What do you lose if you simply accept...

From: Stephen Paul King <stephenk1.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 16 May 2005 11:27:47 -0400

Dear Stathis,

    In a phrase, I would loose choice. What you are asking me is to give up
any hope of understanding how my sense of being-in-the-world is related to
any other phenomena in the world of experience and instead to just blindly
believe some claim. Are we so frustrated that we will accept "authority" as
a proof of our beliefs? I hope not!

    Pratt's disdain follows from the obvious failures of other models. It
does not take a logician or mathematician or philosopher of unbelievable IQ
to see that the models of monism that have been advanced have a fatal flaw:
the inability to proof the necessity of epiphenomena. Maybe Bruno's theory
will solve this, I hold out hope that it does; but meanwhile, why can't we
consider and debate alternatives that offer a view ranging explanations and
unifying threads, such as Pratt's Chu space idea?

Kindest regards,

Stephen

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stathis Papaioannou" <stathispapaioannou.domain.name.hidden>
To: <stephenk1.domain.name.hidden>; <marchal.domain.name.hidden.ac.be>
Cc: <everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 2:36 AM
Subject: Re: Olympia's Beautiful and Profound Mind


> Dear Stephen,
>
> The Pratt quote below shows disdain for historical solutions to the
> mind-body problem, such as Descartes' theory that the two interact through
> the pineal gland, but goes on to say that this is no reason to throw out
> dualism altogether. Now, I have to admit, despite spending my adolescence
> in the thrall of logical positivism (I still think A.J. Ayer's "Language,
> Truth and Logic" is one of the great masterpieces of 20th century English
> nonfictional prose), that there is something irreducible about 1st person
> experience, forever beyond 3rd person verification or falsification; a
> blind man might learn everything about visual perception, but still have
> no idea what it is like to see. However, what reason is there to
> extrapolate from this that there must be some special explanation for the
> interaction between body and mind? What do you lose if you simply accept,
> as per Gilbert Ryle, that the mind is what the brain does? Otherwise, you
> could seek a special explanation for an electronic calculator's
> matter/mathematics dualism, or a falling stone's matter/energy dualism, or
> any number of similar examples. Occam's razor would suggest that such
> complications are unnecessary.
>
> --Stathis Papaioannou
Received on Mon May 16 2005 - 12:14:53 PDT