Ourcellves? (Identity)

by David Turell , Thursday, April 10, 2014, 01:53 (3662 days ago) @ GateKeeper

David: If I may comment, almost all observers are splitters or lumpers. As a dualist, I am a lumper. 
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> GK: To be truthful really don't know what a dualist is. First I talk about how things work. Then if we like we can slap a label on it.-As a dualist, I don't worry bout what each neuron is doing. I realize they are each doing their own thing, but when you step back and look at the whole extremely complex mechanism it is churning out an emergent phenomenon called consciousness. So there are two parts, the producer and what it produces, and I can accept that even if I don't know how it is done. Maybe one day subsequent humans will figure it out.-You are a splitter. You look at what each neuron does and thinks that what tells you the basis of what is going on. But as you add neurons signalling, and synapses transmitting and adjusting their transmissions to fit their curent job, you discover it doesn't explain anything. You can break down a washing machine and learn how it was designed and how it works, but living biology is not that simple. I view the condition of life as a emergent property just as I do with consciousness. Now take my favorite example, the kidney. It adjusts fluid balance, electrolyte blood levels and produces urine. It also makes hormones. We in medicine understand all of it. Nothing emerges. Each of its tasks are straight forward. Here reductionist materialism (splitter approach) works, but not at the level of what the brain does, or the whole body producing the condition we call life.