Science of Self (Humans)

by David Turell , Saturday, March 15, 2014, 15:15 (3904 days ago) @ romansh

Ed Feser to the rescue. Bits from his blog.-"Similarly, when Gelernter points out that "computers can be made to operate precisely as we choose; minds cannot," I would argue that this is a consequence of the deeper point that the conceptual content of thought cannot be reduced to any set of relations between material symbols. There can in principle never be anything more than a very rough and general correlation between, on the one hand, the structure of corporeal states (whether in the brain, the organism as a whole, or the organism together with its environment), and, on the other hand, the conceptual content of our thoughts. Hence, even if we had total technological mastery of the relevant corporeal features of a human being, we would still never be able, even in principle, to predict and control the content of human thought with precision."-"Now for the Aristotelian, the point isn't that the moderns' conception of matter is wrong so much as that it is incomplete. The trouble is not with thinking of matter the way Galileo, Descartes, and their successors have, but with taking this to be an exhaustive conception, as something other than a mere abstraction from a much richer concrete reality. And if it is taken as an exhaustive conception, then a Cartesian form of dualism is hard to avoid. For to say that matter is essentially devoid of qualitative features like color, sound, taste, etc. and that these exist only as the qualia of conscious experience just is to make of qualia something essentially immaterial. And to say that matter is essentially devoid of anything like "directedness" or "finality" is ipso facto to make of the "directedness" or "intentionality" of desires, fears, and other such states also something essentially immaterial. Cartesian dualism was not a rearguard reaction against the early moderns' new conception of matter, but on the contrary a direct consequence of that conception. (I addressed this issue at length in my series of posts on the critics of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, and it is a point Nagel himself has also emphasized.)"-"The concept of information, properly understood, is fully sufficient to do away with popular dualistic schemes invoking spiritual substances distinct from anything in physics. This is Aristotle redivivus, the concept of matter and form united in every object of this world, body and soul, where the latter is nothing but the formal aspect of the former. The very term 'information' clearly demonstrates its Aristotelian origin in its linguistic root." -http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2014/03/gelernter-on-computationalism.html#more- -I have always considered information to be the root of everything.