Physical means mind independent stuff... — Marchesk
Transcendental is natural, by the way, as it does not require the intervention of any god.
— Olivier5
That is an interesting topic for debate in its own right. In practice, naturalism is suspicious of transcendentals, because by definition they're not defineable in purely naturalistic terms; nature is what they're transcendent in respect of, you might say. This shows up in debates about platonic realism and whether maths is invented or discovered. — Wayfarer
I'm left with the impression that you and I both hold that fear is the only innate emotion.
— creativesoul
What about love and social bonding — Marchesk
How do you know you feel angry? — Isaac
You know you want to punch something, you know your heart is racing, you know you're inclined to growl, your speech has got louder, you're thinking less rationally... — Isaac
what is it you're committing to the existence of? — Isaac
Either way, we consider his knowledge of physiology to trump our gut feeling about the cause. — Isaac
"I'm in pain, I feel like there's something stabbing inside my thigh and it's shooting down my leg" — Isaac
"What's actually happening is that you have some tissue damage in your back" — Isaac
That is not denying the end result. It's explaining how it came to be. — Isaac
That's an explanation. It doesn't deny anything except your arbitry armchair guesswork as to how your mind works (which I'm not going to apologise for denying). — Isaac
By definition, when it seems to you that you are angry you are, in fact, angry. — khaled
Social bonding clearly is not innate, — creativesoul
...his essay Real Patterns seems illuminative. — fdrake
Talking to a Vietnam veteran about the horrors of war when you've never fought yourself you'll likely be met with "You don't know what you're talking about". — khaled
So when you say "I feel angry, so there must be such a thing as 'anger'", what is it you're committing to the existence of? — Isaac
A sufferer might say "I'm in pain, I think there's something stabbing inside my thigh and it's shooting down my leg". The doctor will carry out a series of examinations. On finding no nerve or tissue damage in the thigh he might think about referred back pain. We take no issue with him saying something like "I know it feels like there's something stabbing inside your thigh, but there isn't, you're mistaken. What's actually happening is that you have some tissue damage in your back". Or, if he finds no damage there he might consider the pain neuropathic, or even (worst case) made up entirely. Either way, we consider his knowledge of physiology to trump our gut feeling about the cause. — Isaac
Why would you assume privileged and accurate access to your mental states when you already know you have no such privilege over your bodily states? — Isaac
The phenomenological end result is the thing we're taking seriously (the feeling of pain in the thigh, the feeling of anger), not the phenomenological 'gut feeling' about how such a result came about. — Isaac
The former is an attempt to allow the doctor to imagine the pain you're having. — khaled
Sideline question: could you give a checklist for a position not to count as Cartesian? Just to be clear, I'm not trying to "gotcha" question you into "lol the term is meaningless", since non-Cartesians are good company, but I'd struggle to write a list. — fdrake
Talk of the mind, one might say, is merely a convenient facon de parler, a way of speaking about certain human faculties and their exercise. Of course that does not mean that people do not have minds of their own, which would be true only if they were pathologically indecisive. Nor does it mean that people are mindless, which would be true only if they were stupid or thoughtless. For a creature to have a mind is for it to have a distinctive range of capacities of intellect and will, in particular the conceptual powers of a language-user that make self-awareness and self-reflection possible. — Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience - Bennett and Hacker
I have some more questions in that direction:
Does Cartesian = adhering to subject/object and the attendant distinctions (internal/external, mental/physical)? — fdrake
Would you throw a doctrine like "environmental patterns are represented by mental patterns + mental pattern = neural pattern" in the Cartesian bin because what it's trying to reduce (mental patterns) still adheres to a Cartesian model? — fdrake
Can you do an "in the body/in the environment" distinction without being a Cartesian? — fdrake
↪fdrake I'd also add questions about non-perceptual experiences and how those avoid some sort of movie in the head. Dreams being the number one concern, but things like inner dialog sound like a stream of consciousness podcast is running in your skull. Or when a song gets "stuck in your mind". — Marchesk
No... ...I'm just trying to make sense of your earlier comments which are still unclear to me:
"Internal, external, that which consists of both. Conscious experience being of the third; part physical, part non physical; part internal, part external, part neither."
— Andrew M
Fair enough.
Conscious experience of tasting bitter Maxwell House coffee from a red cup...
So, the red cups are external, the biological machinery is internal, and conscious experience of drinking bitter Maxwell House coffee from red cups consists entirely of correlations drawn between the bitterness(which results from the biological machinery) and the Maxwell House coffee by a creature capable of doing so.
The content of the conscious experience is the content of the correlations... that includes both internal things and external things, however the correlation drawn between those things is neither for it consists of both. — creativesoul
An analogy here might be with software that is designed to communicate with some other device on the network. The program could be enhanced to communicate with a virtual device that runs on the same computer as itself, or even as a module within the same program. — Andrew M
Transcendental is natural, by the way, as it does not require the intervention of any god.
— Olivier5
That is an interesting topic for debate in its own right. In practice, naturalism is suspicious of transcendentals, because by definition they're not defineable in purely naturalistic terms — Wayfarer
An experience is not a concrete thing like cups and taste buds are. It instead describes your practical contact with things in the environment, which occurred at some time and location. — Andrew M
Another good thing about the article cited is that it provides a more nuanced account than the rather mundane "qualia or eliminative materialism" spectrum apparently assumed by folk here - Luke, @Olivier5? — Banno
Actually it varies from an itch to a burning; and I don't care what the doctor does or does not imagine. An unimaginative doctor might be just as effective.
You still think of the meaning of talk of pain in terms of pain having a referent. This is why you can't make sense of your opponents. — Banno
That we cannot say everything does not imply that we cannot say anything. — Banno
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