Good and Evil

[emjay]

1st person vs 3rd person... [and] mindfulness, and studying the subjects.

3rd person just means if Sarah stubs her toe, you don't feel it. You may have empathy and sympathy, but you don't feel the stubbed toe. Only Sarah does, since it's her toe. She's in the 1st person, everyone else is 3rd person as far as what she experiences "inside her head where the lights are on." I noticed you used that word, "mindfulness." Did you ever go into social work?  

I don't understand that much of what Pyrrho & Nestor were doing with David Hume on morality and so on. But goodness gracious! One of the first things Hume said is that we trash talk all the older systems of thought:

"Nothing is more usual and more natural for those, who pretend to discover anything new to the world in philosophy and the sciences, than to insinuate the praises of their own systems, by decrying all those, which have been advanced before them." -On Human Nature, 1738

Okay thanks, I think I understand now what you mean by 1st person and 3rd person in this context. And I also think I understand where whateverist's question might have been coming from; the view that Neuroscience as a discipline doesn't pay enough attention to subjective qualia etc?

No, I didn't go into social work but my sister is a psychologist and she's always talking about mindfulness. For myself I didn't really mean it in that sense, hence the 'let's say'; I used to do something kind of like a diary but much less strict (i.e. not one entry per day); any time I had a theory, an idea, an insight, an observation, or just something to get off my chest, I would write it down and date it, filling up notepad after notepad of the stuff. Collectively I called it "Know Thyself" or KT for short. Anyway it was such a big part of my life doing this that everywhere I went and everything I did seemed like an opportunity for insight. For instance I went to Alton Towers and thought 'this would be a good opportunity to study fear' so I forced myself to go on about six different roller coasters and then wrote an essay about it when I got home. So that's kind of what I mean by mindfulness; my writing encouraged me do little experiments and otherwise look for insight in the real world which in turn I would write about, so it was a circular process that generated an awful lot of insight. Then on top of that going back through KT there was insight to be gained from seeing the patterns in my thinking and how my theories evolved prompting even more writing so it was also an iterative process. 

Basically KT was the best thing I ever did and in it I developed some rock solid theories, in my own mind at least, of psychology and neuroscience, ones that stick with me to this day, several years later. I still write occasionally but not in that same obsessive way as I did before and to be honest I miss it; I miss all that excitement and curiosity. I don't really know why I stopped, but I think in part it had served its purpose and I felt I did know myself pretty well   Thankfully though joining this site has rekindled my interest and maybe I can get back into it, either on paper as before or using the forum in place of it    

As for the philosophy debate, I think the most prudent response from me would be 'no comment'