[Wittrs] [C] Re: Wittgenstein's Way
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:32:01 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "BruceD" <blroadies@...> wrote:
>
> --- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "SWM" <SWMirsky@> wrote:
>
> > What you can watch is irrelevant to what causes what...
>
> If I can't watch both X and Y, in some way, I have no business saying
> that X causes Y because that claim is untestable.
>
It doesn't matter what you say or what you know. If something causes something
else then it causes it. Your knowledge or lack of knowledge about it is
irrelevant to the causal relation itself.
> > Note, again, that you can watch the mouth and watch the smile
> > but there is no interacting between a mouth and a smile so you can't
> watch THAT.
>
> So a mouth in motion doesn't cause a smile, by my lights. But you
> write..
>
> > the movement of the mouth causes the smile
>
It causes it in the physical sense. The muscles in the mouth contract here,
expand there, and voila, a smile appears. Thus, the movements (of the different
elements of the mouth) caused the smile. Of course it might also have been
caused by a good joke or a little gas as we have seen, since something prompted
the muscles that move the mouth to move in their turn. We can always trace it
down or decide to come to rest here or there in the process of the search,
depending on what we're trying to find out. What makes mouths move in a smiley
way? What makes persons with faces smile? And so forth.
> How can that be if I can't see the interaction between M and S. Of
> course, the obvious answer is that I can see both the mouth and the
> smile. But I don't conceive of them as interaction but I "take the look
> of the mouth to be a smile."
Well you conceive of them in the way that best serves your purposes and in this
discussion apparently it's to hold out for a non-physical account of minds.
Whatever. If you were interested in how smiles form on faces or which
constituents of the face are connected to which messaging centers in the brain,
you would conceive of them in a different way. You just don't want to for the
purposes of this discussion.
> Since the brain doesn't interpret,
> according to you, that way of conceiving of how the world works is not
> available to you.
>
Sometimes the brain interprets. It depends on the level of detail we are
discussing things at. Generally we don't speak of brains as separate organisms,
as persons. But sometimes, under some circumstances, we might. Then we might
want to lodge the interpreting functions in brains not the larger organism. For
instance, if the issue is where is the interpreting activity as a mental
process going on in Bruce, we couldn't reasonably say (given all we know about
human organisms today) 'in his left kidney'.
> > It would be an odd subject who cried "ouch" but didn't feel pain when
> the fiber in question is stimulated.
>
> Odd, perhaps, but unaccountable by your causal point of view.
>
Odder to imagine that pain is just a matter of certain behaviors, like crying
ouch!
> > YOU DON'T NEED AN "EXTERNAL RELATIONSHIP" WITH YOUR BRAIN
> > FOR IT TO BE THE CAUSE OF YOU BEING A CONSCIOUS CREATURE.
>
> Causes have to be external to the effect is question.
No they don't. There are many uses of "cause" and they don't all imply separate
entities acting on one another. Think of the question, 'why is water wet' and
its answer, 'because of the way its atomic level constituents behave under
certain ambient conditions'.
What is this saying? It's telling us that the feature of water we identify as
wetness is caused by the behavior of the kinds of molecules that make up water.
The molecules in question are not separate entities from the water that act on
the water, they ARE the water!
This is not that difficult nor is it new in our discussions. You just
persistently refuse to accept this simple and obvious example from ordinary
usage. Well, if someone won't accept an example that seems obvious, are we just
stuck? In one sense yes. We can't really go further with that person. But in
another sense no, because if we're right it doesn't matter who or how many
others grant it.
> What you can't ge
> straight is whether there are two things, a brain and consciousness,
No Bruce, THAT is your confusion. I never say there are two separate entities
and have consistently said consciousness, mind, is NOT entity-like. A different
picture is relevant, i.e., consciousness is to the brain as the turning is to
the wheel and the smile to the face. It is YOU who keeps insisting that I must
be arguing about two entities and that's because you seem unable to separate
yourself from conceiving of brains and minds on this false analogy.
> and
> one causes the other (which makes you a dualist, as Joseph points out)
Joe is wrong as I showed him in that thread (though, since he hasn't yet
responded, I have no idea if he accepts that particular showing or not -- but,
as above, whether something is right or wrong in cases like this doesn't depend
on acceptance by others).
> or an indentuty between brain and consciousness (both physical, no
> causation because they are the same thing).
>
You did read my response about the identity issue didn't you? Are you just
disregarding the point I was making about the different notions of identity?
> > See, I have said repeatedly you are a dualist and here you go again:
> > "you have both a machine and a willful person".
> > And yet you keep denying that you are dualist while every
> > claim you make is embedded in dualist presumptions.
>
> I'll end on this note. Try to clarify. Yes, I begin with the Dualism of
> B/M because that is how the philosophical puzzle is initially stated and
> how it occurs in the everyday.
The important philosophical insight here is that this puzzle is based on a
confusion and doesn't have traction when examined closely.
> And like you I'm not happy with the
> Dualism.
And yet you constantly reinvoke it with every argument you present.
> But I'm more unhappy with tricky dualism that claims to be
> physical while attributing intentionality to body parts (vitalism)
I suppose this is a comment on my position? Can you tell us how anything I've
said attributes "intentionality to body parts"?
> and
> that emulates science with talk about causation where NO USE OF THE TERM
> works out,
I've shown several dozen times now how the use "works out". Just asserting and
reasserting that it doesn't doesn't change THAT.
> and confuses the identity of brain/mind with a causal
> relationship.
>
> bruce
>
Until you deal substantively with the distinctions I made in my points about
the nuances of identity and causal claims, instead of simply denying, there
isn't much I can say here except to deny your denials.
SWM
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