Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Rediscovering the Mind 42uniquely human features that so enrich our lives. Radicalreductionism offers very little in the area of moralimperatives. Further, it presents the wrong glossary of termsfor a humanistic pursuit.The scientific community has made notable progress inunderstanding the brain, and I share the enthusiasm forneurobiology that characterizes modern-day research.Nevertheless, we should be reluctant to let that élan generatestatements that go beyond science and lock us into philosophicalpositions that impoverish our humanity by denying the mostintriguing aspect of our species. To underrate the significanceof the appearance and character of reflective thought is a highprice to pay in order to honour the liberation of science fromtheology by our reductionist predecessors several generationsback. The human psyche is part of the observed data of science.We can retain it and still be good empirical biologists andpsychologists.Reflections“The garden of Forking Paths” is a picture, incomplete yet notfalse, of the universe as Ts´ui Pên conceived it to be.Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer.. (he) did not think oftime as absolute and uniform . He believed in an infiniteseries of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading networkof diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time– the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate,intersect, or ignore each other through the centuries –embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them.In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you donot, and yet in others both of us exist. In this one, in whichchance has favoured me, you have come to my gate. In another,you, crossing the garden have found me dead. In yet another, Isay these very same words, but am an error, a phantom.Jorge Luis Borges“The garden of Forking Paths”Actualities seem to float in a wider see of possibilities fromout of which they were chosen; and somewhere, indeterminismsays, such possibilities exist, and form part of the truth.-- William JamesIt is an attractive notion that the mysteries of quantum physicsand the mysteries of consciousness are somehow one. Theepistemological loop that Morowitz describes has just about theproper amounts of hard sci-