Can Cartesian dualism make sense of psycho-physical
interaction?
Can Descartes� claim that �I am not present in my body as
a sailor is present in a ship� be reconciled with his thesis of mind-body
dualism?
What light does his discussion of the passions throw on
the unity of mind and body?
does the 2nd question mean that:
he is claiming something about the phenomenological interaction between mind and body which most people would agree with, but which he hasn�t actually provided metaphysical justification for?
it basically asks:
does Cartesian dualism explain things as he describes them to be?
i.e. can it account for the intimacy of our conscious experience?
none of these essays are about the nature of consciousness, but about the mechanisms by which subjective phenomena can be explained in physicalist terms if at all
not so much how different the mind is from the body, but how unifiable
can there be an objective conception of reality which explains and incorporates them both, their synchronicity yet incommensurability, their respective mechanism yet acausality (by which I mean free will � are they the same though)
can there be mechanism without determinism?
am I a zombie?
you could say that you�ve gone a long way towards answering the question in the negative, just by asking it
what is meant by a zombie?
absent qualia/diminished perceptions, reflexive consciousness � even if both are there, the link between that gives us reason, emotion/motivation and free will and finally the motor control for action upon our decisions
in order for me to be a zombie, i would have to have evolved
to be one (if we're placing ourselves in the context of the actual, physical
world as we know it, where all life evolves according to the Darwinian process
of natural selection). In this case, it might be valuable to briefly assess
what function and value consciousness might confer, and whether it might be
more likely (or even possible - but that's probably outside the bounds of this
article or even current scientific explanation)
of course it makes no sense to use the consciousness-lacking
definition of zombieness - would be self-answering ...
so instead we're using the star trek way of defining it of
what happens if you put someone through a transporter which reconstitutes them
molecularly identically
cf strawson re having multiple bodies, identity
ask dr mander: 'if substance is defined in the principles as
something which doesn't depend on anything else for its existence, can we really
equate 'thing' with it, when we thinking things are so dependent on God?
what supposedly characterises the members of this great and
good university is their intelligence
and yet you're asking them to choose christian faith,
applicable to all men, in a manner which doesn't appeal to their intelligence,
but offends it
why? because it's an unintelligent solution
mind as computer (software/hardware)
������� - internal
transduction at every point?
������� - is the chip a
single state, as opposed to collections of modules (as in the brain)?
������� - a computer
can't modify itself - at least, not its hardware
������� - does hardware
have an environment?
������� - both have
certain innate mechs, e.g. to understand their own coding (and regulation?)
is the difference tween man/animal emotion (according to
Damasio) that we have the conscious evaluative mech, and similarly, that we
have the landscape/foreground body state/thought content 'feeling' which can go
alongside
donald davidson,
zombie, qualia, multiple-realizability, neuroscience, mind-identity, pantheism,
epiphenomenalism, leibniz-mind, bradley?, properties, physics-holism, sellars,
, causation-probabilistic