Hey I've got Siri, I use her all the time, for appointments, reminders, getting about. It's amazing how far this has come and how quickly. — Wayfarer

I notice you smuggled in this awful confession without fanfare. :)

But do you agree that emotions are the only way we can perceive value in our lives? That's where my theory was getting at. I'm also not sure why putting emotions into positive and negative categories would be the wrong thing to do. When we have what we normally call a positive emotion, this emotion feels entirely distinct from what we call a negative emotion. To make this distinction, we say that emotions are either positive or negative. You could also have a mix of positive and negative emotions as well which is what I've pointed out earlier. — TranscendedRealms

Well, I think a more complicated model like the one praxis quotes for 'affect' is clearly better than a simple positive/negative one. But such models are static, and emotion is a dynamic force, for instance feedback including feedback generated by emotion is integral to the whole shebang. In this dynamism what we call 'emotion' is surely interacting with 'rationality' or whatever you want to call our regular thinking. In valuing love for a fellow human being, for instance, I remind myself rationally that this is a long-term feeling and commitment I have, every time I'm tempted to disagree about a short-term problem because of an emotional reaction. Human beings are constantly double-checking themselves, so I don't see how you can isolate 'emotion' as the sole source of value.

The question then for the study of emotionality would be what is the fewest such dichotomies that you could get away with in modelling the brain's architecture. — apokrisis

I did a lot of reading about emotions earlier in the year. I was particularly struck by work done by Roddy Cowie et al for the HUMAINE project - trying to create a basis for modelling emotion in relation to computing and artificial intelligence. They began their project thinking they could get a framework of ideas up and running quickly and then get on with the detail: they ended up debating the framework very long and hard. Or so I understand it.

Broadly the findings were that emotionality colours - at the least - all of human lives - but that the usual terminology and categorisation (from psychology and philosophy) is not easy to match to open-minded empirical findings, i.e. it's probably wrong or partial. Our old models tend to be static when emotion is dynamic, depend on lists of categories when it seems these categories may be 'landmarks' in our emotional life rather than good moment-to-moment descriptions, and over-assume that one person's fear/desire/hope is like another's.

Well, as I said, I just don't see emotions this way, I think they are too complex to be divided into positive and non-positive. You state these ideas as if they were facts but they are just a certain way of describing how we are, and indeed you use them in your last sentence to provide a supposed count of positivity/negativity. I don't do counting like that, although I can see it's useful if you want to compare people for some reason and think you can justify the counting-mechanism.

Emotions are certainly a major source of valuation and judgment, I agree. .

I'm not sure what you're not understanding. If a person judges himself as having the ability to see when he is blind, then he would still not be able to see. In that same sense, if we judge our lives as having good value to us in the absence of our positive emotions, then we would still not be able to actually see that good value. — TranscendedRealms

OK. Personally I find this division between positive and negative emotions hopelessly simplistic. It's handy when psychologists want to do some counting up scores for experiments, but it doesn't mean much to me. Emotionality is nearly always a complex of more than one 'emotion': in grief I am angry, in despair I often keep hopeful, and so on. To place them on some binary scale feels trivial. We have complex ways with words that enable us to 'see' what we are talking about, though we may nto be able to simplify these complexities enough to satisfy people who want to judge psychology through multiple-choice questions.

Out of this welter of emotions we arrive at value. There is an interplay between our feelings and our thoughts, and hey presto: here I am, judging how to act, or how I would like to ask others to act. I appeal to their values, I advance my own values.

No value judgment can allow this blind person to see just as how no value judgment or mindset can allow us to see the values in our lives. — TranscendedRealms

Could you unravel the negatives in this sentence? I don't understand it.

Short of Platonism, are these all the options a non-theist has at his disposal? — Modern Conviviality

The approaches you don't appear to be exploring are (a) virtue ethics, a process of learning good action grounded in the interplay between your reason and experiences with the social practices you find around you; and (b) a grounding of ethics in how we are with and for each other, the I-you relation, which many Continental philosophers are into, but which has been propelled into the analytic way of doing ethics by Stephen Darwall's 'The Second Person Standpoint'.

Anyone read the Wasp Factory? Gender politics meets Lord of the Flies. With hilarious results, not. — unenlightened

Yes. I remember it as deeply creepy :)

I would argue that the degree of 'observer bias' varies in direct proportion to the extent to which the subject matter falls under the heading 'social sciences'. In other words, it is less likely to occur in physics, chemistry, astronomy, and more likely to occur in psychology, sociology or political science. — Wayfarer

My caveat to this would be that much reputable social science understands this in advance and the researcher(s) outline their biasses upfront. You can't study political views and not have a political position. Which would be a good reason for remembering economics is really political economy.

As against this, medics aren't always clear about their own biasses. Andrew Carr at Oxford has been doing interesting work over the last few years, for instance, about the placebo effect of surgery. Much minor surgery - e.g. knee arthroscopy, gastric balloons - seems to have no net benefit over the placebo effect.

A good example of the difference between a narrative and a fact. The fact is that the US authorities divulged the name of the suspect mere 3 hours after the explosion. — Mariner

I don't think this is established as a fact. Do you have a mainstream news source that accepts the timing cited in your conspiracy theorists' blog? It doesn't look like it's been fact-checked, and the report it quotes isn't time-stamped online.

It is at least quite strange (to mention one of the cases listed in the link) that the US authorities knew the Manchester guy before the UK authorities did. — Mariner

That isn't the general view. The general view is that the US authorities published the name first, but that they obtained the name from UK sources who didn't want it published.

The women on TV pretend they are disgusted by what Trump does to them. But secretly, they all desire it, and wish they were the ones. — Agustino

1. Thanks for the reminder of the context. I still think it's profoundly sexist: you claim to know what women secretly want, and you don't. I think you were sexist towards Mongrel, and to and about TimeLine.

2. Responding to a thread about a complaint with a long diatribe as you did at the beginning of this thread was rude and bullying. It's a rhetorical way of saying, If you complain about me, I'll harangue you in return.

3. To all: this forum has very few women in it. Sometimes it seems to me appallingly like a men's club. Some of the remarks on this thread remind me of blokes either ganging up together, or finding nits to pick when they know in their hearts that the smell of a place is masculine. We should be welcoming to all, and focus on philosophy, not personalities.

As I read your last post I got this picture of a problem (for lack of a better word) appearing over and over in different guises. It's like a pendulum swinging or oceanic tides... — Mongrel

Me too, although I'm not sure I'd come to the same conclusion as you :) One thing about the modern era is the idea of 'fact'. I remember when I was just an innocent lamb in the old forum, having a disagreement with Banno about whether one could time-travel to the 16th century and still more-or-less understand one another, or if changes in language and norms would make mutual understanding impossible. To me something hinged on 'fact', invented in the 16th century and not having an ancient equivalent. Chaucer's entire oeuvre didn't know of facts!

I wonder if 'mind' is in the same sort of category :)

Why would having an opinion not be right or wrong? — BlueBanana

Because it's actions not opinions that are right or wrong? Tough experience makes many a person something of a misanthrope. I don't see why I should hold it against them. I'm not a pedophile, for instance, but I don't think one can blame someone for their pedophilic thoughts: thoughts come to us from who-knows-where? Such people are to blame if they act on those thoughts, not for having them.

So do you agree that Descartes' dualism was in some ways a response to the scientific revolution? The rise of physicalism brought the concept of mind into sharp relief? — Mongrel

I think 'physicalism' is the wrong word here. I'm sure that 'dualism' was in some ways a response to the scientific revolution. But as I understand it in the 17th Century the belief in the immateriality of the soul was no different from how it had been for many centuries (with views differing about whether the soul survived the human death). Robert Boyle, for instance, only a bit younger than Descartes, was confident of an immaterial realm.

My understanding of physicalism is that it denies the immaterial, and takes non-physical explanations (which tend to be called 'mental', though I'm never clear where the 'social' fits in either, let alone the 'aesthetic' or 'spiritual' or other ways of describing types of discourse) to supervene on the physical. Sorry if this is all obvious to you.

I've just been reading a book by Emmanuel Levinas, and his mid-20th century version of this cleavage is that the scientific/mathematical view is 'totalising', in that it aims for a completion that it believes to be reachable (very like the Adorno/Horkheimer postwar view), whereas the phenomenological view, the I-view, is 'infinite', unbounded and unbound-able by the totalising view, characterised instead by an excess over mathematizing explanation.

Actually I don't understand why some of the qualitative methods of social science can't be used to tackle scientifically supposedly intractable areas like 'consciousness'. A mix of objectivising data with diaries, focus groups and spontaneous remarks by individuals about how things happen from the 'I' - 'my' point of view seems to me perfectly valid, it's how we better understand lots of social phenomena. But the Chalmers' school have a natural-type science in their sights, which feels like a fruitless exercise, although the apo semiotics model is an interesting one. But this is wandering off into another thread :)

It is via language acquisition that we learn what to call things, how to behave in certain situations, what's considered acceptable and/or unacceptable, what to aspire towards and what to avoid, how to get what we want, etc. — creativesoul

It's not clear to me what roles mood and the emotional life, or indeed physical appetites, have in your formulation. Language-less infants have already learnt 'how to behave in certain situations' and may well have laid the foundations for all sorts of other aspects of how they'll be, haven't they? Emotions, educated by life and reason and other emotions,, still guide me in much of what I do or don't do.

At the end of his paper on Language and Nature, Chomsky grumbles about dualistic language, used to study language and mind using 'non-naturalistic assumptions'. Perhaps, he says, 'our common sense picture of the world is profoundly dualistic, ineradicably...If so, and if metaphysical dualism has been undermined, what is left is a kind of methodological dualism, an illegitimate residue of common sense that should not be allowed to hamper efforts to gain understanding into what kind of creatures we are.'

For myself I see this as in its turn probably mistaken. A way of speaking, writing, thinking is likely not going to come in which such dualism is magicked away. We are pluralist creatures and we like it that way.

So I don't see Chomsky as providing a 'solution' except by trying to ride roughshod over ways of thinking and speaking that are indeed ineradicable.

They are instead the product of a linguistic cultural construct - social-semiosis.

And that is all right. It is the same naturalistic process - sign-processing - happening in a new medium on a higher scale. — apokrisis

Thanks apo. I haven't embraced this idea but I do feel I've understood it better.

Well my point was consciousness is a confused folk psychology term. And that is why neuroscience tries to sharpen things by tieing what we sort of mean in the standard socially constructed folk view to constructs, like attention and habit, which are defensible as the objects of laboratory research. When we talk about attention, there is an information processing argument to explain what that is and identify it with actual brain architecture.

That is why it is better, in my opinion. — apokrisis

The puzzle for me is that in talking in these terms you seem to be adopting the information-processing approach you criticised earlier when I mentioned students of Pylyshyn proposing to dissociate attention from consciousness. Aren't you removing the phenomenological question and therefore the basic issue arising from the idea of 'consciousness'? Attention and habit are characteristics we seem to share with many other animals; consciousness is something we don't seem to share with all that many of them (as I would say), if any (as some say).

I was thinking about placebo studies, which I read a lot about earlier in the year. However cunning our studies of placebos, we can't scientifically get beyond something irreducible about 'belief' and 'expectation'. The I-viewpoint is not, as yet at any rate, susceptible to an 'information-processing argument'.

Are you interested in MacIntyre? I read 'After Virtue' earlier in the summer and jamalrob suggested it might be a good joint reading project.

My own view about the case is that 'honesty' is not a virtue, but that its virtuousness is for some reason a cornerstone of the MacIntyre project. So being honest about adultery for the sake of the marriage strikes me as one of those passing fads of pseudo-virtue, not the real thing. When I was young I remember enjoying the rich sensuality of John Updike's tales of American middle-class sexual adventures, and I have a feeling that's the social milieu out of which such a pseudo-virtue would arise.

Of course MacIntyre has more profound arguments, which begin from a belief that it's natural to tell the truth:

To assert is always and inescapably to assert as true, and learning that truth is required from us in assertions is therefore inseparable from learning what it is to assert...

Note that the rule enjoining truth-telling in speech-acts of assertion is constitutive of language-use as such. It is a rule therefore upon which all interpreters of language-use by others cannot but rely. — MacIntyre

He moves from this however to an account of others' views, from Mill and Kant, and of various discussions of lying, to arrive at truth-telling as a virtue. To me this is downright odd: it may be natural or it may be one of the hard-won virtues, but surely not both.

My feeling is that honesty with oneself is constitutive of how one thinks. To distrust one's own words to oneself is a sign of disorder. But (dis)honesty towards others is a learned practice, and in many cases lying is greatly to be recommended.

See, I am not like you. I would rather be rejected by the whole world and society and hold fast unto truth, rather than accept untruth in order to be well liked, respected, with many friends, etc.

...Why can't we proclaim 'one truth faith'? — Agustino

In a philosophy forum I look to argument, not proclamation. Proclamation is for propagandists, and belongs elsewhere than here. I also look for mutual respect among people who accept each other as intellectual equals, whatever our differences.

I don't think I could talk about that without going off on some weird, pointless tangent. How do you think about it? — Mongrel

No, I'd be tangential too :)

You lost me with your claim that attention and consciousness, habit and non-conscious, cannot be related. Just too contrary. — apokrisis

Oh, I only said that they do not correlate, with my intended meaning being, they cannot be correlated without substantial exceptions - I didn't mean that they 'cannot be related' at all, that would be silly. Habit is often conscious, and attention is sometimes unconscious and certainly is often ascribed to creatures whom we don't normally call 'conscious' : that's my point.

the coolness of post-structuralism — Mongrel

I'm grateful to un for starting this thread, it has at the very least sent me back to a book on my shelves, 'The social construction of what?' by Ian Hacking. Hacking dislikes on the whole the language of social constructionism but he has great sympathy for many of the issues raised by the people who use such terminology.

One phrase he conjures up in talking about 'science wars' - between the Weinbergs and the Kuhns, say - is that those of a (natural) scientific cast of mind usually believe in 'inherent-structurism'. In the natural sciences, that is to say, we have arrived at something like the facts about how the world is put together, which has an inherent structure. So we may debate the 'construction' of the idea of quarks as Pickering did, say, but all the same, it turns out that quarks are there, performing spins and so forth, even if we may remain 'nominalist' about them. And, in Nelson Goodman terminology 'irrealist' about worlds, a word I've always liked because it means you can tick a box that few other people even notice is there in realism vs idealism surveys.

How does your version of post-structuralism deal with quarky worlds and inherent structures in natural science?

Have you read anything about how music and language are linked? — Mongrel

Yes I have, although at the moment to be frank I've become more interested in how language and action are linked: how spoken language is integrated into how we act with each other. But I could easily be diverted back into music at a moment's notice :)

But when your bridge/river collapses, who you going to call - a social engineer, or a structural engineer? — unenlightened

Who y'gonna call? Structure-busters.

I think I may be in a bit of a frivolous mood at the moment.

What would you count as evidence for and against misanthropy? — Andrew4Handel

How can misanthropy, a dis-like, be right or wrong? 'Subject to evidence'? People will like or dislike as they find themselves in the world through their experiences. It doesn't seem to me an ethical matter.

Is a river a social construct? — Mongrel

I'm surprised an Australian hasn't butted in. I understand that in Australia 'a river' is a slightly different thing from a Eurocentric 'river' (see this article) since Aussie rivers may be ephemeral things.

Otherwise, I have a feeling that slithy toves are gimbling in the wabes of this thread at the moment. I wonder how the borogroves are?

One question I would have is about your use of 'personality', a something which to me has the same sort of existence as 'soul': I hear others speak of it, it seems to make sense to say it sometimes, but I wouldn't like to say it 'exists'. Where does someone's 'personality' reside?

Otherwise, I doubt there is anything of me that will survive after death except others' memories of me, I love some soul music, I believe a small number of people I know have good souls, and one of my favourite poems bids 'And so good morrow to our waking souls!' But perhaps this is inadequate: I've just decided that it doesn't matter to me whether or not the soul is an 'entity' of some kind. I'll speak of it sometimes, willy-nilly, while worrying about something else, and accept it on the terms offered when others speak of the soul to me.

Thanks for the longer explanation, apo. I think then that what's puzzling is your paradigm:

A better neuroscientific division than conscious vs unconscious is attentional vs habitual. And in humans, both would have then have the extra feature of being linguistically structured. — apokrisis

I don't understand how this fits with your explanation of your holistic position. Put simply, attention does not correlate with consciousness, and habit does not correlate with non-consciousness, so how does attention/habit help us understand conscious/non-conscious? You seem to have pressed for a more mechanical metaphor than the information-processors Montemayor/Haladjian. I don't grasp how spinning semiotics into the mix makes your approach more respectful of the phenomenological than theirs.

Attention is then where things get escalated because more thought and focus is needed. — apokrisis

I've been away for a couple of weeks and am catching up with threads. I just wanted to mention that there is a body of scientific and philosophical opinion that attention and consciousness overlap, but are clearly dissociated. My best-known source is the 2015 book by Montemayor and Haladjian, Consciousness, Attention and Conscious Attention. Their arguments derive from the evolution of different forms of attention, the earliest forms being prior to any form of 'consciousness'. (They also wrote a sequence of articles in Psychology Today at the time)

Those who defend the view that attention is identical with consciousness must either say that any animal capable of navigating and selecting features from the environment is conscious, or claim that these basic forms of information processing do not deserve the name 'attention'. Because of the evolutionary considerations we are using as theoretical background, as well as the broad consensus that these basic forms of attention are empirically confirmed, we find both options highly problematic. — Montemayor and Haladjian

The missing man in the second Stalin picture is Nikolai Yezhov. The first phase of the Great Purge of the 30's was named after Yezhov, but he fell from grace and was shot in 1940. The writer Isaak Babel had an affair with Yezhov's wife Yevgenia, and sadly this meant Babel was arrested in '39, and eventually shot after a brief secret trial.

Comment and discussion welcome. — tim wood

If you brought up a group of infants to always wear a virtual reality headset, I wonder how they would understand reality. (There might be a Mary's room question lurking in here: what happens when little Ocula and Oculus first have the headset removed?)

And even if it does, it does not follow that the world has a cause; the wold is not in the world. — Banno

Just to mention, here in Yorkshire there are Yorkshire Wolds, which are in the world :)

Look forward to hearing your insights. — ThinkingMatt

One of my favourite campaigning songs, 'Bread and roses', was written early in the 20th century for striking women to sing. The physical is necessary but not sufficient to provide meaning:

Our lives shall not be sweetened
From birth until life closes
Hearts starve as well as bodies
Give us bread, but give us roses...

Zeno walks halfway into a bar. — Michael

:)

Those who subscribe to 'natural law' ethics believe that norms aren't simply a matter of convention but are real independently of convention. Social convention then is supposed to mirror or embody the natural law. I believe Thomism is an example. — Wayfarer

Thanks Wayfarer. I suppose the Quine argument is a secondary or tertiary derivative of this: that norms will eventually be traceable back to a naturalistic explanation. In a sense everything living has norms: this is what we eat, these are my kind of fellow-creatures, this is the kind of place I nest in.

Then we can try to trace norms back to the thread I missed on holiday, started by un: what is a 'social construct' and what is just naturally 'there'? (Of course 'natural' is a construct in itself, this is a hermeneutic circle)

I was just at my old gits' philosophy group today talking about Peter Singer, and talk turned, as it does, to cannibalism. There's an interesting norm: the cannibalism of others was often exaggerated to justify calling them 'savages'. I gather Henry Salt said humans are cannibals who only refuse to eat the noblest meat of all (or something like that).

However, a more vague fear is the fear of eternity. Levinas sort of touches upon this, the inability to shut off, to sleep, to not have to bear the burdens of existing and being. — schopenhauer1

Levinas also touches on enjoyment, on jouissance, being primary, before all this thinking. What of this aspect of his views?

I'm interested in the absence of sex/gender in your musings about this topic. It doesn't require a psychoanalyst to wonder whether there isn't something about *mothers*, rather than people in general, that you're implicitly addressing. The abstractions you talk in seem to be the ways an academic could-be-father would think about such a topic. What of the could-be-mother's body and what the body's moods and tempers and temperaments tell a woman?

I'm a fairly old man, beyond fatherhood now, and never fathered children. Even this male body of mine sometimes feels a great surge of parentness, though, towards children, and grief towards the children I might have had. These are profound feelings that seem to be treated as somehow insignificant in your account.

Thanks.

The idea (as I understand it) is that if convention-following explained normativity, then we should be able to escape normative language. We can't escape it, therefore: we must accept genuine normativity (whether we have an explanation for it or not). — Mongrel

I am very interested in norms. But I haven't understood the basic notion. In what way is 'convention' different from 'normativity', and therefore potentially an 'explanation' of it, rather than just a redescription?

I'm finding it hard to put my finger on what you mean now, talking about:

the problem with the common use, not a specialized use of the term — Reformed Nihilist

...when I was responding to your concern about:

the word as it has more recently come to be used (to refer to something non-specific, non-religious, inherently mysterious, and conceptually ill defined), at least, or perhaps especially, in the context of philosophy, as it leads to equivocation. — Reformed Nihilist

Common use just is common use. I live near an old hippy town, there's a lot of vague spirituality around there, man. Be the change that you want to see in the world. Cleanse the toxins. Manage with NLP. These things aren't my scene, I'm too pedantic and particular to tolerate the vagueness of it, but people are going to use the words they're going to use. Is it contributing to some harm? Do you think it's somehow anti-intellectual?

As I indicated in writing about changing funeral options, I've found a growing acceptance of non-religious spirituality a blessing in ways like that, because when it comes to funerals, I don't want to have to choose between the rigid alternatives of Christian and anti-religious humanist. You're sure you're not an anti-religious humanist who yearns for that lost clarity?