(June 12, 2019 at 10:36 pm)ColdComfort Wrote: I enjoyed that. The part about Lipset's [ sp?] experiments being misrepresented was informative
His experiments aren't being misrepresented by anyone. Anyone is free to conclude whatever they like from the data produced by Libet's experiments. Some take his data to suggest that free will illusory. Libet himself drew different conclusions. This doesn't mean anybody's work is being misrepresented by anyone.
Furthermore, if anyone is misrepresenting Libet, it's the neuroscientist in the video... (although, to be fair, he doesn't really misrepresent Libet)... here's the deal: According to the video, Libet is a property dualist. A property dualist is much like a materialist. They do not posit that there is any kind of immaterial soul or distinct substance like the Cartesians do. All they say is that there is one kind of substance, yet some of that substance has an immaterial property.
I don't really like that they are called dualists... much for the same reasons you give-- guilt by association with Descartes.
Quote:I also don't like the term dualist as it suggests Descartes...
But his position can be easily proved and you can do this at home all by yourself. Imagine any sensation or thought you might have. Now I'll concede the point for arguments sake that these sensations correspond to or are even caused by measurable activities in the brain. Still the sensation or thought you experience is something very different from the brain activity. No? Qualia the eggheads call them. This is obvious to me.
But this is the thought experiment that Rene Descartes describes in the first two chapters of his Meditations. Why do you have a problem that something "suggests Descartes" when your own ideas are distinctly Cartesian. In fact, what you've done is describe the mind/body problem. That's why Descartes was an excellent philosopher... not because his theory, substance dualism, was correct, but that he discovered the question that we had yet to answer. (And we still haven't answered it.)
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You brought up hylomorphism in another post, so maybe you prefer it to substance dualism. But hylomorphism does not suggest an immaterial soul. If anything, it describes a material soul.
Hylomorphism was Aristotle's "improvement" on Plato's theory of Forms (which Aristotle rejected). To Aristotle, you could look at a few examples of different kinds of tables and come up with an idea of "table-ness." Now anyone can recognize that "table-ness" is a real thing. But it isn't a physical thing. It's nonphysical.
Where Aristotle departed from Plato was in that Plato thought that Forms could exist independently of material. Aristotle said "no"... Every real thing was a combination of matter (hyle) and form (morphe). So a table, for example, could be divided into the wood that comprises it (matter) and the form of "table-ness" that organizes the wood. So "table-ness" is an organizing principle and NOT an immaterial substance.
Likewise, the hylomorphic soul, is NOT an immaterial substance but an organizing principle-- or as I said earlier, a material soul. I'm not alone on this. Many philosophers agree with me in that hylomorphism is materialism. There is disagreement too, but not enough disagreement for the neuroscientist in the video to say that hylomorphism relates to the existence of an immaterial thing.
