It is not a physical organ, but conceptual and functional organ. All your thoughts, feelings, emotions and senses i.e. the bundle of perceptions are your organ of mind, which emerged from your brain.I'd like to. Please show me, where is that organ Mind? — ENOAH
We were not talking about truth here. We were talking about whether your knowledge or beliefs were rational or irrational. For that, you need to verify your knowledge or beliefs if they are not from deductive reasoning.Rationality is what delivers the truth, so there can be no question whether rationality delivers truth. It would be like trying to measure the standard metre in Paris in order to find out whether it is a metre long. — Ludwig V
Aquinas and Descartes were the people who used rational thinking to prove the existence of God. They were not the religious authorities who punished the general public based on the faiths and religious social codes.H'm that's a bit quick. What about people like Aquinas or Descartes who believed that they had rational arguments for belief in God? That's quite different from belief from blind faith. True, most people (but not all) believe their arguments were not valid. But they certainly weren't blind faith.
There are theologians who take as their starting-point the "presupposition" that the Bible is the word of God. It has something of the status of an axiom. Something posited as true, but not capable of being proved or disproved. Their theology follows by rational process. Sometimes rational thinking has irrational elements. — Ludwig V
Intelligence means knowing something, or being able to do something in coherent way. It is not same as reflecting, analyzing, criticizing and proving something, which are what rational thinking does.My problem is that I've never been able to grasp a clear meaning for the term "intelligence". So I mostly ignore it, especially in philosophy. — Ludwig V
Seeing images in your dreams and making predictions are totally different things happening in your mind. They are not the same activities. Seeing something is visual. Predicting something is imagining. There are two types of prediction. One by your hunch, and the other by inductive reasoning. Both activities involve your intention, will and inference.What it is like for you to make a prediction and to imagine things when you are awake? — Harry Hindu
I didn't combine anything at all. I just chose words to make up sentences. Anyway, it is not the same thing as seeing the images in your dreams.You just proved that you're wrong. You combined letters above, resulting in sentences. :up: — night912
So it seems that even if I believe my perceptions without any grounds, I can justify them - that is, provide reasons (grounds) for believing them - after I come to believe them. — Ludwig V
Mind craves an afterlife because the mechanism of the subject creates the illusion of continuing. I think, harsh as it is a pill to swallow, the so called subject doesn't really exist, and as for we tge body, it dies and is reborn in tge incessant present. If we want to put it into religious terms, There's God's gift to us, the eternal present, life, our fall is ignoring life and opting for knowledge and our own world that we built with it. — ENOAH
Your problem seems to stem from conflating mind and body at times, and then looking at mind and body separate entities as you go along. Constancy and coherence are lacking in your argument.The body is plainly real in every sense of the word real. You're offering that in your statement.
All of the enumerated things mind can do are what we (mind) ascribes to itself as proof of its reality 'beyond' the physical body. But these are just functions being carried out by a system of stimulus and response. Just happens the functions have evolved to act in such a richly complex and sophisticated way, with a narrative form, mechanisms like the ones we call logic, grammar, reason, etc., that the body observing these functions and responding, triggers good feelings when tge system classifies itself as "real" — ENOAH
Yes, humans have logic, grammar and reasoning, which are handy for delving into more sophisticated tasks for survival in nature and the real world. All other animals which are non-human lack the capacity, and even humans have different levels in logic, grammar and reasoning. It is just a fact, nothing to do with conceit.We are a conceited ape. The conceit is the illusion that our imaginations are special beyond their function (yes, that is impressive) but somehow as an eternal truth — ENOAH
unwittingly giving it lofty designations like spirit and soul, imbuing it not just with reality, but a higher reality, eternity; — ENOAH
I agree that we have gotten it all wrong. We have privileged the Mind (unique to humans), unwittingly giving it lofty designations like spirit and soul, imbuing it not just with reality, but a higher reality, eternity; relegating the flesh to a category shared with 'animals' as if we are superior to 'them', and worse, relegating it as the source of evil. Yet, prima facie, any animal born into this world has no 'cause' to question it's reality nor that of the natural Universe. Then why do we question reality? Because the 'we' doing the questioning is not our bodies, but this process of constructing and projecting (emerging out of our real imaginations--a thing we presumably share with primates, elephants, and sea mammals for e.g.) which has developed over generations, is transmitted with socialization, and has displaced our natures with--admittedly very functional--fictions. — ENOAH
I think this matters because I think a democracy needs to be clear about the difference between fact and fiction. A democracy must have education for rational thinking based on facts and understand what this has to do with morality. If we believe a God made us closer to angels than animals, or if we believe we have evolved along with the rest of the animals, it really matters. That is the center of our understanding of reality and decisions that must be based on reality. — Athena
600 years ago it might have been rational to believe the Bible is the word of God, there was an Eden, an angry God could and would punish people, but given what we know today, is that belief rational? Arguing the Bible is the word of God may be a rational thing to do if we have no standard for "rational" meaning a fact that can be validated. And if we believe rational means facts that can be validated then the belief that the Bible is the word of God, is not rational thinking. A definition of "rational" that treats fantasy as equal to thought based on valid facts is problematic, isn't it? — Athena
Why does it matter whether our beliefs, knowledge, actions or perceptions were rational or irrational? Is it because that is how we know that they are true - or, in the case of actions, justified? — Ludwig V
Combining image 1 and 2? doesn't make sense to me. How do you combine images? Combine something means mixing something. To mix something you must add 1 substance to the other substance, which is only possible with liquid or powder stuff. If you put down image 1 to image 2, then image 2 will be invisible blocked by the image1. What is going on here?That's basically what amalgamate means. Combining image 1 with image 2 results in an image that is neither image 1 or 2. So, the answer is obviously, yes. — night912
You were talking about the images, but suddenly now you are talking a person called someone?Someone who isn't Elon Musk with Bill Gates, Taylor Swift or Madonna — night912
I don't. Do you? Why do you want to come up with a new image?To come up with a new image. — night912
The same type of thing you experience when you make predictions, goals, solve problems, etc. Imagining is part of the process that we use to make predictions and solve problems. — Harry Hindu
Yes. I believe that too. Only the emergent mind is not real like the body is. — ENOAH
You surprise me. I thought that was what you were suggesting. It's good to know that I was wrong. — Ludwig V
If it did shut down completely you wouldn't be able to wake up to loud (and possibly dangerous) noises in the world. — Harry Hindu
That is exactly my point; there is no real "you" and "your" body is not "yours". The question dualists need to consider is why a human body wouldn't be itself without the constructions and projections we classify as a separate entity and call mind. Why is a lizard still a lizard without thought and language, but only humans have a soul? Sure, we claim that God prefers us and gave us a soul. But I think we've grown up enough to stop clinging to that. — ENOAH
What does it mean for our perception to not exist in a material level? Our perceptions and dreams can have a causal impact on the world, no different than when a errant baseball smashes a window. — Harry Hindu
I'd say, it is because of the structure of our "thinking" that we even "desire" eternity/immortality. Of course our bodies are "temporal" in their lived forms. That, to me, doesn't prohibit them from being our only "reality" — ENOAH
Could it be because body is temporal? As we all know, bodies get old, die and becomes dust. Bodies don't last too long.Why is the body not enough. I don't approach these things religiously (as in conventional religions), but even if I did, — ENOAH
but 'soul/spirit' are misunderstandings: illusions within the illusion, about what the illusion might be. — ENOAH
They're the sort of thing that we might find ourselves experiencing, especially if you lead a life that often experiences new places. One would expect to dream of experiencing yet more new things. — noAxioms
Funny, but I have little recall of explicit dreams of sounds. — noAxioms
We apply those terms to the nonphysical, 'mental' processes which ultimately cause/include the illusion of being, although they are actually fleeting and empty processes. — ENOAH
Can't you see Madonna in the eyes and a nose strikingly similar to that of Taylor Swift?
Yes, we are both perceiving an object that doesn't exist. — RussellA
I would only consider the third to be mind (a thing unique to humans). The first two, shared with animals, forms organic consciousness and provides the organic infrastructure for human mind. Within the latter you might find stages/states but we just make those up as part of the processes of its operating. — ENOAH
But my point is that if I dream about the past, this is not necessarily leading me to a deception. So, we have to be careful of using these frames as a notion of reality. — javi2541997
One explanation for this is that the whole image in a dream is not an exact image from memory. That image could be amalgamation of several images. For example, you subconsciously take different parts of a face from several people that you know and blend it all up, resulting with a new face that you've never seen before. — night912
It is not desirable to be 100% formal logic because what is so may not be so tomorrow and our thinking needs to be flexible. We need to be creative. We need to think about what is and what can be. Humans have taken creative thinking and created their own reality. This is beyond what animals do. — Athena
Didn't he say, it is the constant conjunction of the one event followed by the other, which gives us the idea of cause effect?Hume's criticism was aimed at the scholastic concept of some power, hidden from our experience, was what enable to first billiard ball to make the second billiard ball move. — Ludwig V
Really? Could you come up with an example? Much of the math, science and logic are based on formulating proofs from the valid premises based on the rational ground, and we do accept them when it makes sense.Asking what rational ground we have for that is asking for a rational ground for relying on rational grounds. — Ludwig V
I left out the conditional "if formal logic is your standard of rationality" and qualified "the whole of humanity" to "almost the whole of humanity". — Ludwig V
Dreams are a memory of past visual events being sorted through. A person born blind doesn't visually dream, because they have no memory of anything visual.
And by blind, I mean completely blind, not merely legally blind. — Philosophim
From my pespective:
1. They are the same, there is no real duality. We have used soul and spirit to identify that which we have misperceived to be a being distinct from the body. — ENOAH
however, to interpret "demonstrative" as meaning conclusive and hence logical, in the strict sense. This is usually taken to mean sound by the standards of formal logic. Which makes almost the whole of humanity irrational. — Ludwig V
Well, he didn't say exactly that. But the point that is usually made is that inductive reasoning can be wrong - which doesn't necessarily mean that it is irrational. Hume made two points in the light of his argument. The first was that we are going to go on using it even though it may be wrong and the second was that it was as much of a proof as you will ever get of how the world works, and even ends up (in the section on miracles) calling it a "proof, whole and entire". — Ludwig V