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
Dear Bruno,
As for your showng of "necessity" of a 1st personviewpoint , I still do not understand your argument and that is a failure on my part. ;-) As to Pratt's ideas, let me quote directly from one of his papers:
http://boole.stanford.edu/pub/ratmech.pdf
"Some of the questions however remain philosophically challenging even today. A central tenet of Cartesianism is mind-body dualism, the principle that mind and body are the two basic substances of which reality is constituted. Each can exist separately, body as realized in inanimate objects and lower forms of life, mind as realized in abstract concepts and mathematical certainties. According to Descartes the two come together only in humans, where they undergo causal interaction, the mind reflecting on sensory perceptions while orchestrating the physical motions of the limbs and other organs of the body.
The crucial problem for the causal interaction theory of mind and body was its mechanism: how did it work?
Descartes hypothesized the pineal gland, near the center of the brain, as the seat of causal interaction. The objection was raised that the mental and physical planes were of such a fundamentally dissimilar character as to preclude any ordinary notion of causal interaction. But the part about a separate yet joint reality of mind and body seemed less objectionable, and various commentators offered their own explanations for the undeniably strong correlations of mental and physical phenomena.
Malebranche insisted that these were only correlations and not true interactions, whose appearance of interaction was arranged in every detail by God by divine intervention on every occasion of correlation, a theory that naturally enough came to be called occasionalism. Spinoza freed God from this demanding schedule by organizing the parallel behavior of mind and matter as a preordained apartheid emanating from God as the source of everything. Leibniz postulated monads, cosmic chronometers miraculously keeping perfect time with each other yet not interacting.
These patently untestable answers only served to give dualism a bad name, and it gave way in due course to one or another form of monism: either mind or matter but not both as distinct real substances. Berkeley opined that matter did not exist and that the universe consisted solely of ideas. Hobbes ventured the opposite: mind did not exist except as an artifact of matter. Russell [Rus27] embraced neutral monism, which reconciled Berkeley's and Hobbes' viewpoints as compatible dual accounts of a common neutral Leibnizian monad.
This much of the history of mind-body dualism will suffice as a convenient point of reference for the sequel. R. Watson's Britannica article [Wat86] is a conveniently accessible starting point for further reading. The thesis of this paper is that mind-body dualism can be made to work via a theory that we greatly prefer to its monist competitors. Reflecting an era of reduced expectations for the superiority of humans, we have implemented causal interaction not with the pineal gland but with machinery freely available to all classical entities, whether newt, pet rock, electron, or theorem (but not quantum mechanical wavefunction, which is sibling to if not an actual instance of our machinery)."
and
"We have advanced a mechanism for the causal interaction of mind and body, and argued that separate additional mechanisms for body-body and mind-mind interaction can be dispensed with; mind-body interaction is all that is needed. This is a very different outcome from that contemplated by 17th century Cartesianists, who took body-body and mind-mind interaction as given and who could find no satisfactory passage from these to mind-body interaction. Even had they found a technically plausible solution to their puzzle, mind-body interaction would presumably still have been regarded as secondary to body-body interaction. We have reversed that priority.
One might not expect mind-body duality as a mere philosophical problem to address any urgent need outside of philosophy. Nevertheless we have offered solutions to the following practical problems that could be construed as particular applications of our general solution to Descartes' mind-body problem, broadly construed to allow scarecrows and everything else to have minds."
There are his own words!
Stephen
----- Original Message ----- From: "Bruno Marchal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Stephen Paul King" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: "Stathis Papaioannou" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <everything-list@eskimo.com>
Sent: Sunday, May 15, 2005 10:18 AM
Subject: Re: Olympia's Beautiful and Profound Mind
Le 15-mai-05, à 15:40, Stephen Paul King a écrit :
Two points: I am pointing out that the "non-interactional" idea of computation and any form of monism will fail to account for the "necessity" of 1st person viewpoints.
You know that the "necessity" of 1st person viewpoints is what I consider the most easily explained (through the translation of the Theaetetus in arithmetic or in any language of a lobian machine). You refer to paper as hard and technical as my thesis. You should explain why you still believe the 1 person is dismissed in comp or any monism. Also, Pratt seems to me monist, and its mathematical dualism does not address the main question in philosphy of mind/cognitive science. Its paper is interesting but could hardly be refer as an authority on those question at this stage.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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