[Wittrs] Re: When is "brain talk" really dualism?
- From: "swmaerske" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 06 Sep 2009 01:29:10 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "blroadies" <blroadies@...> wrote:
>
> From _Deep Survival_ by Lawrence Gonzales, a psych-physiological study
> of mind, body
> and behavior in extreme situations.
>
> In discussing a study that attempts to predict landslides...
>
> "There is nothing at all in the physics of silicon dioxide (sand) that
> could predict
> the behavior of the sand pile" (That is, as sand is poured slowly upon
> it, at some
> indeterminate moment it collapses.)
>
> "You could use physics and chemistry to examine a grain of sand until
> your lights go
> out and never discover the Sand Pile Effect. But the Sand Pile Effect
> expresses a
> tremendous mount about the way nature works." It works as a system.
> "The
> systems...complex and tightly coupled are actually self-organizing
> systems."
>
> What I get out of this: Even in the physical world isolated X/Y
> causality, which may
> account for simple objects, must be set aside for non-causal,
> teleological accounts.
> No way can one ask "How do the grains of sand cause the Sand Pile
> Effect." By the
> same token, one ought not try to ask "How do brain parts cause mental
> organization?
>
> In a word, these accounts embrace a non-reductionism, a notion of
> emergence,that is every bit naturalistic.
>
> bruce
>
I don't get anything like that out of it! A study of a grain of sand will not
suffice to describe the behavior of the sandpile because a landslide of a
sandpile involves a lot more than one grain of sand. The writer is right to
note the system aspect here but you are wrong, on my view, to think this argues
for anything "teleogical" let alone "non-causal". -- SWM
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