This Debunks Cartesian Dualism
Cartesian dualism tends to be one of the most troublesome concepts in the history of philosophy. Not because of the intrinsic difficulties that are required to effectively criticize such an outdated notion (there are none), but rather, because of the consequences that are brought about by its widespread belief. Everything, ranging from our morals, to our justice system, is at least partially buttressed by the idea that we are not merely materialistic beings, reduced to atoms and molecules, but that there is something else, some metaphysical entity that supersedes on our physical endeavors, some “ghost in the machine”, so to speak.
Cartesian dualism has been one of the most enduring philosophical responses to the mind body problem. It holds that mental events, in their most fundamental sense, are different than physical ones. The mind (as in the thoughts, emotions, and subjective experiences that we have), is absolutely orthogonal to the physical processes that underpin our existence (your neurons firing, your hormones secreting, etc.), Dualists claim. To further elucidate what this means, I might provide an example.
Suppose I pinch you, and you scream “ouch”, this event can be described through two different avenues. The mental, is the subjective feeling of pain that you had when I pinched you. The physical explanation, on the other hand, relates to the observable physical manifestations that arise from me pinching you, in this case, your sensory neurons firing in your nervous system, along with you jerking and screaming “ouch”, and everything else that surrounds it.
As you can see, the difference between the physical and the mental is that the former is scientifically observable, from a third person perspective, while the latter is inherently a first person phenomenon. While anyone in this planet can assuredly confirm that you expressed pain by simply watching you cry, no other person other than you, can have access to your actual feeling of pain; to your inner world of thoughts, emotions and feelings. No matter how many fMRI machines I build, or how groundbreaking our investigative tools become, I will never be able to determine what it is that you feel when you’re having a sip of coffee, or showering in cold water. All I am able to determine with these inquisitive tools are the patterns that correlate with such self-reported experiences (e.g. high cortisol levels usually correlate with people self –reporting feelings of anxiety, caridovascular exercise and the secretion of endorphins in the brain that comes along with it, is correlated with a self reportedly relaxed state of mind), but we can’t go further than that.
The nature of our mental lives, makes it impossible for us to inquire about the nature of others’ mental experiences, it is a private sphere, sealed off from outer examination. With this said, and holding in mind the fact that according to Dualists, the mind is totally distinct, and unrelated to the body, one stumbles upon some pretty strange conclusions that seem to inevitably follow.
For instance, although the physical and mental are in principle completely unrelated, it is a fact that in your case, the two correlate. When you’re happy (subjective mental state) you usually smile (physical manifestation), when you feel stressed (subjective mental state), your blood pressure goes up (physical manifestation). But remember, that the only mental world to which you have access to ,is your own, hence it would be insensible to assume that everyone’s mental world correlates to their physical body in the same way that it does with yours. If the mind and body are not related at all (as Cartesian dualists hold), then the fact that your mental events correlate with your physical manifestations in the way they do, could just be mere coincidence. In other words, it is not intuitively obvious that the kinds of physical happenings that seem to go along with mental experiences should be the way they are. Why should it be obvious that a sense of sadness be expressed through tears? How do you know for sure that tears usually indicate sadness in other people? For all you know, all you can confidently make conclusions about, are your own mental states. To put it another way, if we were to mathematically plot on a Cartesian plane (so ironic!) the correlation between mental events and physical ones, we would not be able to make any significant assertions about it, mainly because we would only have one point in the plot (our own). It would be irresponsible to blindly assume that everyone's physical states correlate with their mental ones in the same way they do in us (or that they have any mental life at all for that matter).
Following this dangerous logic leaves open possibilities that would seem nothing but ridiculous to any sound person. If the mind and body are after all, separate, and not necessarily correlated, it can be possible that while punching you in the face causes you to subjectively feel pain, punching your friend makes him experience a great deal of orgasmic pleasure. When you are seen laughing powerlessly to some joke you heard, you are subjectively experiencing a funny feeling, a feeling of laughter. But when your friend is seen laughing, he is undergoing the deepest feelings of misery any human being can have. These are the outcomes that one has to maintain as possible if he claims that mind and body are in principle, unrelated.
All of this follows of course, if we are generous enough to grant the possibility that other human beings have a mental life at all. For all we know, they might also scream when “mad”, and their face might still turn red in circumstances in which they would be expected to be angry, but subjectively not be feeling anything at all. If the physical and mental don’t affect each other, and they aren’t intertwined, then these possibilities must necessarily remain open.
Cartesian dualism has been one of the most enduring philosophical responses to the mind body problem. It holds that mental events, in their most fundamental sense, are different than physical ones. The mind (as in the thoughts, emotions, and subjective experiences that we have), is absolutely orthogonal to the physical processes that underpin our existence (your neurons firing, your hormones secreting, etc.), Dualists claim. To further elucidate what this means, I might provide an example.
Suppose I pinch you, and you scream “ouch”, this event can be described through two different avenues. The mental, is the subjective feeling of pain that you had when I pinched you. The physical explanation, on the other hand, relates to the observable physical manifestations that arise from me pinching you, in this case, your sensory neurons firing in your nervous system, along with you jerking and screaming “ouch”, and everything else that surrounds it.
As you can see, the difference between the physical and the mental is that the former is scientifically observable, from a third person perspective, while the latter is inherently a first person phenomenon. While anyone in this planet can assuredly confirm that you expressed pain by simply watching you cry, no other person other than you, can have access to your actual feeling of pain; to your inner world of thoughts, emotions and feelings. No matter how many fMRI machines I build, or how groundbreaking our investigative tools become, I will never be able to determine what it is that you feel when you’re having a sip of coffee, or showering in cold water. All I am able to determine with these inquisitive tools are the patterns that correlate with such self-reported experiences (e.g. high cortisol levels usually correlate with people self –reporting feelings of anxiety, caridovascular exercise and the secretion of endorphins in the brain that comes along with it, is correlated with a self reportedly relaxed state of mind), but we can’t go further than that.
The nature of our mental lives, makes it impossible for us to inquire about the nature of others’ mental experiences, it is a private sphere, sealed off from outer examination. With this said, and holding in mind the fact that according to Dualists, the mind is totally distinct, and unrelated to the body, one stumbles upon some pretty strange conclusions that seem to inevitably follow.
For instance, although the physical and mental are in principle completely unrelated, it is a fact that in your case, the two correlate. When you’re happy (subjective mental state) you usually smile (physical manifestation), when you feel stressed (subjective mental state), your blood pressure goes up (physical manifestation). But remember, that the only mental world to which you have access to ,is your own, hence it would be insensible to assume that everyone’s mental world correlates to their physical body in the same way that it does with yours. If the mind and body are not related at all (as Cartesian dualists hold), then the fact that your mental events correlate with your physical manifestations in the way they do, could just be mere coincidence. In other words, it is not intuitively obvious that the kinds of physical happenings that seem to go along with mental experiences should be the way they are. Why should it be obvious that a sense of sadness be expressed through tears? How do you know for sure that tears usually indicate sadness in other people? For all you know, all you can confidently make conclusions about, are your own mental states. To put it another way, if we were to mathematically plot on a Cartesian plane (so ironic!) the correlation between mental events and physical ones, we would not be able to make any significant assertions about it, mainly because we would only have one point in the plot (our own). It would be irresponsible to blindly assume that everyone's physical states correlate with their mental ones in the same way they do in us (or that they have any mental life at all for that matter).
Following this dangerous logic leaves open possibilities that would seem nothing but ridiculous to any sound person. If the mind and body are after all, separate, and not necessarily correlated, it can be possible that while punching you in the face causes you to subjectively feel pain, punching your friend makes him experience a great deal of orgasmic pleasure. When you are seen laughing powerlessly to some joke you heard, you are subjectively experiencing a funny feeling, a feeling of laughter. But when your friend is seen laughing, he is undergoing the deepest feelings of misery any human being can have. These are the outcomes that one has to maintain as possible if he claims that mind and body are in principle, unrelated.
All of this follows of course, if we are generous enough to grant the possibility that other human beings have a mental life at all. For all we know, they might also scream when “mad”, and their face might still turn red in circumstances in which they would be expected to be angry, but subjectively not be feeling anything at all. If the physical and mental don’t affect each other, and they aren’t intertwined, then these possibilities must necessarily remain open.
Comments (128)
Not that it's not a good argument, just against a straw man.
Quoting rickyk95
This is such a commonplace that it almost passes without critique.
But we do enquire about the nature of other's mental experiences. "How are you feeling?"; "Does this hurt?"; "Do you love him?". And further, these enquiries are useful - vital - in our social interactions.
And we can go a step further. That you do not feel someone else's pain is perhaps a mere accident, not a necessity. Does one siamese twin have a pain in the arm of the other? Couldn't we wire Peter and Paul's brains together in such a way that Peter has a pain in Paul's leg?
I would say that is exactly what they believe. It's implicit in the word dualist.
The Cartesian(?) solution was simply to say that God made the body do what the will decided. Not an acceptable solution to my way of thinking. You?
That is to say, the monist has to admit to dualism and offers no better explanation as to the interaction problem as the dualist. The God explanation is the "it just does" explanation. Isn't that what you ultimately say?
People are often saying this stuff. But on the one hand, most of the science I think I know comes from first person testimony by other people. They say they're experts in one field or another, and I trust them. I'm blowed if I'm going to do all the complicated stuff with machinery and textbooks they've gone through.
On the other hand, there are lots of scientific and other ways we enquire into how other people's minds work. Before we can talk we are studying each other for clues. It's how humans interact with each other. There is a very active and growing neuroscience of mind-reading.
Can this sort of thing be justified?
Quoting jorndoe
Going by the illustration, I'd say it would first require the justification of ontically real homunculi. For instance, in Buddhist worldviews, where there are various sorts of afterlives, no such illustration would hold. ... Then again, Buddhists tend not to be substance dualists.
Why? Rather, a monist would reject that very distinction. The "must" is what a dualist might think the monist must do. Monists might well disagree.
A monist can no more reject a distinction between a mental state and a physical state than he can a cat and a dog. They are different things. The problem for the monist though when distinguishing between mental phenomena and objects is that, unlike cats and dogs, they are different in class, not just different in degree. Mental phenomena of rocks are subjective, rocks are objects.
Doesn't the fact that you can't show me your phenomenal state of the rock but you can show me the the actual rock offer a meaningful distinction between the two? So the monist tells me that one is composed of Element A and the other of Element B, but those are both subtypes of Substance A. The dualist says the same thing, he just doesn't acknowledge the two types are of the same substance. I say there's no real difference between the two positions.
Indeed, a cat/dog dualist might insist on their being incommensurate. A cat/dog monist might insist that cats and dogs are both mammals.
These are not distinct epistemologies, so much as distinct ways of talking about cats and dogs.
And do you not concede though that when speaking of mental states versus external states that they are epistemologically distinct?
I know the cup is red by sensing it. I don't know your phenomenal state of the cup is red by sensing it.
Did you learn about the cup and I, or did you learn about how we use the word "red"?
Part of your learning that the cup is red is your learning how to use the word "red".
That supposed distinction between internal and external, subjective and objective, breaks down on close inspection.
And that's the problem with the juxtaposition of dualism and monism. Two ways of talking, not two ways things are.
A wee tiny detour?
You don't find it the slightest suspicious that out of body / near death experiences somehow report seeing something, even though their eyes were safely back in their body...?
Alien abduction stories at least report seeing with their eyes.
We tend to explain phantom pain, synesthesia and confabulation a bit more down-to-Earth, for example.
The problem is that even if we grant the experiences as consistent, how do we tell that they are not a phantom of a brain starved of oxygen (or some other physical malady) - in which case what is common is not a disembodied soul but a certain shared brain structure.
Probably the wand that gives it a humorous flair. :)
There are any number of oddities though.
When is this extra stuff installed?
What difference does it make?
What the heck is this extra stuff anyway?
Did Neanderthals have it? Homo erectus? Homo ergaster? Bats?
Moreover, there are many thousands of experiences that are corroborated by doctors, nurses, friends, and family, that is, the reports of what they saw and heard are verified by people who were there and in a position to know.
That (1) the cup is red and (2) you have an experience the cup is red. I learned #1 by seeing the cup. I learned #2 by your telling me. I have no way to verify #2.
Quoting Banno
I learned about the cup by seeing it. I learned about how we use the word "red" by hearing it.Quoting Banno
Obviously for me to label it red, I must know what "red" means. But if it had a peculiar odor for which I had no name, I'd just as much know that smell name or no name.Quoting Banno
I don't follow this at all.
This is the point. I once bumped into such people. I don't know what to make of their testimony which was similar yet different. It appears to me that something is there to inquire about. Consciousness is a vast unknown. Even everyday phenomenon such as switches in states of consciousness such as sleep-awake, day dreaming, etc. are mysterious. The only way for a person to understand consciousness better is through inquiry your via direct observation and experience. It's an area of inquiry that I keep my eyes and ears open to.
But at heart, I reject the notion that there is a thing that could have consciousness apart from a brain or other substrate. It does not meld with what I know about being awake, being asleep, being drunk and watching corpses.
Whereas perhaps at heart you have a different view?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YO8UVebuA0g&t=4s
So in order to know what "red" means, you must already know what sort of things are red. Yet to know which things are red, you must know what "red" means.
What do you make of this puzzle?
But she was there. Why shouldn't she remember what happened? Presuming that the experiences were disjointed, why should she not remember them as "disembodied"? In putting the memories together, why not recall them from a different vantage?
It's just not enough. But your questioning what would be enough is fair.
The problem with what you've said Banno is that people are seeing the same things. People are not only describing an alternate reality, but they also give accurate information about what was happening around their bodies. How does this take place in the example video I gave above when the brain has no measurable activity and has been drained of blood, and the heart has been stopped. She sees herself from a place above the operating table and is able to describe not only what happened to her in detail, but also describe the conversations. This is corroborated by doctors and nurses who were there.
It's a legitimate question. But another legitimate question is how a disembodied mind might see, hear, smell and form memories.
Which is the harder question?
I'm thinking everyone does (a/theist mon/dualist)... I don't think anyone have a really comprehensive understanding of mind (per se). That said, there are simple characteristics we do know.
Some emerging research:
The experience can occur without the events occurring. I dreamt of flying, but did not fly. She dreamt of being outside her body, without being outside her body.
But that does not lead me to conclude that her mind became disembodied and floated above the surgery.
How many gadgets that look like electric toothbrushes are there in a surgical room? Did the cardiologist visit her again after she became partially conscious? How much of her account is due to unintended cold reading?
I'm just not convinced.
I'm remain unconvinced that they are the result of an actual disembodiment.
As I said before if that's not enough evidence (literally millions of accounts), then nothing would count as testimonial evidence. Thanks though for your responses.
There are holographic theories of the universe which may provide a workable model.
Here I suspect we meet an impasse. I'd say you could distinguish one colour from another, but still did not know that one of them was red. Witness the Greek's "bronze sky", and the Himba seeing different colours to you or I. Language crystallises perception.
Trump, or Wayfarer? It worries me that you should dream about either.
Flip the coin again. What would have to be the case for a mind to be able to see, hear, feel, smell - without a body?
I see so many problems with a dualist account that I will not be easily convinced.
That was a @Wayfarer dream. I just dream about slapping you, without apologizing for any injuries. I'm bad that way. ;)
After studying these experiences it's interesting to compare what happens in dream states to what happens in terms of memory in these NDEs. There seem to be different levels of consciousness, and at least one level of consciousness is quite apart from the physical body.
It seems to me that introducing holographic models of the universe in order to bolster claims of NDE's is looking in the wrong direction, and one might better look to a sceptical approach to the NDE claims.
So that's me out, then.
lead someone down the garden path = mislead, deceive, hoodwink, or seduce
Source: Wiktionary
lead sb up the garden path = to deceive someone
Source: Cambridge Dictionary
But I really gotta do some work...
How do you know unless you first try?
The existing model is not adequate for all of the objections being raised. It doesn't make sense c with the existing model without resorting to denial or illusion, neither of which explain anything.
Pim Von Lommel's work on NDE's also strikes me as credible. But the one book that really opened up some interesting perspectives was H P Lovecraft (of all things). That idea of accessing other realms of being through dreams. Can't remember any detail but it had an uncannily real sense to it, when I read it all those years ago.
In any case, and aside from all that, a great deal of the kerfuffle about 'res cogitans' can be laid to rest if you realise that 'it' is never disclosed or revealed in the third person. In other words it is never a 'that'. The original meaning of 'substance' was nearer in meaning to 'being' than 'stuff'. So Descartes' model is really more like an economic model than a scientific hypothesis about something that actually exists. It's more like 'suppose the world consists of two basic types of [i]being[/I], rather than 'substance' - thinking being, which is not located, nor extended, and material being, which is extended and entirely devoid of intelligence. If it is called 'being' rather than 'substance', I think it is nearer to the intended meaning.
The point about 'intelligent being' is that it is able to grasp incorporeal objects such as numbers, laws, grammatical rules, and such like. Those things comprise as it were the 'intelligible realm' which informs the material realm, by providing the forms of things to which material particulars conform in some degree (although that is more Platonist than Cartesian).
Another salient (but unrelated) point is that minds seem to be able to reconfigure brains. This happens in cases of neuroplasticity but it also happens on a smaller scale through the way attention is directed which can bring about changes in brain function. This seems to indicate that intentionality is able to operate 'top down' on the physical brain. The question that might be asked is, when exactly did this ability begin to manifest in organisms? To which it seems quite possible to imagine that it is characteristic of even the most basic life-forms; it might be a universal attribute of organic life forms, generally overlooked BECAUSE of its dualistic connotations.
Both these points still have many of the familiar problems of interactivity, but I think viewing it helps to reframe the issue. I don't think 'res cogitans' ever meant 'substance' in the way it is commonly but mistakenly said to have done.
How is it that the thing that thinks is able to influence the thing that is extended?
If they are incommensurate, then must that question remain unanswerable?
He raised his arm.
Now he well knows that this mere ability invokes a whole host of difficulties, but the ability of a conscious agent to do that is pretty well unarguable.
Of course nowadays it is simply assumed by most folks that mind is an attribute or quality of body, rather than vice versa, but in my view that is very much a cultural construct. My Indian Studies lecturer used to point out that Westerners say of someone who died, that he 'gave up the ghost' whereas Indians tend to say he 'gave up the body'.
I find his argument quite convincing. Perhaps the difficulties are illusions of one sort or another.
If these experiences do reflect a metaphysical reality, as I believe they do, then it seems that consciousness itself doesn't reside in the body at all, but resides and is dependent upon a separate energy source. After reflecting on this subject for years, it seems that the body is simply a receptacle for consciousness. From what others have experienced, we do keep a form after death, it's just a different form, but with higher sensory inputs. In fact, many have reported their memories returning to them, putting the existence of memories outside of the body and into a metaphysical form or body of some kind. I've come to believe that consciousness is at the bottom of reality itself. That we are part of a vast consciousness, and it is here that the true self resides with all of its memories and knowledge.
I think that my view is a kind of pragmatic dualism - I really do think there is a basic ontological distinction between the physical and the mental. But again, reifying mind as a substance is deeply problematical. From the perspective of a sensory being in the phenomenal domain, there is no object called 'mind' - but it is nevertheless an indubitable reality, just as Descartes said.
Quoting Sam26
I think the analogy of a TV receiver might be an effective metaphor.
Post above have some links.
After 15 years in a vegetative state, nerve stimulation restores consciousness (Sep 2017)
A substance cannot be determined outside of it's attributes and modes, and those are logically dependent on the substance. However, that's exactly what the Cartesian is doing: they believe they can conceptualize a attribute outside its substance, and give it somehow a separate identity. It'd be easier to conceive of matter/mind as two aspects or attributes of the same infinite substance.
This really makes no sense. Are you suggesting that the Himba fail to see the full array of colors that you do because they live in a language deficient environment? That seems hopelessly backwards. The reason the Himba fail to see the full array of colors you do is because they live in a color deficient environment, and since they can't see those colors, they never created words for them. It's not like the Himba are just particularly bad wordsmiths when it comes to labeling colors, and now the Himba can't see colors everyone else can.
I'll certainly admit that pointing things out, discussing them, analyzing them, and thinking about them clarifies them and brings forth knowledge you would have never otherwise known. So if that's what you mean by "language crystalizes perception," I agree. Thought increases our knowledge, thought occurs with language; therefore language increases knowledge. So sometimes language precedes knowledge, sometimes not.
To the real question here, are you actually asserting that your language theory is an empirical one, and this isn't a matter of philosophy as much as it is a scientific one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8scc2YbXUk
[quote=Banno] I'd say you could distinguish one colour from another, but still did not know that one of them was red."[/quote]
I note that "red" isn't in quotes. What does this comment even mean? I could distinguish red from green, but not know they were different?
I assume he meant it in the sense that I can distinguish one person from another but not know that one of them was your wife.
There are non-linguistic ways that lesser animals can – and we humans do – associate qualitative experiences such as the colors green and red with differentiable meaning. Rather than limiting meaning to the semantics embodies within languages, we could, for example, presume language as a refinement of the following: e.g., all mammal’s blood is red; red can then be associated with any number of givens appraised to be ontically associated with blood: the presence of life (signifying fresh food for most, if not all, carnivores); the presence of a wound whereby the other is in some way in need of assistance (arguably common enough among social mammals which will lick each other’s wounds with emotive intent of helping the other out). The qualitative value of green, however, will not hold the same symbolic referents tied into what which is ontic - most likely, most often, meaning something symbolically associated with grass and tree leaves. So, for example, to the carnivore (given that it can visually differentiate between red and green), red will hold a body of meaning apart from the body of symbolic meaning it emotively relates to the color green. In this example, no formal language is required for red to hold specific meaning(s) differentiable from those held via awareness of color green.
Lots of questions, to which I don’t currently have an answer to. But why address this as “extra-stuff”. It is no more extra than is the mind-stuff causally tied into the brain-stuff. Question then is, can the normal stuff of mind yet be when separated from the normal stuff of body to which it is normally causally tied into. To reply with the obvious, in dualism and non-physicalist monism this does become a metaphysical possibility – still, this metaphysical possibility is not the same as a metaphysical requirement/actuality that can be proven to be in any particular way. As to the “hows”, I refer back to my initial sentence (still, what self is as an identity is bound to play some part in this issue, imo).
How we analyze is in part instinctual, and, as we are a higher organism, in part deliberate. Our perhaps best tool for analysis is language, but that's all it is - a tool. This leads to an indirect realist metaphysic, simply saying we know our world only through interpretation, some being the way the eye works, some the brain, and some language.
I don't follow this distinction. If you can distinguish one person from the other, you must have an unspoken definition of person. The only distinction between the definition of person and wife is that the latter is more complex. Are you committing to some arbitrary delineation between simple and complex definitions? What is it?
It strikes me as possible for a dog to recognize a wife, especially one that has interacted with enough human couples to where the dog might fully expect a swat from a particular man if he nips at a particular woman. In fact, adult cats don't interact with other's kittens because they understand what a mother is (and how she acts).
With my curiosity straying away from the metaphysical for a second:
This reminds me of experiments I once learned about where geese (?) chicks were presented with two overhead forms (cardboard cutouts or something like this): one where the bird shape had a short neck and long tail feathers (typical or raptors) and another with long neck and short tail feathers (typical of non-raptors). The chicks ran looking for shelter when the first form was glided overhead but did nothing significant when the second form was glided overhead. I concede this is only hearsay without a proper link given (won’t now try to find it)—but supposing something like this to be at times the case:
Would you be conformable with saying that this synthetic (bottom-up obtained) and analytic (in cog.sci. terms: top-down attained, i.e. (genotypically) predetermined toward learned) conflux of meaning can be inherited in all things that can perceive?
For my part, I’m accustomed to using other terms to express such behavioral inheritance of meaning. But I’m curious to know how one would address this same form of inheritance of meaning(s) in lesser animals via formal epistemological philosophy—this such as via the synthetic / analytic distinction.
If I'm rambling, I'll understand. But I am curious all the same.
I just mean it in the sense that I might see two people standing next to each other but not know that they're husband and wife.
You changed the example to be that I could know that two people were standing side by side but not know they were husband and wife. Obviously I can know some things about an object but not others. I could know that my computer has a USB port but not a CD drive. I could also know that two objects are husband and wife but not know they were people. I could also know they were husband and wife and not know they were standing side by side. I could also see something and not know that there were two of them. My question still being why are there some things I can know without language (like that there are two people standing there), but there are others that require language (like they're husband and wife).
I'm told monkeys are born with a fear of heights and snakes, and I can say that my sheepdog has a herding instinct that I certainly never taught him. This goes along with your goose example.
My use of the synthetic/analytic language comes from my recent re-reading of Quine, who argued the non-existence of the distinction. It dawned on me that there is a distinction between observing the world and performing logic on the world, but the two are always intertwined. I cannot just look at an object without imposing my sense of reason on it. That's what knowledge is. I think animals do that as well, and I don't think it's really significant whether the reasoning ability has developed over time and was learned or whether it comes hard wired. In either event we see the world and we impose the reasoning of our mind onto it, and sometimes that includes using language and sometimes it doesn't.
It was hardly much of a change. My first example was "I can distinguish one person from another but not know that one of them was your wife".
I can distinguish between two different animals but not know that one of them is an elephant shrew. I can distinguish between two different foodstuff but not know that one of them is a dragon fruit.
Haven't you ever been shown something but not know what it is?
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
They had no use for that distinction, so they never learned it.
Perhaps you could distinguish red from other colours before you learned the word. More likely you learned the word and the colour at the same time as you were encouraged to pick up the red block.
Quoting Hanover
Is that just "knowing that..." against "knowing how..."? If so, my point is that this does not go far enough. "Knowing that..." is a form of "knowing how..."; knowing that the cup is red is just knowing how to distinguish that cup from other cups. Knowing that something is the case is just knowing how to use words correctly.
To push the limits a bit, the thought occurred to me that to perceive requires this analytic side (here assumed by me genotypically inherited): either that perceived is innately judged to be a thing, aka entity—e.g. wall, food, predator—or, conversely an activity, aka process—e.g., the wall’s activity is that of inflexibility to one’s being/actions, the prey’s activity is that or running away relative to one’s being/actions, the predator’s activity is in part that of seeking out one’s being/actions. Something along these lines. Taking this perspective would potentially result in the conclusion that to perceive is to analytically judge, at minimum, what is entity and what is processes (i.e., behaviors, activities) of becoming.
Or course, far more complex and stimuli-specific genotypically inherited analytic-judgments can be offered. And, the more adaptively intelligent the lifeform the more of its behaviors will be gained by synthetic means, i.e. by learning (e.g., requiring parenting in due measure) … but these synthetic means too will require some basic analytic (top-down) judgments as to categories of what is perceived. Again, such as what is thing and what is activity.
So, in pushing the limits, thing is, one can readily argue that amoeba engage in such analytic discriminations between walls, foods, and predators as things—as well as between the respective activities of each. Curt evidence for this is that they would perish if they didn't so discriminate. Amoeba have also be experimentally shown to learn *, so, to some extent, they use their inheritable top-down judgments to made bottom-up judgments, the latter being not specific to the species but to individual selves.
Then, back to more philosophical issues, how should we denote such genetically-inherited analytic-judgments of an ameba in terms of (primitive) forms of knowledge? This since there is a behavioral gradation—of both complexity and abstraction—in these analytic judgments from at least ameba all the way to humans.
It’s certainly not JTB, nor knowledge by acquaintance … and terming it tacit knowledge, though I think it proper, doesn’t address what is denoted by us through the term “knowledge”.
I’m thinking of this as a different route to get to the root of what we intend to signify by knowledge—from which, then, can be interpreted to emerge all the more specialized forms of knowledge we humans are familiar with, including that of JTB and of acquaintance. (Currently don’t want to myself start a new thread on this topic, saying this in case this post is too far off topic.)
* as a quickly found on line reference, the first two sentences from an abstract to an article found at: http://diventra.physics.ucsd.edu/Learning.pdf [overall article is about mathematical modeling of simple intelligent behavior]
And how important is this empirical point to your general language theory? If I could know red prior to language, does your whole philosophy unravel? I'm just asking because you seem to hinge a tremendous amount on some sociological language learning theory studies that are ambiguous at best. My cat Gumbo greets Ginger, her lifelong dog friend, but hisses at Fred Barkowitz, the new puppy invading her home. How is it that Gumbo can distinguish Ginger from Fred without language but Hanover the toddler couldn't even tell red from the midnight sky?Quoting BannoI did already take your position as you have clarified here, which is that you're not just claiming that I might know how to fix broken pipe without language, but that I can't even tell a pipe from a wrench without language.
Is there a difference between these two questions:
(The latter refers to some language, not necessarily the language in which the question is asked, but maybe specifying it matters more than I think.)
What might "a metaphysical reality" be? And "a separate energy source"? :o
(I'm guessing you're using the terminology differently from what I'm used to.)
(Y)
Quoting javra
The extra stuff isn't quite the same as mind, as best I can tell. I tend to use mind as an umbrella-term, covering the likes of experiences, qualia, thinking, ideation, love/feelings, headaches, self-awareness, consciousness, all that.
The sensation of the headache is mind stuff (and phenomenological, part of you); the scan is not mind (more empirical if you will, not part of you). Does that differentiation work? If yes, then what of that extra stuff?
We here agree on what mind consists of (leaving behind possible metaphysical appraisals and expressions of the physical, e.g. Pierce’s notion of effete mind).
To my best current understandings there are two means of appraising the issue of life after death: 1) via reincarnations of self-identity and 2) via causal models that specify something along the lines of “while mind, and the self-identity that goes along with it, will always be causally tied into brain within the realms of this physical world, it can subsist to varying extents without being tied into brain within realms that are not of this physical world”.
My favorite is scenario (1). I cannot metaphysically disprove scenario (2). Furthermore, among others, there is an additional metaphysical possibility of both scenarios (1) and (2) co-occurring: e.g. via analogy, like possible dream states between awakened states, so too could there be the possibility of (something like) Elysian Fields or realms of Tortures in-between reincarnations of self-identity within the physical world (e.g., Tibetan Buddhists will often go this route as regards the afterlife).
So the extra-stuff would not be the same as mind if mind is interpreted to always and in all ways be tied into the functioning of the brain—or, else, to in no way be. This, though, is a catch-22 dilemma of physicalism as regards this issue. When addressing mind as first person experience of self-identity and all that it requires, there is no extra stuff involved … neither in scenario (1) nor in scenario (2).
Going back to your diagram, mind can itself be interpreted as a body of information that holds some degree of stability over time, only that this body of information is incorporeal—this holds true even when mind is causally entwined with brain within the physical realm we coexist in. One can interpret the spiritualists’ notion of a subtle body as being nothing more than this: the body of information which is mind, including the self-identity of the conscious agency that is tied into, and emerges from, this body of mind (again, mind as you’ve specified it in the given quote above).
Explaining the “hows” of life after death via scenario (1) is relatively easy when compared to scenario (2). This is in part due to scenario (2) requiring causal mechanisms at play within realms of non-physical reality. Think of string-theory’s multiple parallel dimensions as a rough analogy; only that, here, these other realms are not explainable via the physical, as is string-theory’s.
While I wouldn’t mind further delving into this topic—it’s an interesting topic to me as well—I again am not one to have all the answers. I’ll likely rely more on logical possibilities given a non-physicalist metaphysics. And, to reemphasize, I myself don’t sponsor a Cartesian dualism of mind and body as two basic substances.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/107699
The supposed incommensurability of our mental lives is wrong-headed.
Was that "yes", "no", or "not sure"?
When you learned what a wrench is, was there more involved than learning the link between a name and a thing? Were you shown how t use it? I'm guessing yes. I think there is more to learning what a wrench is than just learning to use it to tighten a pipe(?).
If someone only knew how to use a wrench to tighten pipes, do we say they know what a wrench is? Or is their knowledge incomplete?
Check out https://www.google.com.au/search?q=wrench&client=safari&rls=en&dcr=0&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj0hrnSsd3WAhXMf7wKHX7FA8QQ_AUICigB&biw=1366&bih=684
What do these have in common?
I am not getting your point.
Suppose I was an accomplished mechanic who spoke only German. An English speaker could say truly both that I know how to use a wrench and that I don't know what a wrench is. The latter's just ambiguous. Just explaining the ambiguity is a pain in the ass:
I just can't figure out if your position trades on this ambiguity or makes a point about it or what?!
My point?
@Hanover seems to think that an ape that uses a wrench to fix a leaking pipe knows what a wrench is.
I'm just urging caution.
In the real world they are called "spanners", saving "wrench" for adjustable spanners. Google tells me that in German they are called "Schlüssel". The ape could not follow this conversation. Nor might it recognise a tap spanner or a ring spanner or a podger or hex key as a variation on the theme.
Caution's nice.
Some of your points look to me like they could be, well, if not "settled" then at least addressed by research. An ape that learned to use a particular individual tool for a particular type of job might substitute a similar tool, might recognize when only one of two similar tools will work for a given problem, might, might, might, or might not. There's a threshold beyond which I'll be fine saying he knows everything I do about wrenches except how to talk about them. I don't know what that threshold is exactly, and I might need to see research even to figure that out.
SO for my money this is not a garden path worth our time; leave it to the anthropologists. Philosophically speaking, the response to dualism given here abouts looks like a denial of dualism - "oh, we didn't mean that mind and body are really incommensurate..."
But that's a denial of dualism.
You seem to think that you know what a wrench is. An ape knows it knocks bananas out of trees. You know it tightens the nut on your drawer handle. A mechanic knows how it replaces an alternator. Perhaps an engineer knows something about the wrench I know nothing about. Either we say that unless you know everything about wrenches then you now nothing about wrenches, or we say if you know something about wrenches, then you know, in part, what wrenches are.
Do you know more about wrenches than an ape? Sure. Is part of your superior knowledge the result of the knowledge expanding power of language? Of course. Does this mean that knowledge of the wrench is dependent on language? Of course not.
It's all a matter of degree.
One might look at it that way, but it strikes me as dubious.
But I think it more interesting to look at it in terms of showing and saying. Show that one can use a spanner and an adjustable wrench and a pipe wrench does not tell us how each of these is related in such a way that the one word can be applied to all. That requires language.
Suppose our ape cannot use the sentence "This is a wrench, and so it this". Then there is a sense in which the ape does not know what a wrench is.
That's not a difference in degree, but in kind.
Does a wrench ever come to exist in a fashion that isn't dependent on a linguistic culture? The argument has to work both ways here.
You are treating the wrench as an example of a material object. They are just things to be found in the world. Even if communities of plumbers never existed, a chimp might stumble on to one growing on the wrench tree, the one right next to the banana tree, or some such.
So the knowledge which manifests "real wrenches" is a product of linguistic habit. It is a social constraint that is imposed on material reality. There is a particular job to be done. And look! (melt...twist...hammer...shape.) Here is the right kind of tool to do it.
Hence the reality of the "wrench" is conceptual as much as it is material. Words do more than merely signify - point or refer. They are causal.
Clearly chimps are also conceptual creatures. They can fashion sticks in the right shape to fish termites out of a mound. The trick can be based from old to young by a natural inclination to watch and imitate. So chimps also can "know" - form concepts with consequences.
Conception is not dependent on language. But it is crucial to allow for the fact that humans fill their worlds with linguistically-dependent objects. And these - because they depend on (semiotically) higher order concepts - are always being rolled out in arguments to prove points about "theories of truth" which they can't in fact prove.
Once a wrench becomes a brute fact of the world, a mere material state of affairs, then we are into unvarnished realism and all the usual confusion that entails.
The mind becomes cut away from the existence of the object in question. And the resulting naive realism in fact turns into the very dualism it was pretending to leave behind.
You're just making up distinctions. An ape gets hungry and seeks food. It has a concept of food without a word for food and understands a similarity between bananas and berries in that both satisfy hunger. In fact, to understand that one banana is similar to another banana is to understand a relation between two distinct objects. The ape gets sick from eating a mushroom, so he eats no more mushrooms. Such requires appreciating mushroomness, the abstract notion of mushrooms, yet all without language.
That's simply reifying ape behaviour into a concept.
What is a concept of food, apart from the consumption habits of the ape?
Why not instead say that possession of a concept is always evidenced by behaviour, which in the case of some primates includes the sounds and marks they make?
What sort of thing is a concept, apart from what shows in behaviour?
A way of classifying 'things' (broadly), I suppose.
There's some really abstract classifying it's pretty hard to imagine doing without language, but doesn't it also seem that language presupposes some ability to classify things, rather than engendering it?
One interesting inflection point between some animals and others might be their capacity to remember. Maybe one has to decide "food/not food", for instance, each time it encounters something, even if it's the same individual something over and over, while another might remember having already decided what to do when encountering that thing, or even another thing a lot like it.
This is very interesting. In my experience we often tend to assume in the intellectual landscape that Westerners are the Cartesians, and Indians (Buddhists, Hindus, etc.) are the monists who espouse unity of body-mind. That's why in Chan Buddhism there is the namarupa - mind-body. Is this understanding a Westernized version of Asian culture you would say?
Westerners say "gave up the ghost" because we understand the soul to be the form of the body, meaning its animating principle. So the person (who is a substance formed of the unity of body and mind, form and matter) gave up the ghost - the form and animating principle of the body. Hence why the body is now dead.
N?mar?pa is fundamental to all Buddhism, not simply Ch'an. It means literally 'name and form' and is one of the '12 nidanas' or links of dependent origination.
There are explicitly dualist schools in Hinduism, specifically samhkya, which has parallels to Cartesian dualism, as it believes the two fundamental substances are consciousness (purusa) and matter (prakriti) which are joined together in the human form. (However in many other respects they are of course vastly different as it is an Indian rather than Western philosophy.)
Buddhists will generally say that body and mind are two aspects of a whole, but what that 'whole' is, is an open question, in my opinion, as it is neither body nor mind. Interestingly, I have found that Buddhist scholasticism will sometimes adopt quite a dualist model, as in the following statement of the Dalai Lama, when discussing the ground of re-birth:
Sounds rather dualistic to me.
Anyway, from the viewpoint of Buddhism, many modern people are 'C?rv?ka', i.e. materialists, because they believe that with the death of the body, the elements return to the earth, etc, and there are no karmic consequences ('fruit of action') which is of course not the Buddhist view. However Buddhism also doesn't believe there is a sub-stratum or enduring kernel of consciousness which migrates from life to life, rather that the causes which give rise to a given life, will give rise to another life in future, which will experience itself as 'I and mine', up until the point where all identification with, and attachment to, the causes of rebirth cease.
Right, but this sounds more like neutral monism (much like Spinoza and Schopenhauer) rather than substance dualism or Platonic/Aristotelian hylomorphism. Neutral monism is very popular today in the West.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yeah, but this doesn't have much import to me, the same way that Schopenhauer's argument for immortality doesn't have much import. To say that consciousness continues which will experience "I and mine" isn't t say that I continue in any shape or form (unless I identify myself with that consciousness which says "I and mine"). Also what you're putting down here as the Buddhist view isn't the view of all forms of Buddhism. What is meant by many through reincarnation is that your thought patterns, desires, tendencies, atoms and the like reincarnate - the Five Skandhas. This can be a very materialist doctrine in itself, as much as it can be spiritual. Depends what you consider your "self" ;) .
And we reify the abstract behaviors of a wrench into the concrete term "wrench." Such is the purpose of language. The questions are: (1) did the wrench preexist the "wrench," and (2) is the ape's knowledge of the wrench of a different type (as opposed to degree) than the person's?
I've never understood how #1 couldn't be answered in the affirmative, but that's your thesis.
Regarding #2, you would hold that a languageless mechanical savant, gifted in nothing but the ability to repair all that is broken, who is a maestro with everything wrench like, knows less of the wrench in his hand than a helpless child who is simply able to recite the word "wrench" when his father holds various wrenches in front of him?
What does our child know of the wrench in our savant's hand than does of our savant other than that wrenches have names?
It is difficult to provide non-circular definitions because all things are immanent within experience. So our whole conceptual puzzle will, in the end, be circular. It is impossible to create a non-circular but complete philosophical account of reality.
But that behavior illustrates that the monkey understands that banana is food and rocks are not. What does food mean? Food means something that nourishes the body and satisfies the desire expressed through hunger. So the monkey feels hungry and sees that banana satisfies that hunger by - as apokrisis tells us - imitation. I suppose the first time baby monkey feels hungry, they don't quite know what that feeling is supposed to be about, because to understand what it is about means precisely to understand how it fits in with other things - when it begins, when it ends, etc. - to understand its place in the causal chain.
And the baby monkey doesn't yet understand this. But it sees mother monkey eat banana. It imitates mother monkey and eats banana too. Then hunger disappears. This experience is repeated with regularity over and over again, and soon monkey starts to form a conception of what hunger, food, etc. are. How does it do this? By seeing the regularities and patterns to be found between those aspects of experience.
It's similar to how we learn a language. We go from speaking no language at all, to becoming quite capable to speak one language. And it's a bit miraculous when you think about it, because we essentially learn to speak from nothing. Language is nothing else but the identification of patterns between sounds and other experiences. When you say "fire!" I go back in my memory and seek for the experience associated with you saying fire.
All this has to do with memory. It is memory that makes conception of any kind (including linguistic conception) possible to begin with.
What is concrete about the term wrench? It is not the name of an individual; nor is it universally the name of one class of thing; nor are there no exceptions, for there are things of which we wonder if the term is correctly applied.
Did the wrench exist before it was named? You seem to think the answer obvious; but I invite you to reconsider. You have framed the question in a way that suits your analysis; the first spanners apparently were to tension crossbows; an individual box spanner for each bow, because they were no standard sizes. It was a few hundred years before sizes were standardised, the term wrench not being used until 1793.
So were there wrenches before the word "wrench: was used? Yep, but they were not much like the wrenches we use today. All you have succeeded in doing is applying the term wrench post hoc.
And regarding your second question, you commit the fallacy of false antithesis...
Perhaps you can be free and easy with language because it suits your view to pretend that the interaction between words and world is simple and goes in one direction: words name things; hence thing and minds are different. But of course this is overly simple, as my description of the interaction of things and words shows. There is no one thing called a wrench; so, again, what is a "wrench"? What is a concept, apart from what we do?
What you can't do without circularity is define each word in terms of other words. But it does not follow that our words do not inform us about reality.
I keep quoting that neat bit from PI ?201 about there being a way of using words that is not in terms of other words. It seems to fall on deaf ears, but to me it is profound. It's not about how one learns to use a particular word that already exists within one's shared language; it is about how one learns to use words. Mere imitation, while relevant, will not cut it.
Quoting Agustino
That's crap. As if we never do things with words. We don't just experience, we act. Language is not so passive, nor solipsistic.
there is a picture of life that sees it as merely experiencing the world; hence
Quoting rickyk95
In this view language is the passive naming of experiences, and dualistic solipsism the only outcome.
It's a broken picture. But those obsessed by it can't see it's poverty, because they frame even criticism of that picture in terms of the picture.
Rather, language and the world are locked together, mind and body are one, subject and object is a false dichotomy, and Cartesian dualism fails.
That's pretty well said...