mind/body problem untangled

The so called Mind-Body Problem is an older than dust problem in Philosophy, so old in fact that to really understand it we should talk about it in very different terms than originally proposed. It is also a problem which tends to sound trivial at first mention, but becomes harder and harder as we think further about it. Let’s put it like: how can an immaterial thing be produced from something material? There are things we know are “of the mind”: an idea, an information, an equation or even an opinion. And there are things we know are “of the material world”: a brain cell or a processor chip. But how can the later create the former? This is our circumstance:

fear of language

Anyone who’s read my blog for the last few months (which i really guess is not so many people) would already be familiar with an old feud, a “two households, both alike in dignity” kind of affair, one of those dichotomies that has been going for a long time now, the clash of

realists VS post-modernists

I will admit that framing the issue like this is somehow biased, as realists in fact fight instrumentalists and post-modernists actually are after modernists. But the enmity is actually the same, in different areas.

But the curious is: they are both just afraid of language.

Practicality, in which we defy the notion that certainties lead more easily to results

A very common reaction to relativist claims is to discredit them as fancy musings without any real use or value. It is like saying that “Well, maybe so and so are not valid universally, but, who cares?” — implying that any abstractions are bound to be only valid into the distant realm of theory. This same bias paints “theory” as something distant and without substance. It says anyone involved with lots of ideas is bound to be a day-dreamer.

Contrary to popular belief, abstractions and theories are actually more practical than life without them, and “theoreticians” are the kind of people that are usually more focused on the matters at hand.

un-naive truth

[It might seem completely opportunistic, but this is a repost of yesterday's post. I wrote it hurriedly as i was about to go out, and today by morning, as i woke up, i realized the ordering of my arguments could be lots improved. The original form might probably be gotten from feed-readers or some of those "web-memory" sites. Anyway, this is a commentary on "A Simple Truth", a text by a certain Eliezer Yudkowsky from Overcoming Bias blog.]

To oversimplify, my argument is somewhat like this — Eliezer tells this tale:

Someone says to you: “My miracle snake oil can rid you of lung cancer in just three weeks.” You reply: “Didn’t a clinical study show this claim to be untrue?” The one returns: “This notion of ‘truth’ is quite naive; what do you mean by ‘true’?”

And i say: i can’t really conceive anyone that, spoken like this, would answer anything except: “My notion of ‘truth’ might be naive but you are still not getting my money for your whatever-it-is-oil!”