[Wittrs] Re: Minds, Brains and What There Is

  • From: "Cayuse" <z.z7@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:29:15 +0100

SWM wrote:

"Cayuse" wrote:

SWM wrote:

"Cayuse" wrote:

No, I said that we don't need to envision or imagine "the all" in
order to understand that, WHERE 'PARTS' ARE IDENTIFIED,
/COLLECTIONS/OF 'PARTS' ARE ALSO IDENTIFIED.
We may or may not envision or imagine some kind of 'whole' at the
limit of those collections, but it is not necessary that we do so
in order to understand the idea of /collections/.


Collections of what?


Anything you care to imagine.


Why is that relevant to the question of whether and how brains
produce minds?


If your use of the word 'minds' includes phenomenal consciousness
then it involves a misguided attempt to account for the fact of the
existence of the "contents of consciousness".



If you're equating "consciousness" with "subjective experience"


I'm not equating "consciousness" with "subjective experience"
but with "experience".


It should be clear from our past discussions that, in this context,
I equate the two


And to do so is to force experience into a category arising within
it.


This makes no sense to me.
"Subjective" and "objective" are /categories/ of the "contents of consciousness", the union of which is therefore /neutral/ in that respect. 



and saying this is the same as "the all" or "the microcosm"


I'm not saying that "consciousness" or "experience" is "the same as
the all or the microcosm", but that we /conceive/ of a whole on
the same model as the parts/whole relationships that obtain
/within/ experience. Moreover, that any such conception is
nonsensical.


Then why would we conceive of it or worry about the possibility of
doing so?


To point out that any attempt to account for the fact of the
existence of "the contents of consciousness" is misguided.


Again, I don't see what you can possibly have in mind by the above
statement. How can it be "misguided" to speak of brains as the source
of our minds?


I haven't mentioned 'minds' but 'consciousness', and
to be more specific, what Block calls p-consciousness.



I have a suggestion. In his paper "On a confusion about the function
of consciousness" (1995), Ned Block distinguishes between what
he called "access consciousness" and "phenomenal consciousness".
Regardless of my conviction that this is too simplistic a
distinction, we could agree that you're interested in
a-consciousness and I'm interested in p-consciousness.


That may be. Certainly we seem to be interested in very different
things. The kind of "consciousness" that seems to intrigue you is the
mystery of the first person perspective in an apparently third person
world.


Your portrayal of my view is inaccurate. If the "first-person"
category of the "contents of consciousness" stands in contrast to
the "third-person" category, then the "contents of consciousness"
(being the union of those categories) is /neutral/ in that respect.
If these categories /don't/ stand in contrast to one another then what is their relationship? 

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