "this experience". Mary's Room is interesting above all because it holds that there is a non-physical property – a quale or something like that – that can only be "known" in experience. It contrasts what we can know ***about*** some quality with having direct "experience of" that quality – that is, it contrasts "knowledge" with "acquaintance". Before turning to the "pure quale" of the classic Mary's Room, we should perhaps reflect on the difference between "knowing all about" and "being acquainted with" when the expressions are applied to physical objects or persons. We could imagine that Mary could "learn all about", say, Nicolas Sarkozy to such a degree that she could even recognise his odour, the precise feel of his skin etc. : any form of learning requires ostension, and the different sensations could (imaginably) be reconstituted virtually and presented to Mary (and this reminds us that, whatever her experience of colour, Mary is entirely habituated to identifying sensory impressions in general). If Mary possessed "all the information" about Nicolas Sarkozy, including acquaintance with his odour, the feel of his skin etc. , we could say that her experience of actually meeting Nicolas Sarkozy would be an "integration" of this information – and we would imagine that the information received "in the flesh" would be compared to memory in such a way as to suggest that to Mary that she was most probably in the presence of Nicolas Sarkozy. The "so this is what Nicolas Sarkozy 's really like" is not comparable to "so this is what "red" is really like", as we can imagine that there are no "previously unknown sensory impressions" involved – what is "new to Mary" is the experience of the ***integration*** of the various "known" sensory impressions into a single 'perceived state of affairs'. The "contents of experience" is in the integration, rather than in the sensory impressions themselves – and we would seem to be talking about "the experience of having an experience" (that of "meeting Nicolas Sarkozy") rather than "the experience of Nicolas Sarkozy".

Turning to the problem of sense impressions themselves, I'd say that when Mary sees the colour red for the first time, her experience IS a source of "new physical information" - it gives Mary information concerning the stimulation of Mary's sensory apparatus. In many ways, the encyclopaedic information Mary possesses concerning "colour" is entirely theoretical. Firstly, the optical, physiological and psychological descriptions would be given as universally-quantified conditionals, as would much of the "connotative content" ("red is usually associated with danger" etc.). Secondly, her knowledge of literary and vernacular uses of the term would develop her knowledge of the criteria of justification for believing that some sensation corresponds to "red". I'd hold that Mary's "knowledge" concerns the use and general sense of the TERM "red", and can generally be expressed by universally quantified conditionals having the form "if any thing is red, then that thing X" (where "X" can be replaced by any predicate expressing some correlate or connotation of some thing's being red).

It would be begging the question to say that, despite her exhaustive knowledge, Mary has no acquaintance with the "referent" of the term red, but we can perhaps hold that she has no acquaintance with any physical instantiation of the property of "being red". If – and this is a big if – she could actually "recognise" red on first seeing some red thing, then she would know a lot about the "contents of her sensory impression". But the real question is whether her pre-experiential "knowledge" would actually allow her to decide whether some perceived thing is red. We can accept that she would be reasonably competent in terms of "object recognition" – if her knowledge is exhaustive, we would expect that she has full acquaintance with monochrome representations of "red objects", including three-dimensional representations; so the question is not whether she would recognise some object, but whether she would recognise some object as "being red'".

For my own part, I feel that however exhaustive her (largely linguistic) knowledge of "red" might be, Mary would know ABOUT "red", but would not "know red" – she could at best make inferences about the phenomena she perceives, along the lines of "that thing looks like the black-and-white representations of fire engines that I have see, and fire engines are red; therefore, the "colour" of that object is probably red". From such an initial inferences, she could compare the sensory impression with impressions of other objects having a similar "chromatic intensity" (post-boxes, boiled lobsters, the necks of fundamentalists…) and verify that these, too, are generally held to be "red".

This is, of course, a model of the process, rather than a description of "what's going on" – as I said before, however we turn the problem, the "mind" is a black box. As far as *awareness* is concerned, the problem of mind is the problem of "private experience" - it comes down to the problem of the inscrutability of the reference of the token-reflexive when I say to myself "I'm having THIS experience". Whatever the status of the contents of some experience – whether "there are" or "there are not" qualia – we can only identify the experience as "being of some red thing" by recourse to a series of beliefs that substantiate such an identification.. I need not point out that such beliefs are generally determined by our language – by "our way of talking about the world", even when such "talk" is internal and reflexive. Once again, and over and above the insurmountable problem of what one could call "autophenomenological private use of public language", there would seem to be a certain possibility of indetermination, even in our "internal discourse" about our phenomenal experience.

Time and again in our discussions we return to a seemingly irreducible dichotomy: we know that we inhabit THIS world, but we can't be certain WHICH world "this world" is. Of course, our language integrates the "problem of indetermination" by *redundancy* (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundancy_%28linguistics%29) - the majority of our constructions give more information than is strictly (logically) required by the "deep sense" of the expression. Thus, in an utterance such as "I'm going to London tomorrow" where the speaker's intention is to give information about his future activity, the "am going" is not strictly necessary to position the activity in the future – "I go to London tomorrow" would provide more or less the same declarative content.

Of course, the pragmatics of utterance is far more complex than that – the precise choice of form is largely determined by the speaker's particular perspective, and the grammatical distinctions made by a competent speaker between use of the simple and the progressive forms of "go" would be taken by a competent auditor to reflect this perspective. The more we share assumptions about the world, the more finely we can determine the "best-candidate" state of affairs to which our interlocutor is alluding – and this is where the "second problem of mind" comes in: what evidence do we have for "other minds"? Determining what state of affairs our interlocutor is alluding to is not a matter of "accessing that particular state of affairs" – it is rather a matter of deciding whether the state of affairs to which he is alluding corresponds to some state of affairs which IS accessible to us.

***

The third "problem of mind" concerns the apparent non-physical cause of physical action; this "problem" is best dealt with by a more general criticism of the notion of "causation".

David,

The "black box" theory of mind, implying that mental processes are not accessible to empirical verification, is as outdated as the radical behaviourism of Basil Skinner and other eliminative materialists like Churchland and Crick who have adopted the position of neural reductionism. A position which is challenged by such conceptualizations as the notions that action is mediated by reflection in conscious thought and consiousness is not an epiphenomenal and causally inefficacious by-product of brain processes, noted by neuroscientist Pribram (2004) and others.

As for other dimensions of mind, I suggest that you examine my published contributions to the quantification of unconscious mental precesses, including "ego-defences and affects in women with breast symptoms" (under P.B. Todd) and more recent work in the emerging field of neuropsychoanalysis. Mark Solms, Oliver Turnbull and Jaak Panksepp (Cortex, 2007,43) have made important contributions. Robust and useful predictions have been derived from psychoanalytic theory and verified in empirical research published in peer-reviewed journals.

The problem of other minds is an empirical one. Skinner's "black box" notion and his idea that mind is nothing more than his note book recordings of the results of the operant conditioning of pigeons is not enlightening. However, this notion is an example of the type of absurdity to which obsessive-compulsive positivism in philosophy and behaviourism in psychology historically led.

Ok, just to throw my hat in the metaphysical ring, so to speak,

I am the author of a school of thought, that posits that mind, is the illusion, created as the necessary control mechanism needed to parameterize action in order to keep it in the Organisms comfort zone. Thus the phenomenal properties of mind, are not metaphysical, merely illusions brought about by projection of Meta-cognitive signals onto an image of the environment and the organisms place within it, in order to make it easier for the organism to evaluate the relative danger/opportunity Threat/Strength/Weakness, etc. of the organism with regards to future actions. Because the Meta-cognitive signals are both feedback from previous states, and an indicator of agency of past states, there is a tendency to believe that agency implies causality, where instead it implies the ability to adapt parametric elements to favor one path over another, and the ability to tell, after the fact that the path has been so chosen.

Graeme,

The problem, however, is that the "illusion" to which you refer, especially unconscious mental processes, including defence mechanisms and affects, permits the derivation of robust and useful scientific predictions in such fields as psychosomatic medicine and psychoneuroimmunology. You might view my posting on this subject in the psychoneuroimmunology discussion group on the Researchgate site.

The notion that the neural and immune systems "talk" to one another is empirically well established. So also is the impact of unconscious mental factors on disease via neuroendocrine and immune mediators. In the HIV/AIDS field, the simultaneous analysis of psychosocial / mental factors, biological mediators including neuroendocrine, cytokine and immune system variables and HIV progression remains an important issue for future research.

If mind was the type of "illusion" or "virtual reality" which you believe it to be, such multifactorial causality as is explored in psychosomatic and psychoneuroimmunological research would have yielded neither testable hypotheses nor substantive and significant empirical data!

The "agency" to which you refer implies consciousness and as such is quite meaningless in reference to unconscious dimensions of mind or of the self as these are understood in contemporary psychoanalysis. It might be a useful concept to rationalists or to cognitive behaviour theorists.

Ah... That is the assumption.

You might say that Agency implies causality as associated with the Organism, It involves consciousness because the feedback is part of the conscious illusion. The Illusion does not preclude pre-conscious or Unconscious decision making, and does not eliminate decisions made as a result of parameterization. And therefore directly attributable to consciousness, it just separates those decisions from the "Experience" of consciousness, so that the lack of purchase of any feeling, does not affect the ability of the organism to come to a conclusion.

The Agency is an attribution, and there is nothing to say whether that attribution is correct except the ability to check it against a log of previous decisions, and the Self-image. A person may, especially if they have certain illnesses, falsely attribute something done by someone else to themselves, or alternately falsely fail to attribute something they did themselves to their own agency.

In essence the "Self" meta-cognitive signal, is just a convention used by the brain to simplify the question of Cause and Effect. The whole issue of cause and effect is an illusion of control, based on the brains tendency to link events that happen soon after each other. If two events are linked by this tendency to link events that are close in time, and one event clearly predates the other, then there is a question of Cause and Effect, in that the earlier event is thought to be more likely to cause the later event. It is just such an effect that causes the naive soldier to assume no one is shooting at him because the night sky lights up with rifle flashes on the horizon, but no immediate deaths occur.

In short the assumption of Cause, is an illusion of control, and has no real linkage to actual cause, and so because the logged events happen at about the time that the log becomes available, attribution of Cause to the report instead of the events is made, and we assume that consciousness causes Agency.

Consciousness Illuminates Agency by feeding back the meta-cognitive signal into our world view.

It is however just a feedback mechanism, not the actual source of Agency.

Peter - are we not perhaps confusing "knowledge of" (acquaintance) with "knowledge about".?

The "black box" attacked by post-80s cognitive theories is concerned by more peripheral problems (for example, the treatment of language or the basis of "temporal experience"), but doesn't address the problem of "the contents of first-person experience". I would be most surprised if you were to claim to have "solved" THAT problem.