Comments

  • Complete!! read-thru of Wittgenstein's Blue Book

    It is very tricky. I am inclined to think that it is not overcome but I won't try to argue for that as a thesis but just give some impressions on a field of uncertainty.

    The solipsism of TLP appears as a natural consequence of the previous statements but accepting that result is not a speaking of it. It sounds like a speaking of it. We need a point of comparison to approach this negative.

    The reference to the condition of being "realist" is connected in my mind to 6.431:

    So too the world doesn't change when we die, it just ends.

    This suggests that Berkeley not "carrying out" the thought allowed him to have opinions about what is objective that is a misunderstanding of his transcendental place, to employ a Kantian term. Wittgenstein insists that we are constrained in this regard. That restraint is also evident in his later work. For example:

    240. Disputes do not break out (among mathematicians, say) over the question whether a rule has been obeyed or not. People don't come to blows over it, for example. That is part of the framework on which the working of our language is based (for example, in giving descriptions).

    241. "So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?"—It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is no agreement in opinions but in form of life.
    — Philosophical Investigations

    There is also all the emphasis on what is private or not in the context of language. I will leave it there.
  • Understanding 'Mental Health': What is the Dialogue Between Psychiatry and Philosophy?

    I would like to again underline a difference between psychiatry and psychology. A psychiatrist is a medical doctor. Think of her as a gathering place of different streams of research. That runs the gamut from neuroscience, genetics, pathology of diseases, drugs and their effects, etcetera. That doctor is also a gathering point for streams of psychological research. The psychodynamic is but one of many and they vary greatly upon what they build their models upon. Consider this search page of models of human development psychology. If you go down a few of the pages, you will start seeing reference to the big names of the twentieth century.

    The social dynamics Vygotsky introduced has expanded into many other ways looking at environments where the individual emerges.

    The research of therapies involves the range of such models but also performs researches of therapy as such. That is where the Boulder model comes in. Practice and theory are necessarily connected but also always apart.
  • Complete!! read-thru of Wittgenstein's Blue Book

    When W says that solipsism is not an opinion, the view is connected to the Tractatus saying it is present but cannot be said. There is something to be overcome but is not like overturning a proposition.
  • On how to learn philosophy

    I have learned many things through it but have often come to question their summaries when reading actual texts. Probably the fate of all attempts at classification.
  • Understanding 'Mental Health': What is the Dialogue Between Psychiatry and Philosophy?

    There are many other practitioners who agree and the importance of theories of development is that such views held by many are meaningless theoretically.

    The acknowledgement of a defect is not a theory in itself. It is new theory that leads to new treatments. Rogers wants his seat at the diagnosis table.
  • On how to learn philosophy
    Each attendee to the welcome wagon certainly presents their own tray of muffins.
  • Understanding 'Mental Health': What is the Dialogue Between Psychiatry and Philosophy?

    Szaz stood outside of the community of practitioners and called a pox upon all their houses. Liang was more of an 'ordinary language' protest to the accretion of diagnostic hierarchy. They annoyed practitioners for entirely different reasons.

    Rogers was a well ensconced practitioner in the discipline of "organizational psychology", hardly a voice from the wilderness. Let me leave off from describing Liang other than to question his generalities.
  • On how to learn philosophy

    In so far as directly engaging with original texts goes, I found it helpful to record reactions, note parallels, and keep track of references as one proceeds. Apart from whatever direction I have gone, the practice I began at the beginning has been a gift to my future self. It started out as marginalia and then a notebook linked to marginalia, and then linking to indexes in specific works. I developed a kind of marginalia in those indexes that still helps me decades later.

    Everyone has their own style, but some form of this discipline helps one keep building on previous learning.
  • Understanding 'Mental Health': What is the Dialogue Between Psychiatry and Philosophy?

    Yes. I was waving toward that in my comments above concerning the world of the "patient."

    I see some hope from the developmental conception side where there is a big world outside of the industry of the practitioner.

    As far as assigning blame goes, there is a parallel dynamic in the practice of law in shifting sands of what it stands upon.

    Edit to add: The two sides have some unsightly hook ups on a regular basis.
  • Every Act is a Selfish Act

    The definition excludes a difference that does not replace why the difference has been used up to now. General terms lose their value when they apply equally to all particulars without a way to make distinctions amongst those particulars. "All men have flesh" is not to say, "Flesh is all that men are." As a matter of contrast, the use of the terms self/selfless is similar to other contraries which provide a way to distinguish what is experienced through a range of differences. That was my first point:

    The problem with your bubble is that the generality of the explanation renders any particular instance useless for inquiry. Distinctions without a difference.Paine

    The reference to La Rochefoucauld is to point out that none of his Maxims do anything without the distinction. Your definition erases his observations. Thus, my second point:

    It is a problem with your dichotomy. You enlist La Rochefoucauld for your purposes but are unable to replace his model with equal perspicuity.Paine

    Hanover underlined the paucity of this generality as a way of describing our world. I jumped on the wagon by noting your definition does not give us any leverage understanding actual experiences:

    It is not as if the collapse gives us a better way to understand narcissism, lack of self-awareness, or solipsism, as a form of isolation.Paine

    When Copernicus changed his standpoint from that of Ptolemy, he was looking at the same heavenly bodies. Your definition says they are the same but there is no corresponding discovery proffered.
  • Banning AI Altogether

    I should not have spoken so absolutely. I was focusing on the question "why not?"

    Your example of coding reminds me of how I learned methods of work in the trades. It started by following instructions and imitating others. Through experience, the arts became my own. That does not mean being free of help or learning new methods. It does mean being where the rubber meets the road as you describe in relation to criteria of failure.

    In that context, I have a ready reference for what amplifies a skill and what replaces it. Laser levels are powerful tools but do not check themselves. Plumb bobs do. Scheduling software aggregates information much quicker than I can but are useless without me imagining the work sequences against lived experiences amongst known resources. Calculators and accounting software are great but do not replace the one-on-one correspondence needed to be sure something has not been forgotten. I use cyphers for my material assessment because they don't care when I think of something.

    On the other hand, drawing programs do what my hand sketches do not. They create a model which measurements confirm but do not compose. I would call that a replacement that allows me to communicate with designers in their language but not do all of what they do. GPS and google maps have replaced my orienting skills. There in there somewhere but I hope I don't need them tomorrow. I have no idea what my wife's phone number is.

    As for writing creatively and intellectually, I don't think of it as dispensing with help altogether as Simon Willson describes the matter but do think finding one's own voice and point of view is about becoming more independent from whatever helped a writer in the past. I guess I am one of those Harry Hindu says threw down a bag of drachmas to become a participant in the conversation. The scope of such literacy is itself a dependency, however, an artifact of intelligence that my thinking is far from free of. That is why I have put so much emphasis here on commenting on original texts in favor of commentary upon commentary. It would be fair to say that excludes me from a lot of discourse. It does let me know what my own understanding is and what it is not.
  • Understanding 'Mental Health': What is the Dialogue Between Psychiatry and Philosophy?
    Psychiatry is bound up with values about norms or what is considered 'normal'. There are also political aspects of the practice of psychiatry too.Jack Cummins

    Agreed. I propose that some measure of that is because of the focus upon diagnosis organized around saying what is wrong with a particular patient. There is also the politics of care or the lack of it.

    Psychology is a part of that dynamic too but provides a better background to address your concerns. The different approaches to treatment grow out of models of human development. The range of differences between Freud and Vygotsky, for instance, are attempts to say where the "normal" comes from. The shift in treatment you observed in your comment to BC ultimately hinges upon models of development.

    One work that vividly captures that dimension is Jung's On the Nature of the Psyche. When read by itself rather than as a component of a greater theory, it shows a caregiver suddenly coming face to face with individuals and asking: "What the hell is going on here?"
  • Banning AI Altogether
    If AI helps me compose more correctly, why not?Copernicus

    It precludes you from becoming more skillful. The disengagement from the art limits your horizon.

    I am reminded of the Flappers of Laputa who constantly had to remind their masters where they were and what they were doing in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (page 17 forward)
  • Banning AI Altogether
    Sure, why not? I would be more impressed if someone created a fascinating post by themselves, though.Janus

    The key element in that scenario is that there is no interlocutor to engage with if you attempt a response. Light's on, nobody home.

    The difference between sophism and dialogue has long been drawn as the difference between argument for argument's sake and honest expressions of what one thinks.

    A peddler has come into town with a new collection of masks.
  • Banning AI Altogether
    I don't use AI beyond search engines. I have no experience of it generating text per request.

    Seeing its expansion reminds me of what David Krakauer said about tools for understanding. Some increase your capability, others replace it. It seems like a good rule of thumb regarding the digital.

    As a method of plagiarism, it resembles its predecessors. I remember how Cliff Notes provided the appearance of scholarship without the actual participation of a student.
  • Every Act is a Selfish Act
    If you have arrived at a definition that collapses the distinction, you've not arrived at a new profound truth (i.e. that there is personal benefit in kindness to others so such kindness is selfush), but instead you've just mis-defined a term.Hanover

    That collapse is what I tried to illustrate earlier in the discussion.

    It is not as if the collapse gives us a better way to understand narcissism, lack of self-awareness, or solipsism, as a form of isolation.
  • Understanding 'Mental Health': What is the Dialogue Between Psychiatry and Philosophy?

    As a reflection of professional care, the difference between psychology and psychiatry concerns diagnosis and treatment. Psychiatry has developed as a medical approach and psychology has developed from views of individual behavior that come from many, often conflicting, models. The role of the "subjective" comes from different models of human development. The value and role of subjective reporting is also hotly contested. Both practices are keen upon useful approaches to real-time problems. In many clinics, both kinds are on teams evaluating people. The distinction between objective and subjective is too general in this case.

    On the clinical psychology side, the development of the Boulder model has been prominent in the development of the practice. The goal was to introduce rigorous methods of research that could answer to the standards of "medical" research but remain as a separate discipline. I linked to it as a search page result to show that it is far from being a settled debate.

    P.S. Both sides that I have encountered turn purple at the mention of Liang and Szaz.
  • Cellular Sentience and Cosmic Bigotry

    I will ponder upon the differences of constraints. I don't see it as a direct comparison of models so I have to think about it more.

    But the idea of constraints is helpful in any comparison.
  • Cellular Sentience and Cosmic Bigotry

    I get that from one of many "cybernetic" points of view.

    But I also meant to say that the Aristotle particularity about specific matter comes into question if there are more than one kind of specific matter. Dualists are welcome to the same party.
  • Is sex/relationships entirely a selfish act?
    I agree with Jamal that the OP suffers from the lack of a clear citation of the text.
  • Cellular Sentience and Cosmic Bigotry

    Yes. It would demonstrate a pre-existing potential becoming actual in a different organization.
  • Every Act is a Selfish Act
    ↪Paine Elaborate, please.Copernicus

    My previous efforts were not deemed worthy of consideration,
  • Every Act is a Selfish Act

    You offer only two possible motivations. I have been arguing the limits of such a division, not whether it is the case.
  • Every Act is a Selfish Act

    The argument is based upon being able to completely separate the self from what is not self. You defend the thesis by an appeal to solipsism as a given condition. But you give the world back to yourself when proposing a different one.

    It is not a matter of challenging your thesis but from where the new models will come in the conditions you have set for yourself that make me think that you have had your cake and have eaten it too.
  • Every Act is a Selfish Act
    I fail to see where that's my problem.Copernicus

    It is a problem with your dichotomy. You enlist La Rochefoucauld for your purposes but are unable to replace his model with equal perspicuity.

    Reality is subjective, dependent upon stimulus reception and intellectual perception.Copernicus

    "Stimulus reception" is the language of behaviorism. Reductions to a pure set of external inputs is not the foundation for solipsism.
  • Every Act is a Selfish Act

    By excluding all senses of "self-less" or not-for-yourself as a motive for action, there is no way to model particular behavior as relative to others. It makes La Rochefoucauld's observations useless because he was mainly interested in the differences of motivations behind similar appearances, not turning them into one goo.

    The claim that all moral claims in the past were based upon this proposal of the single motivation of selflessness is taking a presumption for a fact. That kicks a lot of moral philosophy of the past to the curb.

    If one grants your solipsistic bubble, how do we get to the model you present here:

    Every act of kindness, every moral code, every love story is a negotiation between biology and meaning, desire and discipline, self and other.Copernicus

    Solipsists don't usually let themselves out for weekends on the town.
  • Every Act is a Selfish Act
    Framing the matter as either selfish or selfless, there is no way to compare behavior that involves a range of values. In La Rochefoucauld, for instance, demonstrates the scope of self-love and the influence of organic disposition but does not make it the last word on human experience. Our virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses are measured against the ubiquity of self-love as a condition. So, for example, Maxims like these are prominent in the text:

    339.—We only appreciate our good or evil in proportion to our self-love.

    336.—There is a kind of love, the excess of which forbids jealousy.

    267.—A quickness in believing evil without having sufficiently examined it, is the effect of pride and laziness. We wish to find the guilty, and we do not wish to trouble ourselves in examining the crime.
    La Rochefoucauld, Maxims and Reflections

    The problem with your bubble is that the generality of the explanation renders any particular instance useless for inquiry. Distinctions without a difference.
  • The problem of psychophysical harmony and why dualism fails
    Let us assume, for the sake of argument, a form of epiphenomenalist dualism, in which there are two distinct kinds of things: physical processes occurring in the brain and an associated array of conscious experiencestom111

    There is a logical problem here. Attempts to reduce everything not evidently physical to the physical is not an argument for two different kinds of being. The "physical alone" argument is "monist" without qualification.
  • The Preacher's Paradox

    A lot of Kierkegaard's testimony takes the form of an intervention. Philosophical Fragments counterposes the Socratic view of 'recollection' that says we have the grounds for knowing truth within us to the Christian view that the condition for knowing truth must be given to us. That follows Pascal who said that Christianity is a scandal for reason but closer to the truth of the human condition than what reason provides.

    The Concept of Anxiety lays out how that difference relates to a person's experience through a contrast between original sin and the emergence of an individual through their sins. By this means, he draws the limits of psychology and the beginning of the theological.

    Works of Love is one very long sermon on the difference between Christian love and every other kind.

    I don't know how that relates to your paradox, but Soren K definitely intended to turn over tables in the temple.
  • The Mind-Created World

    Yes, a typo.

    It is off topic to this OP, but I often wonder about self-identified schools of thought and the range of vocabulary shared amongst different views represented through them. I won't try to talk about that in this thread.
  • The Mind-Created World
    Kant's terms can be said to move across the background of their Aristotelian versions.
    — Paine
    I didn't know that. It isn't a surprise, though.
    Ludwig V

    I am surprised by your lack of surprise. The shared use of terms by the two authors is clearly evident in comparisons of their texts. That includes the term 'experience', that invokes what is called empria by Aristotle which led to the word "empirical."
  • The Mind-Created World
    I'm bit preoccupied with his concept of the a priori.Ludwig V

    The term comes from Aristotle. a priori is Latin for what comes earlier or first. a posteriori is what comes later or behind. The Greek words are πρότερων (proteron) and ὕστερων (husteron).
    What is primary is what is sought throughout Aristotle. In Metaphysics he says:

    Now things are said to be primary in many ways. Nonetheless, substance is primary in all of them—in account, in knowledge, and in time. For of the various things that are predicated none is separable, but only this. And in account too it is primary, since in the account of each thing its account is necessarily present as a component. — Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1028a34, translated by CDC Reevey

    I am not a Kant scholar who knows all the places Kant mentions Aristotle but his intellectual milieu in Konigsberg is said to have been steeped in the tradition. Kant's terms can be said to move across the background of their Aristotelian versions.

    There is a book I plan to read concerning this topic: Kant and Aristotle: Epistemology, Logic, and Method By Marco Sgarbi

    I need to get more chores off the honey do list first.
  • The Members of TPF Exist

    In Kafka's reflections and maxims, there is provided a glimpse of how to proceed in a dark world. Maybe it could be described as a kind of stoic or gnostic vision. Contact with it requires meeting it on its own terms. So, a failure of description is accepted as description.

    The stories are sharply different from each other. The one's depicting an account given by a person do not match what is given purely through the third person. It all gives the impression of an epistemology just out of reach.
  • The Mind-Created World

    I will pursue my Buddha nature by not commenting on the SEP article.

    The receptivity of perception in Aristotle can be seen as a parallel to that of the intuition of sensibility. But where Kant directly rebukes Aristotle is over his use of logic at A268/B324. The disparaging remark occurs in the section titled: On the amphiboly of the concepts of reflection through the confusion of the empirical use of the understanding with the transcendental at A 260/B316. This topic concerns your question:

    Put the question this way, what determines whether a given object is treated in accordance with sensibility or in accordance with pure speculative reasonLudwig V

    Kant demonstrates how the categories and grounds are different for the two. The sources for the difference has already been established by previous deduction. The "conformity to objects" of Bxvi is the issue at the quote provided previously:

    Now there are only two ways in which a necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects can be thought: either the experience makes these concepts possible or these concepts make the experience possible.CPR B165 to B167 underlined emphasis mine

    The confusion Kant works to undo in the amphiboly is achieved by defeating Leibniz and Locke with one sweeping roundhouse kick:

    The conditions of sensible intuition, which bring with them their own distinctions, he [Leibniz] did not regard as original; for sensibility was only a confused kind of representation for him, and not a special source of representations; for him appearance was the representation of the thing in itself, although distinguished from cognition through the understanding in its logical form, since with its customary lack of analysis the former draws a certain mixture of subsidiary representations into the concept of the thing, from which the understanding knows how to abstract. In a word, intellectualized the appearances, just as Locke totally sensitivized the concepts of understanding in accordance with his system of noogony (if I am permitted this expression), i.e., interpreted them as nothing but empirical or abstracted concepts of reflection. Instead of seeking two entirely different sources of representation in the understanding and the sensibility, which could judge about things with objective validity only in conjunction, each of these great men holds on only to one of them, which in his opinion is immediately related to things in themselves, while the other does nothing but confuse or order the representations of the first.CPR A270/B326

    If you continue reading to B344, the object of the Preface has been put in its transcendental place:

    The concept of the noumenon is therefore not the concept of an object, but rather the problem, unavoidably connected with the limitation of our sensibility, of whether there may not be objects entirely exempt from the intuition of our sensibility, a question that can only be given the indeterminate answer that since sensible intuition does not pertain to all things without distinction room remains for more and other objects; they cannot therefore be absolutely denied, but in the absence of a determinate concept (for which no category is serviceable) they also cannot be asserted as objects for our understanding. — ibid B344

    *Paine checks his pockets to see if he still has enough left over to buy lunch*
  • The Mind-Created World

    Correction noted. Explanatory parsimony rules the day. I may use that tight wad in other shops.
  • The Mind-Created World
    On other words, the Critique does teach the twofold aspect, but not of the object. It is the two-fold aspect of the human intellectual system as laid out in transcendental philosophy. It is by means of that system that an object is treated as an appearance in accordance with sensibility on the one hand, or, an object is treated as a ding an sich on the other, in accordance with pure speculative reason.Mww

    That points to the structure of the Critique establishing limits as starting places before building upon them to introduce new thinking. For instance, the conditions described at B132 to B138 are observed but qualified by B165 or the Result of this deduction of the concepts of the understanding:

    We cannot think any object except through categories; we cannot cognize any object that is thought except through intuitions that correspond to those concepts. Now all our intuitions are sensible, and this cognition, so far as its object is given, is empirical. Empirical cognition,
    however, is experience. Consequently no a priori cognition is possible for us except solely of objects of possible experience.* But this cognition, which is limited merely to objects of experience, is not on that account all borrowed from experience; rather, with regard to the pure intuitions as well as the pure concepts of the understanding, there are elements of cognition that are to be encountered in us a priori. Now there are only two ways in which a necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects can be thought: either the experience makes these concepts possible or these concepts make the experience possible. The first is not the case with the categories (nor with pure sensible intuition; for they are a priori concepts, hence independent of experience (the assertion of an empirical origin would be a sort of generatio aequivoca [spontaneously generated]. Consequently only the second way remains (as it were a system of the epigenesis48 of pure reason): namely that the categories contain the grounds of the possibility of all experience in general from the side of the understanding. But more about how they make experience possible, and which principles of its possibility they yield in their application to appearances, will be taught in the following chapter on the transcendental use of the power of judgment.

    From the footnote at the asterisk:

    * So that one may not prematurely take issue with the worrisome and disadvantageous consequences of this proposition, I will only mention that the categories are not restricted in thinking by the conditions of our sensible intuition, but have an unbounded field, and only the cognition of objects that we think, the determination of the object, requires intuition; in the absence of the latter, the thought of the object can still have its true and useful consequences for the use of the subject's reason, which, however, cannot be expounded here, for it is not always directed to the determination of the object, thus to cognition, but rather also to that of the subject and its willing.
    CPR B165 to B167 underlined emphasis mine

    The reference to epigenesis separates this view from Descartes and Berkeley who only offered versions of the real as reductions to a single ground for experience.
  • The Mind-Created World

    I believe the briefest explanation provided by Kant on the role of intuition as a possibility for experience is where he distinguishes intuition from thinking. In the section titled: On the original-synthetic unity of
    apperception
    (at B132). The terms used there are related to one another and thus given definition.

    At B137, the term object is introduced:

    Understanding is, generally speaking, the faculty of cognitions. These consist in the determinate relation of given representations to an object." An object, however, is that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united. Now, however, all unification of representations requires unity of consciousness in the synthesis of them. Consequently the unity of consciousness is that which alone constitutes the relation of representations to an object, thus their objective validity, and consequently is that which makes them into cognitions and on which even the possibility of the understanding rests.CPR B137

    It is in the context of this unity where the dual aspect referred to by comes in to play. The passage continues to show how space is not just a concept:

    The first pure cognition of the understanding, therefore, on which the whole of the rest of its use is grounded, and that is at the same time also entirely independent from all conditions of sensible intuition, is the principle of the original synthetic unity of apperception. Thus the mere form of outer sensible intuition, space, is not yet cognition at all; it only gives the manifold of intuition a priori for a possible cognition. But in order to cognize something in space, e.g., a line, I must draw it, and thus synthetically bring about a determinate combination of the given manifold, so that the unity of this action is at the same time the unity of consciousness (in the concept of a line) and thereby is an object (a determinate space) first cognized. The synthetic unity of consciousness is therefore an objective condition of all cognition, not merely something I myself need in order to cognize an object but rather something under which every intuition must stand in order to become an object for me, since in any other way, and without this synthesis, the manifold would not be united in one consciousness.ibid. B138 underlined emphasis mine
  • The Mind-Created World

    The writer of the article is assuming that things-in-themselves are present whether we experience them or not. That is not what Kant says in the quote given in the preceding section:

    What may be the case with objects in themselves and abstracted from all this receptivity of our sensibility remains entirely unknown to us. — A42/B59–60

    When the writer says in section 3,

    In some sense, human beings experience only appearances, not things in themselves. — ibid

    experience is taken to be a matter of contact with either one or the other kind of object. The narrowness of that reading is what I argued against in my comment to you here. There is a ground where the inner and outer are thought to be in one world, but it is not presented as only things outside of us. The writer is unknowingly presenting a two-object interpretation: Objects in the world and our representations of them.

    The writer continues the misunderstanding in 3.1. What is being called a "two object interpretation" by the "so-called Göttingen review by Christian Garve" is what Kant vehemently denounced in the Prolegomena passage I quoted previously