John's Brain

Carrol Cox cbcox at mail.ilstu.edu
Tue Nov 24 16:13:03 PST 1998


d-m-c at worldnet.att.net wrote:


> Oh no Frances, mustn't make the mistake of believing
> that thinking involves logic. No, no, no. Logic is
> an illusion. The brain doesn't work this way, we just
> think it does.

Now you are being a plain ignoramus, at a rather lower level of intelligence than the believers in genesis rather than biology. (a) NO ONE HAS EVER REALLY CLAIMED THAT "LOGIC" HAS ANYTHING WHATEVER TO DO WITH HOW THE BRAIN WORKS. So even if Doyle is 110% wrong, you are still wrong also.

(2) Logic is a mode of combining ideas (it NEVER says more than various equivalents of a+b = b+a. It is a critique of certain specific kinds of conscious reasoning. Like the ability to touch your finger to your nose it expresses *one* of the capacities made possible by the operations of the brain, but it tells us nothing whatever about how the brain works -- and, incidentally, even if/when we actually know "enough" about the brain, that will not contribute to understanding logic anymore than playing football helps you fry eggs. They are simply different subjects.

When we are thinking we realize that thinking about thinking doesn't tell us anything about the brain.

Carrol



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