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Quoting from Note 9, Hubey comments:

'I propose that the mind-brain problem is the same as the relation of experience to knowledge, for the following reasons.
a) Whatever we know stems from ongoing experience (not from sense 'data').'

What is the difference?

'b) The exploration of experience is the task of phenomenology.'

What justifies this assertion. Maybe it is the task of biologists, scientists, or astrologists.

'c) Experience is originally not divided into subject and object.'

We don't know what it is divided into. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. OTOH, there is the experiencer and there is the experienced. No?

'd) Mental structures including the subject-object division originate (crystallize, are created, structured) inside the unstructured mind-nature experience.'

They also crystallize in the structured mind-nature experience.

'e) Structural entities (including 'objects') can often be handled as-if they were 'onta' independent of mental activity, that is to say, of ongoing experience.'

Probably.

'h) The 'as-if' clause can be omitted without practical problems for much of the natural sciences, including behavioral and brain studies, but doing so is nevertheless a shortcut in argumentation.'

Only the physical sciences, probably.

H. Mark Hubey
<hubey@amiga.montclair.edu>

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REPLY:

re a) It is the difference between unstructured center of ongoing experience and structured knowledge.

re b) It could be the task of biologists, scientists, or astrologists or anyone else, provided they proceed in a non-ontological way. The problem is that they mostly make assertions of ontological type, and that is the reason why they get stuck. The reason why I say it should be phenomenologists is that they might have a better chance of succeeding. Perhaps we might agree that it should be 'non-ontologists', but of course that is a somewhat negative definition.

re c) We do know because we are the ones who do it. The subject/object division is our invention and habit, and I suggest to try to get out of it for certain purposes. The 'experiencer' and the 'experienced' are already the result of such structuring. So the answer is 'no': if we want to get to the bottom of experience that is.

re d) Mental structures can also crystallize alongside with other structures which have already been structured before, but new structures come out of nothing, or are at least modifications of old ones, on the basis of what happens in ongoing experience with its unstructured center, i.e., ongoing experience.

For the remainder, we seem to be more or less in agreement.

Best regards,
Herbert Muller
<mdmu@musica.mcgill.ca>