[Wittrs] Re: SWM on reduction
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2010 01:39:16 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "BruceD" <blroadies@...> wrote:
> Hi Stuart-- there is so much material. Would agree in plucking one
> theme? I tried on "reduction."
> --- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "SWM" <SWMirsky@> wrote:
> > If thoughts and feelings, etc., are reducible to things unlike
> themselves,
>
> Notice you write "to things unlike themselves" which implies that. prior
> to reduction, there is soemthing (being love), to all appearances, is
> totally different from Y (the electrical flow of brain), the thing you
> wish to reduce X to. Right? This I'll call reduction in character.
>
> How do you test that X is identical with Y?
>
Depends what's meant by "identical". Nothing in anything I've said implies that
there isn't love and that love occurs on a different of our experience than the
activities of the brains of the persons in love. The testing in question is
accomplished by either eliminating certain brain operations in test subjects
(morally unacceptable though sometimes researchers encounter subjects with the
relevant brain damage) or building platforms of other materials (computers?)
and attempting to replicate the operations that result in outputs associated
with being in love.
> Perhaps you mean reduction via causation.
Not perhaps! That's what I've been saying and why I keep using that term (even
while recognizing that "cause" has many applications, many contexts, many
different uses).
> If you stimulate a brain area
> and I report feeling giddy, the the experience of giddiness is dependent
> upon the brain area. OK? But where do you place the person who is making
> the report?
The output of the full range of brain functions, not just the limited one being
tested. Take away the brain or destroy it and where does the person go?
>The brain stimulation didn't cause giddiness, as if that
> were some kind of phenomena in the world.
That's a wrong picture. It certainly causes is and it is certainly in the world
since the person is in the world as is his/her brain. But no, the giddiness is
an experience that does not directly correlate to some physical object or
entity we observe (even if such a thing might sometimes be the trigger of the
experience of feeling giddy).
> Rather, it prompted the person
> to describe his psychological state.
>
No, it produced the psychological state the person is describing. A person
could also describe it from memory or make it up. But in the context of the
testing situation, it is the occurrence of the state which the person,
following instructions, proceeds to report.
> > I had asked that perhaps you would be good enough to explicate your
> own view
> I did in the last sentence above. I begin with a person. Not an entity
> or substance. And, to make life complicated, the person is both outside
> of his world, as author, and part of the world, as an object.
> When you stimulate my brain you alter who I am. I experience my body, as
> an object changing. But experience is always from a point of view. My
> point of view, stance, is not part of the world because it defines my
> world.
>
> bruce
How does beginning with a person, as you put it, answer the question of how
brains produce consciousness or whether they do or not or even what
consciousness, at bottom, is? Aren't you really just talking on a different
level?
And if so, then you really haven't answered my question. All you've done is
changed the subject.
SWM
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