On 8/4/2014 5:14 PM, LizR wrote:
On 5 August 2014 11:59, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 12:40 AM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 8/4/2014 4:23 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Not is a David Lynch movie useful to reduce obesity. What's your point
exactly?
That a good theory of consciousness should be useful for treating
people with
mental problems.
Only if you already assume emergentism. Otherwise a good theory of brain
could be
enough.
This looks like a good example of Kuhnian paradigms. Obviously a good theory of
consciousness is only good for treating mental problems if consciousness is something
that is (in some sense) secreted or created by the brain. Otherwise you aren't
addressing consciousness itself, only the contents of consciousness, which I imagine we
all agree are brain-dependant.
If the contents of consciousness are brain dependent, then what about consciousness is not
brain dependent. What is consciousness apart from it's content?
So until you know what consciousness actually is, you are like the bad neighbours
arguing from different premises.
My theory, admittedly based on inference from a small sample, is that almost everybody is
directly acquainted with consciousness. On the question of helping people we need to know
how we can influence it. We try to do this via language, but also drugs and surgery can
be effective in some cases. I'm not sure in what sense we must know what consciousness
"is" to do this. Vaccination was invented without knowing what a smallpox virus was.
Of course if consciousness is, as Kim speculates, completely independent of the body and
brain and our interactions with them there's not much we can do to help consciousness -
but maybe we can help the body remember where the bathroom is.
Brent
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