From: David MOREY (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Fri Dec 19 2003 - 21:03:31 GMT
> Matt:
> You've got to be kidding, David. I read Nagel as one of the contemporary
arch-SOMists. His whole philosophy is about reconstituing the
subject-object split. I mean, unlike many other philosophers we could pin
SOM on, he even _uses_ the subject-object terminology. And look at his
title: the view from nowhere. I would think the first thing that a
pragmatist and a Heideggerian could agree on is that there is no such thing
as a "view from nowhere".
> No, from what I understand of Nagel, he is pure SOM.
>
Hi Matt
DM: Have you read VFN then? If so what I spotted was Nagel's argument that
physicalism is a form
of idealism, if so, do you have a rebuttal to hand? Nagel does not suggest
that there is any such thing as a view from nowhere, apart from as an
imaginative concept for the purposes of theory. Nagel, is of course, happy
to indulge in
metaphysics, so not a pragmatist. I think his book is a conceptual mess, and
he seems to think that vast areas of thought
are virgin territory as if Nietzsche/Husserl/Heidegger had never put pen to
paper. However, he is no fool and I admire his honesty at times. Given the
traditional choices I would rather be a stuck with the problems of dualism
then the dead ends of materialism or idealism, at least dualism keeps the
problems on the table rather than under the carpet. And at times I think
that Rorty's therapeutics goes too far and not only sweeps away language
game problems with respect to certain games over shooting their use realm,
but dismisses areas where confusion is in fact an opportunity to improve our
understanding. For example, Nagel still wants to try and understand how the
workings of the physical brain relate to consciousness, and suggest that our
current conceptions of what is physical and what is psychic are probably
inadequate to do so. Rorty, of course, says
these are descriptions of two different things, I see Rorty's point, but
also Nagel's that at some level the two meet and at some level it would be
great if we could describe both within a broader description. By the way it
is always good to read the enemy, might make you think more than an easy/fun
read. Also, using the Rorty schema it does get tempting to put people in
boxes and they never quite exactly fit, Nagel makes some good points about
the problems and inadequacy of SOM, and he clearly does not want to allow
objectivist thinking to result in the dismissal of secondary qualities
because they can not be described in terms of primary qualitities, of
course, he does not strongly question this distictions validity. But I
always try to get something positive/interesting out of whoever I read, and
Nagel is not one dimensional in fact. Of course, he takes intuitions more
seriously than Rorty and Rorty accepts that he has no particular argument
for his preference not to, other than it has not proved fruitful to date to
do so.
So to open the question to debate, how would we describe the brain and
consciousness in MOQ terms, and the relationship between the two?
regards
David M
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