, if what we're happy to say is that all three obtain in the mind. — AmadeusD
I think we both reject the scientistic interpretation of 2b, — Leontiskos
So in this rendition the naturalist will posit a brute fact where the theist posits a intentional ordering, and these sorts of disputes move further and further towards metaphysics and away from science. — Leontiskos
Curiously, the first hit on Google initially frames the idea theologically. — Leontiskos
I found that surprising and interesting. It is interesting that it is intuitive and commonly accepted that <If the Big Bang occurred, then the universe was probably created>, — Leontiskos
Ok, right, so then there's a Yes/No answer here:
Are you suggesting the Red Pen is actually out there, in the world, whether or not it is perceived? — AmadeusD
And that the mind merely does the perceiving of a mind-independent red pen? Yes? No? — AmadeusD
Ah, no (after reading your response), this is my bad. "any given red pen" should have been the phrase, because it matters not what instance we're talking about. Either pens can be red, whether or not we know they are, or they can only be red in virtue of our experiencing them as red. One must trump the other, save for lower-level disagreements.There's a bit of an identity crisis here. — creativesoul
So, yes. — creativesoul
I wouldn't say that. — creativesoul
I suspect the role of pain to Wittgenstein is being misunderstood. — Hanover
Wittgenstein enthralled himself with ambiguity. — Metaphysician Undercover
What do you take the pen to be when it isn't being perceived. — AmadeusD
That phenomenal consciousness is "of" distal objects? What is the word "of" doing here? If, for the sake of argument, phenomenal consciousness is reducible to brain activity then this amounts to the claim that brain activity is "of" distal objects. What does that even mean? — Michael
Maybe replace "of" with "about"? In the sense in which intentionality emerges from our brains with 'mental objects' being about distal objects? — wonderer1
Can you see something (relatively simple 'something') that could be a difference between pain and colour as sensations? Or a way in whcih one is not a sensation the way the other is and therefore supporting Witty's endless assurances that our language is hte problem, and not hte problems. LOL. — AmadeusD
2b. There are no teleological realities.
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I think we both reject the scientistic interpretation of 2b, . . . — Leontiskos
Hold up. Biosemioticians like Stan Salthe explicitly recognise a hierarchy of grades of telos that runs from human purpose to biological function to physical tendency. Sorry, no divine intervention involved. Just the appropriate divisions of semiosis as a system science approach embracing all four ArIstotelean causes. — apokrisis
Not really. The brute fact is structural rather than material. So developmental rather than existential.
And science has gone the same way even at Its fundamental physical level of quantum field theory. Hence Ontic Structural Realism as the recent shiny new toy in metaphysics. — apokrisis
The argument goes different. GR showed the cosmos is unstable. It would either have to be contracting or expanding. If contracting, it ought to have already disappeared from existence. It indeed exists, so therefore it must be expanding. — apokrisis
Einstein had nothing to say to the young Abbé about the mathematical part of his paper, technically it was perfect, but he completely disagreed with him concerning its physical interpretation. Einstein said very crudely: “from the point of view of Physics this seems to me abominable”. What’s the reason of such brutal reaction? In fact Einstein did not admit at this time an expanding universe. Probably influenced by his implicit Spinozist philosophy, he did not accept the fact that the universe had a real history. One remembers that Einstein had shown his strong opposition to the papers of Alexander Friedmann, this Russian mathematician and meteorologist who discovered in 1922-1924 solutions of Einstein’s equations corresponding to expanding and contracting universes. According to Einstein, the universe as a whole has to remain forever immutable. Einstein’s first cosmological model, published in 1917, was indeed a spherical and perfectly static universe. It is worth noting that Georges Lemaître, at the time he wrote his paper on the recession of the nebulae, did not know Friedmann’s discoveries. In 1929 Lemaître told that it was Einstein himself who informed him about the existence of the “Friedmann (expanding and contracting) universes”. — Einstein and Lemaître: two friends, two cosmologies…
...and then what remains is a difference over a more narrow version of 2b, "There are no divine teleological realities."
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The more interesting question surely has to do with the narrower version of 2b, but I will leave it there for now. — Leontiskos
there is a key difference between saying that one has no evidence for something and saying that something does not exist. — Leontiskos
It's questionable whether pain is properly a sensation rather than a sort of idea. This is because pain crosses all the sense types. Generally we think of pain as a type of touch, but sharp sounds can be painful, bright lights can be painful, even the tastes and smells which we judge as very bad can be painful. — Metaphysician Undercover
Notice the use of "or" which allows ambiguity. — Metaphysician Undercover
The second definition — Metaphysician Undercover
what happens with the conscious awareness of pain. and consequently the use of the word "pain", is that it becomes a concept which we use to refer to a type of "sensation" which is emotionally based, rather than being based in sense perception — Metaphysician Undercover
Pain is commonly contrasted with pleasure — Metaphysician Undercover
In this way, the emotionally based feeling, or sensation, has a causal object, but the object is a good, as a goal or objective, rather than a sense percept. — Metaphysician Undercover
You asked me "what's the difference between hallucinating red and the mental percept that 620-750nm light ordinarily causes to occur." — Michael
I’m not clear what you are driving at. But I have no problem if you are saying the negative can’t be proved. I can’t claim evidence against a transcendent “God did it” story. One could always adjust a supernatural claim to lie just beyond the reality that can be evidenced.
I mean scientists can posit superdeterminism as the way to regain realism in quantum mechanics. There is always a way to suggest a hidden cause beyond the reach of the evidence available. — apokrisis
So sure, as pragmatists, we advance by having beliefs that we seek to doubt. Einstein had his classical presumptions and because they could be counterfactually expressed, they could be shown to be wrong. — apokrisis
because of this the god-of-the-gaps paradigm of the modern naturalist matches the theological paradigm of the modern fundamentalist — Leontiskos
Pain is a sensation of touch with varying degrees to it - high-enough, and you experience a sensation. — AmadeusD
The one exception here would be "emotional pain" which I think is incorrectly labelled pain rather than discomfort - which can, acceptably, be left very vague and subjective — AmadeusD
but it seems pretty obvious that a "bodily" sensation must be a the result of the senses. — AmadeusD
I don't think this is right, but I do think that this does happen, wrongly. The above responses go some way as to why. Emotions often conflict with the sensation of pain. I believe pain is, like vision, a result of sense perception but is simply open to the all the aberrations vision is open to, being that we never "view" the actual object in the visual field on this account. Pain is rightly not conceptualised as something 'taken in' from without, via the senses, but something produced by the sense-data of touch interacting with the sense organ (in this case, pain receptors/skin variously described as such under particular conditions of intensity, locality etc.. receiving pressure, angle, surface coverage, angle-of-motion etc.. to inform the signal to be sent). All senses are indirect in this way as I understand them both on the empirical, process related information, and the conceptual coherence (or, incoherence, really) involved. And they are all open to being wrong. I think holding a 1:1 concept of the internal representation of sensory data is probably wrong. — AmadeusD
It seems to me that these concepts are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary. Consciousness could indeed be caused by brain activity in a seemingly random and complex way where the brain's development and firings gradually give rise to conscious awareness.Phenomenal consciousness is either reducible to or supervenient on brain activity. The only connection between distal objects and brain activity is that distal objects often play a causal role in determining brain activity. This is what the science shows. — Michael
There are many internal pains, sore muscles, stiffness, headaches, stomach aches, and pains of other organs. I don't think it's proper to call such pains a sensation of touch. — Metaphysician Undercover
I also do not think this proposed distinction between pain and discomfort is useful. What one person calls discomfort, another would call pain. What is subjective is the proposed distinction. — Metaphysician Undercover
Do you not have internal pains? These are not the result of any of the five known senses. You are not touching your stomach when you feel a stomach ache — Metaphysician Undercover
You start with the faulty assumption that pain is produced from the sense of touch, and you proceed from that false premise. — Metaphysician Undercover
Pain is not produced from the sense of touch, as internal pains demonstrate. — Metaphysician Undercover
If you knew some of the science about how pain is supposed to be an interaction between the brain and the inflicted part of the body, through the medium of the nervous system, you would recognize that your proposition is very likely false. — Metaphysician Undercover
This is how Tylenol is thought to work, by affecting the part of the brain which sends the pain signal. — Metaphysician Undercover
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