[Wittrs] Re: Is the brain a hammer?
- From: "BruceD" <blroadies@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 03 May 2010 20:56:47 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "SWM" <SWMirsky@...> wrote:
"This is my third try today since this morning, Bruce. (Have had
numerous interruptions as well as some pc problems so this may end up
shorter now than it would otherwise have been."
I well empathize with PC hell. But brief is good
> I didn't suggest the brain chooses to be conscious
I know. You clearly say that the person chooses. Yet you have brain
causing...causing what?. This is where I get lost.
BTW: By this point on give up trying to understand what is or is not
Dualism, or causation, for that matter, it ain't the words but the logic
of the account.
> But how is it to express oneself?
Well, we have a choice. You stimulate section A of my brain and I say "I
remember April." Choice 1- The stimulation caused this being to utter
that sentence. Choice 2- The stimulation prompted a nostalgic reflection
of a girlfriend and a song. Which choice is more useful in understanding
our lives a as beings with a brain?
> The issue is what causes the subject What brings it about in the
world?
Right! As you point out we are already there in asking the question. So
we can only ask of others who are not there yet. Right? And we find that
brain matures, at some point this entity becomes a subject. In the
process of development all sorts of bio-chemical activity went on in a
context of environmental inputs. If you will, this makes the subject.
But the subject emerges, for us the observer, it is not the physical
brain that we encounter. The ongoing brain bio-chemical activity doesn't
serve the person coming to know himself or us coming to know him.
> I don't think that one has to hold that this makes us automatons.
I don't see how you can have it both ways at the same time. The brain
operates causally, period. If every thought and act stands in a causal
relation to brain activity, then we are automatons. If the brain
exercises choice, we have vitalism.
> Because I am talking about how a physical phenomenon, a brain,
> produces a subjective phenomenon, a mind.
You talk about mind as if it were an object "produced." Though sometimes
you talk about subjectivity as what the brain "does." I prefer the
latter. Because mind isn't an object but an activity. The puzzler is the
relationship between brain and mind activity. We have a correlation.
What can we say beyond that without mixing a causal language with an
intentional one.
BTW: Think about the difference between the relationship of cause and
effect and the relationship between reasons and behavior.
> Could he do any of it without a brain to make him what he is?
Does the brain make the man or does the man make the brain. Well,one
must start with a brain but how one lives (thinks and feels) alters the
brain.
bruce
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