An Immaterial Philosophy of Mind

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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In Plato’s dialogue The Phaedo, the philosopher Socrates spends the final hours before his execution discussing philosophy with his friends in a prison cell in Athens. This essay looks at one of his arguments.

Today’s scientific culture is largely materialist in orientation. In this context, ‘materialism’ doesn’t mean obsession with material goods and status, although that is certainly related to it. Materialism is instead the understanding that at bottom reality consists solely of material or physical forces or objects, from which everything else is both derived and dependent on. (There are philosophical distinctions made between ‘materialism’ and ‘physicalism’ but I’ll leave those aside for now.) Materialism is summarized in slogan form in terms of the sole reality of matter–energy existing in space-time.

This essay will make the case for one of Socrates’ argument against materialism, in an ancient line of reasoning which is simple in essence but which still carries weight.

Brain-Mind Identity

One frequently-cited argument for materialism or physicalism is that mind is the product of the brain. To many, this seems so obvious as to require no argument: what else could it be? If the brain is affected by drugs or intoxicants, the subject’s grasp of reality is correspondingly altered. Likewise, when the brain is damaged by accident or illness, so too our grip on reality. The brain is plainly the principal organ of consciousness.

And the brain, it is said, is a physical organ — examinable through instruments and neuroscience, and understandable as the product of evolutionary adaptation. Hence, if the brain is a physical organ, and mind is the product of the brain, then the mind can also be understood in physical terms.

Such, anyway, is materialist theory of mind¹.

But there is a large, unexplored assumption at the bottom of this chain of reasoning — and that is what we will explore here.

The Meaning of ‘Equals’

What I want to home in on in this argument is the claim that the mind or an act of thought is the same as neural activity — that an act of thought can be equated with the configuration or activities of neural matter. Or that mind just is neural matter, to put it in the simplest terms.

My point is this: whenever we claim that thought is identical with a neural configuration, we are already appealing to the concept of identity. But identity is not a physical object or process. It is a logical relation — a principle that allows us to recognize sameness across different instances or kinds of thing.

This raises a simple question. When we say that two things are the same, or equal, what exactly is the status of the relation expressed by the equals sign? And is the “=” itself something that can be understood in physical terms?

An argument of this kind has ancient origins. It appears in Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, where Socrates, sitting in his jail cell just prior to his death by poisoning, makes a striking point about our ability to recognize when things are equal.

Socrates points out that when we see two things that appear equal in size — for example, two stones or two pieces of wood — we are able to discern that they are equal even if they’re slightly different in some ways. We can do this because we already possess the idea of equality.

Socrates: “We say, I presume, that there is something equal, not of wood to wood, or stone to stone, or anything else of that sort, but the equal itself, something different besides all these. May we say that there is such a thing or not?”

Simmias: “Indeed, let us say most certainly that there is. It is amazing, by Zeus.”

Socrates: “And do we know what it is?”

Simmias: “Certainly,” he replied.

Socrates: “From where did we obtain the knowledge of this? Isn’t it as we just said? From seeing pieces of wood or stone or other equals, we have brought that equal to mind from these, and that (i.e. ‘the idea of equals’) is different from these (i.e. specific things that are equal)”².

Ideas as the Basis of Judgment

Notice the important distinction between the principle, or idea, of equality and the specific instances of equal things. The argument is that while it may seem obvious when two things are of equal dimension, in order to arrive at that judgment we must already possess an understanding of equality itself. We need to know what to look for, and how to recognise it when we see it — and this depends on our grasp of the concept of equality.

The Classics scholar Eric D. Perl explains:

This is precisely the point Plato is making when he characterizes forms as the reality of all things. “Have you ever seen any of these with your eyes? — In no way … Or by any other sense, through the body, have you grasped them? I am speaking about all things such as largeness, health, strength, and, in one word, the reality [ousia, true nature] of all other things, what each thing is” (Phd. 65d4–e1). Is there such a thing as health? Of course there is. Can you see it? Of course not. This does not mean that the forms are occult entities floating ‘somewhere else’ in ‘another world,’ a ‘Platonic heaven.’ It simply says that the intelligible identities which are the reality, the what-ness, of things are not themselves physical things to be perceived by the senses, but must be grasped by thought. ~ Eric D. Perl, Thinking Being³.

The point is straightforward: principles such as equality, largeness, or health are real features of the world, but they are not themselves physical objects. They are intelligible structures that can only be grasped by the mind.

In the case of the idea of equality, the mind appears constantly to draw on this capacity when gauging what is the same and what is different in order to arrive at a judgment. Much of this activity occurs beneath the threshold of conscious awareness, although it can be brought into view, as we are doing by discussing it. But any process of reasoning ultimately depends on statements of identity and difference: what is the same as something else, and what is not. This capacity is fundamental to inference itself and to our ability to perceive relationships between things — and between ideas.

Neuroscientific expertise — indeed any form of scientific expertise — relies on judgment. But judgment in turn rests on comparison: recognising what is the same and what is different. In other words, it depends on the ability to discern relations of equality and difference.

But here we come to the crucial point of the argument. We cannot observe this process from the outside, because we rely on it in order to assess whatever we are making a judgement about. It is the very faculty by which we determine what counts as objective⁴.

So when we claim that a thought is identical with a neural process, we are doing precisely this: we are attempting to describe thought or reason from the outside, as an objective process that can be analyzed in terms of its constituent elements — physical or neuronal and so forth. Yet the very act of making that judgement already presupposes the capacity for comparison and inference that we are trying to explain.

The Circular Reasoning of Materialism

Let us return to the original claim: that the neural configuration of the brain is identical with the content of a thought. This is itself an assertion of equality — a judgement that two apparently different things are in fact the same.

But such a judgement already presupposes the very capacity we have been discussing: the ability to recognize relations of identity and difference. These judgements are made constantly in the operations of conscious thought. We rely on them in determining, for example, what counts as physical and what does not. Scientific reasoning itself depends upon them. It is by means of judgement that we determine what counts as a satisfactory explanation and what counts as an objective description of reality.

The materialist claim that thought is a neural process is therefore itself a judgement about thought. It is an attempt to describe thinking from the outside — as a process that can be analyzed in terms of its constituent physical elements.

As another Classics scholar, Lloyd P. Gerson, puts it:

[According to Aristotle’s De Anima] … in thinking, the intelligible form is present in the intellect, and thinking itself is the identification of the intellect with this form. … When you think ‘equals taken from equals are equal’ this is a perfectly universal truth which you see when you think it. But this truth, since it is universal, could not be identical with any material particular located in space and time.”⁵

The point is that thinking itself does not operate at the level of particular physical states. The objects of reasoned inference are universal: principles that hold in every instance. When we grasp a proposition such as “equals taken from equals are equal,” we recognize a truth that is not tied to any particular place or time.

Accordingly, a universal truth claim — such as the claim that mind is identical with brain — cannot itself be identical with a particular material configuration located in space and time. If the object of thought is universal, then the activity by which we apprehend it cannot simply be reduced to one physical event among other physical events.

Some Caveats

Of course, a sophisticated materialist will not accept this argument without reply. Contemporary philosophy of mind offers several ways of responding. Some argue that logical concepts such as equality are simply patterns realized in neural architecture; others appeal to notions such as emergence or supervenience, suggesting that universal principles need not exist as independent entities in order to arise from complex physical systems. On such views, the capacity for judgement is itself a feature of the brain’s organization rather than evidence of an immaterial intellect.

Nor does the Platonist escape every difficulty. To speak of intelligible forms or universal truths raises further questions about how such realities are to be understood and how the human mind is able to grasp them.

As Eric D. Perl observes, however, these forms need not be conceived as free-floating entities in a separate realm. They can instead be understood in terms of the cognitive acts by which intelligible structures are grasped. Viewed in this way, the impact of such objection is defused, at least to some extent.

So the question raised by Socrates remains. Any attempt to explain thought as an object of neuro-scientific investigation already presupposes the activity of judgment by which explanations are assessed and identities recognized. This is also true of supervenience or emergence arguments. To recognize them as a neural pattern depends on such acts.

Conclusion

In the Phaedo, Socrates draws attention to a simple but profound fact: our ability to recognize equality in particular things presupposes an intelligible principle that is not itself given in sensory experience.

That observation continues to echo in modern debates about the nature of mind. Neuroscience may illuminate the physical conditions under which thinking occurs, but the act of understanding — grasping universal relations and recognizing truths — does not easily fit within a description of material processes alone no matter how sophisticated.

The ancient question therefore remains: whether mind is simply another physical process, or whether the activity of reason belongs to a different order altogether.

Footnotes and References

  1. D. M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968).

  2. Plato, The Phaedo 74a. Full text available at The Platonic Foundation
    https://www.platonicfoundation.org/translation/phaedo/ (retrieved 24/03/2026)

  3. Eric D. Perl, Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition, (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

  4. Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pages 4–6, where Nagel says basic elements of reason such as the law of non-contradiction are ‘thoughts that that we cannot get outside of’— because we have to use them in any attempt to evaluate what they are.

  5. From Platonism vs Naturalism (recorded lecture) Lloyd P. Gerson; also the subject of Platonism and Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy, Cornell University Press, 2024.

Cross posted at Philosophy Today

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Very nice writing! It has a clear, structured Cartesian style and is easy to read. Great job.

I agree with your overall purpose, though I would apply some heavy corrections derived from my [matter-life-thought] metaphysical system.

Here is what I agree with 100%:
Thought, as exemplified by the truth of 2+2=4, has absolutely nothing to do with the Matter category. In humans, there is obviously neural activity when processing “2+2=4,” but it will never be the exact same neural activity between two individuals, nor even within the same individual at different times. You are entirely correct: there is zero strict equality between Matter and Thought. Furthermore, when a Large Language Model (LLM) processes “2+2=4,” it happens within a completely different “material” architecture that no one fully understands.

However, I will offer just one major correction (among many possible ones):
Assigning the act of “equalization” (or categorization of things) strictly to Thought is a category mistake. Animals have no access to the category of Thought, yet they perfectly differentiate, recognize, and equalize objects within their environment.

This specific error stems directly from the faulty [Nature-Human] bi-categorical framework of natural human thinking (which sadly includes classical Philosophy). There is simply no way to ever “solve” the Matter-Thought equation because the crucial middle term—the Life category—is missing. Thought articulates with Life, not directly with Matter.

Once you adopt a functional, multi-categorical [Matter-Life-Thought] framework, the entire mind-body problem clears up immediately, primarily through the introduction of a specific, multi-categorical concept of causality.

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Good stuff as usual. Mind if I voice my inner Andy Rooney?

Odd, innit? The deeper the explanation via speculative metaphysics regarding human thought, the less is determinable by physical processes. On the other hand, the more exacting the manifestations of physical processes, the less explanation for human thought follows therefrom.

Human reason is inherently circular, and insofar as the entirely physical brain is the origin of all human mentality, there is no indication of any form of physical law in the collective manifestations of human mentality.

Reason will not allow its questions to go unanswered, but reason will not accept that human thought, even as originating in the physical brain, is determinable according to natural law in conformity to all such physical processes.

Different order indeed.

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I re-read your post, and it can actually be summarized by one central consequence of the MCogito logic: Thought knows only Thought; ideas know only other ideas.

Consequently, Materialism knows only the idea of Matter. Materialism is merely a low-fidelity (low-Q) version of Plato’s idealism: the idea of Matter has simply replaced Plato’s idea of the Absolute.

The immediate objection naturally arises: “But we know physics is real! So how do we know it?”

This question is strictly impossible to solve within the defective [Nature-Human] bi-categorical framework of classical Philosophy.

It leads directly to the circular aporias you described: materialistic reductionism still needs to be conceived using the categories of Thought (equality, logic, etc.); therefore, it has no truly independent existence from Thought.

All of these aporias vanish instantly within the [Matter-Life-Thought] multi-categorical framework. In this system, the Thought category is totally independent of Matter, yet it knows Matter intimately via the metaphysical concept of the “differential speed of Being output.” as you can (but will not) discover here : A new concept of causality for the matter-life-thought multi-categorical metaphysics

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The arguments in the Phaedo are more complex and unresolved. There is a tension between the particular and the universal, Mind and human thought, the intelligible and the physical.

Socrates identifies two kinds of causes, the first “safe and ignorant” the second “more sophisticated”. What makes a body hot, for example, is not heat but fire. (105b-c) To the extent that equality is what makes things equal it is at best a partial and incomplete account.

Are these cognitive acts the acts of Mind or minds? Socrates tells the following story:

“ One day I heard someone reading, as he said, from a book of Anaxagoras, and saying that it is Mind that directs and is the cause of everything. I was delighted with this cause and it seemed to me good, in a way, that Mind should be the cause of all. I thought that if this were so, the directing Mind would direct everything and arrange each thing in the way that was best. If then one wished to know the cause of each thing, why it comes to be or perishes or exists, one had to find what was the best way for it to be, or to be acted upon, or to act. On these premises then it befitted a man to investigate only, about this and other things, what is best.” (97b-d)

Socrates accepted Mind as the cause, but instead of inquiring about what Mind is, or how it arranged things, he sought an explanation for why it is best that things be the way they are. He did not find such an explanation in Anaxagoras or anywhere else. He thus launched his “second sailing” to find the cause. (99d).

“After this, he said, when I had wearied of looking into beings, I thought that I must be careful to avoid the experience of those who watch an eclipse of the sun, for some of them ruin their eyes unless they watch its reflection in water or some such material. A similar thought crossed my mind, and I feared that my soul would be altogether blinded if I looked at things with my eyes and tried to grasp them with each of my senses. So I thought I must take refuge in discussions and investigate the truth of beings by means of accounts [logoi] … On each occasion I put down as hypothesis whatever account I judge to be mightiest; and whatever seems to me to be consonant with this, I put down as being true, both about cause and about all the rest, while what isn’t, I put down as not true.” (99d-100a)

The equal itself is just such an hypothesis. It is not how Mind directs things but how Socrates’ mind directs his inquiry. That is to say, how we use the senses to make sense of things.

Socrates reminds us:

“Because our present argument concerns the beautiful itself, and the good itself, and just and holy, no less than the equal; in fact, as I say, it concerns everything on which we set this seal, “what it is”, in the questions we ask and in the answers we give.” (75d)

I would add another reminder. The overriding question of the Phaedo is what will happen to Socrates when he dies. At a critical juncture it looks as though argument fails. It is incapable of answering.

Echecrates, who says very little, asks:

“What argument shall we ever trust now?” (88d)

The problem is misologic. Socrates attempts to save philosophy from the hatred of argument. What happens to him, what happens to them, and what happens to us when we die is not a question that we can answer, at least not while we are alive. In other words, the extent to which answers are available to us they cannot be separated from us as living, embodied beings.

In line with the Socratic quest, whatever answers we come up with must be in terms of what is best for us to believe. Rather than a single universal answer, the answer must be in terms of the particular. What is best for me or you or someone else to believe. What is best for Cebes or Simmias, who fear death, is not what is best for Socrates.

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Great OP. Let me engage with your question from a Husserlian perspective. For Husserl, as for Socrates and Plato, logical laws (like identity, non-contradiction, equality) are not empirical facts about brains, but ideal structures that make knowledge possible. But his phenomenological method goes on to undermine the ground for dualistic thinking concerning the relation between the act of understanding and material processes. For Husserl material processes and acts of understanding such things as identities are neither out there, independent of the subject, nor an invention of the mind. Both are products of synthetic acts of intentional construction, but of different sorts. In one sort, physical realities are constituted, and in another sort, idealities like logical
propositions and mathematical structures are produced.

So for Husserl the activity of reason and physical processes belong to the same underlying order, or more precisely, physical processes and logical idealities are two kinds of constructed products of acts of reason (the constitutive activity of consciousness), which by their nature are already about the world. Through a shift in attitude, we can see that world in terms of constituted objects of a physical kind, through another shift we can see the world in terms of constituted logico-mathematical idealities, and through yet another shift in attitude we can uncover the constituting acts of consciousness through which both kinds of objects are generated.

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Great OP!

Reading Husserl and others such as Frege, I realise their intention to defend the Eidos against threats such as the psychological. In Husserl’s Logical Investigations, one finds something like this:

“If the number 2 were a mental state, it would be different in every person and at every moment. But 2 + 2 = 4 is true for everyone and always. Therefore, the objects of logic cannot be mental states.”

To me, this seems a compelling argument, but I wonder whether ideality lies outside the world as a separate realm—a Platonic realm—or whether it is within the world as an idealisation brought about through acts of repetition. A decisive aspect, which Husserl develops particularly in his later writings: ideality is the condition of possibility for communication and science.

If the objects of knowledge were purely individual and temporal, there could be no shared science. Ideality guarantees that what I think of as a ‘triangle’ is the same as what you think of. In the Crisis, Husserl calls this the ideal objectivity that grounds the world of modern science.

However, I wonder: how can something be both independent of subjectivity and constituted by it? If the ideal is unable to escape the particular consciousness of the phenomenologist, do we not fall into a subjectivism that betrays the universalist intention of ideality?

Must not ideality have a correlate in the world as repetition in order to ensure precisely its ideality?

This is where language and the media come in. Taking the ‘first geometer’ as an example, language makes it possible for meaning to be reactivated and to fulfil its ideality as that which escapes the particular subjectivity of the first geometer. For ideality to remain genuinely ideal — identical, universal, meaningful — it must be capable of being reactivated: every new act of understanding must be able to trace back to the original meaning.

What do I mean by this? That a philosophy of mind or consciousness which emphasises ideal contents, idealities, the Eidos, cannot exclude the world (communication, other subjectivities) as the horizon upon which ideality and the Eidos are realised. To think of the Eidos is to think of intersubjectivity and language necessarily as its horizon of realisation.

One could go further, pointing out that language has less universal or ideal scope than writing, and that the ‘sign’ conceals the possibility of idealisation in its deepest form. But that would be to digress too far.

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Yes, indeed. But by the same token, we don’t gain linguistic access to the origin of a ideality simply by repeating an identity. The idealizations of science become reified into method, and the original meanings become obscured beneath sedimentations. In the case of the proto-geometer, it is the pragmatic activities with things that give rise to purposes and aims that make it desirable to construct smooth lines and such, these are the original meanings. Idealities can remain ideal through linguistic transmission without reduction to the originating acts, but then we haven’t arrived at their basis in primordial constituting acts.

The first geometer produces a set of operations or concepts grounded in practical, proto-mathematical activity: measurement, drawing, manipulating materials. These activities carry purposes, aims, and meanings that motivate the abstraction. Over time, as geometry becomes formalized, techniques and idealizations are sedimented into methods. Subsequent generations learn to manipulate symbols, construct lines, and apply definitions without necessarily recalling the original motivations or aims.

Crucially, idealities can remain genuinely ideal even if the original acts are forgotten. What matters is that the ideal is coherent, repeatable, and shareable, the formal structures persist independently of historical awareness.

Husserl argues that the original “motivations” of the first geometer become obscured under sedimented methods, but the ideal objectivity of geometric entities remains intact. That is, the triangle, the line, the number are still universal, even if the historical context that prompted them is no longer accessed.

The ideality itself (its truth, necessity, and universality) does not require knowing the first act. What is lost when the connection to the first acts is severed is historical or motivational meaning: why a certain definition or construction was desirable in the first place, what practical aims it answered, or what the “original insight” intended.

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IMO, repetition (as condition of ideality) is also found, in this case, within the inner workings of consciousness, in the primordial constitutive acts. The synthesis of identification (Deckungssynthese) occurs by establishing the sameness of the object through multiple and temporally dispersed acts. Within the interiority of consciousness, for something to be identical and reproducible, it requires the form of retention and protention within the internal flow of temporal consciousness, which functions as a system of signs (Retention is not the original impression itself, but its modification: the ‘just-now’ that recedes. But for there to be an awareness of time—for the flow to be a flow and not a discontinuous series of instants—the present impression must bear within itself the mark of the immediate past. Isn’t that exactly what a sign does? A sign is the presence of an absence. Retention brings to mind something that is no longer there.). Hence, language does not come to be added as something external; rather, it repeats in a certain way the structure of temporality as a system of signs.

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Yes it is. But we should distinguish between repetition with regard to primordial time consciousness and the repetition of an ideal object. The “repetition” at work in primordial time-constitution is not the repetition of an identical object, but the continuous modification of a single temporal flow. In numerical repetition, the same object is intended again and again. Identity is constituted by recognizing the same as the same across distinct acts.

By contrast, in primordial time-consciousness there are not yet discrete “acts” in the same sense. There is a flow in which the now becomes retention, and retention modifies continuously. There is no “repetition” of an identical content. Rather, there is a continuous self-differentiation of presence.
In sum, retention is not the repetition of identity, but the condition for any later possibility of identity.

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Thanks. That is very much the kind of understanding I’m pursuing also. I think the whole conversation has been bedevilled from time immemorial from percieving the ideas as kinds of things.

There’s a kind of subtle dualism operating here, though. What is ‘inside’ and what ‘outside’? Consider ‘the domain of natural numbers’. That is not ‘outside the world’ but it is also not ‘something inside it’. I think the struggle is to understand the sense in which numbers (as an example of ideal objects) exist. As soon as you ask ‘where do numbers exist’ then you’re essentially trying to locate them in the manifold of spacetime. And of course it is natural to think of ‘objects in spacetime’ as exhaustive of what exists, and therefore of what is real.

The heuristic I’ve long held on to, is that numbers (etc) are real but not existent. To say they exists is to reify them, make them into things, which they’re not. They are cognitive acts, but, as Husserl says, not to be understood in terms of psychology.

Bertrand Russell (of all people) said it best, when he said ‘universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thought’ (Problems of Philosophy, World of Universals).

But consider Husserl’s idea of the transcendental ego. That is, in a sense, ‘the ideal subject’ — not a particular individual. The particular individual is the individual ego, with all his/her quirks and idiosynracies. That is what is private and subjective, in the ordinary sense. But the broader sense of subjectivity is more like subject-hood or ipseity, than the condition of being an individual subject.

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But that is precisely what makes them appear to possess less ideality when compared to intersubjectivity. If they are merely cognitive acts of a single subject, their ideality is limited in relation to intersubjectivity. In other words, for me, ideality does not lie outside this world; it must be realised within this world through various instances and acts in which it fulfils its ideality. Ideality must transcend the subject, reaching various subjects, different cultures, and so on. It must also survive the death of thinking beings, as would be evident in autonomous artificial intelligence in the future. Ideality is a potentially unlimited iteration.

However, in the transcendental reduction, the contents presented there remain confined to individual subjectivity. Imagine that you are carrying out the transcendental reduction: are the contents presented to you there, simply by virtue of belonging to this transcendental layer, already contents proper to every subject? It seems impossible. You have to communicate them through language, writing, etc. This means that the contents of the reductions continue to belong to a subjectivity, and they do not attain the degree of ideality that they would attain in intersubjectivity. It follows from this that ideality must pass through the world and transcend the subject, even if the subject is transcendental.

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I still detect a kind of dualism in your thinking here - between mental and physical or ideal and real. Where ‘inside this world’ are such forms to be found? They’re not empirical objects. You don’t encounter numbers and logical principles by bumping into them. They are discerned through reason. They are normative principles. A principle, a number, a form, in the Platonic sense, may not be dependent on your or my mind, but it can only be known by a mind. That is the sense in which it is ideal.

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I don’t see how you can see a dualism in what was said. Could you explain?

In writing, in language, in computer systems, in the human mind, etc.

Ideality is not given in the mind of the geometer or mathematician unless repetition is already at work in consciousness. That is why I referred earlier to the temporality of consciousness, in which repetition manifests itself through various acts or moments of consciousness. In that sense, it must be said that a process of idealisation has already begun (though not yet been completed) in the mind of the first geometer or the first mathematician.

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The dualism is between what an individual mind can grasp, and ‘the idea’ as instantiated across multiple instances. But again, as in the passage this OP started with - the idea of equals is already something you must possess in order to know what equality means when you see it.

But writing and language presuppose the very ideality they’re supposed to explain. They work because the same meaning can be grasped by different minds across different times and places. That sameness — that identity of meaning across instances — is exactly what needs explaining. You can’t explain it by pointing to the instances. Again, you already have to be able to grasp what they mean - by Zeus!

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  • Numbers (i.e.ideas) exist in the betweenal metaphysical space—i.e., they exist between humans. They are controlled by ideas, which are actual things existing between human entities, exactly like this very discussion.

  • Living beings exist in the internal metaphysical space—i.e., they are controlled from the inside by their DNA, which exists within them.

  • Material beings exist in the external metaphysical space—i.e., they are controlled by physical laws from the exterior, up to the Universe.

Therefore, Reality is topological in a much more abstract sense than what is used in mathematics, because being “external to the Universe” means absolutely nothing from a strictly spatial point of view. Classical “universals” (a fundamentally flawed concept) are actually real things located within the relational manifold of this metaphysical space. They are just as real as a pebble or a bird.

The underlying problem here is that you are not actually interested in the nature of what you claim to be examining. What truly interests you is merely rubbing your mind against the academic grandeur of the name “Husserl”, so you can indulge in these endless, delicate, English cup-of-tea philosophical caresses and soooo philological chatter.

edit: By the way: vehemently denying the actual “thingness” of universals (i.e., ideas) is the absolute signature of underlying materialism. It is the childish belief that “only a pebble is a real thing, man!”

You are merely a repressed materialist.

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I do not believe that the geometer simply ‘grasps’ the ideal triangle from ‘who knows where’. The geometer started with forms from the world of everyday life—rough surfaces, approximate edges—and pushed them to the limit, in such a way that there was a founding act, an impression that would be remembered. But it is precisely to the extent that this impression is remembered that idealisation begins to take effect. For to remember is to repeat something that was once present. There would be a dualism in my position if I believed that man simply ‘grasped’ ideal objects as ideals.

If you think about it carefully, sameness presupposes repetition. Something is not ‘the same’ unless there is already a repetition of that which is supposed to be the same. When I say ‘it is the same’, I am speaking in the second instance. We must therefore consider repetition and idealisation before identity and sameness.

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This is backwards. We do not begin with the idea of equality. We begin with the activities of counting, weighing, and measuring. Equal number, equal weight, equal measure.

Equality is a relation. Of one piece of wood to another piece of wood, of one stone to another. The “equal itself”, however, is not equal to anything.

It does not follow from the claim that concepts are not physical things that they are not the result of physical processes.

Perl gives the example of health. The “what-ness” of health is not intelligible apart from the physical things that are or are not healthy and how they function, that is, apart from the physical processes of an organism

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Very good OP, and the Husserlian connections in the replies are helpful as well.

I accept what you’ve argued as being decisive against all identity theories of mind and brain – at least all I’m aware of.

I think the question remains whether less reductive theories are also refuted. I’ll highlight this:

I’m not sure whether you’re saying that supervenience insists on describing thoughts as neural patterns? There are of course many flavors of supervenience theory, but the attraction of the theory for me is that it requires no commitment to formulas like “Thoughts are in the brain” or “Thoughts are just neurons firing.” If Thought A supervenes on Brain Process B, all we’re saying is that, without B, we would not have A, whereas the reverse is not the case. In particular, this viewpoint doesn’t try to collapse the difference between particulars and universals. As far as I know, it’s neutral on that question. IMO, no conceivable brain process could be a source of supervenience for a universal, for the reasons you elaborate, but doesn’t that leave supervenience untouched as a theory of how minds and brains may relate?

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Equals is an idea, which is required for the activities of weighing, measuring and counting.

Perl goes on:

Forms are ideas, not in the sense of concepts or abstractions, but in that they are realities apprehended by thought rather than by sense. They are thus ‘separate’ in that they are not additional members of the world of sensible things, but are known by a different mode of awareness. But this does not mean that they are ‘located elsewhere,’ or that they are not, as Plato says, the very intelligible contents, the truth and reality of sensible things.

But Perl’s point is that you can see when your dog or horse is unhealthy - at a glance! Surely you might need knowledge of veterinary medicine to understand the specifics - but the passage is about grasping - ‘seeing’ in the sense of ‘getting the picture’ of the health or illness of the animal.

(The full text of Perl is available here.)

Sure, I agree they’re not. There’s a reason that the first reference is to D M Armstrong’s Materialist Theory of Mind. Armstrong’s is reductionist materialism simpliciter. He was one of several Australian philosophers with that attitude, the others being J C C (‘Jack’) Smart, and U. T. Place. I think their form of brain-mind identity has fallen from favour, but they serve the polemical purpose of the essay.

As for supervenience — the point about that term is that it’s so flexible. Nobody can say exactly what it means — it’s rather like analytic philosophy’s counterpart to the ‘god of the gaps’ argument. It can be rolled out, and its shape changed, to counter all kinds of rationalist arguments against materialism. But I’m not really interested in playing that game.

But there’s a deeper, underlying point. I find that it’s almost universally assumed that the mind had evolved as a consequence of the processes described in biological evolution. I think that’s out of scope for this thread. I’ll only observe that plainly human intellectual capacity did evolve to the point of being able to grasp arithmetical concepts etc. But are the primitive entities of arithmetic, like the natural numbers, understandable as a result of that process? Or is it more that, once we had the intelligence to grasp them, we attained insight into them?