Mind vs Matter IDualists

How to brick yourself into a corner!

This post on the de facto Intelligent Design website Uncommon Descent is further evidence of the IDist's struggle with mind vs. matter dualism.  Their implicit dualism mirrors their natural forces vs intelligent agent dichotomy. For the de facto IDists mind and intelligence are necessarily eminently mysterious;  they prefer to withdraw from the question of the nature of mind and believe their terms of reference only require the identification of the presence of intelligent action and otherwise leave it as an undefined. This approach tends to draw them toward a dualist paradigm of mind and matter.

Mind in the form of our techno-scientific culture has explicated much of the mystery of the cosmos in terms of the relationships within dynamic configurations; but the sentiment I'm seeing with the de facto IDists is that we are treading too sacred a ground if our minds attempt to understand themselves in terms of dynamic configurationalism. For them configurationalism is a non starter paradigm in the understanding of mind; mind is too holy for such a cold intellectual incursion!

Let's consider this quote from the UD post: 

In his continuing discussion with Robert J. Marks, Michael Egnor argues that emergence of the mind from the brain is not possible because no properties of the mind have any overlap with the properties of brain. Thought and matter are not similar in any way. Matter has extension in space and mass; thoughts have no extension in space and no mass.

Michael Egnor: The thing is, with the philosophy of mind, if the mind is an emergent property of the brain, it is ontologically completely different. That is, there are no properties of the mind that have any overlap with the properties of brain. Thought and matter are not similar in any way. Matter has extension in space and mass; thoughts have no extension in space and no mass. Thoughts have emotional states; matter doesn’t have emotional states, just matter. So it’s not clear that you can get an emergent property when there is no connection whatsoever between that property and the thing it supposedly emerges from.

Notice the dichotomy being emphasised here: Viz, the first person perspective of mind versus the configuratonalist paradigm of "matter". But there is an obvious reason for this apparent mind vs configuration distinction; it is a perspective effect: Viz: The third person is bound to observe the first person as a dynamic configuration; for whilst we are dealing with two separate conscious perspectives the third person perspective can't see the first person as anything other than a dynamic configuration; the anti-thesis of this is some kind of "mind-meld" which blends two conscious perspectives into a less fragmented perspective. But in the absence of that the conscious cognition of the first person  doesn't have any overlap with the conscious cognition of the third person. 

But of course the third person also has a first person conscious perspective themselves and the perceived configurational reduction of the first person only exists in the world of that third person's conscious cognition.  That is, the configurational reduction of mind that we identify as "matter" is necessarily the third person's perspective on the first person and therefore is itself bound up with conscious perception. Ergo, it is impossible to dichotomise conscious cognition and the dynamic configurations of matter; it's like trying to separate a centre from its periphery; centre and periphery are logically conjoined - one can't exist without the other.  

So basically my difference with the de facto IDaulists is that:

a) Configurationalism is a meaningless idea unless there are conscious minds capable of  constructing it. The up shot is that  I find my self slanting toward Berkeley's idealism.

b) For the Christian, God is the Creator of matter and therefore it is no surprise if there are ways of using matter which give rise to the miraculous complexities of conscious cognition. After all, as I have said in my Melencolia  I and Thinknet projects our modern concept of matter is looking suspiciously like the stuff of mind seen from a third person perspective.  In contrast IDists still conceive matter (whose configurational behaviour can be rendered computationally) as a reality distinct from mind and hold to the traditional quasi-gnostic view of matter as dead and inferior in contrast to mind's ethereal character. 

Explicating mind in terms of configurationalism is taboo among IDists because it means we are "reducing" mind to a computable object; that is, we could run computer simulations of mind if we had sufficient computing power (which we probably don't have at the moment). This is a "no-no" for many de facto IDists because it smacks of swinging things in favour of that much dreaded "secular" category and IDist's worst  nightmare, "materialism". But if matter is God's creation it's no competitor to his sovereign will. 

Perhaps illustrative of the difference between my own position and that of the IDists who attribute an almost untouchable holiness to mind, may be found in my derivation of equation 7.0 in my last post. This equation quantified the IDist concept of Algorithmic Specified Complexity (ASC) Viz: For a configuration L its ASC can be evaluated with: 

ASC(L, C) = I(L)  − K(L)  + K(C)

Where:
The function  I is the Shannon information associated with L.
The function K is the length of the shortest algorithms needed to define L and C
...and where C consists of the mysterious "contextual resources" from which L derives its meaning; this may include that strange thing we call "intelligence".

However, the IDists are very likely to look askance at the last term on the right-hand side of my equation, namely K(C). My derivation of this equation depended on the assumption that the quantity K(C) is mathematically definable;  but this assumption is only true if one assumes that C can be rendered in dynamical configurational terms. That is, it is a computable configuration in so far as it can be defined in data and algorithmic terms: I doubt the de facto IDists would buy that idea!