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Andrew M

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I think you misunderstand. I didn't say that different levels of description were incommensurable. I said that they depended on structure and organiza...
December 13, 2020 at 03:41
It's a conventional way of speaking. We also speak of a person who acts independently as having a mind of their own. But before assuming dualism, we s...
December 13, 2020 at 03:11
Human beings and their bodies are not separate, but we predicate them differently. I have a body (as do other animals). But my body doesn't have belie...
December 11, 2020 at 23:11
No, it's an abstraction over concrete things. It describes something that a person does or has. That is, no person, no experience. (Which we can appre...
December 11, 2020 at 22:52
Yes, agreed. Thoughts, feelings, perceptions, etc., are embodied - they aren't non-physical. So the mental and physical aren't opposing duals. But nei...
December 11, 2020 at 22:30
Sounds good. (Goodman referenced noted.) The main issue for me is that a description of a human being at a physical level should not contradict descri...
December 11, 2020 at 22:21
While I agree that the red cup is external to you, and your taste buds (etc.) are internal to you, I don't think it follows that those predicates are ...
December 09, 2020 at 06:52
Yes, if the term mind is understood as it is used in everyday experience then it's probably fine. That is: Whereas the Cartesian considers mind as a c...
December 09, 2020 at 06:43
No, and I already gave a similar example here (with internal and external house walls). I'm just trying to make sense of your earlier comments which a...
December 08, 2020 at 06:54
You seemed to want to defend the use of internal/external and physical/non-physical qualifiers as meaningful when talking about experiences. If not, a...
December 08, 2020 at 06:21
Well, internal and external are useful when talking about a house (or a theater). They can refer to the internal and external walls of the house, for ...
December 08, 2020 at 05:42
:smile: And is sanity a controlled form of battiness? Slogans and metaphors are all good fun and might be useful to illustrate a point. But to actuall...
December 08, 2020 at 05:29
I'm not saying you do. That would be the Cartesian dualism model. Those predicates are inapplicable if Cartesian dualism is rejected. One might kick a...
December 08, 2020 at 05:07
Yes. It is the human being (a living, sentient organism) that has the capacity to think, not brains or Cartesian minds. Yes, Jaworski knows his stuff....
December 08, 2020 at 04:39
:up: Supposing experience to have internal and external components still implies the Cartesian theater metaphor. Say you were playing a game of footba...
December 07, 2020 at 04:37
Certainly the antecedents for Cartesian dualism can be found in ancient thinking. As it happens, the textbook I quoted earlier links substance dualism...
December 07, 2020 at 04:19
What does it mean, on your view? Maybe. Or even a dissolving of the dichotomy.
December 07, 2020 at 03:57
Or neither. I think the divisions themselves, as understood in their Cartesian sense, are misleading and unnecessary. They don't arise in normal commu...
December 05, 2020 at 11:54
To the extent it endorses a private theater conception of mind, yes. (Though it might not do so - see the third quote below.) As some support for my i...
December 05, 2020 at 11:48
We're trying to avoid Cartesian dualism. That's the position of positing a container mind (the Cartesian theater), and then redefining ordinary words ...
December 05, 2020 at 01:11
Side note: for your last few replies to me, I haven't received a notification. I'm not sure if that's on your end or mine. I'll try signing out and in...
December 03, 2020 at 12:31
As it happens, that was Aristotle's position. His term was ousia, which has been variously interpreted as being, thing, thinghood, and substance. Ousi...
December 02, 2020 at 01:43
Sure, once we've made up our minds to.
December 01, 2020 at 08:02
Yes, that's just the point in distinguishing those activities from perception. You are having a dream - there's nothing being perceived, only dreamt. ...
December 01, 2020 at 07:13
People's experiences sometimes differ in certain situations (reflecting differences either in the environment or in their physical characteristics). A...
November 29, 2020 at 23:43
https://twitter.com/romanoriginals/status/571224722438004736 It seems the dress retailers are not familiar with the Cartesian "facts".
November 29, 2020 at 02:16
Yes. And such differences would be potentially discoverable as we've seen with color-blindness, etc. So color-blindness implies a kind of privacy in p...
November 28, 2020 at 22:25
:up:
November 28, 2020 at 00:10
Because you're describing your perceptions and experiences as private and inaccessible to others. That's the Cartesian theater model of perception. Or...
November 27, 2020 at 23:44
Yes, when we represent the world in language, we generalize and abstract from our experience in the world, not in separation from our experience. The ...
November 27, 2020 at 02:04
My point is that we view the world in a particular way that depends on the kind of physical and perceptual characteristics we have (in our case, as hu...
November 26, 2020 at 13:40
I think that with her knowledge Mary could have learned to visualize yellow before seeing it (in the world). Whether or not she would make that connec...
November 25, 2020 at 00:51
A perspective (or a point-of-view) is a logical precondition for making natural distinctions and observing things. Consider Alice taking a photograph ...
November 25, 2020 at 00:38
It's an empirical question. The conceptual point is that the natural distinctions people make (and which can potentially differ depending on the perso...
November 23, 2020 at 23:22
I think you meant to link to the podcast here from Oct 11, 2014. The podcast you linked to is on Conscious Thought from Jan 15, 2017 (and is 12 mins l...
November 23, 2020 at 00:45
Yes, I briefly discussed Dennett's Cartesian Theater metaphor here. And, of course, Dennett points out how qualia is defined to be beyond the scope of...
November 22, 2020 at 04:35
No. As I'm using the term, it's a logical condition. Yes, my usage here is the former. However, your alternative usage is fine as well (i.e., the resu...
November 22, 2020 at 04:23
Yes, I think that's true for a self-reflective sense of perspective. However I'm just using it in the sense of a reference point from which things are...
November 22, 2020 at 04:08
The difference is that aspiration, etc., are bodily processes or functions. Whereas a perspective is a logical condition for being able to make distin...
November 20, 2020 at 21:28
Yes, that's right. For the first set of examples, if a person dies, they no longer have a perspective on the world - that perspective depended on them...
November 20, 2020 at 04:40
Seems OK to me. This is what I mean by saying that there is no view from nowhere.
November 20, 2020 at 04:37
Yes it happens for any object and event - which are distinguishable in human perception. Yes it can. I can point to the Sun and stars (a human percept...
November 20, 2020 at 04:37
It's a formal aspect of a human being perceiving the world. Their perspective is not a "thing" that has any existence separate from that human activit...
November 19, 2020 at 02:10
You're describing the world as a barren landscape where the human comes along and colors it in with all the qualities that make it interesting to them...
November 19, 2020 at 02:10
You can't reject anything if you're not a human being. But that doesn't imply subject/object dualism, which divides the human being in Cartesian terms...
November 17, 2020 at 10:51
Yes, tools not sullied by having any practical use in the world. Yet, as ideals, often attractive and tempting... That's it. And I think this is an in...
November 17, 2020 at 08:00
Cool. It relates to philosophical issues such as dualism, qualia, the hard problem, and what not. The word "red" has the same meaning in both phrases,...
November 16, 2020 at 11:23
Thanks for the shoutout. And a great Grice quote. Along Grice's lines, a value of the forum is that one gets to try out one's tools on a variety of in...
November 16, 2020 at 04:26
:up: Yet we do make the distinction in practice - see below. Yes. So that's a physical process. In the absence of light, the colors of the apples and ...
November 16, 2020 at 04:18
No, it's about being clear on what the usages are and how they relate to each other. When says that "All cats are grey in the dark", I understand what...
November 15, 2020 at 06:21