Timeline for Is there evidence that brain and mind are separate?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
10 events
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| Mar 17, 2017 at 14:26 | comment | added | Dan M. | @yters Yes, understanding the hardware implementation can be useful for certain kinds of goals. But we can understand many cognitive processes in behavioral/computational terms. Similarly, lots of very good computer programming can proceed with very little knowledge of the hardware implementation -- pretty much any 3GL or 4GL programming language allows you to do this. And being a master user of Word, Photoshop, etc. requires no knowledge of hardware implementation. It really just depends on your goals, so it's not reducible to whether reductionism is "true" or "false". | |
| Mar 15, 2017 at 20:40 | comment | added | yters | @DanM. from a computer programming perspective reductionism is extremely useful. For example, this is the bread and butter of computer hackers. Because they can reduce computer operations down to assembly language and physical memory, or in some cases even hardware circuits, they are able to circumvent and manipulate the higher level "reality" of computer abstractions. If physical reductionism is true for the mind, then scientists will eventually gain complete control over the mind. On the other hand, if reductionism is false, then the mind will always be free. | |
| Aug 7, 2012 at 18:51 | comment | added | user1006 | @Dan Thank you for your patience. I can see now how this question might have seemed a little silly. | |
| Aug 7, 2012 at 11:35 | comment | added | Dan M. | More or less. I probably wouldn't describe the mind as "separate" from the physical brain. I'd say that the term "mind" refers to a set of physical mechanisms, processes, etc. that are better described and studied at the level of organism behavior than the level of neural firing. | |
| Aug 7, 2012 at 2:21 | comment | added | user1006 | @Dan Very valid point. So, assuming my metaphor was adequate, if you were asked what you thought about the mind-brain relationship, somewhere in your comments would be included a statement like, "while all cognition is produced by neural firings, the mind is considered separate from the physical brain because the brain's highest processes and functions cannot be adequately described by said neural firings?" | |
| Aug 6, 2012 at 20:13 | comment | added | Dan M. | Keep in mind that the person peering inside the machine can provide very little guidance about webpage design or statistical analysis or many other functions that matter to the user. From that perspective, he has no idea how the computer works. David Marr (1982, Vision) is typically credited with articulating this functional independence between the "computational" (what it does), "algorithmic" (how it does it), and "implementational" (hardware) levels of analysis. | |
| Aug 6, 2012 at 16:21 | comment | added | user1006 | @Dan Just reading this over again. I suppose a similar metaphor to oppose yours would be the following. You can study how a computer appears to operate by giving it input from its various devices and seeing what it does, and if you would like to know how to operate a computer that's great. The only problem is the user would argue that he indeed knows how a computer works, while someone who has taken apart the machine would scoff at such a statement. By taking apart the machine, the person can observe its inner workings as well as deduce how an outside influence could manipulate the machine. | |
| Aug 2, 2012 at 15:54 | comment | added | Keegan Keplinger | There's non-reductive physicalism and reductive physicalism. There's no need for non reductive dualism, really, the whole point of non reductive physicalism is that emergence can explain consciousness without there being new physics. Dualism with non reduction doesn't really make sense, since reductionism is a physicalist property. | |
| Aug 2, 2012 at 14:09 | comment | added | Artem Kaznatcheev | this is a great answer. Sometimes people take reductionism too far and too seriously. | |
| Aug 2, 2012 at 13:32 | history | answered | Dan M. | CC BY-SA 3.0 |