hi Ray, hi other souls,
I think Rays concept of "soul" is highly implausible.
Ray Scanlon wrote:
> Our answer to the soul (mind)/body problem is that a material
> universe has no need of soul. [...] Our position for purposes of
> brain explanation is that there is soul (mind) but it has no part
> to play in a material account of brain action.
[...]
> The brain has all the neurons needed to perform any action we have
> ever observed. Since the brain may think and decide we may use
> Occam's dictum to deny causal powers to soul.
sorry, but that is not Occam's dictum. :-)
If there is something which plays no part in explaining phenomena
there has to be concluded that there is no such "something". Why do
you think that there is a soul?
"Soul", as opposed to "mind", is traditionally used to refer to a
substance, an entity, an indivisible eternal thing which steers our
body. ("Mind" is often just thought to refer to a cluster of
capacities, such as thinking, feeling, perceiving, etc.)
I don't see a reason for you which could justify your belief in a soul
- whatever you mean with that term.
> I have never said (except in error) that the brain is aware, it
> is the soul that is aware.
you'd better say that the brain is aware. Reductionism has a great
deal more plausibility than your strange substance-dualistic
epiphenomenalism (see below).
[...]
> As to understanding how there may be a soul as observer without
> causal powers, I think McGinn has the best argument, our brain
> lacks the capability to understand the relationship between brain
> and soul.
Have you read McGinn? He does _not_ think, that there is an immaterial
thing called "soul" which stands in an unintelligible relationship to
the material world. McGinn thinks that the mind capacities, especially
consciousness, are natural properties of some clusters of matter, and
what we will never understand, according to him, is how matter can
have mental properties, which are nevertheless natural properties.
Anyway, your point seems to be a special ("soul") kind of
epiphenomenalism: The physical world is closed, the soul doesn't
belong to the physical world and can't influence it, even though the
physical world has influence on the soul. Is that all you want to say?
Well, I don't want to warm up all the arguments against
epiphenomenalism. Look it up in the "Companion to the Philosophy of
Mind". But what's interesting is that you seem to know something about
this "transcendental" relationship between matter and soul:
> [...] We wish to say, "When these neurons are active, we have
> decided". We have not decided, our brain has decided but we
> experience the active neurons and say we did.
[...]
> A quibble: The brain does not "report" anything to the soul (mind),
> the soul is aware of what the brain does without being told.
[...]
> When a particular constellation of neurons is active, we are aware
> of a patch of blue. When another constellation is active we are
> aware of a feeling of loneliness. Why this should be we do not
> know. McGinn argues that we cannot know, that we lack the needed
> brain capabilities.
[...]
> It is not the soul that observes the world, it is the brain. The soul is
> only aware of the activity of the brain.
The soul "experiences" the neurons? I never experienced my active
neurons. I experience tables and garments, or, if you prefer, light
waves and pressure on my skin, but I surely don't experience firing
neurons, except when using an autocerebroscope. Are you using one?
No, consciousness is not a form of higher order perception of
activities in sensory brain areas. At least I see more reasons to
reject this view (see Guezeldere, Dretske and many others) than to
adopt it. But you don't give any reasons.
What, then, is your big insight? I would put it like this:
<< Human behaviour can in principle be explained in purely physical
(biological, functional, etc) terms, without use of mental vocabulary.
But there seems to be something strange about this - our conscious
experiences (Qualia and the like) don't fit in that pattern; it seems
to us that they are more than just firing neurons. We don't understand
this relationship. >>
That is what you seem to argue for. But this is not a theory. This is
the common _starting point_ of analytical philosophy of mind.
One final word on another issue:
> Since the very beginning, since 1955, AI has been bedeviled by the mind.
> Anyone who put forward a design for an intelligent machine was asked, "Can
> it think?" They said "think" but what they meant was, "Is there something
> inside that machine that is aware?" In place of "mind" put the word "soul"
> and we will have the raw question, does the machine have a soul? This
> belongs strictly to religion. If this is what they mean, why don't they say
> so? They don't because they are afraid of appearing soft on religion.
No. There's no need of your transcendent soul to ask this question:
Take a reductionist account of consciousness: There exists some
physical properties which determine whether a being is conscious or
not. But of course we at least today don't know exactly which physical
properties this are (some say representational properties, some say
functional properties, few say quantum mechanical properties, etc.).
But we are sure that there are thing which lack it (stones and shovels
for example) and other things which have it (like men and dogs). The
question is: Does our machine have it?
This is not a religious question.
sorry for
a) crossposting, but I'm reading this in sci.bio.misc and can hardly
f'up2 this group...
b) my humble English
cu,
Wolfgang.
--
homepage: http://www.wald.org/wolfgang
"Das Meer ist voll Wasser. Das soll einer verstehen." (Eric Satie)
