Re: Mind/Body dualism What's the deal?

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed Aug 15 2001 - 10:11:17 MDT


Russell Blackford wrote

> Anyone who thinks you can run a conscious personality on a
> computer substrate is probably some kind of materialist in
> his/her philosophy of mind, or something awfully close to it.

Could be!! :-)

> Off topic, but glancing at your other e-mail, I'm damned if I know what to
> make of Donna Haraway and other such "cyborg" or "posthuman" theorists. To
> me, they're barking up the wrong tree, not realising that the important
> issues for the new century relate to the *literal* possibilities of
> enhancement, extreme longevity, etc. All this stuff about the cyborg as a
> kind of analogue or symbol for the identity politics of feminism, gay rights
> etc, is beside the point.

Yes, it's pretty unbelievable how poor some people's understanding of these
issues is. Katherine Hayles, in her book, "How We Became Posthuman", writes

> I was reading Hans Moravec's "Mind Children"... when I happened upon a
> passage where he argues it will soon be possible to download human
> conscioiusness into a computer.

> How, I asked myself, was it possible for someone of Moravec's obvious
> intelligence to believe that mind could be separated from body?

Ninety percent of her book addresses the question "What do gendered bodies
have to do with the erasure of embodiment and the subsequent merging of
machine and human intelligence in the figure of the cyborg?"

As humorous as a lot of the postmodernist writing is in this book---with
sentences unexpectedly swerving into a denunciation of capitalism or jutting
into stark eroticism---the extent of the disconnect between where some of these
people are and where materialists are is awesome. An enormous chasm has
silently opened between the people raised in the computer and scientific
culture of the 1960's, and the literary crowd, to the point that the latter
simply cannot understand the former. And this is *not* the two cultures of
C. P. Snow, whatever the historical linkage. That old split had to do with
literary people not *appreciating* science. This has to do with the
development of a completely different mindset on philosophical issues.

Lee



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