Recently the subject of Julian Jaynes and his seminal book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind came up. I had read and reviewed it a few years back, and I thought I'd posted my review of it on this blog. But when I went to link it, I discovered that I'd never posted it -- and I couldn't find any way to link to the
(
Read more... )
Comments 2
Reply
Have you encountered Paul Churchland's books about philosophy of mind? He's an advocate of what he calls "eliminative materialism," which means that he thinks that our words such as "think" and "believe" and "mind" are the equivalent, not of "temperature" being a word than can be reinterpreted as "mean molecular kinetic energy," but of "phlogiston" being a word that can be reinterpreted as nothing at all-the birth of modern chemistry involved the decisive rejection of the phlogiston concept. But it turns out that what he really wants to reject is what he calls the "propositional attitudes": The idea that thought necessarily involves verbal statements toward which we can take various intentional stances, such as assertion, questioning, hoping, or commanding, and that mental activity is made up of propositions of this sort (so I might say of my cat, "He thinks there's a mouse under the refrigerator," quite as if my cat's brain held verbal assertions). And he talks about how we would describe ourselves if we had a language of ( ... )
Reply
Leave a comment