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.
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
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
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.