On 8/11/2012 6:00 AM, Roger wrote:
Hi meekerdb
No, the agent is not part of the material world, it is nonmaterial.
It has no extension and so is outside of spacetime.
Mind itself is such (as Descartes observed).
Maybe. But wherever 'the agent' is, it is a non-explanation of agency. If you're going
to explain something you have to explain it in terms of something else that is better
understood. So to 'explain' mind as being an immaterial agent is vacuous.
Brent
Roger , [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
8/11/2012
----- Receiving the following content -----
*From:* meekerdb <mailto:[email protected]>
*Receiver:* everything-list <mailto:[email protected]>
*Time:* 2012-08-10, 15:16:55
*Subject:* Re: Where's the agent ? Who or what does stuff and is aware of
stuff ?
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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