[1]
I am indebted to Jan Holmgren for pointing out difficulties with the working metaphysics view. This is important to me because I have been busy telling myself that this is a useful conceptual basis, and under such circumstances one may talk oneself into untenable positions. First, let me re-emphasize that I am a lay-person in his area, not a philosopher. My attitude in this respect is - until someone talks me out of it - that we must be able to have a sort of consumers' epistemology, because otherwise only professional philosophers can talk to each other. And clarification is needed at this time, perhaps more urgently than in the past, because unsolved conceptual difficulties exist, for instance in the area of the mind-brain relationship.

I will thus discuss a few of the points JH raises, and try to answer them - at least to my own satisfaction.

[2]
Did Linnaeus <1> create the biotic world ? He did not, just as people for the most part do not create (invent) their experiences. But we structure them all, and it seems L said so too. That God created the world refers to the inaccessible (and fictitious) nature-in-itself. Our structuring does however not only concern abstract patterns <2> but also concrete ones. For instance colour-blind people structure a visual world which is less colurful. That we accept structures from others does not change the basic process. The point is that there would be no patterns without patterners, and that is in principle so not only for humans.

[3]
JH agrees <6> that an exclusive objectivism is unable to deal with subjective experience, and suggests <7> that a 'category of the ultimate' in Whitehead's sense can help with this. This it seems corresponds to what Jaspers has called 'the encompassing' (please correct me if this is wrong). 'The sole appeal is to intuition' <5> with respect to this. Tentatively I understand this to mean that encompassing experience is the source or matrix of mental patterns. With respect to Whitehead's formulation my main question is : does he suppose that this metaphysical realm is knowable ? If yes, I think he is mistaken, because MIR is by definition inaccessible. If no, I agree, but in that case he is not a metaphysicist in the usual meaning of this term.

[4]
Whitehead seems to say that some experiences are not conscious <8>. There is no problem in this I would think. But <9-10> 'as soon as we think about anything outside the immediate conscious experience, as we do all the time, we are in metaphysics' needs some clarification. First, 'non-aware' does not mean 'metaphysical'. Secondly, metaphysics is (at least to some extent) our doing. I have tried to deal with this in TA24[47-57] (forthcoming) and will not repeat it here. For me, the question is not 'metaphysics or no metaphysics', but 'how to make metaphysics functional'.

[5]
Concerning Putnam and Fodor <11>, I have not read their study, but for the present discussion I want to use the wider sense of 'methodological solipsism' in the sense of 'phenomenology', unless there is a convincing reason to change.

[6]
<12> 'Since you reject MIR, I cannot understand how our individual minds can contact each other.' This problem I think is an artifact produced by MIR-belief, a fight against windmills. Within given mind-nature experience, we all construct the world as well as our selves, along with others and their selves. There is no problem in communication unless you postulate a pre-established and walled-in autonomy of MIR-entities (like the monads of Leibniz) eg, the one of other persons. Empathy goes a long way, even for our comprehension of the experience of people with different pre-conditions - for instance a paraplegic. Verbal communication too works to an extent by facilitating empathy. You can empathize also with animals to some degree (this includes for instance the ultrasound capacities of bats, because if you walk through a tunnel you can utilize the auditory feedback of your step-sounds from the walls for navigation - the principle is the same, only the frequencies are different).

[7]
<13> 'Truth-like knowledge' : I am all for it. But this does not mean that it has to be MI-truth, it can be entirely functional. The assumptions are always ad-hoc even for long-term uses, but the only consequence of this is that there is no absolute guarantee. If you wish you may add that there is often an asymptotic approach to a more or less stationary concept, or image, or value, etc. If you take an airplane, you assume (in order to feel comfortable, and deliberately or not) that the wings will not fall off, that the pilot is not suicidal, and a few more things which you may have never been aware of assuming. There is a high probability that you are right. But you cannot be absolutely sure, and the rest of life is like that too.

[8]
<14> 'Someone' is you, everybody, no homunculus needed. The computer is your brain, supplied courtesy of evolution. Brains and computers and evolution are in MIR, if you so believe. But I think it is more helpful to see them in as-if-MIR, because MIR is inaccessible and we only can start from (given) ongoing experience within which we generate the metaphysics, along with all other aspects of structures. <15> 'Mixture of rationalism and irrationalism' (Whitehead) : Vico's view may help here (see TA24 [39,53,61,B39]). 'MIR as potentiality' is not clear to me in its meaning. If it means 'we think that so-and-so is possible' that is fine, but how does this help for the question of reality ?

[9]
<15> 'Since MIR is part of Whitehead's God, I trust that belief in it is rational.' Belief in God is both rational and irrational. It responds to the need for certainty and stability, and in this sense it is a rational step. But some of its positive content is also absurd and can only be defended by belief, cf. Tertullian. (Actually all positive existential - rather than functional - assertions are posited rather than provable, I suspect.) Non-theistic religions (for instance atheistic ones like some forms of Buddhism) present less of a paradox in this respect, because they insist less on positive knowledge dogmata than on practices.

[10]
<16> is a mixture of phenomenology and objectivism, which may be inevitable in attempts to know the unknowable, <17-18> is all objective, <19-20> is again both. The statement <19> 'The conscious experience can also be thought of as a set ... In this mechanism, in a stream of conscious experiences, conceptual structures defining space, time, abstract theory, etc, can evolve' is not comprehensible to me in this form. My question here is : do you suggest that you can find subjective experience by looking into the brain, by studying neuronal firing, with or without set theory ? More concretely, do you believe that someone other than you can have your own ongoing subjective experience (with methods other than empathy to some extent) : for instance with the help of a microscope, with electrical, chemical, blood flow measurements of some type, or computer simulation ?

I am interested in further discussion of these and related points.

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Herbert FH Muller
e-mail <mdmu@musica.mcgill.ca>