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A funny thing happened with the invention of fMRI imaging. Rather than explaining away the mysteries of human experience, the technology that made it possible to visualize and map brain activity for the first time only further complicated our understanding of how the mind works.
user-inactivated · 4605 days ago · link ·
Contemporary neuroscience follows Descartes in conceptualizing consciousness as something that occurs internally. The difference is that for Descartes, the soul was the ghost in the machine, while for neuroscientists, the ghost is the machine.
That seems to be the crux of the whole article right there. And the space in between the reductionistic determinism v FREE WILL is pretty big. It seems like that that space is a "feature not a bug" and the ambiguity that is defined between these two understandings of human consciousness, at least cognitively for us great apes, has allowed us to feel the importance of the "I" after the "Thou".
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While the difference is deciding who (or what), actually, the ghost is, the similarity is that both are dualistic, and, in my opinion, utter nonsense. There are lots of causal correlates that exist in the central nervous system that are indispensable to proper function, but to talk about the brain as if its an organism unto itself is conceptually off target. My favorite authors on the subject, Bennett and Hacker, have termed it the mereological fallacy (a mereology is a type of metaphor in which one ascribes an attribute of a whole to one of its constituent parts). Here is a short introduction to their writing for anyone who is interested. I agree with you that this is probably a problem of reductionism. Some things can only be appreciated as a thing and nothing less.
thenewgreen · 4605 days ago · link ·
- I travel and I can access my latest work documents, my deepest, most intimate thoughts on the cloud, so where are my most deepest, most significant thoughts? Where am I working? Where am I located? We ourselves are distributed dynamically, extended beings who are always becoming through our action.