 abailart says: A very important point is being made in this article.While the materialist reduction of identity is as philosophically risible as it has always been, the ideological aspects of the discourses which see so much hot- eyed enthusiasm for popularised neuroscience require attention. The article concludes: "Hard-line identity theorists, and eliminativists above all, don’t appreciate how much they would change things if indeed we could come to believe and implement their theories. Our world would increasingly be leeched of meaning, morality, dignity and freedom, and if we rejected folk psychology in favour of scientific terminology about brain states, not only would we know less, not more, about ourselves; we would also have less to know about, because we would be less." Recently taught a Philosophy B class to my students and one quarter of the course is about Philosophy of the Mind. Introduced the students to Husserl and Heidegger and Hubert Dreyfus and the notions in his book "What Computers Can't Do" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Computers_Can%27t_Do Although I have a great respect for Dan Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter I think Dreyfus has many of the answers here, based on the fact that we are not Cartesian rational beings 24 - 7. Being "Dasein" is something computers may find difficult to comprehend or emulate. Yes, philosophical analysis quite swiftly does a demolition job on many underlying howlers. A neuroscientist such as Damasio is very much aware of the need for such analysis (and, incidentally, in his case makes the case strongly for the embodies mind, the 'rational' mind's roots in the physical and affective attributes of the body). What interests me more, however, at least here, is the ideological dimensions of the issues raised, bringing us closer to the political, the economic and the cultural, in short to a praxis of human quality and value. Yes we could also discuss Davidson's position of "Anomalous Monism" at length, but, as you posit we may be missing the point here. Surely the cat is out the bag. In the Blue Book Wittgenstein uses his parable to make the case for Behaviorism and his philosophy is based on what people do especially within the complexity of their communications and actions which must not be taken at face value but be deeply investigated for meaning. It today's society their is a state consciousness of surveillance Hofstadter states clearly consciousness begins with Perception and neural networks. Does society ready have to know what goes on within a persons neural networks. Or just use its plethora of surveill... That is very interesting; the last sentence suggests that what 'is/are' can become circular and analytic (tautological) and 'defined' by discourses and practices associated with ideology (which, itself an ideological concept and requiring care, points to 'power'). I think my own initial point is far more wooly, perhaps more fitting to a clip or a thought-snip, which was motivated by the feeling (idea?) that popularised neuroscience is a contemporary refraction of 'scientism' in general. Nevertheless, your own comments are interesting in their own right: the notion of 'seeing through' the 'individual' in a constant surveillance which is literal and a matter of practice in discourses reminds m... Yes, let us leave the discussion there, too many avenues to explore, popping up from every sentence and probably not the forum to explore this anyway. A new phrenology, apt. Quite right. Thanks for minding to comment. |
View the Top Clips from May 27, 2009
Embed This Clip In Your Site...
|
||
|
|
|||
