Your question dives into the heart of an ongoing paradigm shift: the limits of biological reductionism when confronting the mind. Biologists traditionally ground theories in observable phenomena, yet consciousness eludes this framework. Theories of mind often assume dimensions beyond the physical, suggesting there's more than meets the eye-or brain, as it were. So, is it about opposition, or is it about the boundaries of our models?
The idea of evolution, which Hart touches, has no real support in observation but plays a huge role in philosophy of mind. Mind must have developed from nothing because we all agree it did. This idea underlies much of modern philosophy of mind. Most modern philosophy of mind suffers from the lack of wonder in human imagination. As the great Hoosier philosopher Kurt Vonnegut said, "Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly, man got to wonder why, why, why. Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land, man got to tell himself he understand." Therein lies much of the problem. We don't really understand the nature of life. Smart people want to understand and even when they don't they delude themselves into thinking they do. And because many smart people work in universities, they get confirmation bias constantly from all the not too imaginative people around them, as Thomas Kuhn wrote about in the Nature of Scientific Revolutions. As to Hart, I find his ideas interesting but he does not write well. He can take an idea that would make sense in a sentence and meanders over two or three paragraphs until even the attentive reader has to backtrack. He wrote this book in Socratic dialectic form but his characters don't speak like real people but like professors. Socrates's ideas came over better because he created characters the reader could understand from life experience. Hart could learn from Bertrand Russell's short essay "How I Write." While I don't agree with much of Russell's philosophy, he could write clearly and concisely. I think Hart to a large degree agrees with Berkely. Deep in his not really formed thought, Hart believes in mind, not matter. Modern philosophers may reject Berkely but no one has refuted him. I think Hart recognizes that we really can't answer the big questions like mind. We can think about them but no one has answered them.
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Just great deep Clarification...
To what extent are theories of the mind at odds with biologists' way of thinking or complementary to them?
Your question dives into the heart of an ongoing paradigm shift: the limits of biological reductionism when confronting the mind. Biologists traditionally ground theories in observable phenomena, yet consciousness eludes this framework. Theories of mind often assume dimensions beyond the physical, suggesting there's more than meets the eye-or brain, as it were. So, is it about opposition, or is it about the boundaries of our models?
The idea of evolution, which Hart touches, has no real support in observation but plays a huge role in philosophy of mind. Mind must have developed from nothing because we all agree it did. This idea underlies much of modern philosophy of mind.
Most modern philosophy of mind suffers from the lack of wonder in human imagination. As the great Hoosier philosopher Kurt Vonnegut said, "Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly, man got to wonder why, why, why. Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land, man got to tell himself he understand." Therein lies much of the problem. We don't really understand the nature of life. Smart people want to understand and even when they don't they delude themselves into thinking they do. And because many smart people work in universities, they get confirmation bias constantly from all the not too imaginative people around them, as Thomas Kuhn wrote about in the Nature of Scientific Revolutions.
As to Hart, I find his ideas interesting but he does not write well. He can take an idea that would make sense in a sentence and meanders over two or three paragraphs until even the attentive reader has to backtrack. He wrote this book in Socratic dialectic form but his characters don't speak like real people but like professors. Socrates's ideas came over better because he created characters the reader could understand from life experience. Hart could learn from Bertrand Russell's short essay "How I Write." While I don't agree with much of Russell's philosophy, he could write clearly and concisely.
I think Hart to a large degree agrees with Berkely. Deep in his not really formed thought, Hart believes in mind, not matter. Modern philosophers may reject Berkely but no one has refuted him. I think Hart recognizes that we really can't answer the big questions like mind. We can think about them but no one has answered them.