Word: materialistic
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Some adherents of the "materialist" line that Ryle helped spread insisted that these things don't even exist. Others said they exist but consist simply of the brain. And by this they didn't just mean that consciousness is produced by the brain the way steam is produced by a steam engine. They meant that the mind is the brain--the machine itself, period...
McGinn doesn't mean that subjective experience is literally a miracle. He considers himself a materialist, if in a "thin" sense. He presumes there is some physical explanation for subjective experience, even though he doubts that the human brain--or mind, or whatever--can ever grasp it. Nevertheless, McGinn doesn't laugh at people who take the water-into-wine metaphor more literally. "I think in a way it's legitimate to take the mystery of consciousness and convert it into a theological system. I don't do that myself, but I think in a sense it's more rational...
...wine question--don't depend on artificial intelligence. They could occur (and have occurred) to people who simply take the mind-as-machine idea seriously and ponder its implications. But the actual construction of a robot like Cog, or of a pandemonium machine, makes the hard questions more vivid. Materialist dismissals of the mind-body problem may seem forceful on paper, but, says McGinn, "you start to see the limits of a concept once it gets realized." With AI, the tenets of strict materialism are being realized--and found, by some at least, incapable of explaining certain parts of human...
...worker is at the hands of impersonal, transnational businesses. Union members who are fighting cutbacks instituted by these corporations are easily controlled or dismissed Journalists can safely be included among such workers after four years of trustless striking in Detroit. Now conservative opinion makers and politicians in their comfortable materialist world, can stop wondering about the derivation of media liberals...
...secular, materialist orientation of our society may be an understandable phenomenon in light of our society's "diversity." But that doesn't mean it's not regrettable as well...