I don’t even know what this is or how it’s relevant to our discussion.
It isn’t, as that post wasn’t to you. To recap, I said to Peter, “First, you probably know but just to be sure, the homunculus idea is a fallacy, because it leads to an infinite regression”.
Peter replied “It is never explained, either, why a little guy in the head “can ONLY be explained by” another little guy in HIS head, as if that proposition runs smack against some necessary logical principle or other.”
But it’s a well-known fallacy -
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument.
*What we’ve learned in neuroscience is perfectly consistent with what we would expect in hylemorphism. *
Agreed.
The problem is that you’re speaking of these as having meaning at all. That they are a physical cascade of material processes, sure, but where does any representation of something beyond itself come into play? For one, you seem to be acknowledging an explicit teleology regarding each area. A materialist would not say that the heart has the purpose of pumping blood. Neither should a materialist say anything along the lines of “This area is for “Is it furry?” and This area is for “Does it have four legs?”” Under a materialist conception, this is simply convenient parlance, and it does no good to hide behind it to try to have your cake and eat it, too. All we have is lump of gray matter sending neuro-electrical chemical signals, perhaps due to light hitting a retina and triggering a neuroelectrical chemical signal up the optic nerve. Or vibrations in the ear canal. Or some type of chemical reaction from the LSD slipped into your coffee. What makes this event (or combination thereof) intrinsically representative of a cat or anything else? Why is the ink scribbled on paper in the form of “cat” intrinsically meaningless as it’s only matter and its meaning is only derived relative to a mind reading it but the matter of our neuroelectrical chemical signals intrinsically representative of something else?
Refer to the talk I linked. They found brain areas which activate only when a word contains particular meanings. For example a specific area which activates for house, castle, palace, etc., but not for cat, saw, hammer. That’s the evidence, no theory or teleology involved.
It appears that there’s an area for every facet of meaning, which activates only when that facet is present in a word. So that provides complete parsing of the meaning of the word.
While not conclusive, the evidence suggests that those activations set a context (perhaps a virtual state machine). That then enables the recall of specific sense perceptions such as feel of furriness of cat, smell of cat, sound of purring, image of cat, etc.
Isn’t that everything that meaning of cat can possibly involve?
You seem to assume I’m concerned about a lack of scientific explanation when that’s not the issue at all. The arguments dualist’s make is that intentionality (from intendere) “to point (at)” or represent something else – includes thoughts, beliefs, consciousness) is irreducible to matter and cannot be explained in materialist terms. No amount of showing me correlations between neuroscience and mental states is going to resolve this issue, as all such correlations are entirely expected. I’m asking you to explain to me how intentionality can be said to be in the system as something more than an epiphenomenon at best. We could speak of our actual first person sense experience also being only an indirect representation of the external world at best and also not something reducible to something which can be learned *entirely *only through third-person study of the material involved absent any experience actual first hand experience of said sensations, which is what most people seem to focus on, but intentionality is, at heart, the bigger issue. Matter is not, in itself, meaningful or representative or directed to anything beyond itself in a mechanistic worldview. Sounds-waves, ink marks, neurochemical interactions . . . what’s the difference?
You started this conversation by asking “When I think chiliagon, does a chiliagon suddenly manifest itself in my brain?”, and I’ve given a detailed answer based on real-world evidence, which seems to fit exactly the meaning of intentionality -
plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/.
(Although again, it’s one of those concepts invented by armchair philosophers which may not even exist objectively, time will tell).
No one else has given
any answers, let alone detailed, or shown why all those philosophers and scientists must be wrong in principle.
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