Of course, the other way to write a dictionary is on historical principles; as an account of the development of the language over time.

But it's a big dictionary. — Banno

Cool. Nietzsche was an expert on that btw.

Then there is the mother, or indeed any close carer, of a baby: she recognises a something in the baby that is very particularly that new human being, a unique identity in the movements and eyes and responses and 'personality' that soon merges: if this were true, the self would be no myth, at least, not to others. 'Why is he acting that way?' 'He's just being himself.' — mcdoodle

That's a good mother who realizes the baby isn't part of her. She's willing to let it be free. That's healthy. :up:

The self only is to the degree that it opposes the Anyone. — plaque flag

I am what's left when you subtract out the Other, yes.

Some member of the chorus has to step forward and become the doomed hero. — plaque flag

Right. Antigone hangs herself. The point is that this devotion to the higher good (higher than society's understanding, anyway) is worth dying for.

The Self appears along with such fierce devotion to the Good that the Self can be sacrificed for it.

I had an old American Heritage Dictionary. In the the front there were two essays giving opposing views of what a dictionary is.

The first was by William F. Buckle and he said dictionaries set out proper language use. He emphasized that they get credentialed experts to write dictionaries so that the poor stupid people will know how to comport themselves properly.

The other essay said a dictionary is where words go to die. They don't tell you how words are used now, but rather how they were used last year. It's the poor crazy street people making up new words out of their schizophrenic day dreams who give life to language.

Those are paraphrases, anyway. Thoughts?

Perhaps the idea of a ‘collective psyche’ or ‘hive mind’ needs to be shelved along with that of an autonomous, identical self. In their place we can substitute the perspectival consistency of a point of view. Point of view is itself a multiplicity of selves that are produced within the collective called a person. The collective selves forming the changing person participate in the social group via the vantage of an ongoing perspective. — Joshs

I'm not sure what this means. A point of view without a viewer makes no sense.

Wow! That quote says it all!

if not, then there is more to consciousness than "phenomenal consciousness". — Banno

There's definitely more.

It came from ideas about the order of the universe. Women were supposed to be lower down on the cosmic scale, so the act of penetration was a symbol of domination. If a man experienced penetration, it was seen as a perverse rejection of the divine order, so a kind of blasphemy.

Rorty jokes about us always finding Hegel ahead of us on the path. — plaque flag

Really? It's true, Hegel's mind was gigantic. Nobody knows how he got it all crammed into that little skull.

It is good to have Josh-whisperer. Sometimes I think I also speak that dialect, but maybe not always. — plaque flag

Just riff on Hegel and it's usually right.

You’ve got it in you, I can tell. — Jamal

Oh good grief.

We're not here to read your genius posts. We want you to read ours.

There is really no reason to fracture the body in any abstract way, or include some sort of intermediary, in order to better understand the body's mysteries, especially when all conscious humans are by-and-large whole. — NOS4A2

I think most parties in philosophy of mind would agree with you. They really are respectable philosophers, not shaman shaking rattles the way we on this forum depict them.

The standard approach right now is non-reductive physicalism. And that's basically because reduction just doesn't work.

The p-zombie argument is an answer to functionalism, which is a rare, now defunct approach. The point of that argument is a subtle, logical wedge into functionalism. If you weren't an advocate of functionalism to begin with, you don't need to worry over p-zombies.

Indirect realism is part of our philosophical heritage. It comes from the days that originally defined the word "physical" for us. That word was originally a medical term that distinguished physical ailments from mental ones. Don't be offended by the way they categorized things. They were doing the best they could.

I speak Joshese. He's saying that Becoming is primal. Being presupposes the Spacious Now, and so the Grand Dramatic Arc from the Eternal Past to the Eternal Future.

Who says we don't have them. The argument is about the kind of thing they are, not whether they are. It's about whether 'experience' describes a set of mental events, an epiphenomena of human fancy, or a type of thing the relationship to which neurons have needs explaining. — Isaac

Chalmers has no particular viewpoint on the constitution of experience. I have to explain this every time his name comes up. :confused:

No one is saying there's no subject matter there at all.

We 'talk about' life-force, luck, auras, God, unicorns, gut instinct, premonition... Doesn't mean they all default exist in any particular form. — Isaac

Cool. So you've accepted that experience exists in some form. You've taken up the burden of explaining what we refer to when we speak of it. I'll call yours the Unicorn Theory of Phenomenal Consciousness. :strong:

Chalmers (if fdrake's interpretation is correct) wants his inability to 'conceive' a bridge to have metaphysical implications. — Isaac

If that's true, fdrake is wrong. The conceivability of the p-zombie just shifts the burden to functionalists to explain why we talk about having experiences when we don't actually have them.

Please review the context. I think you'll see in this case that Russell is just being difficult. <smile> — plaque flag

You might be right.

Just pretend it's not there. Like I said, close enough. — plaque flag

If you have to advise people not to use certain words, that's a bad sign. There's something you don't want to face.

I just noticed you have a transformer symbol as your avatar. Electronic engineer?

RussellA perceives direct realists only indirectly: the direct realist in his head does not resemble the direct realist as it is in the external world. — Jamal

Nice.

If DeSantis were elected, he'd be the first Italian American to reach that office. Why can't he show some respect for the principle of tolerance that makes his candidacy possible?

Oh dear. You’re annoyed at the arrogance. Excuse me while I cringe. I’m annoyed at the fence-sitting and tone-policing. At any rate, yours or mine feelings on the matter help nothing. — NOS4A2

I didn't mean to police your tone. I feel I benefit from discussing things with you. Your challenges are almost always worthwhile to me.

“Bodily” pertains to the body, you know, the structure and being of a human organism? — NOS4A2

Yes. I had to study that sucker when I was in school. Totally apropos of nothing, I was driving along a highway during a time when I was studying the function of the heart. All at once, an image (of sorts) appeared out of my thoughts: I was seeing the whole operation of the heart at once. It blew my mind and I think it must have been a result of pondering the various aspects separately, knowing that they all fit together. It's called integration, one of those amazing features of consciousness that we would love to understand. We're just not quite there yet.

We’re not brains, Frank. If you don’t want to include the ear in the act of hearing then the fence-sitting charade can no longer be maintained. — NOS4A2

I definitely include the ear in the act of hearing. As I said, I just don't know what the brain is doing to create the experience of hearing. Nobody does right now. It's not a fence-sitting charade. It's just recognizing our present limitations.

By the way, you should think about getting into Forex trading. Spend about three months studying it, about three months on a demo account, then start with a real account trading small amounts until you get better at it. If you want some youtube videos that explain more, I'll pm them to you.

We do know that no sound called a voice is moving the membrane, moving the bones, converting mechanical vibration into electrical signals as you just tried to illustrate, so don’t go spouting off like you don’t know. Yet all of these are involved in the activity of hearing. — NOS4A2

I specified that we don't know how the brain produces the experience of sound (assuming that it does). We're at the bootstrapping stage of theorizing about it. Some reach out to quantum theory, others reveal the magnitude of the problem by just trying to lay out the basic requirements for a theory.

So yes, we know what the ear is doing. A microphone is doing pretty much the same thing as an ear. Of course we know what our recording equipment is doing with those electrical signals. We don't know what the brain is doing with those produced by the ear though.

The point is for both sides: back down from assuming we have knowledge about how experience is produced. But I supposed I'm particularly annoyed by the arrogance of those who lay out the word "bodily" like that's supposed to be describing something.

Like kale, definitions might have a place on the plate, with the right accompaniments and in the right quantity. — Banno

:up:

Didn't mean to offend or be rude or evasive somehow — plaque flag

Not at all! I didn't take it that way. :grin:

But I think we should ignore the internals altogether. Forget pineal gremlins and immaterial private showings. Let's look at how in fact we treat claims for which selves are responsible. Let's look directly at what philosophy itself is doing and what that doing requires or implies. — plaque flag

Ignore the question of the nature of experience if it doesn't interest you.

If the biological act of hearing involves using the body to perceive physical sound waves, it cannot be said that a man is hearing voices in his head, because there is neither the biological activity nor the sound waves required to hear such sounds. The biological activity of hearing and the biological act of hallucinating are two distinct biological activities. — NOS4A2

The field of a sound wave is air. Specifically, what's waving is air pressure. Those waves stimulate membranes and bones in the ear which convey the vibration to hairs in the ear which change the mechanical vibration into electrical signals that travel into the brain.

This kind of conversion of energy is well known to us. It's very clear that a transformation has taken place. Since it's all pretty predictable, it would appear that the electrical signals "represent" the audio waves.

What we don't know is what the brain is doing with those electrical signals to produce the experience of hearing sound. We are at the very beginning stages of even imagining how to theorize about it.

So the moral of the story is there for all sides of the issue: we don't know how it works, so leave off spouting off as if you know. And I will comment, that just about everybody contributing to this thread has done that at one time or another.

All true. There are two egos. One appears in reflection only. As far as it has responsibility, this means it's being identified as a causal agent. It can also be helpless, so it's not just a matter of having power.
— frank

We can maybe call this the empirical-normative ego. — plaque flag

OK. But clearly the normativity is partly a priori (as per the Transcendental Aesthetic).

In its radical purity, I think it's best called just being and not consciousness. We realize upon reflection, dragging in the heavy machinery of public concepts, — plaque flag

Yep.

In principle, informal proofs can be translated into extremely pedantic formal proofs and checked by computers. So it's possible to think of all as a generalization of chess. I'm a big fan of Chaitin's Metamath. A FAS (formal axiomatic system) is an idealized program (one could create concrete examples in many ways) that cranks out all theorems implied by a set of axioms but enumerating all finite strings of symbols and seeing if they are proofs. It's all 'dead' symbol crunching. — plaque flag

Ok. Math as we know it originated in tandem with the concept of money. Everywhere the idea of money as value in the abstract went, the development of math soon followed. Zero was originally part of the technology of Babylonian accounting.

Nothing dead about trade. (I'm all into Forex trading at the moment, so I'm seeing everything through that lens).

It's about roles rather than 'positive elements.' And that gets us back to equivalence classes of tools that pretty much do the same thing. — plaque flag

Start with what you can't do without, then ponder the ontology. Otherwise the tail is wagging the dog.

By and large phil-of-math people have recognized that we can't do without abstract objects due to some basic logic. Now if you want to dispense with logic, that's another matter.

To me Brandom is the beautiful collision of AP clarity and continental insight. FWIW, an equivalence class is still abstract in some sense, what exactly do we mean by 'abstract' ? — plaque flag

The typical abstract object are things like numbers and sets. They aren't mental objects because one can be wrong about them, but they aren't physical like golf balls. They're a sort of third category.

I think this is where Hegel and Heidegger pour into Brandom who puts their ideas in a more AP and less freaky vocabulary. A person is like something like a dance rather than a pair of legs — plaque flag

I've long thought of a person as a kind of music with a range of frequencies and recurring themes which harmonize or jangle. :starstruck:

. 'I' am held accountable for what I've said and done. An 'I' is the kind of the thing that ought not disagree with itself. This also applies to claims. I can't say I love animals and kick dogs for pissing in my yard. — plaque flag

All true. There are two egos. One appears in reflection only. As far as it has responsibility, this means it's being identified as a causal agent. It can also be helpless, so it's not just a matter of having power.

The other is that thing Kierkegaard talked about: quality of being. The here and now. The view out the windows of your eyeballs. The two egos are inextricable. They constantly play off of each other. That's a scenario one could ponder anyway.

Have you considered equivalence classes ? You seem to be using the container metaphor. Different wrappers can contain the same candy. We can also think of different expressions having the roughly the same use. For this reason they have the same [enough] meaning / use. — plaque flag

Sounds like another thread. I think it would end up being a collision of analytical philosophy and continental. For AP, a sentence is an abstract object. You and I can be thinking of the same sentence. We aren't here worried about what the sentence means. The sentence itself is just an entity that adheres to certain rules. What you do with the entity is another issue. In other words, analytical philosophy will analyze (pull apart) the pieces of living language use and lay them out on a table. If that burns your brain to accept that we can do that, well, we wouldn't bother starting that thread. Also if you're just not interested in AP, that would be another reason. I got into AP specifically wanting to know how they look at things as opposed to kicking over their house of cards.

I think there's value in that approach. We can talk about the tree as a unity of shapes, as atoms, as a piece of the ecosystem. The key though is that we are still talking about the tree, 'our' tree, the tree we can be wrong or right about.

I agree that 'it's all ideas out there' in the sense that 'language is the house of being,' that the lifeworld's structure is largely linguistic. I don't think it's something we can peel off, though we sometimes ignore a few layers of sediment for this or that purpose. — plaque flag

So our perspectives are pretty close. What do you do about the fact that you can't really exit this "house of being" in order to photograph it and talk about it? It's an uroboros type situation, isn't it? And that was the trajectory of the OP.

I think we are finding common ground and learning to interpret one another. — plaque flag

I think so, yep.

The 'I' that sees the tree exists within the space of reasons. — plaque flag

Apparently, so is the tree. The epiphany comes from looking at the tree the way an artist would. Just see the shapes and shades. When you realize that "tree" is an idea that organizes the data in the visual field in certain way, you begin to see that it's all ideas out there, this contrasted with that, foreground against background.

This isn't opposed to realism, it's just a particular way of understanding what it is that we call reality. It's a kind of projection, although that isn't right either. That's just a way of putting it phenomenologically.

BTW, I like talking to you because you're so poetic, it invites the same. Somethings come out better as poetry than as a recipe. See? More poetry.

What's the difference?

Any views on this, or am I full of shit? — Tom Storm

I saw a documentary on atheism once. The documentarian said a world without religion seemed "thin" to him. He was an atheist, but he appreciated the full bodied mythology, art, and community associated with religion.

It wasn't a reason to believe. Maybe more of a reason for tolerance.

Sweet!

What program are you using?

If someone asks for a definition and/or questions how a term is being used then it is on the author to attempt to offer a different line to bring the reader in or for them to judge the worth of bothering to do so — I like sushi

I think this might be one reason we draw philosophers into a discussion. If I mention "reference" and then nod toward Quine, I'm giving you the basis for my use of the term.

The problem is, if you help me out in this way, I'm prone to ignoring you and creating a wicker man version of you to whom I address all my thoughts on this subject because I've been thinking about it for a long time and I want to put it into words and I hope you don't mind if I'm not even giving any hint that I notice that there's a real person behind your posts.

Bold of you to assume that they're the same sentence — Moliere

I'm just a super bold guy, you know. :strong:

For the most part language is a collection of abstract objects. The bodily part is utterances (sounds and marks, reading and listening). But words and sentences are something else. The fact that the same sentence can be expressed by multiple utterances (a text engraved in stone vs a professor's quotation,) shows this.

I'm just saying that if your goal was to stick to a materialist base, using language as an organ won't work. You'll have to adopt a behaviorist, inscrutable reference, sort of outlook.

An adolescent style of rigidity and dogmatism. Thought everything fit nicely into a flowchart. Constantly uncharitable, frequently insulting. — Mikie

:chin: