There are some very interesting points here, not all of which I am equipped to address, but some I feel I must. The "hard problem" is a very seductive stance, one I subscribed to before I heard Patricia Churchland and Dan Dennett speak at the Tucson II conference: I think a better understanding of neuroscience will demonstrate that it is nothing more than a semantic conjuring on the part of philosophers (much like zombies).
Human thoughts are multilevel and reflexive, so that overriding purposes, as well as formal, efficient and material causes interact in the ongoing evaluation of perception and response. Neural events accompany such awareness, of course, but a description of such events is not necessary to explain or understand perception.
Hmm, "accompany"- yes, of course, but more strongly- why not "cause"? I don't follow why a description of neural events isn't necessary to explain or understand perception. Even within the field of philosophy of mind proper, Daniel Dennett has made some fascinating observations regarding the implications of prosopagnosia. This aphasia, which inhibits the ability to recognize faces, results from a lesion in the frontal region of the non-dominant hemisphere- completely on the other side of the brain from the visual region of the occipital cortex. Now that's very powerful evidence about how the human brain "parses" incoming perceptions, and on that basis we should reject any theory of mind which decribes face-recognition as a simple function of visual activity.
Your point about the necessarily multifaceted nature that any decent explanation of the mind must have, is well stated. However, in it I detect just a trace of that philosopher's provincialism, trying to preserve those "formal" causes that somehow exist independantly of "merely physical" rules of causality. The hard problem is certainly hard, but only because the smaller problems that constitute them are themselves so difficult. I personally have no problems reconciling Minsky's "Society of Mind" with Dennett's "Multiple Drafts", grounding both in the neurophysiological explanations offered by Edelman. I think the most difficult tasks ahead will be for the linguists and the traditional cognitive psychologists to revise (subtly or not) their theories to be more in line with what we know to be neurologically possible and evolutionarily probable.
Robert deMallac
rsauzier@sfsu.edu
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