Of course in all this I'm reminded of the certain scientific and philosophical skeptics who mistake their lack of visualization or lucid dreaming for those abilities not existing in other people. That's a kind of logical error whose name escapes me — Marchesk

I don't know if that would be a logical error. I'm guessing the strong bias towards believing that we're all the same has to do with communication.

Aphantasiacs report that they always thought that when people talked about visualizing things, they didn't mean it literally. It's that charity thing?

. I will not say that I have gnosis of them but only intuition and the extent of my current understanding. — TheMadMan

I see. :smile:

Never said I was. — TheMadMan

Right, but it takes one to know one.

I'm not into organized religion at all. For me there is a big difference between those who awakened and the religions created around them. — TheMadMan

I see. How did you come to be awakened?

Im not sure what that means. — TheMadMan

Interfaith is a progressive form of religion where the differences between Christianity (including all it's sects), Judaism, and Islam are downplayed to focus instead in their similarities. I guess in principle it would extend to other religions. Those are just the ones that show up most significantly for Americans.

When you actually learn what they said, you understand they were saying the same thing. — TheMadMan

Are you into interfaith?

And what would it be like as an octopus, where the nervous system is as much distributed in the tentacles, which act semi-independently, as it is in the head — Marchesk

Plus they don't have hemoglobin. They have hemocyanin.

Uh huh.

Dennett is the source of several well known thought experiments that show that phenomenal consciousness and functionality are identical, — Isaac

Really? Care to justify that statement?

The idea of the "hard problem" is that in order to make a thorough theory of consciousness, we need to explain phenomenal consciousness, otherwise known as experience.

In answer to the assertion that explaining functions of consciousness also explains experience, Chalmers is the source of several well known thought experiments that show that phenomenal consciousness and functionality are not identical, so proponents of aforementioned "function equals phenomenal" carry a burden of justifying that.

Chalmers doesn't believe that's possible and asserts that science needs to expand it's conceptual framework to include experience. His focus is on inviting creativity. He doesn't propose to offer a final answer

don't think that materialist folks are wired much differently than idealistic types — Olivier5

I didn't suggest that idealists and materialists experience the world differently. Idealism vs materialism is a mischaracterization of the issue.

This is an excellent point. Not only is it different, but everyone presumes that their own cognitive makeup is universal. Which leads to some incredibly frustrating discussions on consciousness. — hypericin

Exactly. People flat out won't believe it until they see proof. Note that some of the posters in this thread thought they were being insulted.

Still, as ever, working on this. Derrida is a very interesting way to consummate this Hegel-Heidegger evolvement of thought. — Constance

That a concept is a package of opposites goes back to Plato. It shows up in a lot of philosophy including Schopenhauer and Kant. Good stuff.

It's rude to refer to the police as pigs — Banno

Burn!!!

She is one of the smartest people I know. — T Clark

Sounds right. Ask her about how she found out she has aphantasia and her surprise at discovering that anybody has a "mind's eye."

This is an obstacle to creating a theory of consciousness: we're not all the same. Cognition can vary radically from one human to the next.

I think it's a real possibility that people who favor Dennett's view really are different somehow.

Goats are not subservient in the way pigs are. — Banno

What kind of pigs do you guys have? American pigs are dangerous, as in they kill people.

I said "kin to." That means similar to, but not the same as.

By the way, people with aphantasia have a statistically significant higher IQ. Weird, huh?

Go Somalia! :rofl:

If you disagree with Chalmers you must have brain damage — Isaac

We can't get to the question of whether Chalmers' view is true or false because there's no agreement about what his view is.

See, I told you that without resorting to insults, so I'm the better man. Obviously.

Obviously, I meant that I'm familiar with his ouvre.
1h — bongo fury

If you actually read his stuff and you're still this confused about what he's talking about, I don't know what to tell you. You may have something akin to aphantasia so that you have no frame of reference for understanding qualia.

Chalmers is pretty rigorous. Check him out.

Do you think that's what Chalmers and Nagel are suggesting? That a picture glows in the head?
— frank

Pretty much. Do I slander them? — bongo fury

They're talking about experience. Remember that pan-psychism is on the table as a possible explanation. I've never heard of the glowing picture theory.

How would you paraphrase

the felt quality of redness,
— Nagel/Chalmers

? — bongo fury

I wouldn't. I'd say that if you aren't willing to read an essay or book by Chalmers, you probably aren't really interested in the issue.

for there is this impossible "outside" of the "unhiddenness" of what we deal with that we face when we encounter a creative moment: the nothing of an unmade future possibility. Our freedom is the nothing. — Constance

Maybe so. But the first awareness of the concept of being accompanies recognition of nothingness. Nothingness is the background that allows being to appear to the intellect.

But how is this to be taken? I remember reading Hegel once, and he, as I recall, placed the nothing in dialectical opposition to being, thereby producing becoming, which God works out through our historical progress. That is pretty out there, but I have to look again to see how he spells it out. — Constance

I thought Hagel said becoming is primal and being and nothing emerge from it on analysis.

Unsurprisingly we often have to unpick an apparently reliable (because habitual) account alleging that a picture glows, somewhere inside our head. — bongo fury

Do you think that's what Chalmers and Nagel are suggesting? That a picture glows in the head?

Ah, the nothing. It is such a great, disturbing read. What thoughts have you here? — Constance

You were talking about being. It's a twin of the nothing.

is not about ’how the brain works’, it’s about the question of meaning. — Wayfarer

How is it a question of meaning? It's about a theory of consciousness.

We should do a reading of Heidegger's What is Metaphysics? It's so good.

Thread closed. — Isaac

Fine. Have a good day. :razz:

What's the answer to "how does a DVD contain audio and video?" — Isaac

How does a DVD player work?

It could be. But we suppose to save the most possible lives. If we only use the naturally immunity there would be a lot of weak people dying just for an experiment and I see it unfair... I think everyone deserves to be safe from covid. — javi2541997

Vaccinated people don't get as sick as unvaccinated, so it definitely is a life saving measure for many.

In the other hand, China has two main issues related to their current crisis: 1. Opaque data so we don't truly know what is going on there. 2. The Chinese vaccines are not good enough so these are not helping the citizens. I think that with European/American vaccines the context would be different. — javi2541997

I don't really understand what they're doing. No one thinks lockdowns can stop the Omicron strain. It's just too contagious.

So we get a necessary conclusion from a proposition believed due to a posteriori methods. — Moliere

Yep. We find necessarily true statements that are known a posteriori.

The bits on what we can and cannot imagine are somewhat opaque to me. Not that imagination isn't involved in thinking philosophically, but I'm naturally hesitant to say that imagination is the limit of philosophical thinking. — Moliere

There's a long tradition of examining the ways we're bound to think. I think all philosophers make some use of that kind of exploration, but Hume and Kant are particularly notable for asking about the things we can and can't imagine. Kripke joins them in this for the purpose of showing that if we insist that all necessarily true statements are known a priori, this conflicts with the way we think about counterfactuals.

So there's no recipe here for speaking in a certain way. We're not identifying elements of grammar. We're analyzing a historic philosophical bias with the scalpel of...

the way we think. :grin:

Or it could be that naturally acquired immunity is just better for some reason.

We've learned that locking down has a downstream cost in terms of flu and other viral outbreaks. Hopefully someone in China will pay attention to this and start thinking in post-lockdown terms. Lock downs can't stop the pandemic. All they do is preserve healthcare capacity.

I agree with all of that. I think the quest for a theory of consciousness will be a grand adventure. It's fed by a lust to know. Maybe it will generate technologies that allow some aspect of subjectivity to be recorded and that could be used for medicinal or artistic purposes.

Every step of the way, someone will be pointing out that we're fooling ourselves and the truth we're finding is relative to a particular culture? That's ok. That's always how it is, right?

That's why using "this" (though I'm picking up what you mean by "this" not being a name, now, ala Kripke -- since that's what he's speaking against, is Russel's theory of "this" counting as a name) with the lectern sunk home with me -- if descriptions are really all there are to names, then "this lectern is made of ice" is already picking out another lectern. That's why he's focusing on negative predicates, since the lectern he's talking about is necessarily itself, and it is a wooden lectern. And then the description is not picking out another lectern (another "name"), but the same one, even by the description — Moliere

"This lectern" is quite likely to be used as a rigid designator. Banno was throwing some spin in there. There might be cases where "this lectern" is non-rigid, but you'd have to pick that up from context.

Keep in mind that Kripke is focusing on ordinary language use. This is not an examination of a logical language, so meaning is truly use here.

In a case where "this lectern" is a rigid designator, the baptism is likely to have just happened. It's as if I named the lectern "Bob" but Bob equals this lectern.

The wooden lectern example is pointing to the way we think about objects. Note Kripke's emphasis on what we can and can't imagine. What he's saying should be very intuitive to you.

No, I don't. How about you? — Baden

Only accidentally. I don't have a tv. I don't do Facebook or Twitter. I might be out of touch.

Do you watch commercials?

Notice that this doesn't mean you can't have a description in mind when you talk about Paris, for instance. It just means it isn't necessary.

I just want to clarify my own position that identity is always fragmented; it is something one does in thought, to reflect on oneself, that divides one between the identifier and the identified - the reflection and that which sees it - and simultaneously divides one from the world, which becomes 'other — unenlightened

Guilt is a pain that forces the dragon to peer into a mirror and see itself. In Gnostic myths, this the gift of Sophia. Before she came, there was murder and insanity, but it all went on in darkness. Sophia split the psyche into actor and audience.

I see.