I’ve been following your blogging on Dr. Hoffman’s thesis. Taking on any theory or concept about mind or consciousness is challenging territory; and I commend you for that, so please don’t take my criticisms as hostile by any means, I just fail to see how you establish these criticisms of Dr. Hoffman’s concepts outside of your own “philosophical speculation” something which you attempt to criticize him for, but, in my view, consistently failing to put forth any compelling argument for why any rational person should dismiss Hoffman’s view and replace it with something similar to what you suggest.

First; its a challenge for the reader to get to your core criticism because you paste it in between bad faith questioning; “Is Hoffman science at all???” or “is he really using math at all???”

Not only did you not directly answer those questions nor show any conclusion to your own questioning, you leave it up to the reader to decide, which is a strange position in my view.

This gives you very frail arguments to make, all the while you don’t seem to address the underlying thesis that is implied with Hoffman’s view; mind/consciousness can be modeled scientifically and mathematically far easier if we remove the physical medium than if we add it.

And you criticize this as “speculative assumption” and then criticize using what you insinuate are arbitrarily assigned symbols that are “cartesian” coordinates, implying his model shows a “duality” between experience (modeled as x) and “W”, modeled as the world being experienced, thus worthy of being dismissed. No Cartesian coordinates allowed!

And that is sort of a very narrow attempt. Areas of mind are also studied in psychology, another science. Try using non cartesian coordinates in psychology, see how far that gets you.

And that’s his point, while it is easy to dismiss his view as “idealism” and thus philosophical speculation, what is also clear in Hoffman’s view is that so is physicalism.

His criticism here of physicalist science specifically in the areas of consciousness research is spot on; physicalism is an assumption within science.

There is no scientific theory for the emergence of mind from matter.

What’s more, not only is there no scientific theory for the emergence of mind from matter, Hoffman suggests that it simply may not be possible to model the mind emerging from matter at all, and he needs to use nothing more than the past 30 years of consciousness and brain research to substantiate his point.

Attempting to dismiss his view, which is more properly understood as “non-dualism” and more easily confused as “idealism”, as some sort of Cartesian contradiction seems premature.

While viewing emergence from mind may appear “idealistic” to you, emergence from either substance, physical or mind, one or the other, are both “absurd” positions when deconstructed.

Hoffman’s shows that the “emergence from the mind” model just produces “less contradictions and absurdities” than the physicalist model and points to how falsifiable experimentation can develop from this approach easier than it can with the physicalist approach.

Hoffmans’s view is monism, just like physicalism, your view is also a monism. I think you miss this often in your critiques.

Both views hold that the mind emerges from one substance. You share that in common with Don.

Both of you have hills to climb scientifically speaking, you’re in the same boat he is.

Why?

Because we all really have experience and thus we “appear” to live in a cartesian environment. The scientific challenge is to explain “how” reality appears so cartesian in the first place; that is the “hard problem”.

Illusion perhaps, but to suggest that modeling experience without acknowledging that experience “appears” distinct, even hidden, from the external world it “appears” to exist in is just bad thinking when you, a physicalist, are trying to find someway to “prove” that your assumption is more “scientific” than his assumption simply by removing the equation that contradicts…your assumption and making us question if Don’s is even scientific at all.

There are plenty of good reasons to be skeptical about either form of monism, yours or Don’s. There are good scientific reasons to be skeptical. And while most (but not all) scientists are physicalists, that’s their choice, their “assumption” to build upon, but, as Don’s view shows, it might not be necessary, or even possible, to use a physicalist model for a scientific theory of mind and consciousness.

Am I mistaken?