[lbo-talk] SSRIs

[James Heartfield]

I can agree that brain chemistry and firing neurons are the physical 
substrate of thought, the stuff of which it is made, at one level. But then 
I could say, too, that the painting on the roof od the Sistine Chapel is 
made of pigments, vegetable dyes and crushed minerals etc. (so to speak). 
That would not address those other things that the painting is made of: 
representations, symbols, allegories, techniques of colour and shading and 
so on. The mind is made of neurons and hormones etc, but it is also made of 
concepts, intuitions, directedness, etc. I guess that the latter group are 
'made' of the former, though I suspect that even if by impossible 
coincidence the same array of electrical and chemical activity were to occur 
twice in the same they might well express quite distinct thoughts.

To say that thoughts are nothing but chemicals and electrical activity seems 
to me to make as much sense as the idea that a chair is nothing but 
cellulose fibres.

(And all of that is to set aside the fact that most thoughts, most of the 
time, are not held in brains, but on paper, or more recently, in computers, 
waiting, inert, to be juggled about again by brains, from time to time; or 
that thoughts often exist in the form of spoken words, vibrations of air 
passing from larynx to ear-drum. For that matter why do we insist that the 
mind is only in the brain; isn't it just as much in the finger tips, or in 
the point of the carving chisel?)

Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:


> I
> find it difficult to understand why people are so resistant to the
> idea that
> all our "higher" intellectual and affective states are in fact
> functions of
> the human brain chemistry.  If it is not chemistry then what is
> it?  Souls,
> spirits, and all that metaphysical mumbo jumbo?  How can a rational
> person
> can seriously consider such hogwash that does not even have an
> empirical
> meaning?