An emotional stimulus resonant enough to change my position is also likely to be associated to that emotion thereafter. It's not a moral example, but I never particularly liked pigs. Then one night I had a very emotive dream about a pet pig. Now I love pigs! Point being, I never rationally concluded that pigs were great. I didn't "change my mind", except in a literal sense. I was conscious of all of the data, but reason didn't effect or affect the outcome. Most of my recent moral epiphanies seem very similar: a strong emotional reaction to some stimulus that similar stimuli resonate, with post hoc rationalisation. But yes sometimes you just gotta work it. — Kenosha Kid
But all of this is too speculative and needs something much firmer to hang from. — Banno
t seem'd for a while back then that we were about to find out something really profound, to do with reflexive iterations, self-similarity, Chinese rooms and so on. Then Google Translate came along and beat all that over the head with blind, brute calculating power and statistical analysis, while neural networks seemed to lead in a different direction.
Bump. I'd like to see more thought on the eternal gold braid. — Banno
However many voices there may be it all amounts to the same thing, which is that internalised conversation. Whether it’s true or not I don’t know, but evidence seems to suggest a high rate of suicide in poets. (What the rate is among builders, or plumbers I don’t know, so how can we be sure the poet figures are high?). My feeling is that poets spend too much time in that internalised space. Philosophers are the same. Mathematicians might be considered in that light but their language is maths.
My personal feelings are that action is the only thing to put the internal voices in place. Action is about moving forward, literally one step in front of the other. In the end you are removed from where you were. The voices never do that. To spend too much time in that conversation is profitless. Do they determine how one acts? very rarely in my opinion.
If the way one acts in a different way is action then it doesn’t change one’s internal monologue, it shuts it up long enough to put you in a different space ( then one may have a different conversation). In extreme active situations that monologue is completely shut down, it’s no longer relevant, it has no benefits. — Brett
There is something to observe here, that lies under our noses. It is little attended to, and yet still so obvious as to seem trite. It is this: causality consists in the derivativeness of an effect from its causes. This is the core, the common feature, of causality in its various kinds. Effects derive from, arise out of, come of, their causes. For example, everyone will grant that physical parenthood is a causal relation. Here the derivation is material, by fission. Now analysis in terms of necessity or universality does not tell us of this derivedness of the effect; rather it forgets about that. For the necessity will be that of laws of nature; through it we shall be able to derive knowledge of the effect from knowledge of the cause, or vice versa, but that does not show us the cause as source of the effect. Causation, then, is not to be identified with necessitation. — Anscombe
Have you looked at I am a strange loop? It's dreadful, but also excellent. Your constructs within constructs... strange loops indeed. There might be some similarity between what you describe and Hoftader's thesis. I found it helpful in similar circumstances, especially in identifying the more persistent strange loops so that they can be explicitly dealt with. — Banno