Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> On 26 Jul 2009, at 16:52, David Nyman wrote:
>
>> Thanks to everyone who responded to my initial sally on dreams and
>> machines. Naturally I have arrogated the right to plagiarise your
>> helpful comments in what follows, which is an aphoristic synthesis of
>> my understanding of the main points that have emerged thus far. I
>> hope this will be helpful for future discussion.
>>
>> THE APHORISMS
>>
>> We do not see the mind, we see *through* the mind.
>>
>> What we see through the mind - its contents - is mind-stuff: dreams.
>>
>> Hence dream content - i.e. whatever is capable of being present to us
>> - can't be our ontology - this would be circular (the eye can't see
>> itself).
>>
>> So the brain (i.e. what the eye can see) can't be the mind; but the
>> intuition remains that mind and brain might be correlated by some
>> inclusive conception that would constitute our ontology: Kant's great
>> insight stands.
It's more than an intuition. There's lots of evidence the mind and brain are
correlated: from getting drunk, concusions, neurosurgery, mrfi,...
>>
>> It is similarly obvious that 'identity' theories and the like are
>> non-sense: it would indeed be hard to think of two descriptions less
>> 'identical' than brain-descriptions and mind-descriptions: hence
>> again, any such identification could only be via some singular
>> correlative synthesis.
>>
>> Hence any claim that the mind is literally identical with, or
>> 'inside', the brain can be shown to be false by the simple - if messy
>> - expedient of a scalpel; or else can be unmasked as implicitly
>> dualistic: i.e. the claim is really that 'inside' and 'outside' are
>> not merely different descriptions, but different ontologies.
That's a bit of a straw man you're refuting. I've never heard anyone claim that
the mind is the brain. The materialist claim is that the mind is what the
brain does, i.e. the mind is a process. That's implicit in COMP, the idea that
functionally identical units can substituted for parts of your brain without any
untoward effects.
Brent
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Received on Mon Jul 27 2009 - 10:23:47 PDT