DRFseven

De nada, John.

mhc

Yes,DRFseven, it is the case that I am unaware of much of the detail, but I still have trouble with your semantics!
There's a missing piece somewhere.
I am fine with (though wouldn't necessarily agree with) the notion that a certain thought is identical to a certain brain state, but I can't understand that thought as being "created" by that brain state.
Fast moving molecules don't create the sensation of heat in you're hand, the sensation of heat is identical to certain neural processes taking place, right? These neural processes don't "create" the sensation of heat, they ARE the sensation of heat.
How then do neural processes in the brain "create" thoughts?
Such a notion requires a third something.
The Mona Lisa is just paint on canvas. This paint, in this particular configuration on this canvas IS, objectively, the Mona Lisa.
In order to say the paint "creates" the Mona Lisa, a third thing (here, mind) is called for, a thing which will create from this configuration of paint the face of a woman with a famously ambiguous snarl, er, smile.
Is my question clearer now?
If nuerons firing in this way "create" this thought, what do they create it with/from/out of ?

jpbrooks

Briefly, while this topic has no religious significance for me, the fact that I am not an ontological reductionist compels me to take sides on this issue. I would be very happy simply to remain ''agnostic'' and argue that there doesn't appear to be any way to determine whether the ''mind'' is an entity that exists independently from any set of interconnected neurons - without objecting to any of the claims made on either side of the issue. But I just can't accept Physicalist Reductionism as persuasive if it is presented as anything more than a methodological assumption. If there is no way to reduce mental phenomena to physical/physiological phenomena, then I don't see how causality or identity between mental and physical phenomena can ever be established. And if it/they can't be established, how can the claim that the mind does not / cannot exist independently from the brain be established?

Back to the books.

DRFseven

Agreed; the famous gap.



Well, IS it identical? The neurological phenomenon, itself, isn't hot; it's that the mechanism results in a feeling of heat. They don't seem exactly identical to me, though, for practical purposes, it seems ok for people to refer to them that way.



But why don't you think the sensation of heat requires that same "third something?" There is the neural process and there is the sensation of heat. Why does the neural process feel like heat? And why does another neural process seem like colors when it, too, is made up of electrochemical impulses?

Well, actually, I remain perplexed. I don't understand why in the case of heat, you think the neurological phenomenon is "necessary and sufficient" for identification, but for visual phenomena, a mind that is independent of the brain is required.

I think that the brain creates meaning out of patterns of impulses and that we refer to that function as mind. Our brains receive and send impulses and these processes seem like something, which creates more impulses and, correspondingly, more potentials for impulses.

Memories, which are refirings of cell groups enabled by the way the cell membrane changed on previous firings.

mhc

I didn't mean for the woman's face to be just a visual phenomemon. I meant understanding/knowing that there was a woman's face "in" the paint. There seems to be a real difference between seeing something and knowing what it is you're seeing.
(like the Chinese Room described in Nagel's paper on Searle that jpbrooks linked to, thanks jp). But I'm not sure whether that difference is one of quality or just, as you suggest, one of complexity.(i.e., not different stuff, just more complex interactions of the same stuff)
I see that I am assuming that you don't need to know what you're feeling when you feel heat. I think that's a pretty fair assumption though. You feel a sensation, you see a thing....that you feel heat and see the Mona Lisa requires......language? Somehow I suspect this pivots on a linguistic entanglement. (Why is it that we always reduce this stuff to an either/or scenario? THat sounds so.....binary!)
You guys TOTALLY ROCK for not just being dismissive and dogmatic. I appreciate the interaction.

John Page

You need language to report the sensations to antoher - the apparent entanglement comes from using a name or other symbol to agree on a label for the thing. (Test - you can still recognize two paintings as similar or copies even though the pictures have no name).

Cheers, John

DRFseven

But that mental phenomena cannot be reduced has not been established. Why would we want to give up when we've just now begun to make progress on what the relationship is? And, anyway, what does reductionist mean to you? I'm thinking that maybe you think I'm saying we shouldn't study the mental phenomena at all, but that is far from the case. I'm gung ho on examining everything involved in the thinking process and trying to establish relationships. But I don't know how you can figure out how something works by ONLY watching it's behavior; I think it's necessary to take it apart down to its smallest constituents.

DRFseven

Yes, and the difference is in the visual cortex. When the structure and anatomy of someone's eyes are intact, but there are lesions or abnormalities in the visual cortex, the individual is said to exhibit "cortical blindness". People with cortical blindness receive visual stimuli normally, but it is meaningless to them. More specifically, there is a condition known as Prosapagnosia, which describes an inability to recognize faces, though the ability to recognize other objects remains intact. In Prosapagnosa, there are problems with specific neuron cell groups located in specific locations of the brain.



But the facial recognition system in the monkey is almost identical to ours, and even lizards with their lizard brains can feel heat, though neither one has language. In fact, I keep thinking about the lizard because it is an organism that functions in its environment without what most of us would refer to as thinking. Its behavior is mainly instinctive, though it also learns, but presumably there is "no one home" to "know" what it learns; the learning is in the cells, themselves, contained in "silent" memory. We have the SAME system, but, in addition, we have a lot of neural overlay, from which a much more complex behavior emanates. So how did our behavior evolve from lizard-like slinkings, baskings, and dartings to complex musings based on mental schematics? There has to be a bridge built of the ordinary currency of the brain - tissue, chemicals, electricity.

I do, too.

Dee

jpbrooks

Sorry for the late replies.

Sure, no problem.
Searle himself, however, seems to embrace reductionism. So, while his negative criticisms of the ideas that have been presented by other reductionists in the past may be accurate, his own view may itself be problematic (as Nagel seems to suggest in that article).

jpbrooks

But how could such a reduction ever be accomplished when what it would require is an account of things that are subjective and private in nature in terms of things that are objective and capable (at least in principle) of public observation? No amount of accumulated objective facts that relate to a subjective experience can be equivalent to the actual private experience itself.

But if mental phenomena cannot be reduced to physical phenomena, the actual relationship between consciousness and the brain may be more complex than it appears to be from the standpoint of Physicalist Reductionism. Mental/physical causality, for example, can occur in both directions. Mental states can produce physiological effects and vice versa.

Reductionism, as Nagel points out in that article I cited, "is the analysis of something identified at one level of description in the terms of another, more fundamental level of description--allowing us to say that the first really is nothing but the second".

But the process of reducing the "components" of thinking to their "lowest terms" seems to reach a stopping point in the case of mental phenomena, where subjective experiences, like pain for example, cannot be reduced to more fundamental terms.
However, I do agree with you generally on the issue of research in this area of inquiry. The "Mind/Body problem" is a complex one and reductionisms are useful in helping us to organize our thinking about the problem.