Wednesday, May 17, 2017

The view from where?

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Contemporary philosophy of mind is centrally concerned with the viability of the reductionist approach so prevalent in present-day psychiatry and neuroscience. The philosopher Thomas Nagel has contextualized this trend. In his writing, Thomas Nagel defends the claim—found in classical psychoanalytic theory—that while the human mind is tied to the physical brain, there is something irreducibly perspectival and subjective about human experience, both conscious and unconscious, such that it cannot be wholly explained in terms of, or reduced to, neurophysiological processes in the brain.

View from Nowhere image.jpg

https://audioboom.com/posts/4373596-japa-the-mind-body-problem-and-psychoanalysis

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Daniel Dennett.jpeg

There is a moving essay on the philosopher Daniel Dennett, in a recent New Yorker. It's by Joshua Rothman. This excerpt is near the end:

"Then, late last year, my mother had a catastrophic stroke. It devastated the left side of her brain, wrecking her parietal and temporal lobes and Broca’s area—parts of the brain that are involved in the emotions, the senses, memory, and speech. My mother now appears to be living in an eternal present. She can say only two words, “water” and “time.” She is present in the room—she looks me in the eye—but is capable of only fleeting recognition; she knows only that I am someone she should recognize. She grasps the world, but lightly.

As I spent time with my mother, I found that my intuitions were shifting to Dennett’s side of the field. It seems natural to say that she “sort of” thinks, knows, cares, remembers, and understands, and that she is “sort of” conscious. It seems obvious that there is no “light switch” for consciousness: she is present and absent in different ways, depending on which of her subsystems are functioning. I still can’t quite picture how neurons create consciousness. But, perhaps because I can take a stance toward my mother that I can’t take toward myself, my belief in the “hard problem” has dissolved. On an almost visceral level, I find it easier to accept the reality of the material mind. I have moved from agnosticism to calm conviction."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul