There are reasons why philosophy of mind is often cited as the most lively
area in philosophy today.
At the heart of it is the age-old "mind-body" problem -- which in fact
predates Descartes by 2,000 years (Parmenides tackled it, and so did Plato and
Aristotle). The disputes between "leading names" today are not only energetic,
they
seem curiously primitive, like the familiar "Is!" "Is not!" "Is!" "Is not!"
exchanges between young siblings.
It's startling to see eminent philosophers like Searle, Chalmers, Dennett,
Damasio and others miss each other's point, and use many terms haplessly
because, it seems, they don't realize each has a different notion in mind with
the
same term.
I think some of this disagreement can be relieved a bit by some clarifying
work on key words, but, seemingly, not all. I find I can't agree totally with
any one of the disputants, including Chalmers, but I do side with the core of
his view of "awareness", the stream of consciousness -- the flow of feelings,
pains, images, urges, etc -- that comprises at least our experience during our
waking hours.
Finding the wording to convey this core is tricky. It's a struggle to phrase
it in a way one can feel sure will result in a serviceably similar notion
arising in the other guy's mind. For example, my first thought is to start by
saying this: "I cannot shake the conviction that there is what I'll call a
"material world" out there."
But I'm given pause by noting that some of the disputants seem to claim that
awareness, consciousness, is "material". At its extreme is, say, the
neurologist who shows you an MRI-like picture of nerve-tissue inside your
skull, points
at a throbbing plexus, and says, "That is your pain."
I will concede I believe there is a critical connection of some sort between
that tissue and my feeling, but I can't accept that they are one and the same
"thing". I'm then further paused by realizing that with the word 'thing'
there, I, without sufficient preparatory explanation, sneaked in the notion of
"entities" and, much more serious, the notion of "kinds of entities". I did it
because, at base, my unshakable conviction is that what I mean by feelings, and
other conscious awareness, are NOT material. In other words, I'm convinced that
there are two distinct (though in some way connected) sorts of things:
material and notional. (I'll ignore here discussing other alleged sorts of
entities
like qualities, categories, relations, etc.)
Because of these linguistic unsureties, when William writes. . .
"The brain is part of the body and so it's a body-body issue. As a
prominent biologist friend said, "Biology does not stop at the neck"."
. . .I'm uncertain what his notion of "brain" is. William's phrasing there
suggests he intends with 'brain' to mean the bodily meat inside a skull. Thus
it
sounds likely that he denies there is a non-material, non-nerve-tissue sort
of entity -- the sort I've been calling "awareness" or "consciousness" or
"notion".
The interesting and odd thing about the mind-body dispute is that to this
day, after two millennia of argument, there are still smart guys on both sides,
so it's unwise to call either position "absurd". I think Chalmers, though he
commits blunders of his own, outscores Searles in their exchange, but each of
them sounds silly when he calls the other guy "absurd".
The one point everyone agrees on is that a critical question that would have
to be resolved, but on which effectively no progress has been made, is HOW
neural (material) activity can "cause" awareness -- such as pain. There's no
dispute that a change in neural tissue does result in changes of feelings and
other notion (see "aspirin" and LSD) but just how, nobody knows. There is still
another vigorous group who stand by the equally unproven conviction that notion
can effect change in neural material. How? No answer. Until proven wrong, the
"materialist" can always maintain that, No, a prior neural change affected
BOTH a subsequent neural AND the notional change.
Chalmer's modal logic observation that there is no inherent inconsistency in
the possibility of neural conditions with no notional concomitant -- and thus
they can't be "identical" entities, is suggestive but problematic.
In sum, it's arguable that in two millennia -- right up to today -- we have
made almost no conclusive progress on these core questions in philosophy of
mind.
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