The Self-Aware Universe by Amit Goswami
Author:Amit Goswami [Goswami, Amit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 1995-03-21T04:00:00+00:00
The smaller fleas bite the bigger, but the bigger fleas never affect the behavior of the smaller fleas.”
“Not so fast,” cautions a mentalist, as it is now their turn. “According to Roger Sperry, our guru, mental forces do not violate, disturb, or intervene in neuronal activities, but they do supervene; mental actions with their own causal logic take place as something additional to lower-level brain actions. The causally potent reality of the conscious mind is a new emergent order that arises from the organizational interaction of the neuronal substrata, but is not reducible to it.”
The speaker pauses momentarily; a physicalist from the other side tries to butt in but to no avail: “Sperry holds subjective mental phenomena to be primary, causally potent realities as they are experienced subjectively, different from, more than, and not reducible to their physicochemical elements. The mental entities transcend the physiological just as the physiological transcend the molecular; the molecular, the atomic and subatomic; and so forth.”5
The physicalist debater replies that such reasoning as Sperry’s is all hocus-pocus, that what any conglomerate or configuration of neurons does is inevitably reducible to what the component neurons do. Every so-called causal action of the mind ultimately must be traceable to some underlying neuronal components of the brain. Mind initiating changes in the lower level of the brain is tantamount to having brain substratum acting on brain substratum without a cause. And where does the causal potency of the mind, free choice, come from? “Dr. Sperry’s whole thesis is built on the unprovable theorem of holism—that the whole is greater than its parts. I rest my case.” The speaker sits down complacently.
But the mentalists are ready with their rebuttal. “Sperry says that free will is that aspect of mental phenomena that is more than their physicochemical elements. Somehow this causally potent mind emerges from the interaction of its parts, of the myriad neurons. Clearly, the whole is greater than the parts. We just have to discover how.”
The opposition is not ready to yield. Somebody with a big button that says Think Functionalism takes the podium. “We functionalists look at the brain-mind as a biocomputer, at brain as structure or hardware, and at mind as function or software. As you mentalists surely will agree, O ye misguided supporters of mentalism, the computer is the most versatile metaphor ever invented to describe the brain-mind. And as you know, we don’t completely accept the reductionist view. Mental states and processes are functional entities implementable in different types of structure, be it the brain or the silicon computer. We can prove our point by building an artificial intelligence machine with mind—the Turing machine. But here again, although we use software language to describe mental processes as programs acting on programs, ultimately we know that all is the play of some hardware.”6
“But there must be high-level programs of the mind that can initiate actions at the hardware level ...” a mentalist tries to interrupt, but Think Functionalism does not yield.
“Your so-called high-level program, any
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
The Complete Stick Figure Physics Tutorials by Allen Sarah(7135)
Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion: Tesla, UFOs, and Classified Aerospace Technology by Ph.D. Paul A. Laviolette(4974)
Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe(3782)
The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks(3414)
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli(3072)
How To by Randall Munroe(2911)
I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works by Nick Bilton(2840)
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking(2819)
What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe(2542)
The Great Unknown by Marcus du Sautoy(2533)
Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham(2386)
Blockchain: Ultimate Step By Step Guide To Understanding Blockchain Technology, Bitcoin Creation, and the future of Money (Novice to Expert) by Keizer Söze(2379)
Networks: An Introduction by Newman Mark(2264)
The Meaning of it All by Richard Feynman(2213)
Easy Electronics by Charles Platt(2205)
The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra(2164)
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham(2075)
When by Daniel H Pink(2020)
Introducing Relativity by Bruce Bassett(2018)
