At 08:36 13/10/99 -0700, you wrote: >It's good that we agree on this issue. But my point was not about this kind >of materialism but that Marx and Engels were pushing a different _kind_ of >materialism. > >I don't know, BTW, if saying that ideas are "just chemicals in the brain" >is a good way of saying it. I would restate the issue as follows: if the >brain and its chemicals are like hardware, then ideas are like software. >Every analogy has its limits, of course: the complexity of the brain's >biology and its chemicals mean that ideas are much more complex and >unpredictable than software. (People aren't computers.) We just need the concept of emergent properties. Fits quite well with some aspects of the dialectical principle of quantitative changes sometimes leading to qualitative ones. Chris Burford London
