Richard: sure, minds and brains can “come apart” in possible worlds other than ours (or indeed in this one, if and when someone teaches a computer to think), but I have never understood why some people seem to think that this suggests that there’s anything weird about the relationship between actual minds and actual brains in the actual world.
Consider those airplanes again, but let’s use a more general term like “flying machine” that isn’t so tightly tied to the details of their construction. You can imagine (yes?) a world in which a Boeing 747 takes off, then its wings fall away and it just continues flying; or in which there are flying machines having no apparent similarity to the ones we use in the actual world. In other words, you can conceptually separate flying from the actual aerodynamic phenomena that (here, in the actual world) enable it. None the less, flying (here, in the actual world) is a consequence of those aerodynamic phenomena, and if a god made a world physically just like ours then the Boeing 747s in it would be able to fly without any further “bridging” aviatiophysical laws of nature being added.
So why does the (uncontroversial) fact that one can imagine thinking without a brain, and that (in so far as there “are” possible worlds) there are possible worlds in which thinking happens without brains, give the slightest reason to suspect that psychophysical bridging laws are required to enable our brains to support our minds?
Richard: sure, minds and brains can “come apart” in possible worlds other than ours (or indeed in this one, if and when someone teaches a computer to think), but I have never understood why some people seem to think that this suggests that there’s anything weird about the relationship between actual minds and actual brains in the actual world.
Consider those airplanes again, but let’s use a more general term like “flying machine” that isn’t so tightly tied to the details of their construction. You can imagine (yes?) a world in which a Boeing 747 takes off, then its wings fall away and it just continues flying; or in which there are flying machines having no apparent similarity to the ones we use in the actual world. In other words, you can conceptually separate flying from the actual aerodynamic phenomena that (here, in the actual world) enable it. None the less, flying (here, in the actual world) is a consequence of those aerodynamic phenomena, and if a god made a world physically just like ours then the Boeing 747s in it would be able to fly without any further “bridging” aviatiophysical laws of nature being added.
So why does the (uncontroversial) fact that one can imagine thinking without a brain, and that (in so far as there “are” possible worlds) there are possible worlds in which thinking happens without brains, give the slightest reason to suspect that psychophysical bridging laws are required to enable our brains to support our minds?