Matter and space are both mental models and mathematical abstractions that describe high level patterns well, but fall apart when we measure at higher resolution. The material objects and space we experience are constructs of our mind; the physical universe cannot be experienced.
After the end of Christian metaphysical dominance, our culture got rid of the supernatural, but not of Descartes two substances, because res extensa seems given, yet in the way we understand it (intuitive physics modified by Newton and Einstein), how can it produce consciousness?
The most important philosophical contribution of the 20th century are computational languages, and that they can be implemented in physics (eg in brains), and that both world model and agentic ideas (including the idea of being conscious) can be implemented in such languages.
Repairing Descartes should not reduce res cogitans to res extensa, but give res extensa its rightful status as a mental domain (the real-time world model), so that res extensa and res cogitans coexist in every mind, while a computationalized physics implements the mind.
@Plinz Doesn't this make a new kind of dualism, between "res computans" and its implementations of both res extensa and res cogitans? A dualism between unknowable reality and knowable virtuality?
@Plinz Or rather, between *unexperiencable* reality and experiencable virtuality
@Plinz You could argue that virtuality is contained in reality, so that it's monist, but *from our perspective* there are two realities, one virtual and one real A map is made out of physical molecules from the terrain, but its representational content can't be mistaken for the terrain
@metaphorician @Plinz I agree w/ your queries but i find it wild that people (not referring to you) seem to invoke so easily the concept of representational content. Humans have it but what makes something into a RC? If this were the product of natural processes would this chemical etching be a RC?
@metaphorician @Plinz I believe RCs exist—in us & animals—but i don’t think it’s easy to explain how is it that they exist. Consider a planet where abiogenesis hadn’t happened. Some equivalent of that photosensitive plate formed naturally. Sunlight reflects off a tree & falls on the plate. I’d say 1/4
@metaphorician @Plinz that the plate pattern doesn’t refer to anything. It doesn’t represent any more than a broken glass represents the rock that broke it or a fallen domino represents the falling of some other piece. Physical stuff are what they are in themselves—they don’t refer outside of them 2/4
@metaphorician @Plinz It’s you who takes the sand pattern to represent the nodal lines. The tree pattern on the photographic plate & the sand pattern on the Chladni plate aren’t even a thing! The molecular & sand "pixels" in themselves don’t know they make a pattern, let alone a "tree" 3/4