Paul,
I know that if Ian's android was ever constructed, I would have to seriously consider accepting the physicalist view again - I wonder what would push you over into a dualist/idealist position?
Do you at least see why Larry Boy feels it is intuitively obvious that mental stuff is not merely physical?
Plotting where all sorts of mental events happen within the brain can give a misleading impression of understanding. It is worth bearing in mind that:
Neural plasticity would seem to mean that a lot of the locations where things happen in the brain are provisional - movable if necessary.
Knowing what goes on where does not tell you anything about how it happens.
The various methods measure such things as excess glucose uptake - so there may be relevant activity at lower levels in other parts of the brain too.
You always berate others for not having a theory of consciousness - but you don't have one either - nobody does! All you do, (IMHO) is pretend that consciousness is something else, akin to a computation, and try to explain that instead! A physical theory can't begin to explain something that is fundamentally different from the various entities that exist in that theory. The problem is that you can't explain the tiniest bit of consciousness from physical theory - the two just don't connect anywhere - but this has happened repeatedly in science - each time a new theory with new elements has come to the rescue - why are you so sure this will not happen again?
David  |