They somehow emerged from the physical brain during the course of evolution. Consciousness itself is not so mysterious. What is mysterious is just how the brain creates it. — George Cobau
I think your view of history is a little off. I don't believe that science was formed within a materialistic mindset as you claim. It appears to me that modern science began with Copernicus, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and others of that time, which was well before materialism became ascendant in the twentieth century. Some have thought of Newtonian mechanics as being materialistic but this appears to be a overreach. (At least it is an overreach to think that it can be applied to absolutely everything, although admittedly many did.) Nonetheless, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, idealism was the dominant philosophy. It was only in the twentieth century that materialism became ascendant and got to be associated with science. — George Cobau
My argument against materialism is traditionalist: that the nature of meaning, and therefore reason, inference, mathematics and so even science itself, cannot be understood as a consequence of the kinds of forces and empirically observable entities that naturalism studies, because reason, meaning, intentionality, and so forth, are required and assumed, before science itself can even be established. This is the sense in which reason (and so on) transcends the naturalist description, as reason is essentially prior to the empirical sciences as such. Reason dictates what to consider, what to study, and so on, prior to any actual observation being made — Wayfarer
I think you misunderstand my position. ... I believe in naturalism but not materialism ... I don't get how Uber cannot understand this, but that's his problem. — George Cobau
You say the brain does information processing. How could it do that without a mind? — George Cobau
You seem to be conflating reason and sentience here. — apokrisis
what the empiricist speaks of and describes as sense-knowledge is not exactly sense-knowledge, but sense-knowledge plus unconsciously-introduced intellective ingredients, - sense-knowledge in which he has made room for reason without recognizing it. A confusion which comes about all the more easily as, on the one hand, the senses are, in actual fact, more or less permeated with reason in man, and, on the other, the merely sensory psychology of animals, especially of the higher vertebrates, goes very far in its own realm and imitates intellectual knowledge to a considerable extent.1 — Maritain
Emphatically not. Animals are sentient, but not rational — Wayfarer
I agree that there are coherent evolutionary accounts of how linguistic capacity and reason evolved, but that doesn't explain the horizons that these faculties open up — Wayfarer
the brain causes, creates, produces, and generates conscious mental experience. — George Cobau
Thus, in all likelihood, the brain causes, creates, produces, and generates conscious mental experience. — George Cobau
Which is basically what materialism says. — Wayfarer
Also, I don't really like the term, substance, which appears to be vague and not well defined. — George Cobau
(I wouldn't rely on neuroscientists. To me, they appear to be very biased and confused.) — George Cobau
the traditional dualism of Descartes — George Cobau
The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatio-temporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.
EVERYTHING in the cosmic universe is composed of matter and form. Everything is concrete and individual. Hence the forms of cosmic entities must also be concrete and individual. Now, the process of knowledge is immediately concerned with the separation of form from matter, since a thing is known precisely because its form is received in the knower. But, whatever is received is in the recipient according to the mode of being that the recipient possesses. If, then, the senses are material powers, they receive the forms of objects in a material manner; and if the intellect is an immaterial power, it receives the forms of objects in an immaterial manner. This means that in the case of sense knowledge, the form is still encompassed with the concrete characters which make it particular; and that, in the case of intellectual knowledge, the form is disengaged from all such characters. To understand is to free form completely from matter.
Moreover, if the proper knowledge of the senses is of accidents, through forms that are individualized, the proper knowledge of intellect is of essences, through forms that are universalized. Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge so far forth as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality.
The separation of form from matter requires two stages if the idea is to be elaborated: first, the sensitive stage, wherein the external and internal senses operate upon the material object, accepting its form without matter, but not without the appendages of matter; second the intellectual stage, wherein agent intellect operates upon the phantasmal datum, divesting the form of every character that marks and indentifies it as a particular something.
Abstraction, which is the proper task of active intellect, is essentially a liberating function in which the essence of the sensible object, potentially understandable as it lies beneath its accidents, is liberated from the elements that individualize it and is thus made actually understandable. The product of abstraction is a species of an intelligible order. Now possible intellect is supplied with an adequate stimulus to which it responds by producing a concept.
I believe that the mind must be located within the brain. Where else could it be? — George Cobau
information processing seems a reasonable starting point for most physicalists. — apokrisis
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