I wrote:: Many professional "thinkers", as well as laymen, continue to feel that though the "stuff" of consciousness -- our thoughts and feelings -- may be correlated in time with the physical world, it is not identical with it. A "feeling", they would say, is not "material".
William responds: "To posit that a feeling is not identical with the material world is to assume that there are two separate things, such as the Is of materiality and the IS of mentality." Agreed. "But what if we remove the physical aspects of feeling, the nerves, vascular, and neural activities? Answer: The result is that the associated feelings vanish." I also tend to agree with that. Though I'd have to admit I can't prove to believers in the "paranormal" at a sC)ance that there can't be bodiless "notion" in this world. ". . .Apparently sensation is not just mental stuff -- etherial Cartesian soul-stuff -- but is directly and explicitly a body-brain thing, not a mind-body thing. . . If we restrict ourselves to a brain-body view. . ." But this is not apparent to dualists. It's precisely what dualists maintain is an error. "There can't be a causal relationship and no separate IS, one for body, one for brain. [The body-brain only] view leads to the impossibility of consciousness. (Scientists love to say it "ain't there".) But if we insist on a mind-body view then we are dealing with consciousness on the one hand and brain-body on the other." This is true, and, of course, it has been one of the puzzles for millennia when contemplating the mind-body problem. There is no handy analogy to convey what the dualist believes. Some have cited a magnet. Whirl the magnet and suddenly a bodiless magnetic field appears around it. The magnet does not lose any weight when that happens, so, see!: They must be two different entities! Or they may cite mass and energy. Or mass and "gravitational pull". Or the light when we turn the lamp on. None of this succeeds in conveying the dualist's notion of the fundamentally different "stuff" of notional and material. Chalmers argues there's no modal "necessity" for disbelieving in notion as an entity separate from body. Consider, he says, we can imagine an ultra-advanced robot with all the neural make-up, action, and reaction of a human -- and yet entirely without feeling. We can cite no inherent impossibility of that without assuming the very point at issue. And, as I've mentioned, if you show Joe the Plumber a cat-scan of his brain while he's in agony, and you point to a writhing plexus of nerves and say, "That's your pain," he's apt to answer, "Like hell it is!" >From which it follows there's no inherent modal impossibility in there being "pain" with no material correlate. This solipsistic "all is notion" idea is not the dualist view. They believe there is both material stuff and notional stuff, and the twain may meet, but we don't know how. Many dualists believe all notion is caused and determined by neural goings-on, but there are also dualists who believe notion can cause change in the material world -- i.e. in neural stuff. "In this case we are assuming, or forced to assume, that some supra-brain "manager" is consciousness but we can't yet identify what this ethereal thing "IS"." A dualist might maintain that he "identifies" it by ostension pointing at it. This is how we "identify" the "taste of vanilla". There's no other way to convey to someone what a given taste "is like". A dualist may concede the taste-experience is caused by material goings-on, but still insist the "experience" itself, the feeling, is a notional entity, not a material one.. "What becomes really interesting is the possibility that we can imagine that of which we are NOT conscious, like a disembodied soul, (can we?) or that part of our brain that monitors some crucial bodily functions. Thus consciousness can imagine its own unconsciousness." Agreed. One of the aspects of this that beguiles me is this: When, say, we are trying to come up with the right word "for" a notion -- or even someone's name -- we turn to the thesaurus or directory in our memory. Sometimes we seem to be doing this "consciously", as when we consciously go through the alphabet hoping that when we mouth the letter that begins the word or name, it will pull the whole name into consciousness. But there are times when we just mull the notion -- "What's the name of that guy who runs the Titanic Fundb&?" We're unaware of doing anything systematic in our mind -- and then suddenly that name "pops up on the screen". (In my case it seems often to pop to my larynx.) This suggests my "sub-conscious" is riffling through countless possibilities and, when it hits on the right one, it "recognizes" it, and sends it up to consciousness. Recognition -- and decisions to put something forth -- always seem like very conscious events. But obviously they're not. "Who's that in the cellar doing all the real work around here?" "Philosophers to the rescue, please." Often the only help philosophers contribute is, they phrase the questions more sharply. And at other times, they actually leave the question far more obscure and uselessly complex than it was before they interfered. ************** Plan your next getaway with AOL Travel. Check out Today's Hot 5 Travel Deals! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1212416248x1200771803/aol?redir=http://travel.aol.com/discount-travel?ncid=emlcntustrav00000001)
