Neurophilosophers - am I getting this right?

Namely: what psychologists call "processes" are what philosophers would call "things" (not processes)

The philosophical distinction between things versus processes is the idea that these are two different ways of thinking about the world. In the things way of thinking, the world is made up of just that: things – dogs, cats, me, you, this book, that pencil. In contrast, the process way of thinking shifts the emphasis from thinking about things in a static way to acknowledge the reality that everything is always changing. It's the famous idea that you can't step in the same river twice because the river you would step into a second time is a changed river and thus not the same as the one you stepped into before. From a process perspective, the idea of a thing called "a dog" or "a river" or "you" is an abstraction that captures some aspects of reality (the static aspects) but fails to capture some others (the changing ones).

One way in which the "things" way of thinking manifests in brain/mind research is the idea that there are modules that our brains flexibly combine to accomplish complex tasks; things like vision, audition, memory, attention and decision making. While these are often called "processes" by brain/mind researchers, philosophers would point out that in the way that most brain researchers think about them, they are very much "things" (I think - is that right?)

@yoginho @WorldImagining @ehud @PessoaBrain @dbarack

@NicoleCRust @WorldImagining @PessoaBrain @dbarack @ehud @yoginho

From a formal ontology perspective anything is a thing (something distinguishable against a background -> statistical boundary)
There is no commitment static vs dynamic or object vs process

One way to frame the latter distinction: object is a thing that can be understood as a boundary between processes (inside and outside)

@dbarack @yoginho @WorldImagining @PessoaBrain @NicoleCRust @ehud
Classification is also sensitive to scale and pragmatic context.
There are valid contexts in which a cell is primarily viewed as an object and others for which a process classification makes more sense.
Depending on time scale, each process could also be framed as an event. #PluralismIsFine

@FrohlichMarcel

Pluralism is indeed fine from a pragmatic point of view, as long as you remember that there is only process underneath and things are just slow processes at the particular time scale you are considering them! 😉

#ProcessThinking FTW

@FrohlichMarcel

On a more serious note: there are relevant differences that come from different ontological commitments. Downward causation, for example, simply becomes a non-problem if you drop the restriction that only properties intrinsic to some object are primary, and you take relational/processual properties more seriously.

Also: processes, of course, are generally much harder to delimit than objects. Boundaries are often vague or fluid, interactions are transient, and so on.

@yoginho To delimit processes properly you NEED objects: Material boundaries (constituting particular objects) that provide a sparsely coupled interface between the dynamics of the internal and external (processes). So it is rather a chicken-egg problem in observation than a clear primacy. IMHO if anything should be considered primary at all, it is the observer itself and its capabilities to observe (quantities, scales, measurement resolutions) and process.
@yoginho Is a dynamics that cannot be separated by an observer from the flux around it worth being considered a process?
@yoginho From an instrumental perspective it is not.