Tyler ’s Comments (group member since May 09, 2008)

Tyler ’s comments from the Philosophy group.

Hi Bobbi --

What do you mean by emergent?

I mean that consciousness is epiphenomenal -- that is, a side effect, so to speak, of physical brain states, but not the states themselves.


...but, ultimately, what are we capable of knowing through thought?

Reality.


Consciousness CAN exist without an objective reference to the past but a “person” (as in: a person with a story, identity etc.) can’t.

I agree exactly about personhood and the past. But the consciousness possible without reference to a past would be an animal consciousness, such that of a dog or cat, as far as I can tell. So when I use "consciousness," I mean human consciousness because I don't think other kinds of consciousness possess free will, if free will exists. On the other hand, I've found that I can train my dog to do anything she already wants to do, so ...


“Insubstantiality” in that we try so hard to make ourselves feel solid, and many of us do it through conceptualization. There is nothing substantial about us.///...this shared so-called "reality" we “think” we share is completely insubstantial.

Because idealism questions the nature of what we take to be external reality, and you say idealism has nothing to do with this, then I take it that when you use insubstantial you're referring to our subjective states of consciousness. Am I understanding it correctly?

Hi Zoot --

"water is liquid at 30°C, therefore 2+2=4". Would you say that the conclusion of that argument follows from the premise?

No. Nothing about the premise implies the conclusion, nor can the conclusion be inferred from the premise. The argument is invalid.

But I have the idea you're wanting to say something about "relevance logic." Very well. What is it, why is it useful and how does it work?

Hi Zoot --


That's irrelevant to me. As I said, in my opinion, all that's needed for rationality to obtain in a person is that they link propositions together inferentially.

Your example wasn't linked inferentially at all. That was what I was explaining. If that explanation is irrelevant and inference is a matter of your opinion, then the subjectivity of your posts indeed puts them outside the scope of critical evaluation.

it's easy to construct arguments that are valid and sound, but in which the conclusion - to any reasonable person, at least - doesn't follow from the premise(s).

If the conclusion doesn't follow, the argument cannot be valid, regardless of the status of the premises.

Hi P.D. --

Welcome to the group. What I've been reading lately in Continental Philosophy (Zizek) employs lots of psychoanalytic reasoning. Have you read much of it? Do you find that a fruitful avenue for philosophy?

Hi Zoot --

The example given isn't rational because the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. If you change the conclusion to something like, "Therefore, no lemon ever gets wet," then the conclusion does follow and the argument is rational.

Specifically, this argument would be called "valid." As long as the conclusion follows, you're right that any argument will be valid and can be said to be rational.

The problem people have is with the distinction between a valid argument and a sound one. A sound argument is one whose premises hold up as well as the conclusion. The proposition that all lemons wear raincoats is false. So the conclusion that lemons don't get wet is valid, but unsound.

You're right that all kinds of conclusions can be rationalized. What happens in everyday cases is that the people hearing the reasoning do not know to go back and check the premises for soundness. Among the general public this is the greatest deficiency in reasoning.

Hi Andrew --

I think Harry Franfurt's distinction between levels of volition is indeed vulnerable to a deterministic critique. Even though "wanting to want" is a higher level activity, that doesn't show that the wanting to want is a free act compared to wanting. It just kicks the can down the road a bit.

The more relevant question is whether people who live purely by impulse are any more determined in their thinking than people who think rationally. As you point out, it can't be said that they aren't in fact any less free in their decisions than the rest of us.

In this context, the most philosophically important problem is the one you state at the end --

But I do see it very sad that some people may be determined by whims and arbitrary factors - metaphorically speaking these people are like flotsam in the ocean.

Free will, if it exists, puts us squarely in the moral realm. It is true that people who allow their emotions to drive them this way and that experience their lives as puppets on a string. But if they have chosen to float along according to whim, they are nevertheless morally responsible for their actions. And emotional reasoning often leads to awful decisions. That is indeed sad.

Hi Bobbi --


Is consciousness the brain or is it something else?

Consciousness is not the brain. However, it is an emergent property of the brain.


Just because I do not believe in free will does not mean I believe in determinism.

I was just reading Andrew's post on that, too. It's not clear in philosophy that we have to choose one or the other. The question may present a false dichotomy, and some thinkers have proposed various forms of compatiblism that account for both.

*****

The role of past and future is the subject of a lot of philosophical reasoning. In your post, you seem to be reasoning from people with Alzheimer's to the conclusion that consciousness as such consists in purely subjective states. I question whether an abnormal state of mind can properly serve as a model for a normal state.

In any case, Descartes certainly uses the mind as his starting point. However, other philosophers such as Kant have argued that consciousness cannot exist at all without an objective reference to the past. I'm not sure what you mean by "insubstantiality," but idealism may be the right category for it, and you may like the arguments put forth by Berkley in favor of it.

Hi Zoot --

Welcome to the group. I hope you'll be able to pick up with your studies next year.

Hi Bobbi --

(plus I now realize the last post on this subject was ten months ago...)

This is an important philosophical idea, so the thread never goes away and people can add to it whenever they see it.

I've had posts erased, too, either by hitting "preview" or taking too long to create the message. I now copy my messages frequently while I'm writing them.



Scientists have proved that we act before we are aware of acting.

I've seen this said in conjunction with free will arguments, but I'm skeptical about how much light science can shed on the issue.

The reason is that I think the free will problem is fundamentally a philosophical question. Free will, to me, has to do with consciousness, and science has not been able to identify or explain that.

Consciousness may be an emergent property of the brain, but I think it would have to have the status of a material entity, rather than just a quality, to submit easily to scientific investigation.

A lot of what science says about brain states comes from the recent advent of functional MRI, of fMRI, which now allows scientists to see what the brain is doing over a stretch time. But I wonder if we've all gotten too carried away with this new technology. For example, when a pixel lights up when a person in an experiment thinks about this or that, that pixel represent something like a cubic millmeter of the brain. Such an area contains millions of neurons, so we still don't know just which neurons are signaling in response to what.

As a result, my thinking is that the strongest arguments for determinism will be the ones that rely more on the reasoning and logic of philosophy than on scientific discoveries. Scientific discoveries, especially the newest ones coming from fMRI, are fascinating. But once we take a second look at them, they don't actually tell us nearly as much as we thought the did at first. We learn new things about the cell every day, for instance, but very little of it has translated into better medicine.

I'm sorry about your mother. Alzheimer's is in my family, too. Again, philosophically speaking, the tragedy is that when one loses one's past, one also loses one's identity, maybe even what people refer to as "personhood" too. I've seen this happen myself and I hope we eventually will have medicines that can effectively control it.


P.S. There are over 800 members of this group. I'm surprised nobody else has responded to Bobbi's post.

Hi Adam --

Thanks for the detailed and informative look at the nature of mathematics. Here are some comments:


--Rather than mathematics being merely a language, I believe math is actually a codification of precise rational thinking.

I've heard mathematics described in terms of language quite often, but I've always felt ambivalent about it, wondering if it were an inexact analogy. This way of looking at mathematics may stem mainly from the linguistic turn in philosophy: When you have a hammer, everything around you starts looking like a nail.



--Mathematics is not itself logic (I haven't really addressed this much in my post, but it should be obvious that I don't think it is—logic concerns reasoning about ANYTHING, whereas mathematical subjects are concerned with reasoning about whatever particular subject their structures are designed to reason about)...

This is another point of confusion in philosophy. I've heard it said so often that logic is the sole preserve of mathematics, yet I've never heard an explanation as to how existential statements must have a mathematical basis to count as logical, or how that basis could be established in the first place.



--...for any proposal about the nature of mathematics as a whole, we shouldn't always appeal to physics and counting physical objects as our examples.

The "Philosophy is Dead" thread demonstrates, in the words of Stephen Hawking no less, how physics has come to be seen as that to which all other subjects are reducible. People disagreeing with this often seem to be fighting an uphill battle. My take on it is that even if you could reduce a field of inquiry to something expressible by physics, it would do little good. It would be like talking about biology in terms of chemistry. Sure, some biology could be talked about that way, but not all of it. And trying to express biology in terms suited to chemistry would complicate biology to the point of incomprehension.

The same is the case with mathematics, for the reason you state. It's hard to see how physics would deal with abstract reasoning that didn't involve space and time, or why physics would make a better model for explaining mathematics than mathematics itself.


Thanks again for you view on these topics. They crop up frequently in philosophical discussions, and your post goes a long way toward clearing up the frequent confusion about them.

Hi Adam --

Welcome to the group. I've read Ayn Rand's philosophy, too, and I began reading philosophy partly to get a broader understanding of some of the issues raised by the Objectivists. It was an interesting process.

Anyway, feel free to comment on any of the threads (there are a couple already on metaphysics and epistemology) or start one of your own. I'd like to find out more about what the philosophy of mathematics entails because I've read so little in that area.

Again, welcome.

Welcome, Rob. I read Deleuze's What Is Philosophy? some time ago. How did you like it?

Edit: Oh, I just saw your recommendation on the other thread.

Hi Said --

... interpretations of quantum mechanics and the compatibility of the general theory of relativity with quantum theory (as well as implications of Bell's Theorem) are problems in philosophy of physics and suprisingly enough not in physics itself.

Your answer is insightful. The current interpretations fall on the side of philosophy, or speculative physics, at least partly because no physicist knows how to test the competing hypotheses.

From what I'm able to follow, various hypotheses within the realm of quantum physics have been gaining or losing popularity over the decades. Given the still-evolving understanding of advanced physics, it's hard to see how Hawking can think philosophy is dead.

Even if it were, physics would not be able to fill the void with a factual account of reality. That inability does indeed place the various explanations of quantum phenomena within the scope of philosophy, specifically the philosophy of physics.

"Corporatism," the way Saul uses the term, means the political and economic elevation of the interests of private groups over the interests of the individual.


Hi Michael --

It seems the education system generally is more concerned with teaching procedure than ideas. While the lack of stability in the academic work force is important, it's also fruitful to ask who the "customer" of the education system is in the first place. Is it the student?

Hi Justin --

Political correctness is just one of the problems academic philosophers have fallen prey to. The lack of involvement by philosophers in public debate is an even bigger problem. The Marxist feminist might be an example of a more general problem. Let me quote from The Unconscious Civilization, where John Ralston Saul writes:

…today’s inheritors of the leadership of the reform movement have consolidated their idea of rights into their own acceptance of corporatist structures. To take just one example, philosophy has always been central to the public debate over the human condition. This is because successful reform depends upon a widespread understanding of the philosophical options available and of their implications. Suddenly, the great philosophical voice of humanist decency is absent from the public debate. Why? Because most of its exponents are caught up in the complexities of philosophical professionalism -- a world of narrow specializations and impenetrable dialect. A corporation of philosophy. They have left the field of public debate wide open to more cynical forces on the other side. How can those who share the humanist approach be led by people who do not believe that philosophical public debate is possible? Let alone worthwhile?

While criticizing the profession in the context or corporatism, and from a humanist angle, Raul seems to have put his finger on a "consensus trance" in philosophy departments much wider than just political correctness.

I really like your account your experience as a student, and I hope other members will read it. What class was that professor teaching? He sounds like a wonderful example of the need for objectivity in the classroom. This is what a philosophy class should be -- a place where students entertain new ideas. I hope you'll continue posting on your experiences.

Hi Megan --

I admire the focus of your discussion and you seem quite taken by the Open-Question Argument. Excuse me if this has already been addressed (I haven't been following the thread closely), but is it your position that Moore makes morality rational in a non-naturalistic way, or that the argument ultimately makes belief in God rational?

Hi Historybuff93 --

Thank you for your analysis of Heidegger and being. I think I understand his approach a little better. I'd guess that he approaches being by moving from the particular to the general in order to draw conclusions that are universally valid; but as you point out, a problem then arises in reference to human subjectivities. I would expect this problem to be even more apparent with the discussion of Dasein and Mitsein, which I take to be subjective in their applicability.

I'm delighted that you're working on a treatise pertaining to language. I hope you enjoy this project, and that it sucessfully opens up new avenues to consider on that rather broad topic.

Thanks, RtO

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Hi Elizabeth --

Since I believe most of us engage in philosophy, no matter how poorly, the "we general readers" refers to those of us who make an effort to improve our reasoning skills by reading philosophy independently. Those "more advanced" than us would then be people who can actually call themselves philosophers by virtue of formal study and a degree. So some philosophical concept that might be enticing to me might not be all that exciting to Anthony Flew or Colin McGinn.

Empiricism was partly a reaction to rationalism, so you might want to read John Locke. David Hume also takes up the issue of religion. Immanual Kant took up the formal arguments in favor of the existence of God, but his discussions of them are fairly complex. Among the three, I'd recommend David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

Hi Elizabeth --

I'll add an aside to Robert's remarks about the formal logic of Principle of Sufficient Reason.

First, we don't know that there cannot be an uncaused cause, which is what the principle assumes. Then, if sufficient reason is a true principle, it sets up an endless regress because God cannot be a final reason, requiring a reason Himself. This also introduces the complication of underdetermination because it's not certain that a proposition cannot have just one sufficient reason that answers to it (God might be the sufficient cause of something, but so might some other phenomenon).

So what I think is that the principle is like many in philosophy. It had strong appeal when it was first proposed, but later thinkers cast enough doubt on its reasoning so that religious philosophers today no longer employ it as a knockout punch, the way Liebniz or Spinoza might have expected.

It does, however, retain great appeal among fans of philosophy and theology, which is why we hear of it so much. In this sense, the principle is like many, many in philosophy, in which we general readers find a compelling argument while more advanced philosophers express reservations. It's part of the pleasure of philosophy to discover that arguments themselves have histories, and to read how various thinkers eventually reacted to each new idea.

Hi Ellen --

Yes, I usually try to restrict what I'm reading to the best books, or at least the best authors. That still leaves so many possibilities that I then try to narrow my list down according to my current interests. I change my to-read list often because I find that a book I haven't gotten around to yet often doesn't interest me as much as certain other books I've added since. I read books for guilty pleasure every now and then, but those books are usually page turners that don't take much time to knock out.