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blah
Stranger
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Mind/brain/body
#14358400 - 04/26/11 10:36 PM (12 years, 10 months ago) |
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We have a certain commonsense picture of ourselves as human beings which is very hard to square with our overall 'scientific' conception of the physical world. We think of ourselves as conscious, free,mindful,rational agents in a world that science tells us consists entirely of mindless, meaningless physical particles. Now how can we square these two conceptions? How, for example, can it be the case that the world contains nothing but unconscious physical particles, and yet that it also contains consciousness? How can a mechanical universe contain intentionalistic human beings - that is human beings that can represent the world to themselves? how, in short, can an essentionally meaningless world contain meaning?
Hardest problem of all ; What is the relation of our minds to the rest of the universe? How does the mind, relate to the brain?
How can we account for the relationships between two apparently completely different kinds of things? On the one hand, there are mental things, such as our thoughts, beliefs and feelings; we think of them as subjective, conscious and immaterial. On the other hand, there are physical things; we think of them as having mass, an extended in space, and as causually interacting with other physical things. Most attempted solutions to the mind-body problem wind up by denying the existence of, or in some way downgrading the status of, one or the other of these types of things. Given the successes of the physical sciences, it is not suprising that in our stage of intellectual development the temptation is to downgrade the status of mental entities.
Is the mind in the body, the brain? Or is the brain/body in the mind?
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NetDiver
Wandering Mindfuck


Registered: 08/24/09
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Re: Mind/brain/body [Re: blah]
#14358476 - 04/26/11 10:45 PM (12 years, 10 months ago) |
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IMO, dualism (the idea that the mind is separate from the body) is wrong. Views like the one you summarized:
Quote:
We think of ourselves as conscious, free,mindful,rational agents in a world that science tells us consists entirely of mindless, meaningless physical particles.
are still dualistic in origin. "We, with minds, are separate from the Universe, that doesn't have a mind."
Minds are not things. There's no such thing as a mind, separate from the body, separate from the whole shebang.
You're not a slave to the laws of physics. You are the laws of physics. That doesn't mean you can control them with your mind though, any more than you can control your eye color, or your fingerprint, with your mind.
Edited by NetDiver (04/26/11 11:04 PM)
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Dutchbrewed
Metaphysical



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Re: Mind/brain/body [Re: blah]
#14358590 - 04/26/11 11:00 PM (12 years, 10 months ago) |
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I was trying to find the clip from waking life that has a guy talking about the exact same thing.. I failed, but that leaves up to you to watch Waking Life
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Sophistic Radiance
Free sVs!


Registered: 07/11/06
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Loc: Center of the Universe
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I see consciousness as existing at the center, from which the brain and, in support of the brain, the body, and in support of the the body, the universe, everything else, etc. are emanated.
I don't really have any rational justification for this theory, it's just working.
-------------------- Enlil said: You really are the worst kind of person.
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Silversoul
Rhizome


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Re: Mind/brain/body [Re: blah]
#14359356 - 04/27/11 02:18 AM (12 years, 10 months ago) |
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I like the title of this thread, as it hints at a possible solution. For some time, I've been intrigued by a school of thought known as enactivism, which sees the mind/body problem as really a mind/body/body problem. That is, it's not just the mental world of thoughts and ideas versus the physical world of objects and forces. There's also an intermediate world of the lived body, or the body as subject. This school of thought is largely rooted in the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who might very well have been the first philosopher to really deal with the body as a philosophical subject.
Essentially, we have to understand the brain as necessary but not sufficient for human cognition. In opposition to representationalist models of human perception, enactivism emphasizes the role of embodied action in cognition. Consider the keyboard you're typing on right now. I'm guessing you know how to type by touch, which means you have an embodied relationship with the device, with muscle memory built up over time. Does your brain play a role here? Of course. But your fingers themselves play an important role in this built up learning process of how to type. So your body and the way it interacts with the world actually plays a role in mental function.
J.J. Gibson had a related theory of vision, in which the light particles hitting the eye are actually part of the visual system, and that what we perceive from the field of possibilities present to us is a matter of what he called "affordance," meaning opportunities to act. That is, we perceive our environment in terms of what opportunities it affords us. On the one hand, this leads to a kind of direct realism: we perceive reality not through representations, but in a direct way which is present to us. On the other hand, there is an implication of radical subjectivism: The way we perceive the world is a way that the world exists.
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