Getting rid of ideas
The history of Western philosophy contains many schools of thought that attempt to argue against the existence of ideas. Generally, this is done by reducing all ideas to a single class of ideas. If we do nominalism, we say every universal is just a name. If we do fictionalism, we say that various kinds of idea (equations, languages, etc) are just fictions.
The inevitable counterargument (which crops up again every time) is, "How do you explain that class of idea?" If we can't explain what a fiction is, then what good does it do to reduce ideas to fictions? If we can't explain what a name is, then what good does it do to reduce ideas to names?
Of course, a professional philosopher can say something like, "I have no pretensions to a grand project that explains away all immaterial ideas. But in this particular problem space, my goal is merely...." and then specify some particular thing that has caught his interest.
But it seems to me that the underlying motive here, whether it enters into specific discussions or not, is a discomfort with ideas because they're immaterial. And we wind up trying to pull an immaterial rabbit out of a material hat, over and over again. It mirrors the issues with the intentionality of the mental.
The inevitable counterargument (which crops up again every time) is, "How do you explain that class of idea?" If we can't explain what a fiction is, then what good does it do to reduce ideas to fictions? If we can't explain what a name is, then what good does it do to reduce ideas to names?
Of course, a professional philosopher can say something like, "I have no pretensions to a grand project that explains away all immaterial ideas. But in this particular problem space, my goal is merely...." and then specify some particular thing that has caught his interest.
But it seems to me that the underlying motive here, whether it enters into specific discussions or not, is a discomfort with ideas because they're immaterial. And we wind up trying to pull an immaterial rabbit out of a material hat, over and over again. It mirrors the issues with the intentionality of the mental.
Comments (93)
If ideas were to all be fiction, wouldn't all true propositions then be fictitious?
As to being just names, names of what - other than the archetypes, thoughts, or else conceptualized states of being which they name?
Besides, not all ideas have ready names. These often enough get expressed via art, to includes poetry, music, and painting.
Asking these two questions as someone who upholds ideas to be real existents.
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I'll argue that the two categories of real existents in the poll present a false dichotomy. I didn't vote for either option since I deem them both mistaken.
Some ideas, such as that of a circle, could be mind-dependent in terms of all coexistent minds able to so experience while simultaneously being independent of any one individual mind able to so experience. One implication will be that if this one individual mind no longer is, the mind-dependent idea - in this example, of a circle - will nevertheless continue existing unaltered.
Subsequently idea has become such a polysemic term that it defies definition. I can have ideas of all kinds from the trivial to the profound, all conceived simply as an act of thought. The consequence of which is to reduce any sense of idea to the psychological. So I think to get some clarity on the issue the OP is tackling Ill refer to a passage by A-T philosopher Edward Feser, which refers to concepts rather than ideas:
Concept in this passage is nearer to the sense of idea that was called into question by nominalism in the first place, by way of the reaction against scholastic realism.
[quote=Richard Weaver, Ideas have Consequences] Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.[/quote]
Structure, arrangement, process, are not materials they are aspects of material. Ideas are real but not material. a plague therefore on all your possibilities.
I get what you're trying to do reduce the abstract to the concrete. It ain't gonna work. Any reduction that successfully reduces abstracta fails to explain them, and any reduction that sufficiently explains them fails to reduce them.
Case in point: can a description be spoken more than once? If we both use the same description, which set of physical events is the description? You'll find that your response to that question either introduces some new abstraction to get rid of ideas, or fails to explain multiple realizability of abstractions.
What exists are the actual elements and properties of things, including texts and pictures, of which we can construct abstract things. That's construction, not reduction.
Quoting Pneumenon
Any actual set that exemplifies the description.
Basically, the argument is that signs, which would correspond to ideas/universals we attribute to objects (e.g. triangularity, greenness, etc.), exist everywhere in nature (C.S. Pierce's assertion, but also an idea one can find in medieval thinkers and arguably even in Saint Augustine vis-á-vis his understanding of the "material hypostasis" of reality).
Take for example the experience of walking into a forest clearing and seeing a eucalyptus tree. There, ambient light is reflecting off the tree. The tree reflects some wave lengths more than others, and the result is an implicit sign in the pattern of energy that results. This pattern is readily recognizable by us (through our eyes and nervous system) as the shape of the tree, the greeness of its leaves, etc. Thus, we can say that the intentional sign (what the pattern of matter/energy means to living creatures) is implicit in the "medium," i.e., the relevant volume of space-time/fields.
What the author points out is that the move to limit signs to only involving living things, (something seen in Deacon, etc.) tends to involve on trading off Chinese Room intuitions. But this means that arguments about the special sui generis sign-interpreting powers of life also tend to fall victim to all the arguments against the Chinese Room, primarily that the thought experiment cashes out due to a hidden homunculus/dualism at its core.
Against this, we can set the equally intuitive proposition that words in a book do not cease to be signs when the book is closed and no living creature can see them. The letters "cat" in this post don't cease to mean what they mean when no one is reading this post.
From this intuition, we can develop the idea of virtual signs. These are patterns of matter/energy, or perhaps better yet, "physical information" that contain intentional signs, signs which are implicit in the medium in which they exist.
This is an appealing idea in that it seems to jive better with the idea that consciousness is strongly emergent. If it is strongly emergent, then it should be fundemental in some sense. But at the same time, consciousness should still "follow from" the nature of what it emerges from. It shouldn't be a black box, and indeed the triumphs of modern cognitive and neuroscience would caution against any totally "black box," view of the emergence of conciousness.
The key point is that signs already exist for conciousness to engage with as an essential part of nature.
I think this gets something important right. However, it still seems to be missing things. There is some good work on how relative indiscenibility, "perspective" essentially, plays a role in basic non-living physical phenomena (e.g. Scott Mueller). Rovelli's work on describing entanglement can also be tweaked into a semiotic understanding. It would be nice to see these ideas brought to bear too, because I think a theory of pansemiosis needs to better clarify what is unique in life, and what is not so unique, but rather builds on the nature of non-living systems.
There are also some intriguing references to the idea of semiosis in non-living complex dissipative systems I might follow up on.
Real... neither only in the mind nor mind independent. It's a matter of what ideas consist of.
Circular definition.
Again, it's not gonna work.
The list you provide is quite good, but I think an option of "other" without qualifications would've been useful.
Ideas are as "real" as anything is, in fact it is what we are most acquainted with out of everything there is. Now, the problem aren't ideas per se, it's the world: that's what we really struggle with. Our best science cannot account for 95% of the universe.
And the 5% we do know is giving us a lot of problems, conceptually, theoretically and so on. So, yeah, I do think ideas are a problem - despite our intimate acquaintance with these. But the world is stranger, the mind-independent world anyway.
So, the issue as usually discussed is quite the opposite of the mainstream formulation. It's ghosts all the way down, as far as I can see.
What definition? Above I reply to your question.
Likewise, we recognize these words that we type by some (but not all) features that they possess and that we refer to as we reply. Any physical instance of a word is an example of the word. Is this not supposed to work?
The definition you gave. Go back and re-read. I'm not recapping what we just said. Re-read.
Quoting jkop
And now you're introducing "features", which are another abstraction introduced to explain the first. This is exactly what I said you'd do.
Yeah, like ..whose bright idea was it to get rid of ideas anyway???
Philosophically, I think Gilbert Ryle may have been one the modern precursors in trying to get rid of ideas. Hence "the ghost in the machine".
But more broadly, Galen Strawson points out that it was likely the psychologist John Watson Psychology as the Behaviorists Views It that established the tradition. What began quite nobely as an attempt to understand some of human psychology, by limiting itself to what could be observed - we cannot see into another person's mind - somehow morphed into the view that there is no mind or mental.
But it goes back, haven't read him closely or enough, yet Hobbes for instance, gives an impression of something like this view.
It's all based on the mistaken idea, that we know something enough to dismiss serious problems as illusions or delusions. But we don't. We don't know what a particle is, much less do we know how the brain works. Skinner's psychology, in light of this, is embarrassing.
On the one hand, it doesnt seem like there could be, but on the other, it seems impossible there isnt.
Quite so. Or very close, as I see it.
To (most) of those who don't bother with understanding a bit of modern physics, there is no problem, they are aware and experience the world.
Those who do read or listen or watch material on modern physics, the problem is immense: how could the things of physics lead to mind?
We don't know, likely will never know. But, since we are conscious, then we are forced to conclude that there is nothing in physics which prevents minds from arising, when the stuff of physics is suitably arranged.
Probably right. But the scientistsll keep stabbin at it, hoping for a happy accident.
Dont you think behaviourism was reductionist from the outset? That it was basically a Procrustean bed - because the mind couldnt be observed, and science built around observation, then it has to be excluded from consideration. (Dennett does say somewhere that his approach is basically behaviourist.)
As to how physics comes into consideration - isnt it the case that modern mathematical physics is grounded in the quantisation of measurable attributes of bodies? And that this was then taken as paradigmatic for all manner of science, culminating in what René Guenon describes as the reign of quantity? Then only what is measurable is considered significant. And furthermore the paradigm assumes the separation of observer and observed - something which has been found to be untenable in quantum physics.
Quoting Mww
Ideas, in the original sense of forms or principles, were abandoned in the late medieval period with the decline of realism about universals.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I recommend Charles Pinters Mind and the Cosmic Order. Its mainly about cognitive science but has interesting philosophical implications.
I don't know enough about the history to say. I suspect not, I don't think most phycologists as psychologists, believe this. It's not even useful at all for what they do.
In philosophy, with the bit that I've seen (not a lot - I find it stupid and insulting), the feeling I get it that this approach (behaviorism, vulgar empiricism - meaning, modern versions - sophism, etc.) stands in contrast to another tradition, which you can call Platonic, Rationalistic, etc.
The main point of contention is that either the world is, put in corny manner: either there is something special about us, or there is not. Those who think that we are special, tend to be strong believers in the importance and range of mind. Those that do not, take us to be mere machines, doing what is to be expected from the "laws of nature", such that neither mind nor nature is special.
Dennett called himself a "Neo-positivist" in one paper, so, it's not too far off.
But I need to stress, not that you don't already know this: Locke and Hume whom I have read carefully, would be insulted by how empiricism has been so distorted and mangled. These were among the best philosophers in history, virtually nothing to do with this modern mediocrity.
Quoting Wayfarer
Also very much in line with Tallis, whom you and I both admire.
I don't disagree this is what physics does, in essence. Nonetheless, I do believe that the stuff physics describes existed prior to us, and that we are made of the stuff of physics (but there's a lot more to it than physics, by an unimaginable amount), notwithstanding the many difficulties involved.
But I would agree with you, I think, in saying that, for all practical purposes, physics is not relevant to the mental, and it is related to the brain is a very basic and uninformative manner.
Years later I studied Transpersonal Psychology, which was kind of fringe, but pretty hip. I even edited the ATPA newsletter for a year or so. Abraham Maslow and other new agey kinds of subjects. I've forgotten most of it since, but liked it a lot at the time.
For sure. I don't recall how I felt about Skinner and his skin, I read him in high school. Looking back though, it's just so incredibly poor. But finding a wife is not so bad a price to pay to put it with it, I'd think. :)
Oh yeah, some fringe stuff can be very good, taken with care and salt. For literature it pays off though, and so far as I can see, a good novel is the best psychology a person can get.
Understood, and thanks. You and are much further along the philosophical evolutionary scale than I.
My point was .ideas cant be extinguished, except by defining them out of existence, or embarrassing their proponents into submission.
I find this rather puzzling. Yes, it's true, having a doctorate may make me seem to be "higher in the ladder", but all that means is that I had the time, interest and opportunity to do something I thought would be worth doing.
What bothers me to no end, is how little I know about the darn history, everything you read or contemplate leads to 20 other topics and 20 other obscure figures and it's impossible to read it all, much less know it in-depth.
On the other hand, your mastery of Kant is awe-inducing. I will read the Critique again, even more carefully, probably a commentary, it will be long and maybe I'll fail to do what I have in mind. But even if I do pull it off, I'd still be behind you.
Heck, I've read Locke, Hume and Leibniz twice, both times with quite a bit of care. And I still fear I misunderstood many, many aspects. Nowhere near what you do with Kant. The only similarity in me would be Chomsky, but he doesn't have a Critique or an Essay Concerning Human Understanding. And his linguistics stuff, once it goes beyond lay-audiences, is beyond me.
So, don't sell yourself short.
Have you... heard of Plato?
Yep, studied him a bit. Where does he say ideas are mind-independent?
Isn't all thoughts ideas? Even the idea of "Getting rid of ideas"?
Exactly, because, as pointed out we are Quoting Pneumenon
We don't need to prove that ideas exist. Everything we do and think is testament not only to their existence but also their efficacy. I just finished Deacon's Incomplete Nature, which is an excellent framework for re-integrating the fundamental aspects of intentionality across the entire physical spectrum through morphodynamics and teleodynamics.
The circular reasoning is also an idea.
It is. And rational-idealism is an idea that can be virtuously circular. Materialism isn't. Metaphysical materialism is "autologically unsound."
Yeah, I see what you mean. It would be like saying Experiencial Empiricism.
But here we are talking about just "Idea". It is convenient to name all the building blocks in the minds as "Ideas". If not, what else would be a proper name for it?
A tree I have cut down this summer, has gone from the sight. But I still can remember how it looked in my mind. So I can say I have the idea of the tree, which I cut down. Without the concept of Idea, I wouldn't know what I would call that mental image of the tree which has gone forever from the world.
Why did you write the "idea" twice? "the idea idea"? Why did you do that?
I was having the idea of the tree which was cut down this summer. The tree no longer exists in the world. This afternoon I was able to have "the idea" of the tree as an image, when it was standing in the field. I cannot call the image of the tree nothing but an idea of the tree.
Wouldn't that be syntactically correct? The word ouch accurately reflects the meaning of the idea ouch. The word idea...etc.
Nope. Ideas can mean mental images too. And even when an idea is a word, they are different. Words would be for speaking or writing. Ideas are the contents in your thoughts. Word can mean ideas, but words are not ideas themselves.
I'll put it on my list of books to read. Thanks for mentioning.
The word "ouch" reflects the idea of "ouch" sounds illogical. Words are uttered by the speaker, and it has no ability to perform reflection or consideration. They are passive entity. How does a word reflect an idea?
Sounds illogical? The essence of language is the yoking together of sign and idea. The onomatopoeiac function highlights this connection where the word becomes a symbolic projection or extension of the sound. Chirp. If the word "chirp" could be uttered by a bird, it would be exactly what it is. And, presumably, it would also represent the mental state that evoked it. By your reasoning, nothing represents an idea.
Ouch.
edit. This from the RL Stevenson short story I'm reading, perfectly expresses the sense of the synthesis or synergy of the idea and the form of expression of the idea. The description of the parson's daughter as seen by an admiring mind:
It was not possible to separate her thoughts from her appearance. The turn of her wrist, the still sound of her voice, the light in her eyes, the lines of her body, fell in tune with her grave and gentle words, like the accompaniment that sustains and harmonises the voice of the singer.
You are in deep confusion on the utterance of Ouch as a motor reaction of the verbal expression as a representation of the mental state. Your utterance of Ouch was from the motor reaction which was a pre-mental state unless it was a premeditated act.
We have wandered far astray the original point and this statement of yours isn't a rebuttal. If anything, it makes my point but tacks on an critical ad hominem for some reason. I'd suggest dropping it.
I recall that you started the deviation by putting down "the idea idea", then claiming the word of ouch reflects the idea of ouch, which fell off the cliff of the topic. :chin: :wink:
1. Subjective
2. Objective
3. Platonic
Ok. And how are you able to distinguish those? The only way you can discriminate a subjective from an objective idea is through the instrumentality of the words subjective and objective. The whole notion of an idea presupposes and entails its symbolization. Without that, it's just a "mental state".
Subjective ideas - Ideas when one thinks, imagines, recalls ...etc. The content of the subjective mental state when one thinks about something. Ideas are the elements in the propositions and judgements, but not the propositions or judgements themselves. So when one claims "The sun is bright today.", the sun, bright, today are separate ideas in one's mind, which composed the proposition.
Objective ideas - The ideas and information which exist in the public, be it known or unknown such as the number of people who have ever lived since the start of human civilisation. The number of grapes produced in Europe for the last 100 years. The total number of stars and all the celestial objects in the universe. These information / ideas do exist in the universe, but humans don't know them. They are the objective ideas.
Platonic ideas - In Plato, ideas were used to describe an object in visual perspective. Ideas are also all the universals in the world of ideas. The ideas are the real existence lasting forever, not the material objects which will soon perish.
In British empiricists like Locke, Berkeley and Hume, ideas were equivalent to perception itself. So perceiving an idea of apple meant, having an idea of apple. And also having an idea of the apple meant to be able to describe the apple linguistically.
Hence my characterization of an idea as part of an overarching performative context, versus some kind of abstract noumenal entity. The Platonic conception of form ignores the dialectic reality that universals and particulars are mutual grounds for one another (gestalt).
If I pinched you, and you screamed "ouch", then your utterance of "ouch" is not the idea of "ouch". It is a motor-system response, which is the biological nature.
However, if you thought about the word "ouch", and trying to find what would be the equivalent meaning of the word in Chinese, then it would be an idea of "ouch".
Ideas are both rooted in and grow from the soil of experience, as does language. The idea of equality is both the experiences of inequality that suggest it to the moral mind, and the expressions of tolerance, respect, etc., which it engenders.
I would point out there is a grey area where experiences become ideas. Do you see experience as fitting one of the categories?
Also there is the position of instinct in this. My cat has an instinctive response to sudden movement. But if its a familiar movement, or sound my cat doesnt have the same response as to an unfamiliar movement. Has the cat thought about this, or is it a learned instinct? What is it about the cat which enables this behaviour/experience, to an highly sensitive degree?
Is the cat thinking and if so, is it all thought, or is there a cut of point?
Which part was exactly going in a circle?
I think experience can be abstracted as ideas, but experience itself is not ideas. Ideas are the mental entities which has been abstracted in thoughts.
Quoting Punshhh
Cats appear to think, but it is difficult to grasp exactly what or how they think about due to their lack of linguistic capabilities. We can only infer their thinkings via their actions, and it usually appear to be intelligent. But it appears to be also animal instinct and evolutionary nature too.
I am not 100% sure if we could say what cats think could be classed as same class or category of human thoughts, therefore cats have ideas. If they do, then it is intelligent in animal world, but very limited compared to what human minds do.
Experience can be a vague concept too. What is your definition of experience? Can you experience experience?
Are you talking about things like whether it rises to the level of conscious awareness, and whether it includes things reflection, etc.?
Not sure, but it was my question to you from your earlier post.
Quoting Pantagruel
Remember your earlier post?
What exactly is your take on experience?
Quoting Pantagruel
You have been using the word experience in your posts a lot, so I thought you would provide the definition, which I could investigate on.
Prima facie it seems to imply an exclusive conception of the subject and object. In fact, this is an evolved inter-relationship, whose form reflects the performative-functional history of the experiencer and the experienced, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically. This is why facts are conceptually laden.
Quoting Corvus
I reviewed my posts, and, in fact, I only mentioned it one time prior to your initial question. So the conceptual burden on the term (concept) of experience didn't come from me, it came from you. For example.
Quoting Pantagruel
Could we agree experience as same meaning as "perception", which supervened into knowledge or skills?
Quoting Pantagruel
"a lot" can also mean significantly and notably, rather than "many". I presumed you must have a good definition of experience, when you were using the word in your sentence.
I think the only problem is if there is implicit assumption that perception is passive. Perception is an activity.
Really? Isn't perception passive or active, or both in some cases? You wake up in the morning, open your eyes, and you see all the things around you whether you wanted or not. Isn't that
a passive perception?
And if you were watching a live concert, and seeing and listening to the band's performance on the stage, and suddenly and unexpectedly you get to see the lighting simulation of rainbow in the back stage in the middle of the performance. Isn't that a perception both active and passive?
Well if you allow the images you see in your dreams as type of perception (which we must, I would imagine), then you would find yourself deep in the well of contradiction. Can you actively control what you see in your dreams during your sleep?
But even if you are not dreaming, there must be things that you see, which you didn't expect or want see, when you are living in the real world, as a real person.
We are the efficient causes of many organic functions over which we do not exercise voluntary control. However they are still in essence controlled by us, since that control is a key feature of organic incarnation (evolution). Just so with perception. We are pre-wired to perceive certain things in preference to others. Of course, there could be "radically new" stimuli, at least theoretically. In practical terms, such stimuli are probably only encountered under conditions of "culture shock," where the core values of an adopted culture are radically different.
Just how far we are willing to go to maintain our presuppositions about reality is illustrated by cognitive biases. The most well-known of these - confirmation bias - is exemplary. But there are loads of others that accomplish basically the same thing - prejudice enforcement.
I was not denying that perception is active, and it is an activity. I was suggesting that it is active, but also passive at times, and sometimes it can be both active and passive.
Anyhow, I was looking into my English dictionaries(Collins English Dictionary, Merriam Webster Dictionary) last night, and in there, experience is defined as skills or knowledge acquired via direct participation or observation. It seems to emphasise the skill factor.
Therefore I am wondering if experience has much to do with the epistemological element in its concept.
But think again. You keep insisting perception is active activity meaning that you can control perceiving the world and objects with your own will or desire.
If I pinched your cheek or pulled out your ear hard, then could you control the pain, into not feeling it at all or to some other feeling than the pain? What active part of perception of feeling the pain do you see in that case?
But think again. If I learn to anticipate that there will be cheek and ear pulling I can modify my activity patterns to avoid those circumstances. Perception is an amalgam of external inputs selectively rejected or embraced. Being poisoned is much more painful and deadly a perception than being pinched. But some animals develop an immunity to the poison of their chosen prey. Our existence as a receptive organism is predicated on our capacities as an active organism.
Quoting Corvus
Right. And I said I just wanted to emphasize that perception is not purely passive. Upon which it seems we can agree.
We were talking about the case where you have not been able to avoid getting pinched or pulled out the ears :D
Quoting Pantagruel
This must be some unique and rare case in the Evolution. Can't see happening in human life. Evolutionary theory has little ground for their claims anyway.
Quoting Pantagruel
There are passive features too.
Quoting Pantagruel
It sounded like you were saying that perception is purely active. It rang a bell, it can't be true.
And yet I explicitly offered that comment quite early that it was not "purely passive." Just goes to show you how perceptions can get pre-filtered.... :)
That is a pure nonsense. I never said perception is purely passive. It just proves that perception can be passive at times. :)
Quoting Pantagruel
Another wrong use of the word here - filtered can only be used for the physical entities such as a liquid, gas, light, or sound ...etc. It is not for abstract nouns such as perceptions. :D
As far as filtration being an incorrect usage, you literally couldn't be more wrong. The concept of "perceptual filters" has been around for ages. Here is the APA dictionary of Psychology link.
I have attempted to bridge the nominalist-realist problem (of ideas) by suggesting a way in which a concept (idea) evolves in the course of the practical inter-evolution of an organism and its environment, linking language, idea, and action in the context of praxis-perception. I don't know what it is that you are suggesting.
The whole problem with the OP seemed to have stemmed from the fact that the concept of idea is broad and abstract, and we are here trying to clarify.
And another thing my friend. To a quibbler, everything looks like quibbles. To a philosopher, what matters most is truth. Good day :)
Well concluded. Happy New year. :)
Thank you sir. I wish you and yours a very Happy New Year too. :grin: :pray:
... although time is an illusion. :nerd:
Right, so thoughts are the product of mental activity. While experiences dont necessarily involve mental activity for them to be experiences.
Is there a cross over, a grey area here, or a clear distinction between the two?
Cats appear to think
I bring up cats because they are doing things which we do, but without much abstract thought, if any.
So they are having experiences, learning from them and modifying their behaviour in response to them absent thought. Or with minimal thought.
Secondly we have much more in common with cats and therefore all mammals, than one might at first think. Indeed the only difference might be a layer, or level of intellectual thought.
Therefore if human thought includes mental activity other than intellectual thought, by definition cats and indeed all mammals are thinking too.
We can also conclude that they are doing something akin to intellectual thought without being self consciously aware that they are intellectualising. Because we can observe strategic, social and territorial behaviour.
In essence Im saying that instinctive behaviour is very much thought, thinking.
How would these people who are explaining away thinking describe what a cat, or for that matter, a spider spinning a web is doing?
Yes, I agree with all of your points.
Quoting Punshhh
In the case of cats and dogs, and monkeys, they seem to show the intelligent activities in their daily lives. They definitely have the clear evidence of possessing some level of intelligence, and their reasonings are mostly based on their sense perceptions and memories. They also seem to understand human words when spoken to them although they cannot make linguistic expressions uttering words and sentences.
And even in the case of the spiders putting up their webs to trap their preys for their survival, it looks in most cases it has been done under the well thought out plans. They tend to put up the webs in the good locations where it is dark, dingy and corner of the attics or ceilings where it is likely to attract their prey more than the implausible places such as in the middle of the roads, on the dining tables in the kitchens, or in front of the shower heads etc.
But then we wonder, there are many more insects, mammals, fishes, planktons and even the plants and trees ... etc all seem to be selecting their habitable locations reasonably. Trees tend to grow more in mass in the forests with the warmth of more sunlights and rainfalls combined with the rich soil bases.
The ants, bees and squids, octopuses, grasses, weeds, roses, they all seem to be selecting the places better for their survivals, and seem to be doing the right things looking for their food and making their shelters under the ground, soils and seabeds as necessary for their best survival chances. Does that mean they must be all thinking and reasoning, abstracting and having ideas for their plans, and reflecting their pasts? What do you think?
This reduction also makes a separation between human thought and animal thought, which I dont think exists, although there is clearly a distinction in the level of self awareness in the thinking process between humans and animals. To assume that because animals are not intellectualising like humans that they are not self conscious and consciously thinking is to deny their level of sentience and understanding of their life, world and existence.
My contention is that animals experience life in very similar ways to humans, but without that additional layer of intellectualisation. So their life and experience will be just like ours minus the intellectual thought.
But if an idea means the semantic elements, then animals definitely lack the possession of the mental concepts and abstract ideas based on linguistic expressions.
If we agreed on the claim that animals are supposed to be able to have ideas based on the sense perceptions and memories, then still, it is not clear if they would have the critical, analytic and abstract thinkings on the metaphysical topics such as the world, God, souls, immortality and death. I am prone to think they don't appear to, and it might not be a bad thing for leading a happier and simpler life, compared to humans tending to be worrying, thinking, analysing, criticising, doubting and contemplating about these issues due the possession of the extra layer of intelligence.
Yes, this would indicate though that ideas are both semantic, abstract etc and part of conscious and subconscious mental processes of life, as we see in animals.
Perhaps the intellectual, analytical, contemplative thinking of humanity is just a thin layer on top of the more mundane thinking which is intrinsically part of life. Maybe people think that this thin layer is more important in life, the quality of life, than the mundane because it is such a concern for people. When seen in the round it is of very little importance other than in the advantages it offers in aiding survival in a competitive environment.
This brings me back to the thought that animals may have as rich, or richer life experience than people. Even though they might not be self conscious of the fact etc.
:cool: :ok: