Spirituality
18 Jun 06
12 Jul 06
Originally posted by HalitoseIf you find those links "lucid", you're obviously using the term in a manner I'm not familiar with. Perhaps you'd care to give your take on the AFR and not merely direct people to incomprehensible articles obviously designed to appeal to Christian philosophy majors.
[b]That is why I have little use for philosophy of any kind. The argument is question begging and merely a means to get to a preordained end i.e. some sort of supernatural.
Not quite. Here's two links which propound Lewis's Argument from Reason (AFR) in more lucid terms than I can:
http://go.qci.tripod.com/Reppert-interview.htm
http://apologetics ...[text shortened]... . In my humble opinion, reason, rather than mere mental activity is the product of the soul.[/b]
So only some brain activity is attributable to the soul? If seems that physical brain damage can severely affect the reasoning ability of a human being; in particulary massive doses it can eliminate it. So can damage to your brain "de-soul" you? Or does it merely disrupt the mysterious and magical way that your soul animates your physical brain?
12 Jul 06
2 edits
Originally posted by FreakyKBHNot silly at all. The fact physical descriptions of the workings of the brain are quite different from descriptions of mental phenomena (thinking, deciding, etc.) in no way requires that there are two substances, or even two things, to consider. I assume you know what "dual-aspect" theory is?
[b]Just because brains think, it does not follow that nothing exists outside of thought.
It's the thinking part that we're discussing. According to No1, the brain cannot think; it streams along reacting to chemical and electrical impulses, themselves caused by, well, themselves. Independent thought does not exist! Tee-hee, silly, ain't it?[/b]
Why do people who read so much Christian "philosophy" not bother to read any other philosophy?
12 Jul 06
Originally posted by dottewellThanks a ton. 🙂
Any primer on the philosophy of mind that gives a good account of different physicalist theories.
Donald Davidson's paper Mental Events, if you want to dip into one interesting theory of the relationship between the physical and the mental.
Specifically on the "argument from reason"? I'm not sure; it's as old as Socrates and held in approximat ...[text shortened]... r too often. I studied philosophy for some time, and don't think I ever used it.
12 Jul 06
Originally posted by PawnokeyholeCoincidentally it is John R. Searle's "Mind: A Brief Introduction" from Oxford University Press that I picked up earlier from a local library. Kinda uncanny, I’d say.
John R. Searle's recent book "Mind: An introduction" is a vigorously written and pleasantly opinionated survey of the main philosophical theories about the mind-body link.
