>Sorry, but there you go again. You do not seem to have grasped the
>problem for a consistent materialism
I am not a philosopher and so don't know exactly what belief in
materialism requires, so perhaps there is something important that I
haven't grasped yet. However I have yet to see what the problem is.
>In
>paraphrase, his argument is "If all is matter, then all has extension.
>Mind, you say, is simply a concatenation of 'particles' in various states of
>motion. Fine. Let us then inspect this mind. Imagine that we can
>expand it to a large enough size to do this at our convenience. If all
>is extended matter, then we have only changed the scale, not the inner
>structure. Make the brain large enough so that we can walk around in the
>neurons and check it out. Take your time. See any ideas? I didn't
>think so.
You probably wouldn't _experience_ the ideas, but you may be able to
_see_ them. You might be able to say that a certain collection of
neurons behaving in a certain kind of way corresponds to an idea. At
the moment we don't know enough about brains to do this, but there is
nothing to say that this won't be possible in the future. It might be
possible to be able to determine, just from looking at the workings of a
brain, when that person is seeing red. This is of course different
from _experiencing_ the sensation of red, but we may be able to
observe a brain seeing red. Who is to say that we couldn't eventually
have a physical theory of the brain that describes exactly how the
brain works and exactly what thoughts are in terms of particles (or
neurons or something like that).
> Incidentally, the position of "all is ultimately matter, but at
>certain levels we can ignore this" is called "Epiphenomenalism". It
>tries to have the materialist cake while eating the idealist cake. An
>epiphenomenalist basically accounts for "subjective" or "ideal" phenomena
>(like the idea of a right angle) by saying, "ultimately, all is matter.
>The mind is ultimately just a material complex of some sort. BUT we can
>solve problems in arithmetic by referring only to the rules of
>arithmetic, without having to refer to matter. Why? Because mind is an
>"epiphenomenon" of matter. All genuine causation is from the "bottom
>up"--from matter to mind, but a sort of quasi-causation WITHIN the
>"bubble" of mind can be allowed so long as we do not permit it to react
>back on matter."
> Frankly, this gambit does not work any better than simple materialism.
>One of the most common experiences we have is PLANNING (subjective
>categories) an action (like throwing a fast ball instead of a slider) and
>then carrying it out. The evidence of our experience is that "mind" CAN
>have causal effects on "matter."
But can this "causal effects" of the mind on matter be purely
described in terms of matter? For example, if we had a theory of the
brain, so that we knew, in terms of particles, exactly how decisions
were made etc, then although at one level we could view the mind
affecting matter, at a lower level we could describe the mind's
decision and the resultant effect on matter simply in terms of
particles.
I would be grateful if you could point out the flaw in this.
>Clearly the materialist and
>epiphenomenalist strategies are INHERENTLY flawed. This must be grasped,
>and no technological improvement has the slightest bearing on this issue.
I don't see the flaw, but I would like to if it is there.
Mark Phillips.