You Reppert what you sow

I see that Ed Babinski has responded to something I wrote.

http://edward-t-babinski.blogspot.com/

Babinski’s reply is pretty well-written and well-documented.

EB: I have been discussing brain-mind matters with the Christian philosopher Vic Reppert for years, even before his book was published and before he began his blog. See Vic's blog, named after his book, "C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea." I am a fan of Vic's expertise and composure, including his acknowledgment of arguments contrary to his philosophical and theological opinions. There is agnosticism mingled with his Christian faith--a healthy proportion--so far as I can tell. But that comes from his willingness to remain informed by all sides and to remain aware of unanswered questions and uncertain variables.

SH: If Babinski is insinuating that Reppert is a cut above the likes of me, then he is, of course, entirely right. Reppert is a class act. Several notches above a bottom-feeder like me.

EB: One might take note especially of some comments made by Vic concerning intellectual performances by freethinkers Drange (arguing against a proponent of Bahnsen's views) and Parsons in debates with Christian philosophers. Apparently Vic and even the younger Christian philosopher, Jason, have been impressed by some points freethinkers Drange and Parsons have raised.

SH: I agreed with Reppert that Wilson was bested by his opponent.

There is, however, a difference between being unimpressed by Wilson’s performance and being impressed by the performance of his opponent. Wilson was simply in over his head.

As I also noted, a more balanced debate was the exchange between Michael Martin and John Frame.

EB: Vic also admits that there are a variety of views held even by Christian philosophers regarding the brain-mind question, including pro-physicalist views.

SH: This I’ve never denied.

EB: I’d sooner give science at least a couple more centuries of patient investigation of the brain-mind before coming out with premature proofs or disproofs. I also suspect that brain-minds do not come together all at once, but that just as the brain develops, a mind also take time and a wealth of experiences to develop and incorporates more sensory input and data each second than any of us are consciously aware of, and that even at the moments of creation of memories of the untold numbers of things we each experience, we are probably unconscious of all the initial connections between each memory that happen at their creation inside our brain-minds, and all the thoughts we later take for granted and the connections they have with reality are likewise taken for granted as something automatic, but in fact it all took a lifetime to build up.

SH:

i) Now we’re getting to the nub of the problem. To give science a few more centuries to solve the problem assumes the question at issue is a strictly scientific question. That automatically begs the question in favor of physicalism.

ii) In addition, it overlooks the fact that science is, itself, a mind-dependent discipline—like every other field of knowledge. Science can never step outside of the mind and go behind the mind to say what extramental reality is “truly” like. So the exercise is circular, for the scientist must forever take the mind as both his point of departure and his point of reference.

EB: There is also the question of "commonsense" responses to the brain-mind question, and of "commsense" itself, as elucidated in an article in The Philosopher's Magazine by David Papineau, Professor of Philosophy of Science at King's College, London and author of The Roots of Reason and Thinking about Consciousness (Oxford University Press). Papineau's article is titled, "The Tyranny of Commonsense," and in it he says, "Everyday thinking embodies a rich structure of assumptions about the mind, and it is by no means clear that all these assumptions are sound. In particular, there are many recent scientific findings that cast substantial doubt on our intuitive view of the mind. For a start, take Benjamin Libet's work on the genesis of actions. Libet's experiments indicate that, at least when it comes to basic bodily movements, our conscious choices occur a full third of a second after neural activity in the brain begins to prompt the behaviour. This certainly casts doubt on our intuitive conviction that our actions are instigated by our conscious choices. Again, the work of David Milner and Melvyn Goodale on the separation of the dorsal and ventral streams in visual processing (the “where” and “what” streams) suggests that our basic bodily movements aren't guided by our conscious visual awareness but by some more basic mechanism. And then there are the many experiments on “change blindness.” These show that we often fail to see large visible changes occurring right in front of us, and so question the intuitive compelling idea that we are aware of pretty much everything within our field of vision. However, when philosophers come across this kind of work, they don't view it as an exciting challenge to the everyday view of the mind. Rather, their first reaction is to distrust the interpretation of the scientific experiments. In their view, there is no way that our everyday view of the mind can be threatened by scientific findings. Our intuitive conception of the mind is sacrosanct, so there must be something wrong with scientific arguments that cast doubt on it."

See also the book, The Illusion of Conscious Will, which has generated plenty of controversy. (Perform an exact match in google)

SH:

i) I am not appealing to “common sense” or sensory perception. Rather, I’m appealing to our self-presenting mental states. Since these are immediately given in consciousness, they allow for no discrepancy between appearance and reality.

ii) What exactly is Libet saying? Is he saying that I didn’t choose to type this sentence? That the urge to type this sentence was an involuntary urge over which I had no conscious control? Have I been hijacked by my body to say and do things without my initiative or consent?

EB: Andrew M. Bailey, a young philosopher at the Christian college of BIOLA lists some reasons he too is attracted to physicalism (of an emergent yet non-reductive sort), adding in his blog that “substance dualism remains a (miniscule) minority position among philosophers of mind, despite the traction that more modest forms of dualism have recently found. Substance dualists like J.P. Moreland (and the rest of the Biola crew) [not to forget Platinga] do not yet have reason for triumphal celebrations.”

SH: The argument from consensus is philosophically worthless. A non-argument.