Re: [xmca] Consciousness

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

Andy,

There certainly is a distinction between the President and your  
thought of the President, and between the taler in your pocket and  
your thought of this taler. But again you are siding with Kant, and  
against Marx.  The difference is not that one is mental and the other  
is material. What makes the dollar bill real is not its material  
character, but the practices, customs, laws of a community. Your  
thought of the dollar is different, but not because it is in your  
consciousness. You could write on a piece of paper the statement:  
"There is a dollar in my pocket," and we would have a material object  
(writing on paper), but the same conundrum: does it correspond to the  
reality? The same *impossible* conundrum, because how can a linguistic  
statement ever be said to correspond, or not correspond, to a material  
object? Only (again) because of the practices, customs, of a  
community. They are both equally material - or equally imaginary.

Ilyenkov cited Marx making the same point. Ilyenkov writes:

"[Marx] went on: “'Real talers have the same existence that the  
imagined gods have. Has a real taler
any existence except in the imagination, if only in the general or  
rather common imagination of man? Bring paper money into a country  
where this use of paper is unknown, and everyone will laugh at your  
subjective imagination.'"

Martin


On Sep 23, 2009, at 8:35 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:

> But Vera, all the complexity and nuances of the idea of  
> consciousness and its relation to the material world (both its  
> substratum in the body and in culture and in its relation to its  
> objects) do not obliterate the categorical difference between the  
> President and my thought of the President. And reflecting on this  
> overnight, I am now convinced that this is an *important* as well as  
> a "bleeding obvious" difference.

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