(January 25, 2016 at 10:11 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: It's simply an arbitrary choice. And lacking any real evidence of the supposed mover informing it, seems prima facie irrational.No one can justify saying that their prior commitment to an arbitrary decision is more rational than the other, seemingly or otherwise.
I have committed to the position that reality is intelligible and knowledge is possible for objective reasons beyond us. You say that we merely perceive the world subjectively as intelligible in response to evolutionary pressures.
What one can say; however, is that when someone commits to an absurd reality he or she foregoes the ability engage productively with others over fundamental issues. Many people have an intuitive sense that philosophies based on doubting intelligibility undermine the shared understandings on which most societies build its consensus about values, responsibilities, identity and meaning.
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(January 26, 2016 at 12:38 am)Emjay Wrote: The dualist position takes a lot more for granted than I do about the responsibility of the 'homunculus'…So either we're a completely separate, disembodied mind that happens by extraordinary coincidence to process data in the same manner a neural network demonstrably can and does as a matter of course - i.e. stereotyping etc - and that again by extraordinary coincidence changes to the underlying neural network that it has laid claim to …OR we are that network. …[This] is what I see as an extreme dualist position - one where the mind is absolutely separate from brain. But I don't know where you stand on the question...My position makes no provision for any type of homunculus, ectoplasm, or “ghost in the machine”. Neither does it rely on preexisting harmony, like Leibnitz suspected. I thought I presented it clearly enough in ( http://atheistforums.org/thread-40435-po...pid1182671 ) but you may have missed it. Simply stated, I advocate Thomistic moderate realize. I see human beings are a hylomorphic substance, they have an immaterial essence, or quiddity supported on a material medium. To turn a quote by McLuhan, the medium is not the message. Mind and brain cannot be separated in a living human being. They are distinguishable without being alienable. When material substances (like flesh and bones) participate in a certain forms (like animals), the forms put downward pressure on the material substances and either constrain or expand matter’s operations. My position is that properties do not ‘emerge’ (appear from nowhere by magic) so much as ‘manifest’ (actualize what already exists in potency).
Scholasticism lacks the mind/body problem. Mental properties fall into the category of formal and final causes. Brain states fall into the categories of material and efficient causes. The idealism/materialism dilemma arises when people object to the causal power of one or more of the four Aristotelian causes.