Status Updates From Neither Brain Nor Ghost: A ...

On my second read through, I'm noticing some ambiguity in the author's chapter on causation. He never explicitly endorses determinism or indeterminism, so his view on where exactly the causal nexus ends for particular mental events is obscure. Also, he gestures to any particular causal event being identified for pragmatic reasons. But does this apply to the mental causal nexus? I assume yes, but he never clarifies.

After re-reading some pages I may have hastily breezed through, it seems that Rockwell has definitely answered my objection. By introducing the functional explanation into his account, he can easily find dividing lines between irrelevant and relevant causal factors within the causal nexus.

I may be jumping the gun (probably so), but it seems like the causal nexus can easily create problems if extended to outside the body. In social interactions, does another person's causal nexus become 'one' with mine, thus creating 1 consciousness? Or do we both become engrossed in one causal nexus and somehow become 2 modes of 1 consciousness? The first option seems to entail a hegelean world-spirit.

Rockwell shifts his focus to the notion of causation motivating the cartesian materialist view. An atomistic notion of causation in which we can always isolate a ceteris paribus statement has been refuted by JS Mill (according to Rockwell).

Instead, we ought to view ceteris paribus statements as pragmatic causation accounts needed for different scientific discourses.

Rockwell so far has done a good job at exposing the brain-body dualism that still plagues a lot of modern philosophy of mind. An early rebuttal to such a dualism is accepting that the mind is also hormonal as well as neural.

While I like Rockwell's writing style and he's easy to read, it is a bit sloppy in some places; the fact that you don't really need to parse everything out like its Hegel or something is a sort of disadvantage.

Pretty easy read so far, compared to Paul Churchland. Rockwell has a very pugilistic writing style; he's picking fights with a lot of the big names, which makes for lots of fun.

Really looking forward to this one. Got to meet Teed a few months ago and I was convinced to read the book based on our conversation about pragmatic fields in philosophy of mind.