Justintruth wrote:
I prefer to use a kind of technical language to make the distinction....
Plainly we have to use some sort of language, but it will always be language derived from the mind looking out at the world and trying to make some sense of it. I do not think we can use it in the other direction, (not without begging the question by first turning the mind into an external object like the brain).
Its pretty clear that it is the brain that is thinking and it can be established by simple amputation which does not seem to prevent the amputee from thinking. Brain dead is another matter. Brain dead people don't think....
Ok. Let's be very direct. anesthesia, a physical chemical is introduced into your lungs. You are told to count down from 100. You count to 97 or so and you suddenly are in pain and a nurse says. "The operation went very well. Don't worry". All of the reports from the nurses and all of the damage repaired in the operation are totally consistent with an image of you laying there unconscious while they worked on you. So we can talk about it different ways. But this is the *nature* of what we experience. Now if you are doubtful about saying that what affects the brain at least can affect the mind then how do you describe these facts? How do you think of them?
I do not imagine that I am
ever clearly and directly conscious of the world, under anesthetic, when drunk, asleep or otherwise. My sensations are always filtered through my sensory organs, then translated into ideas via a mental architecture that is partly innate and partly learnt.
So my mind must be something distinct from any particular sensation, let alone the claim that a particular sensation is 'real' in the sense of representing the world, or being shared by others. The reason I think I have a mind is rather in that difference; I can accept that what the nurse describes as what happened during the operation is 'true', yet also that it was not what happened to 'me', me meaning 'my mind'..
...because this suggests that the mind is somehow mapped onto the world.
It is mapped into the world. And mapped into specific structures. This is just an accident of nature an aspect of what we experience. It is the function of senses to preserve external information and deliver it to the neurology so that its experiences are at least somewhat mapped into the world. Else the signals to the motor neurons will not result in conferring survival advantage...
To describe the senses as preserving 'external information' rather begs the question. Cells in my eye respond to light in a mechanical way; my brain may turn this into what we are calling information, but that is different from the electrical signal in the optic nerve, let alone the photons themselves or the origin of those photons. After all, a tree also responds to light, (which confers survival advantage) but we do not imagine that the tree sees the world.
I would suggest that the 'information' is something we create, internally. The map is in our heads. We interpret the signals from our optic nerve by reference to that map. Thus, if we get discordant signals we do not immediately make a new map. When things do not fit in, we first think; '
I must be dreaming/drunk/under anesthetic etc.' Only reluctantly, if there is no other way, will we readjust our map (as minimally as possible) to adapt to disruption. (I see God. I will go with '
I'm drunk' or '
somebody is playing a trick' or even '
an alien!' before abandoning all of science.)
I think we can only do this because we (our minds) stand at a remove from any given sensation, or piece of information. The tree responds to light, we respond to light, but unlike the tree we are
aware we are responding to light, thus we have the ability to think about light as a general phenomenon, and thus we know that our eyes can deceive us.
Even when our experiences are hallucination and no sensory pathway exists and there is no mapping of the phenomenology to the external world there is still presumed to be (as I have said we don't know for sure) that there is a correspondence to our brain states. Evidence for this is present in neuroscience and stimulation of various areas of the brain during surgery can actually cause experiencing to change. So even hallucinations are mapped into the specific structures of the brain. There is a further mapping of those structures to structures outside of our brain that set up the intentionality of our sensory experiencing.
Absolutely. I do not think there is any need to refer to neuroscience. We all know that the sensory experience 'seeing' can be mapped onto the structure 'the eyes'. A baby learns that if it closes its eyes mummy disappears, that if it touches something hot it experiences pain. But the baby also learns from such interactions that it is not mummy, not the hot thing. Its
mind is created through realising difference, separateness.
If so, that doesn't seem to reflect the nature of our minds, which are constantly being altered. Just by reading your post, for example, I am not who I was an hour ago.
Well no because the change could be accidental in the Medieval sense. You are not the same but you are still you.
I would have said that what characterises our minds is a continual awareness of the present.
But if you do you run the risk of hypostatizing the present and de temporalizing it.
I would disagree that I am the same 'me' as I was an hour ago. If I was, then I could not know it; I would not be aware that an hour had passed, since no change would have occurred.
As I live in the moment, everything is fluid. But in the past, everything is fixed. That in itself is a fundamental difference between 'me an hour ago' and 'me now'. I can only connect the two if I think of myself now as if I was an object, if I view myself from outside, imagine myself as a cinema film where a series of slightly changing images connects 'then' to 'now'. Yet at the same time, I am aware this is a falsification; a construction. The me that was is gone absolutely.
A accurate phenomenology of memory is complicated. There is short and long term for instance. Many times I know I know something and know in a minute or two that I will remember it but I can't now. That is different from just not remembering yet it is not remembering in a sense. Memory is a very important key. If I want to know what it is like to be a bat and I can control my biology completely I can turn myself into one and then back. But I must "remember" what it was like to know it at all. Take a look at cases where people are brain injured and have trouble forming short term memory. Indeed without memory no stasis can ever be determined. So memory plays a very key role in upcoming epistemology I think.
I think that making memory into a noun does what I wrote about earlier, turn it into an object, one that can be lost or found. But I would say that there is something we
do called 'remember', in which we try to make sense of the present, place it in our metal map. We need to create patterns, discern cause and effect relationships. When doing this, I think it works both ways. We are quite capable of creating, or adjusting, our memory to fit in with how things are now. I understand that this is something readily observed in life; the witness to an accident will 'remember' details that create a narrative that makes sense, and so on. It is not difficult to implant memories or 'lose' them.
With respect to the will, or with respect to how one thought may be derived from another and if the causality of the brain physics is determining it then how do you know it is true, or is it, can all be very carefully considered. But I don't think that that obviates the possibility of us considering thinking as something a brain does, or a computation is doing, *provided* we are allowed to augment the current physical and computational models
Once again, to be clear, I do not dispute that our ability to have thoughts depends on our brains and body.
I would say that the question of causality is different. Causality is something
we create in order to make the world predictable. If I say '
A caused B' I am selecting two features of the world and pointing out a connection between them, because I find it useful to do so. But the causality only arises because I did that selecting; in reality B is caused by the state of the entire universe, (as was A).
So by trying to explain the mind in terms of causality, we are using a technique that is created in the mind. It is like trying to show that hallucinations are not real through the medium of hallucinations.