My classmate (and fellow blogger), Laniemoetz recently blogged at live, love, learn, laugh about those ubiquitous “10 Things” lists common to grocery-store magazines such as RedBook and Maxim. She created her own version of the list called, Things Men Don’t Know About Women and challenged her readers to come up with their own. Well, Lainemoetz… you asked for it!
Posts Tagged ‘Hadron Philosophy’
Physicalims for the Non-Physicalist – II
Friday, March 12th, 2010Psychoneural Identity Theory, or identity theory, posits that any mental event is equal to a neural occurrence, or some physical event, inside the brain. Jaegwon Kim describes two ways to define what an “event” is. Token physicalism views events as discrete “particulars of the world, along with material objects.” (Kim, Philosophy of Mind, Chapter 4, pg. 101) In token physicalism, a specific mental event “kind” also has a specific physical event “kind”. For example, the action of a hammer hitting my hand is painful, and the painfulness is equal to both the pain itself and the firing of C-fibers in my brain. A second way to define an event is with type physicalism, which states that mental event kinds are equal to physical event kinds and vice versa. Therefore, the hammer hitting my hand is painful, and painfulness is the same as the C-fibers firing in my brain. From this example, it can be shown that type physicalism necessitates token physicalism but token physicalism has no need for the specificity offered by type physicalism. In other words, token physicalism doesn’t actually necessarily mean that the pain I’m feeling is the C-fibers firing, like type physicalism does, it only says that for the particular event of pain that I am feeling, there is the pain and there is also the C-fiber firing. This caveat of token physicalism is what opens the door to dualism and is ultimately why it fails the minimum requirements of a physicalist identity description.
Physicalism for the Non Physicalist – I
Sunday, March 7th, 2010It is no great statement to claim that the human intestinal bacteria known as helicobacter pylori doesn’t have mental states. However, under close inspection, h. pylori can be seen moving towards food, i.e., hydrogen produced in the duodenum. It has also been observed moving away from harm, by tunneling into the intestinal wall in order to move to where the acidic levels of the intestines are lower. To the casual observer, this “moving toward food” behavior and “moving away from harm” behavior might be seen as a sort of awareness – a conscious decision made by the bacteria based on the wish to survive. To a trained scientist however, it’s all a matter of physics. Instead of an ephemeral “mind,” there are chemical reactions occurring within the h. pylori that “reward” the bacteria based on environmental stimuli. For each behavior event, there is a corresponding physical event occurring inside the bacteria. (more…)
