{"id":180223,"date":"2024-01-10T19:28:26","date_gmt":"2024-01-11T01:28:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/01\/andrew-melnyk-first-person"},"modified":"2024-01-10T19:28:26","modified_gmt":"2024-01-11T01:28:26","slug":"andrew-melnyk-first-person","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/01\/andrew-melnyk-first-person","title":{"rendered":"Andrew Melnyk First Person"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In my paper, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/infidels.org\/library\/modern\/andrew-melnyk-physicalism\/\">A Case for Physicalism about the Human Mind<\/a>,\u201d I didn\u2019t attempt to defend physicalism about human mentality (henceforth, just physicalism) <i>against<\/i> the many objections that philosophers, and others, have made to it. Instead, I tried to assemble positive evidence that physicalism is true, while insisting that no aspect of human behavior, including human linguistic behavior, makes it necessary to adopt any kind of dualism about human mentality. In <a href=\"https:\/\/infidels.org\/library\/modern\/stewart-goetz-against-physicalism\/\">their reply to my paper<\/a>, Professors Taliaferro and Goetz (henceforth, TG) don\u2019t engage in any detail with my positive case for physicalism[1], and they offer no examples of human behavior that can\u2019t be explained unless some kind of dualism is assumed. Their main objection to my paper is, rather, that, because it only takes account of evidence \u201cfrom the third-person point of view,\u201d it entirely overlooks \u201cthe first-person point of view,\u201d which, they hold, shows us that human mentality has certain features incompatible with physicalism. Examples of such features would be that \u201ca choice is an uncaused mental event,\u201d and that \u201ca reason is a purpose that provides an <i>ultimate and irreducible<\/i> teleological explanation of that choice.\u201d In my reply to TG, I\u2019ll respond to this objection only; I won\u2019t take up every disagreement I have with TG\u2019s reply.<\/p>\n<p>Before I can respond to TG\u2019s main objection, however, I must clarify it. Since \u201cthe first-person point of view\u201d is presumably just the point of view provided by introspection, TG\u2019s main objection must be that introspection of one\u2019s mental states somehow shows one that human mentality has certain features incompatible with physicalism. However, it\u2019s important to distinguish between the following two claims:<\/p>\n<p><b>(TG1)<\/b> By introspecting one\u2019s own (say) choices, one acquires <i>some reason<\/i> to think that they are uncaused mental events.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In my paper, \u201cA Case for Physicalism about the Human Mind,\u201d I didn\u2019t attempt to defend physicalism about human mentality (henceforth, just physicalism) against the many objections that philosophers, and others, have made to it. Instead, I tried to assemble positive evidence that physicalism is true, while insisting that no aspect of human behavior, including [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-180223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180223\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}