There are different types of conscious activity, such as perception, memory, reason...I think the imagination is like a dynamic work space where can take images, match them to memories or morph them into other images, also synthesis takes place in the imagination.

The following from 2013 Dartmouth College Study

Researchers measured the participants' brain activity with functional MRI and found a cortical and subcortical network over a large part of the brain was responsible for their imagery manipulations. The network closely resembles the "mental workspace" that scholars have theorized might be responsible for much of human conscious experience and for the flexible cognitive abilities that humans have evolved.

I'm not denying all the unconscious activity that goes on in order to produce a a thought. However, the result of all the unconscious activity is the conscious thought.

I don't think this is totally clear. Sure we may experience Freudian slips where bits of our unconscious bubble up to the surface, but in general I think the unconscious is not ordered, at least not on a logical basis. Its activity seems to have more to do with our own idiosyncratic structuring (metaphoric and associative) of conscious activities, memories, beliefs the whole gamut of mental activity. The structuring here is not direct or straight forward. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar sometimes it is not.

Extraneous thoughts spring from our imagination, which is dynamic and always working. The unconscious contributes to what we imagine, but we don't realize its contribution normally. It nudge us, pushes us or compel us to think and act in certain ways.

Most time this is beneficial it opens up un-apparent connections, other times it may be harmful, which is why people seek therapy. to understand why they do what they do.

Is it possible to lack belief on any issue that you are aware of (meaning you possess knowledge/experience/information about the issue)?

I think knowledge without belief is not possible. I also think we are unaware of some of our beliefs. The communities where we live are constructed of laws, practices/customs/normative beliefs as well as ideology. These laws, practices and beliefs describe the idiomatic character of a culture or a community.

An individuals actions at some consequential level are grounded in these inescapable cultural norms (or beliefs) which affect each one in the community to some extent, even if the individual is unaware of its direct effects on their actions.

Has something changed in your life that might be related to this recent activity?

If you think it is a problem then it is a problem, and probably if you drink alone all the time, it is a problem. I drink but I very rarely get drunk, I don't like hangovers.

Sure, if you are young and just starting to drink, it is 'courage' in a bottle, but based on my experience it may also be a peer effect, related to those who you hang out with and what they do.

I agree that we are internally conflicted creatures, but some people relish or delight in that conflict.

It is not that they are bad, or even criminals, because good people can be bad &/or criminals, but there are those who relish being bad, in seeing or causing pain in others, it gets them off and I suggest these people are Evil.

Cavacava I just want to redirect you to the question, "is the desire to achieve more in life an organic process?". Desire is fundamental yes, however the prospect of attaining more than what you have, now is that artificial or organic as well?

desire is forged by the society and its history where we are cast.

The "prospect of attaining more than what you have, now is that artificial or organic as well?", the problem with this question I see is that societal constructs are foundational in every society. The necessity of such constructs are organic to the conception of a functional human society. So the phrase "the prospect of attaining more than what you have", is dynamic in many societies, but it is not the only possibility.

Some like Buckminster Fuller argued that less ought to be more, and Occam's Razor is rarely dulled by complex stubble. These too are viable constructs in current Western society.

In practice we cannot escape the constructs that form our beliefs, even in a pluralistic society. Our practices are empirical and they are unaffected by theory.

Like that thought. Numbers are functional components in some meaningful systems, systems that convey valuations, describe space, time and the rest.


Maybe real but not in the same sense as 'that chair is real', rather 'real' as in reflecting the reality of our shared conclusions, as in 'demonstrably real'.

Nah, but I like the flow

I am agnostic, and by this I mean that I don't believe in a deity, but I am not sure that there is not some else, and this drives me to think about what that could and what cannot be, to search for an answer(s).

The atheistic/theistic duality bears the same center point, an all powerful, all knowing, perfect being who loves his creation. The Abrahamic god given the Greek Gift is a masculine belief which is misogynistic at its core in my opinion. The atheistic/theistic dispute goes nowhere because of the god under question.
The whole conception of god right down to saying that god exists needs to re-thought, re-valued, re-felt, re-vitalized.

Recently I have been drawn towards pluralistic pantheism, one with no deity but somehow substance monism. Still working on this.

Yes, I agree with this, but I've been thinking that we can only choose what is possible to choose. I mean by this that it would been virtually impossible for any educated person in the 1300s to think that religion ought to be separated from science, they were one and the same for the people at that time.

Society has its own bibliography, and most of our choices are limited by it because it is all that we know. For the most part we can only choose between known choices. What we don't know, is not an option.

Is the desire to achieve more in life in the broadest context an organic process in nature, or is it an artificial construct that is forged by the mind?

Hi.
I think desire is an organic process, a part of our nature as humans, but what we desire is forged by the society and its history where we are cast.

The sun is nothing apart from your experience of it. So the warmth + the sight + etc. all the other impressions of it. Why do you feel the need to postulate a sun outside of experience? All that we mean by "sun" is a certain cumulation or association of experiences (the certain warmth, the certain sight, etc.)

Your use of the word 'experience' is equivocal, not all our experiences are external to us. Our experience of the world forms the basis for internal experiences, what we imagine or conclude about what we experienced, our train of thought these too are experienced.

your body is also a cumulation of experiences, and nothing more

Our body is our only access to experiences in the great outdoors, it also provides me with my only access to the experience of my thoughts, my inner world. It is unique and as I previously stated the locus for unification of the self.

Notice the continuation "if by that we mean outside of experience"? I will take that as a yes. If so, then no, I disagree. The smoke and the assumed fire are both within the realm of phenomenal experience. We see the effect and must look for the cause within experience - there are no causes outside of experience.

We build on our conclusions, when I see smoke, I don't have to see the fire to imagine it. I can imagine how it might feel to be weightless in space, even though I have never experienced it. We conclude causes we don't experience them as such, and we can be wrong.

[/quote]I disagree that any such a limit really exists. Everything I experience is the same. I experience pain, just like I experience sunshine. Why is one outside, and the other inside? It seems somewhat arbitrary.
[/quote]

I feel the warmth of the sun on my body when I go outside my house but the sun I see, I conclude is way outside of me, it is at a distance unlike my warm skin which is at no distance from me. The pain I feel from my stubbed toe, is hardly the same as my experience of the chair that I stubbed it on. How can you not get this difference, since it is only through our body that we can experience the world?

I don't think it makes sense to talk of things "outside" of us, if by that we mean outside of experience. Our body is known within experience, and it is known as well as any other things can be known within experience.

Of course it makes sense to talk of things outside our self. These manifestation of the phenomenal are due to something, I see the smoke and I assume fire. We can talk about space exploration but I doubt I will ever experience it. We don't hold objects in existence by our thought, I only suggest that we can't know these things with any kind of absolute certainty, since they are our conclusions based on our phenomenal experience and there is no guarantee that our thought corresponds to the way things are in the world.

Our body is not like any other thing, it is not outside of us it is the limit, what separates the inside from the outside. Our intimacy with our body is unlike our experience with anything else.

If by that you mean things in them self, things outside of us, then yes I agree no access. It is a different story when it comes to the body, which is not beyond us, which is in my estimation the locus of the unity we call our self.

Why do you feel the need to pick and choose one as the "reality" and the other as the "appearance"?

The phenomenal is real, it is the basis for what we conclude, not the other way around.

But isn't a basic purpose of learning the construction of our world, which affects how we understanding it. We learn that objects don't just disappear when they go out of sight, that a ball rolls somewhere, we learn to think causally because this methodology is successful. Our conclusions are the product of our bodies ability to interact with the world and our ability to learn from those interactions.

Being circular can be a problem for logical thought, but I don't that has any bearing on what we experience phenomenally. The stick is phenomenally bent in water that's the way we experience it, we conclude that it is not bent, that light refracts its image and that the stick only appears bent. There is nothing wrong with this distinction assuming our senses are working properly. The conclusion that the stick is not bent, forms the basis of our understand of how light gets refracted, but it does not stop the stick from looking bent.

You called the latter physical and the former mental.

No, those are your words not mine.

And yet, they are all within your experience. How can there be a non-experienced physical thing?! What would that even be?

I don't know what you are saying here.

The notion of a body is arrived at within experience, and hence makes no sense out of it.

We are clearly talking past each other here.

We are born with certain physical structures which enable us to experience the world, and how we see it depends on the adequate functioning of our physical senses.

Our ability to see colors is not learned, it is embedded in us, the same for pattern recognition, but it is from this information that we learn things such as object permanence, individuation, causality... that the truck is red.

In the same way that the body is prior to the experience of seeing.

Part of what it means to see at least for humans

You're already stuck in a theoretical understanding here, where you assume that you are a child, with a physical body, etc. That's not interesting. I'm interested in how you arrived at this framework.

Piaget and Gopnik, et al, people who study babies behavior.

This doesn't make sense. How can the boy track the ball if he cannot individuate it?

To individuate is to "distinguish from others of the same kind; single out". A babies ability to follow patterns is from birth, but that does not enable them to distinguish objects as separate from one another or from themselves for that matter.

For example - individuation. Individuation - that we see experiences as individual, and separate from one another, that we can even make such distinctions as red, blue, etc. - we don't get this concept from any one experience, or any multitude of experiences. Instead, in order to have more than one experience in the first place, individuation already must be possible.

No, I think individuation is a developmental achievement. We can watch a baby track a ball as it rolls by her in the first few months, when the ball rolls out of view the infants stops looking and puts its attention elsewhere, then a couple of months latter, the baby stretches its neck or crawls to see what happened to the ball, where it went. Object permanence is learned and probably a necessary step prior to individuation, language learning and the rest.

I think individuation is tied to the individual's body, that the entire body forms the basis for our interactions with the world. I don't think that a child understands the implications of its individualization without language, and it does not understand itself as a responsible agent until they are 4/7 yrs of age.

Surprised. No discussion of the imagination, at least that I noticed.

Sorry, I am not clearer but I think what the author intends/means is fully expressed in the authors work, but if you ask the author to explicate the meaning of the text then the author's reading is on par with anyone else's reading/interpretation in terms of its its correctness/incorrectness (in my opinion).

Interpretation becomes a question of taste (because there is no correct general method of interpretation), but perhaps this does not mean that interpretations are relative. We share similar conceptual schemes, and historical backgrounds which we cannot escape, and which guide how we express our intended meanings.

So who's right?

Is the author's interpretation of his work superior to the readers', or as I am suggesting, nether of these view points are adequate to explain and do justice to the text as such.



"Pious Lord Jesus
Give them rest
Pious Lord Jesus
Give them everlasting rest."

Is that the authorial intent, the correct translation?

or is it

"Jesus make it stop!"

The point is that there is no foundational, epistemological method to interpret this or any other text which holds generally for all texts. What is intended is the meaning you get out of the text, and all you can do is to persuade someone else that you got it right.

The question is whether intentional-less meaning is possible as pointed out in by Steven Knapp; Walter Benn Michaels in their famous essay on literary theory, Against Theory.

They argue against any critical theory suggesting a proper method of interpretation tied to authorial intent versus what is in the text. They argue that all meaning is intentional, and that there is no such thing as intentional-less meaning, echoing John Searle.

No, I mean that the author's intent is equal to the meaning of the work, there is no relationship between the author's intent and the meaning of the work because the authorial intent is the meaning of work. This entails that there is no separation of intent from meaning and the search for one is the search for the other.

Thinking about infinite regress. There is a difference between how regress works in thought and how it might work in being. We can come to an agreement in thought, but I don't see how we can be definite agreement in terms of being (unless god pops up), since it would assume that being follows thought and not the other way around.

A written text, letter or whatever is available for anyone to read, assuming they can get to read it. Whatever it means it is contained in the work, it is the same as the writer's intention.

Sure an author can read his work, but that work, unless he changes it, is what it is. Speech acts are different than written works. No joke.

That's one of those things about the written text, while speech acts are generally directed at certain people, written texts are there for all to read.

Surely you are not going to deny that people can intend to say certain things? Of course they can also more or less fail to say what they want to say clearly, which may lead to misinterpretations. None of this is to say that misinterpretations have no value; there may be cases of important works that find their inceptions in creative misreadings of other texts.

Sure, but what the author fails to say is not part of what the author did say, and therefore it is not part of the work. The author's intent is exactly the same as the meaning of the work.

The authorial intent is the meaning found in the work, it exists separate from the author as soon the work is published.

The meaning of a text is what is in it, which is what is available for all to interpert. That does not mean that the author can't clarity what he meant, it means that any such clarification is extraneous to the text, that it is one interpretation among other interpretations.

Sure some interpretations can be better, more useful, more insightfull or more educated but they are all in response to the same text.

Something is always better than nothing but that puts consequentialism on the backfoot. I shouldn't be happy I got sushi if the only thing on the menu is sushi, right?

Is this out of the Tao? :-O

Suppose you were a British agent (& latter an actual Don in Philosophy) in France working with the French resistance during the time of WWII and you have to interview a prisoner. The French have explained that they plan to kill the prisoner regardless of what he might say.

You question the prisoner, who informs you that he will not say a thing unless you can guarantee he will not be killed.

Do you lie to him?
or
Do you tell him that you can't make that guarantee?

Because you need to reach from one point to another one and this should take a while otherwise everything elapses in an instant.

The trajectory of a ball can be described mathematically, all other components can similarly be described using math...and in higher math time (t) drops out of the equations altogether, my understanding is that it becomes a frequency function.

What do you mean?

Time would not flow if there were no constant to observe it flow.

Consider a change in state of a system, X->Y. Two states cannot lay on each other since the state of affair becomes ill-defined. This means that two states must lay on different points. This means that we need a variable to allow this to happen. There must however be a duration between two points otherwise the change will never takes place. The variable is therefore time.

If "two states must lay on different points", then why is the concept of time needed in the first place. If any body can be expressed as a set of points in space, then any change can be expressed as a change in the arrangement of those points in space...spacetime.

Fine but less than satisfying psychologically because it lacks an ego, which, I think is why we think time flows.

No democracy is perfect, their are always ways to improve it, such as modification of the way we treat inheritance. Nazism was socialization based so called blood ties, the ideology of the Fuhrer is much closer to what you are talking about, than what I am trying to discuss.

My "Utopia" is democracy in which equality is striven for and not stiffed by a rich aristocracy. My "Utopia" is a just society under rules of law. What you have outlined is not, and cannot constitute a just society.

People are people, basics human facts don't change, you wrote your own rebuttal.