#process-relation

The mind is part of the body, not separate. The mind is a material process, as part of the body, constantly in relation to the rest of the body, the outside world, and other body-minds. and something like a thoroughgoing materialist version of merlau-ponty's embodied relational phenomenal ontology, paired with Whitehead's process ontology, where we already live embedded in the world and in relation to others.

A lot of abstract thought starts off by constructing a sense of distance from the world, so that one can think in abstract terms about generalities, or pasts or futures, or other possibilities. Descartes makes this explicit. If you take that distancing for granted and forget it's constructed, as many philosophically inclined people do, then the mind-body problem seems strange. but the basic truth is that our minds are indelibly embedded in a sense world, and that perception is foundational to the formation of consciousness.

When you're like, in the zone in sport, or athletics, or craft, or having a wild night with your friends, or otherwise engaged directly in relational activity with the world rather than being absorbed by abstract thoughts (which so many of us are so often (and often get stuck there)) then the fact of being first and foremost a body in relation to other bodies, the fact of being a part of the world, is so obvious as to not be commented on. It's only when we take that abstract step back, which so many of us do as the first step to thinking abstractly, that the sense of distance appears and demands explanation. But the sense of distance is just a useful mental phenomenon, not an ontological fact.

The trick that trips philosophers up is that they demand full accounts of everything from the abstract point of view. this works, in that rational, abstract, satisfying explanations can be created, until the problem that you've set for yourself is closing the consciousness gap that's only there because of the abstract thought itself. When you're in the zone doing other things, the gap isn't there and doesn't present itself as a problem and you're not thinking about it or worrying about it so it doesn't occur to you that the gap isn't there. as soon as you remember the idea of the problem, or it gets prompted, then you re-enter the abstract mode that constructs the gap, and then you go "oh yeah... weird."

So i'm explaining it to you in abstract terms but this post isn't the solution, it's a description of the solution. A satisfying solution to the mind-body problem is not found in theory, but in practice and in raw experience. The solution is engaging in direct embodied experience of the world, and getting your mind out of the notion of starting off as separated. The sense of separateness is an illusion. You do this through physical, mental, social, ecological practices -- yoga, exercise, sports, or socially through hanging out or partying hard or doing political organization, or through meditation, or through drugs, or other ways. For me, psychedelic drugs helped enormously. Being proactively ethical in your relations to other people helps (give to the homeless, and be good to the people in your life!), not just because that's good to do in general but also because being aligned and balanced and healthy in those relations makes the jump from an egoist worldview to a relational interdependent worldview less shocking and painful. Also, healing your relationship to yourself and healing trauma also helps, because accumulated trauma encourages a dissociative psychological distance from one's reality that obscures the unity of things in a similar way as i described above. This is obviously, while also good to do, generally really hard. Healing your relationship to the world, in environmental ecological terms, also really helps. Unhealthy, destructive, violent, unsustainable civilizational relationships to the land, the sea, the sky, and other living beings reinforce and in turn are reinforced by the illuison of separateness. In general, an unhealthy relation of harm encourages both parties to perceive separateness over relational unity, thus incentivizing and reinforcing perceptions of ontological separateness. Obviously, most of this work has to be done collectively, not individually. Our minds, worldviews, perceptions are also not only material but relational, and hence collective, and we should treat them that way. But I'm getting off topic.

People who speak in mind-body problem terms, or "the hard problem of consciousness", describe it as bizzare and solution-begging that consciousness seems to have all these very immaterial qualities to it, that consciousness is where qualia and feeling and awareness lie, attributes that seem to be so alien to the material world. But thought like this comes from a worldview that sees the material world as boring, dead, inactive, static, and regular, like this image of atoms being billiard balls knocking into each other forever, or like the notion of a rock as a thing that just sits there. From this notion of a deterministic material world full of objects that "merely" clack into each other crudely, the things that consciousness, intellect, and living things in general do do indeed seem "immaterial" by contrast, and thus in need of mystical, nonphysical explanation from outside.

But that worldview is flawed, coming from, in part, a history of dualistic theism. To be crude and historically inaccurate and leave out a bunch of stuff for the sake of rhetoric (aka to tell a story):

Western people used to think that God, the first principle, was pure mind alone, and that God created the material universe and imbued it with life. They saw material existence alone to be a flawed, incomplete, boring, grey and dead field of objects if God wasn't there to inject life, meaning, intellect, awareness, newness, growth, and all interesting happenings into it. Then, it was discovered that almost everything that it was thought God did could be explained through material processes -- the material word turned out to be much more interesting, generative, and self-consistent than we thought! 'Oh, how wonderful!' said the Atheists, who already had several bones to pick. 'We don't need God to explain living things, or the movement of celestial bodies, or bad things happening to good people anymore!' And so they took the old model, and subtracted the role of exterior God, and said the material world stands on its own, and creates all the interesting things from within itself, immanently. And that was great, except that project is still incomplete. For they did not fully reassess and renew their conception of the material world, and so were left with a concept of material that still at the end of the day amounted to 'theism minus God'. And thus they were left with many flaws in the view, after deleting half of the dualism that made their thought work. Hence the sense of material as boring, inert matter that needs to have process, difference, and interestingness imbued from elsewhere. Hence, we are living with a commonsense legacy of feeling that the physical world is less interesting than it is, and that it's not capable of as much difference and dynamism as it is.

One of the things that hasn't been "ported over" properly in common thinking at least is the notion of awareness, and of consciousness. Many internalize, and install at a deep, intuitive level, the feeling that the things that consciousness does can't possibly be generated by the same materiality that generates rocks, and hence you get the hard problem. The hard problem of consciousness, to put it crudely, is looking for something else to fit a God-shaped hole in a conception of being that they havent reworked to not need that anymore.

In brief, because this is getting long, the alternative ontological worldview that i prefer to break us out of this wrongheaded (and boring!) notion is, like i mentioned before, a relation- and process- oriented ontology. Instead of seeing things as Objects (static associations) we see them as Processes (dynamic associations). And instead of looking at existence as Identity/Being (static associations), we look at it as Relation (dynamic associations).

Anything you might want to explain as an Object, you could explain as a Process. Maybe this is more true. A stone sits there, yes, but it also flows over long time scales. It is cooling of lava from undersea rifts, it is squeezing and molding like putty across time as its mass flows with the tectonics, it is erosion and deposition of sediment, more kneading, heating, cooling, shifting, eroding, until it appears to you on the side of a mountain in that form, frozen in a moment of geologic time. Everything is like this.

Anything you might want to explain as a Being, you could explain as a Relation, or Interaction. Maybe this is also more true. Everything that makes a bird a bird is necessarily the result of eons of relations involving its ancestors, and everything it is even now is relation. Its wings are wings in just that way necessarily because of their relation with the air, and its legs are like that necessarily because of their relation with the branch. Its blood is like that in virtue of its veins, its oxygen is like that in virtue of its hemoglobin, its carbon is like that in virtue of its hydrogen, and its protons are like that in virtue of its quarks, which don't exist outside of relation. Everything is also like this.

Process is relation, and relation is process.

You are Process all the way up and all the way down, and you are Relation all the way up and all the way down.

In a world made fundamentally of shifting interactions, of time patterned by fractal processes building on other processes in relations building on other relations, in an endlessly complex mirror dance, and on and on and on, it becomes a lot easier to see how something like our experience of consciousness might arise. It becomes intuitive. It almost becomes obvious.