Ryle's "category mistake" and why spacetime, to a platonist, is contained in Mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake This is a very subtle issue. "The term "category-mistake" was introduced by Gilbert Ryle in his book The Concept of Mind (1949) to remove what he argued to be a confusion over the nature of mind born from Cartesian metaphysics. Ryle alleged that it was a mistake to treat the mind as an object made of an immaterial substance because predications of [actual] substance are not meaningful for a collection [or fiction] of dispositions and capacities. The first example is of a visitor to Oxford. The visitor, upon viewing the colleges and library, reportedly inquired 'but where is the University?' [4] The visitor's mistake is presuming that a University is part of the category "units of physical infrastructure" or some such thing, rather than the category "institutions", say, which are far more abstract and complex conglomerations of buildings, people, procedures, and so on. " Ryle, like the eliminative materialists, used this logical error to eliminate mind-- simply as being a fiction. But to a platonist, his argument can produce a completely different conclusion. To a platonist or a solipsist, Mind itself, in which objects exist, is not simply a fiction, it is all that there is (the One). To put it another way, Mind is a necessarily higher order of being in which the physical world exists. Then Mind is not a property of brain, it is a higher order (mental) category in which the physical brain exists. Brain is in spacetime, which itself is contained in Mind. Dr. Roger B Clough NIST (ret.) [1/1/2000] See my Leibniz site at http://independent.academia.edu/RogerClough -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
