Different in degree or kind: An essay captures Adler (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, November 19, 2015, 00:57 (3075 days ago) @ dhw

David The brain is directly responsive to me. As a kid when I learned to play the piano, areas of my brain grew. As I grew up my brain grew grey matter to help me.[/i]
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> dhw: Your last sentence, however, causes me problems. You say the brain helps “you”, but the brain is just as capable of hindering “you” - through age, disease, drugs.-Of course we age and have diseases. it is not the brain's fault, as you imply. We are built to age, just as the brain is built to adapt itself to my mental demands on it as I learn new things to do or remember.. -> dhw:If it can help, hinder or change “you”, how can we be sure that it does not actually make “you”? Do "you" command it, or does it command “you”? Materialists will claim it's the latter.-And they are fools. I never sense the brain is controlling me and I feel fully in control, but I am normal. The schizophrenic cannot say that, and it is here the materialist has a point. Again, a normally functional brain is controlled by the person.-> dhw: And so once again your admission that “we do not know how it works” may be turned into “we do not know what is at work.” -Here I agree
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> dhw: Perhaps, after all this discussion, you could remind us just why “kind” rather than “degree” is so important to you.
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> DAVID: Just following Adler's approach: Difference in Kind means we are specially created. His book explains all of this.
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> dhw: I am sure you are perfectly capable of defending your own beliefs without constantly referring to Adler. .....your own acknowledgement that our fellow animals have “a degree of immaterial thought” simply reinforces the argument that we have a greater degree of it than they do.-His point which I have fully accepted, is the gulf between animals and us is so vast that we are different in kind. I use his name with you as you use Shapiro and others with me. Have you read their books for a full interpretive understanding of their positions?