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3643
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The concept of mind excludes body, and vice versa
[Descartes]
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Full Idea:
The concept of body includes nothing at all which belongs to the mind, and the concept of mind includes nothing at all which belongs to the body.
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From:
René Descartes (Reply to Fourth Objections [1641], 225)
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A reaction:
A headache? Hunger? The mistake, I think, is to regard the mind as entirely conscious, thus creating a sharp boundary between two aspects of our lives. As shown by blindsight, I take many of my central mental operations to be pre- or non-conscious.
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8462
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A hallucination can, like an ague, be identified with its host; the ontology is physical, the idiom mental
[Quine]
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Full Idea:
A physical ontology has a place for states of mind. An inspiration or a hallucination can, like the fit of ague, be identified with its host for the duration. It leaves our mentalistic idioms fairly intact, but reconciles them with a physical ontology.
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From:
Willard Quine (The Scope and Language of Science [1954], §VI)
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A reaction:
Quine is employing the same strategy that he uses for substances and properties (Idea 8461): take the predication as basic, rather than reifying the thing being predicated. The ague analogy suggests that Quine is an incipient functionalist.
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7881
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Accept ontological monism, but conceptual dualism; we think in a different way about phenomenal thought
[Papineau]
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Full Idea:
We should be ontological monists, but we should be conceptual dualists. We need to recognise a special phenomenal way of thinking about conscious properties, if we are to dispel the confusions that persuade us that conscious properties cannot be material.
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From:
David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], 7.01)
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A reaction:
This idea came to me as a revelation, and strikes me as spot on. We have developed conceptual dualism simply because humans cannot directly see that their thinking is actually physical brain activity. Thought seems ungrounded, and utterly different.
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