Thursday 10 March 2011

Biology Of Mind

We are evolved creatures, thus the mind is a product of evolutionary forces. Sometimes this is neglected for a priori musings about what the mind is, and problems get exacerbated by removing them from our biology an into the abstract.

So when I hear about particular problems of mind that seem to excite dualists, I really wonder just how closely they've thought about the problem. Have they taken into consideration the utility of such a function in an evolutionary perspective? Have they taken into consideration other animals that have similar behaviours to us? Have they identified something outside of the brain at play? If not, then why are we even considering something beyond the material?

The absence of a good account of organisation of thoughts into knowledge, or failures of the reduction of intentionality to brain states, doesn't to me seem at all good reasons to reject that it's causally reducible to the material. It simply says "we don't know", and warrants further investigation.

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