Gene, what is your view of the relationship between the brain and the mind? It seems as though (human) minds are products of brains; there seems to be some emergent process that creates or actualizes consciousness.
I know that one of my favorite Idealist philosophers, Keith Ward, is a 'process property dualist', or something of that sort. He takes mind to be fundamental to reality, as all idealists do, but then states that there are two different properties (as opposed to substances) in the world, and that (human) minds are products of processes.
I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Gene, what is your view of the relationship between the brain and the mind? It seems as though (human) minds are products of brains; there seems to be some emergent process that creates or actualizes consciousness.
ReplyDeleteI know that one of my favorite Idealist philosophers, Keith Ward, is a 'process property dualist', or something of that sort. He takes mind to be fundamental to reality, as all idealists do, but then states that there are two different properties (as opposed to substances) in the world, and that (human) minds are products of processes.