On 12/5/2012 3:51 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Hi Roger,
This is the case with modern cognitive science:
1) It ignored Descartes' two substance (mind and brain)
solution to the mind/brain problem in favor of treating
both substances as material.
A common criticism of dualism is the problem of interaction. If mind
is outside the physical world, how does it interact with body? Any
mechanism of interaction you can propose would make mind part of the
physical world, thus negating dualism.
Dear Telmo,
There is no "problem of interaction" if mind and body are isomorphs
of each other, as Pratt proposes; they are Stone duals of each other,
here <http://boole.stanford.edu/pub/ratmech.pdf>. Descartes' substance
dualism fails because the poor chap was asking the wrong question. The
right question to ask is: How do minds interact with each other? Answer:
via bodies. Minds are just the self-representations that bodies can have
of themselves.
I appreciate and share the sentiment that there is something extremely
weird about consciousness, that cannot be explained by current
science. I don't buy into the idea that consciousness emerges from
neural activity. Yet, any explanation must place consciousness inside
the real of physical laws (or vice-versa), otherwise the previous
paradox arises.
Once we accept that consciousness is only knowable in a first
person sense we will stop asking for third person
descriptions/explanations for it.
--
Onward!
Stephen
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