Here, the claim is that the flame on your finger carries a non empirical, non discursive or irreducible intuition of a metavalue, i.e., an ethical badness. — Constance
I must admit though, I really don't know what you mean by "metavalue". — Metaphysician Undercover
Are you then supporting what Kierkegaard said? the core of his statement is the word "qualitative divide". Kierkegaard "qualitative divide" is full of dualism, full of God.This is why Kierkegaard is considered a father of existentialism: he said there is this qualitative divide between what is there and what can be said about it. — Constance
Now I'm more confused. Before you mention Kierkegaard, now you mention Wittgenstein, are you saying the meaning of transcendence for Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are the same? I would disagree to this, it appears you're mixing up things here.Wittgenstein said ethics is transcendental. — Constance
Once the facts have been suspended, — Constance
we do the final reduction and consider this event as a qualia — Constance
There is a residuum IN the torturous event that stands outside body of facts that announces itself in our word "bad". This clumsy sounding usage is unavoidable. — Constance
There is a residuum IN the torturous event that stands outside body of facts that announces itself in our word "bad" — Constance
Here is the rub: Once the facts have been suspended, and all that remains is the most "local" fact, the pain itself, right there at the, if you will, Cartesian center of experience, we do the final reduction and consider this event as a qualia, the unutterable presence of the pain. — Constance
Are you then supporting what Kierkegaard said? the core of his statement is the word "qualitative divide". Kierkegaard "qualitative divide" is full of dualism, full of God.
Are you saying you agree on Kierkegaard's divine moral? — Raul
Now I'm more confused. Before you mention Kierkegaard, now you mention Wittgenstein, are you saying the meaning of transcendence for Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are the same? I would disagree to this, it appears you're mixing up things here.
For example Wittgenstein said as well that : "..."And it is clear that a world in which there is only dead matter is neither good not evil; therefore, the world of living beings can in itself be neither good nor evil." and then from here he concludes the "nonsense" of the world and sense being contingent — Raul
Facts suspended? Looks like you're building a play of a movie you imagine within your speculations but studying emotions and feelings like pain (Damasio) and seeing how they work I would say that "suspending" an emotion makes no sense. Do you mean to suspend the conscious phenomena of the pain? Well we know this is a construct of our unconscious, we know our brain unconsciously decides about what to do with this "pain" around 200ms before we become conscious of it (Libet). It can become conscious or maybe not.
This is to say again that the "local" fact of a pain is not something you can suspend. it doesn't work that way. — Raul
We, who? Well I guess Chalmers and metaphysical thinkers. As you can guess me and many other contemporary philosophers do not agree this "qualia", the way you explain it This dualist qualia is not needed to explain pain in a satisfactory way. Emotions and feelings are "incarnated", we have to work with the concept of an extended brain to understand them. Well I guess you know Damasio. Emotions do not need of consciousness to exists, etc. etc. This is the contemporary concept of emotions, again no need qualia... emotions and feeling can artificially be triggered as we know very well how they work. It can be done using electric signals in certains parts of our limbic system or inducing special conscious states with certain chemistry (drugs, psychotropic substances, etc.) — Raul
Can you demonstrate it? In the meantime I would claim this residuum is not needed to explain the word "bad". You just need to put it in a context. If in this case you put it in the context of my finger burning is bad. Well, in this case, this forum is not the right place to explain it as it is not that short but here you can find a good source to understand how pain works and why it is associated to the word "bad". As anyone could expect, such a complex things requires a complex and very technical language but if you really want to understand it I'm sure you can find it accessible:
https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/3/65/65ps1.full — Raul
Consider then: facts of the world. Is my migraine, just because it is an interior event, any less a fact? Is it not somewhere in the grid of worldly affairs as much so as glaciers and planets and clouds and everything else? The problematic here is not location, in my head or on top of a mountain. The mountain is there, in the world. As is my headache. Factual affairs. Only in this factual affair, over here, in my left side, there is a spear in my kidney and the phenomenon we call pain. I see no reason to separate sensate feelings from other facts at all. Everything is just there, an aggregate of atoms.Sorry Constance, I don't buy it. I don't see getting to "the pain itself" as the final reduction. It's just a turning point, of going from the external world of what you call "facts", to the internal world of feelings. So there is a whole new world waiting for our analysis in the world of feelings. And I don't buy the notion that this is a world we cannot speak about, because we commonly talk about our feelings. It just requires a completely different way of talking from the way that we talk about the external world of "facts". — Metaphysician Undercover
The divide I mentioned occurs where reason seeks to subsume the actualities of the world. Nonsense. the world's actualities are not categorial. — Constance
here is a whole new world waiting for our analysis in the world of feelings — Metaphysician Undercover
So once you complete that turn in the turning point, and you observe the sensation, it is just another event no different than any other event as an event. — Constance
It's not "an event" though, that's a misrepresentation, and you ought to be able to see this. There is a huge multitude of things going on all required for me to feel pain. You cannot reduce pain to "an event". — Metaphysician Undercover
At this point, I am moral-realism-adjacent. I think most people are moral realists, but are aware that it is taboo to actually declare oneself as such, so they devise other moral theories in order to mask their moral realism.You are a moral realist?? As am I, and I argue for this frequently. There are few takers on this as it requires a break with the familiar world. Unfortunately, what I consider the most penetrating reading is the least accessible.
Why are you a moral realist? — Constance
If you agree with this principle, wouldn't you agree that it is more likely that neuroscience gives you the right tools and categories to better understand what Husserl called phenomenology?
You can say that technology is the way of being modern human's (Heidegger) but isn't language itself a contingent technology that emerged from a very successful nervous system? Instead of relying on the categories "meaning" and "sense" as used and understood by Heidegger and Dreyfus, shouldn't we open the black-box?, the brain, and analyze it using the new senses we have created (EEG, MEG, fMRI, photon migration tomography, transcranial magnetic simulation, etc.). Don't they have something new to show us related to the categories we create?Shouldn't we give a chance to the transcendence of heterophenomenology? Traditional phenomenology accepts the subject's self-reports as being authoritative. In contrast, heterophenomenology considers the subjects authoritative only about how things seem to them. It does not dismiss the first-person perspective, but rather brackets it so that it can be intersubjectively verified by empirical means, allowing it to be submitted as scientific evidence.I guess you see this more a risk to fall into reductionism? — Raul
At this point, I am moral-realism-adjacent. I think most people are moral realists, but are aware that it is taboo to actually declare oneself as such, so they devise other moral theories in order to mask their moral realism.
For all practical intents and purposes, moral realism (in the form of moral egoism) seems to be the only viable way to be. — baker
nly way to move forward, or at all, would be dialectically. — Constance
In this this physical model of all things, how is it that anything out there (the mind independent world) gets in here (the mind)? — Constance
This one is an easy one. Do you have children? just observe them, see how the grow and learn,. Specially during the first 3-4 years. They interact with the external world in many ways, they copy the behaviour and sounds of the adults, they try and learn via a trial-error approach.
Their inner nervous system that initially is just worried about keeping homeostasis in a very simple way (crying when hungry) little by little gets more sophisticated.
Their brain absorb so many things during those 3-4 years, it creates so many mental objects.... should I follow? This is how the external and physical world gets in your brain.
Then the self rises as the baby interact in society and builds self-consciousness.... should I continue — Raul
How is it that an epistemic connection is made such that cat over there gets into this brain thing such that I can say, I know the cat is under the table in a way that is sustainable independently of any experience making faculties. — Constance
References to other theoretical terms already violate the terms of the question. — Constance
Well, "solipsism" doesn't complicate it for me, nevertheless is it you that is talking above about "epistemic connection" — Raul
ll you said is evasive. — Constance
I think that most people who think science defines the world are proponets of scietism, and therefore, very much assume that science is the one that has all the answers to moral questions.I think most people who think are not moral realists because they also think science defines the world and science cannot discuss morality; therefore, it is assumed morality has no meaning. — Constance
And you think there are people who don't think?most people who think
I've been around Buddhism for some 20 years. In this time I have encountered so many ideas about what meditation "truly is" (and the supposedly peace-loving Buddhists and proponents of mindfulness viciously fighting over it) that by now, all of these ideas seem equally valid/invalid. It really depends on whom you ask.I don't see why you are averse to Kierkegaard. He "speaks" (thought he does it with style, with far too much style--the extended metaphors are maddening) what meditation IS.
I had turned to Kierkegaard to help me solve my problem with theism. It didn't help. All in all, he struck me as yet another theist basking in his faith. A faith I had no hope of obtaining. The idea of a leap to faith is to me like a spit in the face -- like someone telling me, "See, I can do it, but you can't!! Shame on you!" — baker
Pain is NOT reducible. Such complexities are only analytical correspondences. — Constance
But you also encounter this is such a reductive attempt: When you make the move to higher ground analytically, looking to physical brain activities, in the act of data extraction in the observation of the brain, you are not working from outside perspective looking at the brain. You are LOOKING. Literally a product of brain activity and precisely the kind of thing you are supposed to be analyzing. This is the most obvious form of question begging imaginable. — Constance
The pain is what is evidently there, unproblematic in what it is. The reduction is on your part: you take what is clear as a bell, the screaming pain and claim this is not what it really is. It's explanatory grounding is elsewhere. Well, of you are doing a scientific analysis on thephysical anatomy of pain, then fine. But that is not this here at all. — Constance
Pain is NOT reducible — Constance
Analysis is reduction. What are you saying, pain ought not be analyzed? That's a value judgement which needs to be justified. How do you justify it, by insisting that pain is the absolute, metavalue? And you justify this by claiming that pain ought not be analyzed. That looks like a vicious circle to me. — Metaphysician Undercover
No, not quite, I'm not observing the brain, I'm observing the finger, the pain is in the finger. And it is the fact that the pain being in the finger makes the brain want to analyze it, which makes it appear to consist of parts. — Metaphysician Undercover
I'm not denying the pain, I'm saying that there's more to it than just the pain. I feel the pain, I look at the place where it hurts, and I see the wound. Oh, there's a reason why I'm feeling this pain. PAIN is not the end of the inquiry, it's the beginning. — Metaphysician Undercover
All language is contingent, analyzable, but that presence before me is not language. — Constance
Ok Constance, let's go with how the cat gets into the brain.
At the beginning it works the same way a cat would get into the microchips of the computer that has a webcam. Light hits the cat that hits our eye that hits our visual cortex.
Our visual cortex contains already certain neurons that are sensitive to the cat as part of our learnings when we were children (I assume this brain has seen and interacted with cats before).
So those neurons related to cat-ness get activated (here it is exactly same way a CNN works), the image triggers the associated word cat, uit gramatics and it triggers as well lot of neural-networks that get activated that situate the cat within our model-of-the-world so that we get the cat and its properties, expectations activated, the cat-ness gets active.
Our brain is ready to interact with the cat.
Makes sense? — Raul
It is not reducible I agree, naturalism (forget about word materialism) is not reductive because it actually expands our understanding on the power of biology in our brain instead.
I would say that dualists are the ones that have a "reduced" concept of the power of nature (matter, energy, however you want to call it) and lose time with what I think are naif and solipsistic intuitions of the meta-thinking that has not made any progress since Aristotle. Metaphysicians are always trying to reinvent the wheel (Kant, Heidegger, etc...), this is well accepted among philosophers.
The pain you feel in your finger can be induced in your brain from external people activating the specific group of neural network that trigger it using electromagnetic fields. Doing this you won't need the finger to feel the pain, we induce it. But you, subjectively will swear it is your finger burning !
If I disable those specific finger-pain related neural networks you will not feel that pain anymore even if I cut your finger.
Makes sense?
Let's go even beyond, we could trick you neural networks in a way that when I burn your finger you feel the pain in you ear. All this is possible and it is possible because all your pain is within the biology and architecture of your brain.
It is painful I know, but pain is in your brain. — Raul
Of course it is not language. It is about biology of your brain.
Capgras syndrome, phantom-limb-syndrome... we can induce you the feeling of someone following you just increasing certain neurotransmitters and certain hormones in your blood and brain... and you would swear someone is following you, doesn't this change the way you understand "presence" and the "feeling of presence"? And you still think you can rely on your metaphysical ideas of the "pure presence"?
We can even make someone more or less religious, believe more or less in deities, or make him believe he is god by stimulating activity in certain areas of the brain (see Ramachandran research). Doesn't this change the idea we have about religion?
A tumor can change your personality (see the case of pedophile the medicine discover he was pedophile because of a tumor in his brain, famous one you can google). Doesn't this change the idea we have about pedophile? It challenge our justice system and our values (google it, is really worth it). — Raul
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