The machines that show the brain in action are called SPECT and some pictures of brains scanned with this technology are on line.  This work has been cheered on as some of the most exciting work being done in labs today and the discoveries in this field will probably come so quickly that only those professionals in the field will be able to keep up with it and it's implications.  For philosophy, many of the implications of this work can already be discussed. Gone are the dilemmas for us over how reason is related to the world of experience.  The British Empiricists, Locke was one, were right.  Experience, as a flood of sense impressions, enters our brains from our senses and writes on them.  The ancient philosophical quandary, how are our minds, or spirits,  and bodies connected, has lost its central puzzle.  The connection is electrical. 

            So what then happens to the rest of the puzzle?  How do we relate rationality to experience?  Many philosophers thought the answer lay in our spiritual association with knowledge existing in some other place.  Plato's Ideal World was primarily an explanation for how we could have Truth and stability.  Plato hypothesized the Ideal World as if it were that great big hard drive in the sky, where all memory was permanent and we poor CPUs at work in this great bureaucratic networked office called "earth" were pulling our programs and information from this great hard drive through a faulty communications net, that gave us mere shadows of the real information at best.  This idea of the Ideal World, where true ideas lived, evolved into that Christian Heaven where we would return someday to enjoy true knowledge if we behaved ourselves while carrying out the programs designed for us by the great big CPU in the sky. 

            This Ideal World was convincing to everyone and many tried to find alternative explanations for how we could know things.  For the most part, these took the tack that the information was embedded in the earth, or nature, itself.  Imagine, if you will, the earth as that great big hard drive full of information and stability, and all we had to do as little CPUs was pull up as many files from its libraries as possible and read what was there and know the truth.  

Is Logic the connection between a brain working properly and success in experience?

Back to lecture 2.

This page is maintained by William S. Jamison. It was last updated August 14, 2012. All links on these pages are either to open source or public domain materials or they are marked with the appropriate copyright information. I frequently check the links I have made to other web sites but each source is responsible for their own content.