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Dec. 24th, 2003 10:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophiaserpentiaI want to clarify something regarding my post from yesterday on the "Neoplatonist Fallacy."
Of late I feel forced by the evidence I have read into the conclusion that the materialist arguments regarding the workings of mind have more weight than non-materialist arguments. However, this does not mean I am a reductionist.
The difference is that a reductionist thinks that brain is all there is, that mind is either an illusion or an "emergent property" from the physiological workings of the brain. I am not convinced of this; in fact even if the materialist position holds, this does not necessarily or sufficiently argue for the reductionist view.
Logic and scientific examination is not the only means by which we can examine the universe; and the fact that logic alone cannot account for something we "feel" to be there, does not give us sufficient grounds to insist it is not there. Emotions and intuitions originate in something; to insist that mind, or God, or what have you, doesn't exist solely because logic cannot account for them, is to declare that emotion and instinct are simply and solely delusion.
Of late I feel forced by the evidence I have read into the conclusion that the materialist arguments regarding the workings of mind have more weight than non-materialist arguments. However, this does not mean I am a reductionist.
The difference is that a reductionist thinks that brain is all there is, that mind is either an illusion or an "emergent property" from the physiological workings of the brain. I am not convinced of this; in fact even if the materialist position holds, this does not necessarily or sufficiently argue for the reductionist view.
Logic and scientific examination is not the only means by which we can examine the universe; and the fact that logic alone cannot account for something we "feel" to be there, does not give us sufficient grounds to insist it is not there. Emotions and intuitions originate in something; to insist that mind, or God, or what have you, doesn't exist solely because logic cannot account for them, is to declare that emotion and instinct are simply and solely delusion.
