(no subject)
- From: palma <palma@xxxxxxxx>
- To: cblists@xxxxxxxx, wokshevs@xxxxxx, lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2008 03:35:36 -0400 (EDT)
yIt is certainly a good idea to consider the alternatives. Minds do not
exist, minds are souils, minds are supernatural. Quite likely I missed
others, such as minds are cucumbers in Freiburg, there is only one mind
and it resides in the Fuehrer Wolfschanz, in the vatican chambers.
The list can be very long and immensely useful to read.
On Fri,
26 Sep 2008
cblists@xxxxxxxx wrote:
> In answer to a quotation bout 'philosopical scientism' which I posted
> to this list (see below), on 24-Sep-08, at 12:29 PM, palma wrote:
>
> > Can anybody quote a scientist who claims that science gives me the
> > best (??) and "most significant" (???) access to myself?
>
> Note that I wrote about *philosophers* 'seduced by the allure of brain
> science', not scientists. And the words Critchley used were "the
> primary and most significant access to ourselves and the world".
>
> > I'd like a specific source ...
>
> 'Seduction by the allure of brain science' is exemplified in the
> following 2 paragraphs from the a book review found in _Ameircan
> Scientist: The magazine of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society_,
> at
>
> http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/brain-based-values
> "As a graduate student at Caltech, Gazzaniga studied under one of the
> towering figures of neuroscience, Roger Sperry, whose lab pioneered
> research into ... so-called "split brain" patients [which] revealed
> that their two brain hemispheres operated independently, each
> hemisphere acting almost like a distinct person. These were profoundly
> important results, both for philosophy and for neuroscience. Gazzaniga
> went on to explore the neurobiology of higher mental functions ...,
> always with a philosophical question biting his heels. He currently
> serves on the President's Council on Bioethics. Thus it is especially
> fitting that he should now pen his thoughts on neuroethics."
>
> "The most fundamental neuroethical issue concerns free will and
> responsibility. The mind is what the brain does, and the brain is a
> causal machine. Consequently, deliberations, beliefs, decisions and
> ensuing behavior are the outcome of causal processes. Typically, the
> causal processes leading to awareness of a decision are nonconscious.
> The "user illusion," nevertheless, is that a decision is created
> independently of neuronal causes, by one's very own "act of will."
> Some philosophers?usually called libertarians?resolutely believe that
> voluntary decisions actually are created by the will, free of causal
> antecedents. Like flat-earthers and creationists, libertarians glorify
> their scientific naiveté by labeling it transcendental insight."
>
>
> Perhaps I've missed something somewhere, but it seems to me that a
> statement such as "the mind is what the brain does" is one of many
> competing philosophies of mind, and that those who in some way or
> other disagree cannot be so lightly dismissed (by lumping them in with
> 'flat-earthers and creationists' owing to 'their scientific naiveté')
> as the author of this review would have us believe.
>
> Chris Bruce
> Kiel, Germany
>
> > On Wed, 24 Sep 2008
> > cblists@xxxxxxxx wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> On 21-Sep-08, at 8:51 PM, wokshevs@xxxxxx wrote:
> >>
> >>> Scientists seduced by the allure of brain science ...
> >>
> >> To say nothing of philosophers seduced by same:
> >>
> >> ... philosophical scientism fails to see the role that
> >> science and technology play in the alienation of
> >> human beings from the world through the latter's
> >> objectification into a causally determined realm of
> >> nature or, more aggregiously, into a reified realm of
> >> commodities manipulated by an instrumental rationality.
> >> .... [S]cientism rests on the false assumption that the
> >> scientific or theoretical way of viewing things ... provides
> >> the primary and most significant access to ourselves and
> >> the world. ... [T]he scientific view of the world is derivative
> >> and parasitic upon a prior practical view of the world as
> >> [in Heideggerian terms] ready-to-hand, that is, the environing
> >> world that is closest, most familiar, and most meaningful
> >> to us, the world that is always colored by our cognitive,
> >> ethical and aesthetic values. That is to say, scientism ...
> >> overlooks the phenomenon of the *life-world* which is
> >> the enabling condition for scientific practice. Although
> >> such an anti-scientism *can* lead to obscurantism ... it
> >> *need* not do so. The critique of scientism ... does not
> >> seek to refute or negate the results of scientific research in
> >> the name of some mystical apprehension of the unity of
> >> man and nature ...; it rather simply insists that science does
> >> not provide the primary and most significant access to a
> >> sense of ourselves and the world.... [T]he practices of the
> >> natural sciences arise out of life-world practices, and ...
> >> the latter are not simply reducible to the former.
> >>
> >> [from Simon Critchley, "Introduction: what is Continental
> >> philosophy?", in Simon Critchley and William R Schroeder, eds. _A
> >> Companion to Continental Philosophy_, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
> >> 1998; p. 13]
> >>
> >> Of course, one does not have to side with Heidegger in order to be
> >> critical of 'scientism' - Adorno & Horkheimer (with all of their
> >> antipathies to Heidegger) immediately come to (well, at least, *my*)
> >> mind. (I think it is the 'commodities manipulated by an instrumental
> >> rationality' which triggers that.)
> >>
> >> Indeed I think that in Kant's 'Copernican revolution' in philosophy a
> >> critique of theoretical science providing 'the primary and most
> >> significant access to ourselves and the world' can be founded.
> >> (Tentative explication of this view will be made available upon
> >> request.)
> >>
> >> One must be fair to the scientists themselves. Not all are (or were)
> >> 'realists' when it comes to philosophising about their endeavours;
> >> indeed some regard(ed) realism as an impediment to scientific
> >> progress
> >> (the parenthetical past tenses - 'were' and 'regarded' are prompted
> >> by
> >> thoughts of the debate between the early developers of quantum theory
> >> and Einstein: the former thought that Einstein's commitment to
> >> realism
> >> a serious hindrance). 'Anti-scientism' (i.e., rejection of the view
> >> that science 'provides the primary and most significant access to
> >> ourselves and the world') is most definitely not automatically 'anti-
> >> science'.
> >>
> >> - Chris Bruce
> >> Kiel, Germany
> >> --
>
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/begin/read__>sig.file: postal address
palma
University of KwaZulu-Natal Philosophy
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