[Wittrs] Response to Bruce/"Embodied Minds"
- From: "whoooo26505" <whoooo26505@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 04 Sep 2009 02:30:56 -0000
Here is another response from Stuart to Bruce that was sent to the old addy.
(As messages get sufficiently old, this extra step won't be necessary). Anyway,
I give you Stuart and Bruce ....
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "swmaerske" <SWMirsky@...> wrote:
Seems like some stuff is coming directly to my e-mail address though I prefer
to deal on-line with posts and responses. Anyway, Bruce sent this so I am
responding by posting here:
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "swmaerske" <SWMirsky@> wrote:
> And how does it get "embodied"? (the mind)
Bruce: In our earliest language games we learn to speak and think of minds as
embodied. We also learn to think of them as disembodied, especially in some
cultures. This are basic building blocks.
My response: This doesn't answer my question of how embodiment happens. I
didn't ask about language games but about the facts behind how minds relate to
brains. I already grant that we have language games and that we use words in
different ways re: different things we deal with in the world. But one of the
ways is the empirical/descriptive/scientific mode in which science as well as
much of ordinary experience is dealt with. So again, Bruce, how does the mind
get embodied in the brain as you put it? Remember, I am arguing that minds are
existentially dependent on brains and what they do. I take this to be a causal
relation which you deny. Instead you assert that minds are "embodied". I am not
interested in ways we talk. We talk of souls and spirits, too. Rather I'm
interested in how claiming minds are "embodied" is different, on your view,
from my claim that minds are existentially dependent on brains?
Bruce: LW wrote somewhere it is important to start at the beginning but not try
to start before the beginning. Asking your "how", is "before the beginning."
Me: Oh no, you don't get out of it that easily! If scientists can study brains
(and they manifestly can) and show that brains are essential to the occurrence
of minds (we don't get minds without a brain or its equivalent in good working
order, etc.), you cannot simply pretend this is "before the beginning". THAT
means nothing here because it does, as Wittgenstein might have said, no work!
Or, as some of our old buddies on Analytic would have said, it's just
"HANDWAVING", etc., etc.
Bruce: Anyway, this is an alternative to thinking of mind and brain as two
substances or really one or imagining them in a causal relationship. I'm
arguing that this alternative informs developmental psych, not the reductionism
of physicalism or your favorite question of whether mind is an ontological
basic.
Me: Having skipped over my key question of how you differentiate being
"embodied" from being caused/produce/engendered, you now change the subject to
claiming you're talking about "an alternative" way to think about mind. But, of
course, you haven't given any details as to what it means to think about mind
this way. What is the "alternative" here besides different phraseology than I
have selected? In its simplest meaning being embodied seems to mean somehow
stuck into or attached to a physical mass. But THAT is surely dualist because
it presumes that mind and bodies (qua brains) somehow get jammed together. Of
course, I'm sure you don't want to say THAT. But what is left if you don't?
What's your alternative? If something is "embodied" then we can only understand
that concept if we could conceive of it as not being embodied as well. But that
makes no sense unless we believe minds are souls or spirits or monads or some
such. Even though you have once likened mind to spirit, I can't imagine you
REALLY want to go there! Do you? Is a smile "embodied"? Is it "enfaced"?
> Your persistent insistence on describing this in terms of a
mental-material dichotomy
Bruce: Just what is your dichotomy. Without two things, there can be no one
thing causing the other.
Me: Two aspects of a thing, as in two sides of a coin, but still just the one
thing, where "thing" does not merely denote a physical thing (something
observable in the world as an object or group of objects with features like
shape, color, texture, mass, extension, etc., etc.) but any kind of object of
reference including relations, situation, actions, decisions, theories, words,
etc.
> Which tells us you aren't engaged in studying how brains produce the
features
Bruce: because I don't conceive of "brains producing." When we evaluate
different pain medications, we evaluate how these "brain changes" are lived by
the client. No causation!
Me: Looks like you are still hung up on the uses of "causation". Well I doubt I
can change that after three (or is it four) lists and untold hours of on-line
conversation like this! Apparently you still have the same problem with
"produce" too. But you have not yet explicated your own alternative formulation
("being embodied"). If you can explain that in a way that demonstrates a
clearly different concept than what I have offered for characterizing the
existentially dependent relationship of minds on brains, then maybe you have
something. If you can't, well then you don't and all the verbiage in the world
about unintelligibility, etc., etc. will be -- what was that again that people
sometimes do with their hands?
> But it's clear he's experiencing a really horrible deterioration.
Bruce: Yes, a terrible experience. And experiences aren't caused, not in X/Y
sense that must be at the basis of reductionism if it is to mean anything more
than a metaphor.
I'll stop here for the time being.
bruce
Me: Ah, you mean I should inform his neurologist that his collapsing memory and
conceptual functions aren't caused by anything happening in and to his brain?
What should I tell the neurologist instead then? Have you a better explanation?
Is the embodiment just somehow coming unstuck? Any suggestions as to how to
reattach his mind to whatever it is about his body that is its carrier?
SWM
--- End forwarded message ---
Group Home Page: http://seanwilson.org/wittgenstein.discussion.html
Group Discussion Board: http://seanwilson.org/forum/
Google Archive: http://groups.google.com/group/Wittrs
FreeList Archive: //www.freelists.org/archive/wittrs
FreeList for September: //www.freelists.org/archive/wittrs/09-2009
FreeList for August: //www.freelists.org/archive/wittrs/08-2009
Group Creator's Page: http://seanwilson.org/
Today's Messages:
http://seanwilson.org/forum/index.php?SØ86f18704524b9992bac8164354cd96&SQ=0&t=mnav&rng=1&rng2=0&u?400&forum_limiter=&btn_submit¾gin+Search
Messages From Last 3 Days:
http://seanwilson.org/forum/index.php?SØ86f18704524b9992bac8164354cd96&SQ=0&t=mnav&rng=3&rng2=0&u?400&forum_limiter=&btn_submit¾gin+Search
This Week's Messages:
http://seanwilson.org/forum/index.php?SØ86f18704524b9992bac8164354cd96&SQ=0&t=mnav&rng=7&rng2=0&u?400&forum_limiter=&btn_submit¾gin+Search
Yahoo Archive:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Wittrs;_ylc=X3oDMTJmMzg0Z3FnBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzI4NjkzODY5BGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTYzMjIyNwRzZWMDdnRsBHNsawN2Z2hwBHN0aW1lAzEyNTE4NDE4MDc-
Other related posts:
- » [Wittrs] Response to Bruce/"Embodied Minds" - whoooo26505
