Janus

Of course they do, but we also act for reasons. As I keep trying to get you to see they are just different kinds of explanation. You might get it if y...

You continue to misunderstand. I'm not claiming that intentionality and personal experience can be comprehended or encapsulated in any purely physical...

I haven't said that our actions and decisions are exhaustively explainable in terms of neural processes. We make sense of our actions in terms of reas...

However you want to label it is not relevant to the point. So, you don't believe that when you act there have been prior neural processes which give r...

Cheers Ludwig such details are easily missed. I do it all the time. It's not controversial that electrochemical processes cause us to decide to act. D...

It's uncontroversial that the brain responds to stimuli and orchestrates all bodily processes and actions. That's what I mean. I've already said that ...

I don't see why you would think that if the brain is constantly modeling all experience and action that it would imply dualism, a homunculus or an inf...

:cool:

The God's eye view is sometimes referred to as the view from nowhere. I think it would be more aptly understood as the view from everywhere (and every...

It seems reasonable to me to think that for everything we think and do there is a corresponding neural network of activity. That is what I mean by 'mo...

Of course it's the whole system working together. However the brain is the central processing unit so I think it is important to emphasize that nothin...

Why would we not experience wanting? Why compare us to robots? We are not robots we are evolved organisms. We don't know, and may never know, how it i...

I don't see the 'wanting to have milk' as epiphenomenal but as a necessary part of the associated neural activity. We certainly don't experience the n...

There is no essential difference I can see between the example I gave and your "stock example". If you see a difference perhaps you could highlight it...

As explanations they are incompatible in the sense that they cannot be combined into a 'master' explanation that incorporates them. That is not to say...

I don't see why there must be a "single paradigm that explains it all". Those two modes of explanation are both essential to human life. For the moder...

Number being physically instantiated begs the question as to just what about physical existents exists.

It seems to me rather that abstract objects as artefacts of generalization are products of recognition and synthesis.

OK, that makes sense. I also think of being or existing as a verb. Being can also be thought of as a noun, but then it is an abstraction. It's interes...

I wasn't talking about what is pragmatic for individuals, but for societies. I think you'll find that theft, rape, assault and murder are illegal even...

We infer the way they see the world. It doesn't follow that we can see the world that way. We don't know what things are apart from how they appear to...

I'm intrigued. I have no idea what you mean unless you are thinking of counting as an act. I've thought about this question in regard to mathematics. ...

Nice! Note that Burge writes "number" not 'numbers'. I find it to be an important distinction because the quality of number is of course present where...

We infer that they see things differently on the basis of observation and analysis of their different sensory setups. We can infer that they see diffe...

Yes, that's true. But this would only be a problem if we could somehow infallibly know the awful truth and would then be left with the choice of eithe...

What springs to mind is that they are two different articulations of the human all too human need to explain. The need to explain is the problem. We h...

I don't believe morality is either complex or dependent on religion. At least when it comes to the most significant moral issues. Those regarding thef...

You mean the God of the Old Testament? The Gnostics believed that God was a flawed, self-important lesser deity. On the other hand, I think each, the ...

:up: The direct/ indirect polemic seems to me to thrive on the failure to recognize that the two ways of thinking about our experience are just two di...

I don't know if this was meant to be addressed to me since I didn't say we have incomplete knowledge of things in themselves. That said I agree with t...

"As opposed" in the way I used it means "as distinct from" not "opposed to". Its common parlance. If something inspires me, I do not have to conclude ...

What you say here is not relevant to the point. It is always humans that decide whether something is the "word of God", as opposed to being something ...

I see evangelism as being essential to Christianity. "The Word" is understood to be the word of God, and it is believed that those who accept it will ...

It seems to be that there is an inherent incommensurability and thus incompatibility between our two paradigms of explanation—the one in terms of expe...

Anyone who decides to take it upon themselves to decide for everyone that it ought to be spread.

Of course someone has done that. The so-called "Word" would not have gotten out there in the first place if no one had done that.

Accepting that principle, it follows that no one should take it upon themselves to decide for everyone that it ought to be spread.

I didn't mean to be dismissive. I have to acknowledge that a new paradigm of explanation is possible, I guess I just don't see it as a likelihood. Als...

All our explanations are in terms of either causes or reasons. It might be imagined that some completely new paradigm of explanation will be found, bu...

I haven't said that the factor or mechanism or whatever you might want to call it in the neural processes that gives rise to conscious self-awareness ...

Neural processes are fairly well understood. The difficulty is with explaining how physical processes can give rise to consciously experienced feeling...

The study of physics is dependent on human senses, but I think we have little reason to say that physical processes in general are. Human senses and b...

I think it's just a case of looking at thinking from two perspectives. I certainly don't buy the argument that says that if thought is determined by n...

I don't see any puzzle. It comes down to what is meant by saying we don't know things in themselves. Insofar as they are thought as what gives rise to...

If they are incommensurable explanations, then it would seem to follow that they cannot exclude one another.

Good point: 'raining' does not have the assertoric grammatical structure that 'it is raining' could be said to have.

Why should one explanation preclude the other? Another point is that most of our reasoning is inductive or abductive, where there is no logical necess...

Right, I am only passingly familiar with Kahneman's work, but I think I see the point.

You are still misunderstanding the point. I realize that propositional knowledge can be understood as a kind of know-how, but that is not relevant to ...

An interesting question. "If p then q" seems to be inherently an assertion about the relationship between p and q. It is an inherently asymmetric rela...