Similarly (assuming I need to press the analogy here), telling me "the mind is made of (or by) the brain" is meaningless: it adds nothing to my understanding of what the mind is or does. I would say exactly the opposite - saying 'the mind is made of mind' is pointlessly tautological, whereas saying 'the mind is made of the brain' is the doorway to an enormous amount of understanding of the brain that we can gain from neuroscience.
A piston head is a functional component: it does not gain its functionality from our understanding of it. And a neuron is just a neuron, whether we understand it or not. if you are arguing that the ontological status of the mind is based on our understanding, you aren't going to get very far.
Sure, but the "parts" from which it makes any sense to say the mind is emergent are not the neurones but rather language, culture and meaning. I am fairly sure you have that causally backwards. Animals have proto-minds, without language or (much of) a culture.
Very few properties of mind are fully explainable with reference to just the whole (mind). Well, you have a bit of a odd definition of mind. You more or less define mind in an unusual way, claiming it consists only of linguistic functions - so, by your definition, of course the mind is largely linguistic, but only because you have excised a huge amount of what would be the part of the consensus definition of mind (memory, for example) from your personal definition. Its a circular argument - once we accept your odd definition of mind, other things may follow, but we don't. At least, I don't, and I don't think you'd find many other people that would agree that the unconscious and memory are not part of the mind.
Very few questions we might reasonably ask about the Taj Mahal can be answered in any useful or sensible way by reference to the material from which it is constructed; thus it's clear that the fact the Taj Mahal is composed of stone is one of the least relevant things we know about it.
I don't the latter follows at all. You seem to be in that stage of the argument where, in order to defend your ontological ideas about the mind, you are forced to redefine the ontological status of everything else. If you substitute 'The Grand Canyon' into my arguments, they all make just as much sense, so focussing on the human design factor is to miss the point, which is that form and function and history does not determine substance.
I would say exactly the opposite - saying 'the mind is made of mind' is pointlessly tautological, whereas saying 'the mind is made of the brain' is the doorway to an enormous amount of understanding of the brain that we can gain from neuroscience.
A piston head is a functional component: it does not gain its functionality from our understanding of it.
And a neuron is just a neuron, whether we understand it or not. if you are arguing that the ontological status of the mind is based on our understanding, you aren't going to get very far.
Sure, but the "parts" from which it makes any sense to say the mind is emergent are not the neurones but rather language, culture and meaning.
I am fairly sure you have that causally backwards. Animals have proto-minds, without language or (much of) a culture.
Very few properties of mind are fully explainable with reference to just the whole (mind).
Well, you have a bit of a odd definition of mind. You more or less define mind in an unusual way, claiming it consists only of linguistic functions - so, by your definition, of course the mind is largely linguistic, but only because you have excised a huge amount of what would be the part of the consensus definition of mind (memory, for example) from your personal definition. Its a circular argument - once we accept your odd definition of mind, other things may follow, but we don't. At least, I don't, and I don't think you'd find many other people that would agree that the unconscious and memory are not part of the mind.
Very few questions we might reasonably ask about the Taj Mahal can be answered in any useful or sensible way by reference to the material from which it is constructed; thus it's clear that the fact the Taj Mahal is composed of stone is one of the least relevant things we know about it.
I don't the latter follows at all. You seem to be in that stage of the argument where, in order to defend your ontological ideas about the mind, you are forced to redefine the ontological status of everything else. If you substitute 'The Grand Canyon' into my arguments, they all make just as much sense, so focussing on the human design factor is to miss the point, which is that form and function and history does not determine substance.
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