Comparing Mental states
I think there is a serious problem when it comes to describing mental states because of their private subjective nature so that there will never be a case where we can know what someone else's mental, states are like. And if we experienced someone else's mental states they would become our own.
There are two main issues here. One is our ability to accurately define mental states and the other is concerning knowing bout other peoples mental states.
On a YouTube video Stephen Pinker claimed we think in images. I know I think in words and live with a constant stream of language. How could Pinker know what I thought in? Considering he has no direct access to my mental states? Is he just going by analogy to his experience.
It is a big problem for people to assume they know what other people mental states are like especially when it comes to mental health because people with mental illnesses face scepticism and people minimalism their symptoms. Psychiatrists rarely use brain scans to check for brain or biochemical abnormality so essentially their diagnosis amounts to a prejudice.
There are two main issues here. One is our ability to accurately define mental states and the other is concerning knowing bout other peoples mental states.
On a YouTube video Stephen Pinker claimed we think in images. I know I think in words and live with a constant stream of language. How could Pinker know what I thought in? Considering he has no direct access to my mental states? Is he just going by analogy to his experience.
It is a big problem for people to assume they know what other people mental states are like especially when it comes to mental health because people with mental illnesses face scepticism and people minimalism their symptoms. Psychiatrists rarely use brain scans to check for brain or biochemical abnormality so essentially their diagnosis amounts to a prejudice.
Comments (58)
In the study of memory it has gone from their being one continuous memory store to finding out that there are a large range of types of memory and brain abnormalities/lesions etc have shown that one type of memory is independent from another.
These findings cast doubt on our ability to define mental states unless we practise careful phenomenology and look at data on brain disorders etc. And overall this should encourage serious caution in making wide-sweeping claims or naive intuitions.
He could ask you, and you could tell him.
Wittgenstein is the man for this conundrum. It's the beetle in the box. If you only have your beetle, and I only have my beetle, we cannot even disagree about what beetles are like. Pinker says thoughts are like pictures, and you say beetles are like words, and I say they are like flies buzzing. But there is no way of telling whether we are all looking at the same thing, and describing different aspects, or talking about completely different things, because we each only have our own case to look at.
But here we are, you, me, Pinker, and Wittgenstein, expressing our thoughts in words and perhaps in pictures too sometimes, maybe in bricks and mortar as well, why not? So thoughts are not private in that radical sense after all.
I am talking about comparing mental states not comparing verbal reports of mental states. I agree that you can talk about mental states and clarify some issues. But people like Pinker and Dennet don't seem interested in this, especially with Dennet's Hetero-phenomenology (incoherent skeptical method) and The Churchland's (incoherent) Eliminative materialism.
In a trivial case we could both agree that the car is red but I could be perceiving as blue and that is my red. I may perceive the colour as jarring and garish and you may experience it as soothing.
But in trivial cases like this not much is at stake but in the diagnosis of mental illness or in pursuit of accurate psychology the differences become crucial and that is where a direct comparison would help otherwise we end up in endless unverifiable disputes about the phenomenon.
Did she know what sadness was before then? As someone from a troubled background I have always experienced anxiety and sadness and I can't put myself in her shoes.
People who suddenly experience mental distress are often surprised because it was nothing like they imagined including skeptics of depression who have apologised profusely after for doubting the condition.
So these people seem to be failing to know mental states until they finally experience them.
(Especially for the sake of developing better mental health support)
Yes, but what are words except visual scribbles and sounds? If you say you think in your language, then you are essentially saying that you think in visual scribbles and sounds. How did you even learn a language without already thinking in visual imagery? How did you see the scribbles and the pictures associated with them without having the ability to see? How did your mind know that these scribbles represented the object in the picture next to them if your mind didn't already engage in representations - of understanding that what you see is a representation of what is external to your body? It seems that we delude ourselves into thinking that what we see is real, or how the world really is.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Everyone that poses this question seems to ignore the fact that we all live in a shared world and the shared world is where the consistency comes from. We may both experience different colors than each other but we always experience the same color when the same wavelength of EM energy interacts with our eyes. This is why we can still communicate about what it is we experience and understand each other. We couldn't understand each other if we didn't consistently experience the same thing when looking at the same thing every time. I believe that we do see the same colors because we share so much of our DNA. We are members of the same species. Geneticists haven't found a part of our genetic code that creates color in our minds that could be different from individual to individual, like the color of our eyes are.
The fact that we can talk about colors at all and understand what we mean must mean something, right? What about the fact that people that can see can't talk about colors with a congenitally blind person and the fact that sighted people can say that blind people don't see colors at all despite the fact that it may be hard for a sighted person to imagine what it would be like not seeing colors?
They are neither. When I am thinking I have no sound waves hitting my ear. Blind and deaf people learn language. The only thing that creates language is semantic content.
Image is a visual metaphor and vision is only one type of experience.
You have done what I was saying and misrepresented experience. I don't have pictures or sounds in my head when I am thinking. I can bring up a visual image like "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" which is bereft of meaning but I am not usually envisioning orthography.
Visual images rarely come to me. If they do I am trying to remember a place or event or dreaming. But even in the case of memory words have a more powerful effect than the images and I have a narrative about the image I have recalled.
You can't simply assert what someone else's experience is in any kind of valid way. That is not science or philosophy or phenomenological analysis.
If I was lying about the nature of my mental states how would you know anyway?
But in the cases of issues like anxiety, dreams beliefs we have no shared access to these states.
There is also plenty of room to be skeptical of the external world even if you are a realist (see physics). It is always possible to be deceived. But that isn't the issue here.
You could create an unconscious robot that was able to "perceive" the external; world and agree with you about what it contained. You don't have to commit yourself to a belief in other minds to be a realist about the external world because it is not hidden subjective data.
I believe we need experiences of things to talk about them in many cases, however that establishes the centrality of personal experience not that an external world exists. However we are not discussing any of that here but about access to mental states.
It is puzzling that we can have shared experiences of an external world but cannot share our mental states in the same way like we are living in two worlds simultaneously.
Subjective differences may have an external/neural cause like different neural circuitry but that does not support realism because it reinforces the fact that we have different perceptions. As Thomas Nagel said "Objectivity is a view from nowhere" There is no external fact that can be experienced objectively.
Words like "Tree" will have their meaning largely influenced by a shared external perception. But words applied to internal states are informed by private experience and a network of beliefs an so on.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
This is kind of straightforward. I know what a car crash is without having experienced one, but experiencing one is very different from knowing what it is.
But suppose I really have no idea what depression is, and then I get depressed. How do I even know that this feeling is depression and not something else? How do I even recognise my own beetle as a beetle?
If X is totally private, then it cannot be talked about at all, not even by its owner. But depression is not totally private. To the extent that we can talk about it, it is public, it is feelings and experiences, sure, but also characteristic behaviours and ways of talking. If you try to separate out the experiential aspect from the behavioural, then you cannot say anything about it at all.
Now this is not to say that people cannot hide their feelings rather than show them; tears of a clown and all that. But it is a bad habit to get into because in the end, you lose access to your own feelings and those of others, and live in an unreal emotional world.
I had social anxiety for years before I had a name for it. So I didn't know what was happening to me or whether I was normal. The word is not required for access to a mental state. However when you discover a word you can label yourself and tell other people. But this isn't sufficient. It is not enough to have a vague idea about what depression is.
Just because someone uses a word does not mean they are using it to its fullest dimension. The problem in philosophy is using words then giving them a weak or contestable or even inaccurate definition. Words cannot replace experience (which is multifaceted and phenomenologically rich.
I am not talking about the privacy of mental states here in the sense that they might be ineffable but I am talking about the failure of language to do them justice and the lack of ability to compare these states.
Lots of people with mental health problems face minimisation and skepticism. You might say "I can't sleep" And then someone (even a GP) will give an anecdote about how they can't sleep.
Now I know several people who have no problem falling a sleep (two of my sisters and my mother) So I know that there is a sleeping spectrum with extremes at each end and not being able to fall asleep is not trivial. So with a spectrum of conditions under one word there is the issue of the word not being sufficient.
If someone talks about a car you can see a car but if they talk about their mind you can never see it. How can disputes about the nature of thought and memory etc ever be resolved?
Someone told me that they didn't dream in images where as I dream in glorious technicolor so I was surprised. I couldn't have a safe theory of dreams without knowing this. I dream like everyday life the only difference being few sounds and textures and I flip between locations instantaneously. If Myself and X dream differently with little in common how can we safely define a dream.
I am a big believer in very detailed phenomenological and qualitative analysis rather than seeking generalisations.
So how did you find out that was the name for it?
I'm chronically shy and misanthropic; Have I got it?
People with shared language (which presupposed a great deal of cultural sharing) can communicate a great deal about what they are experiencing to each other, and from these communications we have built up the concept of what constitutes the usual human mental repertoire. We also know that some people's experience deviates from that averaged repertoire in fortunate and unfortunate ways.
Maybe you can meet someone briefly and remember their name and face for years afterward. Names and faces tend to fly out of my memory like alarmed pigeons (unless they are really hot, or something). You and I might both be totally crazy, and our craziness will be totally dissimilar. Or we may be geniuses, but not at all in the same way.
Words can effectively communicate what our mental states are like, but it takes a lot of words to do the job well. Just saying "he's manic depressive" doesn't tell us much. Labels are too short, usually. "Paranoid schizophrenic" just doesn't tell us enough about somebody's mental state, if we really want to know what that person is experiencing.
"You seem happy today." "Yes, I feel happy, but let me explain how and why. Have you got an hour?"
Don't believe everything people tell you.
No, let's go there.
I think they dreamt in words.. and.. how can a blind person dream in images.
I think consciousness and characterising the mind is of utmost importance and relevant to everything including physics I don't think it can be reduced or subsumed to another paradigm or ignored. Because consciousness is our only access to reality. That has led to skepticism about reality a la Descartes
It would be puzzling if reality could be explained without an explanation of consciousness. That would be a reality explained but the realities observer remaining unexplained (as if outside reality).
So many issues arise from subjectivity and one I have begun to ponder is whether energy is a subjective notion. It strikes me that we describe something as energy when it is useful to us. The problem for us is not a shortage of energy but a shortage of useful energy,, grass is energy to a herbivore. The same could be said for the perception of entropy. So I don't see physics or at least physics concepts as independent of us creating this relentless mechanical reality.
So I think we need to incorporate the mental into our data and perspective and not go down the eliminatavist or reductionist routes which I believe are dishonest time wasting or delusion.
For example if didn't have minds would the internet exist? I think human inventions cause a great and swift reduction of entropy by putting matter in implausible functional states which arose because of will and desire etc.
Sacks writes about language and the deaf, and how lacking and then receiving sign language changed their experience. I don't know if anything similar has been written about the blind. If someone had been blind since birth, they would not, could not, dream or think in visual images. How could they? For one thing, they wouldn't have any visual images, and much of the visual cortex would have been taken over for non-visual processing.
But, the blind would utilize other senses -- touch, taste, smell, and sound in their dreams. They might dream about a passage they read in braille and feel the braille words. It would be difficult for them to describe these dreams to a sighted - visual image dreamer, and visa versa. To each other, it would make sense quicker, better.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I wonder. I have lately been thinking that our consciousness, which we tend to think is like the pinnacle of the pyramid with the all seeing eye (image on the dollar bill reverse side). I've been thinking that maybe it is just one facility among numerous facilities that the brain operates. It seems like the pinnacle because what we hear and see, do, say, and think seems to be housed in the conscious mind. But maybe it isn't. (I'm not suggesting that mind transcends the brain; I don't think it does--at all.)
We know we have very Important, even critical, brain functions that we are not conscious of:
Memory; (we remember things, but we have no idea how memory is arranged; we have no way of auditing the contents of the memory.)
Movement; we have no conscious control--(except in a very difficult way, and then limited) over how to make our muscles move to produce coordinated and useful actions--like typing on a keyboard.
Vision; we have no knowledge and generally little control over how signals from the retina are interpreted and then integrated into a cohesive view.
Thinking; as I sit here writing this too you, the words are being fed to my fingers from a non-conscious source. I don't know how this happens.
Emotions; very important; we do not get to decide how we are going to feel about something a good share of the time. You meet somebody for the first time; you don't just like them, you fall for them head over heals. They turn you on every which way. You didn't intend this to happen, you didn't (perhaps) want this to happen, but it did. Or, try as you might, there are people that just strike you as disgusting.
and so on. I'm not saying our brains are not plastic; I'm not saying we are robots under the control of mysterious forces. I'm only saying that the Individual person has many systems between his ears not only keeping him alive but make him who he is, enable him to make his way forcefully in the world, and only SOME parts are accessible to, or part of, the conscious facility.
The motor cortex which moves us around, has to be aware of the world around it, has to know how the body is arranged in space from moment to moment, has to take directions from some other part of the brain (the way finding unit) and does this outside of our conscious mind. It receives information, makes decisions, and issues all sorts of instructions second by second--without telling us anything about it. We don't know and we don't need to know what is going on there.
A good share of our brain's always-on activity is not "un-conscious" -- it's just mostly not accessible to "THE consciousness where we live.
Take the "enteric brain" -- the nervous system that operates the gut. Do you really want to know, minute by minute, what it is dealing with? Probably not. Messages from the enteric brain to the cerebral brain are usually bad news: Alarm bell sounds, bright light blinks... Incoming message, red alert... "Contents of your gut are going to be expelled in 9 seconds, whether it is convenient or socially acceptable to you or not." and then it is expelled. Unless you were paying really close attention, you had no idea what was coming down the pipe, so to speak.
When I was unconscious under general anesthetic I had no experiences and there was nothing it was like.There was no way I could know anything in that state. We can posit a wide range of subconscious and unconscious things but we have to be conscious to reflect on them.
So I am invoking a state of non consciousness. How could we know anything and yet be non-conscious or non existent? It is not a case of being skeptical about reality or the external world. I am just talking about access here. How we only know anything through consciousness initially before theorising starts.
People talk about brain imaging to read mental states but that requires the consciousness and subjectivity of the scientist. Psychoanalysis and theory about mental processing require a conscious theorist..
Most theories of perception accept that there is an external reality but claim with evidence that it must be represented to us in the brain. So on this picture What we are perceiving is a construct. I don't know how naive realism could explain the idea we could have direct unmediated access to an objective reality. In this sense reality might be hidden from us. At the same time I do feel I have immediate access to reality.
So I think we need to work out what consciousness does in relation to reality.
Changing the word you use to refer to a mental state doesn't change the mental state or get rid of it. They seemed to think that using scientific language is somehow avoiding mysterious mental state words but when people say they feel angry they are referring to the feeling and not making a claim at possible biochemical influences.
Words can be a short cut or pragmatic access to a topic. A true reduction to the natural sciences would be immensely complex if you wanted to claim we didn't need to invoke folk psychology.
I can't even see how you would reduce semantic statements of motivations like "I divorced my wife because she cheated." A crude reductionist might say you divorced your wife because certain neurons fired at time B but that would be speculative and not a true verifiable causal account.
So-called reason giving explanations are very effective, explanatory and don't need replacing. It is actually surprising how effective words are sparing us many headaches. But also this ease can be misleading. I do believe in the Power relations analysis that words are utilised like tools and weapons not in unbiased, transparent way.
I came across the word social anxiety on a poster in the central library. Below the words Social Anxiety Support Group was a description of the symptoms I shared. That way I was able to then apply the label to myself.
Now I am waiting to be tested for Asperger's Syndrome. The words pull together strands of experience into a recognisable entity.
So, this is one issue. I agree with this view. There is a real world (the cosmos on down to your room) which has real properties. We are immersed in this reality, but we can not apprehend it first hand. The "apprehender" is locked inside the skull and all it knows is what its senses tell it. We are always at least one step removed from 'raw reality'. We have a construct of this "real world" which works, most of the time. All life in the cosmos has to deal with this real world, and since animal sensory systems are a lot like ours, we can assume that senses work pretty well for creatures that are not, apparently, building 'constructs'.
I too think in terms of "my consciousness". We clearly have something called consciousness. It is self-aware. It is one facility in the brain, perhaps "first among equals" or maybe just an equal among other equals.
I am not suggesting that we have more than one conscious facility. It would be very confusing if there was more than one Speaker of the House. But other facilities in the brain (like memory) must have a direct tap into what the Speaker of the House is up to. Otherwise, it could not furnish information when needed. It would not be able to recall what the Speaker of the House heard yesterday while I was eavesdropping on the worker in the neighboring cubicle.
So, again:
Where do you suppose "thinking" is done in the brain?
How does the memory bring to the fore information that has not been requested for about for 30 years? And how does the memory manage to forget a meeting you (somewhere in there) didn't really want to go to in the first place?
The motor cortex has to receive a feed from the visual cortex to be able to move you through the world. It needs to know where the holes, curbs, bumps, and big cracks are--pretty much in a continual stream. If it doesn't have this information (and It has to receive other information too, like information about how slippery the side walk is. This doesn't come from the visual cortex, it's picked up by the sensory system in the feet and legs which detects surface texture (hard, smooth, and slippery).
We aren't aware of all the things that are going on, live, in our brains because (PERHAPS) we have a deficient construct of how the mind works. Maybe we have put way to much emphasis on the conscious mind (one part out of 100 parts) and not enough importance on those other parts which are neither un nor sub conscious. They just do their thing apart from the conscious mind, They may even share awareness and consciousness among themselves which the Speaker of the House (THE consciousness) just doesn't have access to.
I don't happen to have an fMRI machine or a high end EEG in the kitchen, so I can't test this theory.
It transpires only someth9ing like 3% of the blind were never able to see at all, so most do definitely dream in images, and it remains possible that the others do have other parts of the visual system. But it is an interesting question, philosophically not really possible to resolve entirely.
Well I was hoping for some of the actual words. But still, the point can be made, I think. What you get is some words that describe a feeling that leads to described symptoms. All these words must be shared words, in order to be understandable.
http://socialphobia.org/social-anxiety-disorder-definition-symptoms-treatment-therapy-medications-insight-prognosis
So the feelings are described as physical reactions, very generalised feeling words like 'fear', 'nervousness', and forms of thought. These things are not private and inaccessible, and that is why one can recognise them in oneself. And the context in which these feelings are aroused distinguish social anxiety from arachnophobia or OCD.
http://www.philosophyonline.co.uk/oldsite/pom/pom_behaviourism_wittgenstein.htm
Here's the problem A4H. A "state" is a describable condition, and as such it is "static", unchanging according to whatever fulfills that description. The brain is active, and what is studied in the brain is its activities. So if you are one to believe that there really is such a thing as a "mental state", then you have a fundamental incompatibility, an irreconcilable difference, between "mental state" and "brain activity", one being passive, the other active. You can reconcile brain activity with thinking, but thinking is not the same as a mental state. What I think is that "mental state" is a useful assumption for some theoretical purposes but it doesn't really refer to anything real.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Read the second sentence - the one that came after the one you quoted, but you omitted. I said that you think in visual scribbles and sounds, not hear them. You can only think in the same forms that your experiences of the world take, and it is a fact that the only way you could have learned a language is by having some kind of sensory experience and then store those experiences, or qualia as some call them, for recalling later. You must have also had some prior understanding of association - of being able to associate certain sounds and scribbles with other things - other visuals, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells.
Here is a case where a man never learned a language until he was an adult. How did he understand how to dress and feed himself without a language? How could he have organized his thoughts? When he finally understood what language was and how to use it, his surprise wasn't that he could suddenly think. It was the knowledge that there are shared symbols for other things that may be used to communicate with others. This is no surprise to us because language's primary use is communication, not for thinking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_Without_Words
https://vimeo.com/76386718
Could blind people learn a language if they couldn't hear and feel (braille)? What about deaf people that are also blind and can't feel?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
What visual image of "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" could you have other than of the scribbles themselves? You seem to be confusing "visual image" with meaning itself. The scribbles don't mean anything because they don't refer to anything. You can imagine words in meaningless patterns just as you can imagine colors and sounds in meaningless patterns inside your mind. But we still can't think in anything other than colors, shapes, sounds, feelings, etc. Sometimes a few of us assemble certain things in meaningful, new patterns and come up with some really great ideas. The theory of evolution by natural selection is one of those ideas. But Darwin could have never come up with that theory without exploring the world and observing nature closely.
Quoting Andrew4HandelScience is based on observation and I am observing your own use of language. So yes, I can make an assessment about how you think. If you aren't thinking about what the words you use mean when you use them, then how is it that you are able to communicate with me at all? What is it you mean, or are referring to, when you type a particular string of symbols? What is it you want me to think when I look at your scribbles? Just more scribbles - or actual things and processes and states that exist apart from ourselves, out in the world that we can experience, if they were right next to us?
I can't tell you what words were on the flyer because I can't remember as it was over a decade ago.
Is your question how can words about subjective mental states get meaning?
The mental states just "are" before they are labelled. I think there is a transition process where someone sees some external references to a mental state and makes an analogy. So for example fear has a lot of external cues. Once you have language you can internalise it and create analogies. This doesn't give other people direct access to your mind though.
Social anxiety has a lot of external markers so it is not a difficult case, but things like thought, dreams and memory are different. Memory has been shown to include a wide range of phenomena so it is unlikely that the word can be used to a capture a unitary thing. In these cases there is a big possibility of very diverse private mental states that cannot be compared by analogy.
Temple Grandin has talked about thinking in Images and I know it is not how I think. She needs to imagine pictures to have concepts such as seeing different cars in her mind to capture the general concept "car" or seeing red in different images for that concept. That is just one incident of evidence of how people think very differently. I have no images in my thoughts usually just a constant stream of language in an internal dialogue just like how I am writing here.
I am writing in the manner I think.
Ok, let's go into that a bit, though it seems like a non-issue to me. Suppose Temple or you or anyone is walking down the street and meets a friend, George. How does one know it is George, unless either he has a name badge, or one has an image of George in mind? And conversely, how does one know that it is George unless one has the word "George" in one's mind? Come to that, how does one even know it is a street or that one is walking, unless one has both the word and some kind of image, or visceral schema with which the word is associated?
Now some folks are quite astounding in the way that they can recognise faces and put names to them having met them only once. I on the other hand regularly walk past people I know quite well and cannot recall either the face or the name. I have learned to bluff in such situations because people can get upset when you don't know them and they think you ought to. " Oh high there, how are you (total stranger), how's the family?" My wife, on the other hand, regularly stops someone on the street to remind them that they were in primary school together 40 years ago having not seen them since. I can neither recognise nor name anyone I was at school with.
So we think differently. And the difference is apparent in our behaviour. If there was no difference in behaviour, then there would be no difference we could talk about. Anyway, the main point is that words alone can have no meaning unless they are associated with experiences in some way, and experiences can have no meaning unless they are grouped under concepts in some way, so there is no real issue, but one of emphasis. Personally, where my thinking functions best is in abstract relations - neither words nor pictures as such, but what one might call schematics. Individual facts are difficult, but ordered relations are easy. So physics rather than chemistry, political theory rather than politics.
One can see that autistic people think differently. So their thinking is not private. If it was private one could not see it. You can see that I think differently... Do have a read of Wittgenstein, he is quite helpful in getting out of the private world and into the shared world, or rather, realising one was never in a private world after all.
Yes but the problem is that some experiences are public (have an external referent) and some are private so that the words referring to our mental states are not open for comparison.
Temple Grandin does a good job of explaining how she thinks but I am not convinced that what someone tells us is all there is to the phenomenon of thought.
I am not arguing that we are completely cut off from other peoples mental states but that there is not going to be a point where we can compare them to validate our theories about them.
Well I disagree. I have tried to indicate why. Words for things that are not open for comparison fail to have content.
This is false though, and that's why we have "fiction". The imagination creates forms which haven't been experienced in the world. You may argue that the content of those forms is derived from sensory experience, and fiction is just a matter of establishing unexperienced relationships between experienced content, but then what are the relationships here? The relationships are what the mind is creating in thought. If this is what is being created by thought, then isn't the real content of thought the relationships which the thinking mind is creating? If that is the case, then when we think in terms of relating one relationship to another relationship, there is no need for sensory content.
Obviously I'm not talking about something like imagining a green colour, that would be obtained from sensory experience. I'm talking about the relationships which logic is founded on, like opposition, being and not being, or negative and positive, plus and minus, and the relationship between parts and unity which numbers use.
That is simply not true.
There is no reason why someone couldn't attach a word to a private sensation especially when it is very vivid to them. How did people like Einstein come up with new theories? They had to examine their own thoughts and reach new conclusions. I mentioned the transition from referring to some external event and adapting words to use on internal states. It is not all or nothing.
I think you are under some kind of illusion about the power of language to represent reality. Words have limited power to describe phenomena. If I am describing a dream I had I am not telling you everything about it just sketching an outline.
I have no problem in forming images in my mind. For instance I am now imagining a large purple elephant with a banana in its trunk flying through the sky.
But that is not how My thoughts operate. I would find it hard to form a thought like " The German economy has taken a turn for the worse" in images.
All this kind of thing rests of a final theory of language and consciousness that we don't have.
My concern is about bad psychology abusing or neglecting the mentally ill. Especially with this idea that you can be an expert in someone else's mind and thus override what they are telling you (hetero-phenomenology)
If someone says to you "I am depressed" you don't know anything about it. I advocate a very detailed phenomenology. But that is not my experience of psychiatrists. If a psychiatrist fully comprehended what happened to me as a child they would recognise the depth of my problems. But only someone who has either had similar situations or a very sympathetic/empathetic person can fully appreciate the situation. People often minimise or misrepresent other peoples problems because they use weak words and weak analogies.
So if you seriously want to "know" someone else's mind you should be prepared to talk to them for hours in a very open minded but probing way.
When I mentioned social anxiety you said "I'm chronically shy and misanthropic; Have I got it?" That sounded derogatory and poor attempt to imagine social anxiety and this is what people with mental health are up against. IT is a mixture of prejudice and a failure of imagination.
I generally agree with you. The state of psychiatry is very close to the state of science in the era of witchcraft - i.e. nowhere. That 'we' normals are in any position to pathologise 'you' rarities as 'ill' is one patent nonsense amongst many. Clearly we are as a species insane, and drive each other more insane on a regular basis.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I'm sorry. If I hurt your feelings it was unintended. But I am rather against the current fashion for categorising distress into syndromes and then reifying them into things that people have 'got'. But people find some comfort in it, as it allows one to dissociate from the distress, and I should have been more careful about it.
On the question of language, though, having a name, 'social anxiety' allows one to talk about and recognise something in oneself, that is otherwise an amorphous sense of 'being different'. I think Blake Ross described rather well the excitement of discovering the concept of Aphantasia, and how it enabled a new understanding of himself and others. So that was really my question; there are these old-fashioned terms like 'shy', but one says 'I am shy', rather than 'I've got shyness disorder'. And we could say of Blake, that he lacks a visual imagination, instead of that he has this rare mental illness.
So here is a really radical idea for you. The dissociation that language enables is itself the foundation of not only mental illness but of the entire mental world. Even for me to say I am shy is to step out of myself in order to name the condition I am in. And this division, while it seems to promise some relief from that condition, actually perpetuates it. Thus psychiatry itself is an addictive process that seems to offer relief for the distress it subtly creates. So the question arises, is there another way of understanding oneself and the other that does not divide the mind?
You didn't hurt my feelings. I illustrated that comment because it shows how people can use a term without knowing what it refers to and hence mischaracterise it based on their own values etc.
Finding the term social anxiety was very helpful to me. Because before then I had an excessive fear of people and going out and would only go out at night. So the term did not perpetuate my condition because I was very dysfunctional before I went to the group then I went to the group and was able to socialise and make friends.
One thing that happens when you have this condition is that you feel like you are the only person like this and that it is a character flaw. In general I didn't know what was happening to me. I didn't know that severe anxiety was a disorder with even a biological substrate related to the hippocampus and amygdala.
So what happens is that you have a sense of dread, you blush when your around people and or shake but you have no idea what's going on. In the end I went on medication for depression and anxiety and that was what decreased my social anxiety initially.
There are reasons why I might be prone to social anxiety such as Asperger's, long term bullying, aggressive father etc so it is not magic to imagine why someone might have a turbulent mental life. Also I went to a small branch of the Plymouth Brethren church that was very isolationist and hell and damnation and judgemental. It would be remarkable if I came out unscathed.
How ever much detail I give you (like Temple Grandin's clever lengthy descriptions) can you really imagine what I experienced? Also I am British and gay and that is a different experience from being straight and American or something else.
We are bringing so much to our immediate experience.
I know exactly what you are talking about. What's obvious is that you ignored what I said. I already said that I can create illogical, meaningless patterns in my mind. If I can be illogical easier than being logical, as being logical takes more work and energy, then logical relationships cannot be the fundamental aspect of the mind. WHAT would you be logical about? Your logic still takes form. What you are saying is equivalent to saying that you can talk without words or that you can boil nothing on the stove.
I'm not referring to "the fundamental aspect of the mind". I've taken exception to your claim that "you can only think in the same forms that your experiences of the world take". What I've pointed out is that this is not true, we think in other forms, relationships which we have not experienced through our sensory perceptions of the world. Whether or not thinking in these artificial, creative, relationships is the fundamental aspect of thinking is irrelevant. What I am arguing is that they are an aspect of thinking, and cannot be so dismissed, as you claimed.
Well perhaps I have hyper-imaginative empathic syndrome, and find myself taking on other people's psyche whenever they post about it. Or perhaps not. ;) But it certainly seems to me that I get a better picture - oh that phrase again - of your condition from the story of your life than from the list of symptoms that I find on a social anxiety site.
I was at a boarding school in the days when being called 'queer' was the worst insult possible, and was confirmed as true by a failure to immediately start a fight. In such a world, social anxiety is a necessity for a gay (or a wimp like me) rather than an illness, and when the home environment gives no respite either...
Here's something to consider; that dread is a sane response to a hostile social environment. And when one finds a supportive environment, one's dread is diminished. Have you ever considered the thesis that it's not you, it's them? David Smail wrote about the social nature of personal distress, and is worth a read. In particular, he talks about how the world affects us through things that are 'beyond our event horizon'.He gives an example of someone who is made redundant and falls into a depression and has feelings of inadequacy because he cannot really see that it is the implacable forces of the global economy rather than his own psyche that are operating. So you might have symptoms of social anxiety because in the straight world, homophobia is endemic. But it is hard to see that you are suffering from their 'illness'.
I have always been strongly of the opinion that mental illness can and probably is largely caused by society and parents. But I don't think that makes mental illness less real. For example smoking can cause cancer but that doesn't make the cancer less real because it is caused by something external.
Why shouldn't abuse etc cause mental illness? (also chemical imbalance/dementia's)
I don't think I simply have social anxiety any more because I test highly for Asperger's and am awaiting a diagnosis. Asperger's is more that just social anxiety but it includes heightened sensitivity to stimuli, feeling overwhelmed, fixating on things uncontrollably, not enjoying socialising and so on. So knowing this means you need to put yourself in appropriate environments.
It was interesting and shocking to find out that 90% of a people with Asperger's that were interviewed reported chronic bullying at school and there was a good explanation given for this phenomena. So they say "Neurotypicals" are responsible for a lot of the problems people on the Autism spectrum face. Society now tries to accommodate disabled people with ramps and wide spaces in buildings and braille on medication boxes. So there its the argument for society exacerbating or creating disabilities and dysfunction. The problem is not being exposed to, or listening to, other peoples testimonies especially in order to preserve norms and support generalisations.
And because life is heteronormative and based around the predominant sexuality I have felt alienated. Society has been puzzled by homosexuality so there has been far more research into it than heterosexual desire (which is taken for granted often).
I have always thought that homosexuality is easier to explain than heterosexuality. Because as a homosexual you are attracted to a body similar to yours with similar erogenous zones but as a straight man you will never know what exactly what it is like for a female to experience orgasm etc (they fake orgasm didn't you hear!) And evolutionarily it is convoluted because you have to create two sexes that have very different sex organs that are in separate bodies and need to remain compatible. and then you have to get the one gender attracted to then other gender in a different looking body.
I find it strange that people assume I should be attracted to women simply because I am conscious of being in a mans body yet if I woke up as a woman that sexuality would be considered aberrant. Why should the body you are in decide whom you are attracted to? It didn't for me. (God condemns people for simply desiring the wrong gender)
So I do not think me imagining a man and woman having vigorous sex is anywhere near the same as experiencing heterosexual lust.
If you had read all of my post from where you got that quote from, then you'd have understood that I said that the mind must have already had the capability to create associations in order to learn a language, and also creates new patterns, most are meaningless (Colourless green ideas sleep furiously), others are copies of experienced patterns (causation, language, etc.), and some new patterns that actually provide some new shared insight into ourselves and our place in reality (Theory of Natural Selection).
I'm not disagreeing that our mind can create new patterns, or relationships as you call them. My point is that even the new relationships are composed of sensory data. You can still only think in colored shapes, sounds, smells, tastes and feelings - but mostly colored shapes as we seem to think that the world is more how we see it because our sight provides us the most information about the world compared to our other senses.
I can imagine the act of heterosexual sex but not the lust and intense desire motivating it. I don't think imagining someone having sex or feeling lust is the same as the vivid mental states one is in with lust and desire.
In the case of a minority sexuality it is not a big problem but when it is the main desire motivating society it does feel a bit alienating.
It might be like hating football and sitting through a football match surrounded by screaming fans.
The issue though is of whether we can have a theory of these mental states that we share or that are very unique and tied up with other complex mental states?
There is always the possibility of characterising these states wrongly and over generalising. I don't foresee a situation when we can apply one model for the mind that accounts for everyone and is lawful. I find a lot of the literature problematic when it is trying to do this.
This is what I disagree with. My claim is that you can think in relationships themselves, that is what logic is, thinking in relationships without the use of sensory data. In any complex logic, like mathematics, sensory symbols are used as a memory aid, but in fundamental, basic logic, no such symbols are necessary.
For example, I think in the relationship of opposition, is and is not. There is no sensory data of this, yet I think this relationship. Although I must utilize symbols to express this fact to you, I know that X excludes not-X, without reference to any symbols or sense data, There is no sense data within my mind which expresses this relationship, I think it without referring to "X excludes not-X". I just know it, and use it in my thinking. I just know that deciding to proceed excludes not proceeding, for example, without referring to those symbols. But if I am to communicate the relationships which I have thought, to you, I must come up with the symbols to express them. It is evident that thinking exists prior to the symbols which express the thought. Therefore we are capable of thinking in logical relations without reference to sensed symbols.
We aren't going to disagree that the process of thinking includes making distinctions. Thinking wouldn't even be happening, or necessary, if some system that thinks didn't have change to process - change, the degree of which the local environment provides. If all you experienced was blackness since you came into existence, could you say that you would be able to think? If so, what would you think of?
No there is no experience of such a distinction, that's the point. What kind of experience is an experience of is not? There's no such experience. The idea of "is not" is not derived from experience, it comes from something else.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The local environment doesn't provide you with an experience of is not, that's the point. Whatever is not within the local environment you do not experience, so you cannot get this idea of "is not" from experiencing the local environment.
Quoting Harry Hindu
This experience of nothing, which you refer to, might be some sort of experience of "is not". But we do not ever experience this experience of nothing, so you cannot claim that we get this idea of nothing from experience. Nor can you claim that we get the idea of "is not" from experience, because "is not" refers to what is not capable of being experienced.
Of course there is. As I was saying, when you have an experience, it isn't of just one color across your visual field and nothing else. You have an experience of a plethora of colors, and each color is different, or not the other colors. The colors are also not the feelings and sounds that you also experience, which are different. This is what I mean by differentiation being brute and automatic. This is why I asked the question at the end of my post.
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverAnd you can experience things, like a friend, and then not experience them. What you are saying only holds true if you have the same monotonous experience of the same thing that never disappears. Again, this is why I asked the question.
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverWell, if you want to call this an experience of nothing, (I'm calling it an experience of something - the color black, as blind people don't even experience the color black. They experience nothing at all visually, kind of like what it's like seeing behind you.), then the question still stands: What would you think of?. Your reply is that they would think of nothing. While my answer is basically the same thing,as the only thing in the mind would be a field of black.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This seems to agree with what I said about the friend. You experience them and then you don't. That in itself is an experience of "is and is not". You seem to be agreeing with me, but just can't bring yourself to accept it.
I really don't see how a sensory experience of seeing the colour green can be construed as a sensory experience of seeing not-red. This conclusion must be produced by deduction. Therefore it is a logical conclusion that this is seeing not-red, it is not a sensory experience of not-red, whatever that might mean. Otherwise we could conclude that the sensation of seeing green is a sensory experience of seeing not-cold, or seeing not-big, or seeing not-solid, or any other random conclusion. But these random conclusions are just that, logical conclusions, they are not sensory experiences.
Or is this what your trying to argue, that the experience of seeing colours can be described as the experience of not-hearing sound? That's actually nonsense, because to determine that something is not-sound requires that one have knowledge of what sound is, and this is not prerequisite for seeing colour. So it's obvious that one can experience colour without this colour being not-sound if there were no such thing as sound.
Quoting Harry Hindu
We are talking about the difference between what is and what is not. To experience a friend's presence, then to experience that person's lack of presence, is not an experience of "the friend is not".
Quoting Harry Hindu
No, I don't agree with you, because I disagree that this is a sensory experience of is and is not. You experience the presence of your friend, and you may conclude, "the friend is". Then, later this experience is replaced by other experiences and these other experiences are not experiences of "the friend is not", they are other experiences. It requires that one compare one experience to the other, to conclude logically that one experience is not the same as the other, and therefore conclude that one is not the other. This is not itself a sensory experience, it is a comparison of sensory experiences, producing a logical conclusion.
The comparison of sensory experiences, which is what some mental activity consists of, is not itself a sensory experience. What you do not seem to be grasping is that mental activity consists of such comparisons, and there is no need that the things being compared are sensory experiences. So mental activity can proceed by comparing things which are not sensory experiences. This is the case when we compare is and is not, these things are logical principles, they are not sensory experiences.
I don't see how this is so difficult for you to grasp. I think you're blowing through my posts without taking the time to actually read it - every word.
Actually, it is you that has been arguing that you can experience opposition without any experiences. This is starting to get to the point of where I get bored of having to repeat myself and repeat your own position that you seem to not understand yourself.
I did say that we experience a plethora of colors, right? I did say that we experience colors with sounds much of the time. When we have experiences of multiple things, that is where we get the idea of opposition - that the sound I experience isn't the same thing as the colors I experience, and even the colors are different. This is why I kept posing the question (and you refuse to answer, while I have addressed every point and question you have made) of what we would think about if all we had was an experience of just one thing - just one color - that's it. By saying that it is nonsense to determine that something is not something else because you haven't had any experience with it is what I have been saying, not you.Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover Really? Then what would be an experience of "the friend is not" if you experienced the friend just a moment ago and now you don't after they walked through the door?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
When I used the term, "experience", I'm talking about the whole deal - the entirety of all of your colors, shapes, sounds, etc. What you do with those colors (comparing them, etc.) is also part of the experience you are having. I don't recall calling the mental act of comparing a sensory experience. It is simply an experience composed of sensory impressions. What I have said, and I'll say one last time, is that your whole experience, whether it be comparing, imagining, or whatever, is composed of sensory data. To say that you can compare things that aren't within your experience is to say what you just said previously - that it's nonsense.
No, I read your posts, but we're both on completely different wavelengths. You use the word "experience" in a way which doesn't make sense to me. I don't think that opposition is something which can be experienced. You assume that opposition is experienced, and use your words in a way which demonstrates this belief, but this makes your words nonsensical to me.
So in order to make your words make sense to me, you need to explain to me how you experience opposition. Just insisting that opposition is part of your experience doesn't help me, I need you to describe the experience of opposition. And describing differences does not describe opposition.
Quoting Harry Hindu
No, that's not true. That one thing is not the same as another does not produce the idea of opposition. Two things which are opposite, like negative and positive, or, is and is not, are exactly the same in every way, except in the way of opposition. They differ in only one particular way, and that is that they are opposite, in every other way, they are exactly the same. So a colour and a sound are different, but they are not at all opposite to one another.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I don't see the relevance of such a hypothetical question. How am I supposed to describe to you an experience which I've never had? Your question is nonsense, it doesn't get us any closer to understanding what opposition is, nor does it make your point, that you can experience opposition. It's just a distraction.
Quoting Harry Hindu
That's exactly my point, you don't experience "the friend is not", because you don't experience opposition. You have this odd assumption that you experience opposition, and you try to explain it in the strangest ways.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Clearly, opposition is not part of one's experience, yet we compare is and is not, positive and negative. How do you account for this? If you do not allow that some things being compared in mental activity, are actually outside of one's experience, you'll always have an unintelligible representation of mental activity. Why do you insist that it's nonsense to compare things which are not within your experience? This appears to be an assumption which is totally unwarranted, and unjustified, yet you'll defend it to your wits end, for no apparent reason.
Well, it's not without all reason and many people have gone down the road of thinking that every concept is based in experience. If there are concepts that are independent of experience, where the heck do they come from? Possibly we are born with ideas and knowledge that we acquired in a previous life - see Plato. Or maybe there are concepts which we must invent in order for even our sense experiences to mean something to us - see Kant. Or perhaps the concepts that seem to be independent of experience are actually based in experience in the end - empiricism. On the empiricist view even the immutable laws of logic are a function of our experience, although they seem to be quite independent of particular experiences. It may well be a mistake. But it's not mere folly.
Here's a definition of experience from Merriam-Webster:
Experience: the fact or state of having been affected by or gained knowledge through direct observation or participation
If you never experienced opposition, how do you even know you are getting it right without having ever experienced it? How is it that you know that you understand opposition?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Of course it does. Opposition is a kind of difference.
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverBlack and white aren't opposites?
Quoting Metaphysician UndercoverGive me a break, dude. Now you're telling me that you have never attempted to imagine what it's like having other experiences that you never had in a sorry attempt to evade a pertinent question.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Now you aren't making any sense, whatsoever. [/i]What[/i] is it that is in opposition? How does it make any sense to think of opposition without including what it is that is in opposition? Notice how you can't adequately describe opposition without using examples of your experiences - like with numbers and is and is not? How do you know what opposition is without experiencing it? How did you acquire that knowledge, and how do you confirm that knowledge?
This question doesn't make sense. How is it that you know anything? To experience something is not sufficient for knowing something, the experience must be remembered. So if you are asking me how I know I am getting opposition right, I might as well ask you how do you know you are getting anything right?
Quoting Harry Hindu
No, that's wrong. If opposition is a certain type of difference, then describing difference does not tell one what opposition is. Does describing colour tell you what red is?
Quoting Harry Hindu
You really don't understand opposition do you? It is purely conceptual. It is not the case that this thing is opposite to that thing, that's just a complete misrepresentation of opposition.
So you need to remember my post before you know what it says? How does that make any sense to you? You can know how to do things without remembering how you learned it - like walking. You know that you are walking because you have the experience of walking at the moment - without remembering how you learned it.
Experience = knowledge, and experience can be a momentary thing, or something that takes time. We can have the knowledge that something is happening right now, like I'm walking or reading a post, or something that happens over a long period of time, like I'm aging.
Of course it does. Opposition is a kind of difference. — Harry Hindu
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You aren't reading my posts again. Look again, I said, "Opposition is a kind of difference." You're confusing types with kinds. Describing what opposition is tells you about a kind of difference.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover.
Exactly. Opposition is conceptual. It is an idea, and ideas can only come about as the result of experiences.
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Here, in describing "opposition", you even say that these things are the same in every way except in the way of opposition? Aren't you then saying that they are different in some way? What is the opposite of "the same"?