> On Sep 10, 2015, at 10:28 AM, Helmut Raulien <[email protected]> wrote: > > Here (below) there is a quote by Antonio Damasio. He says, that a human > meaning (in the mind) is nonlocal within the nervous system. So I suspect, > that nonlocality, maybe any nonlocality, is mind. But in the case of human > mind, it is restricted to the humans nervous system, at least some part of it > is, eg. the unspoken-of feelings, thoughts...
I’ve always liked Damasio on a lot of these issues. It’s interesting that this issue of non-locality has a long history. Consider the issue of being sad. Now if we are our body, is it the whole of us that is sad or just a soul or brain? There’s long been at least one strain that sees the whole of the being rather than one part that has these properties. This in turn entails a certain sort of non-locality to the parts. When we move to the 20th century then the more Heideggarian inspired notion of full embodiment mean that even limiting to our physical body might be in error. After all many things we call mental may themselves be embodied action and thus not localizable to the particular limits of the body. That is because their very meaning is tied up with the objects they are comporting with. So to talk about driving a car as a mental phenomena seems quite difficult to restrict just to the brain. Of course not all cognitive scientists take this embodied action approach. Not being a cognitive scientist I’ve not a clue about the popularity of this embodiment perspective as compared with more representational or limited symbolic approaches. An implication of the embodiment issue is that meaning quickly takes a far more holistic form. Of course you can find meaning-holism without adopting embodiment. (Consider Quine’s meaning holism for instance) Yet in a Peircean conception where mind seems so tied to action which is tied to the entities involved it seems one is often pushed towards holism of a different sort than mere theory holism. I think one quickly is led to a rather robust externalism. The advantage of externalism (whether of meaning externalism or mind externalism) is that it avoids most of the problems dualisms create. The downside is that the issue of holism can make things complex.
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