On Thu, September 27, 2012 09:41, John F Sowa wrote:
> Doug, William, and Leo,
>
> Rom Harré
>> the brain is not a part of a person in the way that a grain of sand
>> is part of a beach. It is part of a person’s body and a person’s body
>> is not a part of that person in the relevant sense.
>
> DF
>> I would consider this philosophical game playing. I'm guessing that
>> RH is discussing a person as a "soul", a "life force" or event. (01)
> No. He is treating a person as a living human being, all of whose
> parts are working together in every action. (02)
But he is claiming "a person’s body is not a part of that person
in the relevant sense." (03)
This depends upon what he means by "the relevant sense". A body's
(or a brain's) relation to a person is not similar to that of a grain of sand
to a beach, no. If that's all he means, fine. (04)
A person doesn't have billions of bodies or billions of brains, so the
analogy is quite weird. He could as easily used heart or neck as brain
in his analogy. (05)
-- doug (06)
> Please note the longer
> quotation by RH from another lecture (copy below). He knows a great
> deal about neuroscience, psychology, and how they are interrelated.
>
> To avoid issues of "soul" or "life force", let's consider the sentence,
>
> The rover Curiosity analyzed a rock on Mars.
>
> The rover contains many parts, including computers, cameras, tools,
> wheels, etc. To do the analysis, it had to use all the parts working
> together, and no single part could be said to do the analysis.
>
> If you consider the rover to be the mereological sum of its parts,
> you are ignoring all the structure, the methods of interconnection,
> the function of each part, and all the knowledge (programs and data)
> located in multiple computers and storage units in the rover.
>
> As RH said, mereology is OK for talking about grains of sand on
> a beach. But even for a beach, there is a considerable amount
> of structure. Note how mixtures of sand and water behave.
>
> So even with sand on a beach, mereology is only a partial theory
> of the combination. When you get to something as complicated as
> a Mars rover, it's hopelessly inadequate as a theory of structure.
>
> And when you're talking about plants, animals, or people, there
> is so much that we don't understand about the living organism
> that it is a serious mistake to treat it as a sum of its parts.
>
> WF
>> If a body is a *part* of an animal, what is the other part???
>
> The other part is the *process*. The body of an animal or a car
> is mereologically the same as its body immediately after its death
> (or you turn off the engine). But a running car and a living animal
> can do things that the static body cannot.
>
> Cars are designed in a way that lets you restart the process.
> Some bacteria can turn into spores and be revived, but most higher
> animals cannot be stopped and restarted. Aristotle would call
> that running process the psyche, but you could also call it the
> functionally organized process of the living organism.
>
> Leo
>> I'm not a relativist nor a subjectivist nor a nihilist.
>
> There is nothing subjective about function. Engineers build
> functionality into their machines. Biologists determine the
> function of the genes, proteins, hormones, cells, and organs
> of a living organism. Understanding how all the functions
> work together successfully is a major challenge.
>
> Fundamental principle: Mereology does not take structure and
> function into account. You need much, much more than mereology
> or even mereotopology -- you need to consider the functionality
> of each part and its role in a working system or organism.
>
> John
> _____________________________________________________________________
>
> Why Brains Can’t Think: Exposing the Mereological Fallacy
> Rom Harré, Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College
> Monday 16th July, 7pm: Rewley House
>
> As the 21st Century opened, the discipline of 'academic psychology'
> seemed to be separating into two radically distinct and perhaps
> irreconcilable domains. Cultural/Discursive psychology focused on the
> discursive means for the management of meaning in a world of norms,
> while Neuropsychology focused on the investigation of brain processes
> loosely correlated with intuitively identified cognitive processes.
> These two domains can be reconciled in a hybrid science that brings them
> together into a synthesis more powerful than anything psychologists have
> achieved before.
>
> The marriage of Neuroscience and Cultural/Discursive psychology is based
> on the insights of many critics of the causal framework for psychology,
> but the most insightful has been one philosopher in particular, Ludwig
> Wittgenstein. Hybrid psychology depends on the intuition that while
> brains can be assimilated into the world of persons, as among the
> instruments people use for carrying out many of their projects, people
> cannot be assimilated into the world of cell structures and molecular
> processes. To suppose that they can be has been called the 'mereological
> fallacy' – ascribing attributes of wholes to some of their parts. People
> think. Brains, parts of people’s bodies, do not.
>
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