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From: gam@proper.UUCP (Gordon Moffett)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy,net.sci,net.misc
Subject: Re: Mind and Brain
Message-ID: <1419@proper.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 29-Jun-84 11:47:34 EDT
Article-I.D.: proper.1419
Posted: Fri Jun 29 11:47:34 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 1-Jul-84 06:30:13 EDT
References: <769@pyuxn.UUCP>, <838@shark.UUCP>, <1396@proper.UUCP>, <569@ihuxj.UUCP>
Organization: Proper UNIX, Oakland, CA
Lines: 54
Keywords: behaviorism,brain,mind,Aristotle,salt

> From: gek@ihuxj.UUCP (glenn kapetansky)
> Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Naperville, IL
> 
> Ok, Mr. Moffett let's discuss this idea of yours that concepts
> invented by Greeks are to be taken with agrain of salt. I agree.
> So let me paraphrase your contentions by quoting Aristotle, and
> I invite you to take yourself with a grain of salt:
> 
> "Show me these atoms of yours, Leucippus!"
> 
> (By means of this wonderfully scientific argument, Aristotle discredited
> the atomic model of matter effectively until Rutherford). I don't
> mean to insist you are wrong, Mr. Moffett, but may I point out that
> your scientific rigor is suspect?

Nice try.

I get this counter-argument all the time, but it is an empty one.
Indeed we now know that atoms exist because we have manifested
atomic tracks in liquid helium (or hydrogen or something) and
have even changed some atoms into other atoms.

And Mr Aristotle was right in discrediting Leucippus (but I thought
it was Democritus) about his presumed atoms because:
	a) Leucippus didn't demonstrate his atoms, he just guessed there
	   was something like them that made up the universe.
	b) The technology for such a demonstration did not exist
	c) Leucippus' (and Democritus') atoms were not the atoms
	   we know today, but just concepts of how matter is
	   formed, and therefore in the realm of philosophy and not
	   science.

...

Here is a free bonus: I've said that there is no mind because its
existence has not be measured, and that the only thing we can measure
and observe is behavior.  Is behavior itself enough to justify the
existence of mind?

In the behaviorist realm, I believe, this question is quietly ignored.
All such arguments go back to attempts to show that a mind exists, when
in fact we have no evidence to hypothesize its existence (?yet).
(Creationism, anyone?).

Further, behavior is accepted as a characteristic of animals (a priori)
so this is where the science of behavior begins.  So let us just look
at behavior and make our hypotheses from that, rather than impose
a view of the ``mind'' which we would like to have exist but as
of yet have not demonstrated.
-- 

Gordon A. Moffett

{ hplabs!nsc, decvax!sun!amd, ihnp4!dual } !proper!gam