| [Wittrs] Wittgenstein and Whether Brains Behave [message #583] |
Sat, 29 August 2009 14:27  |
 Sean Wilson
Messages: 470
Registered: August 2009 |
Senior Member |
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... here is what the problem is.
1. One cannot say that "the brain does not behave" or that "a cell cannot behave," merely because the term "behave" arises from an ordinary sort of parlance involving the choices made by the faculties of whole bodies. There are all sorts of examples where terms are applied outside of their ordinary use. This is, in fact, how language grows and how terms like "behave" come to acquire family resemblance. We would never say to Wittgenstein, for example, "you cannot use grammar to mean anything but rules for English-syntax." After Wittgenstein, the term "grammar" comes to take on a very unique addition to its family of senses. And note that it is not merely an extension or a poetry. It isn't just colorful talking. One could not dismiss "cells behaving" as a type of poetry. Rather, it is classic family resemblance. It means that organisms show various patterns in the way they exist in their form of life.
2. If one were to say, "what is my brain doing with this thought?" one would have one of two possible meanings. The first might be the kind that would have gathered Wittgenstein's scorn. But the second would not have. The two ideas are as follows:
THE POOR IDEA:
There is a duplication in my head. There lives a little man in my head. I'm here thinking about what I'm doing inside my brain. This is like saying, "there is a pineapple, and there is the thought of the pineapple." Wittgenstein reminds us: "Nothing is hidden from you." The point is this: the argument Wittgenstein has is not against "mental content" per se, it is an argument against a linguistic DUPLICATION or SUPERFLUOUSNESS. Or perhaps it is best thought of an a warning against reification. The idea is that you come to think that you are both here and inside yourself at the same time. Or that when you see a pineapple you also behold its thought or essence, as if you experienced the world in some kind of stereo.
THE GOOD IDEA:
When I teach kids, I see different kinds of brains. I don't say that I see different "persons," because what I see are patterns of persons (seemly attributable to relative differences in their faculties). Some kids absorb detail like a sponge and have good memories. The answers they like are the ones they have gathered like the Squirrels gather nuts. They want to say "I can show you the answer," which for them means the stored item. But other kinds of brains like concepts and abstractions better. They like to ask not what is, but why or how come. These students are far better at understanding philosophy. The memory students think the answer is in the dictionary or encyclopedia or something. All that the memory students want to do is play the game of fetch.
And so, let us imagine a situation where a student is insightful and begins to wonder how his faculties affect him. It could be a person wondering about his feeling of "love" for his girlfriend as he contemplates the effect that dopamine and other neurotransmitters have upon his brain chemistry. Instead of imagining something metaphysical -- "the one chosen girl" -- he imagines (and even senses) the effect of the brain chemistry being altered when seeing her. If he says, "my brain really likes this one," he would not be incorrect or even poetic. Nor would he be committing the fallacy of the little man in the head. He'd merely be focusing in upon a different unit of analysis. He would simply be reporting the effect of being insightful about his body, as when one senses, "those peanuts won't agree with me" (believing he has a food allergy based upon a prior experience).
Or when one says, "I can only do philosophy for two hours, because my mind can't do it any longer." I say this all the time. People who think philosophically have quite often remarked that they can do so only in fits and spurts, and in limited (often unpredictable) patterns or durations. It is not nonsense to say, "the mind won't let me think anymore," where that means what it does: the brain is "tired." One can sense this just as one can say, "I think there's something wrong with the digestion." The problem is that before science discovers something that we can see with an MRI and such, we are left with old wives tales about the nature of these things. And once we have better information, we can then turn that tale into the "picture" provided to us by science (e.g., "love is brain chemistry"). But my point is simple: even if we don't have good "pictures" yet of tired brains, insightful people who experience this nonetheless speak about it in
only the ways they can. Older intellectuals always remark about their "hardware" not working like it used to. They talk of their lowered capacity to remember, and of their inability to multitask. They talk of the energy being less in the head. This is not nonsense or poetry. It is not reification. Worst case scenario, its the reporting of a phenomenon packed in a hypothesis of some sort about what is going on in the body.
I guess, however, you could go "south" with this sort of talk if you ever let it be deterministic rather than descriptive. If you said, for example, "I can't be happy because my brain is sad," where you meant that to mean you were held captive or something -- this would be a kind of nonsense. It would be like saying "my organs have kidnapped me." One could be extremely silly with these sorts of constructions. But so long as they are merely reporting states of affairs about bodily conditions, and not subsuming the "I" into the organ, one would treat these sorts of statements as one would any sort of symptomology.
Here is what I want to say: If you think about what your cognition is doing while you do it -- sort of thinking about thinking -- it is permissible so long as it is not reification. There is nothing wrong with thinking about what chocolate does to your brain (dopamine release) and what the cells of your mouth do instantly when you taste it (cell signalling) -- as you taste it. So you say, "my brain loves chocolate." What this means is "I can feel a dopamine bath," which is not the same as saying "my tongue likes the taste" (which you could also say). Neither of these says "I am prisoner."
Here is what I mean. All that this really talks about is the unit of analysis. One would never say that we can only talk at the level of "person" -- "I like chocolate" -- and never mention subroutines or biological paths associated with this general phenomenon. So long as the sense of the statements are symptomatic (symptomological?), there is no issue.
THAT'S IT! If it is a symptomological statement, it has sense. If it is an identification statement, ("I am my brain"), it is nonsense or poetry. That's the key right there. If you say, "my brain is doing X" you are ok so long as you are not creating two identities but are merely reporting phenomena that you, yourself, experience at a different unit of analysis (or hypothesize the matter being explained this way).
Regards.
Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.
Assistant Professor
Wright State University
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