7 September W6A Rm 107 11.00-1.00 Jenann Ismael (Arizona/Sydney) Being of One Mind Descartes once observed : "When I consider the mind, that is to say, myself inasmuch as I am only a thinking thing, I cannot distinguish in myself any parts, but apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire." He saw here a powerful argument mind-body dualism. For, he argued, if the self is not made of parts, it cannot be made of matter because anything material has parts. Dan Dennett modus tollened Descartes modus ponens arguing that the unity of the self is an illusion. We attribute to termite colonies when we describe their behavior in intentional terms, but we know that in that case it is entirely fictional. I will press the analogy with complex systems in a different direction than Dennett did, suggesting that systems that I call social collectives (e.g., juries, government bureaucracies, corporations) provide better models for understanding the unity of the self. _______________________________________________ SydPhil mailing list: http://sydphil.info
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