Can a materialist conception of the mind really preserve free will?

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Bahman:
I think you misunderstood the sentence. It doesn’t mean that one mind is a universal feature of all things, it means mind in general. We are simply minds/us and Mind/nature if you wish and we perceive state of Mind.
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I’m not sure I understand this version either… Perhaps you could define “mind”?
I think you misunderstood the sentence. It doesn’t mean that one mind is a universal feature of all things, it means mind in general. We are simply minds/us and Mind/nature if you wish and we perceive state of Mind.
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Linusthe2nd:
I think you are just playing.
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You mean you think that is what a materialist is? In that case, I guess my computer is a materialist.
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Linusthe2nd:
Try to imagine your state if you had no sense perceptors at all, I think you will understand. Have you ever read the Helen Keller Story? I think that would give you an idea. Helen contracted a disabling desease ( I forget what ) as a toddler and it left her totally blind and deaf. The story is about her and her teacher and the great difficulty the teaher had in helping Helen experience the world and to learn how to communicate.
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I can imagine my state with no sensory perception at all. And I know that story, but what does it have to do with this?
 
SentinelofTruth said:
I’m not sure I understand this version either… Perhaps you could define “mind”?
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Mind/God and mind are the elements of beings which allow us to experience forms and they have extensions Nature and body. The extension is needed for experiencing external world without them we are just aware of internal world, just “I am”, absolute peace.
 
SentinelofTruth said:
“Materialist” does not mean “someone that is purely material.”

Something does exist outside the mind. There are billions, maybe trillions of other souls that exist outside the self, one of which is God, and then there is this masterpiece of causal correlations that gets (name removed by moderator)ut from living souls, called action, processes it, called the rules of physics, and outputs it in a form we call perception. I’m not sure why this world has to be real for us to have perceptions that suggest it is real.
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God is not a " soul, " and if He were, He would not be just another member of the crowd. How could He be, since He created them. Your ideas get more and more weird each day. We are not computers and if you are making analogies the very poor and very poorly explained.

Linus2nd
 
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Bahman:
How do you define it?
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Wikipedia:
In philosophy, panpsychism is the view that mind or soul (Greek: ψυχή) is a universal feature of all things, and the primordial feature from which all others are derived. The panpsychist sees him or herself as a mind in a world of minds.
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Linusthe2nd:
God is not a " soul, " and if He were, He would not be just another member of the crowd. How could He be, since He created them. Your ideas get more and more weird each day. We are not computers and if you are making analogies the very poor and very poorly explained.
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Yes, God has to be a soul, otherwise he wouldn’t exist. And I never said we were computers nor have I used any analogies for the last several posts.
 
Huh? I didn’t say he had a “genus”, that is a biological term. And I fully agree that he is transcendent, but the word soul really just means a conscious being. My reasoning behind the statement that he wouldn’t exist if he weren’t a soul is that physical things don’t exist (substantively), and I don’t believe in unconscious immaterial substances, so, if he exists substantively then he must be a soul.
 
I would say “genus” is rightly understood a metaphysical term, but we need not debate that point.

By “substantively” do you mean “substantially,” as in, “as a substance”? Or do you mean “substantively” as in, “in any appreciable sense”?

Otherwise, we seem to just have glaring metaphysical disagreements here. God is Pure Act; He is that which is not composed of potentiality and actuality, of matter and form. As such he is not of a particular kind and is not a soul in that sense (since He has no potentialities that need to be actualized).

I am skeptical of the claim that it is His consciousness that makes him a substance, particularly if consciousness is taken univocally. While God is certainly intelligent, consciousness tends to connote various other qualities that we would be hard pressed to predicate of God (sentience, feeling, subjectivity, placement in time).
 
SentinelofTruth said:
Yes, God has to be a soul, otherwise he wouldn’t exist. And I never said we were computers nor have I used any analogies for the last several posts.
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While it may not be heretical to refer to God as a soul, you will not find God referred to as a " soul " anywhere in Catholic Doctrine, Theology, or Philosophy. God is Pure Spirit, Angels and souls are contingent spirits. The term " soul " is applied to human spirits only.

Linus2nd
 
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polytropos:
By “substantively” do you mean “substantially,” as in, “as a substance”? Or do you mean “substantively” as in, “in any appreciable sense”?
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God is certainly his own substance. Do you deny that he is ontologically primary?
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polytropos:
I am skeptical of the claim that it is His consciousness that makes him a substance, particularly if consciousness is taken univocally. While God is certainly intelligent, consciousness tends to connote various other qualities that we would be hard pressed to predicate of God (sentience, feeling, subjectivity, placement in time).
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I don’t see why consciousness need connotate all those things. As far as I am aware, conscious pretty much just means aware.
 
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