David Nyman wrote:
> 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).
I think that's a misuse of "ontology". When we discuss the atomic theory of
matter the ontology is a set of elementary particles, including their couplings
and dynamics. We then regard molecules and stars and planets, etc, as
consisting of these things. It is not legitimate to object, for example, that
weather is *just* an added on description or else requires an addition to the
ontology. It's a description at a different level. Similarly, material changes
in the brain may be described as mental events also. Compare a computer running
some AI program. The events have a description in terms of electrons and gates
and also in terms of decisions and computations. That was pretty much Bertrand
Russell's theory of neutral monads - there's only one kind of thing but they can
be described in mental-causal terms or material-causal terms.
>
> 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.
The difficulty I have with COMP is in step 8, where some measure is invoked to
make sense out of a computation that computes everything. What is this measure?
and what does it actually predict. As I said before, an *everything*
hypothesis is a cheap way to explain anything - unless you can explain why this
rather than that. Bruno promises to be able to do that - so I'm waiting to see.
Brent
>
> 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 Mon Jul 27 2009 - 20:40:00 PDT