> I wrote: > > "A physicalist might claim that this is exactly what he believes -- > i.e. that feelings, ideas, mental images etc are solely neural flesh." > Kate responded:
"Neural flesh? Are you sure you mean neural flesh? It sounds silly. If you > believe-or someone believes-that thinking cannot be distinguished from the > physical stuff that produces it,what do you think the physical > stuff does when it goes on to think about something else? What does it do > with the thought it just had?" > My guess is the physicalist would say this confuses the specific neurons that harbor a specific feeling, idea, image, event etc, and the whole brain-meat. You remember and can "recall" something in a way analogous to how your computer can: a number of neurons in your "hard drive" that were in some way "formed" during the original experience perserveres. You have billions of neurons, just as an Intel chip has a giga-number of bits. And, just as a computer techie might be able to point at a cluster of persevering bits and say, "That's the photo you in-put of your wedding," a neurologist might point at a cluster of neurons in your head and say, "That's your memory of your wedding." That cluster doesn't go on to "think about" something else. It stays relatively put. The brain still has billions of other neurons to do new thinking and remembering. Judging from the erosion of memory with age, what first deteriorates is the linking neural stuff: Your "retrieval" apparatus rots before the more durable cluster that, the neurologist would phrase it, "is" the specific memory. Thus the difference between "recall" and "recognition". The dualist might say that the trouble with the analogy is that a computer has no consciousness, while exactly what's at issue is the (alleged) existence of a non-material entity that accompanies neural entities -- consciousness. When a neurologist points at neural flesh -- "That's your back-ache!" the dualist responds, "Like hell it is!" There are indeed billions of neural "habors" of memory, but very little of it is accompanied by something "conscious" at a given moment. How can this be, if the feeling and its harboring neural flesh are one and the same? ************** Make your life easier with all your friends, email, and favorite sites in one place. Try it now. (http://www.aol.com/?optin=new-dp& icid=aolcom40vanity&ncid=emlcntaolcom00000010)
