On the particularity of each mind

Among all the mysterious and wonderous characteristics of minds, the deepest and most mysterious one, yet also the most overlooked, is their particularity. It is a special and most fundamental kind of particularity: each one of us experiences life through their own, private, unique, and non-duplicable perspective, which is what fundamentally differentiates him/her from the rest of the universe and gives him/her their identity. There is an infinity of possible first-person perspectives, and each mind has a unique one. The particular perspective of each mind is accessible only from within that mind itself and is completely inaccessible to the rest of the universe, to which all minds, considered from a third-person perspective, are exactly similar. The present paper argues that this makes it impossible that a mind is a composite entity, as no combination of constituents could account for that mind’s specific particularity; combining some constituents could never explain why this particular mind had to emerge among an infinity of exactly similar (from the constituents’ perspective) alternatives. Hence there is an aspect of each mind, in fact its most important aspect, that is independent of anything else in the universe, which reveals minds to be non-composite, fundamental substances

Hard Problems in the Philosophy of Mind

The mind is our most intimate and familiar element of reality, yet also the most mysterious. Various schools of thought propose interpretations of the mind that are consistent with their worldview, all of which face some problems. Some of these problems can be characterised as ``hard'', not in the sense of being difficult to solve (most problems concerning the mind are difficult), but in the sense of being most likely insurmountable: they bring to the surface logical inconsistencies between the reality of the mind as we perceive it and the fundamental metaphysical tenets of that particular worldview, thus putting the latter in danger of being disproven. This essay focuses mainly on the hard problems that the author considers to be of greatest importance for physicalism, the currently prevalent worldview. Nevertheless, some of these hard problems pertain also to otherviews such as panpsychism. In the author's opinion, the hardest and most profound of these, pertaining equally to physicalism and to panpsychism, is the one discussed in Section 4: the particular subjective first-person viewpoint that defines a particular person can be found nowhere in the universe except in that person itself; all outside entities (physical or mental) are equally neutral towards the ``particularity'' of that person, which therefore cannot be explained as arising from any combination of such outside elements. Therefore, a person is a simple substance. Other hard problems discussed concern the physical explanation of conscious experiences and the physical explanation of meaning, while their repercussions with respect to free will and ethics are also examined. Although these latter hard problems have already been discussed elsewhere, a somewhat fresh perspective is given here by someone who is not a professional philosopher but a physical scientist