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So you are sticking to your claim that everything is material. I put it to you that any category which subsumes everything means nothing. It is the archetypal motherhood statement to say something is material if everything is material. Like the original motherhood statement, it allows the speaker to signal their allegiance to everything that is good and pure, whilst avoiding the question by saying nothing.
Now, when I asked for you to have a go at a definition of consciousness, you gave us Marx instead: "My consciousness is my relation to my environment." I pointed out to you that Marx was defining consciousness in the first person singular. In my firm opinion, Marx is not being poetic; he means it.
What do you think? Are you willing to go with a first-person singular definition? If so why?
AndyPS. I have slipped into a certain pedantic kind of polemical mode of speech here. I apologise for this. Martin knows that I love and respect him dearly, so it is not personal. It is something about *this question*, in which the boundary between thoughts of things and things themselves gets blurred.
Martin Packer wrote:
Andy,Donald, whose views I was summarizing, subscribes to what he calls "exuberant materialism" (p. 381). He rejects dualism, "the traditional comfortable separation of mind from the material world." He rejects a "simplistic 'reduction' of mind to matter." His vote goes to what he calls "mental materialism," which seeks "a straight material explanation for mind."This from the last paragraph of his book: "Our minds function on several phylogenetically new representational planes, none of which are available to animals. We act in cognitive collectivities, in symbiosis with external memory systems. As we develop new external symbolic configurations and modalities, we configure our own mental architecture in nontrivial ways. The third transition has led to one of the greatest reconfigurations of cognitive structure in mammalian history, without major genetic change."I don't agree with you that to say everything is material is tautological, empty, or meaningless. There are different kinds of matter: different elements, compounds, mixtures, different organisms, artifacts, machines. All are material.Martin On Sep 24, 2009, at 11:03 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:Oh I don't doubt that the various strands of abstract empiricism and so on are full of non-material representational systems and non-material all-sorts-of-things. I think you are just making a point about your not subscribing to Platonism or some dualist philosophical system.But in the meaning *you* give to "material" aren't you making a tautology by saying that representational systems found in history are material? Or are there representational system which *you* say are not material?Andy Martin Packer wrote:Andy,Well, the (putative) representational systems studied by cognitive science, which are taken to be mental functions, properties of thought, which are not doubted to have a material substrate (the brain) but which are assumed not to be material themselves but ideal, in Plato's rather than Ilyenkov's sense. Chomsky's generative grammar is a good example. Piaget's theory of the mental actions and operations going on 'inside the head' of child is another.Martin On Sep 24, 2009, at 9:09 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:Martin, tell me a representational system which is *not* material. a Martin Packer wrote:humans have evolved to use an ordered series of "representational systems." The sequence is as follows: the episodic, mimetic, mythic, and theoretic. I won't go into the details, but crucially important, I think, is that these systems are material._______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Andy Blunden http://www.erythrospress.com/Classics in Activity Theory: Hegel, Leontyev, Meshcheryakov, Ilyenkov $20 ea_______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Andy Blunden http://www.erythrospress.com/Classics in Activity Theory: Hegel, Leontyev, Meshcheryakov, Ilyenkov $20 ea
_______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca