S
smcder
Guest
Ah, getting clearer ...
Consillience - If I remember it's a quick read.
Consillience - If I remember it's a quick read.
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2
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Yes, but it takes ages to change paradigms, "for so retentive of themselves are men," as Stevens wrote in a poem called "To the One of Fictive Music."
"Today, some thinkers seek to ground science in axiomatic assumptions such as the uniformity of nature. The majority of philosophers of science, however, take a coherentist approach to science in which a theory is validated if it makes sense of observations as part of a coherent whole."
Philosophy of science - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/QUOTE]
I'm just getting familiar with them and I think we all need to. Their thinking is a general critique of the whole of philosophy, a fundamental rebalancing of our perspectives. Laruelle, who I mentioned reading yesterday in The Speculative Turn, is nearly opaque {I think intentionally in order to estrange us from our habitual propositional thinking, a device/style he uses for purposes similar to Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt}, but Levi Bryant's paper is much clearer and I recommend it as an accessible starting place:
"The Ontic Principle:
Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology"
Levi R. Bryant
Bryant's third epigraph quotes a major thinker in this new movement of French thought, Quentin Meillassoux , in a statement that is also a helpful orientation to their 'intimidating thesis':
"If contemporary philosophers insist so adamantly that thought
is entirely oriented towards the outside, this could be because of
their failure to come to terms with a bereavement—the denial
of a loss concomitant with the abandonment of dogmatism. For
it could be that contemporary philosophers have lost the great
outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers: that outside
which was not relative to us, and which was given as indifferent
to its own givenness to be what it is, existing in itself regardless
of whether we are thinking of it or not; that outside
which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being
on foreign territory—of being entirely elsewhere.
—Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude
The Levi Bryant paper begins on pg. 261 of The Speculative Turn, just following the Laruelle paper. Again, the whole of the book is presented open-source at this link:
http://www.re-press.org/book-files/OA_Version_Speculative_Turn_9780980668346.pdf
The current exchange between Steve and Pharoah continues:
Now we get to the good stuff:
"A category 3 system state seeks a stable concept of reality. When a concept does not conform to the reality of its learning and experiential evaluations, the stability of that system concept is in jeopardy. And yet, an individual is compelled to reevaluate its concepts of reality whenever its concepts of reality are challenged."
Unless you define "challenged" as being that which compels an individual to reevaluate his/her (do some individuals identify as "it"? - I'm not being fascetious) ... then I'd say many most of the time respond to challenges in any of a number of ways so as to maintain their concept of reality including tremendous feats of denial and amnesia as needed ... trauma in childhood that challenges beliefs about reality such as my parents don't abuse me may result in formation of an additional personality that holds the new belief that my parents are dangerous so that the first personality doesn't have to ... I haven't researched how consciousness studies evaluate multiple personalities - has anyone else? I suspect there are some interesting puzzles.
"Contemplation and discussion always challenge the stability of concepts about reality. Importantly, every individual’s concept of reality includes the individual’s stable interpretation of self."
Interesting ... although I suppose a sense of not-self or a sense of oneself as process or even, if anyone has achieved it, a deep ideation of the self as illusory (a set of unconscious processes) could be called a stable interpretation of self ... but:
yes
"Consequently, there is the tendency for contemplation and discussion to feel like a challenge the self-concept. Individuals are prone to be extremely protective of their perspective of reality and to be eager to maintain stable concepts however absurd they may be shown to be. Introducing new concepts are challenging because they require the 'gentle' dismantling of existing and well guarded concepts of reality."
Telling ... because this presupposes a privileged position for the dismantler who is as subject to being dismantled as the dismantlee ... William James on conversion experiences, the very short Buddhist sutra on the ability of the mind to turn and something like a Stockholm syndrome where the convincer becomes convincee are relevant ...
A discussion entails one individual's conceptual interpretation interacting with another's. One has confidence in the stability of one's own coneptual realisations (they are stable conceptual representations that define the self-identity), thus one tries to address another individual's (assumed) unstable conceptual realisations by convincing them that one's stance is correct...
"The concepts of individuals, encapsulate family, tribal, and social beliefs and ideals. In these situations, concepts are not so much derived from the interpretation of experience, but from the unquestioning incorporation of culture, beliefs and ideals."
Heidegger has much to say here, in fact this point is a received one from Heidegger ... and I would say not just unquestioning but unconscious to the extent that in many cases others would have to point these out to us or perhaps through meditation or psychedelic de conditioning.
What does "this point is a received one from Heidegger" mean
@Individuals will feel compelled to protect the ideals and the beliefs of their affiliated groups. Concepts derived from group affiliation are particularly potent because they are not experience based. The reevaluation of an individual’s concept of reality, can generate both positive and negative conclusions that fuel individual and societal creativity and bias.
Prejudice and creativity are symptomatic of the reinterpretation of realisations, and evoke the experiences and behaviours that are unique to human societies. Interestingly, under certain specific conditions, there may develop different classes of conceptual distortions and divergence strategies to maintain conceptual stability. One could classify these classes and their ensuing behaviours in terms of the relationship with and evolution of category 1, 2 and 3 anomalies. This classification is a new science that requires significant study. This science will lead to advances in psychological profiling and treatments, and to group conflict and resolution principles."
Do you have some examples? This seems to me more descriptive than explanatory ... so examples will help. Can you give me an example (and definition first ) of advances in psychological profiling coming from the theory?
It is descriptive yes. You could have a book on this one area.
There is a hierarchy.
Stabilising physiological mechanisms (biochemical and neural biomechanical mechanisms) These can be manipulated through targetted drug treatments (biochemical) and DBS (biomechanical neural mechanisms) as Panksepp is doing for example.
Stabilsing phenomenal feelings where they are distrupting health and function (these are not conceptually derived problems and are commonly addressed through psychotherapies). Such treatements entail identifying the nature of instability and adjusting the associative/ feeling potency... etc....
Stabilisng concepts. This is the area that fascinates me most. Everyone has a network conceptual construct about reality. e.g. A terroist's construct validates killing innocents. e.g. Individuals subscribe to social norms or ideals about what is right and wrong in action. These are all conceptualised constructs - beliefs, logic, rationality. They define the individual's concept of self. Changing those concepts destabilises self and meets resistance. Rationality is not the key to changing concepts. Rather conceptual stability is the key. Individuals and societies need a stable alternative before they will dispense with a conceptual status quo.... this is a book. It is a 'new' science."
These new French 'realists' appear to challenge the "conceptual stability" you seek, Pharoah, so I think you, indeed all three of us, will want to see what they're arguing.
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[Edited] I think you might see them that way at first, but do find out what they have to say. They're off-putting to people like us who believe that we can understand the whole structure of reality --or find it in a system or construct deep in evolving nature. As I think I said earlier, I first entered into this new French critique of philosophy and its dominantly conditioned approaches to the nature of 'reality' [including dominance by materialist/physicalist science] in reading parts of several books by Graham Harmon concerning his and others' "object-oriented ontology," and I stopped reading because I found it reductive and alienating. Exploring what it's actually about in The Speculative Turn tells me that this French critique can't be ignored and can liberate us from presuppositions that over-reach the cognizable conditions of our experience and exaggerate the significance of our existence in our own minds.
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Thanks for the link to that review of the D'Arcy Thompson book, which I'm reading now. This book was likely in Rupert Sheldrake's family or personal library and at some point influenced his development as a thinker and biologist. This extract from the review is to the point:
"To place Thompson thus among the Platonists and beside the
transcendental morphologists of the last century is by no means derogatory.
Man has been seeking systematically for answers to his
great problems for only 5000 years at most, and on a conservative
estimate will be doing so for some 5,000,000 years to come. To attempt
to read off with finality any consistently developed line of
thought would seem at this stage presumptuous. It needs to be
strongly emphasized that none of the hypothetical entities proposed
on the basis of experiments in embryology deal with form in the sense
that Thompson does. The gradients of Child and the fields of Weiss
serve to organize many significant facts about development, but do
not tell us why specific form develops. Child says that the specific
form develops because the gradient operates in a substratum of specific
protoplasm, but what does that mean? Weiss says "the fact
that each cell is bound to react exclusively in accordance with the
standards of the species to which it belongs" constitutes "the principle
of 'genetic limitation.' What is the basis of that? In spite of
all we have learned about the nature and action of organizers and
evocators, Needham admits "that after all the larger part of the
mystery remains in that we can as yet form little idea of what constitutes
reactivity—competence to react to the morphogenetic inductor." The specificity
of protoplasm from the point of view of morphogenesis, and the competence
of tissues to respond in a specific way to organizers are associated with the
"form" in Thompson's On growth and form. The present day experimental
embryologist is simply not investigating it at all. The geneticist, with his
genom—the fundamental organization of the germ made up of genes arranged
on chromosomes—comes nearer to it. It may well be, as Wrinch suggests,
that as the chemist learns more of the morphology of huge molecules and
their aggregates, and as the biologist learns to apply this knowledge to the
structure of the genom, a new place will be found, in our thinking, for
the form of organisms as the morphologist, who descends from the line of
Plato, thinks of it.
Even before that time arrives, however, this book has a message
for the biologist, whose idea of quantitative biology is frequently
merely the statistical treatment of data, sometimes even forgetting
that "measurements may be as empty of significance as any other
kind of descriptive materials." The statistical answers that can be
wrung out of such measurements may have very little meaning if the
quantities measured depend on a multiplicity of causes. Statistical
treatment may indicate that certain results are significant, but what
they signify no man may know, or even surmise." Such a man might
gain from On growth and form an idea of what could be meant by
mathematical biology.
For the mathematician who has an interest in the relationship between
his abstract ideas and the phenomena of the natural world, the
book should be a treasure house. The author attributes to Lobatchevsky
the statement (p. 11) that "there is no branch of mathematics
however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena
of the real world."
Today increasing numbers of scientists are capable of questioning whether the 'applicability' of mathematics to "the phenomena of the real world" conveys more than a partial understanding of the real world. I wonder how much sooner institutional science might have begun to break beyond its positivist/objectivist boundaries if Thompson's book had been on the primary reading list of all scientists in training since its original publication in 1913 or its second, expanded edition in 1943.
Perhaps the persistence of slowly changing scientific paradigms is a condition we are prey to based in our dependence on language, which constrains thought as much as it enables thinking. I think this hypothesis stands a chance of being valid. As Colin McGinn sees it, though, our difficulties likely lie in our cognitive limitations. Here are the opening paragraphs of his paper "The Problem of Philosophy":
"The question of the scope of human knowledge has been a longstanding preoccupation of philosophy. And that question has always had a special intensity where philosophical knowledge itself is concerned. A certain anxiety about the nature and possibility of such knowledge is endemic to the subject. The suspicion is that, in trying to do philosophy, we run up against the limits of our understanding in some deep way. Ignorance seems the natural condition of philosophical endeavour, contributing both to the charm and the frustration of the discipline (if that is the right word). Thus a tenacious tradition, cutting across the usual division between empiricists and rationalists, accepts (i) that there are nontrivial limits to our epistemic capacities and (ii) that these limits stem, at least in part, from the internal organisation of the knowing mind - its constitutive structure - as distinct from limits that result from our contingent position in the world. It is not merely that we are a tiny speck in a vast cosmos; that speck also has its own specific cognitive orientation, its own distinctive architecture. The human mind conforms to certain principles in forming concepts and beliefs and theories, originally given, and these constrain the range of knowledge to which we have access. We cannot get beyond the specific kinds of data and modes of inference that characterise our knowledge- acquiring systems - however paltry these may be. The question has been, not whether this is correct as a general thesis, but rather what the operative principles are, and where their limits fall. How limited are we, and what explains the extent and quality of our limits? Can we, indeed, come to understand the workings of our own epistemic capacities? Hence the enquiries of Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Peirce, Russell, and many others.
The most recent major theorist in this tradition, and perhaps the most explicit, is Chomsky.(1) According to him, the mind is a biologically given system, organised into discrete (though interacting) subsystems or modules, which function as special-purpose cognitive devices, variously structured and scheduled, and which confer certain epistemic powers and limits on their possessors. The language faculty is one such module: innately based and specifically structured, it comes into operation early in human life and permits the acquisition, or emergence, of an intricate cognitive system in a spectacularly short time - this being made possible by the antecedent presence of the principles of universal grammar in its initial design. As Chomsky observes, the knowledge so generated is no simpler, by any plausible objective standard, than knowledge of advanced mathematics or physics; but the human mind is so adapted that it yields this knowledge with comparative ease - somewhat as we effortlessly develop a complex physiological structure in a pre- programmed way. (Compare the ease with which our visual system converts two-dimensional arrays into three-dimensional percepts, but the difficulty we have in making even simple two-dimensional drawings on the basis of our three- dimensional visual experience.) As a corollary, however, this faculty is poorly adapted to picking up conceivable languages distinct in grammatical structure from that characteristic of human speech. Its strength is thus also its weakness; in fact, it could not be strong in one way without being weak in another.
With language as his model case Chomsky develops a general conception of human intelligence which includes the idea of endogenously fixed cognitive limits even for conscious reason. Here, too, the price of ready success in some domains is fumbling or failure in others. He says:
"The human mind is a biologically given system with certain powers and limits." As Charles Sanders Peirce argued, "Man's mind has a natural adaptation to imagining correct theories of some kinds....If man had not the gift of a mind adapted to his requirements, he could not have acquired any knowledge". The fact that "admissible hypotheses" are available to this specific biological system accounts for its ability to construct rich and complex explanatory theories. But the same properties of mind that provide admissible hypotheses may well exclude other successful theories as unintelligible to humans. Some theories might simply not be among the admissible hypotheses determined by the specific properties of mind that adapt us "to imagining theories of some kinds," though these theories might be accessible to a differently organised intelligence. Or these theories might be so remote in an accessibility ordering of admissible hypotheses that they cannot be constructed under actual empirical conditions, though for a differently structured mind they might be easily accessible.'(2) Among the theories that he thinks may not be accessible to human intelligence, in virtue of its specific slant, Chomsky includes the correct theory of free creative action, particularly the ordinary use of language. We seem able to develop adequate theories of linguistic competence, i.e. grammars, but when it comes to actual performance our theoretical insights are meagre or nonexistent. And this is a reflection of the contingencies of our theoretical capacities, rather than an indication of objective intransigence.
Now much could be said in explication and defence of Chomsky's general position, but that is not my purpose here. I wish to start from something like his general perspective and explore some questions seemingly at some distance from Chomskyan concerns: in particular, I want to ask whether the phenomenon of philosophical perplexity might be a consequence of the kind of constitutive cognitive inaccessibility of which he speaks. Is the hardness of philosophy a result of cognitive bias? Might our difficulties here be a side-effect of our adeptness in other areas? Where does the felt profundity of philosophical questions come from? But first I shall have to make some further general remarks about the idea of cognitive limitation; for we will not be in a position to approach my main question unless we have properly taken the idea of cognitive limitation to heart.(3) . . . ."
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/ProblemOfPhilosophy.html
"The question of the scope of human knowledge has been a longstanding preoccupation of philosophy. And that question has always had a special intensity where philosophical knowledge itself is concerned. A certain anxiety about the nature and possibility of such knowledge is endemic to the subject. The suspicion is that, in trying to do philosophy, we run up against the limits of our understanding in some deep way. Ignorance seems the natural condition of philosophical endeavour, contributing both to the charm and the frustration of the discipline (if that is the right word). Thus a tenacious tradition, cutting across the usual division between empiricists and rationalists, accepts (i) that there are nontrivial limits to our epistemic capacities and (ii) that these limits stem, at least in part, from the internal organisation of the knowing mind - its constitutive structure - as distinct from limits that result from our contingent position in the world. It is not merely that we are a tiny speck in a vast cosmos; that speck also has its own specific cognitive orientation, its own distinctive architecture. The human mind conforms to certain principles in forming concepts and beliefs and theories, originally given, and these constrain the range of knowledge to which we have access. We cannot get beyond the specific kinds of data and modes of inference that characterise our knowledge- acquiring systems - however paltry these may be. The question has been, not whether this is correct as a general thesis, but rather what the operative principles are, and where their limits fall. How limited are we, and what explains the extent and quality of our limits? Can we, indeed, come to understand the workings of our own epistemic capacities? Hence the enquiries of Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Peirce, Russell, and many others.
The most recent major theorist in this tradition, and perhaps the most explicit, is Chomsky.(1) According to him, the mind is a biologically given system, organised into discrete (though interacting) subsystems or modules, which function as special-purpose cognitive devices, variously structured and scheduled, and which confer certain epistemic powers and limits on their possessors. The language faculty is one such module: innately based and specifically structured, it comes into operation early in human life and permits the acquisition, or emergence, of an intricate cognitive system in a spectacularly short time - this being made possible by the antecedent presence of the principles of universal grammar in its initial design. As Chomsky observes, the knowledge so generated is no simpler, by any plausible objective standard, than knowledge of advanced mathematics or physics; but the human mind is so adapted that it yields this knowledge with comparative ease - somewhat as we effortlessly develop a complex physiological structure in a pre- programmed way. (Compare the ease with which our visual system converts two-dimensional arrays into three-dimensional percepts, but the difficulty we have in making even simple two-dimensional drawings on the basis of our three- dimensional visual experience.) As a corollary, however, this faculty is poorly adapted to picking up conceivable languages distinct in grammatical structure from that characteristic of human speech. Its strength is thus also its weakness; in fact, it could not be strong in one way without being weak in another.
With language as his model case Chomsky develops a general conception of human intelligence which includes the idea of endogenously fixed cognitive limits even for conscious reason. Here, too, the price of ready success in some domains is fumbling or failure in others. He says:
"The human mind is a biologically given system with certain powers and limits." As Charles Sanders Peirce argued, "Man's mind has a natural adaptation to imagining correct theories of some kinds....If man had not the gift of a mind adapted to his requirements, he could not have acquired any knowledge". The fact that "admissible hypotheses" are available to this specific biological system accounts for its ability to construct rich and complex explanatory theories. But the same properties of mind that provide admissible hypotheses may well exclude other successful theories as unintelligible to humans. Some theories might simply not be among the admissible hypotheses determined by the specific properties of mind that adapt us "to imagining theories of some kinds," though these theories might be accessible to a differently organised intelligence. Or these theories might be so remote in an accessibility ordering of admissible hypotheses that they cannot be constructed under actual empirical conditions, though for a differently structured mind they might be easily accessible.'(2) Among the theories that he thinks may not be accessible to human intelligence, in virtue of its specific slant, Chomsky includes the correct theory of free creative action, particularly the ordinary use of language. We seem able to develop adequate theories of linguistic competence, i.e. grammars, but when it comes to actual performance our theoretical insights are meagre or nonexistent. And this is a reflection of the contingencies of our theoretical capacities, rather than an indication of objective intransigence.
Now much could be said in explication and defence of Chomsky's general position, but that is not my purpose here. I wish to start from something like his general perspective and explore some questions seemingly at some distance from Chomskyan concerns: in particular, I want to ask whether the phenomenon of philosophical perplexity might be a consequence of the kind of constitutive cognitive inaccessibility of which he speaks. Is the hardness of philosophy a result of cognitive bias? Might our difficulties here be a side-effect of our adeptness in other areas? Where does the felt profundity of philosophical questions come from? But first I shall have to make some further general remarks about the idea of cognitive limitation; for we will not be in a position to approach my main question unless we have properly taken the idea of cognitive limitation to heart.(3) . . . ."
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/ProblemOfPhilosophy.html
S
smcder
Guest
Will resume pursuit of Dowell critique ... It was in terms of two dimensionality (Chalmers) I think ... have to learn to book mark
S
smcder
Guest
@Pharoah
"Stabilsing phenomenal feelings where they are distrupting health and function (these are not conceptually derived problems and are commonly addressed through psychotherapies). Such treatements entail identifying the nature of instability and adjusting the associative/ feeling potency... etc...."
To make sure I understand - phenomenal feelings ... for example? Anxiety? Phobia? OCD ... or specific cognitive distortions as in Ellis' Rational/Emotive therapy?
http://rebtinfo.com/category/ten-cognitive-distortions/
How would the associative/feeling potency be adjusted? Medication? Talk therapy or do you mean some kind of direct alteration of the neural substrate?
Did you catch at the end of the Panksepp interview his interest in psychotherapy?
"Stabilsing phenomenal feelings where they are distrupting health and function (these are not conceptually derived problems and are commonly addressed through psychotherapies). Such treatements entail identifying the nature of instability and adjusting the associative/ feeling potency... etc...."
To make sure I understand - phenomenal feelings ... for example? Anxiety? Phobia? OCD ... or specific cognitive distortions as in Ellis' Rational/Emotive therapy?
http://rebtinfo.com/category/ten-cognitive-distortions/
How would the associative/feeling potency be adjusted? Medication? Talk therapy or do you mean some kind of direct alteration of the neural substrate?
Did you catch at the end of the Panksepp interview his interest in psychotherapy?
S
smcder
Guest
@Pharoah
"Stabilisng concepts. This is the area that fascinates me most. Everyone has a network conceptual construct about reality. e.g. A terroist's construct validates killing innocents. e.g. Individuals subscribe to social norms or ideals about what is right and wrong in action. These are all conceptualised constructs - beliefs, logic, rationality. They define the individual's concept of self. Changing those concepts destabilises self and meets resistance. Rationality is not the key to changing concepts. Rather conceptual stability is the key. Individuals and societies need a stable alternative before they will dispense with a conceptual status quo.... this is a book. It is a 'new' science."
1. What is your ambition for HST? Your on Philpapers and Dave's consc.net - and have presented the work in public ... do you have specific publication goals?
2. How would you "sell " me HST? What can I do with it? Some intriguing possibilities in the last sentence above ... how is a stable alternative found?
Could you work with someone to create problem solving training based on HST either general or specific problem domains ... eg a "hearts and minds" campaign?
"Stabilisng concepts. This is the area that fascinates me most. Everyone has a network conceptual construct about reality. e.g. A terroist's construct validates killing innocents. e.g. Individuals subscribe to social norms or ideals about what is right and wrong in action. These are all conceptualised constructs - beliefs, logic, rationality. They define the individual's concept of self. Changing those concepts destabilises self and meets resistance. Rationality is not the key to changing concepts. Rather conceptual stability is the key. Individuals and societies need a stable alternative before they will dispense with a conceptual status quo.... this is a book. It is a 'new' science."
1. What is your ambition for HST? Your on Philpapers and Dave's consc.net - and have presented the work in public ... do you have specific publication goals?
2. How would you "sell " me HST? What can I do with it? Some intriguing possibilities in the last sentence above ... how is a stable alternative found?
Could you work with someone to create problem solving training based on HST either general or specific problem domains ... eg a "hearts and minds" campaign?
Re Steven's post: "Will resume pursuit of Dowell critique ... It was in terms of two dimensionality (Chalmers) I think ... have to learn to book mark,"
You do that far better than I do, Steve, or otherwise keep track of sources and links. I've been amazed by your ability to do that.
Re that McGinn paper linked and extracted above, you were the one who first brought it to my attention. I read it again tonight and it's brilliant. Though I still sense something is 'off' in McGinn's passages on language and 'universal grammar', and if there is something off about it it's most likely something off in Chomsky's theorizing. I'm presently searching for critiques of Chomsky's theory. [edited] If some core syntactic structures are found across all human languages and constitute a minimal 'universal grammar', these could support adequately a claim regarding a'universal grammar', but the semantics of languages are another matter. Universal 'grammar' can't "control" what we are able to think. McGinn actually uses the word 'control' in that context at one point in the paper. But he moves beyond the boundaries implied in that idea in the last few fascinating paragraphs of the paper when he refers to the subconscious mind as the source of much of what we can think without our being able (yet) to understand how.
You do that far better than I do, Steve, or otherwise keep track of sources and links. I've been amazed by your ability to do that.
Re that McGinn paper linked and extracted above, you were the one who first brought it to my attention. I read it again tonight and it's brilliant. Though I still sense something is 'off' in McGinn's passages on language and 'universal grammar', and if there is something off about it it's most likely something off in Chomsky's theorizing. I'm presently searching for critiques of Chomsky's theory. [edited] If some core syntactic structures are found across all human languages and constitute a minimal 'universal grammar', these could support adequately a claim regarding a'universal grammar', but the semantics of languages are another matter. Universal 'grammar' can't "control" what we are able to think. McGinn actually uses the word 'control' in that context at one point in the paper. But he moves beyond the boundaries implied in that idea in the last few fascinating paragraphs of the paper when he refers to the subconscious mind as the source of much of what we can think without our being able (yet) to understand how.
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S
smcder
Guest
The Two-Dimensional Argument Against Materialism
Philosophy, et cetera: Knowing Sentences
( see exchange between Dowell and Chalmers at end )
Philosophy, et cetera: Knowing Sentences
( see exchange between Dowell and Chalmers at end )
S
smcder
Guest
Still catching up ...
I have another good McGinn article ... also came across Chomskys argument vs materialism may post if it seems relevant, excited about the new "Turn" in the conversation!
S
smcder
Guest
Should we plot a course ...?
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
Yes
medication, therapy yes. But from the oremise that the purposed is a stable state though.
Panksepp... yep
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
1. yes
2. Hmmm... I am not a salesman - someone else will do the selling (and get all the credit most likely)
With this kind of idea, its uses are not always obvious until people start running with it.
Like an amoeba, changing ideas can be impercepible. Finding common ground. identifying comparable goals. Identifying how ideas are more than one side to the same cube i.e. they are not mutually exclusive. seeing the rationale behind different /conflicting perspectives. These all function to modulate concepts in the abscence of revelation
understanding the dynamics behind conceptual prejudice and bias has its uses.
@Pharoah, I'm trying to understand what's involved in the program you're advocating that is not already practiced in various forms of psychotherapy, e.g., cognitive-behavioral therapy, family of origin therapy, and more classic forms of deep therapy (Jungian, Adlerian, etc.). Can you clarify the differences in what you're prop0sing?
Also, is there a paper by Panksepp that presents his ideas concerning psychotherapy? I haven't listened to the interview you and Steve refer to because I prefer to get my information from written texts rather than taped interviews and lectures. But if these ideas of Panksepp are available only in the taped interview I'll listen to it.
My impression is that what you're talking about is effecting a change in how dysfunctional and socially destructive ideations are modified in psychotherapy and psychoactive drug therapies the purpose of which change is to minimize suffering both for individuals and communities in which they exist. Steve asked above: "How would the associative/feeling potency be adjusted? Medication? Talk therapy or do you mean some kind of direct alteration of the neural substrate?" I'm also interested in the latter question. Are you proposing some kind of physical interventions in the neurological processes of persons afflicted with what we would likely agree to call self-destructive and socially destructive psychological conditions? If so, does that imply that you theorize only neurological sources for psychological maladjustment? It's always seemed to me that most psychological maladjustment arises in childhood out of inadequate (even destructive) parenting or later in life from existential conflicts arising from conflicts in values between an individual and his/her social mileau, that in general sickness in individuals is produced by the sickness of their societies and that the level at which intervention most needs to be undertaken is the social, economic, ideological level of values dominant in sick societies. The essential question is whether 'adjustment' of individuals to sets of negative, destructive values dominant in their society is necessarily a 'good thing' even if it produces 'stability'. What do you mean by 'stability'?
@Pharoah, returning to this statement of yours -- "Stabilsing phenomenal feelings where they are distrupting health and function (these are not conceptually derived problems and are commonly addressed through psychotherapies)" -- I realize that it raises a major issue debated in POM and cognitive neuroscience as well as in phenomenology: whether phenomenological experience involves cognition as well as 'feelings'. As I've indicated, I think it's evident that how we feel derives significantly from what we think. The history of psychotherapy and the range of current practices in that field certainly deal with ideation as well as feeling. Do you disagree, and if so on what basis? How do you respond to the philosophers of mind and consciousness researchers who see phenomenal experience as involving cognition? Thanks.
S
smcder
Guest
The fact that "admissible hypotheses" are available to this specific biological system accounts for its ability to construct rich and complex explanatory theories. But the same properties of mind that provide admissible hypotheses may well exclude other successful theories as unintelligible to humans. Some theories might simply not be among the admissible hypotheses determined by the specific properties of mind that adapt us "to imagining theories of some kinds," though these theories might be accessible to a differently organised intelligence. Or these theories might be so remote in an accessibility ordering of admissible hypotheses that they cannot be constructed under actual empirical conditions, though for a differently structured mind they might be easily accessible.'
....
Yes and I think this might answer John Hagelin's question at the end of this paragraph (posted in part one of this thread ... but not forgotten!)
string duality – this way of viewing ourselves as three dimensional creatures living in 4 dimensional space, is absolutely equivalent to, the physics of it, everything about it, is absolutely equivalent to and indistinguishable from a completely different pt of view – in which we are two dimensional creatures living on a certain two dimensional geometry, a very specific two dimensional geometry that is topologically non-trivial multiply connected in a universe w/out gravity but with a different set of particles and forces called a four dimensional maximally super-symmetric yang mills theory and basically what I’m saying is that there are two ways of looking at what’s going on right now, at least two, one in which we are 3 dimensional creatures moving around in a four dimensional world with gravity, identical to it, with respect to every possible prediction and every possible detail, would be somebody else looking at us and saying no no no you are two dimensional creatures swimming on the surface of a two dimensional surface in a world without gravity at asymptotically high temperatures . . .
so why is it, since they are both absolutely equivalent that nobody around us thinks of us as 2 dimensional creatures swimming around on a two dimensional surface at asymptotically high temperatures when we are that as much as we are this . . . why do we latch into the 3d concept and not the 2d concept of ourselves would a different educational sys have caused us all to collectively think we are two dimensional creatures living on a multiply connected two dimensional space on a world with gravity . . . maybe, no reason that favors one over the other (laughs)
S
smcder
Guest
They're off-putting to people like us who believe that we can understand the whole structure of reality --or find it in a system or construct deep in evolving nature.
Colin McGinn
New Statesman | All machine and no ghost?
"I am not against the label, understood correctly, but like all labels it suggests an overly simple view of a complex position."
(smcder which is funny, because his characterization of Panpsychism in this article could (charitably) be described as an overly simple view)
McGinn again
I am not against the label, understood correctly, but like all labels it suggests an overly simple view of a complex position. At first the view was regarded as eccentric and vaguely disreputable but now it is a standard option - though one with very few adherents. Its primary attraction lies in the lack of appeal of all the other options, to which supporters of those options are curiously oblivious. People sometimes ask me if I am still a mysterian, as if perhaps the growth of neuroscience has given me pause; they fail to grasp the depth of mystery I sense in the problem. The more we know of the brain, the less it looks like a device for creating consciousness: it's just a big collection of biological cells and a blur of electrical activity - all machine and no ghost.
... and now it gets interesting:
Latterly, I have come to think that mystery is quite pervasive, even in the hardest of sciences. Physics is a hotbed of mystery: space, time, matter and motion - none of it is free of mysterious elements. The puzzles of quantum theory are just a symptom of this widespread lack of understanding (I discuss this in my latest book, Basic Structures of Reality).
The human intellect grasps the natural world obliquely and glancingly, using mathematics to construct abstract representations of concrete phenomena, but what the ultimate nature of things really is remains obscure and hidden.
How everything fits together is particularly elusive, perhaps reflecting the disparate cognitive faculties we bring to bear on the world (the senses, introspection, mathematical description). We are far from obtaining a unified theory of all being and there is no guarantee that such a theory is accessible by finite human intelligence.
... and just a little later, he gets downright anarchic and off-putting using a version of an argument that our very old friend Alvin Plantinga made famous:
Palaeoanthropologists have taught us that the human brain gradually evolved from ancestral brains, particularly in concert with practical toolmaking, centring on the anatomy of the human hand. This history shaped and constrained the form of intelligence now housed in our skulls (as the lifestyle of other species form their set of cognitive skills). What chance is there that an intelligence geared to making stone tools and grounded in the contingent peculiarities of the human hand can aspire to uncover all the mysteries of the universe?
Can omniscience spring from an opposable thumb?
S
smcder
Guest
And now ... how about those French Realists?
The "mysterianism" I advocate is really nothing more than the acknowledgment that human intelligence is a local, contingent, temporal, practical and expendable feature of life on earth - an incremental adaptation based on earlier forms of intelligence that no one would regard as faintly omniscient. - Colin McGinn-again
The "mysterianism" I advocate is really nothing more than the acknowledgment that human intelligence is a local, contingent, temporal, practical and expendable feature of life on earth - an incremental adaptation based on earlier forms of intelligence that no one would regard as faintly omniscient. - Colin McGinn-again
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