Rephrased: What is the definition of a "representative theory of mind''? — hunterkf5732

It would be contrasted with behaviorism and probably non-reductive. The idea is that thought takes place in the domain of mental representations. Intention is a relation to those representations, which could have a sentence-like structure.

By this however you could only conclude that the part of the world with which we can interact is a complex of ideas, but not necessarily that the entire world, including aspects of it with which we have no connection in any way, is a complex of ideas.

You agree right? — hunterkf5732

Yep. Without some sort of non-idea, it wouldn't make much sense to talk about ideas.

What is your interpretation of a representative theory of mind? — hunterkf5732

I don't quite understand the question, hunter.

I wonder, do I have to be any kind of 'ist', though? — John

No, I don't think so. It's just that if you agree that anytime we respond and interact with the world, ideas are attached to what we respond to, then it seems the next step might be that what we call the world is in a sense a complex of ideas.

Cool... where is that?

I didn't escape but I have big plans for my reincarnation.

Prisma is fun. It's not Photoshop... But if you take a photo of a painting, it becomes bunches of paintings.

“for wherever men are philosophizing in spoken or written dialogues, and provided they are not entirely systematic, irony ought to be produced and postulated.” The task of a literary work with respect to irony is, while presenting an inherently limited perspective, nonetheless to open up the possibility of the infinity of other perspectives: “Irony is, as it were, the demonstration [epideixis] of infinity, of universality, of the feeling for the universe” (KA 18.128); irony is the “clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming chaos.” (Ideas 69). — SEP by way of Hoo

Holy Guacamole!

it hasn't changed form, because the form we're referring to is that molecular composition of hydrocarbons. — Terrapin Station

The forms I referred to were candles and puddles. But if you like molecules better.. the hydrocarbons can take the form of a number of molecules.

And..... it's turtles all the way down. You're fun to pick on Terrapin. No harm intended.

Starvation is likely to intensify self-consciousness because it's a crisis. It's something that will be remembered. Myths will be told about it... how God provided little round pieces of bread called manna.

Of coarse, the Self that looms large because it faced down annihilation is something seen in the rear view mirror. I'm alienated from it. I'm just its shadow.

Russell's A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz remains one of the great studies, imo. — StreetlightX

Oh, cool. Thanks!

My dilettantism often gets the better of me, though, so who knows? — John

:)

So, as you say, I think it is thoughts that we respond to...and sounds and sights...but only insofar as sounds and sights are permeated through and through by thought. — John

Well what's your ontological view then? Are you an idealist?

One needs to ask whether Farrakhan's 'white man' is a race or an institution, — unenlightened

I think to some extent it's neither. There's a problem with oppressed people agreeing with their oppressors...like a giant case of Stockholm syndrome. Isolation from white people became a path to combating it. Farrakhan was involved in that.

As I said.. I'm not saying I'm in a position to tell anybody how to work through their insanity. I can pay attention to what I'm condoning, though.

Did Jews who condemned the German people en masse for their acquiescence to Nazism somehow contribute to racism? Hardly. Does their attitude suggest they were racist / bigoted? Not really. Were they justified in feeling antipathy towards every German for the behaviour of the Nazis. Strictly speaking, no, but... — Baden

I think it's natural for the oppressed to feel angry and full of hatred. Those are potentially toxic emotions. I don't mean to sniff at the psychological journey of the oppressed. Not everybody finds peace. Some people end up dead or worse because of the hatred they face internally and externally. A bystander isn't really in a position to tell them how to navigate it.

But what I see is that sometimes people think they've found a safe spot to vent their bigotry. With a little dose of self-righteousness and an approving crowd.. out it all comes. A person who really knows better than to engage in that sort of thing enjoys a spew.

I don't think there is any safe spot for it. There isn't any exception to the rule. It's precarious to believe that there is. Teaching that it's a free-for-all for victims is dangerous for that reason.

Thanks for that, mcdoodle. Author is a god's-eye-view.... or is it?

You're saying the objective picture can be populated with noise. The author does that. But if there's no idea attached to it, it involves a dance between subjective and objective? Is that what you mean?

You can add in a somersault if you want.

Digital model. Hmm.

Different tack: I think we can discover whether the categories we're talking about are apriori or aposteriori using the Locke/Hume/Kant trick of asking about what is and isn't imaginable.

Can you imagine a cake that can't be sliced? I say no. Therefore, digital is apriori.

Can you imagine that space itself is atomic? I say no. Therefore, analog is apriori.

They both are. They're conditions of knowledge of the cake.

You're saying the primal distinction is between the cake and the not-cake.

You can't digitize the Continuum Cake. It has a high glue content and it just stretches forever if you try to take a piece out of it.

You can bake an entirely different cake that can be sliced because it's fundamentally atomic to begin with.

It can be a matter of temperament (so relying heavily on emotional bias).

It's also possible to accept and reject it at the same time (as in the case of Schopenhauer).

Take it up with math, not with me. — StreetlightX

You can't take it up with math. You can ask a phil-o-math person... which would obviously be Nagase, but he's busy writing some thesis.

To review.. the criticism that was brought was:

That the digital doesn't just fit "loosely" on the analog. I think you're agreeing with that. You note that we use Zero to create a sliced cake... apparently using the Unslice-able Cake as the primal One.

I've found my interests coming back around to Leibniz lately. This is the second time.

No, but you can make the law of the excluded middle apply by imposing a rule which would, on that basis, arbitrarily split said cake. — StreetlightX

"And that's how we make the golf ball go into the hole!" -Zeno

That's my Zeno impression. Later, I'll do my Aristotle explains what all of this has to do with God.

This is how you do it: Take a set, S. Then, you find the compliment of S, which just so happens to be the empty set, ∅ (S-S = ∅). Now that you’ve done this, you’re in a great position because the empty set plays a double role. Not only is it the compliment of S, it is also a subset of S, to the extent that every set contains the empty set. Note that the empty set is thus is both ‘inside’ and ‘outside of S, occupying exactly the paradoxical place which we said a rule for distinction would occupy.

Having done this, you can generate the entirety of the number line by asking how many elements belong to the empty set (=1), and then recursively asking how many elements belong to that set and so on ad infinitum. Ta da. You’ve now digitised the continuum. — StreetlightX

It appears that when you asked how many elements belong to the empty set and came up with one, you were already thinking in discrete terms.

Zero, like negation, is a higher-order, reflexive rule about the continuum on the basis of which we can divide it, provided we cannot situate either negation nor zero properly in that continuum itself. — StreetlightX

Doesn't strike me as intuitional to say that Zero is a higher-order, reflexive rule about the continuum on the basis of which we can divide it. In fact it makes close to Zero sense to me. Um... what's the basis for this rule, then?

We only know being when it is formed into some thing. And thus the notion of unformed being becomes deeply "other". — apokrisis

Not for me. I've never had a particularly clear sense of identity. Being somewhat amorphous is my homebase.

The OP came from a passage in a book: Philosophy of Freedom by Rudolph Steiner. He was saying that without adding ideas to sensation, all we would have is something like raw sense data... noise... and nothing to react to one way or another.

From there, I pondered if that doesn't mean that it's really ideas we react to... not sounds or sights... if that makes any sense.

In ordinary analysis the continuum R is connected in the sense that it cannot be split into two non empty subsets neither of which contains a limit point of the other. In smooth infinitesimal analysis it has the vastly stronger property of indecomposability: it cannot be split in any way whatsoever into two disjoint nonempty subsets. — SEP article, Continuity and Infinitesimal

I think this passage is explaining what I was trying to say... that if you have a cake for which the law of excluded middle fails, you can't just slice the cake.

To remember is literally to re-present... or try to, anyway. Yep... I'm more and more convinced that it has to do with time.

I'm not sure why Vin Diesel was trying to kill me.

Candle melts into a puddle. The wax in the candle is now in the puddle.

It's definitely the same wax.

Yep.. we all have an amazing digitizer. We call it a mind. :)

I don't like that smiley face. Can't we get different ones?

It's also appealing because scientists note that humans are distinct from chimps because we look into each others' eyes a lot. In the ongoing quest to figure out why we're different from other animals, that issue has been probed for significance.

The eyes are windows to the soul, after all.

I'm asking you to elaborate. — StreetlightX

Think about the notion that the digital is a subset of the analog.... as if the analog is made up of discrete points and the digital is just some of them. We have here defined analog as something that is fundamentally atomic. It just seems continuous the way a movie seems continuous, though its made of distinct frames. If that's an accurate characterization of nature, then analog is parasitic on digital... not the other way around.

What's really going on here is that continuous and discontinuous are opposites. They just are. A close kin to that opposition is infinite vs finite. Finite is not a subset of infinite. Infinite is not a quantity... its boundlessness... it's a negative concept.

And what we find in the continuum is... lots of infinity.

So.. that was what you meant in the OP?

That form and material are distinct was all the point I was making to Terrapin.

? This is what I've been saying from the beginning. Not sure what's being pointed out anywhere. — StreetlightX

In that case, the thesis would be that nature is fundamentally digital.

.

I'm referring to the distinction between information and data which is a basic one in computer science. — StreetlightX

The same information can be transmitted digitally or by analog means. So.... I don't know what you're talking about.

Oh good, here's someone with some technical knowledge. Can you explain what a "square" wave is, or is that just a metaphor in itself? — Metaphysician Undercover

Kind of... in electronics, we think of ideal square waves, knowing that in the real world, instantaneous changes of that kind don't happen.

As TGW mentioned, it may be that down at the quantum level there really are changes of that kind... for instance when a photon pops off of a hot iron atom... the energy level of the atom abruptly drops.

Moreover, defining the difference in this way is far more precise than the appeal to the discrete and the continuous, which are more like heuristics, to the extent that the one can simply scale into the other at a level of granularity fine enough. — StreetlightX

This has been pointed out to you before: if there's some base level of granularity in your analog, then you're dealing with something that's fundamentally atomic. Therefore, at that fundamental level, there is negation. That lack of negation that was spoken is only true of a continuum.

With a continuum, if you start talking about discrete points, you're talking about something that the rest of the continuum can only approach as a limit. That is exactly how digital (ideally) is different from analog. You don't pull an infinitely converging progression out with you when you pick out a point.

(and even then, the original sense of the terms have less to do with data than they do information). — StreetlightX

The same information can be transmitted either analog-wise or digitally... so I don't know what you're talking about there.

So I'd say that it's not the same wax — Terrapin Station

Everybody else would say it's the same wax. Candle melts, we're left with a puddle. Its the same wax.

Therefore, the wax is not identical to any particular form it takes.

Just to clarify; when you're taking about form are you just talking about shape? — Michael

Say you encounter some music. Later on, you remember the sounds. You aren't hearing the music now, you're remembering it. Form is what you're left with once the music stops.

Form usually answers a what-question. What is it?

The concept of the unformed as long confused me. I think Cavacava is onto something.... it has to do with becoming.

I read the OP, thanks Michael. My point is that claims have been made regarding the relationship between analog and digital that are not true of the continuous/discontinuous distinction... so no, that's not how the words are being defined here.

Perhaps without time there is no form...the wax always has form, regardless of when you look at it, the candle is just one form that wax, being what it is, can take. — Cavacava

So the form only appears as distinct when we're looking at events over time.

Whoa. It has to do with becoming.

Analog and digital are properties of data. The terms are also used to describe electronic design formats. Analog data is continuous like a sine wave. Digital data is typically a square wave (although multi-level digital formats were discussed at one point).

Analog design obviously preceded digital. It was characterized by the sorts of things we see in a radio: various kinds of filters, inductors, transformers and so forth. Digital electronics started replacing analog electronics back in the 1960's. The first digital telecommunications transmission system went into operation in 1960 and since then, the majority of electronic equipment has become digital or computer driven.

In this thread, the terms are being used metaphorically. It's not clear if everybody realizes that, although it's been pointed out several times in the this thread that the metaphor is being stretched pretty far... maybe too far.

It is interesting to ponder that metaphor. It obviously runs straight into philosophy of math because we're talking about continuity vs discontinuity. Looking at it that way, the notion that the digital is parasitic on the analog is just wrong. If we persist in maintaining that the digital is "loose" on the analog, we're stipulating some specialized meaning for the terms. It wouldn't be appropriate to complain that people don't understand the jargon. You're going to have to explain it since you've made up something unusual.