Posted on 12/07/2002 9:46:51 AM PST by beckett
So why insert dragons on the unexplored portions of the map?
Where you see a locked door marked dragons I see a door marked mysteries. Sadly, our difference in worldview cannot be reconciled:
There are two prominent construals of `material'. First, according to many philosophers, something is material if and only if it is spatial, extended in space. One might thus propose that what it means to say that something is material is that it is extended in space. This construal of `material' is inspired by Descartes's influential characterization of material bodies, in Meditation II. Given this construal, materialism is just the view that everything that exists is extended in space, that nothing nonspatial exists. This portrayal of materialism is attractively simple, but may be unilluminating.
The problem is that the relevant notion of spatial extension may depend on the very notion of material in need of elucidation. If there is such dependence, conceptual circularity hampers the proposed characterization of materialism. The main worry here is that the notion of spatial extension is actually the notion of something's being extended in physical space, or the notion of something's being physically extended. It seems conceivable that something (perhaps a purely spiritual being) has temporal extension, in virtue of extending over time, even though that thing lacks extension in physical space. It does not seem self-contradictory, in other words, to hold that something is temporal (or, temporally extended) but is not a body. If this is so, the proposed characterization of materialism should be qualified to talk of physical space or physical extension. In that case, however, the threat of conceptual circularity is transparent. Even if there is no strict circularity here, the pertinent notion of spatial extension may be too closely related to the notion of material to offer genuine clarification. At a minimum, we need a precise explanation of spatial extension, if talk of such extension aims to elucidate talk of what is material. Perhaps a notion of spatial extension is crucial to an elucidation of materialism, but further explanation, without conceptual circularity, will then be needed. (Cf. Chomsky 1988.)
If there is indeed a coherently conceivable distinction between minds and material bodies, we must reject the view that materialism, understood as entailing mind-body identity, is conceptually, or analytically, true—that is, true just in virtue of the meanings of `mind' and `body'. Given such a coherently conceivable distinction, we can also challenge any version of materialism implying that psychological concepts (for example, the concepts of belief and sensory pain) are defined in terms of the ordinary physical causes of belief states and pain states. (Such materialism has been proposed by D. M. Armstrong 1977, and David Lewis 1966.) If `pain' is defined in terms of the ordinary bodily causes of pain, then it will not be coherently conceivable that there is pain without bodies. The concept of pain will then depend for its semantic significance on the concept of a bodily cause.
Materialists do not share a uniform view about the nature of psychological properties, such as the properties of being a belief, being a desire, and being a sensory experience. In particular, they do not all hold that every psychological property is equivalent or identical to a conjunction of physical properties. Only proponents of reductive materialism hold the latter view, and they are a small minority among contemporary materialists. Proponents of nonreductive materialism reject the latter view, and affirm that psychological properties can be exemplified even in an immaterial world. Such nonreductive materialists include functionalists about the mind, who hold that psychological properties differ from material properties in virtue of the special causal or functional roles of the former. Functionalists differ from behaviorists in acknowledging the psychological relevance of causal relations among not only stimuli and behavior but internal states as well. A third prominent version of materialism, eliminative materialism, recommends that we eliminate most, if not all, everyday psychological discourse, on the ground that it rests on seriously misguided assumptions about human psychology—assumptions that will disappear with the advance of science.
cornelis: Very moving and apropos.
Apropos? Have you been talking to any of my old girlfriends, cornelis?
As VR has pointed out, nearly all of the progress in understanding the mind has come from the study of the material processes of the brain. It is quite obvious from observing people with brain injuries, that bits of the mind can be eliminated by damage to the brain.
I had an uncle who lived 25 years with the kind of amnesia featured in the movie "Memento". Every day he woke up was, to him, the day after his injury. He did learn new habits that made him managable, but he never formed a new permanant conscious memory of anything that happened after his injury.
When someone asserts that materialism can't explain something, my response is our understanding is deficient, not material. I will retract this belief just as soon as the study of the material world ceases to be fruitful. Asserting that materialism can't enter the room of mysteries simply shuts down the most productive form of inquiry ever invented.
Virtually everyone in my family has had that dream, which is also featured in the 1980s spy spoof Top Secret. It seems to be pretty popular.
I have a favorite theme that not too many others share. I get stuck driving down a road that leads inevitably--no exits--to some dazzlingly high bridge or overpass. I gun the engine and go for it but the higher I get, the nearer to vertical the road gets. I usually wake up in a panic before I get over. Sometimes I start to fall, or stop in the road and scream my refusal to go any further as horns begin honking behind me.
Czeslaw Milosz: "Human material seems to have one major defect: it does not like to be considered merely as human material."
what is the evidence that studies of brain function are headed for a brick wall?
On the materialist end we have Francis Crick (The Astonishing Hypothesis : The Scientific Search for the Soul) and on the physicalist end we have Roger Penrose (Emporer’s New Mind and Shadows of the Mind).
Critics find both hypotheses lacking for different reasons. To thoroughly explore the subject and stay up-to-date, I strongly recommend PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Consciousness.
From that site, Webster’s review of Crick’s book:
Crick cheerfully admits that the evidence is not strong for his proposal, but claims that it might provide new guidelines for future research.
Sorry about that! Oh well, at least it is also related to this discussion...
I see the open door called mysteries and people standing outside saying, you can't go in there.
Truth is not threatened by inquiry; therefore resistance to inquiry is prima facie cause for such inquiry. Stonewalling only increases my sense of urgency.
As VR has pointed out, nearly all of the progress in understanding the mind has come from the study of the material processes of the brain.
I disagree and again point to PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Consciousness. IMHO, some of the best ideas are coming from the physics corner – especially Roger Penrose. And that website covers the whole field!
My two cents...
I strongly suspect the brain acts like a transceiver for our non-temporal being, what we normally call consciousness. If the transceiver is damaged, it will not process signals correctly. IOW, it would act the same way as if the entire process were temporal, i.e. the physical brain. I suggest it would be misleading to ignore the transceiver possibility.
We may be able to detect whether our brain is a transceiver. Some researchers already hypothesize this is what underlies NDEs. Also, unrelated work on higher dimensional dynamics or quantum mechanics may open new leads, possibly a means to detect non-spacial or non-temporal messaging.
One of the thing that pains me greatly about these discussions is the mischaracterization of what I said into what I did not say. My statement comes from an English Lit professor acquaintance who said to me once, 'Everything you say is sheer poetry.' To which I replied, 'What do you mean?' and he said, "you say whatever you want to."
I reality, everything we say is metaphor, that is how our minds work. Poetry is not metaphor, it is art. But like art, it doesn't always represent reality. That is what I was saying. Much of many here have to say has no 'real meaning' but is as fantasical as a Unicorn. (my favorite metapor)
The truth is that if we are going to talk at all about things which are not perceived by the senses, we are forced to use language metaphorically.
The truth is if you are going to talk about things that are not ultimately derived from perception by the senses you are talking about Unicorns.
Books on psychology or economics or politics are as continuously metaphorical as books of poetry or devotion. There is no other way of talking, as every philologist is aware. . . . We can make our speech duller; we cannot make it more literal . . .
All symbols are ultimately metaphors, so you have said nothing. You have also used absolute terms 'no other way' 'cannot' that you cannot support. Can't prove these negatives and one 'can' talk in other ways and make it more literal, and be less dull than most of the posers here.
There are so many contra-dictions in this post (against language - poetic use of language itself) I don't know where, or care, where to begin. If you cannot see where what you have said speaks against itself, I am not willing to waste the time to enlighten you, since you will just deny it anyway. Logic is a terrible thing to waste.
I’m not sure I’m following you here, js1138. Certainly consciousness and will are not inventions of mine. And I think it’s abundantly clear that they are things that exist, though they cannot be seen – that is they are real but non-physical. My use of the term “software side” is perhaps unfortunate, because grossly reductionist. I do agree with you that the digital metaphor or model is the wrong model. A better model would recognize that what we are looking for here is the manner in which the immaterial and the material are brought into contact such that they can function together. It has been suggested that, however this occurs, it happens at the level of the neural synapse, in the “in between” of the neurons as distinguished from in the neurons themselves. In other words, the neurons would be mediators of the phenomenon of consciousness, though not its cause.
I really don’t know. Maybe I’ll have a better idea when I read Penrose. Thanks for writing!
You make it seem a very desireable place to be -- with apologies for my redneck sense of humor ... ;-}. I am liking Cohen, too, very much. I will have to go find more. If we as a race, the race of Man, ever lose that sense of humility as expressed by self-effacing humor, we're lost and, as to being lost, we're working on it.
But it seems that this concept of pain -- as dependent on bodily causation -- will not be able to understand or explain what might be called psychic pain -- e.g., guilt, regret, the anguish of losing a loved one, anxiety, loneliness.... These kinds of pain are real, too, though they do not appear to have a bodily cause. But they are so real, in fact, that they can themselves be the causes of bodily effects.
While your concern wanes, there are very many others who spend a lot of their energy and concern to persuade human persons that language is just a material configuration. And they do it with metaphors.
I realize there are those who believe they have shown that truth does not exist, that what goes by the name is only a product of the individual or "collective" will. Nietzsche felt this way, if I remember correctly: "das Leben will Taüschung, es lebt Taüschung" (life requires fiction, lives on fiction). As for this opinion, I can respect it without sharing it. For I believe that only now have we finally managed to see clearly how truth is an essential ingredient in man's makeup. Although it seems incredible, until now it had remianed unexplained why man must seek truth. Truth seemed an obsession, a luxurious, almost ornamental concern, a game or a pointless curiosity, perhaps an added convenience, or, as Aristotle thought, the expression of a natural tendency to exercise certain faculties. All these views presuppose that man can, after all, live without truth. His relation to truth was therefore extrinsic and fortuitous. This is why the Socratic expression that . . ."man cannot sustain a life where there is no longing for truth" had always seemed mere words. But now we understand to what extent it is literally so. Life without truth is unlivable. Truth exists in such a way as to be man's reciprocal. Without man there is no truth, but by the same token without truth man is not man. He can be defined as the being who has an absolute need for truth and conversely, the only thing that man needs absolutely, his only unconditioinal need, is truth. All other needs, even food , are necessary on condition that there also be truth, that is, that it make sense to live. Zoologically speaking, then, one would have to classify man as a Wahrheitsfresser (a veridivore) and not a carnivore.
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