(June 14, 2013 at 7:23 am)Ben Davis Wrote: Hi Fallen, why the complication? It's much more simple than this: all the evidence that we have indicates that the mind is an emergent property of brain function. Further, there is no evidence in support of dualism. So I simply can't accept your first premise because if we were to assume dualism, we can speculate pretty much anything we like because there's no evidence for any dualist position.Even if mind is an emergent "property," that doesn't refute dualism-- it just teaches something about its nature, or about its relationship to physical structures.
Sorry if I'm missing the point!
Even if you can find a 1:1 relationship between brain function and experience (which is so confidently assumed now and so poorly proven), there's still a problem: mind is a brute fact, and it is not objective; you cannot touch someone's mind, or even know if they are actually sentient (as opposed to being a machine which can fake sentience). Brain function, on the other hand, IS objective; you can play with it, monitor it, and do whatever science you want on it.
One approach to this is simply to say that mind is brain function. However, saying repeatedly and confidently that things are equivalent doesn't make them so, and science has a lot more assumptions than proof right now.
