Sorry most of your argument here is going over my head. My mind gets the glazed over feel as soon as I hear the word “epistemology”.
It seems like you are using the word “mind” as a specific technical word within the field of philosophy rather than the general usage of the word so I’ll just defer to you for any philosophical context of the conversation. I’m not interested in that.
What got my goat was the implication that complex systems like the mind and the brain or any other complex system aren’t a “science” because it somehow isn’t pure enough/reduced enough.
> What got my goat was the implication that complex systems like the mind and the brain or any other complex system aren’t a “science” because it somehow isn’t pure enough/reduced enough.
That wasn't the implication, but perhaps more needs to be said. The first distinction I made was between brain and "mind" (here understood as "intellect", that is, the faculty responsibly for conceptualization, or, abstraction from particulars enountered in the senses) by appealing to a classic Aristotelian argument for the immateriality of the intellect. So you can study the physical brain using various empirical methods and through the lenses of various empirical science, sure, but if the intellect is immaterial, then obviously you can't subject it to any direct empirical experimentation. That doesn't mean it cannot become the object of a science (i.e., psychology as classically understood), nor does it mean you can't make observations about human beings to gather supporting evidence of some kind to draw certain conclusions. An immaterial intellect just isn't something you can look at under a microscope or at which you can fire subatomic particles.
> That wasn't the implication... appealing to a classic Aristotelian argument for the immateriality of the intellect
Now what you are saying makes more sense to me. I must not have read far enough up the comment chain to get the full context.
I guess I view the mind/intellect as a “state” of chemicals/electrical impulses/influences/etc that you could in theory take a snapshot of and is therefore material no matter how abstract the thought pattern. Trying to separate the brain vs. intellect is a false dichotomy from my perspective. I’m not sure if you are actually arguing for the Aristotelian perspective (as was my initial assumption) or if you are simply explaining a viewpoint.
I might note that I’m fascinated by super-determinism[0] with non-local variables right now. I can see that the repeatability of recording a given state of mind makes less sense since current QM theory could not guarantee that you could ever fully capture a given state of anything.
I am indeed arguing for the Aristotelian position. A lot of mind/brain talk is thrown around without any deep appreciation of the metaphysical presumptions being made, much less the metaphysical consequences of those presumptions.
> no matter how abstract the thought pattern
This needs to be explained. What exactly is a "thought pattern" and what does it mean for it to be abstract? As I've noted, matter is always concrete whereas abstract things aren't really things in that they cannot exist in their own right. You and I have the concept of "triangularity" in our intellects, and "triangularity" means exactly that and is therefore intelligible as "triangularity", but that concept is not reducible to any particular triangle. However, only particular triangles exist in the physical world. You would need to show how "triangularity" could exist as a concrete physical thing without also being a particular triangle. Then you'd have to show how concrete triangles instantiate this concrete "triangularity".
That's the Aristotelian angle. However, we can also approach this issue from the materialist angle. Take for instance the color red as we commonly understand it. Now, since Galileo and Descartes, matter has been construed as essentially colorless. Instead, matter has reflectance properties and color is construed as an artifact of the mind that in some unexplained way results from those reflectance properties, but is completely distinct from those reflectance properties. This is an essentially Cartesian view of the world wherein the universe is ultimately divided into two basic kinds of distinct things, namely, mental substance and extended substance, i.e., (a particular understanding of) mind and (a particular understanding of) matter, respectively. There are serious problems with Cartesian metaphysics, but for now, it's enough to observe that we moderns more or less hold to that view of matter. Now materialism also holds that view of matter. However, it denies the existence of mental substance leaving you with a broadly Cartesian view of matter. The trouble is that it is now impossible to explain things like the color red as mental phenomena as construed by Cartesians. This is known as the problem of qualia.
There are three directions you can take to try to preserve this view of matter and while accounting for qualia. One is to retreat back to Cartesian dualism. Another is to dabble with panpsychism (which is arguably just crypto-dualism). A third is to deny the existence of the very thing you were supposed to explain (eliminativism). Each of these has serious problems. However, a better option is to reconsider the metaphysics of matter. Aristotelian metaphysics does not suffer from these issues.
It seems like you are using the word “mind” as a specific technical word within the field of philosophy rather than the general usage of the word so I’ll just defer to you for any philosophical context of the conversation. I’m not interested in that.
What got my goat was the implication that complex systems like the mind and the brain or any other complex system aren’t a “science” because it somehow isn’t pure enough/reduced enough.