@5.30 on 24/5/00
Rainolds Room
To facilitate the
process, I will invite questions under the following headings: (1) General -
i.e. questions about philosophy in general (its value, purpose etc, where it's
headed etc), (2) Personal - e.g. how TN became interested in phil, what it was
like to be a student of philosophy in Oxford during 1958-60 etc., how he writes
philosophy (3) Mind - focussing perhaps in particular on the Evans lecture he
will have given the day before www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/nagel/papers/nexus.pdf
- but you could also always bring to him your problems with Descartes..., (4)
Ethics - e.g. his views on objectivity, free will, deontology, the relation
between well-being and morality, and (5) Politics - e.g. his views on
rights, equality, and concealment and exposure in public life, re the latter
see http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/nagel/papers/exposure.html
what distinguishes the mental from the physical?
subjective phenomenological character
non-localised
privileged access
donald davidson says (�) � is philosophy about attaining an answer?
philosophy as the search, not for truth, but for increasingly unanswerable questions?
is Dennett�s Multiple Drafts theory a form of functionalism?
you attack functionalism since it doesn�t (and there doesn�t seem any way in which it ever could) give an explanation for the phenomenological character of our conscious experience � wouldn�t Dennett�s Multiple Drafts be subject to the same problem?
what�s the difference between your conceptual conditions and those of anomalous monism?
Nagel seems to be extending the mental to incorporate phenomenology, while it is difficult to see how anomalous monism can explain why/how the phenomenological nature of our experience came to be so at all
--
that so long as we work with our present mental and physical concepts no
transparently necessary connection will ever be revealed, between physically
described brain processes and sensory experience, of the logical type familiar
from the explanation of other natural processes by analysis into their
physico-chemical constituents. We have good grounds for believing that the
mental supervenes on the physical -- i.e. that there is no mental difference
without a physical difference. But pure, unexplained supervenience is not a
solution but a sign that there is something fundamental we don't know. We
cannot regard pure supervenience as the end of the story because that would
require the physical to necessitate the mental without there being any answer
to the question how it does so.
But there must be a
"how," and our task is to understand it. An obviously systematic
connection that remains unintelligible to us calls out for a theory.
nagel is searching for a systematic relation between mind and body
is nagel ontologically identifying the mental with the physical?
how would you answer McGinn, who reckons that consciousness is �cognitively closed� to us?
more broadly, what do we mean when we speak of �plasticity of concept formation�?
it seems clear enough when you speak of the prescientific concepts of water and heat and sound that it is as much a lack of knowledge at different levels, but there is no sense in which such concepts would remain perpetually unavailable to us, unless we are inhibited by an external force
if you include the mental within whatever expanded conception of the physical which you�re pointing to, then don�t you fall into the trap that Davidson is trying to avoid by subjecting the mental to the nomological laws of causality which the physical is always subject to?
the way would be open for the discovery of a posteriori necessary truths about what physiological state a particular kind of experience is.
davidson
ontologically, mental = physical events
supervenience = between concepts, not events
qualitative not descriptive difference
doesn�t that mean that what seems to be causality between/within mental events = a twisted version of the laws of physical causality
supervenience � does it work both ways?
functionalism doesn�t incorporate phenomenology
but it does have what I see as an advantage: it allows for instantiations of mind in different media
your 3rd conceptual conjunct of the mental and physical sounds ontological
but would that then preclude a programmed artificial intelligence living on a hard disk?