first hour of school (please comment!)

yesterday I had my first hour of school. well, to be exact, it was more like the first 45 minutes. I arrived in school for my Philosophy of Mind lecture, and there Pelczar was, glasses balanced immaculately on his face, with his smooth shaven head, looking primed and clean-cut for this semester's mental workout. and packed into the small, familar classroom along the AS-1 walkway were some of the usual suspects - those philo majors whom i had gotten to know the previous sems, thanks to our common fascination (or distaste) for a bunch of dead people like Descartes, who seem to exert an inordinate amount of influence upon our poor young souls.

nevertheless, the delight and anticipation was palpable (to myself) as Pelczar got through with the usual admin business and embarked on the real stuff. The rest of the lecture consisted of elucidating the basic mind-body problem, or the distinction between materialists and dualists, traditional and modern, with some side apologies to idealists and neutral monists (which we werent going to touch on).

for the uninitiated, dont be daunted by all this terminology. Just consider the following question, whether you would answer 'yes' or 'no' to it:

"Does a thing's physical nature (if it has one) necessitate its mental nature?"

In other words, consider an example. Do you think that whatever mental experience you have eg. thinking, feeling angry, see a rainbow, etc. is completely described by the physical structure of your brain and body?

Send your answers either by posting on the sidebar or adding a comment!

For the record, if you answer yes, then you are a materialist, and if not, then a dualist. And my opinion right now tends to dualism. Interestingly, Pelczar is a materialist who thinks that the best arguments are on the side of dualism.

Anyway, the lecture ended after 45 minutes instead of the stipulated 2 hours (and so ended my first day of school for this semester). Try to find such a case in engineering, and you'd still be hard pressed after graduation.

From that short lecture, I gather that we're in for a fun semester. Fun, of course, does not exclude mental torment. But the sheer joy of sinking your mental teeth into some meaty, abstract argument, attacking it, defending it, finding some loopholes and discovering new perspectives - simply delicious. For those that beg to differ, who think of it as some perverse delight, I can only say that it is an acquired taste that if acquired, would justify its acquiring well enough.

And imagine the practical benefits of philosophy class - less homework, early dismissals, no mathematics, no transistors, no cells, no myocardial infraction, no DNA, RNA, no partial differential equations, no Schroedinger's equations, no Poisson distributions - yet something more basic, more profound, more abstract, yet accessible just by thinking. (Ok, I dont mean to say you need to know nothing about modern science at all. But at least, no circuits to construct!)

and before you click away from here, try and give your answer to the above question... :)