Welcome to the Philosophy Club!

Wednesday the 28th saw the first proper meeting of the Brunswick/GA Philosophy club and it was certainly interesting.

We started out with discussing whether the mind is separate from the body, which is an interesting idea from the perspective that it, unlike many philosophical questions, seems to have an easy answer.  Yes; the brain is connected to the rest of the body.  Our biological functions wouldn't work otherwise.  But that's the brain.  What about the mind?  That's the interesting question.  Of course you have to pose the question: what is the mind?  For our purposes, we defined the mind to be the sum of our perceptions and higher cognitive though.  Our emotions and what we see.  Descartes would posit that they are separate.  This speaks to the ideal that we have a soul which is not a physical part of our "biological" body.  He distinguished the soul as the seat of self awareness and consciousness and the brain as the seat of intelligence.  The Mechanist point of view posits that the mind and the body are one, contiguous thing with consciousness and intelligence existing together in the brain.  For the Mechanist position, one member of the club brought up a scientific experiment by which scientists connected a subject's brain to a neuroimaging device which allows them to see a rough outline of anything the subject looks at constantly in another room.  This experiment speaks to the idea that the brain and the mind are one; there must be electrical impulse to render for the image to be present.  This image of perception is not a concrete part of a person's intelligence, which indicates that perception, or the mind, coexists with the brain.  If you can create images of the "soul" from measuring the impulses of the brain, they must be in someway connected.

As our hour of discussion went on, our talk of perception and understanding led one of our number to bring up the idea of theodicy.  One of the more common metaphors for the theodicy idea is that of the stool.  I found this image which explains the idea pretty well:

Photo Credit: http://unreasonablefaith.com/2011/07/02/theodicy-and-the-three-legged-stool/

According to this idea, humanity is presented with three options regarding the nature of any conceivable god:

• Break the benevolence leg: God is kind of a dick
• Break the omnipotence leg: God can't control everything simply because He does not have the power to
• Break the omniscience leg: God has other things on his mind

This seems to be the only way to justify the existence of God in a world with suffering.  Central to the idea is: If there are atheists in the world, God must be imperfect; and if God is imperfect He can't really be "God" with the understanding that "God" is defined to be the most supreme, perfect being in all the universe.  This is not to say that a specific god can't be imperfect (look at the Greek Pantheon, that's about the most imperfect bunch of people out there), but the general idea of "God" implies a certain amount of perfection.  "God" really has to be benevolent because all of our morals are derived from Him, which really leaves us with the idea that god is either not all powerful or not all knowing.  Which would you rather it be?