Again, you miss the point. What we call 'conscious experience' tends to be a nebulous hotchpotch involving language, images, and sense data. In our culture we distinguish it from 'dreams' and 'hallucinations', and neuroscience throws some light on the bases for those distinctions. The phrase 'gives rise to' is as premature as the question 'what gives rise to disease' asked in medieval times, since the concept of 'disease' was as nebulous then, as 'conscious experience' is now.

Now there are some, including myself, who are tempted by the conundrum, 'how can thinking think about itself ?', but that assumes we know, what both 'thought' and 'knowing' mean. Neurophilosophy throws those questions back at us.

Good points of course.

It is my experience that religious preachers and proselytizers are here to reinforce their own 'rationalities'. Its another aspect of the incestuous relationship between 'word magic' and 'religious belief' which inevitably involves repetition. Shallow 'questions' like this one are mere vehicles for those self reinforcement exercises.

It is not clear cut that the Churchlands were conventional 'reductionists' since they advocated eliminativism.

In the context of materialist understandings of psychology, eliminativism stands in opposition to reductive materialism which argues that mental states as conventionally understood do exist, and that they directly correspond to the physical state of the nervous system.

In short, for eliminativists, concepts like 'free choice' do not 'exist' in the sense of being 'functional targets for explanation'.This is not to deny ' the existence of free choice' as a functional concept in social relationships. Eliminativists seek 'bottom up' explanations by looking at simpler component 'vectors' , like 'gratification', but they do not seem to rule out 'emergence' of complex behavioral structures which have social significance.

But to dwell on the conventional explanatory merits, or failures, of neuroscience is to miss my point, which is that such disputes question the very nature of 'explanation' itself.

I don't think Feser quotes Russell accurately, Russell being focussed on the symmetry of equations in which no 'time directionality' is involved. This has recently been stressed by Rovelli, in which the before/after dimension for cause/ effect are at best 'local', or related to observer reference frames.

Neuroscience like any other 'science', is about prediction and control. In that sense it may seek 'causal mechanisms' which you correctly report, fail to correlate with specific neural activity. However, the philosophical issue ensuing is NOT specifically about the viability of such a quest, but about the status of 'causality' per se in the Russell sense. Also it raises the secondary issue of the ethics of 'control' given that 'behavior modification' has many well established social functions.

I suggest three directions in which your thinking on this might develop.
1. From a linguistic pov, language is infinitely generative in terms of its syntax.(Chomsky etc)
2. From a neuroscientific pov, 'concepts' may associated with 'vector space dynamics' and 'plasticity of network construction'. This is being investigated under the label 'prototype theory' which reflects the dynamics of Wittgensteinian 'language games'.(Rosch).
3. The importance of 'analogy' in explanation (Hempel) has been underscored by Lakoff in his study of 'metaphor'. This includes speculation on the origin of mathematics, and has implications for the status of mathematical models in epistemology.

I have no idea about Chinese concepts. Its origins as a place marker symbol in a number system I think dates back to the Sumerians 3rd Century BC. This may not have been the symbol '0'. Your use of the word 'discovered' above is questionable....maybe 'established a useful concept of' , would be more accurate.

If what you mean by 'sensation' is the extrapolation of the 'causal thinking' which is a ubiquitous aspect of human behavior, to those aspects of our lives we cannot control, then a 'god' of the gaps is inevitable as 'the Big Controller'.

The digit 'zero' and the concept of 'zero' are two different ball games.
The first, like negative numbers, is merely a place marker on an axis denoting equal interval measurement'. The second can involve all sorts of mental scenarios like 'a set with no members' or the philosophical issue of what nothing means.
Note that 'numbers' are already abstract concepts with potential applications to counting and measuring. Students who can't get their heads round elementary algebra, don't realize that it is just a second level of abstraction, numbers being the first.

.....because 'events'; are relative to 'observers' who note their 'repetition' using their memories, and define what constitutes 'the event window'.

Note that 'observation' involves 'verbalization'...assigning 'thinghood'...we are not considering interactions that go unnoticed, nor are we going beyond the operations of 'the minds eye'. There are no unobserved' silent falling trees in the forest ...saying it has already implies observation in the minds eye !

Words re-present events...allow for re-experiencing them,(Vorstelling in German)

Maybe there is something more substantial to 'chew' here than on other threads !

Sorry no.
All this assumes a representalist view of language. The nonrepresentalist view takes 'languaging' to be a behavior in which the meaning of words like 'mind' 'reality' and "existence' cannot be extricated from the ephemeral coordinative roles they play in transient contexts.

Next !

No. I'm advocating deletion because you are a hypocrite. All you do is preach intolerance of mainstream belief systems without which you would have nothing to say. As I said before, this is one of the few forums which puts up with such trolling activity.

[reply="A Gnostic Agnostic;331373"

I am launching on Thinkspot when it goes public, and joined these forums to get a feel for receptivity of the views I'm advancing because of the implications they have for "belief"-based worldviews. If the site owner is going to censor them without explanation, it will have to be something that others need to be aware of because intolerance and/or censorship of criticisms of "belief"-based worldviews is why hundreds of millions of people are dead, and the site owner (if having anything to do with real philosophy) should understand they are not contributing to the solution, but rather the problem.

The question for me, is that following a paragraph like this, 'why only two deletions' ?

The assumption of several posters here is that neuroscience is 'reductionist' In the sense of 'explainable in terms of causal mechanisms'. The Churchlands deny this and point out that neural functioning resists isomorphism with, say,' logic circuitry' and seems to point to 'vector space transitions'. (Other modelling involving differential equations has also been suggested).
What comes to my mind here is that since 'causality' has a debateable status in both philosophy and science, it could be that neuroscientific models are attempting to move beyond what we normally seek as 'explanation'. Furthermore, once we take a step away from 'normal logic' the very notion of 'rationality' is up for grabs.
I apologise the vaguary of these ideas, but I am trying to imagine the scenario of 'pulling the rug' from under 'causal explanation', perhaps in a similar manner to that in which relativity pulled the rug from under 'time' as an independent parameter.

To all.

Okay, I'm semi sceptical myself, but the cross species research implies that if 'philosophy' is contingent on human language, there is a fundamental issue beyond mere problems of interpretation.

Divine Retribution !

The fact that the 'gas laws' also involve 'proportionality' is the only salient point above as neither physical situation, (predicting gas behaviour, or electrical behaviour) has anything to do with each other, or the sharing of apples. And whereas it is also the case the first two involve all 'levels of measurement' (nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio), this incidently underscores the point that they both depart from the third, which at best goes as far as 'ordinal' since neither apples nor persons are standardised.

I rest my case. I suggest further analysis would be attempting to milk a dead cow !

Faulty logic I'm afraid, and nothing to do with the answer. If I define the 'nerd' as the 'physical property' of apples per person, then you will get 2 nerds. Please refer to my 'constant of proportionality point ' above which defines a physical property called 'resistance' measured in 'ohms'.

Why you should think what you said above is 'an answer' beats me ! :smile:

But you are correct about this 'not being philosophy'. Its about specific mathematical modelling.
There is a philosophical angle which could be developed (elsewhere) about the epistemological status of mathematical models in general, and the role played by 'analogy' with respect to that status.
However, this (contrived analogy) question hardly lends itself to such extrapolition.

You still don't get it. See my edit.

No it doesn't ! It implies that people know the derived equation. That is not 'Ohm's Law' which specifies the concept 'proportionality' and naming 'the constant' as a physical property. My reply points out that no such concept applies to 'apples and people', and that reply highlights the superficiality of 'the question'.

BTW, this 'not knowing' of Ohm's Law itself, is mirrored by those who might think one of Newton's laws was Force=Mass x Acceleration . But that is merely a derivation of the actual law...'The rate of change of momentum is proportional to the applied force'.

Sorry....give me the quote ? The 'law' is not the equation.

Nobody seems to have mentioned Ohm's Law which states that ...

Current flowing in a conductor is DIRECTLY PRORTIONAL to potential difference across its ends. Usually this is stated with p.d. as the subject
p.d ∝ current ....... p.d.= a constant x current ....... V= R x I

(NB With current as the subject the constant of proportionality would be 'conductance', the inverse of 'resistance')


The constant of proportionality was named after Ohm, and considered to be 'resistance'. Similarly 'current' and p.d. were named after other physicists, (Ampere and Volta)

There is NO physical theory involving a constant of proportionality relating 'apples' to 'persons' and that is the only basis of an answer to your question.

Unless you are a 'naive realist', existence of anything, from electrons, through rocks, to gods, stands or falls on the utility of that concept for human needs.
And concepts are all we've got !
Human needs differ . I am not a naive realist and I don't need a 'god' concept, so I call myself an 'atheist'.
It has nothing to do with 'belief' and everything to do with the absence of belief and the recognition of the futility of 'existential claims' based on non-consensual 'evidence'.
For those who do have an emotional, psychological or social need for a 'god' concept, then that 'god' does indeed 'exist' for them.
Agnostics are merely those who haven't decided what their needs are !

Macrosoft
Try this !

https://www.learnoutloud.com/Podcast-Directory/Philosophy/Philosophers/Heidegger-Podcast/24272

I found it excellent.
(Skip the intro ...40mins or so....about the course literature and attendence. Lecture 1)

The reason is that 'truth' implies a concept of a 'reality' independent of the needs of observers.
That independence is questioned by post-Kantian developments, by quantim physics, and most significantly by developments in neuroscience which have resulted in the term 'neurophilosophy'.
The implications of the latter extend to the very nature of 'scientific questioning' itself in that brain research does not seem to support operations we might call 'causal reasoning'.

(Obviously these comments indicate the potential for further threads but I am dubious abous the level contributions which might ensue)

This proves my point. We actually didn't understand the truth, forcing a paradigm shift.

No. The word 'truth' is not applicable. The word 'truth' is meaningful in Sherlock's 'crime/courtroom secenario, but not 'science'
A paradigm shift gives 'better understanding' in the sense of 'greater prediction and control'. This is a significant philosophical issue which raises the pragmatist/Nietzchean position that there can only ever be 'descriptions', some more useful than others.
The history of that point involves Kant's distinction between phenomena and noumena and the suhsequent demise of the concept of 'things-in-themselves'.

Hmm...that wasn't expressed very well. I am trying to capture the semantic inevitability of an essential 'tension' between 'chatter' on the one hand, and 'ineffability', on the other.

I think religions in general are suceptible to 'idle chatter' because it appears that they ultimately tend to converge on a concept of 'ineffability' to satisfy their claims of 'rationality'. Who knows ? Recognition of the 'chatter' may be a necessary precondition for 'spiritual metamorphosis'.

Unfortunately Sherlock did not have the opportunity to read about Thomas Kuhn's notion of 'paradigms'.
Simplistically, whtat we mean by 'scientific understanding' depends on a whole web of interconnections which jointly support a range of observations. That interconnected structure, which includes a particular terminology and even agreements about relevance, is what Kuhn called a paradigm. Paradigms tend to supercede each other giving different explanatory accounts (e.g. the explanation of 'falling' differs from Newtonian and Einsteinian povs). Paradigm shifts are prompted by the accumulation of counter examples which resist current 'explanation'. Its a continuous process of refinement of predictability, but not a quest getting closer to the 'truth' in the lay sense of the word.

BTW your example above of 'hypothesis rejection with understanding' is flawed since the minimal understanding of the difference between numberband letter symbols is already paradigmatically assumed. Nor do competing 'scientific hypotheses' normally operate in a 'forced choice alternative' format beloved by Sherlock !

Too many comments to handle individually at this time..

1. I'm not going to define 'rambling', but if pushed I could give a few recent examples.
2. I will accept the attribute of passive-aggressive in that I consider it to refer to what my experience has been of 'philosophy' prior to observing aspects of this forum, and this thread as an expression of my subsequent disappointment.
3. Religion per se is not my target, although its subject matter hardly lends itself to scrutiny by dissenters. It is what I see as 'the talking past each other' taking place on religious threads. Nowhere do Wittgenstein's remarks about 'language on holiday' seem more appropriate.

You are correct about the potential parochial and arbitrary nature of 'belief', but It may go deeper than that, since 'religious belief' for some is an aspect of their 'self integrity'.

I'm not aware of insulting anybody in particular except one religious 'troll' who has found a refuge here after being given short shrift, elsewhere (Oh, and one pompous poster who criticizes authors he has not read) Nor do I expect the nature of discussion to shift much from the level already established. After all, birds of a feather flock together. I merely offer my general 'philosphical thread ' experience, of a dozen or so years (plus live local debate), as a basis for my personal observation. Take it or leave it.

Point taken about those who put 'continental philosophy' in a 'gibberish box'. I put that down mostly to knee jerk fear of iconoclasm and restricted exposure to the literature.
I do ignore most of the religious threads. Maybe I'm expressing my UK/European attitudes to religious discussion in general as being of no consequence, relative say to its status in the US and elsewhere.

Well the only rejoinder on 'The Philosophy Forum', I have to that, is that there are 'interests' and then there are 'philosophical interests.':smile:

I don't 'read'them, since I find them 'unreadable' !
My criticism is about the frequency of these threads relative to other forums. I'm fairly new here and perhaps expected that the forum title implied a certain degree of sophistication. Obviously I was mistaken.

I agree with your deconstruction of the word 'creation'. The issue for religionists would of course be whether they could 'swim' at all, if we take away that buoyancy aid !

The issue for me is that for 'philosophy' to have a separate status from 'bar room banter' or 'word salad', it needs to be grounded in consensual semantic fields, usually by appeal 'the literature'. I don't see that happening in many cases.