Materialism and Objectivity
119
would be true for all the objects having the same meaning or mental image—
but might be false for objects with the same formal definitions but different
meanings in mind. They would depend on subjective mental contents. That
is the very situation that the objective method is designed to avoid.
Imagine now that we try to use the objective method to study the mind.
The elementary constituents of mental phenomena are things such as feelings,
sensations, awareness and so on. If we applied the objective stance to these
concepts, they would be treated as undefined notions, without meaning, just
as points and lines are treated in geometry. We would not be allowed to attach
any intuitive interpretation to them, but instead, they would be treated as
tokens with no intrinsic meaning.
If this were done with mental entities, we would no longer be speaking of
mind. Subjective categories such as sensations and impressions are nothing but
the way they feel to us. If they were abstracted out of psychology, the resulting
science would be vacuous, a meaningless board game.
Claims about mental phenomena depend ineliminably on the meanings of
terms such as feelings and sensations, and cannot be treated as the objects of
physics are treated. One can study the material universe while pretending there
is no mind, but one cannot study mind while pretending there is no mind.
The question that arises in that case is the following: Can the science of
mind be regarded as the study of a material system, or not? Is it possible for
a material system not to yield to objective analysis? This is not a textbook
of philosophy, so I will not go further into this question. But I surmise, and
propose, that phenomena which don’t allow themselves to be studied objectively are not material phenomena. This suggests that we may define material
phenomena to be exactly those phenomena that are amenable to be studied
objectively, as formal systems. Phenomena which are not amenable to being
treated objectively are not material. They are phenomena of a different kind,
located in a different order of reality.
119
would be true for all the objects having the same meaning or mental image—
but might be false for objects with the same formal definitions but different
meanings in mind. They would depend on subjective mental contents. That
is the very situation that the objective method is designed to avoid.
Imagine now that we try to use the objective method to study the mind.
The elementary constituents of mental phenomena are things such as feelings,
sensations, awareness and so on. If we applied the objective stance to these
concepts, they would be treated as undefined notions, without meaning, just
as points and lines are treated in geometry. We would not be allowed to attach
any intuitive interpretation to them, but instead, they would be treated as
tokens with no intrinsic meaning.
If this were done with mental entities, we would no longer be speaking of
mind. Subjective categories such as sensations and impressions are nothing but
the way they feel to us. If they were abstracted out of psychology, the resulting
science would be vacuous, a meaningless board game.
Claims about mental phenomena depend ineliminably on the meanings of
terms such as feelings and sensations, and cannot be treated as the objects of
physics are treated. One can study the material universe while pretending there
is no mind, but one cannot study mind while pretending there is no mind.
The question that arises in that case is the following: Can the science of
mind be regarded as the study of a material system, or not? Is it possible for
a material system not to yield to objective analysis? This is not a textbook
of philosophy, so I will not go further into this question. But I surmise, and
propose, that phenomena which don’t allow themselves to be studied objectively are not material phenomena. This suggests that we may define material
phenomena to be exactly those phenomena that are amenable to be studied
objectively, as formal systems. Phenomena which are not amenable to being
treated objectively are not material. They are phenomena of a different kind,
located in a different order of reality.