On mental states

[Magical Realist]

There's a huge variety of mental states. Some are vividly conscious. Others are liminal or in-between states of awareness and dreamfulness. Are some mental states more subjective than others? Would one be said to be more subjective in one's believing than say in one's perceiving? Are some mental states non conscious and purely causal in nature? Does every mental state have an object? What about pain? Is there subjectivity without a mental state? Is there any "I" without a mental state to be in?
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"A mental state, or a mental property, is a state of mind of a person. Mental states comprise a diverse class, including perception, pain/pleasure experience, belief, desire, intention, emotion, and memory. There is controversy concerning the exact definition of the term. According to epistemic approaches, the essential mark of mental states is that their subject has privileged epistemic access while others can only infer their existence from outward signs. Consciousness-based approaches hold that all mental states are either conscious themselves or stand in the right relation to conscious states. Intentionality-based approaches, on the other hand, see the power of minds to refer to objects and represent the world as the mark of the mental. According to functionalist approaches, mental states are defined in terms of their role in the causal network independent of their intrinsic properties. Some philosophers deny all the aforementioned approaches by holding that the term "mental" refers to a cluster of loosely related ideas without an underlying unifying feature shared by all. Various overlapping classifications of mental states have been proposed. Important distinctions group mental phenomena together according to whether they are sensory, propositional, intentional, conscious or occurrent. Sensory states involve sense impressions like visual perceptions or bodily pains. Propositional attitudes, like beliefs and desires, are relations a subject has to a proposition. The characteristic of intentional states is that they refer to or are about objects or states of affairs.

Conscious states are part of the phenomenal experience while occurrent states are causally efficacious within the owner's mind, with or without consciousness. An influential classification of mental states is due to Franz Brentano, who argues that there are only three basic kinds: presentations, judgments, and phenomena of love and hate."-----
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_sta...d%20memory.

"My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think… and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire."---Jean-Paul Sartre

[C C]

The one thing they all have in common (the unifying factor) is that mental states present themselves rather than being absent (the latter being the trademark condition of anything that is non-conscious in the fullest sense).

And yet 99% of philosophers and interested scientists fail to note something as blatantly obvious as the above. If a materialist acknowledges that after death there is no experience of anything -- neither the presence of personal thoughts nor the presence of the world, that should be an "aha!" moment in which reversing that situation provides the most basic definition of what "mental" [and phenomenal consciousness] is.

Yet such zooms overhead. Despite it being the very consequence of their philosophical belief -- that matter is inert and devoid of mental states (rocks aren't conscious -- nothing "is there" to them).

It's why I've contended in the past that most people are implicit panpsychists, even if they deny it. Few, if any, materialists practice what they preach -- they project the representations of their brain upon an external world that is not present to itself. The latter is just absence (from the standpoint of materialism, anyway).

Like the long desceased Erwin Schrodinger, neuroscientist David Eagleman is one of the few exceptions. When he says below that there "is not real light in the world" he is very poorly trying to articulate that a mind-independent or non-conscious world does not manifest to itself, by definition.

VIDEO EXCERPT (David Eagleman): In the same way that colors don't actually exist in the outside world. All you have is electromagnetic radiation of different wavelengths, and your brain constructs color. Maybe the brain constructs [the flow of] time and there's no such thing as that. Of course, that's completely bizarre for us to try to wrap our heads around. But this is the sense in which time might be one of the most stubborn psychological filters by which we're experiencing the world. It's hard to reach behind that, just just in the same way that it's hard to imagine that there's only electromagnetic radiation and not real light in the world. I mean, just as a your brain is is locked in darkness inside your skull, your brain doesn't see [the outside as it is]. It doesn't experience light or photons itself, it only gets conversions into electrical signals of photons, and it literally lights up the world [the brain's representation of the world] and you see this whole thing.

Is Time Real? ... https://youtu.be/G4ihCsAPPXQ

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/G4ihCsAPPXQ

[Magical Realist]

The world presents itself as lit up not as if by some external light source or perspective. It instantiates itself in a glowing incandescence of Light that shines everywhere from within. Everything is like us, rocks and trees and stars, all lit up and radiating from the inside out. At the very core of our minds we are one with this universal presencing of Being from nonconsciousness.

[Secular Sanity]

The same applies to all our senses. Anil Seth has said pretty much the same thing. That’s why he calls reality a "controlled hallucination".

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/OuANADGjzrM

Anil Seth: Sometime beliefs can conflict with what science reveals. It’s not always comfortable, and I think being a scientist, and trying to understand something like human consciousness and psychology does mean that you have to face the possibility that you’ll learn things about the mind and the brain, which might conflict with some otherwise comforting beliefs, and then you’ve got some work to do, but I think that’s work that’s always worth doing. I think that’s because I have this prior belief—higher level belief that understanding more about how things are, will in the long run, always enable me to live a better life, to manage better, to cope with adversity better. Now, that might be wrong. I might be entirely wrong. Maybe it’s better to just live a life of comfortable delusion.

Dr Rangan Chatterjee: Your perspective that we’re basically living these controlled hallucinations, but if we just take that for a moment, and apply it to death, could we make any case for that death then is actually an illusion?

Anil Seth: I’m not sure we can. Of course, it depends on what you think death is in the first place. For me, and again I might be wrong about this, but witnessing the intimate dependency of consciousness on the brain and the body, and the changes in the brain are instantly reflected in the changes in experience. How the changes in the brain under anesthesia interrupt the flow of consciousness, it’s very-very hard for me to reconcile that with the idea that consciousness for an individual persists when the brain stops entirely, which is when we medically say that death happens.

I think we could though...make a case that death is an illusion, if death only exists for the living. 

"The outside universe we perceive doesn’t exist as such. Through a series of electrical and chemical reactions we generate a reality internally. We create forests and oceans, warmth and cold. We read words and hear voices, and form interpretations, and then in an instance, we produce a response. All this in a world of our own creation." —Rick Rubin

Knowledge might help you cope with adversity better, but looking back, I think it might be better to just live a life of comfortable delusion—less responsibility. 

[Magical Realist]

“What if I told you that the world around you, with its rich colors, textures, sounds, and scents is an illusion, a show put on for you by your brain? If you could perceive reality as it is, you would be shocked by its colorless, odorless, tasteless silence. Outside your brain, there is just energy and matter.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

[C C]

[...] I think we could though...make a case that death is an illusion, if death only exists for the living. 

Yah, from a subjective standpoint. There's no cognition after the fact to verify it.

Goethe: "It is quite impossible for a thinking being to imagine nonbeing, a cessation of thought and life. In this sense, everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.”

One might contend there's even a circularity to one's life history, in terms of a fundamental "blank identity" at both ends. Conscious-wise, we incrementally emerge from a "not even nothingness" in the fetal stage of the womb, progress through various "in the light" developments, and then return to that same "emptiness" after death. But if regarding that as a transitional gateway identity, it must be noted that there is no retention and passage of information of who one is before death occurs.

So it's a kind of superfluous generic identity, but one that Eastern thought makes much hay over. (As well as some corners of Western naturalism: Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity).

[...] "The outside universe we perceive doesn’t exist as such. Through a series of electrical and chemical reactions we generate a reality internally. We create forests and oceans, warmth and cold. We read words and hear voices, and form interpretations, and then in an instance, we produce a response. All this in a world of our own creation." —Rick Rubin

Knowledge might help you cope with adversity better, but looking back, I think it might be better to just live a life of comfortable delusion—less responsibility. 

I actually treat the extrospective half of our experiences (what falls out of our sensory processes) as the legit "outside world" that has evidence, because we can have intersubjective agreement about that representation (similar to how most different web browsers still render the code of a webpage into the same screen image and speaker sounds).

And I even include the physics depiction in that because detecting subatomic particles with instruments means that they are phenomenal entities -- a legitimate part of Plato or Kant's sensible/empirical world. Rather than belonging to the metaphysical world (the transcendent or second level version of an external world that rationalists focus on or treat as the real or ultimate one, but have no empirical access to it -- only untestable inferences).

Metaphysics (or dealing with existence that is not mind/brain representation, or the "noumenal world") is a blank chalkboard. So as individuals we might as well project whatever quasi-argument produced things we want onto it (if they serve practical purposes). As long as such doesn't become an authoritarian club trying to swallow everybody else up. The latter is often going to happen sometimes even if sticking strictly with the empirical world or kosher physical philosophies and dogma. As illustrated by militant materialist and "non-religious" aspirations like Marxism.

[C C]

“What if I told you that the world around you, with its rich colors, textures, sounds, and scents is an illusion, a show put on for you by your brain? If you could perceive reality as it is, you would be shocked by its colorless, odorless, tasteless silence. Outside your brain, there is just energy and matter.”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

And even the latter are represented by abstract description (symbols completely artificial in origin) when not displayed as particles or something detected by equipment/apparatus.

[Secular Sanity]

I actually treat the extrospective half of our experiences (what falls out of our sensory processes) as the legit "outside world" that has evidence, because we can have intersubjective agreement about that representation (similar to how most different web browsers still render the code of a webpage into the same screen image and speaker sounds).

And I even include the physics depiction in that because detecting subatomic particles with instruments means that they are phenomenal entities -- a legitimate part of Plato or Kant's sensible/empirical world. Rather than belonging to the metaphysical world (the transcendent or second level version of an external world that rationalists focus on or treat as the real or ultimate one, but have no empirical access to it -- only untestable inferences).   

Metaphysics (or dealing with existence that is not mind/brain representation, or the "noumenal world") is a blank chalkboard. So as individuals we might as well project whatever quasi-argument produced things we want onto it (if they serve practical purposes). As long as such doesn't become an authoritarian club trying to swallow everybody else up. The latter is often going to happen sometimes even if sticking strictly with the empirical world or kosher physical philosophies and dogma. As illustrated by militant materialist and "non-religious" aspirations like Marxism.

Exactly, you can only imagine matter or energy existing between conscious minds. What would the universe be like without conscious minds to perceive it? It was there before you, and will be there after you, but the universe will not be perceived. Does it still exist? I don’t think it does. Existence itself requires a conscious being to project an image onto.

Do you ever regret it though, peeking behind the curtain, Cece?

[C C]

[...] Do you ever regret it though, peeking behind the curtain, Cece?

I did for the months or years when I didn't peak far enough. In terms of initial beliefs, certainly I'd like to be able to meet deceased family members, friends, colleagues, etc again in a paradise or whatever.

But actually I conceive more possibilities than I originally did. It's just that pessimism or "too good to be true" keeps the best ones from really being favored to a significant degree.

_

[Secular Sanity]

[...] Do you ever regret it though, peeking behind the curtain, Cece?

I did for the months or years when I didn't peak far enough. In terms of initial beliefs, certainly I'd like to be able to meet deceased family members, friends, colleagues, etc again in a paradise or whatever.

But actually I conceive more possibilities than I originally did. It's just that pessimism or "too good to be true" keeps the best ones from really being favored to a significant degree.

_

Non-existence is easier to swallow than some sort of afterlife. It’s not that, it’s more like—"consider the cattle" and "the last men".

It doesn’t have to be delectable, just edible. Got anything that I can swallow, Cece?