_a_) The mind-body problem becomes an integral part of the problem of
knowledge. Sense organs, neurones, and neuronic connections are
certainly involved in the occurrence of a sense quality. If the
occurrence of the latter is in and of itself a mode of knowledge, it
becomes a matter of utmost importance to determine just how the sense
organs take part in it. If one is an idealist he responds with joy to
any intimation that the "process of apprehension" (that is, speaking
truly, the physical conditions of the occurrence of the sensory datum)
transforms the extra-organic stimulus: the alteration is testimony
somehow to the constitutive nature of mind! But if he is a realist he
conceives himself under obligation to show that the external stimulus
is transmitted without any alteration and is apprehended just as it
is; color must be shown to be simply, after all, a compacting of
vibrations--or else the validity of knowledge is impugned! Recognize
that knowledge is something _about_ the color, whether about its
conditions or causes or consequences or whatever, and that we don't
have to identify color itself with a mode of knowing, and the
situation changes. We know a color when we understand, just as we know
a thunder-storm when we understand. More generally speaking, the
relation of brain-change to consciousness is thought to be an
essential part of the problem of knowledge. But if the brain is
involved in knowing simply as part of the mechanism of acting, as the
mechanism for co-ordinating partial and competing stimuli into a
single scheme of response, as part of the mechanism of actual
experimental inquiry, there is no miracle about the participation of
the brain in knowing. One might as well make a problem of the fact
that it takes a hammer to drive a nail and takes a hand to hold the
hammer as to make a problem out of the fact that it also requires a
physical structure to discover and to adapt the particular acts of
holding and striking which are needed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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