[Wittrs] Re: SWM on causation
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:55:24 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "BruceD" <blroadies@...> wrote:
>
> --- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "SWM" <SWMirsky@> wrote:
>
> > In yourself or in others? In yourself it would seem odd to say 'I see
> signs I am waking up'. What signs?
>
> Quite commonly people wonder whether they are still asleep.
>
In dreams but I cannot think of a case where we wonder when we aren't. Of
course there is the common phrase "pinch me so I know I'm not dreaming" but
that is an exercise in hyperbole more than a claim to be unsure about whether
one is asleep or not.
> > How can your brain cause you to do this or that?
>
> Isn't that your point of view. The brain causes consciousness....please
> clarify
>
The brain causes consciousness. But the brain doesn't cause you to do specific
things except insofar as various features of your consciousness, as caused by
the brain, kick in. This has to do with the different senses of "cause" of
course. The same thing we have been talking about here for god know how long!
> > To think about turning, as in a wheel turning, is not to think about
> two entities:
>
> I don't know what entities are but a wheel at rest or turning is
> physical
>
And the turning of the wheel is also physical.
> > you cannot shake this picture that you interpret everything I say
> about this as invoking the idea of mind as entity!
>
> Because a physical account requires a physical medium in which the
> causation occurs.
THAT is your mistake. The wheel's turning is physical. It cannot occur without
a physical something that turns. The turning is certainly not spiritual, not a
ghost outside the machine, etc. And, indeed, the wheel may be called the medium
in which the turning happens. Yet the turning isn't the wheel. Both are
physical yet one can be pointed to directly because of its mass, extension,
texture, etc.; the other can only be pointed to by pointing to the wheel which,
of course, can also be at rest and thus no turning in existence.
> You can't start with a physical thing and claim it
> causes something physical but this physical is not in the same medium.
> In fact, it is nothing.
>
Is the turning of the wheel nothing then? Can the turning happen without the
wheel? Yet both are real and in the world.
> > The question, of course, is what are the implications of what you have
> just said for understanding
> > what we mean by consciousness and what can bring it about and what
> sustains it?
>
> I don't see any mystery in "what we mean by consciousness." The mystery
> begins when one wants to reduce it to the physical.
A certain kind of knock on the head, wherein the brain resides, does away with
consciousnes, the stronger the knock, the more permanent the disappearance.
Nothing is more reductive than that! Unless you can give an account of minds
persisting without brains or occurring apart from them, the reduction is
already implied. The only question is whether you are prepared to acknowledge
the implications or want to avoid that or come up with a different story
(dualism?).
>What brings about
> consciousness is being born, which in every case requires the minimum of
> a body and what sustains it is living well.
That is a different question! Indeed, organisms are born all the time with
varying degrees of consciousness and some, we may say, without consciousness
(at least as we understand it) at all. This isn't about birth and death, it's
about what brains do or do not do.
> The latter appears to be
> very difficult these days.
>
> bruce
"Living well" is irrelevant to the question at hand, indeed it is another
change of subject!
SWM
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