(March 24, 2021 at 12:22 am)Ferrocyanide Wrote:(March 17, 2021 at 8:47 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: If a person on a bus desires cabbage, it would be incorrect to say "the bus desires cabbage."
The pantheist is focused on the unitary cause of things. For the pantheist, it's just as problematic to see the desire as having its cause in an individual person. That would be just as erroneous as ascribing the desire for cabbage to the bus.
There are lots of causes for the cabbage-desiring in a given person. His mother used to make him cabbage, and so he acquired a taste for it. It is a New Years tradition to eat it in his country, so that got him thinking about cabbage right at that moment. His prior meal that day left him craving whatever nutrients are found in cabbage.
The desire for cabbage can scarcely be contained within a bus really... you need something bigger to contain it. If you wanted to find the first cause of the cabbage-desiring, it'd take you all the way back to the big bang. Its history would involve Earth's formation, supernovae, and may even require quasars to fully explain.
That's how a pantheist thinks of things. And it isn't an altogether false way of thinking. It's very accurate. In a way, more correct than our notion that the desire for cabbage just sort of "randomly comes forth" in a person or is encompassed only within them.
The desire for cabbage can be found at the Big Bang moment 14.7 billion years ago?
I’m not sure I understand how that is going to work out.
If desires, thoughts, logic, happens in our brain and memory is stored in our brain, we need to understand how it functions.
The brain is just an organ.
It is made of about +65 billion neurons and a large number of interconnections. If you take these apart, there is no longer a thinking machine and no memories.
So, at that point, your desire for cabbage is lost.
If you take the neurons apart further, there are various molecules. If you take it apart further, you have carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, etc.
You can take it apart further and you will never find desire.
This is because desire is a high level thing. The components don’t contain it. It only arises as a group behavior of a large number of neurons.
You can probably take all those atoms and reorder them and you end up with a book called the Bible.
Then, you can reorder them and end up with the Book of Satan.
Atoms are just lego pieces. They don’t contain high level designs like a brain, a porsche, sheet metal.
--Ferrocyanide
It's not so much that the desire for cabbage can be "found at" the big bang. It's that the causal chain of events that led to the desiring of cabbage began at the big bang. Everything has a causal history. The big bang is where the causal history of any present phenomenon BEGINS.
In my post, I was being highly reductionist. At the end of the day, the brain is comprised of quantum particles, and these particles interact with one another the way they do because of the laws of physics. End of story.
But studying the interactions of quantum particles is NOT how we understand brain functions. It would be tedious and impossible to do neuroscience that way. So we look at larger structures like neurons. But at the end of the day, it's all just atoms moving the way the laws of nature say they should move.
I think your concern derives from the fact that what we know about the brain and how it works is understood as an emergent phenomenon. As a rule, speaking of brain functions as emergent phenomena is more concise. But speaking of them as reductive phenomena is ultimately more correct.
