Is Mind Possible?
Not according to science. According to science, only objects can exist, and only in space and time. The mind is no such thing.
But then where and when do space and time exist? Science is beginning to countenance the real existence of other universes. Where do they exist and if they cannot be located relative to anything else, how do they count as objects? How could they be more than just an abstraction, and are we not just an abstraction relative to them?
Might not other universes exist in the same sense that mathematical objects exist? Any abstraction can exist only in thought. Have we not just shown that ultimately we all can exist only in thought? Realities exist only relative to each other. This is the insight of relationalism. All relations are ultimately subjective. Any world and anything in that world can hardly be more than a set of contenful relations.
If mind is not possible, then nothing (if even that!) would be conceivable. Nothing would be possible or actual for that matter.
Certainly the past and future exist just as abstractions. And is the present different in kind? Or is it only qualitatively different? And where do those qualities reside?
Not only is mind possible, but it is the generator of all possibility. It is the generator of all relations, and what can exist unrelated?
Can there exist half a mind? Can there exist separate minds? It is not at all clear what would separate them other than their subjective polarity, and what kind of separation is that? Is your redness and your pain and your Monster group not really the same as mine? What about our unconsciousnesses? Somewhere, somehow there is a lot of overlap in the mental sphere. One could call that (part of) the mind of God. Is it possible to subdivide that territory in anything other than the most subjective or ad hoc manner?
The existence proof for the Monster group required some 1,500 pages of explication published by a dozen or so individuals. Not one of them knows all of that detail. And yet is it not accessible to each of them and to you and me as well?
Is a kitten excluded from all contact with the Monster group? The symmetry groups of her dexterity, much more intimately known to her than to my klutziness, exist only relative to that master of all groups. Where do you draw the line, and by what authority? Who would doubt that when an infant learns the meaning of its first word that it is demonstrating the actual ability to grasp all possible meaning.
We have naturally circled back to the question of the possibility of God (viz. Rational Theism). Not only must God be possible, God must be the ground or the subject of all possibility. Nothing can ever come between us and God, because there can only be ad hoc distinctions. God can never be further from us than our own reason and feeling. That some of us need to be reminded of this two thousand years after the fact can only be fully appreciated in an eschatological and 'mini-messianic' context.
6/13/02