Post by Admin on Aug 3, 2017 17:33:41 GMT
a doctor says, as many others have said, before proceeding to close the subject: "the test results came out fine. that's just psychologic". and it's a sentence loaded with peril, and one of the most fundamental of ignorances. by nature, nothing is ever 'just psychologic', it must be coming somehow from a physical agent. but why do we think that it may be?
why do we, in the 21st century, still address the mind and the body as separate entities with distinct natures, just as it was proposed by Cartesian dualism back in the 17th century, and even since Aristotle?
why, despite discoveries in science and expansion and sharing of information, has this dualistic frame not completely changed?
why is this line of thinking tucked underneath and supporting our understanding of mind and body, of life in general?
why is the mind-body problem — "how can the human mind and body causally interact?" — a problem at all? could this be perhaps not a mind-body problem, but a language problem embedded in the question?
if we take the question that proposes the problem; "how can the human mind and body causally interact?” we find that perhaps the problem at stake is in the fact that this ‘interacting’ (which is a verb) lets us assume that there’s a certain agency coming from both parts. which would mean that the mind has an agency of its own, which immediately we would assume as an autonomous, wilful entity.
but if we instead reason, as Alva Noë puts it, that “perception is something that we do”, in other words, that the mind is something that the body does, we arrive to a viewpoint in which we see one as a result of the other, rather than the mind being a self-sourced, autonomous subject that somehow has the agency to interact with the other. understanding perception, mind; consciousness, as the result of an action carried by a physical agent rather than as an independent matter-less agent with a mysterious free will, reconciliates the nature of both elements into the same one.
would this shift in perspective, just by changing the wording of the sentence and questioning its syntax and case, lay out a new ground for our culture to understand the traditional ‘substances’ of mind and matter in a different light?
are we aware that the structure of our languages invariably modify our world views?
can we analyse, probe, critically approach the language structures that make up the pillars of our understanding of the world?
why do we, in the 21st century, still address the mind and the body as separate entities with distinct natures, just as it was proposed by Cartesian dualism back in the 17th century, and even since Aristotle?
why, despite discoveries in science and expansion and sharing of information, has this dualistic frame not completely changed?
why is this line of thinking tucked underneath and supporting our understanding of mind and body, of life in general?
why is the mind-body problem — "how can the human mind and body causally interact?" — a problem at all? could this be perhaps not a mind-body problem, but a language problem embedded in the question?
if we take the question that proposes the problem; "how can the human mind and body causally interact?” we find that perhaps the problem at stake is in the fact that this ‘interacting’ (which is a verb) lets us assume that there’s a certain agency coming from both parts. which would mean that the mind has an agency of its own, which immediately we would assume as an autonomous, wilful entity.
but if we instead reason, as Alva Noë puts it, that “perception is something that we do”, in other words, that the mind is something that the body does, we arrive to a viewpoint in which we see one as a result of the other, rather than the mind being a self-sourced, autonomous subject that somehow has the agency to interact with the other. understanding perception, mind; consciousness, as the result of an action carried by a physical agent rather than as an independent matter-less agent with a mysterious free will, reconciliates the nature of both elements into the same one.
would this shift in perspective, just by changing the wording of the sentence and questioning its syntax and case, lay out a new ground for our culture to understand the traditional ‘substances’ of mind and matter in a different light?
are we aware that the structure of our languages invariably modify our world views?
can we analyse, probe, critically approach the language structures that make up the pillars of our understanding of the world?