qraal said:
For a specific rock, yes, but rocks in general? Maybe not. Higher level descriptors are often more succinct than ultra-detailed decompositions, but of course one can do more with more details. Geology, for example, would be impossible if we left out too much detail, and would be too cumbersome if we left in too much detail. One can always be more accurate, but become less meaningful in the process. Coarse-grain descriptions make science communicable.
This is the correct line of thinking. Substance opposed to form. But we just need to generalise "rock" further to really get there in this argument. And this can be done using the template of a spatiotemporal (or scalar) hierarchy.
So substance and form are at opposing limits of a hierarchy. One is the most local or smallest scale, the other the global or largest. Causality at the bottom scale is constructive, at the top scale it becomes constraints based.
Now with rocks, we can agree that a rock is a compound (constructed) of a mix of atoms. At this level of discussion, compounds and how they achieve their form, we need to find what is actually the organisational principles appropriate to this level.
A rock isn't. But a geological strata is. We can then see that this global scale view gives us sight of "rockness" formed over geological timescales, as the result of temperatures, pressures, large-scale mixing processes. It explains why a rock is mixed as it is, with perhaps quartz crystals and other inclusions. And also why the rock is cool, not hot lava temperature.
So it is always easy to win the "its just a configuration of substance" argument if the wrong scale of analysis is applied. We can take some real world object that interests us, like a rock, and reduce its substances towards their most local. But then we leave the formal aspects of the rock at the scale we found it, rather than "reducing it" - though it should seem more like expanding it, as we are increasing scale to head towards the global view.
Once you also expand the configurational or organisational principles of the object, you can then see how the global aspects are also fundamental. Rocks would not exist without rock-forming processes and contexts.
Of course, it can be tricky identifying where to stop in the stepping back to global scale. But atoms and geology seem fairly accurately complementary in this particular example.
Now the trick with consciousness and theories of mind is to do the same thing. To reduce the thing in itself, people who have what we label "consciousness" and "unconsciousness" as aspects of their being, towards both the local and global levels of explanation.
When discussing minds, the question becomes what are the atoms, what the geology, of this area of science?
