The Human Question

Galileo replaced concern with the nature of movement with concern with the measurable characteristics of movement (first of all, velocity). But when we say something moved so many miles/Km an hour, we are talking, in a sense about a kind of disposition. Not the sort of disposition to act that exists when something is inactive. But the disposition to continue to act a certain way. It seems to me that Galileo, in focusing on the measurement, took this disposition as a given, whereas Aristotle, in defining motion as the act of a potency as such, is much more interested in the nature of this disposition.

I am trying to remember what I learned from the study of physicalism... it think it is that to each physical state there corresponds only one mental state. Suppose the above is true but its converse is false. That is, for any mental state, there is a multiplicity of possible physical states: doesn't this claim amount to an application of the Aristotelian understanding of nature? I'm not thinking about how matter receives a new form; rather, I'm thinking of how something keeps its identity during various incidental changes. For example, I remain a human being in virtue of my substantial form while standing, sitting, talking, snoring, blogging, playing piano, etc. One and the same form must have a suitable proximate matter. But the mere fact that an entity continues to possess the same form does not imply that the proximate matter has remained identical in every way. My proximate matter remains well-suited to the form that makes me human, yet that matter fluctuates in v...

Philosophers recognize that a new, higher-level property can become present in matter--a property that is not merely the sum of the lower-level properties belonging to matter. Philosophers speak of this new property as emerging from from its material constituents. That is, the many constituents together possess this one emergent property (e.g., a mental state). I would say, however, that it makes more sense to say that the property is the property of one being. Otherwise, the property would be a mere effect of the many parts (epiphenomenalism) or the mere summation of the properties of the parts (reductive materialism). Action follows being. So if there is an action/property that is not reducible to the sum of the lower level actions/properties, then it must be the property of a being that is likewise not reducible. I would direct the following criticism to those who think of the parts as the real entity. why should the lower-level properties be said to below to lower-level beings...

This thesis by Donald Davidson states that mental events are .... surprise!.... anomalous. They are such b/c they can't be accounted for in terms of the laws of nature that apply to non-living things. They are something more than non-mental events, even though they are purely physical. If we take this as a description of perception (and set aside questions about the human soul, with its knowledge of universal truths), then Davidson seems to be onto something. And the "monism" here might be taken as "non-dualism," i.e., as not precluding an Aristotelian hylomorphism.

Okay, that was a subject heading that I couldn't resist posting, even though it doesn't quite represent what I'm about here. Intelligent design theorists look at living things qua engineered, that is, as complex machines. They seek evidence of an engineer in these machines. There are two ways that one could do so. First, one can look for evidence of "pre-engineering." In this case, one looks at how the very constitution of the non-living world both could have been otherwise (and not have been conducive toward the evolution of life forms) but is as it is. Either we won the cosmic lottery or an engineer has been at work at the very beginning. The anthropic principle is such a theory. Secondly, one could look at stages of the development of life from non life or of more complex from simpler forms of life and attempt to show that some tinkering has been going on. This argument would be something like the following: given the earlier state of affairs, there is ...

This is a fallacy I just learned about. Or rather, I just learned the name for a fallacy I was already more-or-less aware of. One commits this fallacy by trying to describe something that is inanimate as if it had feelings: i.e., fire "tries" to rise, etc. I guess those who reject teleology see Aristotelians as committing this fallacy, but I think Aristotelians themselves would insist that they don't literally mean "tries to" when describing the behavior of inanimate things. Something analogous, but what is it?

I recently heard someone talk of our minds as using internal models (of items in the world) when we perceive. Obviously, there is a way in which this must be at least half-true. For each time we approach an individual,say, for the first time, our expectations are guided by what we have perceived in similar individuals in the past. Certainly, these expectations go beyond what is given through the external senses. And since, they in some sense provide clues as to what things in the world are like, some would call them "models," but I wouldn't. For such a characterization seems to amount saying that one is primarily aware only of internal objects, which serve as representations of things outside oneself. Consider what we mean by "model" when we use this word in everyday life. If it is large, I can walk around it, or if is small enough, I can turn it in my hand. I can compare it side-by-side with the thing it represents. I can look only the thing that has be...

Emergentism states both that the mental is irreducibly different from the physical, and that the mental is founded upon the physical. But I think it errs in calling all mental activity (even perception) non-physical. For its understanding of "physical" is as whatever-can-be-the-object-of-study-in-the-natural-sciences. And it tends to reduce the object of natural science to what can be measured. And the criterion "what can be measured" tends to be combined with the false assumption that they have thereby totally de-anthropomorphized physics. As in getting rid of substance, qualitative differences and teleology. But what if all of the objects to be measured by the natural sciences are derived from analogy with human action? And what if all science is to that degree anthropomorphic? If the answer is that they are the case, then there isn't really such a gulf between the mental and the physical, and the so-called divide between the objective thing and the sub...

I pulled out part of the previous post and edited it: [Hi Tim! If you're looking for your comment(s) and my reply, they're in the post that follows!] Thomas Aquinas and other premoderns would be quite comfortable with the claim that a stone, if not impeded by an extrinsic force, falls to the earth. They would have described this process in teleological terms. The stone by nature inclines toward the earth and heads toward this goal unless something else, (which is also acting to achieve another goal), interferes with the trajectory of the former. Things necessarily act for an end, but don’t necessarily achieve them. But doesn’t every thing in nature act upon another so that the other behaves differently than it would have otherwise behaved? Does that mean that everything is frustrating whatever it interacts with? On the contrary, if any natural processes involve teleology, then the interactions involved in these processes are fullfilments rather than frustrations of pur...

Let's pick up where I left off above... by the way, the comments below are probably more closely related to the previous post If humans, as animals, have bodily movement that follow the laws of physics, and human choices as well as the execution of those choices are in part biological events, then how can human actions be free? Possible approaches to answering this question: 1. note that the very act of knowing necessary truths can't be explained in terms of purely physical laws. For the object of knowledge, as a universal truth, is not a purely concrete event. So that if the act of knowing these truths is in part a biological event yet this does not prevent knowing from operating at the same time on a plane that transcends the merely biological, something similar should be true for the operation of human rational appetite (the operations of which include free choice) 2. note that the way the question sets up the problem assumes that every whole is the sum of its parts, so t...

Can you program a simple calculator with an algorithm and make it so that it does at least some arithmetic problems incorrectly? (Important here is the supposition that the errors be non-random)? I suppose Yes. Can you make a program that uses an algorithm to detect whether or not the said calculator's program is set to work correctly? Let's suppose the answer is yes. But can you make that program defective so that it fails to catch some programs? If the answer to the other two is yes, then Yes to this question as well. In such a case, can a calculator, relying on algorithms in any sense be said to know that it knows when it has the right answer? No.

She argues that laws of nature are false but useful. No mass behaves exactly according to Newton's law of attraction because no body is acted upon solely by gravity. The law of gravity, rather, describes a tendency which, along with other forces, influences the behavior of the body in question. Yet Nancy C. is a necessatarian.... ...to be continued, maybe.

Suppose one thought that qualitative differences (or at least some of them) are accounted for by material differences in neurons. Seeing and hearing are different because of differences in neurons... neurons, that is in the visual cortex and the corresponding auditory site and/or differences in the receptor neurons (rods, cones, etc). We'll call this material/qualia theory. Such a supposer could not at the same time agree that that functionalism is true. I.e., that the same cognition can be had in different media as long as, from the perspective of logical circuitry, they are equivalent (same combination of nand gates, etc., whether they are made of buckets with water or radio tubes or whatever). We'll call this formal/qualia theory. The two ways of accounting for differences in cognition are inconsistent with each other: which is not the same as saying that one of them is true.

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.

The axon hillock either fires entirely or not at all. It is a one or a zero. If cognition were identical witht the collective firing of axons (IF!)... ...then no one of these individual components would cognize differently under different circumstances. All differences in cognition would, at the end of the day, be identical with different combinations of cognitive "ones" and "zeros." Furthermore, every possible cognition in a brain would already be there POTENTIALLY inasmuch as it would be simply a definite combination of these ones and zeroes. And qualitative differences in our perceptions would be reduced to different arrangements of these ones and zeros.