Reply to TiredThinker It's indivisible. Half a mind makes no sense. Half a banana, yes. Half a sandwich, yes. Half a mind, no - incoherent
As all extended things are divisible, the mind is not an extended thing. Our brains can be divided. Our minds cannot be. Thus, our minds are not our brains.
An indivisible thing has no parts (for if it had parts it could be divided into them). And as such the indivisibility of the mind also implies its eternal existence.
it should also be noted that the existence of simple, indivisible things can be independently established. For it is manifest to reason that not everything can be made of other things, for then one has to posit an actual infinity of parts, which is incoherent.
Thus, there are simple things in existence.
And if we listen to our reason rather than convention, we will find that we are among those simple things.
A while I ago I asked myself if there was a basic unit of thought, but I never really pondered about it. Your OP brought me back to it, and somehow I wondered if the mind wasthought. Now, in the case there was a basic unit of thought (the building block of ideas), and the mind was thought (i.e., the mind is an idea of the brain), it could be possible that the mind is composed of several basic units of thought, and it would be divisible. Now, is there a basic unit of thought, and is the mind thought?
Edit: You could also ask I guess if an idea is a composite or a unit or if there can be ideas of the two kinds.
Mind isn't just one thing, it's more like an umbrella term for, say, thinking, feeling happy, perceiving red, experiencing, liking coffee, being self-aware, sentience, ... Maybe some such things are necessary or sufficient or something, to whatever degrees, to be (deemed) a mind?
The mind can be conceptually divided up into different faculties; thought, emotion, volition, perception and so on, or different states: most broadly conscious and unconscious. But it doesn't follow that those faculties and states are somehow separate from one another in "practice".
The mind is not a physical thing, but a function of a physical thing, more of a verb than a noun; so it cannot be literally located and dissected like the brain can. According to reports, if the corpus callosum is severed, one side of the body literally doesn't know what the other is doing. Would you count that as being a division of the mind? What about multiple personality syndrome?
Thoughts are states of mind. They're not things . They're states.
Likewise, consciousness is a 'state'.
States are always of things.
The things that conscious states are states of are called 'minds'.
There's a big philosophical question over what kind of a thing a mind is.
But it is a thing.
If you want to use 'consciousness' and 'mind' interchangeably, then you're just abusing words or you can't understand how consciousness is a state and a mind is the thing it is a state of.
Is the mind a single thing, or does it have parts?
Neither. IMO, a mind is an embodied, metacognitive process constituted by a system of hierarchically tangled (D. Hofstadter, T. Metzinger) cognitive functions.
If it has parts, what are they?
Like a running river, I don't think a mind has discrete "parts".
Are its [s]parts[/s] tied to parts of the brain?
No. Just as choreographed dance-steps are not "tied to parts of" legs ..., mind(ing) is what a sufficiently complex brain do enacted by its (developmental) environment.
If the mind is a thing then it occupies a space. Or are there things that do not occupy a space?
No, minds do not occupy space. If they did, they'd be divisible. But they're indivisible. Thus they do not occupy space.
If you think everything that exists has to occupy space, then our minds demonstrate that's false.
And indeed, we can actually demonstrate it is false independent of the nature of our minds. For if something occupies space, then it is divisible. And thus it will be made of parts into which it can be divided.
But something cannot have infinite parts. Thus the raw ingredients from which a thing is made must themselves be indivisible, else we will find ourselves on an infinite regress.
And those things will not occupy space.
This poses a well known problem for those who believe in things that occupy space: it does not seem possible for there to be such things. As if everything must have some basic ingredients from which it is constructed, and if those ingredients must be indivisible, then anything that exists must be made of (or be) something indivisible. But indivisible things occupy no space. And no amount of joining together things that occupy no space will ever result in the creation of a thing that does occupy space. Thus, it seems that things that occupy space - the notion of such a thing, anyway - make no real sense.
From a physicalist point of view there's the alleged compartmentalization of brain (mind) function - off the top of my head there's the prefrontal cortex (planning, intention), the limbic system (feelings), the speech/language centers (Broca's area), the visual cortex (sight), so on and so forth.
Reply to 180 Proof Extended space makes no sense for the same reason objects extended in it make no sense. See above for an explanation. Oh, sorry, you lack all understanding. I'll just make some little yellow pictures and you can stare at them: :gasp: :snicker: :cool: :love: :death: :flower: :starstruck:
Is the mind a single thing, or does it have parts? If it has parts, what are they? Are its parts tied to parts of the brain?
Allow me to recommend The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle. I only recently got around to this book, and it's just flamethrower for so many entrenched confusions concerning the mind.
One thing to avoid (it seems to me) is just taking it for granted that the word 'mind' is connected as if by a cord to some sufficiently definite concept to make the 'but is it single' question sensible and interesting.
Let me end on a more constructive note. The mind is single in the sense that the person is understood as a locus of responsibility. In fact, it's one and the same ghost in the machine that catches hell when its body misbehaves. But this is a mere report of the way we happen to do things around here. In theory, another culture could allow for even sane people to be temporarily possessed by demons and therefore pardoned for crimes. Or we can imagine ghosts trading bodies, and a culture holding the ghost responsible. "When you, Tim, were in body #45643, you smacked Joe, who was in body #456." The point is that singleness of mind seems ethically important to us.
Reply to Pie Where in that book does Ryle present a single argument against the idea that the mind is a single, indivisible, thing?
All he does is describe cases where we talk 'as if' there is a thing, when in fact there is not. That is not any kind of evidence that our minds are not singular indivisible things.
Mental states are states of mind. That is, they are states of a thing. So there is a thing that bears them, and we call it a mind. There's no mystery here. The word 'mind' denotes that which bears mental states.
And our reason tells us that our minds are indivisible. You note that our moral responsibilty is 'ours' - that is, it belongs to us, not our states of mind. That is just more evidence that our minds are things distinct form the states they are in.
This is quite unlike, say, a university and its buildings and practices and employees (Ryle's example).
So the burden of proof is squarely on him to provide some positive evidence against the 'ghost in the machine' thesis, for the evidence appears to point to it.
What evidence does he provide? And again, brute possibilities are not evidence and nor is describing a view in a scathing way or inviting us to think that only luddites from the past would believe their minds to be souls.
Where in that book does Ryle present a single argument against the idea that the mind is a single, indivisible, thing?
IMV, good philosophers often try to show us that our questions were ill-conceived in the first place.
It also makes more sense to me that metaphysicians should have to argue for their positive claims.
Note that I suggested above why folks are tempted to make strange claims like 'the mind is single' in the first place. I'm trying to plug what would otherwise be silly talk into real life, into the practical unity of a self.
It's our intellectual duty to be consistent. Our bundle of beliefs should work together. The ego is a kind of unifying fiction or piece of software.
It also makes more sense to me that metaphysicians should have to argue for their positive claims.
You either think there's reason to think that's true, or you think there's no reason to think that's true but you think it anyway.
If you think there's reason to think that's true, then you accept the authority of reason. Which is just as well, for all philosophy involves appealing to reason.
Now, our reason represents our minds to exist and to be indivisible things.
That's evidence that that's precisely what they are.
Is there any countervailing evidence? Does Ryle provide any (no)?
This is all those who disbelieve in the soul do: they attempt to show how it is metaphysically possible for the mind 'not' to be an immaterial soul.
It's not even clear they manage this. But who cares? Even if it is possible for the mind to not be an immaterial soul, that doesn't begin to be evidence that it is not an immaterial soul.
I mean, it is metaphysically possible for me to be in Paris. But that's not evidence I'm in Paris. I'm not.
You either think there's reason to think that's true, or you think there's no reason to think that's true but you think it anyway.
If you think there's reason to think that's true, then you accept the authority of reason. Which is just as well, for all philosophy involves appealing to reason.
Yes, philosophy appeals to reason. As Popper and Kojeve and who knows how many others have noted, philosophy is a second order tradition. We don't just trade stories about the way things hang together; we criticize and edit and synthesize such stories. This becomes the way we do things. No individual person or claim has a fixed status (is sacred.) Only the second-order tradition itself is sacred. The opposite of being reasonable is perhaps some combination of arrogance and dogmatism.
Now, our reason represents our minds to exist and to be indivisible things.
Need I point out that this is bald claim ? And that it's also controversial? Perhaps your reason gives you that impression, but that in itself is a personal matter. The mere fact that many find old-fashioned metaphysical chestnuts like that one to be highly questionable if not outright nonsense should give you pause...if you want to be reasonable.
For Ryle, when we talk about a persons mind, we are talking about a persons abilities to perform certain kinds of tasks. Hence words that refer to mental states, such as know, and believe refer to a persons dispositions to behave in certain ways, given certain circumstances.
Allow me to recommend The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle. I only recently got around to this book, and it's just flamethrower for so many entrenched confusions concerning the mind.
Thoughts are states of mind. They're not things . They're states.
Likewise, consciousness is a 'state'.
States are always of things.
The things that conscious states are states of are called 'minds'.
There's a big philosophical question over what kind of a thing a mind is.
But it is a thing.
As I see it, you are describing grammar here as if you were purveying eternal cosmic truths. Yes, we talk of states of mind, states of one and the same mind. But I don't see why states are grammatically kinds of things. Presumably we'd like to do more than give ESL lessons to one another. But that's the problem with analytic truths or and pseudo-profound quasi-tautologies. I don't mean this as an attack. I'm just saying it's way to easy to cough up grammatical platitudes as quasi-theological insights.
Our brains can be divided. Our minds cannot be. Thus, our minds are not our brains.
Here you make a case that 'mind' and 'brain' are used differently. The thesis is true. But you forget that we can give one another a piece of our mind. Or https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/of%20two%20minds So the argument is flawed.
But who here is claiming that minds are brains? Not Ryle. One of us would know that.
An indivisible thing has no parts (for if it had parts it could be divided into them). And as such the indivisibility of the mind also implies its eternal existence.
it should also be noted that the existence of simple, indivisible things can be independently established. For it is manifest to reason that not everything can be made of other things, for then one has to posit an actual infinity of parts, which is incoherent.
Thus, there are simple things in existence.
And if we listen to our reason rather than convention, we will find that we are among those simple things.
Why is an actual infinity of parts incoherent? We are comfortable with the infinity of the primes. If we listen to careful proofs rather than internet cranks. I agree that it's more intuitive for us humans to think in terms of genuine atoms, but I'm not sure reality plays by our rules. Maybe our physicists keep finding parts made of parts made of parts....
Why does indivisibility imply eternal existence? That seems like an unwarranted leap. This whole foray into sincere pre-Kantian metaphysics is quaint even. Quasi-theological. Remains of the day, last scraps of a vanishing religion.
Half a mind makes no sense. Half a banana, yes. Half a sandwich, yes. Half a mind, no - incoherent
Not so fast. I'm of half a mind to correct you and half a mind to leave you to your sandbox and its kitty droppings.
https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/half+a+mind
Or, for your perusal, the etymology of dubious...being of two minds. I'll let you look it up if you care.
Also, some Ryle, to rile you up perhaps.
One of the central negative motives of this book is to show that mental does not denote a status, such that one can sensibly ask of a given thing or event whether it is mental or physical, in the mind or in the outside world. To talk of a persons mind is not to talk of a repository which is permitted to house objects that something called the physical world is forbidden to house; it is to talk of the persons abilities, liabilities and inclinations to do and undergo certain sorts of things, and of the doing and undergoing of these things in the ordinary world. Indeed, it makes no sense to speak as if there could be two or eleven worlds. Nothing but confusion is achieved by labelling worlds after particular avocations. Even the solemn phrase the physical world is as philosophically pointless as would be the phrase the numismatic world, the haberdashery world, or the botanical world.
But it will be urged in defence of the doctrine that mental does denote a status that a special footing must be provided for sensations, feelings and images. The laboratory sciences provide descriptions and correlations of various kinds of things and processes, but our impressions and ideas are unmentioned in these descriptions. They must therefore belong somewhere else. And as it is patent that the occurrence of a sensation, for instance, is a fact about the person who feels the pain or suffers the dazzle, the sensation must be in that person. But this is a special sense of in, since the surgeon will not find it under the persons epidermis. So the sensation must be in the persons mind.
Moreover sensations, feelings and images are things the owner of which must be conscious of them. Whatever else may be contained in his stream of consciousness, at least his sensations, feelings and images are parts of that stream. They help to constitute, if they do not completely constitute, the stuff of which minds are composed. Champions of this argument tend to espouse it with special confidence on behalf of images, such as what I see in my minds eye and what I have running in my head. They feel certain qualms in suggesting too radical a divorce between sensations and conditions of the body. Stomach-aches, tickles and singings in the ears have physiological attachments which threaten to sully the purity of the brook of mental experiences. But the views which I see, even when my eyes are shut, and the music and the voices that I can hear, even when all is quiet, qualify admirably for membership of the kingdom of the mind. I can, within limits, summon, dismiss and modify them at will and the location, position and condition of my body do not appear to be in any correlation with their occurrences or properties.
This belief in the mental status of images carries with it a palatable corollary. When a person has been thinking to himself, retrospection commonly shows him that at least a part of what has been going on has been a sequence of words heard in his head, as if spoken by himself. So the venerable doctrine that discoursing to one self under ones breath is the proprietary business of minds reinforces, and is reinforced by, the doctrine that the apparatus of pure thinking does not belong to the gross world of physical noises, but consists instead of the more ethereal stuff of which dreams are made.
I've made quite a few. Be wary of taking grammar (by which I mean, in this context, proprieties of usage) for theology-strength cosmic insight. Maybe don't think about the mind as some kind of weird plate made of dream stuff. Maybe the mind is better thought of in terms of understanding and unifying a person's doings in this world. The mind can be thought of as the ways their body do. If we are tempted to call it 'single,' that's probably because a person is a unity, a focus of praise and blame. We explain what a person does by reference to a single system of beliefs, unified by the norm that such beliefs don't contradict one another.
Is the mind a single thing, or does it have parts? If it has parts, what are they? Are its parts tied to parts of the brain?
I read the question and started thinking about 'the mind'.
But perhaps I need also to think about 'thing', 'single thing', 'or' and 'have parts'. A sphere is (plausibly) a single thing. And it has whatever parts I decide to split it into, e.g. two hemispheres. Does the sphere 'have' those parts or did I just impose parts on the sphere which had no parts at all until I intervened? So, the word 'or' in the question may be misleading - being a single thing and having parts may not be exclusive categories.
I congratulated my friend on getting a new job. Was that congratulation a thing? Is it still a thing? The congratulation was not a nothing. If it is a thing, I wonder whether it makes sense to wonder whether it has parts. If it is not a thing, then I wonder what criteria to apply to - lets say, things - to decide whether or not they are things. Are numbers things? Rankings in sport? Political offices?
"Is the office of President of the USA a single thing, or does it have parts? If it has parts, what are they? Are its parts tied to the person of the President?" It may be that the OP questions make as much or as little sense as that.
We might find out that the mind is not a thing at all and not a nothing either.
On the one hand, when one does separate the halves of the brain, one can see evidence of a division of mind.
Sperry moved on to human volunteers who had a severed corpus callosum. He showed a word to one of the eyes and found that split-brain people could only remember the word they saw with their right eye. Next, Sperry showed the participants two different objects, one to their left eye only and one to their right eye only and then asked them to draw what they saw. All participants drew what they saw with their left eye and described what they saw with their right eye. Sperry concluded that the left hemisphere of the brain could recognize and analyze speech, while the right hemisphere could not.
But on the other, since it seems to be merely a matter of connection and communication, the separation of my mind from your mind is a trivial matter, and mind is more like water than like anything discrete and separate, and if only we could communicate better we would all be of one mind.
Reply to jorndoe Digestion is an activity. Something does it.
Thinking is an activity. Something does it. And the thing that does thinking is called 'a mind'.
You keep making category errors. A mind is a thing. An object. It is that which has mental states. That is why they are called mental states. States. Of. Mind.
There is a question over what kind of thing it is.
Our reason is our only source of insight into reality.
Our reason tells us that our minds are immaterial things (that's what a 'soul' is - an immaterial mind).
One of the ways in which it does this is to tell us that minds are indivisible. Half a mind makes no sense.
If something is indivisible then it is immaterial.
Why?
Because if something is extended in space, then it can be divided, for any region of space is infinitely divisible (which is a huge problem for the coherence of materialism about anything).
Thus, our minds appear to be immaterial things, for that is what our reason says about them.
That's positive evidence. There is a lot of it.
There's none that our minds are material. None. Prove me wrong.
"Is the office of President of the USA a single thing, or does it have parts? If it has parts, what are they? Are its parts tied to the person of the President?" It may be that the OP questions make as much or as little sense as that.
It's not a bunch of faculties. Faculties are had by a thing. Things are not made of faculties.
Same mistake, Hugh.
It can't be divided into faculties. It 'has' faculties. See?
Faculties are always the faculties 'of' something. Faculties of perception, reason and so on, are faculties 'of' a mind.
All things are not subject to the same the same ways of conception, of thinking about them. If the mind is understood to be a function of the brain (and a function is a thing, although not a physical thing in the sense of being a physical object directly discernible by the senses) or better, a set of functions, then to divide the general faculty of mind into specific faculties is perfectly in order.
The body, considered as a set of functions rather than as a mere thing (in the sense of being an object of the senses) can also be divided into functions: walking, running, digestion, respiration, excretion and so on.
So if the mind is the set of what we think of as mental faculties of the body, as opposed to the obviously physical faculties outlined above, then "faculties of perception, reason and so on" can reasonably be understood to be faculties or functions of the body, which all together make up the overall faculty or function of the body we call "mind".
"faculties of perception, reason and so on" can reasonably be understood to be faculties or functions of the body, which all together make up the overall faculty or function of the body we call "mind".
Allow me to recommend The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle. I only recently got around to this book, and it's just flamethrower for so many entrenched confusions concerning the mind.
Yes, it's a great book; I don't know how many years ago I read it, twenty maybe, and I don't remember too much of it specifically now, but it made a powerful impression on me. Around the same time I read a work by Arthur Koestler titled The Ghost in the Machine (a term coined by Ryle) which was also a pretty good read, if my dim impressions of it now are anything to go by. Maybe I'll revisit those two books, so thanks for the reminder: I'm pretty sure I still have them somewhere.
The term 'ghost in the machine' reminds us that it was Descartes who first thought of the body as a machine animated by a ghostly, incorporeal substance; the mind. Descartes has much to answer for in the tradition of thought that understands animals to be unfeeling machines, on account of the idea that they do not possess the faculty of rationality, which distinguishes the crown of creation, man, from them and justifies using them in whatever ways satisfy our need or desire.
Descartes who first thought of the body as a machine animated by a ghostly, incorporeal substance; the mind.
Actually just really read Descartes lately. Of course I was aware of his ideas, but it was useful to see them in context. As you may remember, he also wanted us to be 'lords and masters and nature' and fantasized about great advances in medicine, very Baconian. His analysis of light and its effect on the eye and the mind was brilliant.
Descartes has much to answer for in the tradition of thought that understands animals to be unfeeling machines, on account of the idea that they do not possess the faculty of rationality, which distinguishes the crown of creation, man, from them and justifies using them in whatever ways satisfy our need or desire.
Indeed. This is maybe the worst part of his thinking, perhaps a byproduct of what I think was a typical evasion of the time...namely rescuing the soul from a Newtonian determinism. I respect Spinoza and Hobbes for just accepting the deterministic implications and, in their own ways, avoiding the gulf between body and mind.
Reply to Janus All I can do is repeat the point: faculties, 'functions' and so forth are always of a thing or involve things. You can't just have 'functions' floating about by themselves.
So, the mind 'has' faculties. It is not a set of faculties. That's a category error.
Minds 'have' states - they're called mental states for that very reason. A mental state is a 'state of mind'. That is, a state a mind can be in.
Minds do not, in my view, have 'funtions' as that supposes that they were made for some purpose, whereas they are not 'made' at all.
But nevertheless, it is always something that has a function, be it a person or a process or whatever. And it is a category error to confuse the function with the person whose function it is.
It is ironic that someone here has mentioned Ryle - someone who clearly hasn't read him or read him and understood him - for this was a point he made over and over.
Minds are things. There are things. And minds are among them. What kind of a thing is what philosophers debate. Materialists think minds are material things and immaterialists and dualists think they are immaterial things. That's what the debate is over.
Even a functionalist about the mind is not someone who identifies the mind with a set of functions. Rather they are someone who thinks that two functionally isomorphic systems will both have mental states if one them does. The mind remains a thing, the functionalism is simply a claim about what governs whether a thing has mental states (and thus whether a thing is a mind or not).
Indeed. This is maybe the worst part of his thinking, perhaps a byproduct of what I think was a typical evasion of the time...namely rescuing the soul from a Newtonian determinism. I respect Spinoza and Hobbes for just accepting the deterministic implications and, in their own ways, avoiding the gulf between body and mind.
I agree that would be a motivation for this kind of thinking; the desire to separate us from nature in order to justify the rectitude of the idea of free will and accountability, as I recall Nietzsche points out in Twilight of the Idols.
Materialists think minds are material things and immaterialists and dualists think they are immaterial things.
This is too simplistic, since it is obvious that mind is not a material things in the sense of being an object of the senses, which is the common definition of a material thing. It is too simplistic to think that if the mind is not a material thing in this sense that it must be an immaterial thing; where immaterial thing (substance) is thought as somehow analogous to material thing (substance). This reification gives rise to the idea of immaterial substance, and if I recall correctly (it's a long time since I read the book) this is something Ryle explicitly points out in Concept of Mind.
Needless to say, the mere fact I have said these things will be, for you, sufficient grounds to reject them, is that not true?
Not at all. You seem to be projecting your own propensities onto me. I don't have time to address anything else you said right now; I have to work. Perhaps I'll come back to it later.
Yes, and this kind of delusional thinking is what has led us to the situation we find ourselves in today.
I'm ambivalent about the 'lords and masters' idea. I think we want access to nutritious food, effective medicine, protection from storms, etc., but we end up with side-effects like polution, global warming, the possibility of a panopticonic dystopia, etc.
agree that would be a motivation for this kind of thinking; the desire to separate us from nature in order to justify the rectitude of the idea of free will and accountability, as I recall Nietzsche points out in Twilight of the Idols.
Indeed. And that reminds me that Fichte and Kant were quite concerned with this. I suspect it was one of 'the' problems of the day, somehow embracing Newton and Christianity at the same time.
Materialists think minds are material things and immaterialists and dualists think they are immaterial things. That's what the debate is over.
The debate is over whether this is what the debate is over. The deeper issue is your fixation on an obsolete dichotomy. How much phlogiston's in an angel's fart ?
Digestion is an activity. Something does it.
Thinking is an activity. Something does it. And the thing that does thinking is called 'a mind'.
We might say that a person thinks with their mind. But whatever we decide, we should (again) be wary of whether we are just teaching some useless idiolect of English to one another.
In other words, is your claim synthetic or analytic? It's all too easy to make grand 'discoveries' that end up about as informative as 'bachelors are unmarried males.'
I'm ambivalent about the 'lords and masters' idea. I think we want access to nutritious food, effective medicine, protection from storms, etc., but we end up with side-effects like polution, global warming, the possibility of a panopticonic dystopia, etc.
The way I see it it is the rise of capitalism-enabling technology which has brought us to this culmination of the largely Christian notion of humanity as masters of nature, which is beginning to look like an ironic caricature and now we find ourselves in a situation wherein we will be shown just how delusional that notion is.
I think "nutritious food, effective medicine, protection from storms" and other "goods" are possible without capitalist driven technocracy, but not on the population scales we have now. So, we have ignorantly dug a hole I don't believe we will be able to "science" our way out of, a situation which there doesn't seem to be any other way out of now, either, other than catastrophe and collapse. Time will tell how long it will take for that to come to fruition. .
the largely Christian notion of humanity as masters of nature
That is not what I see with Christian culture, with all its anti-science shit. If any demographic views itself as master of nature, it would be atheistic-leftist types with all their science shit. Maybe you can elaborate.
The way I see it it is the rise of capitalism-enabling technology which has brought us to this culmination of the largely Christian notion of humanity as masters of nature, which is beginning to look like an ironic caricature and now we find ourselves in a situation wherein we will be shown just how delusional that notion is.
This reminds me of Feuerbach's interpretation. God is above and distinct from nature, hence the prohibition of (nature-referencing) images of the divine. While a demiurge might shape what's already there, the God of the Christians creates from nothing, revealing the essence of nature as nothingness. As Stirner put it, who linked such nature-denying Christians to a type of sceptic, "all things are nothing to me."
That is not what I see with Christian culture, with all its anti-science shit. If any demographic views itself as master of nature, it would be atheistic-leftist types with all their science shit. Maybe you can elaborate.
Perhaps we should distinguish between a sense of human entitlement (lords and masters, gifted this garden by god) from the adoption of norms governing claims (we ought to be rational).
Conservatives are (in my experience) less likely to care about the treatment of pigs and chickens. That's anecdotal, and I'm willing to adjust my prejudice. I connect this more generally to a conservative reluctance to see the human species as continuous with the rest of the animal kingdom. In practical terms, this might manifest as a resentment of protections of an endangered species, if they interfere with profit.
This is too simplistic, since it is obvious that mind is not a material things in the sense of being an object of the senses, which is the common definition of a material thing.
It is not simplistic at all, for they exhaust the alternatives. And that's not the definition of a material thing. An immaterialist does not deny the objects of the senses, yet they deny materialism.
Materialism is the view that there exist extra-mental extended things.
And any and all of those who think conscious states are states of the brain are holders of the view that the mind is the brain or some part of it (or whtaever they take the mental states to be supervening on or whatever ghastly term they employ). I've explained why and it is tedious to have to keep repeating things.
We might say that a person thinks with their mind. But whatever we decide, we should (again) be wary of whether we are just teaching some useless idiolect of English to one another.
All you're saying is "we should be wary of making mistakes". Er, yes. So? Clearly the implication is that you think I've made one. Well, locate it and defend your claim that it is a mistake. At the moment you're trying to have your cake and eat it. You're making very general claims - such as that we should be wary of making mistakes - without actually locating any mistake. So you're implying I'm making mistakes, but you're not saying what mistake I am making. I can't attack fog.
Our reason tells us that our minds are immaterial things (that's what a 'soul' is - an immaterial mind).
It's not 'our reason' but merely a piece of the philosophical tradition (centered on Descartes) that tells you (not us) that souls are immaterial minds. As mentioned above, this questionable assumption was probably motivated by a fear of Newtonian physics swallowing the domain of religion and threatening the idea of free will, the supernatural, etc.
It's simply not necessary to take any position on issues that now seem dated and pointless. Nor must we adopt dichotomies like mental/material as profound laws of the cosmos or human cognition. In other words :
[quote=Austin]
It is worth bearing in mind the general rule that we must not expect to find simple labels for complicated cases however well-equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction.
...
We say, for example, that a certain statement is exaggerated or vague or bold, a description somewhat rough or misleading or not very good, an account rather general or too concise. In cases like these it is pointless to insist on deciding in simple terms whether the statement is true or false. Is it true or false that Belfast is north of London? That the galaxy is the shape of a fried egg? That Beethoven was a drunkard? That Wellington won the battle of Waterloo? There are various degrees and dimensions of success in making statements: the statements fit the facts always more or less loosely, in different ways on different occasions for different intents and purposes.
...
First, words are our tools, and, as a minimum, we should use clean tools: we should know what we mean and what we do not, and we must forearm ourselves against the traps that language sets us. Secondly, words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can re-look at the world without blinkers. Thirdly, and more hopefully, our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth making, in the lifetimes of many generations: these surely are likely to be more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoonthe most favoured alternative method.
[/quote]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/austin-jl/#LangTrut
For instance, 'material' and 'mental' work well enough in practical contexts, but wringing them metaphysically for eternal knowledge juice might not get us anywhere.
It is not simplistic at all, for they exhaust the alternatives. And that's not the definition of a material thing. An immaterialist does not deny the objects of the senses, yet they deny materialism.
All material things are objects of the senses. From the materialists' idea that material things are objects of the senses it does not follow that anyone who believe there are objects of the senses must beleive they are material; so if it is a fact that immaterialists deny materialism, that constitutes no problem for the common notion of materialism.
And any and all of those who think conscious states are states of the brain are holders of the view that the mind is the brain or some part of it (or whtaever they take the mental states to be supervening on or whatever ghastly term they employ).
This is not true; functionalists think there is a coherent distinction between mind and brain. The mind is not part of the brain but the function, understood from a phenomenological, not an objectivist, standpoint, of the whole brain. As far back as Spinoza mind and brain, and more generally mind and matter, or cogitans and extensa have been understood to be the one thing understood from different perspectives.
Spinoza admired and was influenced by Descartes, but he was smart enough to see through Descartes' reificational delusions that mind and matter are two different substances.
You're just contradicting what I just said. LIke I say, you clealy think the fact I have said something is sufficient for it to be mistaken. I'm published on this stuff, for christ's sake!
Now, once again: an immaterialist believes in the objects of the senses. So, if you define a materailst as someone who believes in the objects of the senses, then an immaterialist turns out to be a materialist.
Do you see why that's not the correct definition?
A materialist is not an immaterialist. That's what the 'im' means. They're opposites.
Yet both believe in the objects of the senses. They disagree about what they're made of.
Materialism is the view that there exists an extended mind-external realm: the material realm.
Immaterialism is the view that there is no such place and that all that exists are minds and their contents. The sensible world is made of the sensational activity of another mind. The sensible world exists as surely as it does on materialism, but it exists 'as' sensations as opposed to extended mind-exterrnal things that our sensations - some of them, some of the time - are capable of giving us some awareness of.
And some philosophers believe minds are made of extended stuff - such as our brains - and others (myself included) believe they are made of immaterial stuff.
It's not 'our reason' but merely a piece of the philosophical tradition (centered on Descartes) that tells you (not us) that souls are immaterial minds.
The tradition in question is the tradition of listening to reason. All you're doing is talking about views in a dismissive tone. That's not how you refute a view.
Plato, Descartes, Berkeley - christ, shit loads of philosophers - have all employed what is called 'the indivisiblity' argument for the soul.
They were not part of a cult. They didn't know each other. They often profoundly disagreed with other aspects of the worldviews they came independently to defend. Yet they all got the rational impression that our minds are invidisible.
And virtually everyone does, in fact, for virtually everyone can acknowledge that the idea of half a mind makes no sense whatsoever.
That's very good evidence that our minds are indivisible. Our reason - the reason of humans possessed of reason throughout the history of careful thought on the matter - represents our minds to be indivisible.
Stop the cod history and try and do some actual philosophy. It's called 'the genetic fallacy' - thinking you can dismiss a view simply by describing the history of how it has come to be held.
Our reason represents our minds to be indivisible things.
That's prima facie evidence that's precisely what they are.
That means it is defeasible evidence. That's fancy for 'it could be false'.
But it means the burden of proof is on the person who thinks minds are divisible to undercut those rational intuitions.
You don't undercut a rational intuition by simply noting that it is possible for it to be false. Possibilities are not evidence. And you don't undercut them by inviting others to associate anyone who follows such evidence with people who believe in angels and phlogiston.
So, you are doing nothing in terms of addressing the case I have made for the indivisibility of the mind. You're just not engaging with it at all. It's all filler, no killer.
You're just contradicting what I just said. LIke I say, you clealy think the fact I have said something is sufficient for it to be mistaken. I'm published on this stuff, for christ's sake!
Now, once again: an immaterialist believes in the objects of the senses. So, if you define a materailst as someone who believes in the objects of the senses, then an immaterialist turns out to be a materialist.
Do you see why that's not the correct definition?
Are you willfully misunderstanding what I wrote? I didn't define a materialist as someone who believes in the objects of the senses, but as someone who defines them as being material. So. I am not contradicting your claim that an immaterialist may believe in the objects of the senses.
If you really are published on this, then tell us the title of your book or article; otherwise why should you be believed, and in any case, so what; there is a mountain of drivel that has been published.; being published is no guarantee of rigor or quality of thought.
But it means the burden of proof is on the person who thinks minds are divisible to undercut those rational intuitions
What you call "rational intuitions" I think are imaginative intuitions arrived at by imagining an analogy between how we understand material substance and how we should understand a purported immaterial substance. 'Substance' is a very ambiguous term though.
Material substances in the sense of things like wood, metal, stone and so on are thought to be divisible because we can actually divide them. But only up to point; the fundamental particles of which they are thought to consist are not understood to be divisible. In any case, if we imagine an immaterial substance, there is no way to imagine how it could be divided.
The mistake lies in imagining an immaterial substance in the first place, because we have no clear idea of what such a thing could be. When you think about it the same goes for the more philosophical notions of material substance.
Aristotle thought all individual entities were substances in their own right; he saw substance in this sense as a kind of essence or identity, and of course that could not be divided either. To think in terms of dividing and identity, which is a concept, is simply a category error; and to reify what is merely a concept, and to imagine that it has some kind of substantive existence is also a category error; it is to commit the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness".
since it is obvious that mind is not a material things in the sense of being an object of the senses, which is the common definition of a material thing.
That's not the definition of a material thing. You said it was. It isn't. A material thing is what I said it is: a mind-external extended thing. But that means it is false, yes? Bartricks said it. Therefore it is false.
All you're doing is talking about views in a dismissive tone. That's not how you refute a view.
Some views are not even wrong, or embedded in frameworks of assumptions so rickety that they are not even worth refuting. I don't want to charge at windmills with you, affirming the background assumptions responsible for the confusion as I challenge its mere symptom, this thesis that the mind is a simple or undivided thing. So far you've not assimilated or even really acknowledged any of my criticism of your views. At this point, I don't expect much, but I persist out of curiosity.
Lots of views are this. Lots of views are that. Lots of views are mistaken. So what? What's your point?
You're implying my views are mistaken, yes? That's what you're trying to do - you want to say 'Bartick's views are wrong', but without actually having to go to the trouble of locating a mistake and making a proper criticism.
A material thing is what I said it is: a mind-external extended thing.
You keep jumping all over the place instead of addressing what I say. "A mind-external extended thing" just is an object of the senses; how else would we know it exists if not via the senses?
So far you've not assimilated or even really acknowledged any of my criticism of your views.
Bartricks constantly fails to do this with his interlocutors. I'm not sure if he's desperately trying to divert others' attention in order to protect views he's wedded to, or is simply a troll trying to get attention. His is at least a very unusual case, and I suppose that has to count for something.
Reply to Janus No, you do. You don't seem able to understand very basic points.
An immaterialist - the opposite of a materialist - believes there are objects of the senses. So it is no part of the definition of a materialist that they believe in objects of the senses, for that would generate a contradiction.
You seem unable to distinguish between the defintiion of materialism - which is what I said it is - and the additional claim (and not part of the definition) that our senses give us some awareness of material objects.
Anyway, you're now committed to thinking that's wrong, aren't you? Bartricks said it.
You defined materialism incorrectly. Suck it up. Learn your mistake and move on.
Materialism is the view that there exist extra-mental extended objects.
It's not a view about how we're aware of them. It 's a view about what exists. That is, it is an 'ontological' view (you can drop that into conversation now) not an 'epistemological' view.
It is typically accompanied by the view that our senses give us some awareness of material objects.
But virtually no materialists think that all material things are available to the senses - atoms and so on are material, yet we cannot sensibly detect them.
And it is entirely consistent with being a materialist that one might believe that no objects of the senses are material objects, for it is entirely consistent with the thesis that one might believe we are brains in vats being artificially stimulated.
But again, because I'm saying all of this it must be wrong, right?
My point is that "the mind is indivisible" is (approximately) not even wrong. It's mostly useless hot air, probably religiously motivated.
The square root of Tuesday is tuna fish sandwiches ! Prove me wrong if you dare.
How are you addressing anything I said? Why am I writing posts explaining my argument again and again and again, when you don't seem to be able to address it? It's very foolish of me. I am going to stop now, because you have nothing of any philosophical content to contribute.
Perhaps we should distinguish between a sense of human entitlement (lords and masters, gifted this garden by god) from the adoption of norms governing claims (we ought to be rational).
Im claiming that you are overrgeneralizing a popular interpretion of christiantiy, as well as @Janus. Im arguing that there are many christians that interpret the words as "man was left as caretaker, not master". It is evident in the common subordinate attitude of many Christians, which Nietzsche was appalled by.
Conservatives are (in my experience) less likely to care about the treatment of pigs and chickens. That's anecdotal, and I'm willing to adjust my prejudice. I connect this more generally to a conservative reluctance to see the human species as continuous with the rest of the animal kingdom. In practical terms, this might manifest as a resentment of protections of an endangered species, if they interfere with profit.
I'm not arguing a political position here, so let's not get off course with my next question: but how is the christian positition concerning the issue of prochoice abortion (slaughtering a fetus) any different than the secular notion of cruelty towards animals ( viz: slaughtering pigs for food)? The opponents both master nature.
MerkwurdichliebeJuly 30, 2022 at 06:44#7237380 likes
If you really are published on this, then tell us the title of your book or article
Being published makes nobody an authority in anything. Fuck em. This is TPF, I say: say what you have to say here, there is nothing stopping you other than your own bullshit that will never fly.
MerkwurdichliebeJuly 30, 2022 at 06:58#7237420 likes
How are you addressing anything I said? Why am I writing posts explaining my argument again and again and again, when you don't seem to be able to address it?
Maybe you are a stoopid poopu dummy head. That is not a reason to stop posting your genius philosophies.
To me we'd look not at the common desire to play lord and master but rather to whether or not human beings are understood to be continuous with or radically distinct from the rest of nature. To my knowledge, few conservatives are concerned with the factory farming of pigs, even if we have reason to believe that pigs are more sentient than fetuses. ( One can imagine an intelligent extraterrestrial species making tough decisions so that suffering is minimized, aided by a detailed science of the nervous systems involved. This thought-experiment gives us, I hope, a little distance from a bias toward the human form. )
Firstly. I admire your fealessness. It is a relief from all the question dodgers that dominate TPF. Keep it up. There is no quicker way to work out your arguments.
Reply to Isaac You want me to list names? What would that add? So, shall we start with Parmenides and then Zeno of Elea. How many more do you want? What'll do the trick, Isaac?
Or do you want to know why they thought that any region of space can be infinitely divided?
Our reason represents our minds to be indivisible things.
As far as I can tell, you are leaping from 'mind' being a singular noun to some dusty ontological thesis. Do you think boats have ovaries? Can rivers smoke cigars ?
That's prima facie evidence that's precisely what they are.
This is depressingly sloppy reasoning.
<< 'Mind' is a singular noun and various philosophers have speculated or argued that the mind is indivisible. Case closed. Mind is indivisible. >>
As if philosophy hasn't made progress. As if this quasi-theological confusion is still somehow state of the art. As if 'mind is indivisible' has a usefully determinate meaning or relevance in the first place. If neither Ryle nor Austin can save you from compulsive circle squaring, I doubt I'll make a dent.
MerkwurdichliebeJuly 30, 2022 at 07:34#7237600 likes
Reply to Bartricks just answer the question. Fuck according to whom. Are we dependent on the authority of authorities? Maybe so, what does the pope say?
As far as I can tell, you are leaping from 'mind' being a singular noun to some dusty ontological thesis. Do you think boats have ovaries? Can rivers smoke cigars ?
[quote=Bartricks]You are a wikipedia paraphrasing bot.[/quote]
:chin: :up:
MerkwurdichliebeJuly 30, 2022 at 07:37#7237660 likes
Reply to Bartricks i am @Merkwurdichliebe. Im just saying that if we are going to invoke authority over our own reason, easter bunny is as good as any.
What's the end game, if we were to grant you the indivisibility of mind ? Do you turn the crank on your logic machine until God pops out?
MerkwurdichliebeJuly 30, 2022 at 07:43#7237700 likes
Reply to Agent Smith it is quite simple. From mind perspective it is divisible. From sense perspective it is indivisible. The two perspectives impose upon each other within a singular organism, causing major confusion amongst philosophers on TPF. :chin:
it is quite simple. From mind perspective it is divisible. From sense perspective it is indivisible. The two perspectives impose upon each other within a singular organism, causing major confusion amongst philosophers on TPF.
I'm not sure if I follow. Speaking for myself, if the mind is divisible in any way at all, and you claim it is from a "mind perspective", then that's it, the debate comes to an end then and there.
MerkwurdichliebeJuly 30, 2022 at 07:48#7237750 likes
I'm not sure if I follow. Speaking for myself, if the mind is divisible in any way at all, and you claim it is from a "mind perspective", then that's it, the debate comes to an end then and there.
I think you follow fine. I'm not trying to be clever. If I get you, you are saying that mind trumps sense in all cases. Correct?
I think you follow fine. I'm not trying to be clever. If I get you, you are saying that mind trumps sense in all cases. Correct?
What exactly do you mean when you say the mind is divisible and also indivisible? I get that in one way it is and in another way it isn't. How exactly? Danke in advance.
My contention is quite simple: My mind is distinct from yours but that means there are at least 2 minds which shouldn't be possible if mind is indivisible.
MerkwurdichliebeJuly 30, 2022 at 07:59#7237840 likes
What exactly do you mean when you say the mind is divisible and also indivisible? I get that in one way it is and in another way it isn't. How exactly? Danke in advance.
I am only saying that from one point of view it appears indivisible, and from another it appears divisible. I am only saying that this is how it appears from differing perspectives, and I suspect that where they intersect, we may find a better depiction of the truth of it all Perhaps, if we could adquately define a third perspective, we could triangulate the reality of the mind's singularity. Any thoughts, you're very intelligent?
MerkwurdichliebeJuly 30, 2022 at 08:04#7237870 likes
My contention is quite simple: My mind is distinct from yours but that means there are at least 2 minds which shouldn't be possible if mind is indivisible.
You seem like a very nice interlocutor, would you be so kind as to recapitulate the debate for us late comers? Pretty please.
Sure. Since I've been here, it's pretty much @Bartricks insisting the mind is indivisible and ignoring all criticisms of his arguments, all the while insisting that others don't actually read books, etc. It's a sit-com where watching any episode prepares you for all the others. Variations on a theme.
MerkwurdichliebeJuly 30, 2022 at 08:07#7237890 likes
My contention is quite simple: My mind is distinct from yours but that means there are at least 2 minds which shouldn't be possible if mind is indivisible.
But how do you know it is not identical? We cannot use spatiotemporal relations to define the demarcations of mind, unless you are willing to reduce mind to physical explanations. Im not.
MerkwurdichliebeJuly 30, 2022 at 08:10#7237900 likes
Sure. Since I've been here, it's pretty much Bartricks insisting the mind is indivisible and ignoring all criticisms of his arguments, all the while insisting that others don't actually read books, etc. It's a sit-com where watching any episode prepares you for all the others. Variations on a theme.
Lol. Let me take up the mantle and argue on behalf of an indivisible mind.
I am only saying that from one point of view it appears indivisible, and from another it appears divisible. I am only saying that this is how it appears from differing perspectives, and I suspect that where they intersect, we may find a better depiction of the truth of it all Perhaps, if we could adquately define a third perspective, we could triangulate the reality of the mind's singularity. Any thoughts, you're very intelligent?
:snicker:
True, take a line for example: It is divisible lengthwise but not breadthwise. Perhaps this is what you mean. Mine is (only) an analogy. Can you kindly edify me as to what the length and breadth of a line correspond to vis-à-vis mind?
Lol. Let me take up the mantle and argue on behalf of an indivisible mind.
I should add that I even leaned in earlier in the thread and suggested that the minds are indivisible in the sense that persons are unified targets for praise and blame. It's also a norm of rationality that our beliefs are consistent. A good trained body no talky talky doublethink, in other words. In fact, we sometimes contradict ourselves, but (ideally) we adjust our beliefs when we are made aware of such contradictions. It's also our duty to adjust our beliefs if their logical consequences conflict with other, prior beliefs. In practical terms, we want to know who is making a claim in order to weight that claim properly. This is Brandom's 'scorekeeping' notion of rationality. There are fouls in the game of rationality that reduce credibility, etc. The big picture is that minds/persons strive toward cohesion and unity. From the outside they are already unified by a proper name and a reputation for sense or nonsense.
To me the following is good approach to the unity or continuity of the mind/self.
The practical activity one is obliging oneself to engage in by judging and acting is integrating those new commitments into a unified whole comprising all the other commitments one acknowledges . Engaging in those integrative activities is synthesizing a self or subject, which shows up as what is responsible for the component commitments (ibid).
A self or subject in this usage is not something that just exists. It is a guiding aim that is itself subject to development. [T]he synthetic-integrative process, with its aspects of critical and ampliative activity [rejecting incompatibilities and developing consequences] provides the basis for understanding both the subjective and the objective poles of the intentional nexus. Subjects are what repel incompatible commitments in that they ought not to endorse them, and objects are what repel incompatible properties in that they cannot exhibit them (p. 53).
...
Upstream from all of this, according to Brandom, is Kants normative understanding of mental activity (ibid). This is closely bound up with what he calls Kants radically original conception of freedom (ibid). In the Latin medieval and early modern traditions, questions about freedom were considered to be in a broad sense questions of fact about our power. For Kant, all such questions of fact apply only to the domain of represented objects. On the other hand, Practical freedom is an aspect of the spontaneity of discursive activity on the subjective side (pp. 58-59).
The positive freedom exhibited by exercises of our spontaneity is just this normative ability: the ability to commit ourselves, to become responsible. It can be thought of as a kind of authority: the authority to bind oneself by conceptual norms (p. 59). Brandom recalls Kants example of a young person reaching legal adulthood. Suddenly, she has the authority to bind herself legally, for instance by entering into contracts. That gives her a host of new abilities: to borrow money, take out a mortgage, start a business. The new authority to bind oneself normatively involves a huge increase in positive freedom (ibid).
Rationality for Kant does not consist in having good reasons. It consists rather just in being in the space of reasons (p. 60), in being liable to specific kinds of normative assessment.
So, shall we start with Parmenides and then Zeno of Elea. How many more do you want? What'll do the trick, Isaac?
Or do you want to know why they thought that any region of space can be infinitely divided?
Well yes, I suppose. I was leaving open the possibility that you'd supply the names of anyone who has actually studied space...
But let's look at what some other people reckoned. So two ancient Greeks from way before even the beginnings of physics had s bit of a think about it and reckoned that space is infinitely divisible, and that tells us what...? A good historical insight into the cultural beliefs of ancient Greece, perhaps.
As usual, you're supporting a premise of the form "Bartricks reckons...", by appealing to something else you reckon.
1. Leprechauns exist
2. If leprechauns exist then they're the only tiny creatures who wear pointy red hats
3. The tiny creature I just saw with a pointy red hat must have been a leprechaun.
All valid and sound.
Premise 1 is undeniable because I also believe leprechauns take the milk I put out for them and they couldn't do that if they didn't exist.
Premise 2 is undeniable because I also believe that the book I have on leprechauns is the gospel truth and it says they're the only tiny creatures who wear pointy red hats.
Do explain to me, isaac, how it could be that an extended thing might not be divisible.
Easy. It seems to me that extended things are sometimes indivisible. It's what reason tells me. And, as you're so fond of reminding us, we have no other ground for knowing anything. It's you who have the burden of proof to show this self-evident fact of reason is not true.
And don't be predictable and say 'philosophers' and then lament that physicists don't study philosophy. It's very tiresome.
Reply to Isaac oh, well you edumacated me for sure. Thanks guv. If only you could have edumacated Zeno and Plato and Parmenides! You belong in the canon. We dumb philosophers -we need help from washed up academics from other disciplines. Help us, oh unimaginative ones, so that we too may see as narrowly as you.
Imagine a region of space isaac. Now imagine half of that. See?
Space. You can divide it. Any region of space. And so too for anything occupying it.
Reply to Isaac Tell me, Isaac, when you get a pizza and it hasn't been sliced up, do you think it can't be divided?
It can be, can't it?
What if it was smaller. Oh, then it can't.
But what if we had itsy bitsy cutlery - couldn't we then divide it?
But our big chubby hands would get in the way!
Okay, so make us smaller too.
If we all shrank down, and everything else with us, would there come a size where we couldn't divide our pizzas Isaac? Does your reason say yes?
"Mr Isaac sir, we is everso hungry. Can we orphans have a slice of your big pizza? Please sir, may we?" "No, you foolish urchins. We are too small to divide things anymore. My reason says so. Below a certain size a pizza cannot be divided as is manifest to the reason of all those who have contempt for careful thought. So I will have to eat the whole thing although I cant do that either as my teeth are too small to bite through the too small pizza, despite the fact it's three times bigger than my head"
Imagine a region of space isaac. Now imagine half of that. See?
Space. You can divide it. Any region of space.
Nope. I imagine at some point that just becomes impossible. I imagine that at some point the fabric of space becomes quantised such that it ceases to be like the space I'm used to but acts rather more like something space is made of than something divisible.
Wonderful thing the imagination.
Unfortunately almost useless when determining what actually is the case.
Reply to Isaac But we orphans is so hungry mister. It don't make no sense what you is saying. The pizza is three times bigger than your head. I gets that we is all tiny, but everything else is tiny too ain't it? So why can't you divide it? You ain't making no sense sir, as even us foolish urchins can see. Your reason ain't up to much it seems to me sir, begging your pardon. Don't be a tommy tanker, cut us a slice sir. You knows you can.
We can't get that tiny and still be functional objects capable of dividing other objects.
Shrinking things doesn't even make sense without a non-shrunk background against which to compare and that non-shrunk background exerts a field which restricts shrinking.
... Are just some of the ideas I've just imagined.
Reply to Isaac No, isaac - don't say physics. I told you about that. Give the urchins a slice of the pizza. You know you can. Stop saying you can't and not explaining why.
It's got nothing to do with shrinking. Imagine we've always been this tiny size. How could that stop us being able to divide things?
Don't say 'physics' Isaac. Don't. That's naughty and it means you are not thinking.
Reply to Isaac You are not appealing to reason, but to physics.
You lie when you say it is clear to your reason that the pizza cannot be divided. It can be, can't it? The idea that below a certain size it would become indivisible is utterly inconceivable.
No, the physics is entirely imagined. I haven't a clue about physics. I'm appealing entirely to reason. My reason says that you can't just keep dividing extended objects forever, it sounds ridiculous.
Since my reason said it, we take it as default true and you have to prove it's wrong.
Reply to Isaac Yes, you can't keep dividing something forever.
But you would be able to divide an extended thing forever. As the tiny pizza case shows.
What those two truths of reason entail is that there are no extended objects. In other words, immaterialism about the sensible world is true. I already noted this earlier. Divisibility is a huge problem for the coherence of materialism.
But that's not what this thread is about, is it? This thread is about the indivisibility of the mind.
Extended things are divisible. Your claim - your correct claim - that nothing can be infinitely divisible does not contradict that. It just entails what I said, namely that reality contains no extended things.
Now focus on this thread. Extended things are divisible and nothing our reason says implies otherwise.
But you would be able to divide an extended thing forever. As the tiny pizza case shows.
It doesn't 'show' that at all. You thought it would remain divisible, I thought it wouldn't. Nothing's been 'shown' other than what we each reckon would be the case with a shrinking pizza.
It's patently absurd to imagine a shrinking pizza and then claim that whatever you imagine happening to it tells us anything whatsoever about what would really happen to it.
Extended things are divisible. Your claim - your correct claim - that nothing can be infinitely divisible does not contradict that. It just entails what I said, namely that reality contains no extended things.
But reality does contain extended things. It's a self-evident fact my reason presents to me, so the burden is on you to disprove it.
I have two self-evident facts of reason. The world contains extended things, and you can't divide things forever. Therefore you can't divide extended things infinitely.
It's on you to prove that wrong, and you can't just say "it isn't" to either of my premises, because they're self-evident facts of reason.
The practical activity one is obliging oneself to engage in by judging and acting is integrating those new commitments into a unified whole comprising all the other commitments one acknowledges . Engaging in those integrative activities is synthesizing a self or subject, which shows up as what is responsible for the component commitments (ibid).
A self or subject in this usage is not something that just exists. It is a guiding aim that is itself subject to development. [T]he synthetic-integrative process, with its aspects of critical and ampliative activity [rejecting incompatibilities and developing consequences] provides the basis for understanding both the subjective and the objective poles of the intentional nexus. Subjects are what repel incompatible commitments in that they ought not to endorse them, and objects are what repel incompatible properties in that they cannot exhibit them (p. 53).
...
Upstream from all of this, according to Brandom, is Kants normative understanding of mental activity (ibid). This is closely bound up with what he calls Kants radically original conception of freedom (ibid). In the Latin medieval and early modern traditions, questions about freedom were considered to be in a broad sense questions of fact about our power. For Kant, all such questions of fact apply only to the domain of represented objects. On the other hand, Practical freedom is an aspect of the spontaneity of discursive activity on the subjective side (pp. 58-59).
The positive freedom exhibited by exercises of our spontaneity is just this normative ability: the ability to commit ourselves, to become responsible. It can be thought of as a kind of authority: the authority to bind oneself by conceptual norms (p. 59). Brandom recalls Kants example of a young person reaching legal adulthood. Suddenly, she has the authority to bind herself legally, for instance by entering into contracts. That gives her a host of new abilities: to borrow money, take out a mortgage, start a business. The new authority to bind oneself normatively involves a huge increase in positive freedom (ibid).
Rationality for Kant does not consist in having good reasons. It consists rather just in being in the space of reasons (p. 60), in being liable to specific kinds of normative assessment.
[quote=Ms. Marple]Most interesting.[/quote]
What do you call this kinda perspective/point of view on philosophical topics? It's (very/too) general/co-opts concepts or ideas from other disciplines/etc. It also gives me the feeling of someone backed up against a wall rather than someone in control of the situation so to speak. I maybe way off the mark here but that's the impression I get.
You know how when you want to open a jar, one hand holds the jar and the other the lid and they twist against each other to get the job done? You and I would work together like that. And when the jar was open, we wouldn't be fighting over the contents.
If you remove parts of the brain you consequently effect the functions of the mind. I don't know how good of an understanding that you will come up with when dissecting the mind into parts, or cognitions into parts, but in neurology anatomists can localize specific parts of the brain and their functions.
I think the mind is divisible, but into what? And if we grasp all that the mind can be divided into, have we a more clear or even better grasp of what the mind is?
Minds 'have' states - they're called mental states for that very reason. A mental state is a 'state of mind'. That is, a state a mind can be in.
You said earlier that minds are indivisible, not made of parts. But they can be in states that are different from one another. Typically, objects change their states by rearranging their parts in some way. But for a partless immaterial soul, I'm struggling to understand how such a thing could support different states. How can it change?
Typically, objects change their states by rearranging their parts in some way. But for a partless immaterial soul, I'm struggling to understand how such a thing could support different states. How can it change?
How do you square "mind is not divisible" with Socrates'/Plato's idea (which is based on reason alone)?
From the fact that one can be affected by two or more desires simultaneously, he infers that the soul (psyche) cannot be unitary, since it is impossible for the same thing to act in opposite ways at the same time (there are obvious affinities here with the logical principle of non-contradiction, which Plato learned from Socrates [c. 470399 b.c.e.]). Accordingly, in the Republic he identifies three distinct parts of the soul (psyche) reason (nous), passion (thumos), and appetite (epithumia) and posits these as the source of conflicting desires (IV, 439de). Reason rules over the soul with wisdom, but opposed to it is appetite, the irrational part of the soul "with which it loves, hungers, thirsts, and feels the flutter and titillation of other desires" (439d).
Reply to Isaac Well now you are simply ignoring reason. The only basis upon which you claim the pizza - and everything else - would magically become indivisible upon shrinking is another self evident truth of reason, namely that nothing can be infinitely divided. But as I just explained - utterly pointlessly, it seems - the conclusion that follows from that is that extended things do not exist and that the pizza needs to be reconceived as a bundle of sensations occurring in another mind.
It is because you are wed to a false worldview- one not endorsed by reason, but convention - that you find this conclusion absurd and mistake its clash with convention as a clash with reason. It is not. It - the immaterialism of the sensible - is just what follows if one follows reason. The pizza exists, but not as an extended thing. For if it was an extended thing - a notion of ours that we bring to bear on our sensible experiences - then it would be capable of infinite division, something our reason denies is possible. Ni conventional thinker is going to be able to follow reason if doing so threatens their conventional beliefs, as for them they are only seeing in philosophy a resource to support their conventional beliefs. Hence why, at base, you have contempt for the subject and sneer at it.
Reply to bert1 I do not yet see a problem that would not just be a much more general problem of change (one that would apply as much to complex things as to indivisible simple things).
Take a lump of clay. This lump is currently a sphere. That is a property it has. Now change it so that it is a cube. Well, it has changed shape, but nothing has been added or taken away from it. That is, the clay has not been divided.
So, let's now imagine that in fact the clay could not be divided. Well, that would be no impediment to it changing shape given we changed its shape without dividing it.
So, that the mind is indivisible is no impediment to it changing. The states of a thing are not parts of it.
Take a lump of clay. This lump is currently a sphere. That is a property it has. Now change it so that it is a cube. Well, it has changed shape, but nothing has been added or taken away from it. That is, the clay has not been divided.
Sure, but it changes its shape because of the particles in it moving around. Its ability to change shape depends on the fact that it is composed of many small parts. That doesn't disprove you of course, it may be that indivisible minds are just not like clay in the relevant respects. I was just trying to understand how something indivisible can change. You could say "Well it must do, because minds change and minds are indivisible, exactly how they do it is not my concern." I've heard people say that kind of thing on this forum about other matters (i.e. such and such must be the case somehow, and it's not the job of me as a philosopher to work out the details of how).
EDIT: maybe it's a kind of stretchiness that isn't like the stretchiness caused by chemical bonds in, say, rubber? But I'm thinking of spatially extended analogues, whereas you don't think minds are spatially extended at all (unlike me).
So it is no part of the definition of a materialist that they believe in objects of the senses, for that would generate a contradiction.
You are just repeating the same nonsense that I've already shown to be such without offering any counterargument.
Materialists believe that what is real is a material world of, as you say, "mind-external extended things"; things which just are the "objects of the senses". Where is the contradiction in that?
That doesn't preclude others from believing that the objects of the senses are real, but that they are not "mind-external extended things".
That reason apparently show different people different things shows that what reason show depends on its starting assumptions, which themselves are not show by reason, but appeal intuitively to some, and not to others..
Reply to bert1 You are quite right that the clearest demonstration that change us possible for an indivisible thing is that our minds change states yet are indivisible. And yes, it is correct that one does not have to be able to explain why something is happening in order to have evidence that it is happening.
But we can explain in this case. The states of a thing are not what the thing is made of. There does not begin to be a problem then. So it is really you who owes an explanation. Why do you think that a change in something's properties requires that the thing itself be divided? That, to my mind, does not even get out of the starting blocks.
For if it was an extended thing - a notion of ours that we bring to bear on our sensible experiences - then it would be capable of infinite division, something our reason denies is possible.
Democrtius' reason told him over two thousand years ago that divisible extended things are made up of tiny indivisible extended things and that therefore extended things are not, as it is possible to imagine they are, infinitely divisible. Kant's antinomies show us that exercising pure reason may lead to contradictory conclusions.
Kant understood this to show that our sometimes contradictory understandings of appearances cannot be in accordance with any absolutely mind-independent reality. One could be counted as a materialist and yet take the indubitable existence, for us, of material objects of the senses to show nothing beyond what it shows about our own experience. Just as Kant said he is an empirical realist, he could equally consistently have said he is an empirical materialist and that materialism has no bearing on anything beyond the empirical.
I said earlier "absolutely mind-independent reality"; we cannot know anything about such a thing, but we can say that objects of the senses are mind-independent relative to our experience, because our experience shows them to be such; it seems obvious to reason that they must be independent of any individual mind, because the world will not disappear no matter how many people you remove.
What will happen if the last person and all the animals (and plants?) are removed? It seems then the world would no longer appear; but will it still be there: visible, audible and tangible, but unseen, unheard and unfelt? That is the question about which no absolute, context-free answer can sensibly be given.
Reply to Bartricks So you can't refute Plato's reasoning for a tripart soul (i.e. divisible mind). Of course you can't; I just wanted to confirm that. Thanks, Bratshitz! :up:
Democrtius' reason told him over two thousand years ago that divisible extended things are made up of tiny indivisible extended things and that therefore extended things are not, as it is possible to imagine they are, infinitely divisible.
:100: :smirk:
(Also corroborated by quantum physics (of which, of course, Bratshitz, is also demonstably ignorant) Reply to 180 Proof).
What do you call this kinda perspective/point of view on philosophical topics?
As I understand it, lots of philosophers simply make what is already going on explicit. They foreground what in retrospect was haunting the background.
Another way to approach this is to ask what makes philosophy philosophy ? Or a philosopher a philosopher, as opposed to a mystic or a confidence man? What already counts as intellectual virtue or hygiene ? What qualities or behaviors already disqualify them from being trusted or honored? We want people to keep their story straight, to not call something black and white or round and square at the same time. We are also responsible for either adopting the implications of our beliefs or dropping those beliefs as such troublesome implications become manifest (which takes time and discussion.) (And so on.)
As I understand it, lots of philosophers simply make what is already going on explicit. They foreground what in retrospect was haunting the background.
Democrtius' reason told him over two thousand years ago that divisible extended things are made up of tiny indivisible extended things and that therefore extended things are not, as it is possible to imagine they are, infinitely divisible. Kant's antinomies show us that exercising pure reason may lead to contradictory conclusions.
That's not an argument. Explain why an extended thing could not be divided.
An extended thing occupies some space. So it can be divided.
That it can be infinitely divided is a problem - not for me, but for those who believe there are extended things.
Nothing Democritus - and it is Democritus, not Democritius - said suggests any solution to the problem of the infinite divisibility of extended things.
It also gives me the feeling of someone backed up against a wall rather than someone in control of the situation so to speak.
As I see it, scientists and philosophers are both constrained by facts and the way their beliefs and hypotheses are expected to fit together. An exalted submission is perhaps involved in the pursuit of objective knowledge. As someone put it once, freedom is just living by norms that make sense to you (the right kind of prison).
But reality does contain extended things. It's a self-evident fact my reason presents to me, so the burden is on you to disprove it.
I have two self-evident facts of reason. The world contains extended things, and you can't divide things forever. Therefore you can't divide extended things infinitely.
It's on you to prove that wrong, and you can't just say "it isn't" to either of my premises, because they're self-evident facts of reason.
Excellent and succinct parody, which'll probably leave no scratch (I speak from recent experience.)
That's not an argument. Explain why an extended thing could not be divided.
It wasn't intended to show that, but to show that there are different reasonable ways of thinking about it. In other words your blanket mantra "reason tell us" is a vacuous nostrum.
Reply to Janus Well, I will wait until you can provide an actual refutation of the self evident truth of reason that any extended thing will be capable of division.
Well, I will wait until you can provide an actual refutation of the self evident truth of reason that any extended thing will be capable of infinite division.
Why would I bother trying to refute something that does not seem self-evident to me, just because you claim it seems self-evident to you? On the contrary I would be wasting my time, wouldn't I? In such a situation we could not but talk past one another. You'll say I can't see what is self-evident, and I'll say that you can't see what's self-evident (that neither the infinite divisibility nor the finite divisibility of extended things is self-evident). Where will that get us?
Well, I will wait until you can provide an actual refutation of the self evident truth of reason that any extended thing will be capable of division.
Perhaps without realizing it, you are coming off somewhat like the theist who knows God 'directly.' It also makes no sense to refute a self-evident truth, since no inference is involved, just glowing and divine intuition.
Reply to Janus No doubt, words both of us can profit from in circumstances such as this ...
[quote=Mark Twain]Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.[/quote]
As I see it, scientists and philosophers are both constrained by facts and the way their beliefs and hypotheses are expected to fit together. An exalted submission is perhaps involved in the pursuit of objective knowledge. As someone put it once, freedom is just living by norms that make sense to you (the right kind of prison).
On second thought, the reason philosophers tend to grab at anything within reach, the closest object as it were, when doing philosophy (of mind) is due to the fact that they (we) are by and large ignorant, we're in the dark and it shows.
That said, the efforts are laudable and there maybe a grain or two of truth in what is essentially fumbling (for the keys) and stumbling (towards the door with the sign TRUTH).
Bonam fortunam o philosopher! We must presss on, we must!
the reason philosophers tend to grab at anything within reach, the closest object as it were, when doing philosophy (of mind) is due to the fact that they (we) are by and large ignorant, we're in the dark and it shows.
Well said !
I try to know when I don't know, and this is largely a matter of discipline, because
[quote=H. Miller]
With a hot pad under my ass I can play the braggart or the buffoon as good as any man, no matter what sign he be born under.
[/quote]
I view what Brandom is doing as something like fixing Descartes' starting point. I don't start as a ghost in the machine, but I do start after Socrates, which is to say as a philosopher among philosophers, all of us subject (ideally anyway) to 'the force of reason', and only to that force (not [directly] to gods or states, etc.) If you ask me to prove this, because you refuse to take it on faith, then you support my point by challenging it.
the efforts are laudable and there maybe a grain or two of truth
Influenced by the pragmatists, I look to our practical/technological power as a species and think that we have more than a grain or two of truth or knowledge or whatever you want to call it. Various neo-Kantians accepted the existence of a science as a fact and went on from there. I think they were correct to do so. That doesn't mean we can't articulate what's going on better and better, etc. And it doesn't mean we aren't in the dark or talking nonsense as we get farther away from practical life in our talking (so I sympathize with the idea that lots of metaphysics is pointless, not even wrong.)
It is because you are wed to a false worldview- one not endorsed by reason, but convention
No. I double checked the label (the one which, of course, is attached to all our thoughts) and it said 'intuition', not 'convention'.
Not quite fully satisfied though (because I knew I was speaking to an Actual Philosopher) I checked the small print telling us where our beliefs come from (which again, as us experts know, is attached to all our beliefs), and it said 'made in Reason'.
So yeah, I've done my due diligence. Definitely an Intuition, and definitely From Reason.
Have you double-checked yours? Because your belief that extended things ought to be infinitely divisible sounds a bit like a Convention to me. You know you have to turn the beliefs upside to see the label properly, right?
Excellent and succinct parody, which'll probably leave no scratch (I speak from recent experience.)
Thanks, though I suspect the far greater parody is being played on us by @Bartricks himself, who'll reveal, on his 6,000th post, that his contributions were all a work of performance art lampooning the self-assurance of cult religion... It's very deep.
Thanks, though I suspect the far greater parody is being played on us by Bartricks himself, who'll reveal, on his 6,000th post, that his contributions were all a work of performance art lampooning the self-assurance of cult religion... It's very deep.
Nice theory!
He also tempts me to think he's a bot in his apparent failure to assimilate and respond to criticism. I imagine a bot that looks for a few keywords to choose between a small set of responses. I enjoy the insult responses most, because these are occasionally creative and surprising.
Influenced by the pragmatists, I look to our practical/technological power as a species and think that we have more than a grain or two of truth or knowledge or whatever you want to call it. Various neo-Kantians accepted the existence of a science as a fact and went on from there. I think they were correct to do so. That doesn't mean we can't articulate what's going on better and better, etc. And it doesn't mean we aren't in the dark or talking nonsense as we get farther away from practical life in our talking (so I sympathize with the idea that lots of metaphysics is pointless, not even wrong.)
I couldn't have said it better mon ami, I really couldn't have!
As you are already aware, philosophers are, how would you say it?, frontline personnel - I compare them to explorers and as we all know, explorers are the ones who take all the risk - losing an eye, even dying are part of the job description - operating as they are in what in the game universe is known as the fog of war. Hic sunt dracones comrades, hic sunt dracones. Careful now, careful! :snicker:
[quote=Wikipedia]Dissociative identity disorder (DID), previously known as multiple personality disorder (MPD) and colloquially known as split personality disorder,[7] is a mental disorder characterized by the maintenance of at least two distinct and relatively enduring personality states.[3] The disorder is accompanied by memory gaps beyond what would be explained by ordinary memory issues. The personality states alternately show in a person's behavior; however, presentations of the disorder vary. Other conditions that often occur in people with DID include post-traumatic stress disorder, personality disorders (especially borderline and avoidant), depression, substance use disorders, conversion disorder, somatic symptom disorder, eating disorders, obsessivecompulsive disorder, and sleep disorders.[3] Self-harm, non-epileptic seizures, flashbacks with amnesia for content of flashbacks, anxiety disorders, and suicidality are also common.[/quote]
As you are already aware, philosophers are, how would you say it?, frontline personnel - I compare them to explorers and as we all know, explorers are the ones who take all the risk - losing an eye, even dying are part of the job description - operating as they are in what in the game universe is known as the fog of war. Hic sunt dracones comrades, hic sunt dracones. Careful now, careful! :snicker:
Nice ! This squares with Nietzsche in the sense a 'moral pioneer' (this is the stuff that scares people and gets Spinoza in trouble) and with Popper in the sense that metaphysical theories sometimes ripen into science...so it's a bad idea to hide from everything that's ambiguous (like a stereotypical positivist who thinks anything fancy is nonsense.*)
*A healthy dose of positivistic skepticism is not so bad though.
How can something that has no extension be able to have states, as in the states of mind? Are they states of an expanse-less thing? Try to imagine that.
TiredThinkerAugust 01, 2022 at 03:03#7243960 likes
It seems like this forum needs functions for drawing out what one is describing including venn diagrams.
How can something that has no extension be able to have states, as in the states of mind? Are they states of an expanse-less thing?
I do not know what you want by way of an answer. Our minds are immaterial: that's what the argument from indivisibility appears to show. And our minds have states. So, the evidence is that immaterial things have states. I do not owe an account of 'how' that could be the case - it clearly 'is' the case.
Furthermore, when it comes to some sensible object - a piece of cheese, say - it makes sense to wonder what it might feel like, or taste like, given that one can see it (or of something one is only touching, it makes sense to wonder what it might look like). But it clearly makes no sense to wonder what it thinks like.
So, it seems that our reason represents sensible objects to be things that have states such as shape, and size and colour and so on, but not mental states.
And when it comes to our minds it seems to make no sense to wonder what they look like, or smell like, or taste like, or what colour they are. And so our reason seems to represent those things that have mental states positively not to have sensible states.
I imagine you have a mind. And you imagine I do. When you imagine that, what colour and size and texture do you imagine my mind to have? None,yes? You imagine a thing that is in a state of thought, rather than something that has sensible states.
I imagine you have a mind. And you imagine I do. When you imagine that, what colour and size and texture do you imagine my mind to have?
And the question of the year award goes to Dr. Bartricks. Most excellent, monsieur, most excellent.
Allow me to attempt at an answer. The mind isn't an object like a mandarin which is orange, roundish, and rough to touch. It's more like walking (function) and has none of these properties. Nevertheless, the mind, for this reason amd this reason alone, can't be considered nonphysical. Plus, pick up a Gray's anatomy book and turn the page to ambulation - you'll get an idea of how walking is divided into, well, parts, the swing phase is one such part.
unenlightenedAugust 03, 2022 at 11:50#7252580 likes
I went to an Alternative Health Fair with a friend who spent £20 (at that time about half his weekly welfare benefits) on a 'kirlean' aura photograph together with character analysis. It said he was a very warm purple and rather too trusting and gullible. Typical Aquarius, of course.
unenlightenedAugust 04, 2022 at 13:27#7255690 likes
I went to an Alternative Health Fair with a friend
The only alternative I've found to health is sickness; and a pile of horseshit at £20 is pretty alternatively invigorating even at todays' prices. A fair that does what it says on the tinfoil hat.
Reply to Agent Smith Dumb question. :sweat:
A mind (i.e. minding) is what a sufficiently complex brain does. That's how I know (re: cog-sci master's degree). Read D. Kahneman. Ciao. :yawn:
Dumb question. :sweat:
A mind (i.e. minding) is what a sufficiently complex brain does. That's how I know (re: cog-sci master's degree). Read D. Kahneman. Ciao. :yawn:
I see; so if I drive, play golf ( :grin: ) and eat pizza, I'm 3 people? :sweat:
I recently read a book that extensively discussed consciousness in the context of brain injuries. In certain types of hemispherical injuries, a person will be unaware of an object with senses tied to the damaged hemisphere, but accurately aware of the object with senses tied to the other. There is the phrase "to be of two minds." There is also a book called "The origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" that discusses the role of the corpus callosum in communicating between and uniting the left and right hemispheres.
So, I would have to say pretty conclusively that the mind is a complex entity, i.e. composed of multiple components. And the evidence suggests that it is, in some sense, divisible.
Minds can be divided from a intrapersonal (among the populus of others) degree, it cannot be from ones own perspective. Per se, the zone of seeing is non conventional - doesn't move per our own discomfort-m - but when imagining unto another, it can be divided into sectors. You can even do yourself via an intrapersonal-outlook. Mind can be divided, but not personal experience of mind.
Nor can it be divided evenly, only through sectors and sphering can a even mind division be achieved.
If the mind is divisible, show me the pieces its divided into!
I want to stop smoking.
I want a cigarette.
I don't want to live.
I am afraid to die.
Any other internal conflict, ie any cause of stress. Stress, physically, is nothing other than 2 or more opposing forces in stasis. Muscle tension opposes gravity to enable one to stand. Mental stress presupposes parts of the mind.
Reply to TiredThinker I think Buddhism has a very nice take on the topic. It argues that the mind isn't actually a thing, but a process. So it's less of an apple, but more of a flame. So you can't really have half a process.
Reply to praxis Yes, you can have half a banana, but not half a mind. Therefore minds are not bananas. Shall we run through every single extended thing you can conceive of?
TiredThinkerAugust 09, 2022 at 21:05#7272700 likes
Reply to TiredThinker I don't know of any limit to divisibility except fundamental planck units. "Mind" is a classical phenomenon, ergo divisible. As Reply to unenlightened and others have pointed out, "mind" consists of conflicting / divergent impulses & processes. Bratshitz is just talking out of his incorrigibly uninformed, crypto-Thomistic, D-K bunghole again. :eyes:
Reply to praxis The only extended thing that begins with a b that you can conceive of is a banana?
I don't know what you can conceive of as I so not have access to the content of your mind, so you need to tell me what comes next. But it will be divisible and thus won't be a mind.
Reply to TiredThinker Itself. Indivisible things are called 'simples' and they are not made of anything more basic than themselves.
Not everything can be made of other things. So there must be some simples from which all else is made. And it would seem we ourselves are simples.
I imagine that a hemispherectomy aint no walk in the park either.
One side-effect of split-brain surgery is two distinct minds (i.e. phenomenal self models) with personalities which can diverge over time. Also, split personality disorderdemonstrates the "divisibility" of human mind.
unenlightenedAugust 10, 2022 at 07:51#7273930 likes
I struggle to see what can be meant by the suggestion that mind is indivisible. Clearly @Bartricks' mind is completely separate from everyone else's and of a much finer construction; and each of our minds are divided from the others. The nearest I can get would be to say that mind is like water; each of us has their separate cup of water, some muddy and some salty and so on, but the separation is temporary, and somewhere is the Great Sea of Mind whence we all came and to which we all return.
Those that recall MarsMan, will be familiar with the idea of mind as a 'noncount noun', and in this way it makes sense to me that the mind of a mouse is complete as the mind of any human; big or small the cup is always filled with water and water is everywhere the same and in that sense indivisible.
Mmm. I asked because I happened to be reading this thread in the middle of a conversation I was having with @Janus about mental events. It struck me that it's odd to assume mental events are different to brain activity in one sense (in the sense that phenomenology can give us true statements about mental events without being constrained by neuroscience), but then have one's concept of the mental constrained again by science in it's 'en-cuppedness' (to use your analogy).
Why the cup? Why not just the great sea of minds? As I said on the other thread, it sometimes seems to me that my wife knows what I'm thinking. It's only science that tells me she can't. So if science doesn't restrict what mind is (only brain), then why not ditch the idea that minds are private at all, or singular, or anything.
Maybe it's a colander?
unenlightenedAugust 10, 2022 at 11:53#7274550 likes
I cannot say why. But I observe, as a matter of fact, everywhere but the internet and the phone, that minds are always embodied. Without embodiment there would indeed be nothing but a sea of mind, - at least that is the suggestion (sea of mind, not sea of minds), but the separation of physical senses into these eyes and those eyes produces the appearance of separation as the virtual 'point of view' that is each of our separate identities, together with the illusion of its indivisibility.
You must mean [math] 0 ^ {-1} [/math] isn't defined, (roughly) because of the last part of your statement. In other words, [math] f(x) = 0x = 0 [/math] is not one-to-one and hence not invertible.
unenlightenedAugust 10, 2022 at 11:58#7274590 likes
Well yes, I suppose it is; my mind pours out here and drips onto your screen, to be absorbed by your mind, and vice versa. They call it 'social being'.
why not ditch the idea that minds are private at all, or singular, or anything.
I suggest that we understand the self primarily in normative terms, as a locus of responsibility. I ought to keep my story straight (maintain a coherent set of beliefs), report simple facts reliably, keep my promises...
I suggest that we understand the self primarily in normative terms, as a locus of responsibility. I ought to keep my story straight (maintain a coherent set of beliefs), report simple facts reliably, keep my promises...
Interesting. My personal view is that the self is a modeling assumption used to delineate non-entropic forces from entropic ones. It locates the boundary between the system which is to be retained and the forces which would reduce its improbable structure to a nice even Gaussian distribution of variables.
Interesting. My personal view is that the self is a modeling assumption used to delineate non-entropic forces from entropic ones. It locates the boundary between the system which is to be retained and the forces which would reduce its improbable structure to a nice even Gaussian distribution of variables.
Different uses for different contexts ! I like your version...reminds me of @apokrisis's. But consider how selves function here on the forum. We track claims, hold one another to coherence norms, and just generally keep score.
Yeah, I think your version works socially. It also explains ideas like belonging (I have responsibility for this item), offenses against the person (it's not your responsibility to put my body in some location), etc...
FWIW, I'm largely paraphrasing Robert Brandom who finds his own sources in Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Hegel. According to Brandom, Hegel's accomplishment was describing how groups could be bound by the norms that they were ( eventually self-consciously ) co-creating in the first place.
No. I have never seen a brain, only models, and possibly a piece of meat on a butcher's slab that I failed to recognise. I see your posts, and I assume you speak your mind as I do. I converse with other embodied minds and interact with animal embodied minds.
No. I have never seen a brain, only models, and possibly a piece of meat on a butcher's slab that I failed to recognise. I see your posts, and I assume you speak your mind as I do. I converse with other embodied minds and interact with animal embodied minds.
I think it would be strange to suggest that your mind is (or is inside) my computer screen.
I have never seen a brain, only models, and possibly a piece of meat on a butcher's slab that I failed to recognise. I see your posts, and I assume you speak your mind as I do. I converse with other embodied minds and interact with animal embodied minds.
But you've never seen a mind either, yet you infer their existence quite happily. I'd have thought even the butcher's slab was better evidence for the existence of brains than my post is for the existence of minds.
The point is that if you want 'minds', then have at them, but if they're this spooky stuff which cannot be seen, touched or otherwise amenable to empirical investigation, then they're not constrained by the world of objects (bodies, skulls, space-time). If they are that way constrained, then they're constrained by all of the empirical world, not just the biology you learned in college.
Alkis PiskasAugust 10, 2022 at 16:11#7275660 likes
Reply to TiredThinker
Everything has parts. Even an atom, which in the old times was supposed to be indivisible. (Ancient Greek: a- (= not) + tomi (= cut).)
Then, asking if something is a single thing or it has parts is not a valid question because one does not exclude the other. My body is a single object but it also has parts. This reply consists of a single message which however has parts. .
Then, you have to clarify the kind of parts you are looking for. A sentence consists of words (one kind), letters (another kind), symbols (another kind), syntax parts (another kind). All these have a different function and belong to a different linguistic field.
So, mind too consists of a lot of things, of a totally different nature: memory, feelings, thoughts, etc., as well as functions: perception, thinking, imagining, reasoning, etc. Yet, it is referred to as a single thing.
unenlightenedAugust 10, 2022 at 16:27#7275730 likes
But you've never seen a mind either, yet you infer their existence quite happily. I'd have thought even the butcher's slab was better evidence for the existence of brains than my post is for the existence of minds.
Yes, and livers and kidneys too, I guess. Am I talking to a piece of meat here? Or why are we discussing meat in a thread about minds?
Well yes. We argue about the properties that piece of meat has, but a piece of meat I certainly am.
Or... we could say I'm a mind, some metaphysical construct. I don't care which, I'm quite happy with the whole 'mind' narrative. But in this second case, why constrain the mind by some (but not all) of our empirical observations?
unenlightenedAugust 10, 2022 at 16:58#7275920 likes
Reply to Isaac You say 'talking meat', I prefer 'embodied mind'. It's not exactly controversial or even original.
ou say 'talking meat', I prefer 'embodied mind'. It's not exactly controversial or even original.
Neither it's controversy, nor its originality were my target. Meat is uncontestedly empirical. Bound by the laws of physics, chemistry, biology... We do not assume meat can detect angels, or have a soul.
Mind (as you're using it) is not so bound. People regularly do assume it can do all sorts of things our current scientific understanding denies of mere meat.
So why bind it to a body on empirical grounds? You've not constrained it on any other empirical grounds (such as the discoveries of neuroscience). I'm just trying to understand why you've picked some empirical observations to constrain the mind, but not others.
unenlightenedAugust 10, 2022 at 17:09#7276020 likes
Reply to Isaac Whence the religious language? Angels? Soul? You are arguing with your fantasy of what I have been saying. So you can carry on without my input, or pretend you have made a meaningful contribution, or whatever.
mind is like water; each of us has their separate cup of water, some muddy and some salty and so on, but the separation is temporary, and somewhere is the Great Sea of Mind whence we all came and to which we all return.
...are you claiming that is all empirical scientific fact? If not, then the argument remains the same. why constrain 'mind' by some empirical facts and not others?
unenlightenedAugust 10, 2022 at 17:18#7276090 likes
The point is that if you want 'minds', then have at them, but if they're this spooky stuff which cannot be seen, touched or otherwise amenable to empirical investigation, then they're not constrained by the world of objects (bodies, skulls, space-time). If they are that way constrained, then they're constrained by all of the empirical world, not just the biology you learned in college.
If the distinguishing characteristic of spooky stuff is that which cannot be seen or touched, then your worldly examples of space and time would actually be spooky stuff.
You assert without explanation why a thing that is constrained by some physical forces must be constrained by all physical forces. That is, just because minds cannot be seen but brains can does not mean that minds cannot share other properties of brains, like that both exist in space and time.
And that is the bigger problem. Space and time are not properties at all but are required elements for comprehension. A dog that exists in neither space nor time does not exist, so it's hard to call it "a dog that exists." By the same token, for a mind to exist, it must exist in space and time, but because it shares the requirement with brains that it exist in space and time doesn't mean it is subject to all the same scientific descriptions.
And speaking of what is needed for comprehension speaks to yet another thing that we cannot see or touch, which is comprehension itself. Comprehension does, however, exist somewhere (between my hat and bow tie) and at some time (like right now) because if it didn't, it wouldn't exist.
If the distinguishing characteristic of spooky stuff is that which cannot be seen or touched, then your worldly examples of space and time would actually be spooky stuff.
It was only intended to be rhetorical. The division I'm talking about (which is clear from the rest of my posts) is empirical science in general. I assume you're comfortable with the fact that we have empirical observations demonstrating space and time?
for a mind to exist, it must exist in space and time, but because it shares the requirement with brains that it exist in space and time doesn't mean it is subject to all the same scientific descriptions.
Absolutely. I'm not making the claim that it must share all the same physical restrictions. I'm asking why people think is doesn't (or does - share some of them).
Do you not find it at all odd that the physical restrictions people tend to think the mind shares are all the easy ones they learnt in school (it's in a body, we can't read other people's, it stops when you're unconscious...) and the ones they reject are all the hard ones that only neuroscientists and cognitive scientists tend to understand?
I assume you're comfortable with the fact that we have empirical observations demonstrating space and time?
So humor me. Demonstrate time for me. It seems I must start with the presumption that there is time or else I won't be able to understand anything you're talking about. Quoting Isaac
Not asserting. Asking. If a thing is constrained by some physical laws, why not all of them?
Because I don't think time and space are simply physical laws, but they are part of a most fundamental conceptual framework that nothing can be understood without their presumption. Existence is not a property of something and time and space are fundamental components of existence. If you have a dog without hair, you have a hairless dog. If you have a dog outside space and outside time, it exists no where at no time, meaning you don't have dog at all.
And this is part of the bigger question about objects generally in terms of how much is the physical object and how much is imposed by our perceptions and conceptual framework.
So, the reason you can't have an existing mind that does not occur in space or time is because such a mind is by definition not in existence.Quoting Isaac
Do you not find it at all odd that the physical restrictions people tend to think the mind shares are all the easy ones they learnt in school (it's in a body, we can't read other people's, it stops when you're unconscious...) and the ones they reject are all the hard ones that only neuroscientists and cognitive scientists tend to understand?
I don't think it odd at all. I see the things near my eyes and hear what is near my ears. Everywhere I experience a perception occurs right where my body is. And we don't read other people's minds. We hear what they tell us, watch how they gesture, and we notice all sorts of behavioral manifestations that often tell us what they might be thinking, but we don't see directly into their mind, as if to see a head is the same as to see a mind.
Way above my level of understanding. I trust the scientists on the matter. If I'm wrong then we merely need to drop 'time' from my list. It doesn't affect the argument.
Because I don't think time and space are simply physical laws, but they are part of a most fundamental conceptual framework that nothing can be understood without their presumption. Existence is not a property of something and time and space are fundamental components of existence. If you have a dog without hair, you have a hairless dog. If you have a dog outside space and outside time, it exists no where at no time, meaning you don't have dog at all.
And this is part of the bigger question about objects generally in terms of how much is the physical object and how much is imposed by our perceptions and conceptual framework.
So, the reason you can't have an existing mind that does not occur in space or time is because such a mind is by definition not in existence.
Don't we? When I feel I know what someone else is thinking, maybe I'm reading their mind. Why not?
Sure, we know what people are thinking based upon their behaviors, and one such behavior is when they tell us. They may also use gestures, or they may reveal it from expressions. You may also know that someone is thinking about eating by watching them make a sandwich or perhaps they grab their car keys right at lunch time and make their way out of the house. All of that is basic behaviorism, but we don't equate the communicative behavior with the internal state.
That is, their mind experienced a desire to want to eat. That wanting to eat was a state of being and you didn't experience their state of being. Their mind remains to you a black box accessible to you only to the extent they manifest it in some sort of behavior. A person can mute or fake their behaviors, but just because I remain stoical doesn't mean I'm not suffering. The suffering is one thing, the exhibition of that suffering another.
So, when you say "mind reading" in normal discourse, people generally think of the paranormal or some sort of telepathy, as if the internal state streams from them to you. If you mean that, then no, I don't think you can mind read.
Imagine a pendulum hanging from your ceiling, for example. Let's assume the pendulum oscillates in two dimensions indefinitely without ever coming to a stop. Now, imagine we could somehow shade the area of space which is occupied by the pendulum during its oscillations, giving it some kind of coloration. If the weight is dropped from a height equal to ceiling's height, the area of the oscillation will be a semicircle; anything lower than that will form a pizza-slice shape that gets smaller and smaller with decreasing dropping height. If during a pendulum's oscillation one were to block this area with a finger, for example, one would eventually interrupt the pendulum's oscillation with certainty. Now, imagine one dropped the pendulum several times, each from the same height but varying on the angle with respect to a coordinate plane drawn on the ceiling with its origin at the fixed point from which the pendulum hangs, limiting the oscillations to a two-dimensional plane, as in the previous example. If one rotated the pendulum an infinitesimal distance and shaded the area of the pendulum's oscillation for an entire rotation of the pendulum, each of the shaded areas would add to the volume of a semicircle. Again, blocking this volume would eventually interrupt the pendulum's oscillations, given that it rotates. Now, do you think the oscillations occupy a space?
We have five senses, and unless you reduce your communication to where it can be sensed by one of my senses, I won't be able to perceive it. Unless your behavior is visible, audible, tangible, tasteable, or smellable, how am I supposed to know it happened? If you were hungry and that emitted electrical activity from your brain into my brain, then I could read your mind, but that would require my having the sense to read electrical brain activity, which, alas, I don't.
I was told once (although I don't feel like looking it up), that they determined that pigeons were able to find their way back home due to magnetic material they found in their brain that acted as a compass. By putting a magnet on the pigeons head, they could disorient the pigeon. So, it is possible that other organisms have all sorts of unusual ways of sensing external activity, but that still comes down to following the laws of physics.
But you know this, so what is the real question here? Are you asking why we're confined to the laws of physics? That sounds like a question of why is the world like it is. I guess it just got made that way. If you are denying it actually has been made that way, then you'll need to show some evidence that you can read minds. So, let us begin. What am I thinking about?
Wrong. I was thinking about twice baked potatoes with cheese.
I do share your sentiment though that I too can read my wife's mind. She wants me to take out the garbage. I can just feel it.
I've obviously not made myself very clear, my apologies.
You say we only have five senses and that we get our information from those senses. You say " If you were hungry and that emitted electrical activity from your brain into my brain, then I could read your mind, but that would require my having the sense to read electrical brain activity, which, alas, I don't."
Where did you get this information from? Presumably school biology? I don't know how far your human sciences instruction has gone, so we'll plump for the middle (college level) and you can correct me if I'm wrong.
I have a theory about the mind. My theory is that minds can communicate to other minds. You say no - that theory cannot be true because... "If you were hungry and that emitted electrical activity from your brain into my brain, then I could read your mind, but that would require my having the sense to read electrical brain activity, which, alas, I don't."
In other words, my theory, about minds, cannot be true because your college science says that brain don't work that way.
Now @unenlightened has a theory about minds, that minds might all be part of a sea of minds to which they return. Can we similarly use our college science to say - that theory can't be true, brains don't work that way?
Now the phenomenologist has a theory about minds, they say that because it seems like they experience the colour yellow, they do, in fact, experience the colour yellow. I say, that theory can't be true because my post-graduate science says brains don't work that way. The response is invariably a diatribe about how minds are not brains, how brain sciences are only speculative, how it's all about interpretation, a couple of mentions of Kuhn, and usually more than one accusation of scientism thrown in for good measure.
The person suggesting minds can do something (mind-read) which is denied by college science is a crackpot. A lunatic, not to be taken seriously. A woo-merchant.
The person suggesting minds can do something (say, gain knowledge of certain thought processes by introspection) which is denied by post-graduate level science is a philosopher, wiser and more open-minded than the overly scientistic post-grad.
I'm enquiring about the reasons for the difference of approach. What is it about college-level science about brains which gets a free pass, while post-graduate level science is rejected as not applying to minds?
unenlightenedAugust 12, 2022 at 08:26#7282700 likes
unenlightened has a theory about minds, that minds might all be part of a sea of minds to which they return. Can we similarly use our college science to say - that theory can't be true, brains don't work that way?
You don't seem to know the difference between a theory and an analogy, which i used to try and make sense of what other people have been saying. So I'd prefer that you just leave me out of your discussions altogether.
You don't seem to know the difference between a theory and an analogy, which i used to try and make sense of what other people have been saying. So I'd prefer that you just leave me out of your discussions altogether.
You don't seem to know the difference between being mentioned as a courtesy and being 'involved in my discussion' so I'd prefer you leave me out of your tribal border disputes altogether.
I was discussing the nature of my enquiry with @Hanover, that enquiry derived from my interpretation of something you said, and I don't think it polite to talk about other people without involving them.
If I've misinterpreted what you said, you could just say so. You know, like normal people having a civil discussion would. But hey, then you'd miss out on the chance to waive your little flag so...
unenlightenedAugust 12, 2022 at 09:01#7282740 likes
If I've misinterpreted what you said, you could just say so.
I just this moment did say so. Again. You made a false claim about me which I wanted to deny. I have denied it. And Now I ask you, again, not to talk about me, as you do "misinterpret" me rather too often. I hope that, at least, is clear and understandable.
If you don't want the members of it to interpret and respond to your posts then I suggest you stop posting them.
I don't want YOU to MISINTERPRET and MISREPRESENT my posts. I cannot stop you, and I am not going to stop posting, but I have asked. I understand that you may not do as I wish, but I will endeavour to continue my conversations with careful readers and charitable interpreters notwithstanding your intransigence.
I will endeavour to continue my conversations with careful readers and charitable interpreters
You seriously don't see the hipocrisy? You read my posts and decide the misunderstanding simply must be the result of a lack of care and charity. In the same breath as you accuse me of a lack of care and charity interpreting posts.
Can I ask where your care and charity are in interpreting our misunderstandings? Maybe it's your poor quality writing? Maybe it's our radically different worldviews and so the communication barrier is that much harder. Maybe it's a little bias on your part because you have such a passionate dislike for my field, not to mention my politics...
But no, apparently none of those, it's definitely my lack of care and charity. Your own care and charity be damned.
The person suggesting minds can do something (mind-read) which is denied by college science is a crackpot. A lunatic, not to be taken seriously. A woo-merchant.
This just isn't accurate, as if my denial of mind reading is the result of indoctrination I've been unable to rise above as you have. I deny it because I've never seen it done nor seen a study of it being done nor been made aware of a reliable account of when it's been done.
If you're going to argue in support of the paranormal, bigfoot, or the elusive white penguin, you need evidence. Your psychological evaluation that I'm just stubbornly committed to the status quo isn't evidence of anything, even if it were true.
And it's not like there isn't extensive literature attempting to prove the paranormal that I'm unaware of. I am very much aware of it, and it's extremely unpersuasive.
If you're going to argue in support of the paranormal, bigfoot, or the elusive white penguin, you need evidence. Your psychological evaluation that I'm just stubbornly committed to the status quo isn't evidence of anything, even if it were true.
And it's not like there isn't extensive literature attempting to prove the paranormal that I'm unaware of. I am very much aware of it, and it's extremely unpersuasive.
You reslise I'm not actually proposing mind-reading. It's a hypothetical. My point is that doing so would be no less unreasonable than certain propositions arising from, say, phenomenology. The only difference being that the former is countered by a level of science most people know and understand, the latter by a level of science many don't.
If this isn't a phenomena you've encountered, then all this will probably seem quite bizarre to you.
If you're already of the opinion that science fully constrains our theories about minds then you're not in a position to answer my enquiry.
I'm not of that opinion.
In any event, I disagree that you can't debate varying epistemological theories just because you already have one you rely upon. That is, the fact that I use science to answer certain questions doesn't mean I'm closed minded to considering other epistemological methods.
So, make your argument for why you believe in mind reading and establish how your method of knowing that is consistent with how you know other things, and if it's not, why such is a special class deserving of special rules.
In any event, I disagree that you can't debate varying epistemological theories just because you already have one you rely upon. That is, the fact that I use science to answer certain questions doesn't mean I'm closed minded to considering other epistemological methods.
Then I puzzled as to why you're so confused as the nature of my enquiry. If you use some science to constrain theories about the mind, and not other science, then does it really seem odd that someone might ask why, and how you choose?
So, make your argument for why you believe in mind reading and establish how your method of knowing that is consistent with how you know other things, and if it's not, why such is a special class deserving of special rules.
Hypothetically - I'm saying that if 'mind' is not a type of entity constrained by science (not the same as brain, or constrained by the way brains work), then when I feel like I know what my wife is thinking, I have absolutely no reason at all to think I don't.
Comments (267)
As all extended things are divisible, the mind is not an extended thing. Our brains can be divided. Our minds cannot be. Thus, our minds are not our brains.
An indivisible thing has no parts (for if it had parts it could be divided into them). And as such the indivisibility of the mind also implies its eternal existence.
it should also be noted that the existence of simple, indivisible things can be independently established. For it is manifest to reason that not everything can be made of other things, for then one has to posit an actual infinity of parts, which is incoherent.
Thus, there are simple things in existence.
And if we listen to our reason rather than convention, we will find that we are among those simple things.
A while I ago I asked myself if there was a basic unit of thought, but I never really pondered about it. Your OP brought me back to it, and somehow I wondered if the mind was thought. Now, in the case there was a basic unit of thought (the building block of ideas), and the mind was thought (i.e., the mind is an idea of the brain), it could be possible that the mind is composed of several basic units of thought, and it would be divisible. Now, is there a basic unit of thought, and is the mind thought?
Edit: You could also ask I guess if an idea is a composite or a unit or if there can be ideas of the two kinds.
The mind is not a physical thing, but a function of a physical thing, more of a verb than a noun; so it cannot be literally located and dissected like the brain can. According to reports, if the corpus callosum is severed, one side of the body literally doesn't know what the other is doing. Would you count that as being a division of the mind? What about multiple personality syndrome?
The mind is a thing.
Thoughts are states of mind. They're not things . They're states.
Likewise, consciousness is a 'state'.
States are always of things.
The things that conscious states are states of are called 'minds'.
There's a big philosophical question over what kind of a thing a mind is.
But it is a thing.
If you want to use 'consciousness' and 'mind' interchangeably, then you're just abusing words or you can't understand how consciousness is a state and a mind is the thing it is a state of.
It's not a bunch of faculties. Faculties are had by a thing. Things are not made of faculties.
Same mistake, Hugh.
It can't be divided into faculties. It 'has' faculties. See?
Faculties are always the faculties 'of' something. Faculties of perception, reason and so on, are faculties 'of' a mind.
Quoting Bartricks
If the mind is a thing then it occupies a space. Or are there things that do not occupy a space?
:up:
Quoting TiredThinker
Neither. IMO, a mind is an embodied, metacognitive process constituted by a system of hierarchically tangled (D. Hofstadter, T. Metzinger) cognitive functions.
Like a running river, I don't think a mind has discrete "parts".
No. Just as choreographed dance-steps are not "tied to parts of" legs ..., mind(ing) is what a sufficiently complex brain do enacted by its (developmental) environment.
No, minds do not occupy space. If they did, they'd be divisible. But they're indivisible. Thus they do not occupy space.
If you think everything that exists has to occupy space, then our minds demonstrate that's false.
And indeed, we can actually demonstrate it is false independent of the nature of our minds. For if something occupies space, then it is divisible. And thus it will be made of parts into which it can be divided.
But something cannot have infinite parts. Thus the raw ingredients from which a thing is made must themselves be indivisible, else we will find ourselves on an infinite regress.
And those things will not occupy space.
This poses a well known problem for those who believe in things that occupy space: it does not seem possible for there to be such things. As if everything must have some basic ingredients from which it is constructed, and if those ingredients must be indivisible, then anything that exists must be made of (or be) something indivisible. But indivisible things occupy no space. And no amount of joining together things that occupy no space will ever result in the creation of a thing that does occupy space. Thus, it seems that things that occupy space - the notion of such a thing, anyway - make no real sense.
Allow me to recommend The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle. I only recently got around to this book, and it's just flamethrower for so many entrenched confusions concerning the mind.
One thing to avoid (it seems to me) is just taking it for granted that the word 'mind' is connected as if by a cord to some sufficiently definite concept to make the 'but is it single' question sensible and interesting.
Let me end on a more constructive note. The mind is single in the sense that the person is understood as a locus of responsibility. In fact, it's one and the same ghost in the machine that catches hell when its body misbehaves. But this is a mere report of the way we happen to do things around here. In theory, another culture could allow for even sane people to be temporarily possessed by demons and therefore pardoned for crimes. Or we can imagine ghosts trading bodies, and a culture holding the ghost responsible. "When you, Tim, were in body #45643, you smacked Joe, who was in body #456." The point is that singleness of mind seems ethically important to us.
All he does is describe cases where we talk 'as if' there is a thing, when in fact there is not. That is not any kind of evidence that our minds are not singular indivisible things.
Mental states are states of mind. That is, they are states of a thing. So there is a thing that bears them, and we call it a mind. There's no mystery here. The word 'mind' denotes that which bears mental states.
And our reason tells us that our minds are indivisible. You note that our moral responsibilty is 'ours' - that is, it belongs to us, not our states of mind. That is just more evidence that our minds are things distinct form the states they are in.
This is quite unlike, say, a university and its buildings and practices and employees (Ryle's example).
So the burden of proof is squarely on him to provide some positive evidence against the 'ghost in the machine' thesis, for the evidence appears to point to it.
What evidence does he provide? And again, brute possibilities are not evidence and nor is describing a view in a scathing way or inviting us to think that only luddites from the past would believe their minds to be souls.
IMV, good philosophers often try to show us that our questions were ill-conceived in the first place.
It also makes more sense to me that metaphysicians should have to argue for their positive claims.
Note that I suggested above why folks are tempted to make strange claims like 'the mind is single' in the first place. I'm trying to plug what would otherwise be silly talk into real life, into the practical unity of a self.
It's our intellectual duty to be consistent. Our bundle of beliefs should work together. The ego is a kind of unifying fiction or piece of software.
Where is there any evidence that questions about the mind are of this sort?
Quoting Pie
You either think there's reason to think that's true, or you think there's no reason to think that's true but you think it anyway.
If you think there's reason to think that's true, then you accept the authority of reason. Which is just as well, for all philosophy involves appealing to reason.
Now, our reason represents our minds to exist and to be indivisible things.
That's evidence that that's precisely what they are.
Is there any countervailing evidence? Does Ryle provide any (no)?
This is all those who disbelieve in the soul do: they attempt to show how it is metaphysically possible for the mind 'not' to be an immaterial soul.
It's not even clear they manage this. But who cares? Even if it is possible for the mind to not be an immaterial soul, that doesn't begin to be evidence that it is not an immaterial soul.
I mean, it is metaphysically possible for me to be in Paris. But that's not evidence I'm in Paris. I'm not.
You might find some in an excellent book entitled The Concept of Mind. It's by this dude named Gilbert Ryle. It's one of my favorites.
Quoting Bartricks
Yes, philosophy appeals to reason. As Popper and Kojeve and who knows how many others have noted, philosophy is a second order tradition. We don't just trade stories about the way things hang together; we criticize and edit and synthesize such stories. This becomes the way we do things. No individual person or claim has a fixed status (is sacred.) Only the second-order tradition itself is sacred. The opposite of being reasonable is perhaps some combination of arrogance and dogmatism.
Quoting Bartricks
Need I point out that this is bald claim ? And that it's also controversial? Perhaps your reason gives you that impression, but that in itself is a personal matter. The mere fact that many find old-fashioned metaphysical chestnuts like that one to be highly questionable if not outright nonsense should give you pause...if you want to be reasonable.
Quoting Bartricks
This might be a good time to present that evidence?
Excellent book. The beginnings of clear thinking about mind. The Official Doctrine might well be sitting behind 's OP.
https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/concept-of-mind.pdf
A precis.
:up:
I think so.
After reading Ryle, I thought now this is the book for those who find the later Wittgenstein too nebulous. He just chops away confusion methodically.
I should also plug Sellars here. His normative, inferential approach to concepts and rationality demystifies 'reason' as Ryle does 'mind.'
"I was wet and weary and had half a mind to curl up on the mossy hillside and wait for the rescue helicopter." - Globe and Mail (2003)
Quoting Pie
:up:
It's great to see Ryle and Sellars get recognition around here.
Now, locate for me an actual argument that the mind is not an immaterial soul
As I see it, you are describing grammar here as if you were purveying eternal cosmic truths. Yes, we talk of states of mind, states of one and the same mind. But I don't see why states are grammatically kinds of things. Presumably we'd like to do more than give ESL lessons to one another. But that's the problem with analytic truths or and pseudo-profound quasi-tautologies. I don't mean this as an attack. I'm just saying it's way to easy to cough up grammatical platitudes as quasi-theological insights.
An argument. Give me one argument for the materiality of the mind. Use Ryle. Come on.
Dude. Descartes has been tied to the whipping post for quite a while now. Prove to me first that Jesus isn't the crown prince of the Crab Nebula.
Now, present an argument for the materiality of the mind. You are about to be taken to school
Of course I have. It's weird to make such a big deal of it. It's a relatively easy read. Heidegger for the less pretentious ?
Quoting Bartricks
I never claimed the mind was material. It seems that, like many folks who charge at metaphysical windmills, you can't see around your pet dichotomies.
I'm not trying to be Pepsi to your Coca-Cola. I'm saying we don't need this bubbly acidic sugar water in the first place.
Do commas smell like cream spirit? Is the mime shingle?
Bless your little heart, friend. Go in peace.
Do you know how I know that?
I'm curious what you'll say, knowing how wrong you are.
You have nothing to say. You are a wikipedia paraphrasing bot.
Here you make a case that 'mind' and 'brain' are used differently. The thesis is true. But you forget that we can give one another a piece of our mind. Or https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/of%20two%20minds So the argument is flawed.
But who here is claiming that minds are brains? Not Ryle. One of us would know that.
Why is an actual infinity of parts incoherent? We are comfortable with the infinity of the primes. If we listen to careful proofs rather than internet cranks. I agree that it's more intuitive for us humans to think in terms of genuine atoms, but I'm not sure reality plays by our rules. Maybe our physicists keep finding parts made of parts made of parts....
Why does indivisibility imply eternal existence? That seems like an unwarranted leap. This whole foray into sincere pre-Kantian metaphysics is quaint even. Quasi-theological. Remains of the day, last scraps of a vanishing religion.
Not so fast. I'm of half a mind to correct you and half a mind to leave you to your sandbox and its kitty droppings.
https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/half+a+mind
Or, for your perusal, the etymology of dubious...being of two minds. I'll let you look it up if you care.
Also, some Ryle, to rile you up perhaps.
I bet you say that to all the girls, you old rake.
Do you have any kind of point to make? Or did you just want to pretend to have read things you haven't read?
I've made quite a few. Be wary of taking grammar (by which I mean, in this context, proprieties of usage) for theology-strength cosmic insight. Maybe don't think about the mind as some kind of weird plate made of dream stuff. Maybe the mind is better thought of in terms of understanding and unifying a person's doings in this world. The mind can be thought of as the ways their body do. If we are tempted to call it 'single,' that's probably because a person is a unity, a focus of praise and blame. We explain what a person does by reference to a single system of beliefs, unified by the norm that such beliefs don't contradict one another.
Sorry, matey. You are reminding me of my cat when she no longer chases the red dot but only stares at it. I feel as old as yonder elm.
I read the question and started thinking about 'the mind'.
But perhaps I need also to think about 'thing', 'single thing', 'or' and 'have parts'. A sphere is (plausibly) a single thing. And it has whatever parts I decide to split it into, e.g. two hemispheres. Does the sphere 'have' those parts or did I just impose parts on the sphere which had no parts at all until I intervened? So, the word 'or' in the question may be misleading - being a single thing and having parts may not be exclusive categories.
I congratulated my friend on getting a new job. Was that congratulation a thing? Is it still a thing? The congratulation was not a nothing. If it is a thing, I wonder whether it makes sense to wonder whether it has parts. If it is not a thing, then I wonder what criteria to apply to - lets say, things - to decide whether or not they are things. Are numbers things? Rankings in sport? Political offices?
"Is the office of President of the USA a single thing, or does it have parts? If it has parts, what are they? Are its parts tied to the person of the President?" It may be that the OP questions make as much or as little sense as that.
We might find out that the mind is not a thing at all and not a nothing either.
On the one hand, when one does separate the halves of the brain, one can see evidence of a division of mind.
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/roger-sperrys-split-brain-experiments-1959-1968
But on the other, since it seems to be merely a matter of connection and communication, the separation of my mind from your mind is a trivial matter, and mind is more like water than like anything discrete and separate, and if only we could communicate better we would all be of one mind.
Isn't there an existential claim hiding there that needs justification in its own right...? "immaterial soul"?
Probably read this or something similar here on the forum... Mind is to body much like what digestion is to stomach.
Thinking is an activity. Something does it. And the thing that does thinking is called 'a mind'.
You keep making category errors. A mind is a thing. An object. It is that which has mental states. That is why they are called mental states. States. Of. Mind.
There is a question over what kind of thing it is.
Our reason is our only source of insight into reality.
Our reason tells us that our minds are immaterial things (that's what a 'soul' is - an immaterial mind).
One of the ways in which it does this is to tell us that minds are indivisible. Half a mind makes no sense.
If something is indivisible then it is immaterial.
Why?
Because if something is extended in space, then it can be divided, for any region of space is infinitely divisible (which is a huge problem for the coherence of materialism about anything).
Thus, our minds appear to be immaterial things, for that is what our reason says about them.
That's positive evidence. There is a lot of it.
There's none that our minds are material. None. Prove me wrong.
:up:
:up:
All things are not subject to the same the same ways of conception, of thinking about them. If the mind is understood to be a function of the brain (and a function is a thing, although not a physical thing in the sense of being a physical object directly discernible by the senses) or better, a set of functions, then to divide the general faculty of mind into specific faculties is perfectly in order.
The body, considered as a set of functions rather than as a mere thing (in the sense of being an object of the senses) can also be divided into functions: walking, running, digestion, respiration, excretion and so on.
So if the mind is the set of what we think of as mental faculties of the body, as opposed to the obviously physical faculties outlined above, then "faculties of perception, reason and so on" can reasonably be understood to be faculties or functions of the body, which all together make up the overall faculty or function of the body we call "mind".
:up:
Yes, it's a great book; I don't know how many years ago I read it, twenty maybe, and I don't remember too much of it specifically now, but it made a powerful impression on me. Around the same time I read a work by Arthur Koestler titled The Ghost in the Machine (a term coined by Ryle) which was also a pretty good read, if my dim impressions of it now are anything to go by. Maybe I'll revisit those two books, so thanks for the reminder: I'm pretty sure I still have them somewhere.
The term 'ghost in the machine' reminds us that it was Descartes who first thought of the body as a machine animated by a ghostly, incorporeal substance; the mind. Descartes has much to answer for in the tradition of thought that understands animals to be unfeeling machines, on account of the idea that they do not possess the faculty of rationality, which distinguishes the crown of creation, man, from them and justifies using them in whatever ways satisfy our need or desire.
Actually just really read Descartes lately. Of course I was aware of his ideas, but it was useful to see them in context. As you may remember, he also wanted us to be 'lords and masters and nature' and fantasized about great advances in medicine, very Baconian. His analysis of light and its effect on the eye and the mind was brilliant.
Quoting Janus
Indeed. This is maybe the worst part of his thinking, perhaps a byproduct of what I think was a typical evasion of the time...namely rescuing the soul from a Newtonian determinism. I respect Spinoza and Hobbes for just accepting the deterministic implications and, in their own ways, avoiding the gulf between body and mind.
So, the mind 'has' faculties. It is not a set of faculties. That's a category error.
Minds 'have' states - they're called mental states for that very reason. A mental state is a 'state of mind'. That is, a state a mind can be in.
Minds do not, in my view, have 'funtions' as that supposes that they were made for some purpose, whereas they are not 'made' at all.
But nevertheless, it is always something that has a function, be it a person or a process or whatever. And it is a category error to confuse the function with the person whose function it is.
It is ironic that someone here has mentioned Ryle - someone who clearly hasn't read him or read him and understood him - for this was a point he made over and over.
Minds are things. There are things. And minds are among them. What kind of a thing is what philosophers debate. Materialists think minds are material things and immaterialists and dualists think they are immaterial things. That's what the debate is over.
Even a functionalist about the mind is not someone who identifies the mind with a set of functions. Rather they are someone who thinks that two functionally isomorphic systems will both have mental states if one them does. The mind remains a thing, the functionalism is simply a claim about what governs whether a thing has mental states (and thus whether a thing is a mind or not).
Yes, and this kind of delusional thinking is what has led us to the situation we find ourselves in today.
Quoting Pie
I agree that would be a motivation for this kind of thinking; the desire to separate us from nature in order to justify the rectitude of the idea of free will and accountability, as I recall Nietzsche points out in Twilight of the Idols.
This is too simplistic, since it is obvious that mind is not a material things in the sense of being an object of the senses, which is the common definition of a material thing. It is too simplistic to think that if the mind is not a material thing in this sense that it must be an immaterial thing; where immaterial thing (substance) is thought as somehow analogous to material thing (substance). This reification gives rise to the idea of immaterial substance, and if I recall correctly (it's a long time since I read the book) this is something Ryle explicitly points out in Concept of Mind.
Quoting Bartricks
Not at all. You seem to be projecting your own propensities onto me. I don't have time to address anything else you said right now; I have to work. Perhaps I'll come back to it later.
I'm ambivalent about the 'lords and masters' idea. I think we want access to nutritious food, effective medicine, protection from storms, etc., but we end up with side-effects like polution, global warming, the possibility of a panopticonic dystopia, etc.
Quoting Janus
Indeed. And that reminds me that Fichte and Kant were quite concerned with this. I suspect it was one of 'the' problems of the day, somehow embracing Newton and Christianity at the same time.
The debate is over whether this is what the debate is over. The deeper issue is your fixation on an obsolete dichotomy. How much phlogiston's in an angel's fart ?
We might say that a person thinks with their mind. But whatever we decide, we should (again) be wary of whether we are just teaching some useless idiolect of English to one another.
In other words, is your claim synthetic or analytic? It's all too easy to make grand 'discoveries' that end up about as informative as 'bachelors are unmarried males.'
The way I see it it is the rise of capitalism-enabling technology which has brought us to this culmination of the largely Christian notion of humanity as masters of nature, which is beginning to look like an ironic caricature and now we find ourselves in a situation wherein we will be shown just how delusional that notion is.
I think "nutritious food, effective medicine, protection from storms" and other "goods" are possible without capitalist driven technocracy, but not on the population scales we have now. So, we have ignorantly dug a hole I don't believe we will be able to "science" our way out of, a situation which there doesn't seem to be any other way out of now, either, other than catastrophe and collapse. Time will tell how long it will take for that to come to fruition. .
Quoting Pie
:up:
That is not what I see with Christian culture, with all its anti-science shit. If any demographic views itself as master of nature, it would be atheistic-leftist types with all their science shit. Maybe you can elaborate.
This reminds me of Feuerbach's interpretation. God is above and distinct from nature, hence the prohibition of (nature-referencing) images of the divine. While a demiurge might shape what's already there, the God of the Christians creates from nothing, revealing the essence of nature as nothingness. As Stirner put it, who linked such nature-denying Christians to a type of sceptic, "all things are nothing to me."
Perhaps we should distinguish between a sense of human entitlement (lords and masters, gifted this garden by god) from the adoption of norms governing claims (we ought to be rational).
Conservatives are (in my experience) less likely to care about the treatment of pigs and chickens. That's anecdotal, and I'm willing to adjust my prejudice. I connect this more generally to a conservative reluctance to see the human species as continuous with the rest of the animal kingdom. In practical terms, this might manifest as a resentment of protections of an endangered species, if they interfere with profit.
It is not simplistic at all, for they exhaust the alternatives. And that's not the definition of a material thing. An immaterialist does not deny the objects of the senses, yet they deny materialism.
Materialism is the view that there exist extra-mental extended things.
And any and all of those who think conscious states are states of the brain are holders of the view that the mind is the brain or some part of it (or whtaever they take the mental states to be supervening on or whatever ghastly term they employ). I've explained why and it is tedious to have to keep repeating things.
All you're saying is "we should be wary of making mistakes". Er, yes. So? Clearly the implication is that you think I've made one. Well, locate it and defend your claim that it is a mistake. At the moment you're trying to have your cake and eat it. You're making very general claims - such as that we should be wary of making mistakes - without actually locating any mistake. So you're implying I'm making mistakes, but you're not saying what mistake I am making. I can't attack fog.
It's not 'our reason' but merely a piece of the philosophical tradition (centered on Descartes) that tells you (not us) that souls are immaterial minds. As mentioned above, this questionable assumption was probably motivated by a fear of Newtonian physics swallowing the domain of religion and threatening the idea of free will, the supernatural, etc.
It's simply not necessary to take any position on issues that now seem dated and pointless. Nor must we adopt dichotomies like mental/material as profound laws of the cosmos or human cognition. In other words :
[quote=Austin]
It is worth bearing in mind the general rule that we must not expect to find simple labels for complicated cases however well-equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction.
...
We say, for example, that a certain statement is exaggerated or vague or bold, a description somewhat rough or misleading or not very good, an account rather general or too concise. In cases like these it is pointless to insist on deciding in simple terms whether the statement is true or false. Is it true or false that Belfast is north of London? That the galaxy is the shape of a fried egg? That Beethoven was a drunkard? That Wellington won the battle of Waterloo? There are various degrees and dimensions of success in making statements: the statements fit the facts always more or less loosely, in different ways on different occasions for different intents and purposes.
...
First, words are our tools, and, as a minimum, we should use clean tools: we should know what we mean and what we do not, and we must forearm ourselves against the traps that language sets us. Secondly, words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can re-look at the world without blinkers. Thirdly, and more hopefully, our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth making, in the lifetimes of many generations: these surely are likely to be more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoonthe most favoured alternative method.
[/quote]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/austin-jl/#LangTrut
For instance, 'material' and 'mental' work well enough in practical contexts, but wringing them metaphysically for eternal knowledge juice might not get us anywhere.
All material things are objects of the senses. From the materialists' idea that material things are objects of the senses it does not follow that anyone who believe there are objects of the senses must beleive they are material; so if it is a fact that immaterialists deny materialism, that constitutes no problem for the common notion of materialism.
Quoting Bartricks
This is not true; functionalists think there is a coherent distinction between mind and brain. The mind is not part of the brain but the function, understood from a phenomenological, not an objectivist, standpoint, of the whole brain. As far back as Spinoza mind and brain, and more generally mind and matter, or cogitans and extensa have been understood to be the one thing understood from different perspectives.
Spinoza admired and was influenced by Descartes, but he was smart enough to see through Descartes' reificational delusions that mind and matter are two different substances.
You're just contradicting what I just said. LIke I say, you clealy think the fact I have said something is sufficient for it to be mistaken. I'm published on this stuff, for christ's sake!
Now, once again: an immaterialist believes in the objects of the senses. So, if you define a materailst as someone who believes in the objects of the senses, then an immaterialist turns out to be a materialist.
Do you see why that's not the correct definition?
A materialist is not an immaterialist. That's what the 'im' means. They're opposites.
Yet both believe in the objects of the senses. They disagree about what they're made of.
Materialism is the view that there exists an extended mind-external realm: the material realm.
Immaterialism is the view that there is no such place and that all that exists are minds and their contents. The sensible world is made of the sensational activity of another mind. The sensible world exists as surely as it does on materialism, but it exists 'as' sensations as opposed to extended mind-exterrnal things that our sensations - some of them, some of the time - are capable of giving us some awareness of.
And some philosophers believe minds are made of extended stuff - such as our brains - and others (myself included) believe they are made of immaterial stuff.
The tradition in question is the tradition of listening to reason. All you're doing is talking about views in a dismissive tone. That's not how you refute a view.
Plato, Descartes, Berkeley - christ, shit loads of philosophers - have all employed what is called 'the indivisiblity' argument for the soul.
They were not part of a cult. They didn't know each other. They often profoundly disagreed with other aspects of the worldviews they came independently to defend. Yet they all got the rational impression that our minds are invidisible.
And virtually everyone does, in fact, for virtually everyone can acknowledge that the idea of half a mind makes no sense whatsoever.
That's very good evidence that our minds are indivisible. Our reason - the reason of humans possessed of reason throughout the history of careful thought on the matter - represents our minds to be indivisible.
Stop the cod history and try and do some actual philosophy. It's called 'the genetic fallacy' - thinking you can dismiss a view simply by describing the history of how it has come to be held.
Our reason represents our minds to be indivisible things.
That's prima facie evidence that's precisely what they are.
That means it is defeasible evidence. That's fancy for 'it could be false'.
But it means the burden of proof is on the person who thinks minds are divisible to undercut those rational intuitions.
You don't undercut a rational intuition by simply noting that it is possible for it to be false. Possibilities are not evidence. And you don't undercut them by inviting others to associate anyone who follows such evidence with people who believe in angels and phlogiston.
So, you are doing nothing in terms of addressing the case I have made for the indivisibility of the mind. You're just not engaging with it at all. It's all filler, no killer.
Are you willfully misunderstanding what I wrote? I didn't define a materialist as someone who believes in the objects of the senses, but as someone who defines them as being material. So. I am not contradicting your claim that an immaterialist may believe in the objects of the senses.
If you really are published on this, then tell us the title of your book or article; otherwise why should you be believed, and in any case, so what; there is a mountain of drivel that has been published.; being published is no guarantee of rigor or quality of thought.
Quoting Bartricks
What you call "rational intuitions" I think are imaginative intuitions arrived at by imagining an analogy between how we understand material substance and how we should understand a purported immaterial substance. 'Substance' is a very ambiguous term though.
Material substances in the sense of things like wood, metal, stone and so on are thought to be divisible because we can actually divide them. But only up to point; the fundamental particles of which they are thought to consist are not understood to be divisible. In any case, if we imagine an immaterial substance, there is no way to imagine how it could be divided.
The mistake lies in imagining an immaterial substance in the first place, because we have no clear idea of what such a thing could be. When you think about it the same goes for the more philosophical notions of material substance.
Aristotle thought all individual entities were substances in their own right; he saw substance in this sense as a kind of essence or identity, and of course that could not be divided either. To think in terms of dividing and identity, which is a concept, is simply a category error; and to reify what is merely a concept, and to imagine that it has some kind of substantive existence is also a category error; it is to commit the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness".
Quoting Janus
That's not the definition of a material thing. You said it was. It isn't. A material thing is what I said it is: a mind-external extended thing. But that means it is false, yes? Bartricks said it. Therefore it is false.
Quoting Bartricks
Some views are not even wrong, or embedded in frameworks of assumptions so rickety that they are not even worth refuting. I don't want to charge at windmills with you, affirming the background assumptions responsible for the confusion as I challenge its mere symptom, this thesis that the mind is a simple or undivided thing. So far you've not assimilated or even really acknowledged any of my criticism of your views. At this point, I don't expect much, but I persist out of curiosity.
Lots of views are this. Lots of views are that. Lots of views are mistaken. So what? What's your point?
You're implying my views are mistaken, yes? That's what you're trying to do - you want to say 'Bartick's views are wrong', but without actually having to go to the trouble of locating a mistake and making a proper criticism.
My point is that "the mind is indivisible" is (approximately) not even wrong. It's mostly useless hot air, probably religiously motivated.
The square root of Tuesday is tuna fish sandwiches ! Prove me wrong if you dare.
You keep jumping all over the place instead of addressing what I say. "A mind-external extended thing" just is an object of the senses; how else would we know it exists if not via the senses?
Quoting Pie
Bartricks constantly fails to do this with his interlocutors. I'm not sure if he's desperately trying to divert others' attention in order to protect views he's wedded to, or is simply a troll trying to get attention. His is at least a very unusual case, and I suppose that has to count for something.
An immaterialist - the opposite of a materialist - believes there are objects of the senses. So it is no part of the definition of a materialist that they believe in objects of the senses, for that would generate a contradiction.
You seem unable to distinguish between the defintiion of materialism - which is what I said it is - and the additional claim (and not part of the definition) that our senses give us some awareness of material objects.
Anyway, you're now committed to thinking that's wrong, aren't you? Bartricks said it.
You defined materialism incorrectly. Suck it up. Learn your mistake and move on.
Materialism is the view that there exist extra-mental extended objects.
It's not a view about how we're aware of them. It 's a view about what exists. That is, it is an 'ontological' view (you can drop that into conversation now) not an 'epistemological' view.
It is typically accompanied by the view that our senses give us some awareness of material objects.
But virtually no materialists think that all material things are available to the senses - atoms and so on are material, yet we cannot sensibly detect them.
And it is entirely consistent with being a materialist that one might believe that no objects of the senses are material objects, for it is entirely consistent with the thesis that one might believe we are brains in vats being artificially stimulated.
But again, because I'm saying all of this it must be wrong, right?
How are you addressing anything I said? Why am I writing posts explaining my argument again and again and again, when you don't seem to be able to address it? It's very foolish of me. I am going to stop now, because you have nothing of any philosophical content to contribute.
It's alright. I think I've found it...
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4419-7859-2_1
Im claiming that you are overrgeneralizing a popular interpretion of christiantiy, as well as @Janus. Im arguing that there are many christians that interpret the words as "man was left as caretaker, not master". It is evident in the common subordinate attitude of many Christians, which Nietzsche was appalled by.
Quoting Pie
I'm not arguing a political position here, so let's not get off course with my next question: but how is the christian positition concerning the issue of prochoice abortion (slaughtering a fetus) any different than the secular notion of cruelty towards animals ( viz: slaughtering pigs for food)? The opponents both master nature.
Being published makes nobody an authority in anything. Fuck em. This is TPF, I say: say what you have to say here, there is nothing stopping you other than your own bullshit that will never fly.
Maybe you are a stoopid poopu dummy head. That is not a reason to stop posting your genius philosophies.
One does not need to be a genius to see that this argument is sound:
1. If my mind is a material thing, then it is divisible
2. My mind is not divisible
3. Therefore, my mind is not a material thing
Premise 1 is clearly true, for a material thing is, by definition, extended in space and any region of space can be divided.
And premise 2 is also manifest to reason, as half a mind makes no sense.
The conclusion follows as a matter of logic.
Sorry if the conclusion is inconvenient, but there you go - the truth sometimes is.
I don't dispute that. It's a big tent.
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
To me we'd look not at the common desire to play lord and master but rather to whether or not human beings are understood to be continuous with or radically distinct from the rest of nature. To my knowledge, few conservatives are concerned with the factory farming of pigs, even if we have reason to believe that pigs are more sentient than fetuses. ( One can imagine an intelligent extraterrestrial species making tough decisions so that suffering is minimized, aided by a detailed science of the nervous systems involved. This thought-experiment gives us, I hope, a little distance from a bias toward the human form. )
According to whom?
Quoting Bartricks
According to whom?
Firstly. I admire your fealessness. It is a relief from all the question dodgers that dominate TPF. Keep it up. There is no quicker way to work out your arguments.
Quoting Bartricks
I only disagree with your reasoning. Not your conclusion. :cool:
Or do you want to know why they thought that any region of space can be infinitely divided?
As far as I can tell, you are leaping from 'mind' being a singular noun to some dusty ontological thesis. Do you think boats have ovaries? Can rivers smoke cigars ?
Quoting Bartricks
This is depressingly sloppy reasoning.
<< 'Mind' is a singular noun and various philosophers have speculated or argued that the mind is indivisible. Case closed. Mind is indivisible. >>
As if philosophy hasn't made progress. As if this quasi-theological confusion is still somehow state of the art. As if 'mind is indivisible' has a usefully determinate meaning or relevance in the first place. If neither Ryle nor Austin can save you from compulsive circle squaring, I doubt I'll make a dent.
But badger's pickle yellow numbers by night.
Quoting Pie
No it isn't. I mean, it may depress you. But it is not sloppy.
Your question betokens insanity on your part. Can you ask me a sane one please.
:chin: :up:
What's the end game, if we were to grant you the indivisibility of mind ? Do you turn the crank on your logic machine until God pops out?
My walls always speak to me, my sister. :kiss:
I don't see how that's relevant to my point about the badger. Have you read the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius? I haven't. I really enjoyed it.
I'm not sure if I follow. Speaking for myself, if the mind is divisible in any way at all, and you claim it is from a "mind perspective", then that's it, the debate comes to an end then and there.
You seem like a very nice interlocutor, would you be so kind as to recapitulate the debate for us late comers? Pretty please. :pray:
I think you follow fine. I'm not trying to be clever. If I get you, you are saying that mind trumps sense in all cases. Correct?
Good question! I'm all ears...
What exactly do you mean when you say the mind is divisible and also indivisible? I get that in one way it is and in another way it isn't. How exactly? Danke in advance.
My contention is quite simple: My mind is distinct from yours but that means there are at least 2 minds which shouldn't be possible if mind is indivisible.
I am only saying that from one point of view it appears indivisible, and from another it appears divisible. I am only saying that this is how it appears from differing perspectives, and I suspect that where they intersect, we may find a better depiction of the truth of it all Perhaps, if we could adquately define a third perspective, we could triangulate the reality of the mind's singularity. Any thoughts, you're very intelligent?
I missed this, one sec to respond
Sure. Since I've been here, it's pretty much @Bartricks insisting the mind is indivisible and ignoring all criticisms of his arguments, all the while insisting that others don't actually read books, etc. It's a sit-com where watching any episode prepares you for all the others. Variations on a theme.
But how do you know it is not identical? We cannot use spatiotemporal relations to define the demarcations of mind, unless you are willing to reduce mind to physical explanations. Im not.
Lol. Let me take up the mantle and argue on behalf of an indivisible mind.
:snicker:
True, take a line for example: It is divisible lengthwise but not breadthwise. Perhaps this is what you mean. Mine is (only) an analogy. Can you kindly edify me as to what the length and breadth of a line correspond to vis-à-vis mind?
We're thinking different things at the same time and some of these thoughts may be contradictory.
I should add that I even leaned in earlier in the thread and suggested that the minds are indivisible in the sense that persons are unified targets for praise and blame. It's also a norm of rationality that our beliefs are consistent. A good trained body no talky talky doublethink, in other words. In fact, we sometimes contradict ourselves, but (ideally) we adjust our beliefs when we are made aware of such contradictions. It's also our duty to adjust our beliefs if their logical consequences conflict with other, prior beliefs. In practical terms, we want to know who is making a claim in order to weight that claim properly. This is Brandom's 'scorekeeping' notion of rationality. There are fouls in the game of rationality that reduce credibility, etc. The big picture is that minds/persons strive toward cohesion and unity. From the outside they are already unified by a proper name and a reputation for sense or nonsense.
To me the following is good approach to the unity or continuity of the mind/self.
https://brinkley.blog/2020/10/19/autonomy-normativity/
Well yes, I suppose. I was leaving open the possibility that you'd supply the names of anyone who has actually studied space...
But let's look at what some other people reckoned. So two ancient Greeks from way before even the beginnings of physics had s bit of a think about it and reckoned that space is infinitely divisible, and that tells us what...? A good historical insight into the cultural beliefs of ancient Greece, perhaps.
As usual, you're supporting a premise of the form "Bartricks reckons...", by appealing to something else you reckon.
1. Leprechauns exist
2. If leprechauns exist then they're the only tiny creatures who wear pointy red hats
3. The tiny creature I just saw with a pointy red hat must have been a leprechaun.
All valid and sound.
Premise 1 is undeniable because I also believe leprechauns take the milk I put out for them and they couldn't do that if they didn't exist.
Premise 2 is undeniable because I also believe that the book I have on leprechauns is the gospel truth and it says they're the only tiny creatures who wear pointy red hats.
So the conclusion is undeniable.
Do explain to me, isaac, how it could be that an extended thing might not be divisible.
And don't be predictable and say 'physics' and then lament that philosophers don't study physics. It's very tiresome.
Easy. It seems to me that extended things are sometimes indivisible. It's what reason tells me. And, as you're so fond of reminding us, we have no other ground for knowing anything. It's you who have the burden of proof to show this self-evident fact of reason is not true.
And don't be predictable and say 'philosophers' and then lament that physicists don't study philosophy. It's very tiresome.
Imagine a region of space isaac. Now imagine half of that. See?
Space. You can divide it. Any region of space. And so too for anything occupying it.
It can be, can't it?
What if it was smaller. Oh, then it can't.
But what if we had itsy bitsy cutlery - couldn't we then divide it?
But our big chubby hands would get in the way!
Okay, so make us smaller too.
If we all shrank down, and everything else with us, would there come a size where we couldn't divide our pizzas Isaac? Does your reason say yes?
"Mr Isaac sir, we is everso hungry. Can we orphans have a slice of your big pizza? Please sir, may we?" "No, you foolish urchins. We are too small to divide things anymore. My reason says so. Below a certain size a pizza cannot be divided as is manifest to the reason of all those who have contempt for careful thought. So I will have to eat the whole thing although I cant do that either as my teeth are too small to bite through the too small pizza, despite the fact it's three times bigger than my head"
Nope. I imagine at some point that just becomes impossible. I imagine that at some point the fabric of space becomes quantised such that it ceases to be like the space I'm used to but acts rather more like something space is made of than something divisible.
Wonderful thing the imagination.
Unfortunately almost useless when determining what actually is the case.
Quoting Bartricks
Yes. That's what I just told you. My reason says that space is not infinitely divisible and what you've just described is infinite divisibility.
Some law of physics prevents it.
We can't get that tiny and still be functional objects capable of dividing other objects.
Shrinking things doesn't even make sense without a non-shrunk background against which to compare and that non-shrunk background exerts a field which restricts shrinking.
... Are just some of the ideas I've just imagined.
I might imagine a few more over tea.
It's got nothing to do with shrinking. Imagine we've always been this tiny size. How could that stop us being able to divide things?
Don't say 'physics' Isaac. Don't. That's naughty and it means you are not thinking.
I don't need to explain why I can't. It's a self-evident fact of reason. You have to explain why I can. The burden of proof is on you.
Shall I remind you...?
Quoting Bartricks
You lie when you say it is clear to your reason that the pizza cannot be divided. It can be, can't it? The idea that below a certain size it would become indivisible is utterly inconceivable.
No, the physics is entirely imagined. I haven't a clue about physics. I'm appealing entirely to reason. My reason says that you can't just keep dividing extended objects forever, it sounds ridiculous.
Since my reason said it, we take it as default true and you have to prove it's wrong.
Quoting Bartricks
I'm conceiving of it right now. Can't be held responsible for your lack of facility can I?
But you would be able to divide an extended thing forever. As the tiny pizza case shows.
What those two truths of reason entail is that there are no extended objects. In other words, immaterialism about the sensible world is true. I already noted this earlier. Divisibility is a huge problem for the coherence of materialism.
But that's not what this thread is about, is it? This thread is about the indivisibility of the mind.
Extended things are divisible. Your claim - your correct claim - that nothing can be infinitely divisible does not contradict that. It just entails what I said, namely that reality contains no extended things.
Now focus on this thread. Extended things are divisible and nothing our reason says implies otherwise.
Minds are indivisible
It follows that minds are not extended things.
It doesn't 'show' that at all. You thought it would remain divisible, I thought it wouldn't. Nothing's been 'shown' other than what we each reckon would be the case with a shrinking pizza.
It's patently absurd to imagine a shrinking pizza and then claim that whatever you imagine happening to it tells us anything whatsoever about what would really happen to it.
Quoting Bartricks
But reality does contain extended things. It's a self-evident fact my reason presents to me, so the burden is on you to disprove it.
I have two self-evident facts of reason. The world contains extended things, and you can't divide things forever. Therefore you can't divide extended things infinitely.
It's on you to prove that wrong, and you can't just say "it isn't" to either of my premises, because they're self-evident facts of reason.
[quote=Ms. Marple]Most interesting.[/quote]
What do you call this kinda perspective/point of view on philosophical topics? It's (very/too) general/co-opts concepts or ideas from other disciplines/etc. It also gives me the feeling of someone backed up against a wall rather than someone in control of the situation so to speak. I maybe way off the mark here but that's the impression I get.
What the heck would that look like tho?
You know how when you want to open a jar, one hand holds the jar and the other the lid and they twist against each other to get the job done? You and I would work together like that. And when the jar was open, we wouldn't be fighting over the contents.
I think the mind is divisible, but into what? And if we grasp all that the mind can be divided into, have we a more clear or even better grasp of what the mind is?
You said earlier that minds are indivisible, not made of parts. But they can be in states that are different from one another. Typically, objects change their states by rearranging their parts in some way. But for a partless immaterial soul, I'm struggling to understand how such a thing could support different states. How can it change?
Quoting Agent Smith
:up:
Quoting bert1
:clap:
Quoting Bartricks
:sweat:
How do you square "mind is not divisible" with Socrates'/Plato's idea (which is based on reason alone)?
source: https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/philosophy-mind-ancient-and-medieval
It is because you are wed to a false worldview- one not endorsed by reason, but convention - that you find this conclusion absurd and mistake its clash with convention as a clash with reason. It is not. It - the immaterialism of the sensible - is just what follows if one follows reason. The pizza exists, but not as an extended thing. For if it was an extended thing - a notion of ours that we bring to bear on our sensible experiences - then it would be capable of infinite division, something our reason denies is possible. Ni conventional thinker is going to be able to follow reason if doing so threatens their conventional beliefs, as for them they are only seeing in philosophy a resource to support their conventional beliefs. Hence why, at base, you have contempt for the subject and sneer at it.
Take a lump of clay. This lump is currently a sphere. That is a property it has. Now change it so that it is a cube. Well, it has changed shape, but nothing has been added or taken away from it. That is, the clay has not been divided.
So, let's now imagine that in fact the clay could not be divided. Well, that would be no impediment to it changing shape given we changed its shape without dividing it.
So, that the mind is indivisible is no impediment to it changing. The states of a thing are not parts of it.
Sure, but it changes its shape because of the particles in it moving around. Its ability to change shape depends on the fact that it is composed of many small parts. That doesn't disprove you of course, it may be that indivisible minds are just not like clay in the relevant respects. I was just trying to understand how something indivisible can change. You could say "Well it must do, because minds change and minds are indivisible, exactly how they do it is not my concern." I've heard people say that kind of thing on this forum about other matters (i.e. such and such must be the case somehow, and it's not the job of me as a philosopher to work out the details of how).
EDIT: maybe it's a kind of stretchiness that isn't like the stretchiness caused by chemical bonds in, say, rubber? But I'm thinking of spatially extended analogues, whereas you don't think minds are spatially extended at all (unlike me).
You are just repeating the same nonsense that I've already shown to be such without offering any counterargument.
Materialists believe that what is real is a material world of, as you say, "mind-external extended things"; things which just are the "objects of the senses". Where is the contradiction in that?
That doesn't preclude others from believing that the objects of the senses are real, but that they are not "mind-external extended things".
That reason apparently show different people different things shows that what reason show depends on its starting assumptions, which themselves are not show by reason, but appeal intuitively to some, and not to others..
But we can explain in this case. The states of a thing are not what the thing is made of. There does not begin to be a problem then. So it is really you who owes an explanation. Why do you think that a change in something's properties requires that the thing itself be divided? That, to my mind, does not even get out of the starting blocks.
Democrtius' reason told him over two thousand years ago that divisible extended things are made up of tiny indivisible extended things and that therefore extended things are not, as it is possible to imagine they are, infinitely divisible. Kant's antinomies show us that exercising pure reason may lead to contradictory conclusions.
Kant understood this to show that our sometimes contradictory understandings of appearances cannot be in accordance with any absolutely mind-independent reality. One could be counted as a materialist and yet take the indubitable existence, for us, of material objects of the senses to show nothing beyond what it shows about our own experience. Just as Kant said he is an empirical realist, he could equally consistently have said he is an empirical materialist and that materialism has no bearing on anything beyond the empirical.
I said earlier "absolutely mind-independent reality"; we cannot know anything about such a thing, but we can say that objects of the senses are mind-independent relative to our experience, because our experience shows them to be such; it seems obvious to reason that they must be independent of any individual mind, because the world will not disappear no matter how many people you remove.
What will happen if the last person and all the animals (and plants?) are removed? It seems then the world would no longer appear; but will it still be there: visible, audible and tangible, but unseen, unheard and unfelt? That is the question about which no absolute, context-free answer can sensibly be given.
Quoting Janus
:100: :smirk:
(Also corroborated by quantum physics (of which, of course, Bratshitz, is also demonstably ignorant) ).
As I understand it, lots of philosophers simply make what is already going on explicit. They foreground what in retrospect was haunting the background.
Another way to approach this is to ask what makes philosophy philosophy ? Or a philosopher a philosopher, as opposed to a mystic or a confidence man? What already counts as intellectual virtue or hygiene ? What qualities or behaviors already disqualify them from being trusted or honored? We want people to keep their story straight, to not call something black and white or round and square at the same time. We are also responsible for either adopting the implications of our beliefs or dropping those beliefs as such troublesome implications become manifest (which takes time and discussion.) (And so on.)
:fire: :up:
That's not an argument. Explain why an extended thing could not be divided.
An extended thing occupies some space. So it can be divided.
That it can be infinitely divided is a problem - not for me, but for those who believe there are extended things.
Nothing Democritus - and it is Democritus, not Democritius - said suggests any solution to the problem of the infinite divisibility of extended things.
As I see it, scientists and philosophers are both constrained by facts and the way their beliefs and hypotheses are expected to fit together. An exalted submission is perhaps involved in the pursuit of objective knowledge. As someone put it once, freedom is just living by norms that make sense to you (the right kind of prison).
Excellent and succinct parody, which'll probably leave no scratch (I speak from recent experience.)
It wasn't intended to show that, but to show that there are different reasonable ways of thinking about it. In other words your blanket mantra "reason tell us" is a vacuous nostrum.
Now you're reduced to pointing out typos?
Quoting 180 Proof
:lol: OMG, it's the lecturer from Hell! This thread has become the 'comedy relief sandbox'.
Why would I bother trying to refute something that does not seem self-evident to me, just because you claim it seems self-evident to you? On the contrary I would be wasting my time, wouldn't I? In such a situation we could not but talk past one another. You'll say I can't see what is self-evident, and I'll say that you can't see what's self-evident (that neither the infinite divisibility nor the finite divisibility of extended things is self-evident). Where will that get us?
Perhaps without realizing it, you are coming off somewhat like the theist who knows God 'directly.' It also makes no sense to refute a self-evident truth, since no inference is involved, just glowing and divine intuition.
[quote=Mark Twain]Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.[/quote]
:up:
That's how I'm taking it. It's fascinating, such complete incorrigibility.
:lol: :up: Brilliant!
Quoting Pie
Yep, it's pretty unique.
On second thought, the reason philosophers tend to grab at anything within reach, the closest object as it were, when doing philosophy (of mind) is due to the fact that they (we) are by and large ignorant, we're in the dark and it shows.
That said, the efforts are laudable and there maybe a grain or two of truth in what is essentially fumbling (for the keys) and stumbling (towards the door with the sign TRUTH).
Bonam fortunam o philosopher! We must presss on, we must!
Well said !
I try to know when I don't know, and this is largely a matter of discipline, because
[quote=H. Miller]
With a hot pad under my ass I can play the braggart or the buffoon as good as any man, no matter what sign he be born under.
[/quote]
I view what Brandom is doing as something like fixing Descartes' starting point. I don't start as a ghost in the machine, but I do start after Socrates, which is to say as a philosopher among philosophers, all of us subject (ideally anyway) to 'the force of reason', and only to that force (not [directly] to gods or states, etc.) If you ask me to prove this, because you refuse to take it on faith, then you support my point by challenging it.
Influenced by the pragmatists, I look to our practical/technological power as a species and think that we have more than a grain or two of truth or knowledge or whatever you want to call it. Various neo-Kantians accepted the existence of a science as a fact and went on from there. I think they were correct to do so. That doesn't mean we can't articulate what's going on better and better, etc. And it doesn't mean we aren't in the dark or talking nonsense as we get farther away from practical life in our talking (so I sympathize with the idea that lots of metaphysics is pointless, not even wrong.)
No. I double checked the label (the one which, of course, is attached to all our thoughts) and it said 'intuition', not 'convention'.
Not quite fully satisfied though (because I knew I was speaking to an Actual Philosopher) I checked the small print telling us where our beliefs come from (which again, as us experts know, is attached to all our beliefs), and it said 'made in Reason'.
So yeah, I've done my due diligence. Definitely an Intuition, and definitely From Reason.
Have you double-checked yours? Because your belief that extended things ought to be infinitely divisible sounds a bit like a Convention to me. You know you have to turn the beliefs upside to see the label properly, right?
Thanks, though I suspect the far greater parody is being played on us by @Bartricks himself, who'll reveal, on his 6,000th post, that his contributions were all a work of performance art lampooning the self-assurance of cult religion... It's very deep.
Nice theory!
He also tempts me to think he's a bot in his apparent failure to assimilate and respond to criticism. I imagine a bot that looks for a few keywords to choose between a small set of responses. I enjoy the insult responses most, because these are occasionally creative and surprising.
I couldn't have said it better mon ami, I really couldn't have!
As you are already aware, philosophers are, how would you say it?, frontline personnel - I compare them to explorers and as we all know, explorers are the ones who take all the risk - losing an eye, even dying are part of the job description - operating as they are in what in the game universe is known as the fog of war. Hic sunt dracones comrades, hic sunt dracones. Careful now, careful! :snicker:
Ha! I think AI has moved on. It takes a human to be quite so dogmatic!
:snicker:
Nice ! This squares with Nietzsche in the sense a 'moral pioneer' (this is the stuff that scares people and gets Spinoza in trouble) and with Popper in the sense that metaphysical theories sometimes ripen into science...so it's a bad idea to hide from everything that's ambiguous (like a stereotypical positivist who thinks anything fancy is nonsense.*)
*A healthy dose of positivistic skepticism is not so bad though.
How can something that has no extension be able to have states, as in the states of mind? Are they states of an expanse-less thing? Try to imagine that.
I do not know what you want by way of an answer. Our minds are immaterial: that's what the argument from indivisibility appears to show. And our minds have states. So, the evidence is that immaterial things have states. I do not owe an account of 'how' that could be the case - it clearly 'is' the case.
Furthermore, when it comes to some sensible object - a piece of cheese, say - it makes sense to wonder what it might feel like, or taste like, given that one can see it (or of something one is only touching, it makes sense to wonder what it might look like). But it clearly makes no sense to wonder what it thinks like.
So, it seems that our reason represents sensible objects to be things that have states such as shape, and size and colour and so on, but not mental states.
And when it comes to our minds it seems to make no sense to wonder what they look like, or smell like, or taste like, or what colour they are. And so our reason seems to represent those things that have mental states positively not to have sensible states.
Quoting Daniel
I imagine you have a mind. And you imagine I do. When you imagine that, what colour and size and texture do you imagine my mind to have? None,yes? You imagine a thing that is in a state of thought, rather than something that has sensible states.
And the question of the year award goes to Dr. Bartricks. Most excellent, monsieur, most excellent.
Allow me to attempt at an answer. The mind isn't an object like a mandarin which is orange, roundish, and rough to touch. It's more like walking (function) and has none of these properties. Nevertheless, the mind, for this reason amd this reason alone, can't be considered nonphysical. Plus, pick up a Gray's anatomy book and turn the page to ambulation - you'll get an idea of how walking is divided into, well, parts, the swing phase is one such part.
Small and dark with a thick fibrous skin and many prickles, like a somewhat browned off horse-chestnut still in its outer covering.
I went to an Alternative Health Fair with a friend who spent £20 (at that time about half his weekly welfare benefits) on a 'kirlean' aura photograph together with character analysis. It said he was a very warm purple and rather too trusting and gullible. Typical Aquarius, of course.
The only alternative I've found to health is sickness; and a pile of horseshit at £20 is pretty alternatively invigorating even at todays' prices. A fair that does what it says on the tinfoil hat.
If the mind is divisible, show me the pieces its divided into!
Cognitions, subcognitions and metacognitions.
:up: :100:
How do you know that these are not just what the mind does like how I eat, work, sleep, etc.? Good question? :snicker:
A mind (i.e. minding) is what a sufficiently complex brain does. That's how I know (re: cog-sci master's degree). Read D. Kahneman. Ciao. :yawn:
I see; so if I drive, play golf ( :grin: ) and eat pizza, I'm 3 people? :sweat:
:up:
Wonderful! Which year, if I may be so bold as to inquire?
So, I would have to say pretty conclusively that the mind is a complex entity, i.e. composed of multiple components. And the evidence suggests that it is, in some sense, divisible.
:up: Good to know there are highly qualified folks around here!
This has to be one of the best ripostes ever.
Nor can it be divided evenly, only through sectors and sphering can a even mind division be achieved.
I want to stop smoking.
I want a cigarette.
I don't want to live.
I am afraid to die.
Any other internal conflict, ie any cause of stress. Stress, physically, is nothing other than 2 or more opposing forces in stasis. Muscle tension opposes gravity to enable one to stand. Mental stress presupposes parts of the mind.
:lol:
If I may utilize your fine logic, half a banana is still a banana.
What is the mind made of that it can't be divided?
Okay. Going alphabetically, what comes after banana?
I don't know what you can conceive of as I so not have access to the content of your mind, so you need to tell me what comes next. But it will be divisible and thus won't be a mind.
Not everything can be made of other things. So there must be some simples from which all else is made. And it would seem we ourselves are simples.
How about boner.
I have to ask; how the fuck do you divide a boner?
Daniel raises a salient point; how does one maintain a erection after a boner is divided?
What follows? Any ideas?
Maybe with the help of a taxidermist.
0 = the mind; or the mind and 0 belong to the same category of things?
That feels right!
I imagine that a hemispherectomy aint no walk in the park either.
Quoting praxis
One side-effect of split-brain surgery is two distinct minds (i.e. phenomenal self models) with personalities which can diverge over time. Also, split personality disorder demonstrates the "divisibility" of human mind.
Those that recall MarsMan, will be familiar with the idea of mind as a 'noncount noun', and in this way it makes sense to me that the mind of a mouse is complete as the mind of any human; big or small the cup is always filled with water and water is everywhere the same and in that sense indivisible.
Interesting. What's the cup, in this analogy?
Mmm. I asked because I happened to be reading this thread in the middle of a conversation I was having with @Janus about mental events. It struck me that it's odd to assume mental events are different to brain activity in one sense (in the sense that phenomenology can give us true statements about mental events without being constrained by neuroscience), but then have one's concept of the mental constrained again by science in it's 'en-cuppedness' (to use your analogy).
Why the cup? Why not just the great sea of minds? As I said on the other thread, it sometimes seems to me that my wife knows what I'm thinking. It's only science that tells me she can't. So if science doesn't restrict what mind is (only brain), then why not ditch the idea that minds are private at all, or singular, or anything.
Maybe it's a colander?
I cannot say why. But I observe, as a matter of fact, everywhere but the internet and the phone, that minds are always embodied. Without embodiment there would indeed be nothing but a sea of mind, - at least that is the suggestion (sea of mind, not sea of minds), but the separation of physical senses into these eyes and those eyes produces the appearance of separation as the virtual 'point of view' that is each of our separate identities, together with the illusion of its indivisibility.
Say what ?
You must mean [math] 0 ^ {-1} [/math] isn't defined, (roughly) because of the last part of your statement. In other words, [math] f(x) = 0x = 0 [/math] is not one-to-one and hence not invertible.
Well yes, I suppose it is; my mind pours out here and drips onto your screen, to be absorbed by your mind, and vice versa. They call it 'social being'.
I suggest that we understand the self primarily in normative terms, as a locus of responsibility. I ought to keep my story straight (maintain a coherent set of beliefs), report simple facts reliably, keep my promises...
:chin:
You observe minds? This is the empiricism creeping in. Once you let it in, any talk of 'mind seas' has to go.
You can observe brains are embodied. But then there's no brain sea.
Quoting unenlightened
That's more like it. Out go private minds!
Interesting. My personal view is that the self is a modeling assumption used to delineate non-entropic forces from entropic ones. It locates the boundary between the system which is to be retained and the forces which would reduce its improbable structure to a nice even Gaussian distribution of variables.
But... Each to their own...
Different uses for different contexts ! I like your version...reminds me of @apokrisis's. But consider how selves function here on the forum. We track claims, hold one another to coherence norms, and just generally keep score.
Division by zero isn't allowed because zero has too many divisors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_divisor
Yeah, I think your version works socially. It also explains ideas like belonging (I have responsibility for this item), offenses against the person (it's not your responsibility to put my body in some location), etc...
There's a lot going for it.
I like yours too.
FWIW, I'm largely paraphrasing Robert Brandom who finds his own sources in Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Hegel. According to Brandom, Hegel's accomplishment was describing how groups could be bound by the norms that they were ( eventually self-consciously ) co-creating in the first place.
Well if we're 'fessing up to our plagiarism, mine's basically a paraphrasing of active inference accounts of self-organising systems.
I didn't even know that Hegel had so much as an opinion on groups and norms... You learn something new every day...
No. I have never seen a brain, only models, and possibly a piece of meat on a butcher's slab that I failed to recognise. I see your posts, and I assume you speak your mind as I do. I converse with other embodied minds and interact with animal embodied minds.
I think it would be strange to suggest that your mind is (or is inside) my computer screen.
But you've never seen a mind either, yet you infer their existence quite happily. I'd have thought even the butcher's slab was better evidence for the existence of brains than my post is for the existence of minds.
The point is that if you want 'minds', then have at them, but if they're this spooky stuff which cannot be seen, touched or otherwise amenable to empirical investigation, then they're not constrained by the world of objects (bodies, skulls, space-time). If they are that way constrained, then they're constrained by all of the empirical world, not just the biology you learned in college.
Everything has parts. Even an atom, which in the old times was supposed to be indivisible. (Ancient Greek: a- (= not) + tomi (= cut).)
Then, asking if something is a single thing or it has parts is not a valid question because one does not exclude the other. My body is a single object but it also has parts. This reply consists of a single message which however has parts. .
Then, you have to clarify the kind of parts you are looking for. A sentence consists of words (one kind), letters (another kind), symbols (another kind), syntax parts (another kind). All these have a different function and belong to a different linguistic field.
So, mind too consists of a lot of things, of a totally different nature: memory, feelings, thoughts, etc., as well as functions: perception, thinking, imagining, reasoning, etc. Yet, it is referred to as a single thing.
Yes, and livers and kidneys too, I guess. Am I talking to a piece of meat here? Or why are we discussing meat in a thread about minds?
Well yes. We argue about the properties that piece of meat has, but a piece of meat I certainly am.
Or... we could say I'm a mind, some metaphysical construct. I don't care which, I'm quite happy with the whole 'mind' narrative. But in this second case, why constrain the mind by some (but not all) of our empirical observations?
Neither it's controversy, nor its originality were my target. Meat is uncontestedly empirical. Bound by the laws of physics, chemistry, biology... We do not assume meat can detect angels, or have a soul.
Mind (as you're using it) is not so bound. People regularly do assume it can do all sorts of things our current scientific understanding denies of mere meat.
So why bind it to a body on empirical grounds? You've not constrained it on any other empirical grounds (such as the discoveries of neuroscience). I'm just trying to understand why you've picked some empirical observations to constrain the mind, but not others.
Fair enough. I thought the rhetoric was clear, but my apologies. What you've actually been saying is...
Quoting unenlightened
Quoting unenlightened
Quoting unenlightened
...are you claiming that is all empirical scientific fact? If not, then the argument remains the same. why constrain 'mind' by some empirical facts and not others?
If the distinguishing characteristic of spooky stuff is that which cannot be seen or touched, then your worldly examples of space and time would actually be spooky stuff.
You assert without explanation why a thing that is constrained by some physical forces must be constrained by all physical forces. That is, just because minds cannot be seen but brains can does not mean that minds cannot share other properties of brains, like that both exist in space and time.
And that is the bigger problem. Space and time are not properties at all but are required elements for comprehension. A dog that exists in neither space nor time does not exist, so it's hard to call it "a dog that exists." By the same token, for a mind to exist, it must exist in space and time, but because it shares the requirement with brains that it exist in space and time doesn't mean it is subject to all the same scientific descriptions.
And speaking of what is needed for comprehension speaks to yet another thing that we cannot see or touch, which is comprehension itself. Comprehension does, however, exist somewhere (between my hat and bow tie) and at some time (like right now) because if it didn't, it wouldn't exist.
It was only intended to be rhetorical. The division I'm talking about (which is clear from the rest of my posts) is empirical science in general. I assume you're comfortable with the fact that we have empirical observations demonstrating space and time?
Quoting Hanover
Not asserting. Asking. If a thing is constrained by some physical laws, why not all of them?
Quoting Hanover
Absolutely. I'm not making the claim that it must share all the same physical restrictions. I'm asking why people think is doesn't (or does - share some of them).
Do you not find it at all odd that the physical restrictions people tend to think the mind shares are all the easy ones they learnt in school (it's in a body, we can't read other people's, it stops when you're unconscious...) and the ones they reject are all the hard ones that only neuroscientists and cognitive scientists tend to understand?
:up:
So humor me. Demonstrate time for me. It seems I must start with the presumption that there is time or else I won't be able to understand anything you're talking about. Quoting Isaac
Because I don't think time and space are simply physical laws, but they are part of a most fundamental conceptual framework that nothing can be understood without their presumption. Existence is not a property of something and time and space are fundamental components of existence. If you have a dog without hair, you have a hairless dog. If you have a dog outside space and outside time, it exists no where at no time, meaning you don't have dog at all.
And this is part of the bigger question about objects generally in terms of how much is the physical object and how much is imposed by our perceptions and conceptual framework.
So, the reason you can't have an existing mind that does not occur in space or time is because such a mind is by definition not in existence.Quoting Isaac
I don't think it odd at all. I see the things near my eyes and hear what is near my ears. Everywhere I experience a perception occurs right where my body is. And we don't read other people's minds. We hear what they tell us, watch how they gesture, and we notice all sorts of behavioral manifestations that often tell us what they might be thinking, but we don't see directly into their mind, as if to see a head is the same as to see a mind.
Way above my level of understanding. I trust the scientists on the matter. If I'm wrong then we merely need to drop 'time' from my list. It doesn't affect the argument.
Quoting Hanover
That all makes sense.
Quoting Hanover
Don't we? When I feel I know what someone else is thinking, maybe I'm reading their mind. Why not?
Sure, we know what people are thinking based upon their behaviors, and one such behavior is when they tell us. They may also use gestures, or they may reveal it from expressions. You may also know that someone is thinking about eating by watching them make a sandwich or perhaps they grab their car keys right at lunch time and make their way out of the house. All of that is basic behaviorism, but we don't equate the communicative behavior with the internal state.
That is, their mind experienced a desire to want to eat. That wanting to eat was a state of being and you didn't experience their state of being. Their mind remains to you a black box accessible to you only to the extent they manifest it in some sort of behavior. A person can mute or fake their behaviors, but just because I remain stoical doesn't mean I'm not suffering. The suffering is one thing, the exhibition of that suffering another.
So, when you say "mind reading" in normal discourse, people generally think of the paranormal or some sort of telepathy, as if the internal state streams from them to you. If you mean that, then no, I don't think you can mind read.
:smirk:
I did mean that, I was just wondering why not.
We have five senses, and unless you reduce your communication to where it can be sensed by one of my senses, I won't be able to perceive it. Unless your behavior is visible, audible, tangible, tasteable, or smellable, how am I supposed to know it happened? If you were hungry and that emitted electrical activity from your brain into my brain, then I could read your mind, but that would require my having the sense to read electrical brain activity, which, alas, I don't.
I was told once (although I don't feel like looking it up), that they determined that pigeons were able to find their way back home due to magnetic material they found in their brain that acted as a compass. By putting a magnet on the pigeons head, they could disorient the pigeon. So, it is possible that other organisms have all sorts of unusual ways of sensing external activity, but that still comes down to following the laws of physics.
But you know this, so what is the real question here? Are you asking why we're confined to the laws of physics? That sounds like a question of why is the world like it is. I guess it just got made that way. If you are denying it actually has been made that way, then you'll need to show some evidence that you can read minds. So, let us begin. What am I thinking about?
Wrong. I was thinking about twice baked potatoes with cheese.
I do share your sentiment though that I too can read my wife's mind. She wants me to take out the garbage. I can just feel it.
Well: what is mind?
I've obviously not made myself very clear, my apologies.
You say we only have five senses and that we get our information from those senses. You say " If you were hungry and that emitted electrical activity from your brain into my brain, then I could read your mind, but that would require my having the sense to read electrical brain activity, which, alas, I don't."
Where did you get this information from? Presumably school biology? I don't know how far your human sciences instruction has gone, so we'll plump for the middle (college level) and you can correct me if I'm wrong.
I have a theory about the mind. My theory is that minds can communicate to other minds. You say no - that theory cannot be true because... "If you were hungry and that emitted electrical activity from your brain into my brain, then I could read your mind, but that would require my having the sense to read electrical brain activity, which, alas, I don't."
In other words, my theory, about minds, cannot be true because your college science says that brain don't work that way.
Now @unenlightened has a theory about minds, that minds might all be part of a sea of minds to which they return. Can we similarly use our college science to say - that theory can't be true, brains don't work that way?
Now the phenomenologist has a theory about minds, they say that because it seems like they experience the colour yellow, they do, in fact, experience the colour yellow. I say, that theory can't be true because my post-graduate science says brains don't work that way. The response is invariably a diatribe about how minds are not brains, how brain sciences are only speculative, how it's all about interpretation, a couple of mentions of Kuhn, and usually more than one accusation of scientism thrown in for good measure.
The person suggesting minds can do something (mind-read) which is denied by college science is a crackpot. A lunatic, not to be taken seriously. A woo-merchant.
The person suggesting minds can do something (say, gain knowledge of certain thought processes by introspection) which is denied by post-graduate level science is a philosopher, wiser and more open-minded than the overly scientistic post-grad.
I'm enquiring about the reasons for the difference of approach. What is it about college-level science about brains which gets a free pass, while post-graduate level science is rejected as not applying to minds?
You don't seem to know the difference between a theory and an analogy, which i used to try and make sense of what other people have been saying. So I'd prefer that you just leave me out of your discussions altogether.
You don't seem to know the difference between being mentioned as a courtesy and being 'involved in my discussion' so I'd prefer you leave me out of your tribal border disputes altogether.
I was discussing the nature of my enquiry with @Hanover, that enquiry derived from my interpretation of something you said, and I don't think it polite to talk about other people without involving them.
If I've misinterpreted what you said, you could just say so. You know, like normal people having a civil discussion would. But hey, then you'd miss out on the chance to waive your little flag so...
I just this moment did say so. Again. You made a false claim about me which I wanted to deny. I have denied it. And Now I ask you, again, not to talk about me, as you do "misinterpret" me rather too often. I hope that, at least, is clear and understandable.
This is a public discussion forum. If you don't want the members of it to interpret and respond to your posts then I suggest you stop posting them.
If you want a private club wherein you can exclude those whose views you don't like, then there are plenty of means by which you can achieve that.
Using a public forum and excluding people one by one is neither civil, nor efficient.
I don't want YOU to MISINTERPRET and MISREPRESENT my posts. I cannot stop you, and I am not going to stop posting, but I have asked. I understand that you may not do as I wish, but I will endeavour to continue my conversations with careful readers and charitable interpreters notwithstanding your intransigence.
Then write more clearly.
Quoting unenlightened
You seriously don't see the hipocrisy? You read my posts and decide the misunderstanding simply must be the result of a lack of care and charity. In the same breath as you accuse me of a lack of care and charity interpreting posts.
Can I ask where your care and charity are in interpreting our misunderstandings? Maybe it's your poor quality writing? Maybe it's our radically different worldviews and so the communication barrier is that much harder. Maybe it's a little bias on your part because you have such a passionate dislike for my field, not to mention my politics...
But no, apparently none of those, it's definitely my lack of care and charity. Your own care and charity be damned.
This just isn't accurate, as if my denial of mind reading is the result of indoctrination I've been unable to rise above as you have. I deny it because I've never seen it done nor seen a study of it being done nor been made aware of a reliable account of when it's been done.
If you're going to argue in support of the paranormal, bigfoot, or the elusive white penguin, you need evidence. Your psychological evaluation that I'm just stubbornly committed to the status quo isn't evidence of anything, even if it were true.
And it's not like there isn't extensive literature attempting to prove the paranormal that I'm unaware of. I am very much aware of it, and it's extremely unpersuasive.
That's the point. You deny it because of the science you know and understand.
If you're already of the opinion that science fully constrains our theories about minds then you're not in a position to answer my enquiry.
Quoting Hanover
You reslise I'm not actually proposing mind-reading. It's a hypothetical. My point is that doing so would be no less unreasonable than certain propositions arising from, say, phenomenology. The only difference being that the former is countered by a level of science most people know and understand, the latter by a level of science many don't.
If this isn't a phenomena you've encountered, then all this will probably seem quite bizarre to you.
I'm not of that opinion.
In any event, I disagree that you can't debate varying epistemological theories just because you already have one you rely upon. That is, the fact that I use science to answer certain questions doesn't mean I'm closed minded to considering other epistemological methods.
So, make your argument for why you believe in mind reading and establish how your method of knowing that is consistent with how you know other things, and if it's not, why such is a special class deserving of special rules.
Then I puzzled as to why you're so confused as the nature of my enquiry. If you use some science to constrain theories about the mind, and not other science, then does it really seem odd that someone might ask why, and how you choose?
Quoting Hanover
Hypothetically - I'm saying that if 'mind' is not a type of entity constrained by science (not the same as brain, or constrained by the way brains work), then when I feel like I know what my wife is thinking, I have absolutely no reason at all to think I don't.