• Writing prompt (200-400 words):  How is the answer to the philosophical/theological question Are we just material beings, or something more? related to (constrained by?) the scientific answer to Is Your Brain a Computer?  Come to the next class prepared to share what you have written in your notebook.

• Jerry Lettvin’s thinking was once described — I think by Marvin Minsky — as “a fascinating combination of brilliance and bullshit.”  After reading Lettvin’s lecture transcript, what strikes you as particularly relevant to our contemporary study of nervous system information processing?   Is there anything that strikes you as particularly brilliant or particularly confused?

 

The most popular materialist view nowadays is functionalism…. Rather than identifying mental states with types of physical states, functionalists identify mental states with functional or “configurational” states.  Functional states are more abstract than physical states, and are capable of realization in a wide variety of physical constitutions. In terms of the computer metaphor, our mentality is a matter of the way we are programmed,” our “software,” whereas our physiology is a matter of our “hardware.”  (paraphrased from Joseph Levine)

 

What does it mean to say that mental processes are subserved by neural circuits?  Has cognitive neuroscience established this beyond any reasonable doubt?  Or is this a more- -or-less well-justified presumption of contemporary neuroscience?   Careful!  Your interpretation of subserved in the statement “mental processes are subserved by neural circuits” is your solution to the mind-body problem of philosophy.

 

En-Soi (being-in-itself, objective) vs. Pour-Soi (being-for-itself, subjective)

Sartre defines two types, or ways, of being: en-soi, or being-in-itself, and pour-soi, or being-for-itself. He uses the first of these, en-soi, to describe things that have a definable and complete essence yet are not conscious of themselves or their essential completeness. Trees, rocks, and birds, for example, fall into this category. Sartre uses pour-soi to describe human beings, who are defined by their possession of consciousness and, more specifically, by their consciousness of their own existence—and, as Sartre writes, by their consciousness of lacking the complete, definable essence of the en-soi. This state of being-for-itself is not just defined by self-consciousness—it would not exist without that consciousness. In Sartre’s philosophical system, the interplay and difference between these two manners of being is a constant and indispensable point of discussion.

https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/sartre/themes/

 

The field of brain-mind research is so inundated with conceptual difficulties, philosophical controversy, and empirical unknowns that even the firmest answer should be regarded with caution. (Cyriel Pennartz, The Brain’s Representational Power, p. 3)