Copyright © October 2008 Jud
Evans. Permission granted to distribute
in any medium,
commercial or non-commercial, provided
author attribution and copyright notices
remain intact.
THINKING MEAT
Please Note:
These are actors highlighting our human cruelty
to animals |
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THE MYTH OF QUALIA
JUD EVANS
Humans are animals - evolved organisms -
embrained thinking animals comprised of meat
like any other primate. Humans have a fleshy
brain but there are no pseudo-dualistic
brain states, no qualia, no mind, consciousness,
properties, ontological differences or existential
modalities.
Such useful fictions are modern leftovers
from primitive folk psychology born of historical
ignorance. What exists are active, thinking,
functional creatures with thinking brain-meat.
If you happen to meet a qualia-freak - ask
him or her to put their so-called soul-stuff where their mouth is and prove that qualia
exists and then stand back and watch them
begin to flannel and obfuscate evasively.
Humans have had to create some form of words
to explain and describe their constantly
changing thinking brain-meat. We have invented
words to describe all kinds of (what we call)
actions and movements both neurological and somatic. We have done
this in order that we can create and communicate
statements that represent information regarding
existential aspects of our body-brain and
modalities of the body-brains of others.
There are two different approaches to painful tissue or bone
- the primitive motivational-affective component which is concerned with painful tissue as
something nasty to be avoided, and the evolutionarily
more recently acquired sensory/discriminative ability to identify exactly where the painful flesh, tissue or bone is located
and respond appropriately.
Lexico-symbolic descriptive words like mind, consciousness, feelings, qualia, etc. does not exist in themselves - that
is meaningful word-symbols cannot be found
in the world either inside or outside of
human body-brains - we exist as living lexicons,
the printed words in books and libraries
contain meaningless symbols which only become
meaningful when they are scanned by embrained
humans.
The words on a signpost which read:
LONDON CITY CENTRE - 10 MILES are meaningless
daubs of dried paint until a human comes
along and reads them. At that instant
the words become meaningful TO THE HUMAN
READER CONCERNED. The words we invent
for any form of description do not suddenly
burst into meaningful existence just
because we vibrate our voice-box as we force
air over it to make sounds. If no other person
is present the words are only meaningful
to the utterer of those words.
If human toe-meat is damaged when a brick
falls on it - it starts to exist as a painful
toe the condition of which the sensory cortex area of the
brainmeat becomes aware of electro-chemically
via the nerve circuitry. Just because
we invented a word pain does not mean that pain exists in the world or in the toe - the word
pain itself has no nominatum - it just
means that because of certain tissue damage
the toe exists with injured tissue or bone
rather than the manner in which it existed
before the brick fell on it.
Human bipeds with painful toes exist as mobile
organic units become neurologically changed
and conditioned by the painful toe-flesh.
The body's repair system consists of a continual
process of replacing worn-out and damaged
tissues. The ability to repair itself includes
life preserving systems for combating infection
and disease together with the ability to
grow and to repair broken bones and damaged
body parts without outside help. Damage to
a body-part needs to be recognised and assessed
by the human holism as a potential threat
to its successful survival and therefore
organisms have evolved a irritated-tissue
change modality as part of the initial-injury
phase which accompanies the cellular repair
operation of our damage control system in
order that the organic unity can continue
to function normally. Most of this circuitry
which transmits damage alerts to the brain
is involved in affective pain, with extensive
connections to the reticular system of the
brainstem. The lateral thalamus is thought
to be mainly concerned with discriminative
pain, the medial with "affect/motivation".
Pain in the periphery - One might think that
once we moved out to the periphery, things
might become more simple. Not so! Most tissues
are well provided with specific pain receptors
called nociceptors. Formerly it was thought
that painful stimuli were detected through
overstimulation of receptors for other modalities.
This is incorrect. The quality of the pain
perceived on stimulation of nociceptors seems
to depend on the site of stimulation, and
the nature of the fibres transmitting the
sensation. Even in the periphery, there is
a distinction between the sharp immediate
pain ("first pain") transmitted
by A delta fibres, and the prolonged unpleasant
burning pain mediated through the smaller
unmyelinated C fibres.
Nociceptors have numerous different receptors
on their surfaces that modulate their sensitivity
to stimulation. These include GABA, opiate,
bradykinin, histamine, serotonin and capsaicin
receptors, but the various roles of these
receptors are poorly characterised.
The most fascinating aspect of pain perception
in the periphery is that normally most nociceptors
lie dormant. Inflammation sensitizes this
vast population of nociceptors, making them
far more sensitive to stimulation (hyperalgesia).
Hyperalgesia may be primary (felt at the
site of stimulation, related to sensitization
of the neurones innervating that area) or
secondary (felt at a site remote from the
original injury, and probably related to
NMDA-mediated "wind-up."
Jud Evans and The Athenaeum Library of Philosophy acknowledges the much respected work of
Lara Hopley and Jo van Schalkwyk the principal
authors of the above quotation from The Anaesthetist website - and points out that they may not
necessarily agree with his ontological analysis
of qualia in general or pain qualia in particular.
(Pain Physiology - http://www.anaesthetist.com/icu/pain/Findex.htm#pain3.htm)
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The representation of the entity-threatening
condition of the painful toe is electro-chemically
mapped by data-transmission circuitry specially
evolved to convey information concerning
the damaged toe to the central nervous system.
In terms of the requirement for
remedial action there is nowhere else to
map it to in the foot. To have developed
the brain in an exposed area such as the
feet would have not met the evolutionary
requirements necessary for a fleshy bipedal
organism to have survived, multiplied and
evolved to become the most dominant living
organism on earth.
Functionally a foot is in
too much of an exposed position right down
there near to the ground for it to have its
own colonial or ancillary brain. The toe
contains its own reactive data feeder cells
or nociceptors which send the information
as system alarm signals regarding any physical trauma to the specialized
areas for awareness and cogitation situated
up in the head, out of harm's way of the
entity's locomotory action with its attendant
exposure to the hazards of locomotion down
below.
The condition of the damaged toe, [condition meaning: the way the toe exists at that moment in
time] as represented to the neural network as pain is name we have given to this protective,
neuro-physiologically nodalised alarm system.
If no such alarm system had developed (as
when the signals are suppressed or bracketed
out in the case of a modern anaesthetically
accompanied surgical amputation of the toe)
– then the neural network would be unaware
that the relevant chunk of painful flesh
had been crushed until the effects of the
drug wears off or the patient is able to
look down at his foot and see that the toe
is no longer attached to his body.
In a surgical removal of the painful toe
tissue where no chemical supressant of the
toe-brain communication is administered,
the electro-chemical periphial condition
system alerts the thinking brain-meat that
the painful toe tissue threat has been replaced by a painful cut tissue threat in the area where the cut was made to sever
the toe.
The neural network is then aware of the painful cut tissue. All of these physiological processes concern
physical (matergic = matter+ energy) entities
which can be impinged upon with surgical
instruments (knives,etc.) and
chemical inhibitors and absolutely no primitively
conceptualised, dualistically imagined transcendental
or paranormal souls, spirits or occult qualia characteristic of primitive folk-medicine
and ontologically challenged folk philosophy are involved. Those who think differently
must provide evidence then book their flight
to Stockholm to pick up their Nobel Prize for Services to Occultism.
If our bodies start to exist in a manner
that we call running, that does not mean
that running exists - it is simply a way
we have of describing (to others) a running
body. We do not need to use our language
TO OURSELVES if we are running or if we see
someone else running We simply register the
object in the way that it exists at the moment
we witness it - we do not need to convert
what we see into words for our own benefit,
and we only do that if we decide to tell
somebody what we saw.
Following my understanding of eliminativism
– which really means the way I look at things
– for I only take the ideas of others as
guides rather than gospel – I reject the
suggestion that there actually exist physiological
'feelings' pertaining to, or involving pleasurable
or painful sensations. I therefore consider
it apodictically obvious that the claim that
the 'pain' when we stub our toe - or the
'pleasure' when we experience orgasm, or
any other so-called 'somatic feelings' or
'qualia' we undergo are bio-chemically definable
and measurable 'objects' is a fiction.
For my version of eliminative determinism
what is really being measured is the electro-chemical
sensual signals whose modulation and intensity
represent courier-coded information about
the traumatic or pleasurable condition of
the originative object-flesh or meaty tissue
from which it comes as heralded messages
via the nerves as mediated by the neuronal
networks of the central nervous system.
The embodied brain or embrained body (take
your pick) needs to know of the painful toe-meat
so that automatic damage limitation adjustments
can be made
(survival-wise) by the human holism. The
painful toe's pain is NOT transported to
the brainmeat - you do not get to know about
the painful toe-meat in your head - you do
not feel the painful toe in your aware brain,
the complete holism senses it and is aware
of it because the whole system has been breached
and the body carries out its own systems-survey.
That is NOT to say, eliminativistically speaking
that a system exists - what exists is a systematised
holism.
In ontological discussion if someone uses
words like qualia, mind, consciousness, brain-states,
properties, essences, existential modalities
and other such transcendentalist occult terms
WITHOUT CONFIRMING THAT THEY ARE EMPLOYING
THEM MERELY AS USEFUL FICTIONS, then that
is enough for that person to be considered
a transcendentalist. Such a person is espousing
(either ignorantly of deliberately) a noxious
infantile dualism which is only different
in the manner and DEGREE of harm it causes
from the idiots who steered the aircraft
into the side of Twin Towers.
In the present era of weapons of mass destruction
- each hypostasising financier, each small
town abstractionist, each academic reificationist
is either an ingenuous perpetuator of an
insidious reality-unconnectedness upon which
most of the troubles of mankind are based,
or, if a deliberate disseminator of ontological
dualism, a culpable constituent in the savage,
uncomprehending behemoth of a primitive mordacious
transcendentalism that threaten western civilisation.
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