(January 26, 2016 at 2:59 pm)ChadWooters Wrote:(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.
Hi Chad. I'm sorry I didn't reply to this until now. I wanted to but I didn't know how so I decided to leave it but just seeing what you've said in that other thread - 'there are many kinds of dualists' - I just wanted to acknowledge that I understand that your position is very different from the stereotypes I have of dualists. I did read your other post before, and understood some of it but not all, but in light of this one and rereading the other (not just now... before - when I chose to leave it be), it's pretty clear.
But ultimately I didn't know how to reply because your position seems to be steeped in heavy-duty philosophy... which, along with heavy duty logic, as I said before, tends to go right over my head. So I didn't see the point in trying to present my position for comparison because I'd be at a distinct disadvantage in trying to argue my case in this terminology because I don't understand it. And that's made worse by the fact that I'm not entirely sure what my position is on that particular question. You say manifest, I say emergent, but I'm not even sure if emergent quite captures what I mean.
