↪Joshs
I see/hear your challenge to the thesis of the OP. I agree with an element of it but also am trying to challenge your statements — Paine
According to Kant's totally unnecessary theory. In reality, ideas such as Humean causality are empirical generalizations.The categories are the architecture of mind. They are not imposed in the sense that one can either impose them or not. They are the way the mind makes sense of sense data. — Fooloso4
I have Windows 10 and can open all my files. Message me with your email address, let me know what you want, and I will send it in a format you can open (docx? pdf?).I get a message stating that I cannot open files from Microsoft 95 or earlier — Fooloso4
Quite so. As Kant has no facts to be categorized, there is no basis for categorization, as the mind categorizes based on recognized content. The theory is incoherent.A follow up. You skipped right over the point:
According to Kant, it is not that the mind organizes or categories facts ... — Fooloso4 — Fooloso4
I have Windows 10 and can open all my files. Message me with your email address, let me know what you want, and I will send it in a format you can open (docx? pdf?). — Dfpolis
,As Kant has no facts to be categorized, there is no basis for categorization, — Dfpolis
...as the mind categorizes based on recognized content. — Dfpolis
They are available online and some are quite long.I think it would be more useful to copy and paste or at least summarize the article so that it could be part of this discussion. — Fooloso4
Sensation cannot impose abstract categories. It can only modify of our prior neural state. To categorize we must judge that we are dealing with an instance of a category, and judgements are propositional attitudes which, as Churchland notes, have no neural counterpart. Are you now abandoning naturalism?The basis for categorizing sensory intuitions, not facts, is the a priori categorical structure of the human mind. — Fooloso4
But it cannot do so at the sensory level, which is simply neural signal processing, not on a recognition of meaning -- which is required for categorization. So, you must either abandon Kant, or explain how neural processing can impose abstract a priori categories. (Connectionism assumes training, which may establish a posteriori patterns or associations. As I point out in my article, associations are not judgements.)Kant would argue that in order for there to be recognized content the mind must organize and make sense of what is given to it, that is, sensory intuitions. — Fooloso4
The theory is not incoherent because I disagree with it. Rather, I disagree because it is incoherent. Categorization requires judgement, which is not a sensory function.You may not agree but that does not mean the theory is incoherent. — Fooloso4
Only if one does not reflect on the mechanisms it proposes.It coheres quite nicely. — Fooloso4
This is not a complete sentence, and I cannot complete it in a sensible way. Sensing and knowing are similar, but essentially different, as sensation does not involve concepts, which require awarenss of content.The question of whether seeing and knowing are receptive or conceptive, passive or constructive. — Fooloso4
The article rejects dualism as a framework, qualia as essential to consciousness, actual information in computers, and the reduction of biology to physics. It also clarifies the concept of emergence. — Dfpolis
Sensation cannot impose abstract categories. — Dfpolis
To categorize we must judge ... — Dfpolis
Are you now abandoning naturalism? — Dfpolis
But it cannot do so at the sensory level, which is simply neural signal processing — Dfpolis
I disagree because it is incoherent. — Dfpolis
The question of whether seeing and knowing are receptive or conceptive, passive or constructive.
— Fooloso4
This is not a complete sentence, and I cannot complete it in a sensible way. — Dfpolis
Sensing and knowing — Dfpolis
Metaphysician Undercover — Metaphysician Undercover
That is not my premise. I agree with your observations in one way, and disagree in another, more relevant, way. I agree that any distinction of one thing into two aspects may be called "dualistic." I disagree if you are denying that the Aristotelian approach disposes of Cartesian dualism, which was my actual claim. Identifying Cartesian dualism with dualism in the first sense equivocates on "dualism." Aristotle does not see the psyche as necessarily thinking (res cogitans), or even as a thing (res). Thus, he is not a Cartesian dualist.So I think your basic premise, that dualism can be rejected through an appeal to Aristotle's hylomorphic dichotomy, is fundamentally misguided. — Metaphysician Undercover
While it is peripheral to my article, I think you are looking in the wrong direction for the source of the concept of potency (dynamis). As I note in my hyle article, (https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=POLANR&u=https%3A%2F%2Fphilpapers.org%2Farchive%2FPOLANR.DOC), the source of the concept is medical, referring to the hidden healing power of medicinals. A. then applied it to the argument against the reality of change in order to go between the horns of being and non-being. Thus, the origin and original application of the concept are physical, not mental.Therefore he proposed a duality of matter/form for physics, which would accommodate the duality of potential/actual derived from subjective introspection. — Metaphysician Undercover
We can, as shown by the fact that Aristotle does in De Anima, as I and others have noted.we cannot realistically exclude the Fundamental Abstraction — Metaphysician Undercover
I am not sure what you are saying here. We are able to know from experience, and so a posteriori, that all knowing involves a known object and a knowing subject. Whether we focus on one (as the FA does) or attend to both, is a matter of methodological choice. If attend to both, we are not employing the FA.The "Fundamental Abstraction" can be apprehended as the a priori, and since the a priori is very real, and supported by real introspective analysis, we cannot simply reject it just because we desire to absolve ourselves from dualism. — Metaphysician Undercover
So, we do not represent token observations?you refer to a type/token distinction, which is an ontological distinction, then you draw the invalid conclusion: " Thus, the consciousness impasse is a representational, not an ontological, issue". Only one side of the distinction is representational, the type side. — Metaphysician Undercover
I did not discuss the basis of the type-token distinction in this article. So, it makes no such claim. If you want to see what I think about the relation between universals and instances, see my "Metaphysics and Evolution: Response to Critics," Studia Gilsoniana 10, no. 4 (October–December 2021): 847–891 (http://gilsonsociety.com/files/847-891-Polis.pdf). There, I discuss the relation of the species concept (a type) to individual members of that species (tokens) (pp. 849-63).And your claim that the type/token distinction is representational rather than ontological — Metaphysician Undercover
I address that in the article I am currently working on. I have fundamental problems with Aquinas's rational psychology. I think his notion the agent intellect does is flawed. I see the passive intellect as neural representations (the phantasm) being understood.The difficulty that the Scholastics, like Aquinas had, was to explain the reality of the passive intellect. — Metaphysician Undercover
The agent intellect does not create content. It actualizes (makes known) prior intelligibility, which is the source of known content.he agent intellect, as the creative source of imagination and conception, — Metaphysician Undercover
That is the standard Scholastic view. My view is more complex, and is given in my hyle article. Briefly, hyle plays a passive role in cases where there is an intelligent agent informing a result, but not in natural substantial change, where it is a "source of power."And under Aristotle's conceptual structure, passivity, and potential, are the defining features of matter. — Metaphysician Undercover
Exactly! He also insists that the phantasm, a sensory, and so a material representation, is necessary to thought.So one could interpret Aristotle as demonstrating that the human intellect depends on the material brain for its capacity to receive sense impressions. — Metaphysician Undercover
That is my point. Categorization cannot be a sensory function, and mind cannot categorize without first knowing, so Kant's theory is incoherent.Sensation cannot impose abstract categories. — Dfpolis
It doesn't, the mind does. — Fooloso4
That is hardly a cogent argument for Kantianism.According to Kant the categories of the understanding are a priori. — Fooloso4
Okay. I am not concerned with understanding Kant, but with understanding reality. So, do you think his theory contributes to understanding reality? If not, let's not waste more time on Kant.You are confusing the attempt to understand Kant and my stance on naturalism. — Fooloso4
I did not say signal processing was simple. That is twisting my words.I doubt that neuroscientists studying neural signal processing regard it as "simple". — Fooloso4
Okay. But, that is not the question I am addressing in my article.It should be: The question is whether ... — Fooloso4
That value statement lies on objective criteria.Right, and but that is smuggling in value statements as if they were objective fact about what comprises what. — schopenhauer1
-Again you are asking a "why" question in disguise. This is what emergent features do! This is why we classify them as emergent in the fist place. Just because you constructed an answerable question that doesn't make it a serious question and No....made up magical substrates do not qualify as an answer.It does not (at least now, possibly never because the answer might never be empirical) tell us how it is that emergent phenomena supervene on its constituents. — schopenhauer1
-Observations are the foundation of our evaluations. You can not go around it. If you do then you will need to lower the standards and accept Every claim out there.Facts of reality render that claim wrong. — Nickolasgaspar
Which are based observationally. Convenient. — schopenhauer1
-Your comment is irrelevant to the fact of Diachronic Emergent phenomenon (Where the low level system ceases to exist but the Emergent property persists).No the analogy of a container is wrong since Diachronic Emergence wouldn't be possible. (persistence after the causal mechanism ceasing to exist). — Nickolasgaspar
Still doesn't bypass it. You are assuming the consequent again. — schopenhauer1
And I didn't say you said ghost. You said ghostly and I pointed out that the phenomenon doesn't share the same ghostly qualities.(or the other way around to be fair -"Ghosts do not share the same qualities.".Yep they are observable indeed. And I did not say "ghosts" but "ghostly" big difference in what I am conveying. — schopenhauer1
It depends what "nature" you are looking for. If you are looking for its contingency then its nature is physical and its taxonomy is Strong Emergence.Rather, what is the nature of this emergence from its constituent parts? — schopenhauer1
Wrong accusations are not philosophical arguments.You are making an odd antagonism. Most philosophers are not denying empirical claims. Functionally, the science carries on, no matter what the argument behind the metaphysics and epistemology is, so not sure what has got you so annoyed besides just general incredulity over and over. — schopenhauer1
mind cannot categorize without first knowing — Dfpolis
That is hardly a cogent argument for Kantianism. — Dfpolis
So, do you think his theory contributes to understanding reality? — Dfpolis
I did not say signal processing was simple. That is twisting my words. — Dfpolis
Kant would argue that in order for there to be recognized content the mind must organize and make sense of what is given to it, that is, sensory intuitions.
— Fooloso4
But it cannot do so at the sensory level, which is simply neural signal processing — Dfpolis
But, that is not the question I am addressing in my article. — Dfpolis
Why am I not surprised? :smile:no progress has been made toward a physical reduction of consciousness. — D. F. Polis
There is nothing incoherent in the idea that there are innate categories of mind. — Fooloso4
.The mind’s a priori conceptual contribution to experience can be enumerated by a special set of concepts that make all other empirical concepts and judgments possible. These concepts cannot be experienced directly; they are only manifest as the form which particular judgments of objects take. Kant believes that formal logic has already revealed what the fundamental categories of thought are. The special set of concepts is Kant’s Table of Categories, which are taken mostly from Aristotlewith a few revisions — IEP, Kant's Metaphysics
No, it is based on understanding, from experience, how we judge -- for categorization is a judgement, <a is an instance of b>. As Paul Churchland pointed out, there are no neural structures corresponding to propositional attitudes.mind cannot categorize without first knowing — Dfpolis
That is an opinion stated as a matter of fact. — Fooloso4
This is the worst case of an argument from authority -- citing Kant in support of Kantianism.According to Kant there cannot be knowing without the mind's categories. — Fooloso4
It is not the existence of categories that is incoherent -- that is merely an baseless conjecture. It is categorization without knowing what one is categorizing that is incoherent.There is nothing incoherent in the idea that there are innate categories of mind. — Fooloso4
My article made no claim about immortality. So, are you concluding that our capacity to be aware of contents makes us immortal? In my view, we need more premises to reach that conclusion.Or your claim that the active intellect is consciousness and thereby the consciousness of human beings is deathless and everlasting. — Fooloso4
Aristotle argued that two millennia earlier. Aquinas concurred. So, what of value did Kant add?To the extent seeing and knowing are not independent of the seer and knower, yes. — Fooloso4
I wrote "simply neural signal processing," meaning nothing more than neural signal processing, not that neural signal processing is simple.I did not say signal processing was simple. That is twisting my words. — Dfpolis — Fooloso4
I have given my view of what the agent intellect does. If you think my view is wrong, please say why. If not, we need not continue in this direction. I am not arguing that my view is Aristotle's view, I am only crediting Aristotle with inspiring my view. So, what Aristotle actually thought about the agent intellect is not relevant, unless it provides an argument against my view.First of all, whether seeing and knowing are receptive or conceptive, passive or constructive has direct bearing on what you are addressing. It relates to the question of the activity of the active intellect. — Fooloso4
No, it is based on understanding, from experience, how we judge - — Dfpolis
for categorization is a judgement, <a is an instance of b>. — Dfpolis
According to Kant there cannot be knowing without the mind's categories.
— Fooloso4
This is the worst case of an argument from authority -- citing Kant in support of Kantianism. — Dfpolis
It is categorization without knowing what one is categorizing that is incoherent. — Dfpolis
The bottom line is that I did not discuss Kant in my article, so this discussion does not relate to the topic. — Dfpolis
My article made no claim about immortality. So, are you concluding that our capacity to be aware of contents makes us immortal? — Dfpolis
So, what of value did Kant add? — Dfpolis
meaning nothing more than neural signal processing — Dfpolis
I am not arguing that my view is Aristotle's view, I am only crediting Aristotle with inspiring my view. — Dfpolis
Only potentially. The intelligibility of a must include notes that elicit the concept <b>, as I explained in my paper. It is because of need to elicit <b> that we must be aware of a to categorize it as an instance of b.The category 'b' must exist in order for 'a' to be an instance of it. — Fooloso4
If Aristotle deserves credit for my position, I try to cite him. I do not cite him as an authority.if you are an Aristotelian, as you say you are, then what you claim about Aristotle should be supported by citing Aristotle. — Fooloso4
Quite true. It is citing Kant as an authority against my position that makes you seem a Kantian.In any case, an attempt to understand Kant does not make me a Kantian. — Fooloso4
No matter what you call the categorized content, the act of categorizing is an ace of judgement, requiring awareness, and hence knowledge, of those contents. Different sensory processing (e.g. of visual vs auditory signals) is not categorization. Only judgement of type is categorization.What is categorized are the manifold of sense intuitions. — Fooloso4
So, you conclude that our intellect is immortal. I think the conclusion requires more reflection.Based on your claim that our power of awareness is agent intellect, and that according Aristotle the agent intellect is deathless and everlasting, then it can only be ours as long as we are living beings. It is then separable from us. — Fooloso4
The claim that the categories are the a priori conditions for knowing and that knowledge is not of how things are in themselves but how they are for us. — Fooloso4
None of that says neural signal processing is simple. Further, I did not say "conscious is not the result of neural activity" without further qualification. I said that the contents of consciousness are neurally processed, but that such processing does not explain our awareness of those contents.You made the distinction between neural signal processing and a recognition of meaning. A variation of your claim that we can't get there from here, that we will never understand consciousness by studying neural signal processing, that conscious is not the result of neural activity. — Fooloso4
Do you have an example in mind? Note that not stating his entire position is not abusing his terminology. To state his entire position would take volumes, and no one has yet done so to universal satisfaction.You are using his terminology but have neglected to indicate that you are using in in ways that differ from his. — Fooloso4
↪Joshs
After setting my previously expressed peevishness aside, I became curious about your thinking in terms of periods of time. Why is it an example of the Enlightenment instead of an expression of Scholastic philosophy? — Paine
I disagree if you are denying that the Aristotelian approach disposes of Cartesian dualism, which was my actual claim. Identifying — Dfpolis
While it is peripheral to my article, I think you are looking in the wrong direction for the source of the concept of potency (dynamis). As I note in my hyle article, (https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=POLANR&u=https%3A%2F%2Fphilpapers.org%2Farchive%2FPOLANR.DOC), the source of the concept is medical, referring to the hidden healing power of medicinals. A. then applied it to the argument against the reality of change in order to go between the horns of being and non-being. Thus, the origin and original application of the concept are physical, not mental. — Dfpolis
I am not sure what you are saying here. We are able to know from experience, and so a posteriori, that all knowing involves a known object and a knowing subject. Whether we focus on one (as the FA does) or attend to both, is a matter of methodological choice. If attend to both, we are not employing the FA.
Further, I see no reason to think we know anything in a truly a priori way. — Dfpolis
The agent intellect does not create content. It actualizes (makes known) prior intelligibility, which is the source of known content. — Dfpolis
That is the standard Scholastic view. My view is more complex, and is given in my hyle article. Briefly, hyle plays a passive role in cases where there is an intelligent agent informing a result, but not in natural substantial change, where it is a "source of power." — Dfpolis
So, you are a Kantian, holding "that the categories are the a priori conditions for knowing." — Dfpolis
You are using his terminology but have neglected to indicate that you are using in in ways that differ from his.
— Fooloso4
Do you have an example in mind? — Dfpolis
To state his entire position would take volumes, and no one has yet done so to universal satisfaction. — Dfpolis
How do we experience coming to know sensible objects? As attending to, and becoming aware of, sensory contents. Thus, the agent intellect is our power of awareness – and its operation is
consciousness. Qualia are the contingent forms of actualized sensory intelligibility.
My article made no claim about immortality. — Dfpolis
Why is it an example of the Enlightenment instead of an expression of Scholastic philosophy? — Paine
The novelty was the notion of a single inner space in which bodily and perceptual sensations ("confused ideas of sense and imagination" in Descartes's phrase), mathematical truths, moral rules, the idea of God, moods of depression, and all the rest of what we now call "mental" were objects of quasi-observation. Such an inner arena with its inner observer had been suggested at various points in ancient and medieval thought but it had never been taken seriously long enough to form the basis for a problematic. But the seventeenth century took it seriously enough to permit it to pose the problem of the veil of ideas, the problem which made epistemology central to philosophy.
Once Descartes had invented that "precise sense" of "feeling" in which it was "no other than thinking," we began to lose touch with the Aristotelian distinction between reason-as-grasp-of-universals and the living body which takes care of sensation and motion. A new mind-body distinction was required-the one which we call that "between consciousness and what is not consciousness…Once mind is no longer synonymous with reason then something other than our grasp of universal truths must serve as the mark of mind.”(Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature)
Yes, an Aristotelian approach is more than assuming an Aristotelian conceptual space.Actually your claim was that Aristotelian conceptual space provides a means for rejecting dualism. — Metaphysician Undercover
An introduction cannot exhaust intentions that take a full article to elaborate. It can only indicate the direction one intends to take. The article reveals my intentions.[quote="MetaphysicianI'm being hard on you on this point, because I believe that you ought to leave your intentions as open and revealed as possible. — Metaphysician Undercover
You seem not to understand analogies. The analogues are partly the same and partly different, so one has to look beyond an analogy to understand its relevant aspect. Aristotle is careful to distinguish natural processes, in which change derives from natural or intrinsic principles (physis), from artificial processes in which change is imposed by an extrinsic agent. I explained this over 30 years ago in my hyle article, to which I refer you ("A New Reading of Aristotle's Hyle," Modern Schoolman 68 (3):225-244 (1991) https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=POLANR&u=https%3A%2F%2Fphilpapers.org%2Farchive%2FPOLANR.DOC).I told you that Aristotle seems quite clear to me, to compare the coming into being of a natural article to that of an artificial object. In this case, the form comes from an external source, the mind of the artist, and it is put into the matter. You insisted that Aristotle allowed that the form inhered within the matter itself, in a natural object. But of course Aristotle's analogy of comparing a natural object to an artificial object does not really allow for that interpretation. — Metaphysician Undercover
I did not say that "the form of an object inheres within the matter." I said that, in natural substantial changes, hyle is the potential to a determinate form. What is potential does not "inhere in" anything, nor is it a property (Aristotelian accident), because it is not yet actual.by saying that the form of an object inheres within the matter, you interpret "form" as necessarily the property of matter. — Metaphysician Undercover
No, what allows me to avoid Cartesian dualism is Arsitotle's definition of the psyche as the actuality of a potentially living body instead of as res cogitans.This allows you to deny dualism — Metaphysician Undercover
You are confused. If the hylomorphism allowed me to "cling to emergence," I would see it in every case of substantial change. I do not. If you read carefully, you will see that my argument for the ontological emergence of cosciousness is based on far more modern considerations -- the nature of mathematical physics as limited by the Fundamental Abstraction.and cling to emergence. — Metaphysician Undercover
Ultimately, it is. Proximately, it cannot be, because change requires a prior potential to new form. That is why the Unmoved Mover cannot change.it completely neglects Aristotle's "Metaphysics", especially his cosmological argument where actuality is shown to be prior to potentiality. — Metaphysician Undercover
This is incorrect. First, the Metaphysics presupposes the analysis in the Physics and other works on nature. That analysis shows the necessity of prior potentials in natural processes. Second, nowhere does he "derive" potency from introspection. In De Anima he applies the distinction of potency and act to the analysis of sensation and intellection, based on a combination of first and third person data.As such, [t]he reality of "potential" which Aristotle argued for, is derived from introspection. It is subjective, mental. — Metaphysician Undercover
As the first paragraph you quote shows, I use the type-token distinction only to show why introspective data is methodologically acceptable. It is the end of a previous line of thought. The second and third paragraphs you quote do not summarize the first paragraph, as can be seen from the fact that neither mentions introspection.You very clearly use the type-token distinction as the basis of your rejection of dualism. — Metaphysician Undercover
You misunderstand the FA. It is not the fact that "there is a distinction between known and knower," but the methodological choice to attend to the object to the exclusion of the subject.There are certain necessary conditions, essential aspects of what constitutes a "knowing subject". One of these necessary conditions is the FA, (that there is a distinction between known and knower) as an a priori principle. — Metaphysician Undercover
More fundamentally, we cannot think without existing. The order of knowing is not the order of existence.we cannot get access to the being without the thinking — Metaphysician Undercover
"Creation" is an imprecise word. We need to distinguish between making what was potential actual, and making something with no prior potential (true creation).Within Aristotle's conceptual space this is an act of creation — Metaphysician Undercover
I cannot agree. If known content came from the mind, rather than reality, there would be no reason to expect it to apply to reality. The reason prior concepts apply to new instances is that the new instance is able to elicit the same, prior concept. If a new instance can elicit the concept, it can to so even when the concept it did not already exist.So in the case of "discovering" ideas, the form, which is the essence of the idea, comes from the mind of the geometer in an act of creation, and this is an act of creation by the agent intellect. — Metaphysician Undercover
There is: our brain is informed by sensation. When a neural representation is actually understood (which is done by the agent intellect), no new representation is formed. If it were, it would not be the neural representation that is understood. It would be a different representation, the new one (which Aquinas calls the "intelligible species"). Since to understand a new representation is not to understand the neural representation, the passive intellect is the neural representation, not simpliciter, but as understood. Therefore, the passive intellect receives its content physically, and its being understood intentionally.If the intelligible object had actual existence in some mode independent of the mind which "discovers" it, then it would have to be the passive intellect which receives it into the mind. The passive intellect is posited as a receptor, because it is necessary to have something which can receive the forms of sensible objects through sensation. — Metaphysician Undercover
I agree. The intelligiblity is neurally encoded in the mind.the reality of such independent potential is denied. — Metaphysician Undercover
Not quite. Augustine had exemplar ideas in the mind of God. Aquinas reduced them to God's intention to create whatever He creates (see my "Metaphysics and Evolution: Response to Critics," Studia Gilsoniana 10 (4):847-891 (2021) https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1005583).Therefore the Christian theologians posited independent Forms, as prior to material existence, to account for the forms of natural objects. — Metaphysician Undercover
If you read my hyle article, you will find citations supporting my view.You are assigning to matter special powers to act which are inconsistent with the concept in Aristotle's conceptual space. — Metaphysician Undercover
We need to distinguish secondary causality, which is the causality found in nature, from metaphysical actualization, which is what the cosmological argument relies upon. Aristotle is clear that hyle is a kind of physis (an intrinsic principle of change), a "source of power," and that it "desires" the new form in a substantial change. Thus, it is an active tendency, and not passively receptive, in the case of natural changes. In artificial changes, it is passively receptive.It has no actuality, therefore no act, and the becoming of material objects cannot be accounted for because there is no act as causation. That matter cannot have such special power is the reason why the cosmological argument is so powerful. — Metaphysician Undercover
At any moment, it is what it is. Potentially, corporeal being can be something else. It is because of this that we need a source of potentiality, i.e. hyle.And, by the law of identity the object must be what it is, it cannot be something other than it is. — Metaphysician Undercover
Its form must be determined by a prior potential, viz. its predecessor's hyle. Also, it must be actualized by something that is already operational/actual. That line of actualization can be traced to the Unmoved Mover. Still, the form cannot exist prior to the being, because the form is the being's actuality, and it is not actual before it exists.Therefore when the object comes into existence as an orderly thing, its form must be prior to its material existence, to account for it being what it is rather than something else — Metaphysician Undercover
I think I have some answers. If answers were not attainable, there would be no point in inquiry. Philosophy is not a game.Here's the difference: I regard philosophy as inquiry into questions and problems. You think you have the answers. — Fooloso4
I have not misrepresented it. I said it was controversial and gave my understanding.We have been over this. The term 'agent intellect (νοῦς ποιητικóς)'. — Fooloso4
True. But, it is not relevant to my topic any more than the related discussion of the Unmoved Mover.It does not take volumes to say deathless and everlasting. — Fooloso4
The quoted text is relating the agent intellect to phenomenology, not explaining its dynamics.Sufficiently vague. Consciousness, the operation of the agent intellect, is the operation of our power of awareness. — Fooloso4
Because it is best to deal with each issue in a focused, rather than in a convoluted, way.To say that the agent intellect is a deathless and everlasting power seems to be right in line with your metaphysics of God and Mind. But you side step — Fooloso4
I agree that neither Aristotle nor the Scholastics focused on issues of personal identity, and that I am concerned with them. So, to that extent, I am post-Scholastic. I also deal with modern science more than "Thomists" do.“The novelty was the notion of a single inner space in which bodily and perceptual sensations ("confused ideas of sense and imagination" in Descartes's phrase), mathematical truths, moral rules, the idea of God, moods of depression, and all the rest of what we now call "mental" were objects of quasi-observation. Such an inner arena with its inner observer had been suggested at various points in ancient and medieval thought but it had never been taken seriously long enough to form the basis for a problematic. But the seventeenth century took it seriously enough to permit it to pose the problem of the veil of ideas, the problem which made epistemology central to philosophy. — Joshs
I am writing an article for the Thomist community in which I argue that intellection is not essentially universal, that there are physical representations of universals and that we have concepts of individuals. I also think that the notion of universal exemplars underpins prejudice and undermines natural law ethics.something other than our grasp of universal truths must serve as the mark of mind. — Joshs
I have not misrepresented it. I said it was controversial and gave my understanding. — Dfpolis
But, it is not relevant to my topic any more than the related discussion of the Unmoved Mover. — Dfpolis
Sufficiently vague. Consciousness, the operation of the agent intellect, is the operation of our power of awareness.
— Fooloso4
The quoted text is relating the agent intellect to phenomenology, not explaining its dynamics. — Dfpolis
Consequently, consciousness, the operation of the agent intellect, is not a niggling anomaly that
can be ignored until explained as a neurophysical side effect, but an experiential primitive
essential to understanding human rationality. Certain concepts, such as <electric charge>, are
an experiential primitive accepted, not because they are theoretically reducible, but because they are epistemologically primitive – reflecting contingent realities that cannot be, or at least are not, further explained.
But if consciousness (active intellect) is deathless and everlasting then it does not emerge in an interaction, it is employed.
You say the active intellect is a "personal capacity", as if the ongoing controversies have been settled. As Joe Sachs points out:
... in Metaphysics, Book XII, ch.7-10. Aristotle again distinguishes between the active and passive intellects, but this time he equates the active intellect with the "unmoved mover" and God.
— Wikipedia, Active Intellect — Fooloso4
In separation it is just what it is, and this alone is immortal and eternal. (But we do not remember because this is unaffected, whereas the passive intellect is perishable, and without this nothing thinks. — Aristotle, De Anima, 430a18, translated by DW Hamlyn
Actual knowledge is identical with its object. But potential knowledge is prior in time in the individual, but not prior even in time in general; for all things that come to be are derived from that which is so actually. — ibid. 431a1
It is clear that the object of perception makes that which can perceive actively so instead of potentially so; for it is not affected or altered. Hence this is a different form from movement; for movement is the activity of the incomplete, while activity proper is different, the activity of the complete. — ibid.431a4
It is as if you said: "Hard problem? What hard problem? There is no hard problem. Consciousness just is. No further explanation is needed or possible." — Fooloso4
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