[Wittrs] Re: Minds, Brains and What There Is

  • From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
  • To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:01:42 -0000

--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Cayuse" <z.z7@...> wrote:
>
> SWM wrote:
> > "Cayuse" wrote:
> >> If your use of the word 'minds' includes phenomenal consciousness
> >> then it involves a misguided attempt to account for the fact of the
> >> existence of the "contents of consciousness".
> >
> <snip>
> > How can we of mind as anything but "phenomenal consciousness"?
> > What other kind of consciousness is there, even if we mean just to
> > be aware as in to be attentive! At the bottom of it all MUST be an
> > experiencing experiencer. What other "contents of consciousness"
> > can there be than the many aspects, facets and bits of experience?
>
> Ned Block's term "access consciousness" describes certain processes that are
> associated with brain activity, and that are likely amenable to explanation.
>



Offline, Sean asked if I could be clearer about my views in this thread and I 
sent him a clarification. After sending it, it occurred to me that I should 
post this here more publicly as well.

My position: To speak of mind is to speak of what we usually mean by 
"consciousness" and this (consciousness) consists of being a subject.

What is a subject? It has a point of view. It experiences things.

To experience you must have both experiencer and experiences. But experiencing, 
itself, is transparent, only known through each experience which is to say the 
content of experiencing.

By "experience" I mean awareness of all types, from sensory input awareness 
(perceptions) to thoughts to feelings to memories to visual images to 
understanding, etc. We have awareness of all these kinds of things even if they 
aren't all the same type (and so involve different particular experiences).

Further, and as I have often said, language, being of a public provenance, is 
not equipped for dealing with the private phenomena of what we call our mental 
lives (including all our experiences). But this doesn't mean that language 
grinds to a halt here. We can and do routinely refer to our thoughts, feelings, 
ideas and so forth. It's just that the referring works a little differently.

Nevertheless, because the linguistic paradigm derives its potency from the 
public sphere, the words we use for the private sphere often are the same as 
those we use for items in the public. Thus the grammar of the public sphere 
sometimes intrudes into the private sphere and we think, say, that because we 
can speak of "mind" as we speak of "rock" there must be some entity somewhere 
called "mind" in the same way we can pick out rocks in the physical world. THAT 
is a linguistic mistake which I think Wittgenstein clearly showed.

Based on the above, I am saying that:

1) There really are referents for words like "mind" and "consciousness" and so 
forth.

2) When we speak of them we have to be cognizant of their different provenance 
from other things we can denote (rocks, trees, basketballs) and so use our 
denotative terms in a way that is consistent with their characteristics as 
private phenomena. (Wittgenstein)

3) We can speak intelligibly about minds and how they relate to brains as long 
as we pay attention to the specialized linguistic usages implied by the 
different arena in which mental referents occur. (Implied by Wittgenstein's 
insights.)

4) One does not need to ascribe a mystical or dual nature to mind in order to 
conceptualize it. (See Dennett's model.)

5) If the evidence available to us leads us to believe that minds fit into a 
physical universe in a casual fashion, there is no reason not to accept such a 
view or to hold out for something more complex (made so by adding more to the 
universe than the current physics-based descriptions now available to us imply).

I think this summarizes my philosophical position on this in a nutshell.

SWM


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