[ExI] LA Times: Misreading the mind

[Lee Corbin]

Spike writes

>> Stathis Papaioannou
> ...
>> 
>> Lee, could you please reassure the alarmed reader that in 
>> explaining feelings scientifically you aren't thereby seeking 
>> to take them away? Stathis Papaioannou
>  
> But Stathis, we DO want to take them away.

"Thanks" for letting the cat out of the bag, Spike. Now we'll
never hear the end of it.

Oh well, I guess it's time to come clean (since *some* people
just can't manage to keep their mouths shut).

Yes, it's true.

Not only are we reductionists seeking to take away the ideas
of beauty, aesthetic appreciation, sensual enjoyment and so on,
but to forever more expose these as the fallacies that they are.
Of course in science, we have no room for feeling, or for
"feelings", or anything like that. 

(See Dawkin's remark about "baby-eating reductionists" in his
"The Blind Watchmaker".)

Now it's really an exaggeration to say that we eat babies.  We
might *like* to, but we don't. (It's illegal.) But were we ourselves
capable of experiencing pleasure, our chief happiness in life would
undoubtedly be depriving everyone else of pleasure.

(Actually, we do derive a sort of mean-spirited satisfaction---
that can sometimes come close to pleasure---by bursting the
bubbles of the weak-minded who fail to understand that life
is meaningless, and that art and music and so on have no real
validity.)

> That would make us so much easier to simulate.

Ever practical!   Yes!   Long live science and progress, and down with
happiness, experience, enjoyment, excitement, satisfaction (mere illusions)
---and all that stuff.

Lee

> |8-| <---- (me, without feelings)
> 
> spike