[Wittrs] Re: Is Homeostasis caused or purposive?
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2010 02:45:23 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "BruceD" <blroadies@...> wrote:
<snip>
> SWM: all experience involves the physical both in terms of experiencing
> whatever we are experiencing and in terms of what it takes to have an
> experience at all, i.e., brains and physical events that become sensory
> input via signals passed along the neural pathways, etc.
Bruce: It's the etc, that's our problem. At some point, in your mechanical
model, the physical becomes experiential. Because you hold to a mechanical
model you are required to explain this transformation. Do you see why it isn't
my problem? I see your mechanical account as conceptual. Shifting concepts
requires justification but no account of transformation.
SWM Replies: As I have said and been saying for an interminably long time now,
at the end of the day this is about HOW WE CONCEIVE CONSCIOUSNESS! So yes, it's
"conceptual". Congratulations! Is it a shift? Well, yes, of course. Dennett
argues that we can account for all the features we typically associate with
consciousness in ourselves by thinking of them in a different way, changing the
paradigm. The argument against him must be to show that his proposed paradigm
doesn't do what he claims, i.e., fully account for all the features of
consciousness, that something critical has been left out. You want to say I or
he have left out the transformation of a physical phenomenon to a mental one.
Fair enough. But then you miss the point because we haven't left it out if one
accepts the paradigm shift. So you can't argue against the shift by saying it
isn't the same as the pre-shift paradigm. Well, of course it isn't. THAT'S JUST
THE POINT!
> > I suggest you have another look at Dehaene
>
> A global neural workplace is a way of metaphorizing the brain in
> mentalistic terms that gives some the impression that he has discovered
> the transformation of brain into mind when all he has is a correlation.
Dehaene doesn't give any indication that he is "metaphorizing" even if you want
to take him as doing that. But if you do you are not really considering his
actual words, you are simply reinterpreting them to fit with YOUR preferred
paradigm which he manifestly doesn't share. Note that he says of his research
at one point that "it turns out Dennett was right". If he shared your paradigm,
he couldn't say that now could he?
Again, there is no "transformation" of brain into mind, as you put it, to be
discovered because that would be like claiming to discover the transformation
of wheel into turning!!!!!!!
> But this fact doesn't diminish the practical use his finding for
> understanding brain damage. It just doesn't address our philosophical
> muddle and hence can't resolve it.
>
His research is aimed at discovering what it is that brains do that
yield/produce/constitute/cause consciousness. Yes it has important medical and
other practical applications but at the end of the day he is interested in how
brains produce what he calls "access consciousness" (being aware). The only one
who is philosophically muddled about this . . . well, you know my opinion!
> > The brain's operations cause the features we associate with
> consciousness
>
> The brain causes "features" -- features of what? -- consciousness? --
I have described consciousness as being an agglomeration of certain features we
recognize in ourselves, specifically in our subjective experience. This is
hardly the first time in our many discussions that I have referred to
"features" or described consciousness in this way!
> then why write "associate with." You make it sound as if the brain
> causes something to happen somewhere else (the mind).
You simply misread me. By "we associate with" I meant (and have always meant)
the things we think of when speaking of consciousness! You continue to be
fixated on this idea that the "mind" if invoked as such must be taken to mean
something entity-like. Think again of the wheel and its turning. If the wheel
is an entity, must we think its turning is, too??????
>But according to
> Dehaene the brain dioesn't cause the GNW, the brain is the GNW.
No, he says it is many different parts of the brain working together and
interacting that are the global neuronal network. The brain is firstly more
than just those parts and secondly a physical object and not, itself, such a
network.
> The
> brain is mind. An identity, not a causal account, closer to two sides of
> the coin. If you see the coin as conceptual, then no problem, but if you
> try to place the sides of a coin in a causal relationship, you got
> trouble.
>
> bruce
Here's the coin picture again: The brain's processes, its operations, are the
coin. The publicly observable features of those operations (the electrical
firings, the identifiable patterns seen through the agency of an fMRI) are the
one side. The experiences occurring to the subject, the subjectness, are the
other. Two sides, one coin, but each side is also itself and not the other. Not
logical identity, something else, albeit something perfectly ordinary and
comprehensible if one can shake the fixation on identity as a claim of logic.
SWM
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