I prepared a first version of these notes for a meeting in our local library. To my regret, the meeting didn’t end up producing any criticism of my little argument. I’m leaving them here, and expanding them, as part of my retirement reading project and in hopes that someone may find them useful or may do me the favor of criticizing them in an email to me.

The meeting did result in my realizing that it is important to have a much clearer and more direct approach to presentations like this. So I have added the page called Mind and Matter Quick View.

As I created these arguments just out of my own head (or mind...) at the time, naturally basing them on such reading and thinking as I had already done, it has been interesting to me to take a closer look at how better educated and more experienced thinkers argue for the same conclusion. I think I’ll call my notes on that Other Minds’ Matter.

Also, as an old friend, a certified college-prof materialist in the same vein as I always supposed ran through me, has been so very kind as to begin quite a long round of email disagreement with my arguments, her objections now find — or will find — their own place interspersed in these many-branched virtual pages. Her criticism has been of very great usefulness to me in clarifying my own thought and helping me see just how there is essentially no chance of my arguments persuading committed materialists.

Mind-Matter

my naïve approach to an old-old problem