Hal

Wikipedia seems to disagree with this While I dont claim Wikipedia is an authorative source, this does fit in with my (almost non-existence) knowledge of Chinese philosophy, which I believe emphasises man and life as being part of a universal order rather than being something distinct, standing outside it.

Well, this is debateable. There's no reason to think that consciousness necessarily depends on brains - this would rule out a priori the possibility of (eg) conscious computers or conscious aliens with radically different physiologies than ours. While we can say that consciousness must have a physical basis, theres no reason why this physical basis has to be a brain. And in this sense, consciousness is something abstract - it can be realised in many different mediums in a similar way to computer programs or a musical score. Indeed, the computationalist viewpoint you presented early generally holds that conciousness is the result of the implementation by physical systems of certain algorithms, and this is often taken as an argument in favour of non-reductive materialism (not that I agree with any of this). This is true, but it also contradicts the idea of the mind and brain being identical. If X strongly influences Y, then X cannot be strictly identical to Y. Well, you can make the decision to call what you see in MRI scans the 'observation of thought processes'. But theres no obvious reason to do so - saying that what we are actually observing is the brain processes correlated with thought is equally consistent with the facts, and does less violence to common sense. Noone is denying that events in the brain influence consciousness, but this is very different from saying that the mind and the brain are identical. To go back to your computer analogy, the transistors and electrons moving around my motherboard are not Microsoft Office, even though they 'strongly influence' how Microsoft Office runs on my computer.

It would be worth your while looking at how the self was conceived of by the Greeks, Aristotle in particular. Ayn Rand's conception of man as an integrated unity is rooted in the Aristotlean tradition, not in the system of categories which were created by post-Cartesian philosophy. The idea of a metaphysical gap between the mind and body is a modern notion which did not exist in pre-enlightenment thought, nor is it acknowledged in the work of those who either follow a roughly Aristotelian approach or reject Cartesianism such as Heidegger or Searle (not that I'm saying the views of these people have anything specific in common with ARs, which is probably more closely related to Aristotle's). Trying to classify all conceptions of the self as being either 'dualist' or 'monist' is an attempt to shoehorn everything into a Cartesian framework. Dualism is a poorly defined term which presupposes a lot of questionable metaphysical assumptions, such as there being a principled distinction between the physical and the non-physical.

You might find this useful. I disagree with your mind=brain stance but I dont agree with the Objectivist position on determinism/freewill so a debate would be silly.

In this context, demanding criminal prosecution for blasphemy is no worse, and no better, than demanding prosecution for holocaust denial or racism. Either we have free speech or we dont. Its illegal for French papers to print cartoons denying the holocaust. The French paper complies with the law. Muslims say they dont want cartoons of Mohammed. The French paper prints them to be controversial, and claims to be protecting free speech. How isnt this hypocrisy?

While there obviously shouldnt be any laws governing which cartoons newspapers can print, the whole thing strikes me as fairly hypocritical. If a newspaper printed inflamatory pictures about the Holocaust for instance, I imagine that the protest from the worlds Jewish community would be fairly significant (especially if it suggested that it didnt happen - this would even be illegal in many European countries). Ditto for a cartoon featuring a stereotype black person with big lips eating fried chicken. Yet only the Muslims are here being criticised for protesting things they find offensive.

As someone who just read all 3 pages of this thread, I would advise you to specify this explicitly in your next debate. Talking about the 'mind' being deterministic throws up a whole host of definitional questions, but most of these can be avoided by talking about actual physical objects instead. It also puts more pressure on your opponent to explain how physical determinism can be reconciled with free-will, and lets you sidestep the 'but volition is axiomatic!' responses.

Most of our knowledge is 'secondhand', but to say it isnt certain on these grounds seems to be a strange use of the word 'certain'. I'm at least as certain that Mars exists than I am that Belgium exists, even though I couldnt even begin to prove the former statement without an appeal to authority (such as an encyclopaedia). The certainty of my knowledge about Mars is derived from my understanding of our social institutions function as a whole (eg the scientific process, how textbooks are written, etc), not from any specific sets of experience which I could cite. Without accepting second-hand knowledge, how could you even know that you'd travelled to Chad? All you know is that you got on a plane that said 'Chad' on the front. Perhaps the country you ended up in isnt the same place that other people are referring to when they talk about Chad?! I'm certain that Chad exists because I can look up facts about Chad in sources which I consider to be reliable. Personal verification of these facts couldnt increase the level of certainty I have - it doesnt make sense to say that (for instance) someone who goes to Spain on vacation comes back more certain that Spain exists. There was never any rational doubt about its existence, and 'seeing it for yourself' is insufficient to remove the potential for irrational doubt (maybe you just dreamed that you went there!).

When I download a file, I'm not 'taking' it from the producer - I'm taking it from the computer I download it from. The word 'take' in the context you use it implies tangible loss. I buy a CD, I make a copy and give it to my friend. He has taken the CD and music from me, not the producer.

Copyright infringement isnt theft. This doesnt imply that it should be legal, but we should be more precise in our terminology. Pirating music/software does not necessarily result in tangible loss, and in many cases it results in gain for the creators (many indie bands only become widely-known because of illegal distribution of their music, and piracy has certainly helped companies like Microsoft and Adobe).

I find Antonio Damasio's popular-science writing on neurology to be interesting. I've only read "The Feeling of What Happens", but "Descartes' Error" seems to be highly recommended too.

From his post, I think he was asking for a scientific (ie neurological) explanation of the perception process, not what perception 'is'. The former is a question for science, the latter is a question for philosophers/lexicographers. We all know roughly what perception is (its what we do when we are awake), but we dont know the physical basis/cause of it. Analysing our concepts of 'consciousness' and 'perception' doesnt help advance us towards a neurological explanation of how these processes occur.

If this isnt direct perception, then what would you call 'direct perception'? In other words, what are you using that phrase to mean? It makes sense to talk about direct perception when, for example, we are comparing the way we gain knowledge of trees and cats to the way we gain knowledge of quarks and the mental images of others (the former are 'perceived directly', while the latter are indirectly inferred from things which we perceive). But when you say that all knowledge is indirect perception, you have removed any real meaning that those words have.

You can do this with any term. When you look something up in a dictionary, youre only going to get words as an answer. But these words will be defined in terms of other words, and so on. In order to properly understand the term you need to actually observe how it used in reality, not just read a dictionary. Most people have an intuitive idea of what it means to 'perceive' something - we can all use the word in day-to-day conversation without any problems, philosophical or otherwise. Nothing is hidden here. Science can tell us how perception works, and it can tell us whether there are any neural processes which correspond to what we call 'perceiving'. But it cannot tell us anything about the word, or concept, 'perceive'.

No, this wouldnt be morally wrong. It wouldnt even be illegal under current US law afaik. I think some people will argue that having heterosexual sex in a similar environment would be immoral (for the same reason they think masturbation is immoral), but this wouldnt apply to the paedophile because he has no other outlet for his desires.

Being homosexual has nothing to do with 'prancing around like a fairy'. Having an interest in women has nothing to do with 'being masculine'. The heros of ancient Greece are about as masculine as you can get, yet I doubt they would have conformed to our cultural notions of heterosexuality. This is either false, or vacuous (take your pick). Its obviously true that animals dont self-identify as homosexual, but intercourse between animals of the same sex does happen. Also if humans are animals, then anything a human does is by definition 'part of animality'. This is a misuse of the word 'choice'. Being homosexual is not like the choice to eat fish for dinner instead of steak. There is no reason to think that attraction to men is in general a product of conscious decision, and talk of 'unconscious choices' lacks sense. Being homosexual has nothing to do with being, or acting, female. This is meaningless. You arent distinguishing between thoughts and actions. Paedophilia (= being attracted to children) isnt immoral. However, a person who acts on these desires and has sex with a prepubescant child is acting immorally. Paedophiles who manage to control their urges throughout their life deserve nothing but praise and respect - it must be exceptionally difficult. Inborn behavior patterns is more accurate. Talking about 'knowledge' makes it sound like we mean knowledge of facts (such as knowing that Paris is in France) rather than knowledge of how to do things (such as knowing how to ride a bike).

I realise you werent being entirely serious, but its worth noting that this sort of approach to the problem is generally classed as a Homunculus fallacy. Anyway, noone knows how consciousness is produced, philosophers least of all. Hopefully neuroscience might be able to give us some pointers in the future, but its still an open question. Scientists cant 'see' quarks either, yet they are still objects of investigation. If we can correlate mind pictures with brain events, then you could use a combination of asking people what they see, and trying the experiments on yourself so that you can see it too.

The term 'unconscious mind' is very vague, since it has been used in many different ways by many different people. Perhaps you should start by explaining what you think an 'unconscious mind' is, and then others can tell you whether Ayn Rand said anything relevant about it. On a sidenote, talk about 'uncognitive thoughts' seems strange, simply because I dont think most people would be prepared to call something a thought if it was non-cognitive. But anyway, theres no reason to postulate some queer inaccesible nether region of the mind in order to explain this sort of thing. What we call unconscious processes are almost certainly just events happening in the brain - we dont need to subdivide the mind in order to incorporate them into theory (although talking about an unconscious mind may be a useful metaphor in some situations)

Theres no arguments presented in her essay, or at least no philosophically interesting ones. I wouldnt have bothered replying if I were you, but meh. No serious philosopher would argue from biographical details when discussing the work of Wittgenstein or Kripke, so theres no reason to dignify it in a discussion of Ayn Rand.

Sorry, that sounded needlessly bitter and sarcastic. However I find it frustrating when people continually advance opinions on complex psychological issues which are fundamentally based on nothing. I doubt that Peikoff has any idea what causes homosexual behavior, and I'd be surprised if he even had more than a passing familiarity with research in that area. This is a scientific question - you dont get to make up facts based on what you want to be true. Anyone who claims to 'know' why people are homosexual without having any research/evidence to back up their opinions does not deserve to be listened to.

Does he present any evidence in support of this hypothesis? The 'cause' of homosexuality is still a fairly controversial issue within behavioral psychology and neither the nature or the nurture side has conclusively established their position. I think that the academic community would be very interested in any scientific research that Peikoff has carried out.

In "The Rediscovery of the Mind", John Searle presents a similar thought experiment, and also gives some possibilities about what the results could be: I dont think that theres any a priori reason to think that one thing is more likely to happen than another in this situation. Most people are going to have intuitons about what the result 'must' be, but I suspect that these are ultimately prejudices that are going to be incapable of rational defence. We just dont know enough about the workings of consciousness and the brain to say anything definite.

No, thats a horribly idealised view of how language works. Natural language definitions are not (and cannot be) precise in the sense that a formal system demands. There are no rules of inference, nor are there rules for constructing new sentences from existing ones. You also dont seem to understand Goedel's theorem. Its not a general statement about 'axiomatic systems', its a statement about a particular class of formal systems, namely those powerful enough to allow the formulation of number theory. You cannot formulate number theory within the 'formal system' of ordinary language because a) there are no axioms, there are no rules of inference, c) there is no decision procedure for what constitutes a valid theorem of the system, d) the meaning of natural language sentences are inherantly tied to their use in reality rather than being something you can specify by purely formal semantics, e) language use is not rule-governed. edit: I notice you cited Wittgenstein. Assuming youve read his later work, its baffling how you can hold this ultra-positivist view of language, because its precisely the sort of thing he was reacting against. This is incorrect: see the whole of mathematics. Axioms can have purely deductive yet highly non-trivial consequences.

Its an obvious choice, but the music in Final Fantasy 7 is consistently beautiful.

The journal of applied physiology is a peer reviewed medical journal, whereas that is a random commercial website devoted to selling a product. Has the study it cites actually been published anywhere respectable? A google search for "Nautilus North Study" reveals no matches other than that site and some magazine which references it.