5Read more at location 975
Note: tesi: l anima esiste e il dualismo è il migliir modo x documentarla. l anima conferisce identità i monisti materialisti sono in grado di rendere conto dell identità? no. dimostrazione col trapianto dei cervelli: prendi i miei due emisferi e trapiantali in due crani vuoti. chi sono io? boh. ecco dimostrato che anche sapere tutto sui cervelli nn ci assicura di conoscere l identità. l io ha qualcosa in più che la sua materialità. chiamo qs qualcosa in più anima... altro esperimento: il chirurgo pazzo trapuanta i miei due emisferi in a e b dicendomi prima che a avrà una vita piacevole e b solo sofferenze. poi mi fa scegliere chi voglio essere. ovviamente farò scena muta xchè la sorte del mio cervello mi dice poco su di me. altro esperimento. muoio e i miei parenti senza il mio consenso ongelano il mio cervello ma un terremoto lo manda a pezzi. tra 100 anni grazie a nuove tecniche il mio cervello viene riparato integrandolo con un altre. poi viene scongelato. la xsona rediviva si comporta in qlc modo come me. sono io? imho: un evidenza definitiva la dà il teletrsporto. ammettiamo che esistano due canine a e b connesse: nella prima entri, vieni distrutto e ricostruito fedelmente nell altra. chi esce da b è la stessa xsona che entra in a. ma se chi entra in a nn viene distrutto chi esce da b è solo un gemello di chi è entrato in a. morale: lo stesso identico cervello può dare origine a identità diverse. nn esiste tra cervello identità un legame preciso. imho: l argomento della disconnessione può essere fatto valrre contro chi la postula in materia di aborto. nella misura in cui gli animali hanno una vita mentale hanno anche un anima... la possobole storia: l anima potrebbe emergere dal cervello allorchè quast ultimo raggiunge una certa complessità nel corso dell evoluzione... lo stadio è inferito dai comportamenti: i mammiferi hanmo una vita mentale tutti gli animali il cui comportamemto è meglio spiegato in termimi di intenzione esentimenti e credenze posseggono un anima.. il nesso causale mente cervello è a doppio senso... xchè il dualismo è poco gettonato? xchè nn sappiamo spiegare come emerge l anima. ok ma nn è molto razionale negare l evidenza solo xchè nn sappiamo spiegarla. inoltre i teisti hanno una buona spiegazione.... le neuroscienze ci forniscono una lista: 1 toccando qui il cervello vedo blu 2 toccandolo qui faccio una certa operazione aritmetica. possono fornirci una lunga lista di abbinamenti: una certa puntura al cervello mi fa vedere il blu. mangiare il cioccolato mi fa sentire il gusto del cioccolato eccetera le neuroscienze potrebbero anche dirci la conformazione del cervello che origina la coscienza. ma non possono dirci xchè. xchè mangiare il cioccolato mi fa sentire il gusto del cioccolato e nn video ceversa. le neroscienze mettono i fila una serie di frasi ma nn ci forniscono nè una grammatica né un dizionario. nn esiste una teoria scientifica dell anima. una teoria che ci faccia predire in anticipo gli effetti di un trattamento del cervello mai sperimentato da un soggetto. difficoltà: cervello e mente sono di sostanze differenti la scienza nn si è mai cimentata in qs campo. difficoltà: mentre i fenomeni cerebrali sono misurabili quelli della mente nn lo sono con una scala altrettanto precisa questo rende impossibile generalizzare la relazione. scale differenti e nn convertibili. l anima poi o c è o non c è. nn è misurabile su una scala continua. ma la scinza nn può sorprenderci? ha ridotto la termodinamica alla meccanica quantistica smascherando la temperatura che nn una prop. intrinseca ma una velocità atomica... c è una differenza fondamentale: la riduzione della territorio dinamica si ottiene sostituendo il moto delle particelle dalla sensazione di calore. ma nel ns caso una simile scissione è impensabile poichè l oggetto d indagine è la sensazione stessa... come convertire il desiderio di cioccolato in un desidrio di carne? le grandi integrazioni della scienza si sono ottenute marginalizzando il mentale. operazione impossibile quando il mentale stesso diviene oggetto della scienza... la scienza deve emarginare il mentale. darwin tratta l uomo come un robot. perchè la mia anima è emersa dal mio cervello e la tua dal tuo? nn poteva essere viceversa? ecco un altra domanda a cui la scienza nn potrà mai rispondere... pensiero 1:"la russia è immensa". pensiero 2"la gioconda è bellissima". che scala cardinale utilizzo x convertire qs due pensieri uno nell altro. il linguaggio della scienza deve "numerizzare" le relazioni x funzionare. nell ambito della materia tutto è convertibile (tutto si trasforma). un equazione ci spiega come convertire l oggetto 1 nell oggetto 2. nella mente qs operazione sarà mai possibile? penso di no. ergo: la scienza dell anima è impossibile. il teismo invece converte facilmente 1 in due: dio è buono e ci ha connesso mente e cervello per realizzare cose buone: la conoscenza del mondo è buona così come è cosa buona godere della bellezza. ergo: il teismo spiega l anima la scienza no. in qs campo (più ancora che nell origine dell universo) il suo resoconto è particolarmente incompleto. dio ha molti motivi x connettere anime e corpi: regalarci una proprietà regalarci la libertà farci provare sensazioni piacevoli. solo se la connessione è ordinata noi siamo liberi e proprietari. imho: ci sono anche ragioni x connettere quel corpo a quell anima: poterci giudicare secondo giustizia. ma il free will nn nega le leggi scientifiche del cervello? 1 il cervello nn è un organo come gli altri (del resto fa emergere l anima). 2 nel cervello la meccanica quantistica agisce con effetti particolari... 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there is more to humans than their bodies. Humans (and the higher animals) are conscious beings. They have thoughts and feelings; atoms do not have thoughts and feelings. But consciousness, I shall be arguing, cannot be the property of a mere body, a material object. It must be a property of something else connected to a body; and to that something else I shall give the traditional name of soul.Read more at location 979
something utterly beyond the power of science to explain. But theism can explain this—Read more at location 982
I need to describe the phenomena, and to bring out that humans (and the higher animals) consist of two parts—a body which is a material substance, and a soul which is an immaterial substanceRead more at location 984
as well as material substances, substances which occupy volumes of space, there may be immaterial ones as well, which do not occupy space.Read more at location 992
I am going to argue in this chapter that the essential part of each one of us is a soul which is an immaterial substance.Read more at location 994
Physical events are public; there is no privileged access to them.Read more at location 999
Mental events, by contrast, are ones which just one person has a special way of finding out about—Read more at location 1002
Evidently—more evidently than anything else—there really are mental events, as we know from our own experience.Read more at location 1005
I could study my brain—via a system of mirrors and microscopes—just as well as anyone else could. But, of course, I have a way of knowing about pains, thoughts, and suchlike other than those available to the best other student of my behaviour or brain: I actually experience them. Consequently, they must be distinct from brain events, or any other bodily events. A neurophysiologist cannot observe the quality of the colour in my visual field,Read more at location 1010
I emphasize my definition of the mental as that to which the subject has privileged access. There are many properties which we attribute to people, which we might sometimes call ‘mental’ but which are not mental in my sense but are merely properties of public behaviour. When we say that someone is generous or irritableRead more at location 1019
That mental life itself, I now argue, is the state of an immaterial substance, a soul, which is connected to the body. That humans consist of two connected substances—body and soul—is the view known as substance dualism.Read more at location 1031
The alternative is to say that humans are just bodies (I am the same thing as what we loosely call my body). In that case, my mental properties, such as being in pain or having an after-image, would be properties of my body. Let us call this view about humans substance monism—Read more at location 1032
If monism were correct, then there would be nothing more to the history of the world than the succession of those events which involve material substances, their coming into existence or ceasing to exist and having properties and relations (physical or mental).Read more at location 1035
Let me illustrate this with the example of brain transplants. The brain consists of two hemispheres and a brain-stem. There is good evidence that humans can survive and behave as conscious beings if much of one hemisphere is destroyed.Read more at location 1039
imagine my brain (hemispheres plus brain-stem) divided into two, and each half-brain taken out of my skull and transplanted into the empty skull of a body from which a brain has just been removed; and there to be added to each half-brain from some other brain (e.g. the brain of my identical twin)Read more at location 1040
question—if this operation were done and we then had two living persons, both with lives of conscious experiences, which would be me? Probably both would to some extent behave like me and claim to be me and to remember having done what I did;Read more at location 1046
we cannot be certain which holds. It follows that that mere knowledge of what happens to brains or bodies or anything else material does not tell you what happens to persons.Read more at location 1053
if we imagine that I have been captured by a mad surgeon who is about to perform the split-brain operation on me. He tells me (and I have every reason to believe him) that the person to be formed from my left half-brain is to have an enjoyable life and the person to be formed from my right half-brain is to be subjected to a life of torture. Whether my future life will be happy or very painful, or whether I shall survive an operation at all, are clearly factual questions.Read more at location 1056
Reflection on this thought experiment shows that, however much we know about what has happened to my brain—we may know exactly what has happened to every atom in it—and to every other material part of me, we do not necessarily know what has happened to me. From that it follows that there must be more to me than the matter of which my body and brain are made,Read more at location 1066
Take a slightly different example. I die of a brain haemorrhage which today’s doctors cannot cure, but my relatives take my corpse and put it straight into a deep freeze in California. Shortly thereafter there is an earthquake as a result of which my frozen brain is split into many parts,Read more at location 1072
living person who behaves somewhat like me and seems to remember quite a lot of my past life. Have I come to life again, or not? Maybe, maybe not. AgainRead more at location 1076
my survival consists in the continuing of something else, which I call my soul, linked to my previous body;Read more at location 1078
Dualism is not a popular philosophical position today, but I find these arguments (of an entirely non-theological kind) in its favour inescapable.Read more at location 1086
These arguments which show that humans have two parts—body and soul—will show that any creature which has a mental life will also have two parts. The same issues will arise for a chimpanzee or a cat as for a human.Read more at location 1100
So we must postulate a cat-soul which is the essential part of the cat, and whose continuation makes for the continuation of the cat. Only when we come to animals without thought or feeling does such a question not arise, and then there is no need to postulate an immaterial part of the animal.Read more at location 1103
I do not necessarily wish to deny that events in the brain play a role in causing the existence of souls. At some stage of animal evolution, an animal brain became so complex that that caused the existence of a soulRead more at location 1110
It is events in this particular brain which cause events in this particular soul, and events in this particular soul which cause events in this particular brain;Read more at location 1113
At which stage of the evolutionary process did animals first start to have souls and so a mental life? We do not know.Read more at location 1115
My view is that all the vertebrates have a mental life, because they all have a brain similar to the human brain, which, we know, causes a mental life in us, and their behaviour, too, is best explained in terms of their having feelings and beliefs.Read more at location 1116
But there is no reason at all to attribute a mental life to viruses and bacteria, nor in my view to ants and beetles.Read more at location 1118
The reluctance of so many philosophers and scientists to admit that at a particular moment of evolutionary history there came into existence, connected to animal bodies, souls with mental properties seems to me to be due in part to the fact that, if such a thing happened, they are utterly lost for an explanation of how it came to happen. But it is highly irrational to say that something is not there, just because you cannot explain how it came to be there.Read more at location 1122
The list would state that brain events of a certain kind cause blue images, and brain events of a different kind cause red images; brain events of one kind cause a belief that 36 × 2 = 72, and brain events of another kind cause a strong desire to drink tea;Read more at location 1130
Also, just possibly, scientists could list which primitive brains give rise to consciousness—thatRead more at location 1133
But let us waive difficulties about how we could establish such things, and suppose that we have lists of causal connections between brain events and mental events,Read more at location 1138
The problem is to explain them. Why does the formation of a brain of a complexity as great as or greater than that of a certain animal (perhaps an early vertebrate) give rise to consciousness—that is, to a soul with mental states? And why do brain events give rise to the particular mental events they do? Why does a brain event of this kind cause a blue image, and one of that kind cause a red image, and not vice versa? Why does eating chocolate cause the brain events which cause the taste we call chocolateyRead more at location 1141
A mere list of correlations would be like a list of sentences of a foreign language which translate sentences of English, without any grammar or word dictionary to explain why those sentences are correct translations. And, in the absence of a grammar and dictionary, you are in no position to translate any new sentence.Read more at location 1145
To provide an inanimate explanation of these phenomena we would need a scientific soul—body theoryRead more at location 1147
The theory would then enable us to predict which brain events of a new kind would give rise to which mental events of a new kind,Read more at location 1151
Now what makes a theory of mechanics able to explain a diverse set of mechanical phenomena is that the laws of mechanics all deal with the same sort of thing—material objects, their mass, shape, size, and position,Read more at location 1153
mass and velocity, and electrical and other physical properties, of material objects are utterly different from the mental (private) properties of thought and feeling which pertain to souls.Read more at location 1162
thoughts do not differ from each other along measurable scales. One thought does not have twice as much of some sort of meaning as another one.Read more at location 1165
A desire for roast beef is not distinguished from a desire for chocolate by having twice as much of something.Read more at location 1168
But does not science always surprise us with new discoveries?Read more at location 1181
Thermodynamics dealing with heat was reduced to statistical mechanics dealing with velocities of large groups of particles of matter and collisions between them;Read more at location 1183
There is a crucial difference between these cases. Every earlier integration into a super-science, of sciences dealing with entities and properties apparently qualitatively very distinct, was achieved by saying that really some of these entities and properties were not as they appeared to be.Read more at location 1188
The felt hotness of a hot body is indeed qualitatively distinct from particle velocities and collisions. The reduction to statistical mechanics was achieved by distinguishing between the underlying cause of the hotness (the motion of molecules) and the sensations which the motion of molecules cause in observers, and saying that really the former was what temperature was, the latter was just the effect of temperature on observers such as us.Read more at location 1192
molecules are particles; the entities and properties are not now of distinct kinds.Read more at location 1196
the reduction was achieved at the price of separating off the felt hotness from its causes, and only explaining the latter.Read more at location 1197
when you come to face the problem of the mental events themselves, you cannot do this.Read more at location 1202
success of science in producing an integrated physico-chemistry has been achieved at the expense of separating off from the physical world colours, smells, and tastes,Read more at location 1203
history of science shows is that the way to achieve integration of sciences is to ignore the mental.Read more at location 1205
Darwinian explanation would explain equally well the evolution of inanimate robots. Could not Darwinism also tell us something about how the bodies came to be connected with consciousnessRead more at location 1211
It may well be that certain primitive brain states cause the existence of souls—as the foetal brain reaches a certain state of development it gives rise to a soul connected with it. But what it could not cause is—which soul is connected with it.Read more at location 1252
God, being omnipotent, is able to join souls to bodies.Read more at location 1263
have enjoyable sensations, satisfy their desires, have their beliefs about what the world is like, and form their own purposes in the light of these beliefs which make a difference to the world.Read more at location 1268
He may also have a reason to join this soul to this particular body,Read more at location 1275
he has a special reason for producing human beings. Human beings differ from the higher animals in the kinds of beliefs and purposes they have. For instance, we have moral beliefs, beliefs about the origin of our existence or fundamental theories of mathematics. We can reason from this to that, and our beliefs are consciouslyRead more at location 1279
Humans also, I believe, and I suggested in Chapter 1, have free will—that is, our purposes are not fully determined by our brain states or anything else.Read more at location 1285
Is not the brain an ordinary material object in which normal scientific laws operate? How, then, can a human freely choose to move his arm or not, or perform any piece of public behaviour, without violating scientific laws?Read more at location 1287
if humans have free will, would they not then be able to prevent normal scientific laws operating in the brain?Read more at location 1290
One answer to this is that quite obviously the brain is not an ordinary material object, since—unlike ordinary material objects—it gives rise to souls and their mental lives. Hence we would not necessarily expect it to be governed totally by the normal laws of physicsRead more at location 1291
Quantum Theory, shows that the physical world on the small scale is not fully deterministic.Read more at location 1295
This unpredictability is not just a limit to human ability to predict effects, but, if Quantum Theory is true, a limit to the extent to which material objects have precise effects, a limit to the extent to which the physical world is deterministic.Read more at location 1296
These two answers suggest that there is no reason from physics for supposing that things are not as they seem to be with respect to free human choice.Read more at location 1307
In so many different ways we can choose between good and evil, and our choices make a big difference. A generous God has reason to create such beings.Read more at location 1310
The existence of God, a simple hypothesis which leads us with some probability to expect the phenomena discussed in the last chapter, also leads us to expect these phenomena.Read more at location 1314
Hence they constitute further evidence for his existence.Read more at location 1315
God’s action also provides the ultimate explanation of there being a soulRead more at location 1317
