PUZZLED ELEPHANT TO DAVID AND DAVID:
(HERE'S ONE I DEFINITELY SHOULD HAVE MADE EARLIER.)
DAVID (PZEPH, THAT IS, THINGAMY, ME, MYSELF, FORMERLY WITH A LIFE) HAD
WRITTEN:
.....Besides, you can't seriously beleive that if I
don't act on it, then I didn't even have the thought?
DAVID PRINCE WROTE:
>> You still "behaved" because your brain behaved. Your neurons fired. If
> your
>> Neurons had not fired you would not have had the thought.
ELEPHANT:
IMO that's wrong in two ways, one of which is interesting.
Boring error: I'm not aware of any mainstream consensus science identifying
a thought with any specific neural event(s). We are supposed to find this
at some stage in the future, apparently (an article of faith), but a lot of
people are acting as it we are already there, and we are not. (One possible
reason for this slow progress is that it's pretty hard (logically
impossible?) to specify empirical criteria for identifying one specific
countable 'thought'.
Interesting error: Given that it's not my project to fire Neurons, but
rather to think this MOQ through, how can the firing of my Neurons be
thought of as my behaviour? It certainly seems a funny way of looking at
it. Moving my arms so that my hand can pick up a cup of coffee, well that
is me behaving towards coffee. But Is the pulsing of blood in my veins
Behaviour? What about the movement of white blood cells? Digestion?
(indegestion?) Come on, tell me where you draw the line and why. Of course,
if you don't draw the line at all then that's just fine too.... (but takes
us back to the boring error).
Pzeph
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
"...might suddenly evolve into a creature with far longer arms, but which is
probably quite incapable of drinking coffee...."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@wasted.demon.nl
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:00:54 BST