On 8/10/2012 5:53 AM, Roger wrote:
Hi Russell Standish But Dennet has no agent to react to all of those signals. To perceive. To judge. To cause action.
If he had an agent he would have failed to explain anything - he would have just pushed the problem off into the "agent".
To do those, an agent has to be unified and singular -- a point of focus-- and there's no propect for such in current neuroscience/neurophilosophy.
But that's Dennett's point. Humans aren't that way. They may do something because of X and yet think they did it because of Y. This is blatant in split brain experiments where the subjects brain on one side makes a reasonable decision based on the information available to it; while the other side, which doesn't have that information, confabulates a completely different story about the decision. This is most obvious in split brain patients, but it happens to the rest of us too. There is only one action because a physical body can't do two different things at the same time; but that doesn't mean the person is not of two minds.
Brent
Hence I follow Leibniz, even though he's difficult and some say contradictory. That agent or soul or self you have is your monad, the only (alhough indirectly) perceiving/acting/feeling agent in all of us, but currently missing in neuroscience and neurophilosophy.
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