What is an event, FFS?

I shouldn't even think about reading philosophy, because it just hurts my head, but sadly I appear to be addicted to it.

This to hand, from an apparently reputable commentator (Wikipedia):

 "Since every mental event is some physical event or other, the idea is that someone's thinking at a certain time, for example, that snow is white, is a certain pattern of neural firing in their brain at that time, an event which can be characterized as both a thinking that snow is white (a type of mental event) and a pattern of neural firing (a type of physical event)."


That just seems wrong before you even begin to think about it. "A certain time" causes me real problems. If I think snow is white, that's going to take time; that's "think" as an action verb, not a state verb, BTW. If you're going to make difficulties with that then we'll just translate the discussion into a language which uses different words for the state & action aspects of the English "think" - and there are plenty to choose from. "Over a period of time" would be much more appropriate.


Why is that important? Because down the track in this argument, "events" get conflated with "states". But I would say that there are multiple states between t0 & t1, and I might want to go on to say that an event is a change between states (seems reasonable, no?) in which case the mental event maps to a large number of physical events. 


That's important because thinking, believing & knowing are all in the domain of education, and we should be clear how we individually conceive them, and how they work. Mind/body is still a contentious problem & for educators it's more than a theoretical one.