PHIL: Eliminative Materialism

Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@pobox.com)
Tue, 02 Sep 1997 11:51:17 -0700


Again, just a brief followup to Mark Crosby's excellent
summary. I still suspect that Churchland's prototype
activation model of explanatory understanding is going to hold
up better than most of its competitors that I've seen, so I'm
with you there.

But I'm suspicious of most recent attempts to syncretize Eastern
philosophy with Western neuroscience. I really am specifically
interested in trying to assimilate whatever "introspective paradigms"
Nagarjuna and the like were using in their attempts to attain a
good explanatory understanding of human psychology. Just assimiliating
them into my own Western-educated head will be quite difficult
enough; I really don't trust the work of previous synthesists and
generalists to make these diverse ways of attemping to perceive
the activity of one's own mind commensurable with one another.
Commensurability between independently developed paradigms is
possible but costly, and there are no guarantees that we're doing
it right. So while my interest in the very confusing and
difficult-to-decipher *primary* texts of Buddhist philosophy has
been mounting, my interest in the secondary texts written by my
fellow Western enthusiasts of dharma is dropping to nearly indetectable
levels.

--
Eric Watt Forste ++ arkuat@pigdog.org ++ expectation foils perception -pcd