RE: Do you believe in free will?
March 15, 2012 at 2:01 am
(This post was last modified: March 15, 2012 at 2:26 am by Angrboda.)
Perhaps if you won't take my word for it, you'll accept the word of noted cognitive scientist . She wrote this in 1986, but I don't believe anything has changed. (But you're welcome to correct her if it has.) Pay attention to the bolded part at the bottom.
Quote:Until much more is known about the mind-brain, these questions will have to wait for an answer, tantalizing though they may be. As things stand, the notions of a center of consciousness, or a center of control, let alone "mind," "self," "person," and "soul," are theoretically so ill defined that we are at a loss to know how to count such things. In the absence of a psychological and neuroscientific theory concerning cognition, consciousness, attention, and so on, counting centers of consciousness and the like is essentially a guess-and-by-golly affair.
Until we know what we are counting, we cannot begin to count — and we cannot even say with much confidence that we have one of whatever it is that split-brain subjects seem to have two of. It is like trying to count blood types before there was a theory about the constituents of blood and how they differed from organism to organism, or like trying before Cantor to decide whether there was more than one infinite set; without a sound set theory, it was like clawing at the air. To the amusement of future historians, current debates on the number of selves in split-brain subjects may be seen as akin to nineteenth-century debates in biology over whether each organism or organism-part had its own vital spirit, and over what happens to the vital spirit of a bisected worm whose parts squirm off in separate directions to begin lives of their own. What I find especially important in the split-brain results is the suggestion that our familiar conceptions, such as "center of consciousness" and "self," do not have the empirical integrity they are often assumed to have. (For more discussion on these questions, see Patricia S. Churchland 1983, Dennett 1978b, 1979, Griffin 1984, and the commentaries on Puccetti 1981.)
— Neurophilosophy: Toward A Unified Science Of The Mind/Brain, p. 182, , 1986-1995 (my copy is 1995)
Bold and underlining added. I doubt I have read this since before 2000, so I'm not claiming intimate familiarity with her text.
(Oh, and you're equivocating again. The question is not is the brain the mind, the question was what is the "I" or the self. I realize you have some comprehension problems, but do try to keep it straight, please?)