Editing Head to Head with The Philosopher (section)

==Round 3: Scourge vs Toecutters==

Moisture leaked from an incontinent sky.  Play maker and self anointed brain of the Scouge, Theo Rogers, moved uneasily amid the nervous giggles from within his ranks.  The toe cutters amassed from AA meetings, probation check ins, ‘done clinics and assorted safe houses.  The absence of Knuckles Rogers from the pre match stare down had Theo’s normally highly sensitive sphincter dancing on oiled razor wire.  Sun-Tsu’s advice ‘keep your friends close, and your enemies closer’ (400BC) had gnawed into Theo’s consciousness and was now wedged like a cork holding back his usual torrent of verbal diarrhoea.   

Having woken from their slumber and gotten on the scoreboard last week against an extremely fortunate Blek outfit, the Toe Cutters celebrated their pedagogic state by pondering the mind-body problem. 

For hundreds of years the march of science has swept all before it – all that is except the human mind.  We are all immediately conscious of our consciousness – that we have thoughts, feelings, desires that are subjective and private to us – that we are actors at the centre of our own world and that we have a unique and personal perspective on it.  In stark contrast science is triumphantly objective, open to scrutiny, eschewing the personal and the perspectival.  So how are mental phenomena explicably in terms of, or inextricably related to, physical states and events in the body?  Having come to not only know the buce, but to know how they know the buce, the toe cutters now needed to explore the relationship between mind and body. 

Descarte’s refuge in the certainty of his own self led him to elevate the status of mind as a distinct entity – a mental substance whose only function was thinking and feeling.  Everything else is matter or material substance, whose defining characteristic was having physical properties such as mass and shape and filling physical space.  Ryle pilloried this substance dualism as the Dogma of the Ghost in the Machine where the immaterial mind or soul was somehow living within and pulling the levers of the material body.  If mind and body were essentially different, how could they interact? 

If substance dualism could not account for the obvious interaction going on between mind and body (Theo is annoying me so I raised my hand and hit him) then perhaps a monistic approach was required.  Physicalism is essentially reductive in that it holds that mental phenomena can be analysed, fully and exhaustively, in purely physical terms.  So when the Thin Blue Line struck a scouge player, it can easily be shown to be a physical correction in the sharp elevation in his corticosteroids, amines and neurotransmitter activity which occurred after hearing Theo’s annoying voice.  Seen in this line it was Theo who should have been sin binned rather than the Thin Blue Line who was obviously the actual victim in the incident.  While such explanations account for people’s negative response to seeing or hearing (or smelling for that matter) Theo, it fails to capture the essence of conscious experience, its subjective nature.

When in 1974 Thomas Nagle asked us to imagine what it is like to be a bat, he succinctly captured the essence of the discontent that many were feeling when trying to analyse the mind in purely physical terms.  Although I could ‘imagine’ what it would be like to grow flaps under our arms and fly around at night catching insects in our mouth using sonar and sleeping all day upside down in a dark cave, this can only tell us what it would be like for me to be a bat and not what it would be like for the bat to be a bat.  Nagle’s central point is that there is a subjective character of experience – something that it is to be a particular organism – something it is like ‘for’ the organism – that cannot be captured in reductive accounts.  

Last week the toe cutters had found the glue to bind their individual efforts, this week the toe cutters knew that it was not enough to form a network with their fellow cutters, they needed to respect the unique perception that each of their team mates held.  Passing the buce to a team mate in a way that would allow them to do what ‘you’ thought they should be doing with the buce was not the answer.  The buce needed to be delivered so that the team mate could do what ‘they’ knew they needed to be doing. 
So there it was and as expected the scoreboard attendant was kept busy.  Cememt to Pool Cleaner –double buce.  Pool Cleaner to Cement – double buce.  An incident late in the first half left the small but knowledgeable crowd bewildered.  A sin binning of not only the wrong man but the wrong team outrageously reduced the cutters to three players and saw the scouge get a couple of lucky scores prior to the break. 
In a brilliant display of timing Knuckles arrived early in the second half.  The vision of their fallen comrade out of his wheelchair focussed the cutters back to their pre match plan and within seconds it was the Pool Cleaner to Cream da la Cream onto Connections and the scores were flowing again.  When knuckles tightened the laces on his dessert boots, rolled up the cuffs on his 501s and injected himself (onto the field – not self medicating) additional scores were inevitable and duly came.   
Mercifully for the scourge, ‘final play’ was called and the buce was soon lying symbolically flaccid at the feet of a spent Scouge defender only millimetres from yet another toe cutter score.  The toe cutters stood proudly above their slain opponents and let cry the traditional marinading tones: 
We will play on any ground

Always hunt opponents down

Silver hair with a wise crack

Never give up the treasure sack

Running hot on amber juice

Always ready to score the buce

Round the front or out the back

With your life we’ll guard the sack

A sharp knife cuts clean

Uglier players never seen

Recruited from life’s gutters

We’re the buce toe cutters

TOE CUTTERS 
Round five is a bye for the cutters so two weeks to prepare for the Hawks – learn to fly sweet Hawks because soon you will have your wings trimmed by the cutters - bring it on, bring it on!