Pottery Barn Rules?

God, those two sentences are horribly written. Is this an adequate translation?

“Unthinking men may be unhappy, but they realize they can’t change things so they learn to accept them. This instinct is rooted in human nature.”

Sounds trite to me, but maybe I’m missing something.

The Rousseau quote is indeed by way of Berlin, though the original is in bk 2 vol 4 of Emile. As for Scruton — ugh. Proof that, unless you’re actually Oakeshott, you shouldn’t try to write like Oakeshott (and even if you *are* Oakeshott, …)

Reminds me of that ‘serenity’ thing: “to accept the things I can’t change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”.

So, yeah, I suppose if you don’t have the wisdom you’re bound to err either on the ‘too much acceptance’ side or the ‘too much courage’ side…

Only the question mark at the end of the title keeps it from being the silliest thing I’ve ever read….until Gielgud, Olivier, Sandler, Black that is.

Re#7:

John, I didn’t mean “what’s wrong with that?”; I meant “what’s odd about that”? In other words, why the need to attribute the idea to Rousseau when it’s a perfectly commonplace (even if mistaken) notion that any man in the street might (and undoubtedly has, a million times) come up with?

Isn’t fatalism a form of despair, and thus, a sin?

‘American exceptionalism’ = ‘unwilling to lodge blame where he sees no remedy’

_is Ted Honderich as bad as Colin McGinn says?_

Um yes, I’m afraid so. McGinn’s review concerns Honderich’s contribution to the philosophy of mind, but his claims to innovation in political and moral philosophy, centred on his pretentious but anodyne “principle of humanity” would also be worth a good kicking, if anyone could be bothered.

Chris, Ted’s work on free will is solid. Or perhaps was solid – the recent book rehashes it, but adds some extra confusion.

dsquared expressed my sentiments perfectly. I wish the philosophers would just leave “mind” alone and let the neuroscientists get on with it without annoying them with their kibbitzing. To put it mildly, philosophy has a piss-poor track record of predicting what science can and can’t accomplish, and a worse one of recommending how to go about it.

Yes, I’m aware that philosophers with a good grounding in the science and who like working with scientists play a significant role (though frankly you are exaggerating its importance considerably). That kind of leaves out mysterians who are telling them not to even bother, though.

Been reading Calderón, eh?

No doubt, but he expressed it so beautifully that it just begged to be borrowed for other purposes. ;)

We don’t know much yet, but what we find out will be found out by the methods of science, with perhaps some help in the conceptual-clarification department from philosophers. And the most significant progress won’t necessarily come from those who identify with the program of “cognitive science”, either. In fact I suspect we need to learn a good deal more about the basic neuroscience before such an enterprise can even really become interesting. My $0.02-worth, not even worth that on the open market, and no doubt you feel differently.

Anyway, I don’t want to drag this thread further off-topic…

I like Searle, as it happens. I’m trying to say much what he says: that the mind is a biological function and will be understood primarily by working out the neurobiology.

Steve,

I don’t think that is what Searle says at all, and it almost certainly is not what he articulates in the Rediscovery of Mind (my dissertation involves this book as well as Consciousness & Language). In RoM, he essentially (and persuasively, IMO) argues that the dichotomy between materialism and mentalism or idealism is not necessary. That is, it is not the case that we can understand consciousness solely either in terms of neurobiology or in terms of some ethereal substance.

Clearly, physiology is a sine qua non for consciousness. Searle agrees with this, but he argues against the invalid inference from this premise to the conclusion that consciousness is nothing but neurophysiology. So, he argues, consciousness is not equivalent to brain states. This is supported by the notion that many individuals in long-term PVS have brain waves as measured by EEG. Yet they do not seem conscious in any identifiable respect.

Accordingly, Searle argues, there is an ineluctably subjective element to consciousness. Something that, by definition, is not quantifiable and is not reducible merely to a neurobiological substrate. It is of course possible that Searle is mistaken, and that consciousness is nothing but brain states, but (1) this is not persuasive to me at all; (2) there is good evidence against it; and (3) pace Descartes, it is difficult to imagine a rationalistic criterion that could definitively establish that consciousness is nothing but material structure.

As neuroscientists well know, there is no Pineal Gland of consciousness — consciousness is an emergent property, one that arises out of the amazingly complex neural system but, with little evidence hitherto that it is reducible to its material components. As such, it seems extremely unlikely to me — as it does to many of the leading scholars in the field, like Sacks, Koch, Gillett, etc., that all of what we would like to know about consciousness will be established via neuroscience.

There is obviously room to debate these propositions, but it is difficult IMO to deny that to do so is to commit to either a strong or a weak form of scientism.

In RoM, he essentially (and persuasively, IMO) argues that the dichotomy between materialism and mentalism or idealism is not necessary.

Well, precisely. Hence Searle’s often-repeated disdain for the traditional philosophy of mind.

consciousness is an emergent property, one that arises out of the amazingly complex neural system

Again, precisely- hence Searle’s own term for his position, “biological naturalism”. Searle, by the way, has often been accused of “scientism” himself. The word has become a meaningless all-purpose insult, rather like “fascism”, and I don’t take any such accusation seriously.

“It is a fact of neurobiology that certain brain processes cause conscious states and processes. I am urging that we should grant the facts without accepting the metaphysical baggage that traditionally goes along with the facts.” Searle, Mind, Language and Society, p. 52

“We have thus ‘naturalized’ consciousness, and indeed, my label for this view is ‘biological naturalism’: ‘naturalism’ because, on this view, the mind is part of nature,snd ‘biological’ because the mode of explanation of the existence of mental phenomena is biological- as opposed to, for example, computational, behavioral, social, or linguistic.” Searle, op. cit., p.54

“Much of philosophy is concerned with questions that we do not know how to answer in the systematic way that is characteristic of science, and many of the results of philosophy are efforts to revise questions to the point that they can become scientific questions. In this book, for example, I have been trying to do that with the problem of consciousness.” Searle, op. cit., p. 158

I agree with the positions expressed by Searle in these passages, including his description in the third quoted passage of the way in which philosophy can be useful in the enterprise of understanding the mind.

Searle’s emergentism is fantastic, in the literal sense of that word.

I enjoy imagining you saying that word in Christopher Eccleston’s accent. ;)

Steve,

Correct me if I am wrong, but you were earlier in this thread defending the proposition that ” wish the philosophers would just leave “mind” alone and let the neuroscientists get on with it without annoying them with their kibbitzing.”

I interpreted this to mean that you reject the notion that philosophers — or other humanities or social science scholars, perhaps — can contribute anything useful to the problem of consciousness, and that whatever there is to know on the subject will be exhausted by neuroscience.

In response to this, I cited Searle — who almost certainly believes that philosophers, among others, have a very great deal to contribute to the problem of consciousness — for the notion that insofar as consciousness necessarily implicated subjective phenomena that are not reducible to neurobiology, it is unlikely that neuroscience in and of itself is likely to provide all knowledge we seek regarding consciousness.

You say you agree with Searle’s take. I admit that if this is so, I have a hard time seeing how you can defend the notion that the problem of consciousness is best left to the neuroscientists. I do not think Searle would agree with that perspective.

As for scientism, I meant no insult, but I also disagree that it is “meaningless.” It has a very clear meaning, IMO, which is principally the notion that whatever the desideratum, it is best assessed through the methods of the natural sciences. The belief that the problem of consciousness, which involves analysis of subjective, ambiguous phenomena, will be explained by neuroscience rather than in addition to varieties of humanists, many of whom are trained to operate amidst significant subjectivity and ambiguity, strikes me as scientistic.