The Human Question

I've been told that neurons guide the churning of the stomach. Well, it doesn't seem to need to be the case that our stomach neurons "think" while doing this process. They can do it in zombie-like fashion, in the same way that they circuits in an expensive calculator arrive at the results of a complex equation. But what about the cerebellum, which is supposed to fine tune our movements? Is the cerebellum in some way cognizant with the cortex? Or does it just churn out the signals that fine tune our movements? And what about the fact that we sometimes seem to perceive something at B, a midpoint between A and C, when as a matter of fact, there is nothing causing B, but there are causes of what we perceive at A and C? Doesn't this involve a kind of neurological churning (of what some might call sense data) as well?

There is a famous pair of questions that have been posed to subjects whose brain are being scanned while they ponder how to answer... Those questions are 1. would you divert a train heading toward five so that it runs over one instead?; 2. would you push someone in front of the train to save the lives of five people? The nearly universal answer is 1.yes and 2.no. The consequentialist, however, will think that the two answers are morally equivalent; hence this variation is based upon irrational factors... the physical act of pushing involves a personal involvement. Further confirmation of this contrast comes from the fact that the limbic system becomes very active when deciding about the answer to the second question. But the reason why persons answer as they do may be due to the fact that they understand the difference between what one is trying to do and unintended consequences in the first case, and the difference between unintended consequence and an evil means toward a good end i...

Reduction occurs when one set of laws that explain a set of facts is recast in terms of another set of laws that explain the same, differently characterized set of facts. This happens when when the latter characterization is concerned with the parts while the wholes described by the former, and when the laws pertaining to the latter are more general than the former. For example, Kepler's 3 laws of planetary motion can be reduced to Newton's laws of motion. Materialistic reductionism of psychological events to chemical events is thought to be impossible because so many different physical conditions seem to occasion the same psychological event. For example, many people may think that George Bush was a poor decision maker: we may all think the same thought. But there need be nothing identical going on in our brains as we think the same thought. In fact, as I continue to think this thought through time, every part of my brain may undergo very minor changes while I adhere to t...

If the firing of the axon hillock were thought to be a kind of atom of cognition, then the following problem would emerge. The same axon hillock fires when many dendrites are moderately active at the same time, when they are active in a sequence, or when one axon hillock is very active. So is the firing of the same axon hillock at different times under different circumstances a different kind of cognitive act with a different object? Does this firing differ at different times because it possesses a different intentionality? Or is it the same regardless of what sort of dendrite activity caused it to fire? Both alternatives are problematic. Of course we can escape this atomistic approach through holism (because holism requires that one take into account the differences in the dendrites as being partially constitutive of cognitive activity), but in order for that holism to work, the whole could not be the sum of its parts: one would have to reject reductionism.