On 28 July, 01:30, David Nyman <david.ny....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> 2009/7/27 Brent Meeker <meeke....domain.name.hidden>:
>
> >>> 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,...
>
> Yes, sorry - am I REALLY being so unclear? Obviously, as you say, it
> is all too easy to see that mind and brain are *correlated*: my point
> was that such correlation can't be conceived as a simple one-to-one
> mind-material identity of any sort without doing violence to mind as
> an uneliminable primary reality. I think the problem here is with the
> all too easy - but flatly wrong - analogy of 'the same thing under two
> different descriptions', because here we need to be concerned not with
> mere description but with apparently incommensurable modes of
> existence: nobody, I take it, could seriously claim that the
> manifestly radical ontological dichotomy between 'material-existence'
> and 'mind-existence' is exhausted merely by description.
Cart before the horse:
Why should anyone believe in an ontological gap that isn't backed by
an explanatory gap?
> Because - and with justification - for many quotidian and scientific
> purposes we focus on the 'material' characterisation of our shared
> 'externalised' reality, it is fatally easy to lose sight of the fact
> that any reification of the material description ineluctably invokes
> dualism in the face of the indubitable existence of the mental realm.
The mere existence of the mental implies nothing whatsoever
about any dualism. any more than the simultaneous existence
of cabbages and kings. Dualism requires an ontological divide--not
a mere difference of kind--and an ontological divide requires
explanatory irreducibility.
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Received on Thu Jul 30 2009 - 13:54:27 PDT