What’s Wrong with the World

Dispatches from the 10th Crusade

The men signed of the cross of Christ go gaily in the dark.

About

What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

Website

Search

Authors

Blog Roll

Conservative Bloggers

Conservative Thought Journals

General Information/News

Religion/Philosophy/Apologetics

The materialist shell game

by Edward Feser

Don't be taken in! Some more philosophy of mind, over at my personal blog.

Posted by Edward Feser on June 24, 2009 3:04 PM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Comments (2)

I'm in some sympathy with your post.

One little thought and a minor quibble. 1. A commitment to mechanistic explanation needn't involve defining 'matter' as inherently lacking qualia. There is an independent characterization of a mechanism that abstracts away from the materials of its components. Whatever the history of mechanistic accounts of mind, I think of current functional and mechanistic explanations as structural in nature.

2. Including Fodor in a list of people who have "come to doubt that naturalistic models of the mind really can succeed" is a little weird. I'm vaguely aware that he's said some off-color things in an article or two at the LRB about qualia, but basically he hasn't objected to cognitive models for their inability to capture them. As I read him, he's given a 'diagnosis of a problem' -- vs. anything like an in principle objection -- to the best naturalistic mental theory we have at present, the Computational Theory of Mind. And this diagnosis is in terms of 'global properties of thought', where there's no 'sweeping' of qualia at issue.

Posted by catchy | June 24, 2009 5:17 PM

Hello Catchy,

1. Not sure how that is at odds with what I said, since a structural description of the natural world is precisely one which leaves out qualia (among other things). It's true that one could go on to take the Russellian view that qualia are what "flesh out" this structure, but since this would, if true, be a contingent fact about the structure, the resulting view would be a kind of dualism (of material-world-as-structure + non-material qualia -- which is why Chalmers, in entertaining this view, thinks of it as being a variation on dualism).

2. Fodor does think we have a good naturalistic theory of cognitive processes (i.e. CTM), but he is less confident that naturalistic theories of intentional content tell the whole story (though he has himself defended such theories, of course) and he is pessimistic about a naturalistic theory of consciousness. It was this latter fact that I had in mind in saying what I did, which I thought was evident given that I focused on qualia, but perhaps I should have made it clearer.

Posted by Edward Feser | June 24, 2009 9:06 PM

Post a comment

Name:
Email Address:
URL:
Remember personal info?

Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style)

Note: In order to limit duplicate comments, please submit a comment only once. A comment may take a few minutes to appear beneath the article.

Although this site does not actively hold comments for moderation, some comments are automatically held by the blog system. For best results, limit the number of links (including links in your signature line to your own website) to under 3 per comment as all comments with a large number of links will be automatically held. If your comment is held for any reason, please be patient and an author or administrator will approve it. Do not resubmit the same comment as subsequent submissions of the same comment will be held as well.

Reverse the order of the digits in 31, then type the answer using letters instead of numbers, all lower case. (required):