In Search of a Mechanism: from the Brain to the Mind by Burton Howard;

Author:Burton, Howard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Biology
Publisher: Open Agenda Publishing
Published: 2020-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

Questions for Discussion:

Do you agree that our apparent human weakness at correctly evaluating probabilities mostly boils down to a matter of how the question is phrased? What might be some counterarguments to that view?

What does the claim that humans are poor at consciously evaluating probabilities imply about the role of probabilistic thinking in evolution?

V. In Search of a Mechanism

How to connect the subpersonal with the personal

HB: For the moment, however, I’d like to concentrate on the apparent distinction between our brains and the processing that they’re doing, and our conscious minds—a distinction that strikes me as a major theme throughout Making Up The Mind.

I’m certainly willing to accept the fact that there are irrational people—after all, the evidence seems to be overwhelming. Whether or not that means they have irrational brains, as well as irrational minds, I don’t know, but the point is that this distinction certainly seems to exist for even reasonably rational people.

So if we focus on that we can now forget about focusing on Bayesian probability per se—that was an example of trying to look at the distinction.

When we talk about whether or not we’re convinced of something—our beliefs, our desires, all the rest of that—we’re talking about “ourselves”. We all have a fairly clear understanding of what that means—even if we can’t specify it logically or physiologically—and that’s very different, of course, than looking at brain activity in an fMRI machine.

Now, what I detect from you is some ambiguity—I’m not accusing you of anything other than what every reasonable human being has grappled with throughout the dawn of history, so this is not particularly directed at you—but there is this obvious ambiguity that we’re all battling with, it seems to me.

If we are materialists, we are naturally inclined to say something like, “We don’t believe in a soul or ‘soul-stuff’; we believe that at some level there’s nothing other than physical stuff out there, and therefore the brain must cause the mind—and we also have all sorts of other evidence for those conclusions, ranging from lesions to the brains to how people behave under narcotics and so forth.”

So there are all sorts of reasons to believe that the brain and the mind are causally connected, but the question is, Well, how does it work exactly? Or even approximately, for that matter.

At one point in Making Up The Mind, you say admirably humble words to the effect of, “This leads us to the question of consciousness, and I’m not going to look so much at consciousness because that’s too difficult. I’m going to look at what it’s for and go through an evolutionary pathway and so on.”

But I want to put you back on the hook for a moment now and simply ask you, “OK, look, we’ve got these two things: the brain and the mind. How are they linked up?”

CF: Well, that’s what I’ve been thinking about, mostly, since writing that book. And it’s very much to do with what I was saying before about the

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