[Please excuse a short off-topic rant.]
Michael Berkeley interviewing a psychiatrist, Prof. Anthony David, on BBC Radio 3’s Private Passions just now:
Is it possible to say where the brain meets the body?
‘Mind’ is a four-letter word.
Even more obscene is ‘soul’. (I hope I haven’t offended anybody!)
Hey T
So, you’ve got me interested, but I think I’m missing something obvious from your post. What do you mean exactly?
Cheers
P^2
It’s the Orwellian way in which people feel pressured or obliged to use the word brain when they mean mind, to the extent that they are oblivious that they are doing it, even when the absurdity of the usage should be obvious.
What Berkeley (no relation to the famous idealist bishop!) obviously meant to ask was:
Is it possible to say where the mind meets the body?
The brain is, of course, part of the body, the part generally believed to be most closely associated with the mind.
Oh, I’m sorry, I mean: the brain is the part of the body generally believed to be most closely associated with the brain. That’s much more scientific.
Let’s see if I can give a link:
Here is the full extract (the above was from memory), from 16m18s to 16m38s:
Is it possible to say, Anthony David, where the brain meets the body? Can you think of an example that you’ve had to deal with where that distinction between the physical and the psychological was really an issue?
I did want to keep my rant short, but perhaps I overdid the brevity.
I heard that programme too, Twirl. Wrote David down pretty soon as on the materialist side of the wall impeding any further movement in current orthodox science on ‘The Hard Problem’. As Tom Campbell’s work on a new/old basic physics worldview - and Bernardo Kastrup’s work in associated philosophical enquiry - indicates fulsomely, no progress will be made with the fundamental conundrum of consciousness until it’s approached from a hypothesising-foundation of philosophical-idealism. Once you stand there, the intractable puzzles evaporate.
Hahahahaha! That’s exactly right. It is interesting, isn’t it, how definite the materialists are about it all. There’s not a shadow of a doubt that any non-material descriptions of reality must have precisely zero value.
And yet… as we get deeper and deeper into what is already known about the quantum realm, we quickly despatch dispense with any notions of physicality, being ultimately left with nothing but fields. And if someone can actually explain what a field really is, I would be eternally grateful. Regardless of explanations, surely mind-like phenonomena are much more akin to field-like phenomena, than they are to, say, billiard balls.
One of my favourite discussions of the so-called hard-problem was Anil Seth simply saying that he can make the problem go away by simply not trying to answer it! Hard to argue with such reasoning.
Just so you don’t think I’ve got anything against Seth, by the way, here he is with a pretty good panel discussing what psychedelic research can tell us about the mind (yes, they really did use that word!)
I thought it was really interesting, and I thought the moderator was great.
Cheers
PP