hhh333hhh : Our brains tell us things all the time. My brain tells me to be attracted to the opposite sex. ...
Thank you for the response, hhh333hhh and well done for engaging with this.You have not understood, however. I will try to explain once again. (Please do not feel diminished by failure to understand this, btw, hhh333hhh or others; lots of super intelligent people, over many years, have fallen into similar error; a famous philosopher once described this as the ' bewitchment of our intelligence'.)
(I note you did not take on my question, ' How does your brain tell you ...?' The 'how' was important.)
Sorry this gets so long. Philosophy of mind is tricky, I know. And really this is not a good medium in which to pursue it. Still, and faute de mieux ...
Talk of your brain telling you things may look like a harmless metaphor or synechdoche, but actually is dodgy in that it is liable to push you into a certain kind of mistaken metaphysics. This can appear strange when you come across it at first, but bear with me. I will try to clarify.
Here is how it works:
Think of what we might call a standard, or perhaps literal use of 'telling': 'Alan tells Brenda it is raining', say. Three things: A tells B that R.
OK, now think of your brain telling you something. Here the brain takes the place of A. So far so good. But what, precisely, is B in this case? Here is where things tend to go a bit wonky. Originally ('A tells B') B was a person -- a specific individual. So we tend to look around for something like that in the brain case ... and generally the place filler (what B refers to) gets to be called a 'soul' or 'ego' , something like that. Sometimes 'what B refers to' in specific cases such as ours is (disparagingly, often) itself referred to as a 'little person' or 'homunculus'.
[Recall this is the so-called 'homunculus fallacy', first so named by Sir Anthony Kenny, see Kenny 1971. Kenny explains much better than I could hope to do, especially in such a short space. Do have a read. Kenny is very clear. The ref is to the original 1971 article; the notion occurs in later articles and books as well ( The Metaphysics of Mind is particularly worth a read; note the hat-tip to Gilbert Ryle in that title, those with some familiarity here). Other authors also have taken on the notion -- and the nomenclature.]
My brain tells my soul so-and-so? Will that do? (If not, what is the 'me' my brain is supposed to be telling?)
Think, now, of the 'telling' going on in our story. To be successful, this telling must be understandable by both A and B. That was OK; both A and B, we tacitly took it, understood the language (English) in which R ('it is raining') was couched. But, now, if A is my brain and B my soul, what language (or organised set of conventional signs, if we wish to broaden a little) does my brain use to tell me (my soul?) things, and how do I (my soul?) learn this language? My brain might try to tell me something, but how am I to understand what it means?
More. Mostly I think of my brain as being part of me. (The 'my' in 'my brain' is not possessive in the sense of 'my handkerchief', say, but rather of 'my hands' or 'my memory', whatever, (there are further distinctions -- philosophy of mind is tricky indeed!)) And often it makes no sense to apply predicates (including of action) to parts of a human or other animal when such predicates apply paradigmatically only to the person or animal as a whole. So to the brain.
'All hands on deck!' may be a useful certainly well-understood synechdoche; but contrariwise, 'All hands cut your hair!' makes no sense. I could not cut my hair without hands to hold the scissors, but it does not follow that it makes sense to say my hands cut my hair. It was me that cut my hair, not my hands. Likewise without a brain I could not decide to cut my hair, but it does not follow that it makes sense to say my brain decided or told me that it had done so. No, I decided, not my brain. (And maybe I told myself it needed cutting.) My brain could not tell me, not as a matter of empirical fact, but as a matter of what can make sense -- of what 'tell' means.
There is more of course. But this is already long. Another ref, for this last part especially. Check out The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience by MR Bennett and PMS Hacker (Bennett & Hacker). Sorry I have no link to an online copy; your local uni library will certainly have it though. Bennett and Hacker really do the business on this.
[ "The ... mistake of ascribing to the constituent parts of an animal attributes that logically apply only to the whole animal we call 'the mereological fallacy' ... The principle that psychological predicates which apply only to human beings (or other animals) as wholes cannot intelligibly be applied to their parts, such as the brain, we shall call 'the mereological principle' in neuroscience." ( Bennett& Hacker, 2003, P. 73)]
One last thing (a coda, perhaps). You write of your brain telling you to be attracted. This is another mistake. Being attracted is not something subject to imperative command. I can tell my daughter until I am blue in the face to be attracted to that lovely young fellow with the nice manners and personal fortune; of course this would be to no avail. (She will still fall for the handsome penniless lothario with the dark eyes and foul mouth.)
Even if you could make sense of your brain telling you to be attracted to so-and-so even if you tell yourself to be so attracted it would make no difference. Attraction just happens, or not, as the case may be. (Note which may be quite important for you understanding stuff like all this, hhh333hhh this is a conceptual fact; it is about what 'attraction' means, or which is the same, it is about what attraction is.)
Any clearer now?
[The challenge about 'gender identity' still stands, I note. I quarreled with your claim, hhh333hhh that everyone has such a thing, recall, and asked if anyone has a way of detecting its presence. Any offers? -- The relevance of souls, brains, homunculi and mereology to gender identity is probably evident, but anyway if not, I leave it as an exercise.]