AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Jul 05, 2022 10:57 pm
Hi Federica,
I was wondering if you noticed BK answered your question about bodily boundaries and what your thoughts were on his answer? As I'm sure you know by now, I have my own thoughts on it but it would be nice to hear yours first, whenever you have a chance.
Hi Ashvin,
Yes I have noticed Bernardo’s answer and I am unsurprisingly unsatisfied with it. I can certainly write down my thoughts about it, but let me warn you, and anyone else tempted to read here - this is going to be as boring and pedantic as it can be!
First, I would get out of the way the part of the question he hasn’t touched at all - NDEs and other similar phenomena. He could have neutralized that part by saying that the boundary is not perfect but porous. Ok let's drop it. Another detail, he mentioned that the body boundary can at a minimum be redefined as nervous system boundary, maybe to avoid remarks about skin, I’m not sure. Anyhow, I am taking note of that in what follows.
Now, I consider BK an intellectually honest person, however I have noticed that the body boundary as exposed in ‘The idea of the world’ and the way he has set up his argument in the video are somewhat different. Briefly, the statement under scrutiny originates from our ordinary habit of, in BK’s own published words, “delineating a subset of the physical world on functional or structural grounds and treating the subset as a separate entity in some sense. The question is whether such delineation is ontic or epistemic”. As we know, he then argues that such functional / structural delineation is ontic and non-arbitrary for living beings and epistemically convenient, conceptual and arbitrary for all other physical objects. My critique was that the delineation seems epistemic in both cases, and that picking up the boundary of the physical body as a way out of the decomposition problem of MAL seems arbitrary, not ontic.
In the video though, BK takes a different turn and says “...my argument that physical objects are only nominal is on the basis of function, while the argument for carving out our bodies is not based on function, it is based on experience”. I see this as a strategy to dismiss the question by detaching ‘function’ from his own argument as developed in the book, then throwing ‘function’ as a lasso of conflation around my critique in an attempt to restrain it within the supposed misunderstanding of function: “to carve out living beings as proper parts of the universe is ontic but it’s not done on a functional basis, and that’s the conflation that is in the question. She is lifting the basis of my argument for saying that physical objects are just nominal functions and she is bringing it to the argument about bodies being actual subsets of the universe. But my argument for that has nothing to do with functionality. And that’s the error”. This really seems an expedient to attract attention towards a supposed dichotomy function/experience (absent in the original model) only to conclude that my question is on the wrong side of the dichotomy. Moreover - and I can be wrong here, I am not used to the methods of philosophy - I would suspect that founding the argument on such a dichotomy would be logically wrong (big coincidence, BK doesn't do it in the book). Because if I want to demonstrate that, within a given set of elements, a property - for example quality of ontic delineation - only belongs to some subset of elements - such as for example living beings - in relation to other subsets which do not possess the property, I should run on all subsets a common test not two separate ones - such as for instance functional/structural carveout - and show how in that occurrence, different subsets display or do not display the property. So one should test the same criterion of functional/structural carving-out, not two different criteria, on all subsets, to demonstrate that only one subset passes the test. According to BK living bodies alone pass the test.
Again, in the book, and not in the video answer, BK respects this logic and concludes that the functionality of living beings is ontically separate, and not of epistemic convenience, insofar as it “does not merely help us structure the conceptual knowledge of the physical world”. This functionality consists in the living body/the nervous system being “intrinsically associated” with experience. “I cannot just decide that the chair I am sitting in is integral to the body in the way that I can decide that the handle is integral to the mug. (...) The criterion here is not merely functional/structural, but the range of mentation intrinsically associated with the body” where “there is no epistemic freedom to move boundaries at will".
That’s the diversion that’s been used to avoid the question. What’s the part of sincere conviction versus rhetorical habit I’m not sure. Another thing I noticed is that in the examples of 'experience' only sensory perceptions are mentioned, like the photons in Australia, the needles in the arm, and so on. Be it by coincidence or careful consideration, thinking is left out from the examples of conscious experiences BK provides. To be fair, I also see today that my question could have been expressed in more incisive terms, going directly to dualism of subject and object. At the time I wrote it, I was just carefully following BKs model, looking for weak links, ready to twist a knife in them. Not in a bad spirit - after all, I thought I had found a promising approach to understanding reality - but I wanted to be sure, so I was searching for breaches. It’s my intellectual standard way to understand ideas and check internal consistency. But even without knowing what I am realizing today about thinking, BK’s model seems, after careful consideration, fragile and I wonder if he will end up moving away from it in the future. I hope he will.
Because after all, as it is now, the implications of the model are that my brain, while it doesn’t generate my experience, is the extrinsic appearance of my mental processes on the screen of perception of another living observer, or subject. So on their screen of their perception, my brain is an airplane cockpit indicator, a representation of my experiential life. At the same time my brain/nervous system is also an ontologically separate, non-arbitrary physical system in the physical universe, by virtue of containing within its physical boundaries, or by virtue of “being intrinsically associated with”, my experience/my perceptions, while not containing those of my friend in Australia. So this same physical brain is “ontic” just for me, making me a legitimate, non-arbitrary separate subject of experience in the universe, while at the same time, for another observer, this brain is an extrinsic appearance, a nominal representation of foreign experience. When all living brains of the universe get ontic wild cards, while they also are extrinsic appearances, in a system where after all the one and only ontological primitive is supposed to be MAL, one can wonder how robust the model is in itself, even without opening the question of thinking...