Re: the meme/brain problem

From: Dace (edace@earthlink.net)
Date: Fri 06 Feb 2004 - 19:36:22 GMT

  • Next message: William Benzon: "The evolution of the novel"

    > From: "Scott Chase" <ecphoric@hotmail.com>
    >
    > I'm a hardcore mechanistic, materialistic monist (aka 3M'er). This
    > philosophical dogma of mine can be explored in several ways:
    >
    > 1. mind is what the brain does

    When a neuron coughs up some dopamine, that's brain activity. Mind activity is the same thing but viewed internally, that is, subjectively.

    > 2. mind emerges from brain

    The brain is an emergent property of neurons.

    > 3. mind is a combination of functions and epiphenomenal sequelae of the
    > brain

    You're gettin pretty fancy there, Scott. But you still can't explain how a mental thing like representation can exist in a physical thing like the brain.

    > 3a. the functions are adaptions
    >
    > 3b. the epiphenomena are spandrels
    >
    >
    > No matter (pun not intended) how you parse it, mind stems from brain. It's
    > brain all the way down.
    >
    > I sometimes prefer the hardcore monist term mindbrain.

    Me too. I happen to be a hardcore monist myself. The coin may have two sides, but it's still one coin. Only when we try to find mentality in the objective point of view do we end up with absurdities like an image that's physically real.

    Point being that we only find memes when we look at mindbrain from the subjective angle.

    Ted

    =============================================================== This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit

    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri 06 Feb 2004 - 19:47:43 GMT