Here’s a nice little back and forth between a Christian dualist and physicalist. It’s interesting:
Ah, yes, Lynne Rudder Baker. She’s quite interesting.
I do get to a point, however, when I start to wonder if these debates are over anything other than semantics. When we say the mind is of a separate substance from the brain, but does not exist without the brain and cannot do anything without a brain thru which to operate, I am having a difficult time seeing how that differs from saying the mind is just an emergent property of the brain.
This thread is so old I’m not sure I was talking about anesthesia. Let me gather my thoughts
This can be true. See the recent debate on twitter between Pat Churchland and Phil Goff on if a rock is conscious lol.
Lynne Rudder Baker gets to what I see as one of the nubs of the debate:
Consider an old-fashioned carburetor. A carburetor is defined as “a device that vaporizes a liquid fuel such as gasoline and mixes it with air in the proper ration for combustion in an internal-combustion engine, such as the gasoline engine.”2 Suppose that people had invented devices that mixed water and air in the process of making soft drinks. Call these soft-drink-making machines ‘drinkalators’.
Exactly the same set of structures (parts, what they are made up of, and how they are related to each other) could make drinkalators and carburetors: The difference between being a carburetor and being a drinkalator is a difference in their intended function: if something of the right structure were in front of you, and you had all the instruments for discriminating its parts, you could not detect whether it was a carburetor or a drinkalator without information about what it is intended to do.
For all that, a carburetor is not a drinkalator: A world could contain either without the other. This is not just a linguistic point, that we have two names for the same kind of thing.
It isn’t? I’m interested to see if Zimmerman takes her up on this…