The mind is a process

 

An old Richard Carrier extravaganza from 2018. Some excerpts, not necessarily germane to the main argument:

>>>For example, we now know we are not conscious of spans of time smaller than about a twentieth of a second. Which is why movies work: we don’t see the individual cells flicker by, one after the other, because they fly past at 24 frames per second, so we only perceive a continuous moving picture. That means if you “zoom in” to a thirtieth of a second, during that whole span of time, consciousness doesn’t exist. It only exists as an event extended over time—a time span longer than 33 milliseconds. A thing that doesn’t even exist except over a span of time? That’s a process. No process, no thought. No thought, no mind.

>>>For example, for some people, we know red doesn’t look red. It looks green. And they don’t know the difference. They are qualia inverted: people with genes for both versions of color blindness (a statistical inevitability) will have their red cones wired to their green circuits, and vice versa (see Martine Nida-Rümelin, “Pseudonormal Vision: An Actual Case of Qualia Inversion?” in Philosophical Studies 82.2 (May 1996): 145-57). But because they will only ever have heard us call green things red, they don’t know they are actually experiencing a different color than we are when we both say we are seeing “red.”

The mind is a process, not an object