Mind-Body Problem

[polytropos]

I have The Waning of Materialism sitting on my desk. It looks rather interesting.

Nagel’s book is kind of interesting in an “anthropological” sort of way. By that I mean, I find it incredible that the state of analytic philosophy is such that Nagel could write that book (and declare, for example, that the reductionist project has failed) and be taken seriously by many of his peers.

That said, that is largely what he does: declare that the reductionist project has failed. The book unfortunately doesn’t really contain arguments against materialism (its starting point is the failure of materialism, you could say). He gestures toward recent literature that he finds particularly damning and tries to provide guidelines for where he thinks the naturalistic (no longer materialistic) project should go. (It’s also very short, and there is not a paperback edition yet. The Waning of Materialism, though I haven’t read it, is certainly more bang for your buck.)

Nagel’s book was prominent enough that you could probably find it at any ordinary library.

 

[polytropos]

Unfortunately, I just don’t think I’d be remotely capable to taking even the more accessible essays in right now (I’m still a high school student, so I’ve had precious little teaching in logic or philosophy).

Hmm. If I could make a suggestion, it would be to just dive in. You may run into some things you don’t understand, but that’s not the end of the world. You can reread, and if there are a couple essays that don’t make sense, it’s not the end of the world. I managed to get a hold of Feser’s anthology Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics through my university, and I didn’t understand several of the essays. Some of them, I did understand. I think if I were to go back to them today, they would be a lot clearer.

Analytical philosophy is dense (especially philosophy of language). But ultimately the way to learn to read it is to read it.

 

[ccmnxc]

Hmm. If I could make a suggestion, it would be to just dive in. You may run into some things you don’t understand, but that’s not the end of the world. You can reread, and if there are a couple essays that don’t make sense, it’s not the end of the world. I managed to get a hold of Feser’s anthology Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics through my university, and I didn’t understand several of the essays. Some of them, I did understand. I think if I were to go back to them today, they would be a lot clearer.

Analytical philosophy is dense (especially philosophy of language). But ultimately the way to learn to read it is to read it.

You’re making too much sense, and its killing me. I suppose that you indeed have a fair point in saying that I’m going to learn philosophy by reading it. In the case of anthologies especially, there is the advantage that I don’t have to understand the earlier parts of the good to get a good grasp of the later parts. I think I just might take you up on that advice. Thanks.

But enough of my thread-jacking…

 

[Skeptic92]

Hmm. If I could make a suggestion, it would be to just dive in. You may run into some things you don’t understand, but that’s not the end of the world. You can reread, and if there are a couple essays that don’t make sense, it’s not the end of the world. I managed to get a hold of Feser’s anthology Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics through my university, and I didn’t understand several of the essays. Some of them, I did understand. I think if I were to go back to them today, they would be a lot clearer.

Analytical philosophy is dense (especially philosophy of language). But ultimately the way to learn to read it is to read it.

Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics is damn near inaccessible for the majority of the papers, you need a good familiarity with Formal Logic and be up to date in current Aristotelian scholarship to have a chance. It also isn’t actually Fesers anthology: he just contributed a paper I believe.

 

[ccmnxc]

Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics is damn near inaccessible for the majority of the papers, you need a good familiarity with Formal Logic and be up to date in current Aristotelian scholarship to have a chance. It also isn’t actually Fesers anthology: he just contributed a paper I believe.

He’s listed as the editor, though as to what that actually entails for such an anthology, I have no idea.

 

[polytropos]

Feser was the editor. The essays on essential identity dependence are mind numbing. But a handful of them are not too bad. Boulter’s and Tahko’s. Feser’s, Oderberg’s, and Klima’s.

 

[Skeptic92]

He’s listed as the editor, though as to what that actually entails for such an anthology, I have no idea.

He’d have been responsible for any typographical editing, ordering etc. The actual peer-review and collection was done by Palgrave (the publisher) themselves as it requested papers for the Anthology. I’ll need to get a hold of it again once I’ve got the time to read it, not looking like I’ve got much time for recreational reading for a while.

 

[Faith1960]

Bump.

I don’t know of anything written in the Church that takes modern brain science into account.

I can think of one or two philosophers, but am unsure of their orthodoxy.

ICXC NIKA

What does it mean when posters write “bump”?

 

[Skeptic92]

What does it mean when posters write “bump”?

**ringing
p
[m]y
[p]ost

Just means they are bringing it up from the bottom of the page to the top**

 

[Aloysium]

It is interesting that being who and what we are, we don’t know what that is.
It isn’t clear what we are looking for: maybe some model, some analogy, some formula, something that ties it all together.
We may be looking to be more aware, to be more our true selves.
I would say that ultimately, we yearn to know and connect to the Ground of our being, where all will be known.

Going through life, we tend to identify ourselves with what actually belongs to the realm of ideas, images, roles and such.
We carry around these mental pictures and identities that are so far, far less than who we actually are.
These entrenched beliefs affect the relationships we have with ourselves, with each other and with God…

We are ultimately persons: holy beings that are in relation to creation and to God.
Within that unity, is the body: those processes that are governed by the laws of nature and make us participants in that realm.
At the same time our perceptions, thoughts, memories, feelings, and sensations are of a different order or structure and follow different rules than those of the body: they are of the mind.
If you destroy part of the brain, you will destroy the particular function associated with that anatomical area.
Conversely mental activity explains the whys of brain activity. Psychologically, we exist in a social world. The person can be affected by physical and/or psychological trauma. We see that intense mental experiences at a young age can permanently change how the brain is wired and performs.
Again, there is one person that we can understand in terms of material, physiological processes or as a psychosocial entity.
It is God’s breath, giving this matter life that makes us persons. We can know of our existence, know beauty and truth, and even step outside of time and ourselves to make the sorts of considerations being expressed in this thread. Our free will is a property of this spiritual unity that we are; we participate in a finite sense to create who we become. It is not that the spirit controls, as it is simply that we, you and I, decide and act.

 

[KyrieEleison17]

The reason I say that (and I’m really thinking and writing at the same) is, if there is no duality, than the mind and the brain aren’t separate. This means that everything is determined inside the brain and we truly don’t have free will. Studies have shown that before a person makes a decision to do something, a firing off of synapses in the brain occurs and this triggers our actions. So wouldn’t this mean that we are slaves to our brain? I don’t know, it seems this is either above my level of comprehension or I’m just ignorant of something. That’s why I came here. Hopefully someone knows of something I don’t. haha

This is why science needs philosophers. The theory results in an absurdity, equivalent to Dawkins’ Meme Theory of thought, where the explanation is a non-explanation because it, too, would necessarily just be another meaningless and utterly unverifiable “meme”.

As for Dualism, the difficulty for Christian theologians and philosophers at that time was the fact that “substance” had extremely specific connotations important for dogmatic beliefs about the Trinity and Christ’s human and divine natures. Descartes, however, changed man’s nature by making him not one but rather a combination of two distinct substances, resulting in the notorious “mind-body” “problem” of modern philosophy.

This problem is inescapable for moderns and keeps resurfacing. Scientists generally misunderstand the nature of this problem and will sometimes even confidently claim that modern empirical science will somehow “solve” it but don’t realize they are just recreating the problem and even being living proof of the “problem”. The more ideologically deluded will even think science has already somehow “solved” the problem or deny there even is one, which is tantamount to willful blindness: if even our thoughts are pre-determined by brain chemistry (or whatever strictly physical phenomenon/phenomena), then necessarily it would be impossible to actually acquire knowledge or ever truly learn anything (your brain would just be producing these experiences and, therefore, would necessarily already need to have the “knowledge” you imagine you are “learning”). This will result in the opposite end of empiricism, i.e. rationalism and innate knowledge. All of it, however, is replete with contradictions and absurdities (like our history texts recording that human progress resulted in our learning that we can’t learn).

 

[ThinkingSapien]

Prove it. Can you open up a man’s brain and out spills his entire life of memories and reasoning and hopes and desires? Prove it.

Isn’t that a bit like, to refer to the brain as a computer metaphor,asking some one to disassemble a computer to show the notes of a song that were in an mp3 that the computer had?

 

[Linusthe2nd]

Does anyone know where I can find a good read on the Christian view of human Consciousness? I don’t want one that just says: “this is what we believe” and does nothing but quote scripture, but instead gives evidence of the claim through philosophy and science.

Why worry about it. Did Christ or the Apostles or the Prophets ever mention it. You have a mind, you have a body. That’s it, end of worry. Don’t worry about what all those " intellectuals " try to tell you, they don’t know when to come in out of the rain. Ignor them.

Linus2nd

 

[KyrieEleison17]

Isn’t that a bit like, to refer to the brain as a computer metaphor,asking some one to disassemble a computer to show the notes of a song that were in an mp3 that the computer had?

“Show the notes”? Aren’t notes in the sound itself (i.e. heard) and not seen? So yes it would be like that I guess; that is, a category error and looking for things in the wrong places. If thought or intelligence is essentially immaterial then it will not be itself a visible thing (it won’t have dimensions for instance).

 

[ThinkingSapien]

“Show the notes”? Aren’t notes in the sound itself (i.e. heard) and not seen? So yes it would be like that I guess; that is, a category error and looking for things in the wrong places. If thought or intelligence is essentially immaterial then it will not be itself a visible thing (it won’t have dimensions for instance).

It’s not just that, even in the case of some physical/material systems the above mentioned request wouldn’t work. For example, if a computer has some piece of information in volatile storage and I was asked to disassemble the storage so that it’s contents could be examined in disassembling the computer I’ve separated the volatile memory from the that which is needed to maintain it (power, refresh circuitry, so on). The information to be examined would be gone because the method used for examining it was destructive.

 

[GEddie]

It’s not just that, even in the case of some physical/material systems the above mentioned request wouldn’t work. For example, if a computer has some piece of information in volatile storage and I was asked to disassemble the storage so that it’s contents could be examined in disassembling the computer I’ve separated the volatile memory from the that which is needed to maintain it (power, refresh circuitry, so on). The information to be examined would be gone because the method used for examining it was destructive.

Which was also true of the human head, prior to just before the turn of the century.

 

[polytropos]

I think ThinkingSapien has a good point.

The difficulties with materialism do not stem from the practical problems of knowing what is going on in a human brain, which is perhaps the most complex object in the universe. The difficulties stem from the possibility of doing so in principle. Objections to materialism should have nothing to do with “irreducible complexity.”

 

[balto]

It’s not just that, even in the case of some physical/material systems the above mentioned request wouldn’t work. For example, if a computer has some piece of information in volatile storage and I was asked to disassemble the storage so that it’s contents could be examined in disassembling the computer I’ve separated the volatile memory from the that which is needed to maintain it (power, refresh circuitry, so on). The information to be examined would be gone because the method used for examining it was destructive.

I think you bring up a good analogy, but I don’t think that the question concerning how the brain works is really about whether it functions more like volatile main memory or non-volatile hard disk space. Presumably the kind of thought content that a thinker entertains could not be represented determinately under either volatile or non-volatile conditions. To use your MP3 example, it may be possible to find “MP3 data” encoded in a human brain (even if the data were volatile and are lost upon death) but the experience of the song or the intention/meaning behind it would not be data that could reside wholly in the brain. You would have to ask the programmer and/or user what the meaning is, but then that would show that the meaning is not reducible to the physical state.

 

[balto]

This is why science needs philosophers. The theory results in an absurdity, equivalent to Dawkins’ Meme Theory of thought, where the explanation is a non-explanation because it, too, would necessarily just be another meaningless and utterly unverifiable “meme”.

As for Dualism, the difficulty for Christian theologians and philosophers at that time was the fact that “substance” had extremely specific connotations important for dogmatic beliefs about the Trinity and Christ’s human and divine natures. Descartes, however, changed man’s nature by making him not one but rather a combination of two distinct substances, resulting in the notorious “mind-body” “problem” of modern philosophy.

This problem is inescapable for moderns and keeps resurfacing. Scientists generally misunderstand the nature of this problem and will sometimes even confidently claim that modern empirical science will somehow “solve” it but don’t realize they are just recreating the problem and even being living proof of the “problem”. The more ideologically deluded will even think science has already somehow “solved” the problem or deny there even is one, which is tantamount to willful blindness: if even our thoughts are pre-determined by brain chemistry (or whatever strictly physical phenomenon/phenomena), then necessarily it would be impossible to actually acquire knowledge or ever truly learn anything (your brain would just be producing these experiences and, therefore, would necessarily already need to have the “knowledge” you imagine you are “learning”). This will result in the opposite end of empiricism, i.e. rationalism and innate knowledge. All of it, however, is replete with contradictions and absurdities (like our history texts recording that human progress resulted in our learning that we can’t learn).

I think you hit the nail right on the head with your analysis. Descartes’ separating of mind and matter in his dualist system has led many contemporary thinkers to believe that the mind, which previously had been brushed aside as something that is not able to be investigated, is really just an illusion that is produced by physical states in our brain. This ironically throws doubt over all scientific findings because we still have to make all of our observations through these mind experiences. It makes it impossible to be able to claim that your “knowledge” that materialism/naturalism is true is really anything insightful and not just a random consequence of your mental programming.

C.S. Lewis has some interesting thoughts on this problem in his discourse on the Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism which the OP may be interested in.

 

[Aslan10]

Why worry about it. Did Christ or the Apostles or the Prophets ever mention it. You have a mind, you have a body. That’s it, end of worry. Don’t worry about what all those " intellectuals " try to tell you, they don’t know when to come in out of the rain. Ignor them.

Linus2nd

No. But they also didn’t feel the need to argue or explain the trinity. Thank goodness the Council of Nicaea did. I think its something worth exploring.