Seeing red

[bennyboy]

Is it that argument, or similar, that you're putting forward here? I'm really sorry but I have trouble understanding these sorts of logical arguments, even if that does make me as thick as a plank. I just can't get my head around what we call in Mafia games, WIFOMs: Wine In Front Of Me, and that's what these sorts of arguments seem like to me.

No, it's not quite the same, though certainly I find Lewis' argument interesting.

When it comes to attempts to establish truth at a foundational level, the brain-mind thread of thinking leads to a nasty circle, or at least a question-begging assumption.

• My brain creates mind.
  
• My mind perceives a brain.
  
• Therefore I know that the brain is real, and that mind comes from it.
  

This is similar to:

• God created the Bible.
  
• The Bible says God is real.
  
• Since God created the Bible, we know it's accurate, and guess what? It says God is real.
  

In the latter, you must take AS GIVEN either that God exists, or that the Bible is correct.

The problem with the former is that you must take AS GIVEN either that the brain creates mind, or that the perceptions of the mind represent an objective reality.  But they are mutually self-supporting.  So any materialist view which attempts to use brain science to establish the truth about what mind is is really doing this:


In the scope of everyday human life, this doesn't matter: you do your brain science, you develop your drugs, you live your life-- much the same as you don't need to understand QM (or possibly even what framework might underlie QM) to know that your desk is solid and it's safe to put your dinner on it.  It's only when you start looking for "truth" that you have to challenge those things we are so sure we "know."