Ontomorph: Mind Meets The World :: Philosophy Science Papers

Ontomorph: Mind Meets The World Chunking of the world as done by the mind depends on how the world is. The world is one object, but not a simple one. Morphological content is just right to allow organisms which move in the world to perform the appropriate dynamical chunking, which from the perspective of the higher cognition may appear to consist of several separate objects. Embracing nonreductionism is desirable because organisms are part of the world. At bottom, there is nothing else other than physical stuff. But it is possible, and indeed it is true, that the physical stuff is very richly structured. One kind of physical stuff are things such as minds. The intricate structure of minds, particularly the complicated topography of their multidimensional space is ultimately responsible for qualitative experiences and consequently for the hard problems of consciousness. As the space of morphological content is itself a part of the physical world, it can begin to throw light on this problem and primarily at the quali tative states — as products of encounter of one form of physical stuff, organisms, with the rest of the physical stuff around them. Some surfaces of the world are moulded and shaped in their encounter other surfaces in the world. But the world has many dimensions; some surfaces are richer than others. The purpose of the shaping is the tacit expectation of further encounters with surfaces in the world. I. Bringing Ontology Of The World And Cognition Together The issues of ontology and cognition are tackled in a separate manner. "As I try to think about the issues in cognition, I try to exclude the issues about how the world is" is an often adopted attitude. This does not mean that investigation of the mind would be extraneous to ontological questions. Quite to the contrary. A respectable contemporary philosopher would normally adopt physicalism as a hypothesis about the mind, thus embracing a materialist ontology. A materialist treats organisms possessing mind as parts of the physical world. The way how the problem is posited then generates a question about the persisting explanatory gap, or about the reductionist hard problem: All in being treated as a part of the world, organisms possessing mind still differ from the World in that they have consciousness consisting of qualitative experiences which are not reducible to the physical World. So one may wish to be a nonreductionist concerning the ontology of mind.