OpenYale哲学／死亡 2、3

OpenYale哲学／死亡 2、3(2008-02-21 12:40:07)
第二节课，不知道是那课让人头疼还是我真的头疼，有点感冒了，反正我听了一遍就拉倒了。

看来这个课对于我除了听力训练以及观察西方教育外，没有其他实际意义，但我会坚持听完，有些东西必须积累才有“意义”，星星点点是看不出来的。

我不是评价它的好与坏（现在还没有发言权），以中国人的一般看法而言，这样一堂课，从形式到内容在中国，都是不太可能存在的．
现在速度越来越快了，一者是英语能力相对提高了，二是老师的语速越来越慢了。

第三课。

我想，起码前本截的所有课都会差不多，很浅的问题，有没有灵魂，展开辩论，很直白浅显，但也很绕，主要在教育如何辩论，如何“哲学地”思考问题，否则我们说，想检测有无灵魂，用生物学或电子或什么科学方法岂不简单。

摘录一些有意思的话语：
if you shoot me, there's my corpse lying on the stage. My brain is still there in my head. But we no longer have a person. The person has died. The person, it seems, no longer exists. But it seems pretty clear that the mind has been dest royed, even though the brain is still there. So I think, at least when there's the need
On the dualist view, what was death? Death is presumably the separation of the mind and the body, perhaps the permanent separation, with the destruction of th e body. What's death on the physicalist view? Well, there is no extra entity, t he soul. The mind is just the proper P-functioning of the body. So, the mind ge ts destroyed when the ability of the body to function in that way has been dest royed. Death is, roughly, the end of this set of functioning． But there's noth ing mysterious about death from the physicalist point of view, at least about t he basic idea of what's going on in death.
I'm going to at least try to save the word "soul" for when I'm talking about th e dualist view. So we might put it this way. The neutral term is going to be "m ind."
Sometimes, we posit the existence of something that we can't see so as to expla in something else that we all agree takes place. Why do I believe in the existe nce of atoms? I don't see individual atoms. Why do I believe in the existence o
f atoms so small that I can't see them? Because atomic theory explains things. When I posit the existence of atoms with certain structures and certain sort of ways of interactin
g and combining and building up, when I posit atoms, suddenl y I can explain all sorts of things about the physical world. So, I infer the e xistence of atoms based on the fact that doing that allows me to explain things that need explaining. This is a kind of argument that we use all the time. How do I posit--why do I believe in x-rays, even thoug
h I don't see them? Because doing that allows me to explain certain things. Why do I believe in certain pla nets too far away to be observed directly through a telescope? Because positing them allows you explain things about the rotation of the star or the gravitat
i onal fluctuations, what have you. We make inferences to the existence of things we can't see, when doing that helps us to explain something we can't otherwise explain. This pattern of argument, which is ubiquitous, is called "inference to the best explanation."。