If Alice says, "My tooth hurts" (first-person) and Bob says, "Alice's tooth hurts" (third-person), then both are describing exactly the same thing - Alice's toothache. However neither Alice's nor Bob's description of her pain is the pain itself. — Andrew M
The apodeictic certainty of an intrinsic impossibility, within the existential confines of the induction principle, such that no A and no B can ever be in the same place at the same time, is only given a priori, hence sans linguistic appeal. — Mww
But what if space were "layered" — Janus
habit of thought developed a posteriori from experience, not given a priori. — Janus
Thus, if space is layered, it contradicts the standing hypothesis of cosmic isomorphism, and all standing empirical science lands in the circular file. — Mww
But somebody, somewhere, got the ball rolling, which serves as proof of the possibility of a priori cognitions. — Mww
Compromise: mediation by linguistic appeal upon the condition of being taught; mediation by conceptual appeal alone, absent language appeal, upon the condition of original thought. — Mww
Yes, but what is the mind? According to science the mind is a function of the brain; so we are back to physical investigations in order to understand anything definite about the mind. — Janus
I agree that, in the context of so-called "folk" understandings of the mind, the physical is "defined in the negative" or more accurately as derivative of the mind; insofar as it is defined as "what can be sensed and measured" and it is understood under that paradigm that it is always a mind which measures. But we can equally say that it is the body/brain which measures; that it is something physical which measures something physical, and there is no contradiction in that. If it were really something non-physical doing the measuring then that would be dualism. — Janus
I agree that the emphasis on the sovereignty of the individual is a relatively modern phenomenon, and as such it is a public, socially mediated phenomenon. But there is also no purely rational justification for any institution's right to enforce, or even coerce, individual's beliefs and allegiances when it comes to matters of faith. — Janus
The problem isn't trying to think how mind can arise from matter. The problem is thinking of the world as two different things - matter and mind. Everything is information. There is no need to explain how information arises from information. If you think that matter is something that exists and is directly opposed to mind and it's nature, then that is the problem. In all of these explanations, I have yet to see anyone explain how two opposing properties - matter and mind - interact. — Harry Hindu
What does saying everything is "matter", or everything is "mind" do for us? It gives us a name to use to refer to the substance of reality so that we may communicate the idea of the substance of reality. It solves the problems of dualism - primarily the problem where dualists are unable to answer the question of how matter and mind interact.Ok, so everything is information. What does that do for us? What are we to do with that information? Is it sufficient from the fact everything is information, that no metaphysical arguments remain? — Mww
I'm talking about your mind - it's substance and arrangement. Your mind is an arrangement of information. Now, how does matter (if matter is not an arrangement of information, but of atoms) interact with that?The 'information' approach is still a little vague. If you could define what you mean by it, that would help me. If it's the stuff of information theory, then your theory sounds like a mathematical ontology. — jjAmEs
If you mean merely that a thought is original if it is the first occurrence of that thought, then I agree. — Janus
some unfathomable inspiration due to the nature of a transcendental ego or something like that — Janus
I agree. At the same time I'd include the notion of the 'purely rational' as itself quasi-spiritual. — jjAmEs
Yes, and from which is given, that because circumferences and diameters were already objects of experience, the relationship between them being pi does not immediately follow from them alone. — Mww
You could say the notion is quasi-spiritual; but the salient point is that only the purely rational is (in principle at least) is free of prejudice or bias. And to be free of prejudice and bias in dealing with other humans would seem to be the highest ideal commonly aspired to cross-culturally. — Janus
How, then, did the intoxicating success of this discovery of physical infinity affect the scientific mastery of the realm of spirit? In the focus on the environing world, a constantly objective attitude, everything spiritual appeared to be based on physical corporeality. Thus an application of the mode of thought proper to natural science was obvious. For this reason we already find in the early stages Democritean materialism and determinism.47 However, the greatest minds recoiled from this and also from any newer style of psychophysics (Psychophysik). Since Socrates, man is made thematic precisely as human, man with his spiritual life in society. Man retains an orientation to the objective world, but with the advent of Plato and Aristotle this world becomes the great theme of investigations. At this point a remarkable cleavage makes itself felt: the human belongs to the universe of objective facts, but as persons, as egos, men have goals, aims. They have norms for tradition, truth norms - eternal norms. Though the development proceeded haltingly in ancient times, still it was not lost. Let us make the leap to so-called 'modern' times. With glowing enthusiasm the infinite task of a mathematical knowledge of nature and in general of a world knowledge is undertaken. The extraordinary successes of natural knowledge are now to be extended to knowledge of the spirit. Reason had proved its power in nature. 'As the sun is one all-illuminating and warming sun, so too is reason one' (Descartes).48 The method of natural science must also embrace the mysteries of spirit. The spirit is real49 and objectively in the world, founded as such in corporeality. With this the interpretation of the world immediately takes on a predominantly dualistic, i.e., psychophysical, form. The same causality -only split in two- embraces the one world; the sense of rational explanation is everywhere the same, but in such a way that all explanation of spirit, in the only way in which it can be universal, involves the physical. There can be no pure, self-contained search for an explanation of the spiritual, no purely inneroriented psychology or theory of spirit beginning with the ego in psychical self-experience and extending to the other psyche.50 The way that must be traveled is the external one, the path of physics and chemistry. All the fond talk of common spirit, of the common will of a people, of nations' ideal political goals, and the like, are romanticism and mythology, derived from an analogous application of concepts that have a proper sense only in the individual personal sphere. Spiritual being is fragmentary. To the question regarding the source of all these difficulties the following answer is to be given: this objectivism or this psychophysical interpretation of the world, despite its seeming self-evidence, is a naïve one-sidedness that never was understood to be such. To speak of the spirit as reality (Realitat), presumably a real (realen) annex to bodies and having its supposedly spatiotemporal being within nature, is an absurdity.
At this point, however, it is important for our problem of the crisis to show how it is that the 'modern age', that has for centuries been so proud of its successes in theory and practice, has itself finally fallen into a growing dissatisfaction and must even look upon its own situation as distressful. Want has invaded all the sciences, most recently as a want of method. Moreover, the want that grips us Europeans, even though it is not understood, involves very many persons.51
There are all sorts of problems that stem from naïveté, according to which objectivistic science holds what it calls the objective world to be the totality of what is, without paying any attention to the fact that no objective science can do justice to the subjectivity that achieves science. One who has been trained in the natural sciences finds it self-evident that whatever is merely subjective must be eliminated and that the method of natural science, formulated according to a subjective mode of representation, is objectively determined. In the same manner he seeks what is objectively true for the psychic too. By the same token, it is taken for granted that the subjective, eliminated by the physical scientist, is, precisely as psychic, to be investigated in psychology and of course in psychophysical psychology. The investigator of nature, however, does not make it clear to himself that the constant foundation of his admittedly subjective thinking activity is the environing world of life. This latter is constantly presupposed as the basic working area, in which alone his questions and his methodology make sense. Where, at the present time, is that powerful bit of method that leads from the intuitive environing world to the idealizing of mathematics and its interpretation as objective being, subjected to criticism and clarification? Einstein's revolutionary changes concern the formulas wherein idealized and naïvely objectivized nature (physis) is treated. But regarding the question of how formulas or mathematical objectification in general are given a sense based on life and the intuitive environing world, of this we hear nothing. Thus Einstein does nothing to reformulate the space and time in which our actual life takes place. — Husserl
Anyone who thinks that everything is matter, mind or information would be a monist.Does anybody these days still think everything is matter or everything is mind? Doesn’t seem all that logical to me. That is not to say dualists don’t still walk the Earth, but I rather think they are of the mind and matter kind, not one or the other. — Mww
Well sure, if the hard scientist and the metaphysician is a dualist, then they are at a loss to explan the interaction between matter and mind. Ignorance is the harm. Socrates said that knowledge is the greatest good and ignorance is the greatest evil. It basically comes down to whether or not you believe that reality is composed of one substance or more than one. Then you need to explain how different substances interact.And the metaphysician is at no more loss to explain the interaction between mind and matter than the hard scientist, so as long as they are equal in their ignorance, no harm is done in theorizing about it. Which has been done for millennia, and even if nothing substantial has come from it, nothing particularly detrimental has either. — Mww
Why do so many people on this forum plead to some authority? Was there a reference-able standing theory when Darwin proposed his theory of natural selection? No, his theory was the basis of a new idea that had no reference-able prior theories. It was based on his own observations of nature over several years. Instead of worrying about what some other human (who is in no better a situation than you or I in figuring out the relationship between mind and matter) thinks, focus on what I am saying.Is there a reference-able standing theory in support of the notion that information is everything? — Mww
Thanks for the thoughtful, and interesting, reply. I look forward to them, even while voicing opposition where I find it. As you are welcome to do as well. — Mww
We don’t really care that a human is rational or moral, insofar as those are reasonable expectations pursuant to his kind of creature; we want to know how he got that way. Or better yet....how he didn’t. — Mww
“...Yet to say that it is the soul which is angry is as inexact as it would be to say that it is the soul that weaves webs or builds houses. It is doubtless better to avoid saying that the soul pities or learns or thinks and rather to say that it is the man who does this with his soul. The case of mind is different; it seems to be an independent substance implanted within the soul and to be incapable of being destroyed...” [On The Soul, I,4 in Smith, Oxford, 1931] — Mww
Joe Sachs, in his introduction to Aristotle's On the Soul, 33, says, negating any Cartesian notion of mind in regard to Aristotle, that 'never does Aristotle construe the noun or verb [nous and its verb noein] as naming anything but an activity[;] ... even when Aristotle speaks of the intellect as passive, indeed as pure and unmixed passivity, he is still speaking of a high level of concentrated activity; in no way compatible with any notion of a mind stored with ideas.' — Maggie Ross
The case of mind is different; it seems to be an independent substance implanted within the soul and to be incapable of being destroyed. If it could be destroyed at all, it would be under the blunting influence of old age. What really happens in respect of mind in old age is, however, exactly parallel to what happens in the case of the sense organs; if the old man could recover the proper kind of eye, he would see just as well as the young man. The incapacity of old age is due to an affection not of the soul but of its vehicle, as occurs in drunkenness or disease. Thus it is that in old age the activity of mind or intellectual apprehension declines only through the decay of some other inward part; mind itself is impassible. Thinking, loving, and hating are affections not of mind, but of that which has mind, so far as it has it. That is why, when this vehicle decays, memory and love cease; they were activities not of mind, but of the composite which has perished; mind is, no doubt, something more divine and impassible. That the soul cannot be moved is therefore clear from what we have said, and if it cannot be moved at all, manifestly it cannot be moved by itself. — On the Soul, Book I, Part 4 (Smith)
But Aristotle doesn’t seem to differentiate “knowing being” from plain ol’ objects, in that he treats them all alike, insofar as they are all conditioned by the same set of predicates. Re: the same, e.g., category “substance” of things being the same “substance” of soul, along with “movement” and “essence”. So there wouldn’t be a philosophical issue under those conditions. — Mww
Problem is, we have the capacity to ask why we are actually NOT exactly like all other objects, which is the issue Descartes brought to the table....
“....The absolute distinction of mind and body is, besides, confirmed in this Second Meditation, by showing that we cannot conceive body unless as divisible; while, on the other hand, mind cannot be conceived unless as indivisible....”(2)
....and is best exemplified in Kant....
“...This relation, then, does not exist because I accompany every representation with consciousness, but because I join one representation to another, and am conscious of the synthesis of them. Consequently, only because I can connect a variety of given representations in one consciousness, is it possible that I can represent to myself the identity of consciousness in these representations....”(3)
....where “this relation” is intended, within the context of the entire section therein, as the absolute and altogether necessary distinction between the subject (conscious that) and object (conscious of), which is the ground of the difference between us and other objects. In effect, Aristotle denies a distinction, Descartes warrants the distinction, Kant identifies the distinction.
Done deal!!!!! — Mww
Ryle's point is that there no empirical-observation/rational-thinking divide. (...) Alice sees more because she is rational.
— Andrew M
Do you see the contradiction? If there is no observational/rational divide, how does Alice see more than she merely observes? — Mww
It’s not difficult, actually. The proposition “Bob is running in a race” is a synthetic judgement, insofar as the conception of running and racing does not contain the conception of winning, for, as you have already noted, the race may not end or all the racers may be disqualified, ad infinitum. Therefore, there absolutely is an observational/rational divide, as soon as it is recognized that additional conceptions are required for additional understandings of any given empirical occasion. In order to understand winning, one must have already understood the race to be over. Therefore, the former is conditioned by the latter, which is an a priori rational judgement of an empirical occassion.
Think of it this way: in principle you cannot get to 10, when all you have is a 4 on one hand and a 6 on the other, with nothing else given whatsoever. — Mww
That is what I mean by holistic. Instead of a dualistic "physical" seeing + "transcendent" rationality, it's instead just a richer form of seeing.
— Andrew M
Which I understand, but at the same time consider to be a categorical error, in that a richer form of seeing is better known as understanding. And understanding is certainly not seeing in any sense, regardless of how convention wishes upon us the less philosophically taxing. — Mww
Yes, but that natural ground is properly called understanding, in which the conception is already given. I understand what you mean when you pick up a handful of schnee because I already know what snow is, and you are showing me exactly the same thing in your hand. But I don’t understand schnee because of the word “schnee”; I understand it from the extant conception that schnee represents.
I would rather think language use has its natural ground in the commonality of conceptions. Conceptions are always antecedent to talk of them. Right? I mean......how can we talk of that which we have not yet conceived? — Mww
The practical approach is not apodeictic (it's instead provisional), but neither is it arbitrary.
— Andrew M
Yep. No objections there. There are, however, things that are not provisional, that are apodeictic. — Mww
Because there are two of those kinds of knowing things, the provisional and the certain.....how do we assure ourselves we aren’t confusing one of them for the other? If the answer to that is to start over, first we have to realize a manifest false knowledge, then we have to determine where to start over from. Then we have to determine why starting over from here is more or better justified then starting over from there. How do we stop this potential infinite regress? Because we are certain we know some things, the infinite regress must have its termination.
In addition, you said the observational approach is provisional, which is irrefutably correct given the principle of induction for empirical conditions, then it follows that the apodeictic cannot be empirical given the principle of contradiction, re: that which is provisional cannot be at the same time be certain.
That which is not empirical is necessarily rational or transcendent. That which is transcendent can have no empirical proofs, but that which is rational, may be susceptible to empirical proofs, depending on its content.
The empirical/rational duality is inescapable with respect to the human cognitive system. — Mww
Le Penseur's thinking is private in a mundane sense and remains open to natural investigation.
— Andrew M
I am not aware of any natural investigation, or, which is the same thing, investigation using natural means, that has any chance of showing our private thinking. That our experimental equipment cannot show the word-images used for our thought, and our word-images are never given in terms of elementary particles, suggests natural investigation is very far removed from internal privacy.
I suppose philosophy is a natural investigation, and our private thinking is certain open to that. As long as we expect no empirical proofs from such philosophy, we should be ok. — Mww
The ghost only makes an appearance when that privacy is separated out from the natural world (whether in a transcendent realm per Plato or in a substantial mind per Descartes).
— Andrew M
Cool. So I don’t have to worry about it; I make no attempt to isolate my private thinking from the natural world. I understand there are, or at least were, a multitude of those holding with subjectivity as sufficient causality for the world. I say...a viral POX on them!!! — Mww
My proposal is that meanings are behaviors or ways of doing things. We don't need the qualia/sensations to mean. The qualia/sensations are experienced and expressed, not said. But that does not solve the object-subject relationship. It's just about relating my feelings or senses to what I do. And so I become meaningful. But I don't dissolve my problem of the relationship of my consciousness with what I signify and the world. I just transfer it to the problem of meaning.What is your conclusion then: there is no hard problem, there is no qualia, or what? — Zelebg
But it seems you're instead asking the conditions under which a person is rational, or moral, etc., since a human need not always act in those ways. — Andrew M
Which brings us to the Aristotle quote...
“...It is doubtless better to avoid saying that the soul pities or learns or thinks and ...” [On The Soul, I,4 in Smith, Oxford, 1931] — Andrew M
nous is the Greek term translated as mind there, which is also often translated as intellect. It should be understood to name an activity, not a Cartesian-style mind: — Andrew M
The case of mind is different; it seems to be an independent substance implanted within the soul and to be incapable of being destroyed...” [On The Soul, I,4 in Smith, Oxford, 1931] — Mww
Ryle's point is that there no empirical-observation/rational-thinking divide. Alice sees more because she is rational.
— Andrew M
how does Alice see more than she merely observes?
— Mww
She doesn't. Separating sensory perception and rationality is an abstract and after-the-fact exercise. — Andrew M
Alice didn't observe something and then infer that Bob won the race - she simply observed that he won the race (contra both the Reductionist and Duplicationist who wrongly think the same thing has been observed regardless of whether Bob won or not). — Andrew M
Racing does contain the conception of winning - it's the governing purpose. — Andrew M
Running does not contain a conception of winning. — Andrew M
Which is to say, we can get to 10. But our hypothesis for how we got there might be a work in progress. — Andrew M
Put differently, to be able to talk competently about snow just is to have the concept of snow. — Andrew M
Well we can always ask a person what they're thinking if we need to. That seems a natural approach. But we don't have to have to regard their reports as certain. People can sometimes lie, be mistaken, be inarticulate, confused or delusional, exaggerate, etc. And we can test these things. — Andrew M
As I see it, things we might call certain are themselves empirical. — Andrew M
There are, however, things that are not provisional, that are apodeictic.
— Mww
What would some examples be? — Andrew M
OK! We agree! — Andrew M
In other words, because one is human, he is necessarily rational and moral, the manifestations of it being given merely from the subjectivity of the individual. It is clear from that, that irrational or immoral is nothing but a relative judgement between agent and observer of the agent. — Mww
So here we have two things you’ve denied: assigning agency to a faculty, and using Aristotle to refute the Cartesian mind. In the first, correct me if I’m wrong, but you objected to my assertion that understanding is the named thinking faculty, yet here you seem to grant that the intellect names a mental activity. So either intellect is not a faculty or thinking is not an activity. — Mww
And in the second, Aristotle himself asserts mind as substance, just as Descartes. So either Descartes is talking about mind as indivisible matter (which he isn’t) or they are employing the conception of substance differently. But substance is fundamental for both, Aristotle as a category, Descartes as a continuance, hence refutation, of Aristotle’s final cause. — Mww
Besides, it is really confusing: mind (intellect) implanted within the soul makes the soul of higher rank in the mental echelon, but it has already been said it is better not to let soul do anything important in the human animal. — Mww
This twofoldness within the meaning of thinking causes an unavoidable confusion, which can be compounded by translations that are not attentive to the difficulty. In particular, the use of the word "mind" can muddle things beyond repair. The idea of mind is an orphan left behind by the Cartesian shift in the conception of body. The mind is a kind of container, isolated and self-enclosed, in which thoughts, desires, and feelings - all the remnants unconnected with extended body - are found. The closest thing to it in classical philosophy is the birdcage in Plato's Theatetus (197A - 200D), but that image is a parody meant to expose the absurdity of considering knowledge a stock of possessions rather than a living activity. — Joe Sachs - On the Soul
The confusion that is not a product of translation has to do with whether there is an intellect at the foundation of the world, as well as an intellect that is part of the soul. Three times Aristotle refers to "what is called intellect". Once this is in relation to the assertion in Plato's Timeaus that there is a soul of the world; Aristotle claims that the functions given there to a world-soul really belong to what is called intellect (407a 4). A second time, it is connected with Anaxagoras's positing of an intellect that rules all things; in this case Aristotle adopts the word and the argument made about it, but applies them to something within our souls (429a 22). The third time, the phrase is equated with the reasoning part of the soul (432b 26).
The twofoldness described above, of discursive and contemplative thinking, is, for Aristotle, inseparable from the distinction between an intellect and an intellect on which the world as a whole is founded. Aristotle never doubts that the discursive intellect that thinks things through belongs to the embodied soul, and decays and dies along with it (408b 25-29). But the discursive intellect is bound up with a contemplative intellect that must be in us but not of us. If it were not somehow in us, our thinking would not be what it is; if it were wholly within us and subject to our limitations, no thinking would be possible at all. This is the claim made in Book III, Chapter 5. — Joe Sachs - On the Soul
Putting all these together, I get that the knowing being can be a subject (as conscious object), cannot be predicated of anything else, and is not in itself a dual. — Mww
But the conjunction of representations into a conception is not to be found in objects themselves, nor can it be, as it were, borrowed from them and taken up into the understanding by perception, but it is on the contrary an operation of the understanding itself, which is nothing more than the faculty of conjoining a priori and of bringing the variety of given representations under the unity of apperception. This principle is the highest in all human cognition...”
(1787, B134-5) — Mww
Alice didn't observe something and then infer that Bob won the race - she simply observed that he won the race (contra both the Reductionist and Duplicationist who wrongly think the same thing has been observed regardless of whether Bob won or not).
— Andrew M
So is this the point Ryle is making? That Alice makes no inference connecting winning and running? Does anyone actually hold with that? Ya know, doncha.......if Alice makes no inference, that is the same as denying Alice her rational capacity for judgement? Does anyone think Alice makes no judgements? — Mww
Agreed, but the only way to test is to already know what the differences in the test results mean, which presupposes a set of criteria. If we want our criteria to set some standard, we need some certainty from it. Because there is no apodeictic certainty under empirical conditions, we are left with what form certainty would have if we could find it in the empirical world. And where does the form of certainty live? In pure logic. And where does pure logic live? In human judgement, which is itself the conclusion of reason. — Mww
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