2009/7/27 Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>
> 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.
Yes indeed. But what do we mean by a process in materialist ontology?
To speak of what the brain 'does' is to refer to actual changes of
state of physical elements - at whatever arbitrary level you care to
define them - of the material object in question. So now you have two
options: either the 'process' is just an added-on description of these
material changes of state, and hence redundant or imaginary in any
ontological sense, or else you are implicitly claiming a second -
non-material - ontological status for the mind-process so invoked. As
I said, it would be difficult to imagine two states of being more
different than minds and brains (i.e. this is the classic mind-body
dilemma).
This is the insight in Bruno's requirement of the COMP reversal of
physics and mind as described in step 08 of his SANE2004 paper. It's
aim is to deal a knockdown blow to any facile intuition of the mind as
the computation (i.e. process) of a material brain, and IMO the
argument more than merits a direct riposte in that light.
Furthermore, in a platonic COMP, the question of the level of
substitution required to reproduce your mind is unprovable, and has to
be an act of faith in any 'doctor' who claims to know.
AFAICS, until these 'under-the-carpet' issues are squarely faced, the
customary waving away of the brain-mind relation as a simplistic
functional identity remains pure materialist prejudice, and on the
basis of the above, flatly erroneous. To say the least, any such
relation is moot, absent a radically deeper insight into the mind-body
problem.
David
>
> 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 Tue Jul 28 2009 - 00:34:53 PDT