Descartes and dualism

[WageSlave]

Unfortunately, I'm forced to believe that the mind and the brain are one and the same.

Why unfortunately? And how could it be otherwise?

Why unfortunate? Simply because I'm a romantic at heart and always liked to believe in the create soul. However, the more I read and thought about it, the more I became a materialist.
How could it be otherwise? That's the reason for my 'conversion'!

[Bagpuss]

I wonder if the computer would have been invented if we didnt have cartesian coordinates

[threaded]

Bagpuss: Well, Descartes had some interesting ideas on language, such as assigning a number to a letter, phoneme, word which is used in cryptography, and cryptography was one of the forces to produce the first electronic computer.

[Rebecca Loos]

These are the sort of juvenile reponses that substantiate my point. The stuff on here is banal drivel, I am really wasted on you lot. The baboons on here should get back to their bananas and leave the intellectual high ground to those with moral fortitude.

So there we are, having fun between ourselves, harmless to the great and the good of this world, and suddenly the great and the good decide to have a look at what we do, do not like it, and tell us to get back to our bananas?
Sorry mate, we were here first. Please go back to your intellectual high ground and leave the floor to those with a total lack of moral fortitude. Thank you

[Jabberwocky]

So there we are, having fun between ourselves, harmless to the great and the good of this world, and suddenly the great and the good decide to have a look at what we do, do not like it, and tell us to get back to our bananas?
Sorry mate, we were here first. Please go back to your intellectual high ground and leave the floor to those with a total lack of moral fortitude. Thank you

Have you got big jugs too ?

What has always worried me about the chinese room is that Searle says that the database guy looking up chinese expressions is clearly not doing things intelligently and yet he passes the Turing test. He is arguing that intelligence is more than just database retrieval - and yet he doesn't have a definition of what intelligence actually is - he gives no mechanism.

[Rebecca Loos]

maybe. But it is not just a question of size, is it? What about firmness?
Anyway I digress: any test designed to measure intelligence is doomed to fail as any person failing it can always practice it and get better next time round.

[expat]

How does one separate the mind from the body and is this really possible ?

Or is it possible not to? Easily, I'd say. So (as always) the psychological question behind the philosophy remains: why does everybody see the body and mind as a duality? If I said that the body-mind problem is not really a problem at all, you might hear me out, but you wouldn't really believe it.

This compares with Hume's second question on inference: why do people believe it works? (though he automatically fell into his own trap: why did Hume feel able to say that people believe in inference? Because he had seen them do so in the past, so he assumed they would in the future...)