debates was guilty / innocent was debates

[Peter van Heusden]

On Tue, 17 Oct 2000, Gordon Fitch wrote:
> 
> I'm trying to imagine how some sort of disjointed set of
> subject-components could be deluded into a direct experience
> of unity, but it isn't easy, even supposing brains in vats of
> interesting drugs.  Moreover, a disunited self would seem to
> be disadvantageous to survival even if it could be achieved
> on the scale of a mammalian body, and hence likely to be
> eliminated by the process of natural selection and evolution.
> Of course, if one is going to throw out direct experience,
> getting rid of evolution, physiology, the body, etc. should
> be fairly easy in spite of their aesthetic and practical
> attractions.

I'm having a bit of trouble following what you're arguing here. Are you
arguing that a 'unified subject' is an evolutionary advantage? That seems
rather unlikely to me, particularly given the evidence that the brain is
not a simple, unified 'problem solving machine', but rather a set of
(seperately, but relatedly) evolving units.

To put it another way, where, biologically, is intentionality? After all,
intentionality is something we can observe in all sorts of biological
levels - whether it is self-regulation of the individual cell's molecular
machinery, or the way a cell behaves like an ecosystem - an environment
for things like mitochondria, etc. On many levels, the me that is me is an
emergent property of a whole lot of processes which are on some level not
unified. (Which is one reason biologists have such a hard time pinning
down exactly what 'organism' or 'life' means)

To put it yet another way, isn't the argument that there is an ultimate,
unified subject really a kind of hidden dualism: arguing that ultimately,
at a different level to all the messy, contradictory processes going on in
the 'body', there is some unified 'mind'?

Peter
--
Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com>
NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics
"Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man 
shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain 
and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844