Q&A: A Collection of Stimuli
A Collection of Stimuli
Question
Hello Rabbi,
It seems to me that you dealt with this issue in your book The Science of Freedom (I’ll probably read it), but maybe you could answer me briefly.
One of the common arguments against the existence of a purely physical world is the existence of consciousness and dreams (Descartes), etc.
I have a simple question: what if that same consciousness that allows us to say "I," to think, and so on, and dreams themselves, are actually just a collection of chemical processes?
What if those very tools that allow us to doubt the physical world are themselves physical?
Question 2: I haven’t yet gone deeply into this issue (analytic/synthetic), but for example, a depressed person who takes medication will feel better. The action is analytic (a certain chemical-biological treatment), but its implication is synthetic (the person will say, "I feel better"). How can that be?
Are we just a collection of stimuli?
Answer
Hello.
1. There are claims that we are only physical matter, and that mental phenomena “emerge” from it, meaning that it produces them (and there is no need to assume the existence of an additional component, spirit). This is the approach called emergentism. I have nothing especially decisive against it, except that it is not plausible.
But here you are apparently presenting a different argument. You are bringing a proof for the existence of spirit from the fact that there are mental phenomena, meaning that you do not accept emergentism. And against that you argue that perhaps consciousness itself is a result of matter, which is exactly emergentism. So really there is no point in presenting this as a question and answer; you can simply propose emergentism, and that’s it. As I said, it is possible, but not plausible. Certainly if we accept that a person has choice (free will), which does not fit with the materialist picture.
2. The terminology is not precise. What is an analytic action or a synthetic one? What you probably mean to say is that the body affects the mind. That is not such a great novelty. When we have a wound, we feel pain. That too is an action of the body on the mind. Of course this does not mean that materialism is correct, because it is possible that the body affects the mind, but there is still a mind. And if what you mean to ask is whether the mind is entirely acted upon by the body or whether it has freedom of its own, in my opinion here too there is no proof from the examples you brought. Clearly the body affects the mind, but that does not mean it determines everything in a חד-ערכי way. Many things affect us; the question under debate is whether those things determine us (and not merely influence us).
For more detail, see my book (and also the article here on the site).