Exactly...the reductionists seek to analyze the physical in terms of the mental (idealism) or the mental in terms of the physical (eliminative physicalism). Tendentious thinking prevails on both sides. — Janus
I don't think physicalists deny the existence of experience nor do they say that experience must accompany cognitive functions. Or have I misunderstood you? — T Clark
I also believe it is reasonable to call into question the mind-independence of the objects of cognition. — T Clark
A theory of consciousness should ideally be able to specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for a thing to be conscious, and explain why those conditions result in/constitute/realise consciousness. A physicalist theory, if it is to have any force, must specify the sufficient conditions, that is, what conditions necessitate consciousness, and explain why. — bert1
To question the mind-independence of a thing, is to suppose the possibility that thing without a mind. — Mww
If the major function of a mind is pure thought, and the major contribution of pure thought is cognition, and the product of any cognition is an object, albeit of a particular kind, how can it be reasonable to believe objects of cognition may be possible without a mind? — Mww
But there is nothing in that form of belief that is sufficient to suggest contingently on the one hand, or prove necessarily on the other, that the belief is not itself a mind-dependent object of cognition. — Mww
the glaring self-contradiction of having to use mind in order to deny the very possibility of whatever functionality is supposed as belonging to it. — Mww
In the interest of fair play, I can still ask how it is that you think it reasonable to question the mind-independence of objects of cognition, given the mutually agreeable presupposition that objects of Nature are not what is meant by objects of cognition. — Mww
‘Learning to use’ is not quite the same as ‘inventing’. Was the law of the excluded middle invented by us, or was it discerned? Would it be something that is ‘true in all possible worlds’? — Wayfarer
Brains don’t do anything, rather agents make judgements. — Wayfarer
without the exercise of reason — Wayfarer
The claim is that our cognition is conditioned by adaptation to see in terms of what is useful from the perspective of evolution, not what is true. So - what is true? What does the word even refer to? Well, that’s a question that neither walruses nor whelks can ask. Whereas we can ask it, and the answer matters to us. — Wayfarer
What does it mean for a theory to specify what conditions necessitate consciousness or any other phenomenon? What does it mean that a theory has force or is robust? Why must a theory specify what conditions are necessary for a phenomenon rather than just sufficient? — T Clark
The key insight of phenomenology is that the modern interpretation of knowledge as a relation between consciousness as a self-contained ‘subject’ and reality as an ‘object’ extrinsic to it is incoherent. On the one hand, consciousness is always and essentially the awareness of something, and is thus always already together with being. On the other hand, if ‘being’ is to mean anything at all, it can only mean that which is phenomenal, that which is so to speak ‘there’ for awareness, and thus always already belongs to consciousness. Consciousness is the grasping of being; being is what is grasped by consciousness. The phenomenological term for the first of these observations is ‘intentionality;’ for the second, ‘givenness.’ “The mind is a moment to the world and the things in it; the mind is essentially correlated with its objects. The mind is essentially intentional. There is no ‘problem of knowledge’ or ‘problem of the external world,’ there is no problem about how we get to ‘extramental’ reality, because the mind should never be separated from reality from the beginning. Mind and being are moments to each other; they are not pieces that can be segmented out of the whole to which they belong.”* Intended as an exposition of Husserlian phenomenology, these words hold true for the entire classical tradition from Parmenides to Aquinas.
Or did I misunderstand what you wrote? — T Clark
it is reasonable to call into question the mind-independence of the objects of cognition. — T Clark
After all, objects of cognition are also objects of nature. — T Clark
To what temperature do I have to heat this water to get it to boil? Prediction: it will boil at 100 degrees provided the following necessary conditions are met:
- sea level atmospheric pressure
- and all the obvious ones like having a heat source and a container that conducts heat etc
...when all these necessary conditions are met they will be jointly sufficient for the water to boil at 100 degrees. That is to say that even if one of the necessary conditions are not met then the water will not boil, and if all the necessary condition are met, they are jointly sufficient, which means the water MUST boil at 100 degrees. It can't not. — bert1
Applied to consciousness, a well-fleshed out theory will tell us the necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness to arise at all, and perhaps even go further and tell us what particular experiences a conscious thing will feel under what circumstances. So to take apokrisis preferred theory, the necessary conditions for x to be conscious are:
- models environment
- makes predictions based on that model
- for the purpose of building and maintaining itself as an organism (sorry if I got that wrong)
...and I presume these are taken to be jointly sufficient for consciousness. — bert1
So apokrisis preferred theory makes a great reasonably clear prediction, because it specifies the necessary and sufficient conditions. — bert1
Or, I misunderstood what you wrote. I took…..
it is reasonable to call into question the mind-independence of the objects of cognition.
— T Clark
…..as characterizing objects of cognition as already being mind-independent, which is possible if objects of cognition and objects of Nature are treated alike. — Mww
There’s a movie, 2011, “The Sunset Limited”, where the entire cast consisting of only these two rather excellent actors Jones and Jackson, engage in a pure Socratic dialectic, involving all sorts of one-idea/proposition-leads-to another kinda stuff, attempts by the one to get the other to concede a point, using premises without mutually granted relevance. — Mww
But we can't check, because we don't have a consciousness-o-meter. — bert1
To determine brain death, electrocerebral inactivity (ECI) should be demonstrated on EEG at a sensitivity of 2 μV/mm using double-distance electrodes spaced 10 centimeters or more apart from each other for at least 30 minutes, with intense somatosensory or audiovisual stimuli.
I think my position is not to argue about some single notion of veridicality, or objective truth - If, there is in principle no perspective-independent way that organisms can view and interact with the world perceptually, then such a notion is undermined in the sense that organisms simply cannot pick out such single "veridical" perspective even if there is an actual objective way the world is independently of our perception in principle (very difficult to see how this isnt the case from my perspective). — Apustimelogist
Seems to imply to me that what I perceive is radically different in structure to the actual objective world. But in my story about the actual objective world, if coherent perception is to work effectively by mapping consistently to actual structures of the world so that we can get payoffs, then in some sense it must be the case that our perceptions are still mapping to an embedded subset of the objective of the world with that structure — Apustimelogist
can we actually ascertain an objective fact of the matter about perceptual reference from within our perspectives? An even deeper question perhaps. — Apustimelogist
Now, when moderns talk about "mind-independent" being they are generally bringing in a whole load of metaphysical assumptions alien to the earlier period. The "mind-independence" here is sometimes framed as a causal one. "The mind doesn't create the world; looking at things doesn't make them spring into existence." This point is made a lot, but it's a little strange because I know of no one who ever argued that looking at things makes them exist. But I think we end up here because of the modern division between subject and object, and the division between primary qualities that exist "out there" "in objects themselves," and secondary qualities (e.g. color or taste) that are said to only emerge in interactions between objects and minds — Count Timothy von Icarus
For much of ancient and medieval philosophy, created things only exist within a web of relations — Count Timothy von Icarus
To get the "mind-independence" of modern thought you need to have already, perhaps unknowingly, started with some metaphysical assumptions about relationships, reductionism, the subject/object distinction, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Exactly, because the world was the expression of a will, not simply dumb matter being acted upon by physical forces. Existence was ‘participatory’ in that through religious mythology and ritual we re-enact and participate in creation. We had yet to see ourselves as pieces of flotsam thrown up by what basically amounts to a highly sophisticated chemical reaction, Stephen Hawking’s ‘chemical scum’.
How exactly does Spinoza's conception demonstrate why the experiences produced by our bodies should synch up with the evolutionary history of our perceptual organs? If everything has an experiential/mental side to it, why is our phenomenological horizon rooted to our body in the way it seems to be? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Now, of course many aspects of Aristotelian philosophy such as his physics have been superseded but I believe the ‘doctrine of the rational soul’ is not among them. — Wayfarer
Crick believed that the object 'as it is in itself' is simply the same object that our perceptions represent but existing unperceived. — Wayfarer
You won't find apokrisis theory in a dictionary. — bert1
It's not what we mean by 'consciousness'. — bert1
Life is a quality that distinguishes matter that has biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from matter that does not. It is defined descriptively by the capacity for homeostasis, organisation, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, and reproduction. — Wikipedia - Life
So for example, the epiphenomenalist might say consciousness does no work, just "goes along for the ride", so to speak, but that would be an illegitimate elimination of one reasonable way of explaining human behavior. I think what puzzles people is that we cannot combine the two explanations or achieve any absolute perspective which would eliminate one and retain the other. 'Either/ or' thinking seems to generally dominate the human mind.
I'll take a look. — T Clark
Obviously one does not 'have' reality in one's eye or in one's brain, one has visions and models and heuristics. But crossing the road without attending to what one can see and hear is perilous and foolish.
Hint: "... truly see reality" is a dog's breakfast of a phrase. — unenlightened
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