From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!wupost!uwm.edu!daffy!uwvax!meteor!tobis Wed Sep 23 16:54:29 EDT 1992
Article 6982 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: tobis@meteor.wisc.edu (Michael Tobis)
Subject: Re: Thought? Physical processes? Inside? Outside?
Message-ID: <1992Sep19.133328.22892@meteor.wisc.edu>
Organization: University of Wisconsin, Meteorology and Space Science
References: <1992Sep17.204023.20400@meteor.wisc.edu> <JJ.92Sep17171659@medulla.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: Sat, 19 Sep 92 13:33:28 GMT
Lines: 35

In article <JJ.92Sep17171659@medulla.cis.ohio-state.edu> jj@medulla.cis.ohio-state.edu (John Josephson) writes:
>
>>> There seems to me to be no evidence that awareness has anything
>>> that can reasonably be called a location.
>
>There is plenty of evidence that awareness goes away when the brain
>stops working.  And plenty of evidence that awareness ``gets funny''
>when certain chemicals are ingested that appear to have their major
>effects in the brain.  In fact the evidence is so overwhelming that
>awareness is brain-dependent, that it takes a special sort of
>blindness not to see it.

Obviously the brain has something to do with it. That doesn't mean
awareness is "in" the brain, any more than these ideas are "on" your
newsserver's disk drive. A bit pattern is on the disk, and it
through well known processes causes an image on your screen and some
impulses in your neurons. But how the _impulses_ in your neurons
get translated into an _idea_ "in" your awareness is utterly mysterious.

That this process is reducible to physical events is an assumption,
not a result.  As it stands, there is no useful objective definition
of awareness that could be used in such a theory. I maintain that this
alone is sufficient evidence that such a theory is not imminent.

In fact, I fail to see how an ojective definition of awareness can
exist: nothing can be more subjective than experience itself. Accordingly
I fail to see how a theory of consciousness that is reducible to physics
even _can_ exist.

It seems to me that the assumption that there is nothing extrinsic to
physics involved in the mind/body problem is generally treated as an
article of faith among the scientific community. This is rather
ironic. 

mt


