Originally posted by Jim B.
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The question I am asking is: How can reasoning be possible if reasons and thoughts are physical events?
Reasons are not physically located in me, are not in my skull the way that neural events are in my skull. My deliberations happen in a space of reasons, not cranial space, regardless of how many correlations can be discovered with physical facts (what Pinker talks about). My belief that 1+1=2 is not physically in my brain even if it's physically realized by a brain event. Otherwise, how could I know that it's true? It would merely be another brain event, and no physical event is "true"; it merely is. If my representation of X = X, then it wouldn't be a representation but just another instance of X. I could not justifiably believe that every belief is a physical event if that belief is a physical event.
Reasons are not physically located in me, are not in my skull the way that neural events are in my skull. My deliberations happen in a space of reasons, not cranial space, regardless of how many correlations can be discovered with physical facts (what Pinker talks about). My belief that 1+1=2 is not physically in my brain even if it's physically realized by a brain event. Otherwise, how could I know that it's true? It would merely be another brain event, and no physical event is "true"; it merely is. If my representation of X = X, then it wouldn't be a representation but just another instance of X. I could not justifiably believe that every belief is a physical event if that belief is a physical event.
Do you believe in determinism because you are determined to believe it or because it is true? If those two things, what i am determined to believe and what is true, don't always coincide, then there has to be something to account for the distinction. I could be deternined to have false beliefs.
We don't have to posit a soul in the Cartesian sense to doubt that all beliefs are physical events, although I think there are good reasons for thinking that the self is a non-physical substance. There's also emergence, and the idea that, considering consciousness, not all reality is physical reality.
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