I am listening to some excellent lectures on neurology. But the professor (a Dr. Wang from Princeton) cannot avoid using homuncular language. For example, a neuron "signals" another. Signalling involves imagining, remember, anticipating, perceiving, kinaesthesis, cultural context, etc. Cells don't really have what it takes to signal in the primary sense of the word. But they do something analogous, albeit at a lower level than do human wholes. Perhaps we should use the term "sub-signaling" or "infra-signaling" for the way parts of the brain interact with each other.
Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson. He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal. My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this. I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true. Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist. In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
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