tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4705190583378659608.post3326471676313881439..comments2023-11-13T03:52:13.643-05:00Comments on Pragmatism Refreshed: Stephen BradleyChristopherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17755575167245729981noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4705190583378659608.post-12740934616264594962007-08-13T11:05:00.000-04:002007-08-13T11:05:00.000-04:00"If stimulating the liver in a particular way ever..."If stimulating the liver in a particular way ever yielded atheism, then, of course, one could dismiss atheism."<BR/><BR/>"No, that would be irrelevant to the merits of any atheistic conviction or argument."<BR/><BR/>I agree. I meant that one could dismiss atheism to the same extent that Dr. Persinger's technique would justify dismissing a religious experience as caused by something external to person experiencing it.<BR/><BR/>-------------------------<BR/><BR/>"Beliefs can be altered by arguments, and Occam's razor suggests that we therefore need not look for physiological causes for them."<BR/><BR/>"The razor would suggest that we acknowledge the correspondence of mental states to neuronal states quite generally, rather than that we postulate a sub-category of mental states that don't correspond to any neurology. The latter policy would amount to the invocation of a belief-generating ghost in the machine."<BR/><BR/>I did not mean that there would be a sub-category of mental states that don't correspond to any neurology. I meant that there would be a sub-category of metal states that could not be caused by the outside stimulation of neurons, independently of the subject's thoughts.Henryhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10646656656732971583noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4705190583378659608.post-55142464846380099842007-08-13T09:06:00.000-04:002007-08-13T09:06:00.000-04:00"If stimulating the liver in a particular way ever..."If stimulating the liver in a particular way ever yielded atheism, then, of course, one could dismiss atheism."<BR/><BR/>No, that would be irrelevant to the merits of any atheistic conviction or argument.<BR/><BR/>"But it is unlikely that this will occur because atheism, like theism, is a belief, not an experience."<BR/><BR/>There aren't very firm boundaries there, I'm afraid. <BR/><BR/>"Beliefs can be altered by arguments, and Occam's razor suggests that we therefore need not look for physiological causes for them."<BR/><BR/>The razor would suggest that we acknowledge the correspondence of mental states to neuronal states quite generally, rather than that we postulate a sub-category of mental states that don't correspond to any neurology. The latter policy would amount to the invocation of a belief-generating ghost in the machine.Christopherhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17755575167245729981noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4705190583378659608.post-76062754346638551932007-08-12T15:50:00.000-04:002007-08-12T15:50:00.000-04:00Christopher, Regarding the "unless" clause of Jame...Christopher, Regarding the "unless" clause of James' that you quote in your second paragraph, it apparently has been worked out. I'm no expert on this, but a moment of googling yielded this article: http://www.bidstrup.com/mystic.htm, which states, among other things, "Dr. Michael Persinger, working at Laurentian University, in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, has pioneered a method for inducing the religious, spiritual experience of the shaman. Without drugs, herbs, hypnosis or invasive surgery, he can quite literally flip a switch and induce the experience of 'god.' Using an ordinary striped yellow motorcycle helmet purchased at a sporting goods store, which he has modified with electromagnetic coils, he can place the helmet on your head, connect the wires to a device he has constructed that generates the proper signals, and when the magnetic fields produced by the coils penetrate the skull and into the temporal lobes of the brain, the result is the stimulation of those lobes and a religious experience results." If stimulating the liver in a particular way ever yielded atheism, then, of course, one could dismiss atheism. But it is unlikely that this will occur because atheism, like theism, is a belief, not an experience. Beliefs can be altered by arguments, and Occam's razor suggests that we therefore need not look for physiological causes for them.Henryhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10646656656732971583noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4705190583378659608.post-40163971765950494482007-08-12T14:18:00.000-04:002007-08-12T14:18:00.000-04:00James spoke of such interpretations in general ter...James spoke of such interpretations in general terms -- without specific reference to Bradley -- in his first lecture in the VRE series, "Religion and Neurology." <BR/><BR/>The point of that chapter was that no pleading of "the organic causation of a religious state of mind" can properly be said to refute its claim to possess spiritual value, "unless one has already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change." And James had few hopes for the sort of psycho-physical theory that would require. <BR/><BR/>After all, he said, a skeptic's disbelief, or a positivist's adherence to a reductionist physicalism, must itself be as neurologically determined as any ecstatic saint's belief. If we only knew the facts intimately enough, we might see some operation of the liver as "determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul." References to physiology, then, don't help us make judgments about value, cognitive or otherwise.Christopherhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17755575167245729981noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4705190583378659608.post-44572501482447511612007-08-12T09:04:00.000-04:002007-08-12T09:04:00.000-04:00Bradley's description of his symptoms is so precis...Bradley's description of his symptoms is so precise (although how can a stream resembling air feel as if it is entering the heart?) that I suspect that a medical doctor today could tell us what he experienced. James was a medical doctor, of course, and, even though medical knowledge was far less advanced in his day, I wonder whether it occurred to him to view Bradley's experience as a medical condition.Henryhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10646656656732971583noreply@blogger.com