The semantic only has reality insofar as it is embodied in neurophysiological matter or its correlates in the material world. — Enrique
Claiming that a substance is "immaterial" seems contradictory to me. — Enrique
In their review of John Searle, Bennett and Hacker find much with which they agree. Cartesian dualism, behaviorism, identity theory, eliminative materialism and functionalism are all rejected, and rightly so. Searle advocates “biological naturalism,” the view that consciousness is a biological phenomenon, a proper subject of the biological sciences (p. 444). Bennett and Hacker serve up no objection here. It is when Searle claims that “mental phenomena are caused by neurophysiological processes in the brain and are themselves features of the brain” (Searle, Rediscovery, p. 1) that Bennett and Hacker demur. Searle's claim commits the mereological fallacy discussed earlier. Brains are no more conscious than they are capable of taking a walk or holding a conversation. True, no animal could do either of these things without a properly functioning brain. But it is the person, not the brain, that engages in these activities.
unless you mean something along the lines of the morphic fields that were mentioned by Janus, — Enrique
do we begin with that which is given to us, or do we begin with that which is in us, that it is given to.
— Mww
I tend to think that what is in us is given to us as much as what is external. — Janus
My point was that we can arrange them in all the ways necessary such as to show the attributes that go to define the quantity six. — Janus
There are maths prodigies and geniuses that solve real problems that have eluded others for centuries. In what are such problems embodied? To say that they only exist in brains, then they're just the product of brains, and have no intrinsic reality, which is a bold claim, and one that not many mathematicians would agree with, I would think. — Wayfarer
Akashic fields, or morphic fields. It's a no-go topic here, but suffice to say it stymies standard-issue physicalism. — Wayfarer
I don’t understand how merely arranging six objects in various ways shows the attributes that defines the quantity “six”. Arranged as a four-sided figure, arranged as a pyramid, arranged with each other as a succession of points.....there’s still just a quantity of objects represented by some number. — Mww
The mind conceives of the mathematical unicorn by imagining a figure with no imprecisions (neurophysiology), and represents the imaginary concept in a real figure by more or less disregarding the imprecisions intrinsic to instantiation (physical matter). — Enrique
As Aristotelians and Thomists use the term, intellect is that faculty by which we grasp abstract concepts (like the concepts man and mortal), put them together into judgments (like the judgment that all men are mortal), and reason logically from one judgment to another (as when we reason from all men are mortal and Socrates is a man to the conclusion thatSocrates is mortal). It is to be distinguished from imagination, the faculty by which we form mental images (such as a visual mental image of what your mother looks like, an auditory mental image of what your favorite song sounds like, a gustatory mental image of what pizza tastes like, and so forth); and from sensation, the faculty by which we perceive the goings on in the external material world and the internal world of the body (such as a visual experience of the computer in front of you, the auditory experience of the cars passing by on the street outside your window, the awareness you have of the position of your legs, etc.).
That intellectual activity -- thought in the strictest sense of the term -- is irreducible to sensation and imagination is a thesis that unites Platonists, Aristotelians, and rationalists of either the ancient Parmenidean sort or the modern Cartesian sort. The thesis is either explicitly or implicitly denied by modern empiricists and by ancients like Democritus; as I noted in an earlier post, the various bizarre metaphysical conclusions defended by writers like Berkeley and Hume largely rest on the conflation of intellect and imagination. But the irreducibility of intellect to imagination is for all that undeniable, for several reasons.
Thinking versus imagining
First, the concepts that are the constituents of intellectual activity are universal while mental images and sensations are always essentially particular. Any mental image I can form of a man is always going to be of a man of a particular sort -- tall, short, fat, thin, blonde, redheaded, bald, or what have you. It will fit at most many men, but not all. But my concept man applies to every single man without exception. Or to use my stock example, any mental image I can form of a triangle will be an image of an isosceles , scalene, or equilateral triangle, of a black, blue, or green triangle, etc. But the abstract concept triangularity applies to all triangles without exception. And so forth.
Second, mental images are always to some extent vague or indeterminate, while concepts are at least often precise and determinate. To use Descartes’ famous example, a mental image of a chiliagon (a 1,000-sided figure) cannot be clearly distinguished from a mental image of a 1,002-sided figure, or even from a mental image of a circle. But the concept of a chiliagon is clearly distinct from the concept of a 1,002-sided figure or the concept of a circle. I cannot clearly differentiate a mental image of a crowd of one million people from a mental image of a crowd of 900,000 people. But the intellect easily understands the difference between the concept of a crowd of one million people and the concept of a crowd of 900,000 people. And so on.
Third, we have many concepts that are so abstract that they do not have even the loose sort of connection with mental imagery that concepts like man, triangle, and crowd have. You cannot visualize triangularity or humanness per se, but you can at least visualize a particular triangle or a particular human being. But we also have concepts -- such as the concepts 'law', 'square root', 'logical consistency', 'collapse of the wave function', and innumerably many others -- that can strictly be associated with no mental image at all. You might form a visual or auditory image of the English word 'law' when you think about law, but the concept 'law' obviously has no essential connection whatsoever with that word, since ancient Greeks, Chinese, and Indians had the concept without using that specific word to name it. — Ed Feser - Think, McFly, Think
Quibbling about the meaning of "to be" doesn't seem like it gets at the truth, — Enrique
The interesting inquiry from my angle (thinking a lot about panprotopsychist consciousness theory via quantum biology) is how these faculties and their subject matter are situated in relationship to the brain. — Enrique
So the qualities of divisibility of six objects is immediately perceptually apparent. — Janus
neither of which are reliant on the least on neuroscience, unless you've got a neurological disorder. — Wayfarer
Doesn't the synthetic a priori, according to Kant, require prior actual experience to be able to then realize what is necessary to all possible experience? — Janus
guess we should simply remove the brain, can't stop now! — Enrique
Man, get ready to dodge the tomatoes.....bringing Kant into a discussion analyzing strictly Platonic shadows. Much of Plato is found in Kant, to be sure, but not this. — Mww
When a word for tree was developed and applied to many kinds of trees, the recognition of the patterns of configuration that trees manifest must already have been in place. — Janus
We are not born with the ability to count and calculate, even though we are obviously born with the capacity to develop these abilities in our interaction with the perceived diversifies and similarities of the environments we inhabit. — Janus
But no abstract universal or notion of an abstract universal needs to be there for that. That comes later with the elaborate abstract analysis made possible by symbolic language. — Janus
These abilities, I think it most plausible to believe, are developed in our concrete embodied interactions with the world; they could not be developed in abstraction. — Janus
That's my take on it anyhow. — Janus
What you're not addressing is the 'explanatory gap'. — Wayfarer
it isn’t recognition of patterns we want to know about, it being common across species; it’s word development, which is not common at all. — Mww
Resolving the explanatory gap and hard problem is exactly what I'm into — Enrique
My view is that, certainly, h. sapiens evolved, pretty much as discovered (although the details keep shifting) but that once the ability to abstract and reason developed, then humans escape from biological determinism. In other words, we can discover things that are not dictated by evolutionary development as such, we 'transcend the biological'. Tremendously unpopular and politically-incorrect view, of course. — Wayfarer
The problem that Chalmer's legendary paper brings up is not that it's objectively difficult to understand the nature of conscious experience, but that it's not an objective phenomenon at all. It's not a matter of providing 'a mechanism' - that is still within the domain of third-person cognitive science. It is that first-person consciousness is of a different order - or is ontologically distinct - from the domain of objective phenomena. — Wayfarer
What is Chalmers wanting to explain? Does he think it's impossible to overcome certain prejudicial notions about consciousness that arise from subjectivity? — Enrique
The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (in 'What is it like to be a Bat') has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.
It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.
If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of "consciousness", an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state. — David Chalmers, Facing up to the Hard Problem
continuing the progression that has occurred in psychology and neuroscience already. — Enrique
we would be able to perform feats such as creating elements of humanlike subjectivity in electronic devices — Enrique
subject of experience is never within the field of vision in the objective examination of phenomena. That's what makes it a 'hard problem' - not that it's devilishly complicated, or that we have to unravel and trace how billions of neural connections work to 'create consciousness', but because it requires a different stance or perspective to that assumed by the natural sciences. — Wayfarer
It has been remarked by some philosophers of science that this observation actually originated with the Indian philosophy of the Upaniṣads in the saying that 'the hand cannot grasp itself, the eye cannot see itself'. — Wayfarer
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.