love, mind etc.
"Love is not like a response to a single stimulus, such as a picture.." "It's not even a single enduring state, like being cold. It is a many-splendored and many-miseried thing," which includes hope, jealousy, kindness, lust, guilt, delight, and moments of not feeling in love at all. ..
Aping Mankind (by Raymond Tallis0 argues that neuroscientific approaches to things like love, wisdom, and beauty are flawed because you can't reduce the mind to brain activity alone...
.. Gray (Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals) wrote, "If Darwin's theory of natural selection is true ... the human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. To think otherwise is to resurrect the pre-Darwinian error that humans are different from all other animals." In reality, "our lives are more like fragmentary dreams than the enactments of conscious selves." Our natural condition is illusion. Our faith in progress is a fantasy. Will Self, a novelist and admirer of Gray's, wrote that a better title for Straw Dogs might have been "How to Contemplate the Inevitable Destruction of the Majority of Humanity With Total Equanimity."..
...[B]ut what about the mind-brain distinction? .. the basic dilemma is clear enough. It is what some philosophers call the "hard problem" of consciousness.
Tallis explains it using the example of himself, sitting on a plum couch in the Athenaeum's smoking room. How is it that he perceives the glass of water on the table? How is it that he feels a sense of self over time? How is it that he can remember a patient he saw in 1973, and then cast his mind forward to his impending visit to the zoo? There are serious problems with trying to reduce such things to impulses in the brain, he argues. We can explain "how the light gets in," he says, but not "how the gaze looks out."
And isn't it astonishing, he adds, that much neural activity seems to have no link to consciousness? Instead, it's associated with things like controlling automatic movements and regulating blood pressure. Sure, we need the brain for consciousness: "Chop my head off, and my IQ descends." But it's not the whole story. There is more to perceptions, memories, and beliefs than neural impulses can explain. The human sphere encompasses a "community of minds," Tallis has written, "woven out of a trillion cognitive handshakes of shared attention, within which our freedom operates and our narrated lives are led." (Ch. of High Ed., October 9,2011 by M. Parry)
Aping Mankind (by Raymond Tallis0 argues that neuroscientific approaches to things like love, wisdom, and beauty are flawed because you can't reduce the mind to brain activity alone...
.. Gray (Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals) wrote, "If Darwin's theory of natural selection is true ... the human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. To think otherwise is to resurrect the pre-Darwinian error that humans are different from all other animals." In reality, "our lives are more like fragmentary dreams than the enactments of conscious selves." Our natural condition is illusion. Our faith in progress is a fantasy. Will Self, a novelist and admirer of Gray's, wrote that a better title for Straw Dogs might have been "How to Contemplate the Inevitable Destruction of the Majority of Humanity With Total Equanimity."..
...[B]ut what about the mind-brain distinction? .. the basic dilemma is clear enough. It is what some philosophers call the "hard problem" of consciousness.
Tallis explains it using the example of himself, sitting on a plum couch in the Athenaeum's smoking room. How is it that he perceives the glass of water on the table? How is it that he feels a sense of self over time? How is it that he can remember a patient he saw in 1973, and then cast his mind forward to his impending visit to the zoo? There are serious problems with trying to reduce such things to impulses in the brain, he argues. We can explain "how the light gets in," he says, but not "how the gaze looks out."
And isn't it astonishing, he adds, that much neural activity seems to have no link to consciousness? Instead, it's associated with things like controlling automatic movements and regulating blood pressure. Sure, we need the brain for consciousness: "Chop my head off, and my IQ descends." But it's not the whole story. There is more to perceptions, memories, and beliefs than neural impulses can explain. The human sphere encompasses a "community of minds," Tallis has written, "woven out of a trillion cognitive handshakes of shared attention, within which our freedom operates and our narrated lives are led." (Ch. of High Ed., October 9,2011 by M. Parry)