Can a Machine Change your Mind?
I love discussions of mind and brain–they’re some of the sites of the most interesting philosophical work that I’ve seen. I took a History of Psychology class at Milligan, and as a young philosophy major, I thought I’d hit a vein of gold for reflection–every age that takes on the nature of psyche or of mens, of mod or whatever else, really asks some of the big ontological questions of being–what does it mean to exist in the world?? What is the character of my own contribution?
O’Grady’s argument (which only takes up the first third of the page–don’t panic when you see how the comments extend the page) is basically a Continental one, emphasizing that materialists’ insistence that experiences are “just” this or that, reducing them to the movements of uniform prime matter:
As Kripke said, when God (obviously metaphoric here) created the world, all he needed to do to create heat was to create molecular motion (which is what heat is) but he needed to do something extra in order to create a sensation of heat. Ditto with creating water, it was just a matter of creating H2O, but the sight, sound, taste, feel, smell(?) of water were an additional labour, actually requiring the creation of sentient organisms. (In a way, heat is in a slightly different category from lightning and water. The latter two phenomena (especially water) can be more easily imagined as unperceived entities than heat can. With heat, the objective phenomenon is much more inextricably interwoven with the subjective effect of it, which is why Kripke?s use of heat as an example can be misleading.)
The most irritating (to us lay people) aspect of philosophical and scientific attempts to reduce the mental to the neural, and to squash down human beings into being on all fours with other physical things, is that their proponents nearly always say that actually they are just putting the truth about consciousness more clearly and taking nothing away from our experience. Like politicians deviously withdrawing privileges, they expect us to be quite happy about this.
I’ll leave the article itself for folks to read on their own–the prose is clear enough that I don’t need to explicate it–but I will quote here O’Grady’s philosophical conclusion about the overreach of neuroscience:
The new neuro-social-sciences are the latest of many attempts to naturalise the human—to make every aspect of our lives and selves comprehensible merely as subjects of scientific explanation. The social consequences of the naturalistic program make it especially important to understand its philosophical limits. Not only do we become experimental subjects, but we very easily become subjected — to the particular types of control that scientific understanding invites, especially the “medical model” of the expert which offers the ‘patient’ diagnosis, prophylaxis, prognosis and cure. This may produce wonderful results in the right context, but should be tightly confined within the world of atoms; in the world of meanings, its essentially metaphorical status needs to be always understood. A naturalised, rather than thoughtful and deliberative politics, is not only creepy, it is incoherent. Ironically, it substitutes a medical metaphor for meaningful argument.
