Mind/Matter dualism

It's mysterious because it's literally the only phenomena in the universe that has no physically observable component.

The only thing I don't agree with is with the notion of a dualism, experience in all it's "subjectivism", that is thoughts, feelings and sensations don't need to be the same substance, I mean there are also pluralist views on metaphysics that don't divide everything in two essential substances like Plato did.

I tend to move away from monism and dualism.

I'd also like to point out something else: it's a serious mistake to think that brain cells, synapses and other parts of the brain are the same thing as thoughts, feelings or sensations, brain cells and other parts of the brain are not subjective entities and most scientists that don't mistake their metaphysical views on the world with science are very aware that all we can do is associate thoughts with some parts of the brain and that this association doesn't imply sameness at all (this would be like confusing causes and effects like the same thing thus making impossible even think of causal relations) and if you have any doubts about that you can look up the law of identity, it's simple a thought is not the same as a brain cell, they don't share the same atributes and relations, for example a thought has an intimate relationship with language which you can't tell simply observing a brain, people need to talk to you in order to let you know what they are thinking.

In either case, the older I get, the more dualism seems like horse shit. In the physics world, phenomena that at first seemed dualistic (such as electricity and magnetism) were later discovered to be part of the same phenomena (electromagnetism). There has been a battle for over a century to connect other seemingly separate parts, into what is called a grand unified theory, with string theory being a possible candidate, although there's no known way to prove it due to the incredibly small scale at which strings are said to exist.

Anyway, the fact that physics keeps trying to bridge the gap between seemingly unrelated phenomena tells me that making any sort of divide between phenomena is ultimately a sign of our ignorance. If you keep scaling things up, everything gets lumped into one large, overarching system. I suspect thoughts, abstract and elusive as they are, can fit within the framework of particles and quanta, but a new theoretical system must be developed which can encompass both worlds. Problem with this is that we have to determine what the hell thoughts are and how to measure them, because otherwise there is nothing to describe. If you can't describe thoughts, then you can't develop a theory that pairs it with materialism.

You seem to be more keen of monism then and I think you are refering to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/181284-human-consciousness-is-simply-a-state-of-matter-like-a-solid-or-liquid-but-quantum

Could be total bull, but this article seems to favor consciousness as having quantum properties...

I'm currently thinking that the non-location of thoughts is actually a false problem that is product of mistaking the subjective with the objective, this confusion leads to dualism and a platonic views on metaphysics, thinking of the subjective as objective entities, like Plato's theory of forms or ideas for instance.

Still trying to figure it out, but the thing is basically that the subject implies objective entities that have a location (like a body and all it's parts) so when we think we do it from where we are located.

GoatLord said:

It's mysterious because it's literally the only phenomena in the universe that has no physically observable component.

Untrue. Have you not heard of functional MRI?

Elaborate.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. Activity in certain areas of the brain as detected by fMRI has been associated with certain kinds of thoughts and actions.

You might say that a scientist using fMRI isn't actually observing your thoughts (begging the question of what the activity she's observing actually represents), but surely she is; she just has a different perspective than you do.