Philosophical pessimism, as I have laid it out, encourages the development of communities based on real understanding and support, rather than superficial optimism. — schopenhauer1

And then calls doing so malignantly useless?

Modern Unitarians are as Christian as Mormons, which are not. Ancient unitarians are something else, which why we don't simply call them "Christian", but a modifier comes before. — Lionino

I'm inclined to leave arguing about who is truly a Christian, to those who want to call themselves Christians. It's not as if there exists some essence of True Christian.

But even if the answer to our initial question, “Can human behavior be studied scientifically,” is yes, that doesn’t imply it can be studied easily.

So you have gone from it being sheerly impossible to experimentally test human behavior to not easy.

FWIW, I just experimentally tested your behavior, and found that you were capable of going from making a ridiculously hyperbolic claim, to something more reasonable. It seemed like a pretty easy experiment to conduct to me.

The problem is rather that it is sheer impossible to experimentally test human behavior. — Tarskian

Why do you think that?

, are you familiar with the sort of psychological conditions associated with black and white thinking?

The Journey uses music. Isn't that a kind of universal language? — Amity

I'd have to say, that a more useful language for the companions is dancing. :grin:

But there is no theory of 'how brains generate consciousness'... — Wayfarer

You are thinking in black and white terms.

First off, we should be talking about a theory of minds, rather than mind.

Secondly, I certainly have a rough working hypothesis that has a lot of predictive strengths. Of course, it is certainly not anything like a complete theory. There is an enormous amount still to be learned, and good reason to doubt that any human could actually grasp what might (on some unknown criteria) be considered a finished theory of minds.

Thirdly, the fact that you don't have much of a working hypothesis yourself, seems like something that you might want to correct.

So, I have very little other than my own opinions of my ideas as a check on whether they are right or not. — Brendan Golledge

Perhaps this is a problem with considering a monastic life to be conducive to developing psychological insight? Considered from a neuroscientific perspective, a monastic life could be considered to be starving one's brain of the input that comes with interacting with diverse people in diverse situations. It doesn't seem to me like a monastic life would be very conducive to developing robust intuitons regarding human psychology.

To take it back to Christianity, do you think the diversity of people who Jesus is purported to have associated with might have been relevant to Jesus being particularly psychologically insightful?

Sam mentions the idea of the body as a 'receiver' or 'transmitter' akin to a television. Why is that necessarily a daft idea? — Wayfarer

It's not necessarily daft. However, in light of modern scientific understanding of the nature of brains, and the sort of information processing that can occur in neural networks, it's unparsimonious. I.e. "I have no need of that hypothesis."

:sparkle:

Thanks for sharing :sparkle: — Amity

Something Journey related I posted in another thread recently, that I think will give you a sense of how deeply affecting the game can be:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/924182

I gave a definition of "belief" in a previous post - "attitudes about the world which can be either true or false." You must be using a different definition, which makes fruitful discussion impossible. How can a picture or video be true or false? — T Clark

I was thinking about a mental model of an electronic circuit, with "picture" or "video" being words used to try to roughly convey a sense of what it is like for me subjectively to consider such a mental model.

By "true" in this case I mean that my mental model has a correspondence (or isomorphism) with what is going on within the physical system being mentally modeled. That correspondence (or lack thereof in the case of my mental model being false) is not dependent on whether I have attempted to convey my mental model using language.

Not to be cute, but since saying things uses words, how can you say you know things that aren't expressed in words. That's a serious question. — T Clark

Well knowing something about an electronics design I'm considering is often for me a matter of pictures or maybe something somewhat analogous to videos. (Although probably better to just substitute the more ambiguous term "mental model" for "video", because I wouldn't say that it is literally like a video.)

In any case, saying I know something is a different matter than expressing what it is that I know. I'm not likely to be able to express my knowledge of something without resorting to words in a lot of cases. Though I imagine that in some cases I could communicate things in pictures and without resorting to words, if I were attempting to communicate with someone with relevant background knowledge, who was aware of the somewhat strange communication game being played.

In fact the video game Journey is an example of such a strange communication game, as it doesn't provide for language use between players, but it certainly allows for teaching aspects of Journey-world physics via a sort of monkey-see/monkey-do mechanism. It tends to involve a bit of repetitive doing, until the other player develops recognition of a pattern to what is going on in our interactions, and the other player realizes that they can do something that they didn't previously realize that they could do.

So, can you have a belief that is not expressed in words? I think maybe the answer is "no," but I'm not sure. — T Clark

I find it interesting, in light of your career as an engineer, that you question having beliefs that are not expressed in words. I often believe, and I'd say know things, without the belief being expressed in words. For me putting my beliefs into words is often obviously secondary to having the belief itself.

You mentioned once, funneling facts into your head and engineering solutions arising later as a result. If you don't mind me asking, were the results that arose from this process results in the form of words?

But keeping it simple, supposing one has a general duty of care to one's fellow beings, one who is bent on harming his fellows thereby forfeits his own right to be cared for. — unenlightened

l think in a very practical sense of, 'this is the way things go among humans', I would have to agree with something like that. More idealistically I'd hope for caring for everyone, even knowing it's an ideal I can't come close to living up to.

It certainly is relevant to my having taken a chunk of brass rod to what I was afraid could turn into a gun fight. The guy with the gun was a coworker at my first job out of college, and it's really a story about a fucked up year in four people's lives.

I guess I was hoping mentioning having such an experience myself might motivate someone else to give an account of a relevant experience of their own, and spare me from feeling I should go into more detail. It's a story I would have to get out between bouts of tears and I'm awfully ambivalent about trying to condense it to reasonable post length.

I thought the claim to have acted in self defence was the way one justified an act of harm. You want a justification of the justification? — unenlightened

Maybe there is a difference between justifying to society and justifying to oneself that is relevant here?

The point is that having a religious background doesn't correlate all that well with people having psychological insight.

Perhaps you can provide an example of one of the horror stories. — T Clark

My father, shortly before he entered seminary, spanked me until I was black and blue when I was six months old because I wouldn't stop crying, and my mother stayed with him.

You say the validity of the psychological understanding expressed by religious beliefs is somehow invalid because of the consequences of actions by religious institutions. — T Clark

No, I didn't say anything about actions by religious institutions.

:grin:

I detest behaviourism. — Wayfarer

It is clear you have a negative attachment to behaviorism. That's why I found it ironic that you sounded like a behaviorist.

First, there is no way of knowing, or of testing, whether animals have emotional states. — Wayfarer

You sound like a behaviorist. Have you ever spent much time around animals?

The world of science and technology is full of its own horror stories. — T Clark

Granted, but not clearly relevant to what I was interested in discussing with .

I think religious traditions are a mixture of good psychology, bad science, and lots of random circumstances... — Brendan Golledge

Considering that psychology is a science, your statement there seems a bit incoherent.

I think we could reasonably say, that history shows religious traditions disseminate passable folk-psychologies, as evidenced by the fact that there are societies still maintaining those traditions.

However, to suggest that religious traditions result in good understanding of psychology, seems rather naive to me. Not to say that consideration of religious perspectives doesn't contribute to psychological insight, but I could tell you horror stories about the results of a strongly religion based 'understanding' of psychology.

It seems worth adding, that in the case of a vaccination, there only some probability of the vaccinated individual receiving any benefit. After all, the vaccinated person might never encounter the pathogen. targeted by the vaccine.

Once a person knows and understands their options in a moral situation, they cannot stop being a part of the equation by simply 'doing nothing'. In the end, their 'inaction' to alter a situation is fully within the choices that are being judged. — Philosophim

:up:

Will they ever be able to say "the firing of this specific number of these neurons in this part of the brain will produce this specific intensity of this emotion"? — Gregory

No, each brain is unique. Vastly 'more unique' than the differences between our fingerprints.* Rough generalizations are a more realistic expectation.

*Edit: Talking about human brains. (In before some pedant brings up C. Elegans.)

That strikes me as being closer to the spirit of indirect realism than direct realism. — Michael

I can't say I am particularly interested in fitting into either box, let alone fighting for one of them.

Perhaps Scott Atran's book, "In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, Oxford University Press, 2002".

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?

:up:

Yes, and yes. Primary qualities or attributes are just those which are measurable, and, crucially, those that are said to be mind-independent. A hue may look different to different observers - although that’s hard to tell - but any value that can be measured objectively is not subject to opinion. Principally: mass, charge, velocity, dimension, and location. Just those elements of matter and chemistry which are said by materialism to be the foundation of all else that exists. — Wayfarer

Though I am loath to wade into this discussion, and two pages behind, I can't resist pointing out that the optical absorption spectrum of a tomato, and the emission spectrum of light illuminating a tomato are both measureable.

But carry on.

Care to expand? Any examples of how metaphysical imagination is used? — Amity

At the moment, the things which come readily to mind are either mind-numbingly technical, or more personal than I feel comfortable talking about on the forum. Let me allow the question to rattle around in my subconscious for a bit, and we'll see what comes out.

My observation is that people's intuition is wrong as often as right. It often seems to be someone's "feeling."

Other times the answer someone's intuition gives them is the answer they get when they consider it and explain reasoning behind it. And a lot of people have some pretty faulty reasoning. I assume a lot of people here will be happy to say mine is faulty. :grin: Perhaps others think I generally do ok. Mainly, we will say someone's intuition is wrong when it leads them to an answer we disagree with.

I guarantee my intuition leads me astray at times.

In short, I don't consider intuition to be very useful. But I don't know what wonderer1 has in mind. — Patterner

To a significant extent I agree:

Absolutely our intuitions can fool us. And logic is subject to GIGO, and can fool us as well. — wonderer1

And yet our intutions (or what Kahneman refers to as fast thinking) provide a necessary basis for us to be able to think at all, and logic (Kahneman's slow thinking) can work synergistically/critically with our intuitions, and lead to us developing more reliable intuitions. For me, understanding 'the scientific method' and the role of observations in testing the reliability of intuitions, and achieving recognition that one of my current intuitions is faulty has been something which had enabled me to improve the reliability of my intuitions over the long run.

I'd suggest not being too dismissive of the value of one's own or other's intuitions, or their potential for improvement. That said, I also advise keeping a grain of salt handy. :wink:

'Metaphysical Imagination' - what do you think it is? How have you used it?
In the meantime, I found this: https://philarchive.org/archive/MCSMAE — Amity

Wonderful find! :up:

That really resonated with a lot of my thinking. I especially appreciated the contrast of understanding with truth.

So we should stand by and watch someone brutally murder several innocent people because it is 'bad' to harm the murdered. :D — I like sushi

Having, once upon a time, taken a piece of brass rod (well suited to wrapping my fist around) to what I was afraid might become a gun fight, the OP does suggest a tendency towards scrupulosity to me.

Sorry, I am late getting round to replying to you because I started at the bottom of replies. — Jack Cummins

No apologies necessary. I much too often fail to respond to others who merit a response, to judge anyone for that. Off the top of my head, I can think of recent posts from @Tom Storm, @Patterner, @schopenhauer1, and @Joshs that I have wanted to respond to, but haven't gotten around to.

However, your question is important. It does seem that materialism and realism have become fashionable. This is connected to the rise of science as at the centre of philosophy, with philosophy almost being seen as an appendix.

The rise of materialim may also be related to popular philosophy, especially thinkers like Daniel Dennett and his notion of consciousness as an illusion. But, fashions change and who knows what will come next? — Jack Cummins

I guess I don't see scientific understanding as so much a matter of fashion, and the direction that things are likely to take in philosophy of mind, to be so mysterious.

I see Dennett as someone who recognized the importance of science to understanding what we are, and as someone who has contributed substantially to philosophical thought on our natures as a result of his efforts at understanding, where the science he was apprised of was pointing.

Very well said. :up:

I suppose there is the author of Ecclesiastes and The Byrds as well.

Nice! :up: