The Basic Dilemma Of The Artist :: essays research papers

<a href="http//www.geocities.com/vaksam/">Sam Vaknins Psychology, Philosophy, economics and Foreign Affairs Web SitesThe psychophysical problem is long standing and, probably, intractable.We move over a corporeal body. It is a physical entity, subject to all the laws of physics. Yet, we suffer ourselves, our internal lives, external events in a manner which provokes us to posit the existence of a corresponding, non-physical ontos, entity. This corresponding entity ostensibly incorporates a dimension of our organism which, in principle, can never be tackled with the instruments and the formal logic of science.A compromise was proposed long ago the soul is nothing but our egotism aw arness or the route that we experience ourselves. But this is a flawed solution. It is flawed because it assumes that the human experience is uniform, unequivocal and identical. It might well be so - but there is no methodologically rigorous way of proving it. We have no way to objective ly ascertain that all of us experience painful sensation in the same manner or that pain that we experience is the same in all of us. This is even when the causes of the sensation are carefully controlled and monitored.A scientist might say that it is only a social occasion of time before we find the exact part of the virtuoso which is amenable for the specific pain in our gedankenexperiment. Moreover, will add our gedankenscientist, in imputable course, science will even be able to demonstrate a monovalent relationship between a pattern of brain act in situ and the aforementioned pain. In other(a) words, the scientific claim is that the patterns of brain activity ARE the pain itself.Such an argument is, prima facie, inadmissible. The occurrence that two events coincide (even if they do so forever) does not make them identical. The serial publication occurrence of two events does not make one of them the cause and the other the order, as is well known. Similarly, the contemp oraneous occurrence of two events only message that they are correlated. A correlate is not an alter ego. It is not an verbal expression of the same event. The brain activity is what appears WHEN pain happens - it by no factor follows that it IS the pain itself.A stronger argument would crystallize if it was convincingly and repeatedly exhibit that playing back these patterns of brain activity induces the same pain. Even in such a case, we would be talking about cause and effect rather than identity of pain and its correlate in the brain.