(August 22, 2021 at 2:04 am)DLJ Wrote: Yay, man! Good to see you (virtually of course)
Life's good. Mostly. Have you heard about those people who got stuck in a foreign country when the world shut down?
I'm one of those. 18 months (to the day) in a strange, primitive land where they barely speak English!! The horror!
I dread to think what's happened in my fridge in the mean time.
For real? You're joshin'
Quote:How about you? All good, I hope.
Yeah man. I'm good.
Quote:The Ship of Theseus problem is surprisingly obvious once one sees it. I can imagine Darwin looking at his notes and thinking "I can't possibly be the first person to notice this." As it turns out, he wasn't but that's another story.
I tend to see the ship of Theseus as a thought experiment that shows us the ambiguity inherent in identity more than a problem in need of a "hard" solution. Like, are you the same person as twelve-year-old DLJ? We tend to want to answer "yes" to that question, but, like the ship of Theseus, there has been stuff added to "us" and stuff subtracted. What makes us "us"?
Quote:Isn't John Searle persona non grata at the moment? I seem to remember a #metoo thingy.
I struggle a bit with his terminology but I think he's close. Except I've seen a couple of lectures where he starts with "You want your arm to go up and it goes up." Pah!
Try it. It doesn't. It's like he hasn't noticed that conscious thought is not the same as (auto)motive stimulus.
Well, his metaphysics is there and open for criticism. His status as a decent human being doesn't enter into that debate. He does have some good insights. For instance, intentionality, Searle says, is simply a quality in natural objects. That seems plainly true. But it's something that, say, a dualist thinks is untrue.
Can't really comment on the "arm goes up thing"... don't know the lecture. But it's quite possible that he understands automotive stimulus, but is interested in its relation to conscious thought (shrug?)... again: I haven't seen the lecture.
Quote:Anyway, the poll... I agree regarding the word 'create'. Hence the word 'produce'.
Not sure if "produce" works either. Does the mind "produce" thoughts? Maybe. I'm more apt to say thoughts are caused by brain states. Where "mind" enters into it, I'm not certain. I don't like approaches that see mind as some kind of artifact... inasmuch as they want to ignore mind altogether. Mind is quite a mystery, and it is a genuine phenomenon.
Quote:Regarding consciousness, yup, it's a tricky one. I'm coming to the conclusion that there's something fundamentally wrong with the question.
It's a bit like the centuries of asking about the nature of god and pin-dancing angels... yeah but no... wrong question.
As wrong as Descartes assumptions were, I do think he asked the right question.
Quote:I'm thinking that the phenomenologists were onto something with 'intentionality' in that we are conscious 'of' something. So consciousness isn't some 'extra' factor (as the Philosopher I was debating last week insists)... it's part of an organisms monitoring system.
You familiar with Heidegger's critique of phenomenology?
