From: Van oost Kenneth (kennethvanoost@belgacom.net)
Date: Mon 09 Dec 2002 - 10:26:24 GMT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Wade Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu>
> On the other hand, 'mental replicators' still seems, to me, to be a
> nonsense phrase.
Something of interest Wade !?
Mental Conditions,
Wim De Muijnck got his PhD. upon Dependencies, Connections and other
Relations. A theory of mental causation.
He concludes that mental conditions are more than merely states of the
brain.
What are mental conditions !?
Suppose, it rains and in order not to get wet you decide to take an
umbrella.
Your conviction that rain makes you wet and the will not to get wet in the
first
place we call a mental condition. My thesis upholds the very nature of such
mental conditions.
Standard we conceive them as states of the brain, as structures of grey
cells
and neurons. Such a state people call thus mental. The material neurons do
give eventually a signal to the hand to reach for the umbrella.
No problem surely !?
The problem with the standard conception is that mental conditions do
have all sorts of characteristics, such as truth, which don 't fit with
states of
the brain. A conviction is true or false, but you can 't say that about a
state
of where the brain is supposingly in.
So, mental conditions aren 't the same as those states.
That is also due by experiences out of the past, which do influence mental
conditions like convictions, in the present.
I try to grasp how mental facts ( the fact that I do think or the fact that
I do
want something) can have a material bias and be in the same token more than
just matter on the move.
To move from the material reality towards mental conditions, you only need
to add a ' sparkle ' of soul into the equation.
How is it than possible that mental conditions are the cause of moving my
hand !?
That depends on what you understand and defines under as a cause !
If you scrutinize rooted pre- conceptions about causes than you discover
that the push and pull- notion don 't tells you the whole of the story.
First_ a cause always can be thwarted by circumstances. Those are due to
some situations which occured in the past.
The past thus plays its part in the cause occuring today.
Furthermore_ actions are not the same as movements. The point to make is
to understand that causes can occur on a multi- level.
A mental condition which causes an action is thus not the same as the one
which causes a movement.
Take for example a game of tennis.
If you simply describe the movements of the ball and players, than you
forget the contribution of the rules. Apparently, tennis is thus more than
just
making ' tennis- movements ', like mental conditions are more than just
merely states of the brain !
Eveline Steenbrinck FM November 2002
Translated out of Dutch by KVO, december 2002
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