Reply to comment

Isn't it kind of funny that we're using our brains to think about the brain?

We can only examine it via the very organ we are seeking to understand. Reminds me a bit of trying to smell one's own nose...

Good thing we're not looking for "answers", only useful, generative stories--

I'm not a big fan of Descartes (I sort of blame him for a lot of the pseudo-problems of modern Western philosophy), Ibut  find the mind=brain camp even less appealing. Here's why:

1. I'm not comfortable with the idea that my experience of being is ultimately reducible to a series of brain states. For instance, what, exactly, is an MRI of a brain in a God-aware or ecstatic state supposed to demonstrate? That certain neural pathways light up when particpants report profound spiritual feelings? The MRI's interesting, but it has very little explanatory power. WHY are those pathways lit up? What's happening in this person's consciousness such that his or her brain is processing information in this unusual way?

Do we ignore the mystics' self-reports regarding their states of consciousness because they are not empirically verifiable? I think so. For knowledge claims to be taken seriously they seem to need to be cast as sceintific claims. It's kind of a shame, I think. There are so many kinds of knowing, but it seems that we only take a very few kinds seriously. Imagine someone looking at Picasso's Guernica and saying, Yeah, neat painting, but is it true?

Or on a more ordinary level (or maybe not)- say a neurologist shows you an MRI of your brain that was taken while you were deeply in love. Your brain looks a particular way. Other in-love brains look the same or similar. What is this MRI showing/explaining? It certainly doesn't tell us what being in love feels like. Can you imagine going to your friends and showing them them the image: "I was having such a hard time explaining what's going on with me, but here--*this* is what I feel like..."

 2. While I don't think that morality requires a belief in some sort of soul or god or afterlife (we can find other grounds for morality in philosophy-in our capacity for rationality, according to Kant, or in a shared conception of the good human life, as in Plato and Aristotle), I DO think that a belief in justice (that is, that justice exists)requires one, or maybe all of these things. Because I am not yet ready to reconcile myself to living in an indifferent- if not ACTIVELY HOSTILE- cosmos, I need to believe that somewhere, sometime, somehow accounts are settled, the stricken are comforted, etc.  You know, that our suffering counts for something...and our loves and joys do too.