Ron takes the debate over to mind v matter into language - which is where the mystery of mind is best revealed. He gives us a crash course in philosophy in ten minutes - and uses the colour 'red' to reveal the immense complexity in simply naming the world. The highlight though belongs to his one year old grandson , Levi - and he uses Levi's early experiments with words to celebrate the wonders of the mind at work through language and how we acquire it.

1. The “Hard Problem” of
Consciousness
David Chalmers
Is there a Ghost
in the Machine?
Gilbert Ryle
1

2. What Is a Human?
Psalm 8
3 When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
4 what is mankind that you are
mindful of them,
human beings that you care for
them?
5 You have made them a little
lower than the angels
and crowned them with glory
and honor.
6 You made them rulers over the
works of your hands;
you put everything under their
feet
2
Hamlet
What a piece of work is man,
How noble in reason, how
infinite in faculty,
In form and moving how
express and admirable,
In action how like an Angel,
In apprehension how like a god,
The beauty of the world,
The paragon of animals.
And yet to me, what is this
quintessence of dust?

3. Thomas Hobbes 1588 - 1679
“Thus mind will be nothing but the motions of
certain parts of an organic Body.”
3
Is this any different to
neuroscience or modern
psychiatry?

4. Alexander Pope 1688 - 1744
“Nature, and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night.
God said, Let Newton be! And All was Light.”
Isaac Newton
1643 -1727
4

5. Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace
“ We may regard the present state
of the universe as the effect of its
past and the cause of its future. An
intellect which at a certain moment
would know all forces that set
nature in motion, and all positions of
all items of which nature is
composed, if this intellect were also
vast enough to submit these data to
analysis, it would embrace in a
single formula the movements of the
greatest bodies of the universe and
those of the tiniest atom; for such an
intellect nothing would be uncertain
and the future just like the past
would be present before its eyes. ”
1749-1827
5

6. Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882
6
Genesis 1
27 So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
Genesis 2
7 Then the LORD God formed a man from the
dust of the ground and breathed into his
nostrils the breath of life, and the man
became a living soul.

7. Gilbert Ryle 1900 - 1976
There is a doctrine about the nature and place of
the mind which is prevalent among theorists, to
which most philosophers, psychologists and
religious teachers subscribe with minor
reservations. Although they admit certain
theoretical difficulties in it.... [the doctrine states
that] every human being has both a body and a
mind.
Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often
speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as "the
dogma of the Ghost in the Machine." I hope to
prove that it is entirely false, and false not in
detail but in principle.
7

8. Atomic Reductionism
Increasingly
sophisticated
models of
matter have
been developed
throughout the
20th Century
and have
become the
basis for a very
strong realist
materialism.
8

9. 9

10. The Vienna Circle 1907 – 1938
The Logical (or Empirical) Positivists
10
Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, Philipp Frank, Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Richard von Mises, Karl
Menger, Kurt Gödel, Friedrich Waismann, Felix Kaufmann, Viktor Kraft, Edgar Zilsel, Alfred Tarski, Hans
Reichenbach, Carl Gustav Hempel, Willard Van Orman Quine, Ernest Nagel, Alfred Jules Ayer, Oskar
Morgenstern, Frank P. Ramsey, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper

11. “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through the Logical
Analysis of Language” Rudolph Carnap
The development of [logical positivism] has made it
possible to give a new and sharper answer to the…
validity and justification of metaphysics… The
positive result is worked out in the domain of
empirical science…
In the domain of metaphysics, including all
philosophy of value and normative theory, logical
analysis yields the negative result that the alleged
statements in this domain are entirely meaningless.
11

12. Rationalists vs Empiricists
Idealists vs Realists
John Locke
1632 – 1704
Thomas Hobbes
1588 - 1679
David Hume
1711 – 1776
René Descartes
1596 – 1650
George Berkeley
1685 – 1753
Immanuel Kant
1724 – 1804
12

13. Francis Bacon
A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to
atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's
minds about to religion.
FRANCIS BACON, Essays 1597
13

14. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772 - 1834
Despite his enthusiasm, Coleridge didn’t see science as the highest authority
because it cannot answer questions of meaning or value. In 1804 he
complained that “I have met with several genuine… keen hunters after
knowledge and Science; but Truth and Wisdom are higher names than these…
I am half angry… for [them] prostituting and profaning the name of
Philosopher, great Philosopher, eminent philosopher etc. etc. etc. to every
Fellow, who has made a lucky experiment.”
In 1833, the year before he died, Coleridge attended the annual meeting of
the newly-established British Association for the Advancement of Science.
During a debate on the proper title for ‘men of science’, he stood up and
argued very strongly that experimental work is not philosophy, so these
people should not be calling themselves natural philosophers. The term
‘scientist’ was proposed by William Whewell, Master of Trinity College,
Cambridge, but it didn’t go down well at the time.
https://scienceandbelief.org/2014/05/01/whats-in-a-name/#more-2296
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15. 15

16. 16
RED

17. 17
REDRED OR PINK

18. 18
REDRED OR
PINK
RED or
ORANGE

19. CONCEPTUAL CATEGORY: “COLOUR”
19
REDRED OR
PINK
RED or
ORANGE

20. Concept: CHAIR
20

21. IS THIS A CHAIR?
21

22. IS THIS A (RED) CHAIR?
22

23. Concept: Broom Broom
23

24. Broom Broom
24

25. Broom Broom
25

26. Broom Broom
26

27. 27
RED

28. The Visible Spectrum
28

29. 29
The East is Red
Red Hot

30. Microwave Oven
30

31. Empiricism vs Idealism
31

32. John Locke 1632 - 1704
32
Very difficult philosophical
and scientific problem Primary Qualities Secondary Qualities

33. 33
Primary Qualities
Secondary Qualities

34. The Height of Idealism: Immanuel Kant 1724 – 1804
Critique Of Pure Reason: Transcendental Idealism
Category Error: Empirical Realism
34

35. Empiricism: Naïve Realism
35

36. The old woman sat on the most comfortable red chair to watch TV
36

37. The red TV sat in the old chair to watch
the comfortable woman
37

38. The Sun Rising
John Donne 1572 – 1631
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
38

39. Philosophy of Language
TV the sat old the watch comfortable to on chair
woman red most.
The old woman sat on the most comfortable red
chair to watch TV.
REFERENCE SENSE

40. Apoplectic
Furious
Angry
Annoyed
Displeased
Inconvenienced
Indifferent
40
Concerned
Sympathetic
Empathetic
Indifferent
Disinterested
Hostile
Repulsed

41. Philosophers of Language
Neo-Platonists vs Empiricists
Gottlob Frege 1848 - 1925
Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889 - 1951
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
1. The world is everything that is the
case.
2. What is the case, the fact, is the
existence of atomic facts.
3. The logical picture of the facts is the
thought.
4. A thought is a proposition with
sense.
5. Propositions are truth-functions of
elementary propositions.
6. The general form of a truth-
function is [p, ξ, N(ξ)].
This is the general form of a
proposition.
7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof
one must be silent.
Michael Dummett 1925 - 2011
1910 - 1989
1872 - 1970
Willard Van Orman Quine 1908 - 2000

42. 42
(NEURO)SCIENCE: ALL REFENCE / NO SENSE OR MEANING

44. Beyond the blues: Even with the latest wonder drugs, there
is no short-term, quick fix for depression. SMH 2006
It is almost 20 years since Prozac became the first blockbuster drug of the
new generation of antidepressants that were supposed to lift mood through a
subtle finessing of brain chemicals, instead of the sedating “whammy” of
yesteryear.
But despite the huge volumes of antidepressants prescribed – 8.4 million
scripts were dispensed last year (2005) in Australia for the 6 most popular
drugs – specialists have been flying blind when choosing which drug to add to
one that is having only partial success.
For Dr Jon Jureidini, the US researchers’ bullish assessment of their own
results is typical of a general insistence in the specialty on talking up the
slenderest of silver linings round the darkest clouds of data.

45. “It’s pure spin … They’ve gone through the wreckage of the results and said,
“What can we salvage?” It’s just intellectually dishonest.
It is possible , Jureidini believes, that the remission of depression experienced by
some of the participants may be a true reflection of the effect of the drugs.
But it is less of a stretch, he says, to think those people who got better would have
done so anyway. That is because the illness is widely acknowledged to resolve
spontaneously and unpredictably in a high proportion – perhaps up to half – of
cases.
“We’re still in the stage of wishful thinking that these drugs are going to help
anyone who feels unhappy.”
Dr Jon Jureidini: Head of the Department of Psychological Medicine at the
Women’s and Children’s Hospital in Adelaide.

46. “The Hard Problem”: Ambition, Determination, Application, Vision, Persistence, Patience,
Ingenuity, Understanding, Comprehension, Problem Solving, Analysis, Planning, Invention,
Resilience, Transcendence, Weariness, Desperation, Hope, Hopelessness, Panic, Fear, Anger,
Elation, Joy, Satisfaction, Vindication, Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Psychology,
Politics…….. Consciousness
46
Neil
Armstrong
1969

47. John 1
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all
things were made; without him nothing was made that has been
made.
Genesis 1
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the
earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the
deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that
the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God
called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there
was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
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48. Are you an Idealist or an Empiricist?
Deuteronomy 8:3
Man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of
the Lord.
Matthew 11:28-30
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my
yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will
find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Romans 12:2
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of
your mind.
Galatians 5:22-23
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness,
faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.
48