The reification consciousness is a folk myth. One cannot engage with consciousness
theoretically or scientifically other than
to reprise the myth as an embarrassing aspect
of human ignorance carried over from man's
most primitive past. The human brain like
that of most other animals, is a unified,
auto-concatenational, self-booting and programmatically
self-initiating computational object of cause
and effect. There is no putative conjugation
of the physical and metaphysical. There is
simply the conscious brain-meat undergoing
change in the way it exists from one causally-effective
fleshy sequence to the next.
If the above is to be offered as some sort
of an axiom it needs to mention self referentiality. On the question of the inclusion of cause and effect I now realise that I have not represented
my ideas clearly enough, and an important
ambiguity is present. I hereby present the
material which will go towards the creation
of a redraft which will include the following
tripartite combination of cause, effect and
self-referentiality as existential modalic unity
of the emoting brain - or in eliminativist-speak:
the causal, eventive, self-referential emoting
human holism.
1. Firstly cause and effect are the same
thing.
If because of inattention driver (a) smashes
his car into the car of driver (b) then both
drivers are at the same time the cause and
the effect of the crash. In order to accept
this fact it is necessary to view the event
in purely physical terms (as no court or
insurance company would.) Physically as far
as the vehicles are concerned the crash occurred
because both vehicles were placed in a position
of competing to occupy the same space. To
accept this as a fact it is necessary to
suspend all human concepts of guilt and responsibly
and just view the event rather in the same
way that you would dispassionately observe
two asteroids colliding in the absence of
any human presence or intervention whatsoever.
From the point of view of the vehicles, they
just happened to be on a collision course.
No blame can be attached to them for one
being on the wrong course, and the other being in the way or vice versa.
Accepting that we cannot blame the insensate automobiles for the crash,
let us now turn to the humans and consider
their involvement.
2. Are Both Objects the Cause and Effect
of Shared Occurences?
Was the driver (b) responsible for the crash?
Considering the driver as a competent road
user as far as the highway code and the law
is concerned - the answer is no. But considering
the event as the outcome of his being there
with his car at the precise moment the other
driver took his eyes from the road and the
fact that the accident would not have occurred
if he had not been there - the answer is
yes.
Thus far I have merely extrapolated and extended
in more detail an argument by Sartre, in
which he famously said that if you get mugged in Montmartre then it
is just as much your fault for being there
as it is the mugger's for attacking you, which is an attempt to view such events
as purely physical impingements abstracted
away from human laws, opinions and morals
etc. The interesting bit comes when we consider
the role of the mugger or driver (a).
3. The Law, Determinism and Free Will.
A court of law's consideration of the role
of driver (a) or the mugger usually involves
a consideration of intentionality. Did the
mugger intend to mug the victim - if so why?
Did driver (a) deliberately drive his car
at the car of driver (b) (perhaps his wife's
lover, etc.) A lawyer acting for the defence
inevitably introduces circumstances which
he hopes that the jury will accept as mitigation.
The mugger had a wife and children who were
starving, he had been abused as a child,
he had been drinking heavily and did not
know what he was doing and had no recollection
of committing the offence, etc.
The driver had business worries, a bailiff
was due to repossess his house, he was on
his way to hospital to visit his dying child,
he suffered from a temporary blurring of
his vision which since the accident had been
diagnosed as a symptom of incipient diabetes,
etc. What do these pleadings all have in
common? What they have in common is the belief
that twelve good jurymen and true accept
that prior events effect later events and
that those antecedal occurrences caused the
plaintiff to be present in court to answer
the charges before the court.
Now if those excuses where to be true does
this not mean that for all intents and purposes
we should consider the mugger and driver
(a) to be in a certain sense out of control
or under the control of an irreversible concatenation
of events triggered a priori and they are
therefore not responsible for their own actions?
An acquittal by judge and jury would seem
to validate determinism. A guilty verdict
would dismiss any claim that the offences
were the inevitable consequences of antecedent
sufficient causes and would be a declaration
of the supremacy of free will in those particular
cases.
What has all this got to do with the brain?
Was all the above catenulate scene-setting
necessary as a part of the explanation? Well
I believe yes for driver (a) and driver (b)
and the mugger and the victim all had brains
just like all the other members of the human
race, so perhaps yes - perhaps not, for what
I am suggesting is that the terms which describe
the abstract concepts cause and effect in
fact describe one concept and not a dichotomised
pair.
Conclusion.
I suggest that the brain operates at such
a speed that there is no eventive gap or self reflective memorist interstice and
that neural cause is stored in memory and any eventive outcome is a present immediacy
and the neurologically zipped causal templates
and their contingent eventive outcomes are
fused into what we call emotion and in an Axel Hägerström and
Humean sense, neurological cause and effect
are indistinguishably homogenised into man
as an emoting object.
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