Patterner

Are there different physicalist accounts, and you don't know which seems most likely? I'm not being confrontational. I'm asking. No, I don't believe p...

What is your account of the bridge from the physical to the phenomenal?

This is from Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam.

you have been participating on a philosophy forum to the tune of 1.5K posts. Surely, you've been in one or two discussions where you did not expect th...

You just can't argue with Martians.

A classic!

Ever read Stranger in a Stranger Land? The protagonist decided that's what separates us. Man is the animal that laughs.

Although the concept of prime numbers shows that there are areas of thought that humans have that other species do not, I don't see how it disproves d...

Not sure what you mean by the part I bolded. My take would be you want subjective preferences to be chosen for practical reasons? If the ability is no...

What I bolded is what is being contested. It is not established fact. Until it is at least agreed upon (better if established as fact), there is no go...

I believe what is being contested here is the idea that anything that did happen had to happen.

In Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious, Antonio Damasio has a bit to say about this.

Still, I make that judgement. It's entirely subjective, after all. I think our intelligence and consciousness (I believe the two are very tightly inte...

I agree. But I don't have the answers. The general idea I get from looking it up is that rational thinking and decisions are arrived at through logic ...

I've read those. I also read 2 Mental Abilities Separate Humans from Animals. Much is made of learning from each other. Here's a good quote about it, ...

I don't think I'm missing that point at all. I have not said anything to suggest I don't think we are animals. Of course we are. And we reached our cu...

What do you mean by "human areas"? That almost sounds like you are suggesting there are areas of thought that are only seen in humans. Can someone not...

Culture, empathy, moral sense, and social living are surely up for grabs. Because the merit of each is subjective. Even an animal that kills it's prey...

hit post accidentally. Can't find delete

Yes, we can be such things. In some ways, that is surely the case. But we don't merely think in certain ways to a higher degree. We think in ways no o...

Yes. But, surely, we are exceptional in some way. Not just being the species that can lift the most weight, run the fastest, live in the greatest numb...

I know you weren't responding to me, but it might be how you would. I think we are different in kind. One animal thinks about leaping out at prey. Ano...

I may not understand how you mean this. We store memory outside of our bodies. We've invented more ways of storing information than I will ever know. ...

Well those are expensive! :rofl: I wouldn't mind the price if I had a chance of understanding them. Gazzaniga's The Conscious Instinct is a good deal ...

Or if the caregiver had the free will to NOT retrieve it the first twenty times? :rofl:

I don't expect to be able to make head nor tail of such books. But I would like to try. can you name some?

Let me try to approach this from the angle I was coming from in the things I said most recently, when I added you to my post to FJ. For me, this issue...

I'm good. Just wasn't sure if you were getting at something different.

I'm not sure I understanding all of this. I don't know if my response is relevant. I would say 'motivations' and 'preferences' are different things. M...

I haven't heard of any guess as to why evolution would select for the illusion of choice, or any subjective experience, that makes sense. If the physi...

Right? The Hard Problem of Consciousness. Of course, the HP isn't about an exception to determinism. More basic, it's about how the objective physical...

Indeed. Choiceless, we come into being. (The creed of the American teenager. "I didn't ask to be born.") Yes, by definition, the first choice was a fr...

Those who have been alive an infinite time would have an infinite series. The rest of us only go back to our first choice.

Yes. We make all choices, from the moment we are aware that we have options.

Agreed. And, not to derail, but just for fun. This reminds me of the thirteen seconds of this fun video, beginning at 5:03. Fight of the Century: Keyn...

It is an odd thought that all the movements of particles/energy in our brains could cause feelings of doubt about the resolution as they all resolve i...

I don't entirely agree.I don't think so. Certain things can and cannot happen in this universe, due to its properties and laws. For example, a human c...

I don't know. Rational processes have come into being through it. Does that make it a rational process?

I do not agree with your stipulations. Particularly #3. It is not an absolute that harming someone is bad. For example, it is not bad to harm someone ...

In Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious, Antonio Damasio writes:andIt's a long road between that non-explicit competences type of intelligence ...

Indeed, not along the lines of the op. I just commented on a snippet of side conversation I thought was interesting. I'll stop now. :smile:

I doubt it's possible. We communicate much more than mathematical ideas. If we tried using math to talk about any of those things, it would no longer ...

Late to the party, and I haven't read any responses yet. I'm going to agree that it is not a valid statement. The statement isn't about anything that ...

Holy cow! You guys are great! Penn and Teller wouldn't have been able to pull that off more smoothly! It seems fascinating. Probably moreso for those ...

Srap's whole post is excellent. If intuition is, as it says in the part you quoted, "zipping through the analysis," that's fine. That doesn't make it ...

I don't know if I'm defining it correctly. It seems as though people sometimes think of intuition like a hunch to play certain numbers in the lottery....

Thank you! I'm just not feeling Chandler's book.

That Lyons book is expensive! :lol: And probably way beyond me. I need a good intro to Semiotics. Hopefully, Daniel Chandler is good.

That's extremely interesting! I can't read it, bit I read about it here: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/06/10/science/african-elephants-name-like-calls-...

Well I'll get to your post later. Yard work today. But I don't think there's any possibility that any other animal has any language that approaches hu...