Nicole Rust on Nostr: Neurophilosophers - am I getting this right? Namely: what psychologists call ...

Neurophilosophers - am I getting this right?

Namely: what psychologists call "processes" are what philosophers would call "things" (not processes)

The philosophical distinction between things versus processes is the idea that these are two different ways of thinking about the world. In the things way of thinking, the world is made up of just that: things – dogs, cats, me, you, this book, that pencil. In contrast, the process way of thinking shifts the emphasis from thinking about things in a static way to acknowledge the reality that everything is always changing. It's the famous idea that you can't step in the same river twice because the river you would step into a second time is a changed river and thus not the same as the one you stepped into before. From a process perspective, the idea of a thing called "a dog" or "a river" or "you" is an abstraction that captures some aspects of reality (the static aspects) but fails to capture some others (the changing ones).

One way in which the "things" way of thinking manifests in brain/mind research is the idea that there are modules that our brains flexibly combine to accomplish complex tasks; things like vision, audition, memory, attention and decision making. While these are often called "processes" by brain/mind researchers, philosophers would point out that in the way that most brain researchers think about them, they are very much "things".

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