MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited March 2009
It doesn't just apply to social though. (Hmm, another way to put it: it doesn't just apply to constructions we invent in our heads) Our visual system works like this as well.
I think the auditory system does too, but on the other hand our auditory system is the most precise of all our senses.
Basically it's how the brain works overall. With "thinking" being produced from this machinery it's no surprise our thoughts can be a little...fuzzy around the edges. :P
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
Can the creation and use of increasingly complex concepts be reduced to biology and evolution? I mean, it at one point was simple survival instincts to say...recognize a mammoth and understand that they are potentially dangerous, tying a causal concept to an object. Are we maybe giving the rational human mind a little too much credit here, romanticizing it too much, to think it is anything above and beyond that?
UnknownSaint on
0
Options
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
Can the creation and use of increasingly complex concepts be reduced to biology and evolution? I mean, it at one point was simple survival instincts to say...recognize a mammoth and understand that they are potentially dangerous, tying a causal concept to an object. Are we maybe giving the rational human mind a little too much credit here, romanticizing it too much, to think it is anything above and beyond that?
I'm going to pick on rational here. How are you defining this term?
Not trying to be dick I'm just acknowledging what you said earlier.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
Complex systems exist naturally. Humans live within these complex systems. It was and continues to be useful for us to understand these complex systems, and the better we can understand complex systems, the better we are able to survive and pass on our genes. So I can't see why we wouldn't develop said.
I'm going to pick on rational here. How are you defining this term?
Not trying to be dick I'm just acknowledging what you said earlier.
I'm actually not sure why he mentioned "rational," so I think this is a fair question.
Incenjucar on
0
Options
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited March 2009
Well ignoring rational for now, it's a good idea to remember that just because we can spend a few years to learn about some of these complicated constructions that doesn't mean a single human invented them.
They were all built upon using various methodologies over hundreds, in some cases thousands of years. No single human did much more than add on a piece here and there, although there were those who did a lot more and those who did a lot less.
I think it's very possible for a limited human to create something as complicated as the constructions that exist in say, philosophy, if you take that kind of "over time" viewpoint.
I don't think this is a bad example, but that might just be me: a hammer and an anvil. These are extremely simple tools. What can you create if you take these tools and a lot of time and patience?
Virtually anything. Not directly from those tools, but you can make the tools to make the machines that make the etc etc ad infinitum.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
I'm going to pick on rational here. How are you defining this term?
Not trying to be dick I'm just acknowledging what you said earlier.
I'm actually not sure why he mentioned "rational," so I think this is a fair question.
It was actually fairly unimportant in the context of the series of questions, I was just describing the human mind as operating with some degree of reason and understanding. (As opposed to general ideas of some reptilian mind that in contrast operates on pure instinct.)
UnknownSaint on
0
Options
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
I'm going to pick on rational here. How are you defining this term?
Not trying to be dick I'm just acknowledging what you said earlier.
I'm actually not sure why he mentioned "rational," so I think this is a fair question.
It was actually fairly unimportant in the context of the series of questions, I was just describing the human mind as operating with some degree of reason and understanding. (As opposed to general ideas of some reptilian mind that in contrast operates on pure instinct.)
Reason is connected to rational isn't it?
Rational is a reductionistic view of thought, to me. It's conclusionistic, if you will. Logic is a wonderful tool, but very rarely do people operate like that. (for example, you can change the rational people give for an incident by how you word your questions.)
I certainly don't, my processes are very abstract. It's very difficult for me to grasp math, for example. Not the concepts, but the way it's presented and it's linearity. I keep trying to "jump the gaps" automatically.
Yet I can have this conversation with you and have you understand it. And I can understand visual diagrams extremely quickly. They just go straight in.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
I'm going to pick on rational here. How are you defining this term?
Not trying to be dick I'm just acknowledging what you said earlier.
I'm actually not sure why he mentioned "rational," so I think this is a fair question.
It was actually fairly unimportant in the context of the series of questions, I was just describing the human mind as operating with some degree of reason and understanding. (As opposed to general ideas of some reptilian mind that in contrast operates on pure instinct.)
Reason is connected to rational isn't it?
Rational is a reductionistic view of thought, to me. It's conclusionistic, if you will. Logic is a wonderful tool, but very rarely do people operate like that.
I certainly don't, my processes are very abstract. It's very difficult for me to grasp math, for example. Not the concepts, but the way it's presented and it's linearity. I keep trying to "jump the gaps" automatically.
Yet I can have this conversation with you and have you understand it.
I was talking about biology and the human mind, and used it as a specifying descriptor. I feel like the pertinent questoin was ignored entirely and we're merely seizing on some minor part of it.
UnknownSaint on
0
Options
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
I was talking about biology and the human mind, and used it as a specifying descriptor. I feel like the pertinent questoin was ignored entirely and we're merely seizing on some minor part of it.
I took a guess at what you meant above, I didn't ignore it.
The post that starts with "Ignoring rational for now".
Did I miss what you meant? (Quote that post instead of this one if you want to reply to it.)
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
I was talking about biology and the human mind, and used it as a specifying descriptor. I feel like the pertinent questoin was ignored entirely and we're merely seizing on some minor part of it.
I took a guess at what you meant above, I didn't ignore it.
The post that starts with "Ignoring rational for now".
Did I miss what you meant? (Quote that post instead of this one if you want to reply to it.)
You sort of got at it, but I'm not so sure about this progressive, ever-evolving idea about our concepts that you seemed to describe, though perhaps I misunderstood you. I think our constructions of concepts are a bit different though, I'm thinking in very simple terms and you seem to be discussing things much more complex.
(Also as to the hammer/anvil relationship, I don't think you need to grasp the infinite possibilities of what can be created with those things to understand it even in the fullest practical sense.)
What I was trying to express was basically, the act of creating and ordering 'mental' (I use this term very loosely) conceptions of objects and relationships, (referred to earlier as 'social shorthand') can this be reduced to some biological product of evolution? Do we make this shit up for any reason other than it somehow satisfies something on a more instinctual level? (You can perhaps see how this gets back to physicalism.)
UnknownSaint on
0
Options
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited March 2009
I don't know the answer to the question of evolutionary origins of the mental categorisation you speak of.
I should say....I treat that as an irrelevant, answerless question from my point of view, so I haven't thought much about it and remember few arguments or research about it. (Because I'm interested in how we work now, not how we used to work.)
I know that evolutionary psychology exists though.
I also want to stress that just because I don't find it important doesn't mean I can't also acknowledge that someone else would.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
0
Options
Grudgeblessed is the mind too small for doubtRegistered Userregular
edited March 2009
Thing is, how we work now is a product of how we used to work, through evolution. Knowledge of how we (and other animals) used to work might gain insights to how we work now that would otherwise be hard to reach.
EDIT: This is in the same way as in understanding history might help giving an understanding of society today.
Grudge on
0
Options
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited March 2009
Yeah I get that.
But psychology is so vast (~200 research reports per day?), it's impossible for any one person to know all of it. So I've had to choose a few fields to specialise in.
Eventually I will, realistically, have to choose only one.
Evo Psych just isn't one of them, unfortuantly.
I welcome the insights of anybody who knows more about it.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
I think it's safe to say that broad cognitive abilities like the ability to form conceptual representations of physical objects are the product of evolution, yes.
My objection to evo psych is when it gets overly specific. We evolved to have certain cognitive talents; we did not necessarily evolve to use those talents in any particular fashion.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I think it's safe to say that broad cognitive abilities like the ability to form conceptual representations of physical objects are the product of evolution, yes.
My objection to evo psych is when it gets overly specific. We evolved to have certain cognitive talents; we did not necessarily evolve to use those talents in any particular fashion.
Why not? The evolution happened because our particular set of cognitive talents were used in a way that helped us survive. Cognitive talents are only relevant to evolution when you look at the actions they cause us to take.
I think it's safe to say that broad cognitive abilities like the ability to form conceptual representations of physical objects are the product of evolution, yes.
My objection to evo psych is when it gets overly specific. We evolved to have certain cognitive talents; we did not necessarily evolve to use those talents in any particular fashion.
Why not? The evolution happened because our particular set of cognitive talents were used in a way that helped us survive. Cognitive talents are only relevant to evolution when you look at the actions they cause us to take.
We've been down this road many, many times. I'm leery of dragging this thread off-course.
In it you'll find links to a debate between Stephen Pinker and Stephen Jay Gould. Basically, I agree with everything that Gould says and I think Pinker has blinkers on.
(Way late edit: I unfucked my link. Sorry about that.)
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I think it's safe to say that broad cognitive abilities like the ability to form conceptual representations of physical objects are the product of evolution, yes.
My objection to evo psych is when it gets overly specific. We evolved to have certain cognitive talents; we did not necessarily evolve to use those talents in any particular fashion.
Why not? The evolution happened because our particular set of cognitive talents were used in a way that helped us survive. Cognitive talents are only relevant to evolution when you look at the actions they cause us to take.
Why?
I mean, it's not as though physiological evolution is only relevant when you look at exactly the action it's designed to facilitate. I can lift my hands above my head because that makes it easier to brachiate. That doesn't mean anything I do involving my arms going above my head is only relevant if it involves swinging through trees.
To use a contemporary example: if you buy a screwdriver because you need to put in a windowframe, is that a screwdriver or a The-windowframe-in-the-bedroom-to-the-left-insertion-assistance-tool?
Most of our modern cognitive faculties are in fact used in ways that bear little relation to what they were used for when they initially evolved. We got tools, and realized that we could use them for more than just windowframes.
I think it's safe to say that broad cognitive abilities like the ability to form conceptual representations of physical objects are the product of evolution, yes.
My objection to evo psych is when it gets overly specific. We evolved to have certain cognitive talents; we did not necessarily evolve to use those talents in any particular fashion.
Are universals (concepts, etc) and reason limited to humans and our particularly evolutionary path?
The psych chauvinist in me wants to say that a problem with discussions going in circles and ultimately running out of steam is an issue with philosophy in general. That's what happens when you get a bunch of pure rationalists sitting in a classroom believing that they can know something just by talking about it, while the empiricists are actually out in the world observing and gathering useful knowledge.
Logical positivism is dead for a reason. Science, actual science I'm talking about here, has definite limitations. These limitations are quite notable and really prevent meaningful discussion of epistemology, metaphysics, or ethics - most often we are pigeon holed into an ever increasing contest of reductionism, and that's just useless.
Psychology, though, isn't an empirical science. It's a pseudo-science which attempts to take something that is ultimately uncommunicable (one's private mental life), reduce it to something other than than that (such as behavior or a materialist understanding of the brain), and then produce statistical correlational arguments and attempts to present these as actually meaningful or doing something other than giving us correlation. Perhaps psychology has its uses, and that's fine (this is not the thread to debate them), but if psychology can only ever give us sometimes-correlation in terms of results, why the hell would we ever want to use if we wish to discuss the nature of the mind? Maybe I'm crazy, but I want to see things established, rigorously, and proven.
I would defend the latter theory: The mind is an incorporeal substance attached to an extended, corporeal, body via the pineal gland. Hi, I'm Descartes.
Descartes conception of the self fails so hard. Kant destroyed it in The Critique of Pure Reason using his three Paralogisms of the Self. Basically, when Descartes gets to his big moment of "I think, I am" he can't move beyond it - he tries to, he tries to outline all of the activities which his thinking thing does beyond that. But he is simply repeating "I think I think I think I think I think" over and over again. Kant develops an argument (which would take too long to recreate here) that leads him to a number of conclusions, the most of important is that we can't experience our self, we can only experience with our self. Hegel says the same thing when he asserts that the thinking thing can't ever be its own object of thought.
What does this mean? It means that introspection with regards to the self is hemmed in or cut off entirely. Which is fundamentally problematic if introspection is the chief way in which an individual can consider the nature of their self (or mind).
I think it's safe to say that broad cognitive abilities like the ability to form conceptual representations of physical objects are the product of evolution, yes.
My objection to evo psych is when it gets overly specific. We evolved to have certain cognitive talents; we did not necessarily evolve to use those talents in any particular fashion.
Why not? The evolution happened because our particular set of cognitive talents were used in a way that helped us survive. Cognitive talents are only relevant to evolution when you look at the actions they cause us to take.
Why?
I mean, it's not as though physiological evolution is only relevant when you look at exactly the action it's designed to facilitate. I can lift my hands above my head because that makes it easier to brachiate. That doesn't mean anything I do involving my arms going above my head is only relevant if it involves swinging through trees.
To use a contemporary example: if you buy a screwdriver because you need to put in a windowframe, is that a screwdriver or a The-windowframe-in-the-bedroom-to-the-left-insertion-assistance-tool?
Most of our modern cognitive faculties are in fact used in ways that bear little relation to what they were used for when they initially evolved. We got tools, and realized that we could use them for more than just windowframes.
I didn't say that the way we use those talents today is the same as the reason why they evolved. But more likely than not they did evolve for a reason, even if it's long since forgotten. It doesn't make sense to say that we "evolved to have certain cognitive talents" without looking at the influence those cognitive talents had on our actions, which ultimately are what propagates the species. It's definitely not a safe assumption that every little aspect of our personalities is a direct result of natural selection though, there is such a thing as random coincidence. There's also an evolutionary aspect to our tools and society - maybe the reason there are so many screws is because we realized we already had a perfectly good screwdriver from that first time.
These discussions generally tend to stall pretty early, typically because a lot of it boils down to not being able to prove that something doesn't exist. So you have the physicalists and verificationists on one side wondering just how in the fuck people can still buy into dualism or even tripe like epiphenomenalism, and the other side that is going off of intuition and really can't be fully disproven, just sort of shamed into obscurity.
This debate specifically is why I hate philosophy of the mind in general. It's interesting to talk about, it just goes nowhere.
This is a complete mischaracterization of how debates in philosophy of mind go. No one appeals to intuition. The chief argument for dualism is that there is information in mental events that cannot be captured by a physical description of the brain. For example, even perfect knowledge of the brain could never tell you what it is like to see colors. The chief argument for physicalism is that it is impossible to reconcile causation between a mental realm and a physical realm, in particular between a non-spatial and a spatial realm.
Both of these positions are of course quite wrong. The true answer is idealism, the belief that all information about the world can be contained in a purely mental description. The physical world is an abstraction of certain features of the mental world; all physical entities are fundamentally defined in terms of mental effects.
I think it's safe to say that broad cognitive abilities like the ability to form conceptual representations of physical objects are the product of evolution, yes.
My objection to evo psych is when it gets overly specific. We evolved to have certain cognitive talents; we did not necessarily evolve to use those talents in any particular fashion.
Are universals (concepts, etc) and reason limited to humans and our particularly evolutionary path?
Psychology, though, isn't an empirical science. It's a pseudo-science which attempts to take something that is ultimately uncommunicable (one's private mental life), reduce it to something other than than that (such as behavior or a materialist understanding of the brain), and then produce statistical correlational arguments and attempts to present these as actually meaningful or doing something other than giving us correlation. Perhaps psychology has its uses, and that's fine (this is not the thread to debate them), but if psychology can only ever give us sometimes-correlation in terms of results, why the hell would we ever want to use if we wish to discuss the nature of the mind? Maybe I'm crazy, but I want to see things established, rigorously, and proven.
man... what?
First off, I don't think "pseudo-science" means what you think it means. Regardless of what Freud and Jung did decades ago, current psychology, as it is practiced as a science, puts a strong emphasis on the scientific method. The defining characteristic of a pseudo-science is a lack of rigorous scientific method. In what way do you consider psychology - as a field - to lack scientific rigor?
Secondly, one's private mental life is not incommunicable. If it were, empathy would be impossible and statements such as "i feel happy" or "i get turned on thinking about naked girls" would be meaningless. You could state that they are not perfectly communicable, for reasons similar to our elephant discussion above, but imperfect communicability and incommunicability are two very different things.
Third, psychology is not exclusively concerned with people's private mental lives. In fact, I would venture that at this time, it is more concerned with observable behaviors and observable differences in neurobiology than it is with internal qualia.
Fourth, I'm not really sure how you can imply that all psychology succumbs to the causation-correlation conundrum - any more than any other science. For example, if I take 50 children, all of whom demonstrate a specific set of short-attention-span behaviors; and I give 25 of them Adderall, and those 25 show a marked improvement in attention, that is strong evidence of a causal connection at least as far as the efficacy of Adderall goes. And if I start by showing a correlation between poor dopamine metabolism and ADHD, then show that ADHD medication improves dopamine metabolism in an experimental group compared to a control, followed by a decrease in ADHD symptoms, then that is strong evidence of a causal connection between dopamine and attention. In that example, how can you declare that all I've shown is a "sometimes-correlation?"
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I don't get the qualia argument against physicalism at all.
That's because it's pretty much absurd.
I'm not sure if I can explain it in a way to do it justice, because I find it incoherent. Basically, since an experience (say, the experience of seeing a red apple) cannot be directly mapped onto a physical structure (there is no little representation of a red apple anywhere in the brain) then there must be something other than the physical structure that explains qualia.
This is as stupid as taking my hard drive apart to look for a little tiny Windows logo, failing to find it, and then claiming that Windows must exist in a substance other than the bits on my hard drive.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
0
Options
Podlyyou unzipped me! it's all coming back! i don't like it!Registered Userregular
I don't get the qualia argument against physicalism at all. Could someone try to explain how the existence of qualia would imply some kind of dualism?
Not being a physicalist does not make you a dualist or a cartesianist or a subjectivist. You could be, for instance, an existentialist. The idea is that there is some holistic thing which makes the sum of the parts of a chair have a certain "chairness." It is what we grasp when we point to an indexical and say "chair."
Really, I think that this thread should start over, because there are billions and billions of assumptions being made, it seems.
First off, as an ontological phenomenologist, I would like to say that we have an existential existence which is not present as something objectively at hand, that we have an ontological existence which is purely existential. By this I mean that we have a sense of "being there' which is neither spatio-temporal nor exists purely as some emergent property of the brain.
Rationality is the system through which we produce reasons. There is theoretical and practical reason. Theoretical reasoning concerns how we formulate our beliefs and how we are assured that it is the case. Practical reasoning is the process by which we formulate ways to fulfill our desires.
Edit* Rationality is, in essence, how we give ourselves "reasons" for doing something or believing something.
Particularly with WVO Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism."
Descartes conception of the self fails so hard. Kant destroyed it in The Critique of Pure Reason using his three Paralogisms of the Self. Basically, when Descartes gets to his big moment of "I think, I am" he can't move beyond it - he tries to, he tries to outline all of the activities which his thinking thing does beyond that. But he is simply repeating "I think I think I think I think I think" over and over again. Kant develops an argument (which would take too long to recreate here) that leads him to a number of conclusions, the most of important is that we can't experience our self, we can only experience with our self. Hegel says the same thing when he asserts that the thinking thing can't ever be its own object of thought.
What does this mean? It means that introspection with regards to the self is hemmed in or cut off entirely. Which is fundamentally problematic if introspection is the chief way in which an individual can consider the nature of their self (or mind).
While I do love Kant's critique and agree with it, I'm not so sure that it holds up if you posit that being actually is a predicate of thinking, and that it is categorically such.
If you've never read Heidegger's The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, you would love it.
I'm not sure if I can explain it in a way to do it justice, because I find it incoherent. Basically, since an experience (say, the experience of seeing a red apple) cannot be directly mapped onto a physical structure (there is no little representation of a red apple anywhere in the brain) then there must be something other than the physical structure that explains qualia.
Not really. It's more that in the experience of the red apple, there is a certain "redness" and a certain "appleness" which the mind "grasps" from the holistic experience.
J's argument is remarkably similar to the arguments I hear from most religious people who actually get down to the reason they believe on a personal level.
I find this amusing as I believe he is as rigidly atheistic as I am?
So last time something like this came up I brought up Chalmers zombie, and I think one person responded with something along the lines of "I don't think that's relevant or important" which strikes me as simply ignoring the issue.
Is anyone interested in talking about the possibility of such creatures? Because if they are possible then you have to recognize the implications for the mind, namely it having to be something not entirely physical in nature.
For those that aren't familiar with the philosophical zombie
Okay, take a totally accurate physical copy of you, but remove consciousness. It still behaves as though it's conscious, but the actions are simply physical reflexive processes. It doesn't posses one of those things that we take for granted, the ability to think about thinking (among others). Now, Chalmers uses this to point out that if we conceptualize the mind as something that is purely physical we have to assert that the zombie cannot possibly exist (remember this is logical possibility too, so it has to violate the laws of logic such as create a contradiction) and as far as I know there isn't any good arguments for that position (that their existence is impossible)
Thus I come to the conclusion that the nature of the mind is such that it is not entirely physical. As to what it is, I admit that I'm very very lost. However, if I can't figure out what it is right away, then at least I can try to figure out what it isn't
Also, is there a really good materialist way to deal with the What Mary Doesn't Know? Because that also got handwaved away last time a thread like this popped up.
LoserForHireX on
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
0
Options
Podlyyou unzipped me! it's all coming back! i don't like it!Registered Userregular
edited March 2009
Also, a strict physicalist and materialist has to account for the problem of classes. They either have to take a Fregian route and posit platonic entities, a Carnapian route and posit "material classes," or just outright ignore everything which is not composed in physical substance and accordant to the laws of physics.
I can assert that there is no evidence that a Chalmers zombie does exist, consequently there is no evidence against physicalism.
This is also similar to the atheist arguments against God: if God is a supernatural being outside of human consciousness, then there is no evidence He exists, and therefore no reason to believe in him. Likewise, if the mind is a different substance than matter, there is no evidence that substance exists, and no reason to believe in it.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
0
Options
HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
Also, a strict physicalist and materialist has to account for the problem of classes. They either have to take a Fregian route and posit platonic entities, a Carnapian route and posit "material classes," or just outright ignore everything which is not composed in physical substance and accordant to the laws of physics.
Posts
I think the auditory system does too, but on the other hand our auditory system is the most precise of all our senses.
Basically it's how the brain works overall. With "thinking" being produced from this machinery it's no surprise our thoughts can be a little...fuzzy around the edges. :P
Of course it's 3AM, but still.
I'm going to pick on rational here. How are you defining this term?
Not trying to be dick I'm just acknowledging what you said earlier.
I'm actually not sure why he mentioned "rational," so I think this is a fair question.
They were all built upon using various methodologies over hundreds, in some cases thousands of years. No single human did much more than add on a piece here and there, although there were those who did a lot more and those who did a lot less.
I think it's very possible for a limited human to create something as complicated as the constructions that exist in say, philosophy, if you take that kind of "over time" viewpoint.
I don't think this is a bad example, but that might just be me: a hammer and an anvil. These are extremely simple tools. What can you create if you take these tools and a lot of time and patience?
Virtually anything. Not directly from those tools, but you can make the tools to make the machines that make the etc etc ad infinitum.
It was actually fairly unimportant in the context of the series of questions, I was just describing the human mind as operating with some degree of reason and understanding. (As opposed to general ideas of some reptilian mind that in contrast operates on pure instinct.)
Reason is connected to rational isn't it?
Rational is a reductionistic view of thought, to me. It's conclusionistic, if you will. Logic is a wonderful tool, but very rarely do people operate like that. (for example, you can change the rational people give for an incident by how you word your questions.)
I certainly don't, my processes are very abstract. It's very difficult for me to grasp math, for example. Not the concepts, but the way it's presented and it's linearity. I keep trying to "jump the gaps" automatically.
Yet I can have this conversation with you and have you understand it. And I can understand visual diagrams extremely quickly. They just go straight in.
I was talking about biology and the human mind, and used it as a specifying descriptor. I feel like the pertinent questoin was ignored entirely and we're merely seizing on some minor part of it.
I took a guess at what you meant above, I didn't ignore it.
The post that starts with "Ignoring rational for now".
Did I miss what you meant? (Quote that post instead of this one if you want to reply to it.)
You sort of got at it, but I'm not so sure about this progressive, ever-evolving idea about our concepts that you seemed to describe, though perhaps I misunderstood you. I think our constructions of concepts are a bit different though, I'm thinking in very simple terms and you seem to be discussing things much more complex.
(Also as to the hammer/anvil relationship, I don't think you need to grasp the infinite possibilities of what can be created with those things to understand it even in the fullest practical sense.)
I should say....I treat that as an irrelevant, answerless question from my point of view, so I haven't thought much about it and remember few arguments or research about it. (Because I'm interested in how we work now, not how we used to work.)
I know that evolutionary psychology exists though.
I also want to stress that just because I don't find it important doesn't mean I can't also acknowledge that someone else would.
EDIT: This is in the same way as in understanding history might help giving an understanding of society today.
But psychology is so vast (~200 research reports per day?), it's impossible for any one person to know all of it. So I've had to choose a few fields to specialise in.
Eventually I will, realistically, have to choose only one.
Evo Psych just isn't one of them, unfortuantly.
I welcome the insights of anybody who knows more about it.
My objection to evo psych is when it gets overly specific. We evolved to have certain cognitive talents; we did not necessarily evolve to use those talents in any particular fashion.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Why not? The evolution happened because our particular set of cognitive talents were used in a way that helped us survive. Cognitive talents are only relevant to evolution when you look at the actions they cause us to take.
We've been down this road many, many times. I'm leery of dragging this thread off-course.
I'll just link this post: http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?p=8983111
In it you'll find links to a debate between Stephen Pinker and Stephen Jay Gould. Basically, I agree with everything that Gould says and I think Pinker has blinkers on.
(Way late edit: I unfucked my link. Sorry about that.)
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Why?
I mean, it's not as though physiological evolution is only relevant when you look at exactly the action it's designed to facilitate. I can lift my hands above my head because that makes it easier to brachiate. That doesn't mean anything I do involving my arms going above my head is only relevant if it involves swinging through trees.
To use a contemporary example: if you buy a screwdriver because you need to put in a windowframe, is that a screwdriver or a The-windowframe-in-the-bedroom-to-the-left-insertion-assistance-tool?
Most of our modern cognitive faculties are in fact used in ways that bear little relation to what they were used for when they initially evolved. We got tools, and realized that we could use them for more than just windowframes.
Are universals (concepts, etc) and reason limited to humans and our particularly evolutionary path?
Logical positivism is dead for a reason. Science, actual science I'm talking about here, has definite limitations. These limitations are quite notable and really prevent meaningful discussion of epistemology, metaphysics, or ethics - most often we are pigeon holed into an ever increasing contest of reductionism, and that's just useless.
Psychology, though, isn't an empirical science. It's a pseudo-science which attempts to take something that is ultimately uncommunicable (one's private mental life), reduce it to something other than than that (such as behavior or a materialist understanding of the brain), and then produce statistical correlational arguments and attempts to present these as actually meaningful or doing something other than giving us correlation. Perhaps psychology has its uses, and that's fine (this is not the thread to debate them), but if psychology can only ever give us sometimes-correlation in terms of results, why the hell would we ever want to use if we wish to discuss the nature of the mind? Maybe I'm crazy, but I want to see things established, rigorously, and proven.
Descartes conception of the self fails so hard. Kant destroyed it in The Critique of Pure Reason using his three Paralogisms of the Self. Basically, when Descartes gets to his big moment of "I think, I am" he can't move beyond it - he tries to, he tries to outline all of the activities which his thinking thing does beyond that. But he is simply repeating "I think I think I think I think I think" over and over again. Kant develops an argument (which would take too long to recreate here) that leads him to a number of conclusions, the most of important is that we can't experience our self, we can only experience with our self. Hegel says the same thing when he asserts that the thinking thing can't ever be its own object of thought.
What does this mean? It means that introspection with regards to the self is hemmed in or cut off entirely. Which is fundamentally problematic if introspection is the chief way in which an individual can consider the nature of their self (or mind).
I didn't say that the way we use those talents today is the same as the reason why they evolved. But more likely than not they did evolve for a reason, even if it's long since forgotten. It doesn't make sense to say that we "evolved to have certain cognitive talents" without looking at the influence those cognitive talents had on our actions, which ultimately are what propagates the species. It's definitely not a safe assumption that every little aspect of our personalities is a direct result of natural selection though, there is such a thing as random coincidence. There's also an evolutionary aspect to our tools and society - maybe the reason there are so many screws is because we realized we already had a perfectly good screwdriver from that first time.
This is a complete mischaracterization of how debates in philosophy of mind go. No one appeals to intuition. The chief argument for dualism is that there is information in mental events that cannot be captured by a physical description of the brain. For example, even perfect knowledge of the brain could never tell you what it is like to see colors. The chief argument for physicalism is that it is impossible to reconcile causation between a mental realm and a physical realm, in particular between a non-spatial and a spatial realm.
Both of these positions are of course quite wrong. The true answer is idealism, the belief that all information about the world can be contained in a purely mental description. The physical world is an abstraction of certain features of the mental world; all physical entities are fundamentally defined in terms of mental effects.
I don't see why they would be.
man... what?
First off, I don't think "pseudo-science" means what you think it means. Regardless of what Freud and Jung did decades ago, current psychology, as it is practiced as a science, puts a strong emphasis on the scientific method. The defining characteristic of a pseudo-science is a lack of rigorous scientific method. In what way do you consider psychology - as a field - to lack scientific rigor?
Secondly, one's private mental life is not incommunicable. If it were, empathy would be impossible and statements such as "i feel happy" or "i get turned on thinking about naked girls" would be meaningless. You could state that they are not perfectly communicable, for reasons similar to our elephant discussion above, but imperfect communicability and incommunicability are two very different things.
Third, psychology is not exclusively concerned with people's private mental lives. In fact, I would venture that at this time, it is more concerned with observable behaviors and observable differences in neurobiology than it is with internal qualia.
Fourth, I'm not really sure how you can imply that all psychology succumbs to the causation-correlation conundrum - any more than any other science. For example, if I take 50 children, all of whom demonstrate a specific set of short-attention-span behaviors; and I give 25 of them Adderall, and those 25 show a marked improvement in attention, that is strong evidence of a causal connection at least as far as the efficacy of Adderall goes. And if I start by showing a correlation between poor dopamine metabolism and ADHD, then show that ADHD medication improves dopamine metabolism in an experimental group compared to a control, followed by a decrease in ADHD symptoms, then that is strong evidence of a causal connection between dopamine and attention. In that example, how can you declare that all I've shown is a "sometimes-correlation?"
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
That's because it's pretty much absurd.
I'm not sure if I can explain it in a way to do it justice, because I find it incoherent. Basically, since an experience (say, the experience of seeing a red apple) cannot be directly mapped onto a physical structure (there is no little representation of a red apple anywhere in the brain) then there must be something other than the physical structure that explains qualia.
This is as stupid as taking my hard drive apart to look for a little tiny Windows logo, failing to find it, and then claiming that Windows must exist in a substance other than the bits on my hard drive.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Not being a physicalist does not make you a dualist or a cartesianist or a subjectivist. You could be, for instance, an existentialist. The idea is that there is some holistic thing which makes the sum of the parts of a chair have a certain "chairness." It is what we grasp when we point to an indexical and say "chair."
Really, I think that this thread should start over, because there are billions and billions of assumptions being made, it seems.
First off, as an ontological phenomenologist, I would like to say that we have an existential existence which is not present as something objectively at hand, that we have an ontological existence which is purely existential. By this I mean that we have a sense of "being there' which is neither spatio-temporal nor exists purely as some emergent property of the brain.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Actually, you do not mean ontologically. You mean ontically.
an ecosystem is not an objective being. It is an ontological, existential one.
What is a number?
That's fairly awesome.
Rationality is the system through which we produce reasons. There is theoretical and practical reason. Theoretical reasoning concerns how we formulate our beliefs and how we are assured that it is the case. Practical reasoning is the process by which we formulate ways to fulfill our desires.
Edit* Rationality is, in essence, how we give ourselves "reasons" for doing something or believing something.
Particularly with WVO Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism."
While I do love Kant's critique and agree with it, I'm not so sure that it holds up if you posit that being actually is a predicate of thinking, and that it is categorically such.
If you've never read Heidegger's The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, you would love it.
Not really. It's more that in the experience of the red apple, there is a certain "redness" and a certain "appleness" which the mind "grasps" from the holistic experience.
I find this amusing as I believe he is as rigidly atheistic as I am?
Is anyone interested in talking about the possibility of such creatures? Because if they are possible then you have to recognize the implications for the mind, namely it having to be something not entirely physical in nature.
For those that aren't familiar with the philosophical zombie
Thus I come to the conclusion that the nature of the mind is such that it is not entirely physical. As to what it is, I admit that I'm very very lost. However, if I can't figure out what it is right away, then at least I can try to figure out what it isn't
Also, is there a really good materialist way to deal with the What Mary Doesn't Know? Because that also got handwaved away last time a thread like this popped up.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
This is also similar to the atheist arguments against God: if God is a supernatural being outside of human consciousness, then there is no evidence He exists, and therefore no reason to believe in him. Likewise, if the mind is a different substance than matter, there is no evidence that substance exists, and no reason to believe in it.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Are you familiar with the work of George Lakoff?