[Wittrs] Re: Current Brain Research: Causal Model?
- From: "BruceD" <blroadies@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2010 01:12:50 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "SWM" <SWMirsky@...> wrote:
> After all, the feature of wetness is... an emergent feature of H2O
molecules. > Nothing strange or non-physical there.
Right, so far.
> So what I have described hardly seems to warrant
> being labeled a doctrine of non-emergence!
Your position is non-emergent in so far as it is reductive. Even if your
reduction only amounts to causation (as you contend). Why? Because there
can be no causation between levels of emergence.
Another way of putting it: The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
The organism, as a self-sufficient entity, has properties that none of
its parts have and hence its parts, on their own, can't cause them.
Brain activity is necessary for mind. Even specific brain events are
associated with specific mental events. But mind, that is the say the
person's mind, is not to be identified with any brain part. What one can
say about the person, one cannot say about the brain.
Finally, there can be no causal relation between the brain, which is
accounted for in causal-mechanical terms, and the mind, accounted for in
intentional terms.
That is why you can never get to the last step in the causal chain, the
person's mind. You attempt to do so by talking about a mental event as
if it happened apart from a person having it. The C-fiber causes "pain",
where pain is thought of disconnected from the person who experiences
the pain in a certain way, in a certain light.
From an emergent viewpoint, the person doesn't "appear" in the causal
chain terminating in the brain. So the brain can't cause the person to
feel, rather the person uses his brain to feel. This shift from a causal
to an intentional account is perfectly in line with a science. What
isn't scientific, is to dogmatically insist that physics, or what passes
for a physical account, is the dominant discourse.
bruce
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