I was a teenage logical positivist
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littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
'define stuff' has a very particular point. Santino said 'stuff exists'. But what is 'stuff', beyond 'that which exists'? He has rephrased what I said but is still saying the same thing. That's my point in pulling him up on the definition of 'stuff'.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
My point, thus far, is this:
Plus the fact that Godel's theorem is directly applicable to this, and that this is what 'metaphysics' refers to and it is all that 'metaphysics' refers to.
And in my opinion, this is the strength of 'analytical philosophy'. I don't see what else there is to be said about philosophy once you've sorted this bit out. Everything else becomes a question for a different kind of enquiry, one based upon empirical study, the study of the stuff that exists.
Plus the fact that Godel's theorem is directly applicable to this, and that this is what 'metaphysics' refers to and it is all that 'metaphysics' refers to.
And in my opinion, this is the strength of 'analytical philosophy'. I don't see what else there is to be said about philosophy once you've sorted this bit out. Everything else becomes a question for a different kind of enquiry, one based upon empirical study, the study of the stuff that exists.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I think I can refute that refutation.
Any statement about the content of a mind at any given point, including the concepts within that mind, is exactly equivalent to a statement about all the physical processes that are producing that content. We experience our minds as somehow disembodied, as existing in time but not in space, because there is nowhere within the simplified models of the universe that we generate to make sense of our senses to put it. That's all - the disembodiedness is simply an absence of bodiedness within our 'model' ('bodiedness' itself being a creation of our model) rather than a deep statement about the nature of mind.
So, rephrasing the above statement to be a fuller representation of what is going on - I am defining the word metaphysical to mean a statement that cannot be tested - you can now test this, since it is a statement about the content of my mind, which is itself a product of physical processes, not metaphysical.
Mistaking the physical for metaphysical because of the way we represent ourselves to ourselves is, imo, a fundamental error inherent in all kinds of philosophy. That's why so much philosophy needs a healthy dose of science to correct it. Even Kant got it wrong when he thought that he could know time and space a priori.
Any statement about the content of a mind at any given point, including the concepts within that mind, is exactly equivalent to a statement about all the physical processes that are producing that content. We experience our minds as somehow disembodied, as existing in time but not in space, because there is nowhere within the simplified models of the universe that we generate to make sense of our senses to put it. That's all - the disembodiedness is simply an absence of bodiedness within our 'model' ('bodiedness' itself being a creation of our model) rather than a deep statement about the nature of mind.
So, rephrasing the above statement to be a fuller representation of what is going on - I am defining the word metaphysical to mean a statement that cannot be tested - you can now test this, since it is a statement about the content of my mind, which is itself a product of physical processes, not metaphysical.
Mistaking the physical for metaphysical because of the way we represent ourselves to ourselves is, imo, a fundamental error inherent in all kinds of philosophy. That's why so much philosophy needs a healthy dose of science to correct it. Even Kant got it wrong when he thought that he could know time and space a priori.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Where is your mind? Sure it feels attached to the bodied bits of our representation, but how? We do not attach the value 'bodiedness' to our minds. Perhaps we give it a rough spatial extent - 'in our heads' - but that's a very much culturally determined, arbitrary attribution of bodiedness. In other cultures in other times, the 'seat of the soul' was considered to be elsewhere.
When I sway my body, do my thoughts sway with it? Not really. We don't attach that fixed, 3D meaning to our minds that we attach to other aspects of our representation.
And that's not really true about the mentally ill/people on drugs. The purpose of many kinds of meditation and the explicit goal of, for instance, Japanese budo training, is to place your mind equally everywhere. And it can be done.
When I sway my body, do my thoughts sway with it? Not really. We don't attach that fixed, 3D meaning to our minds that we attach to other aspects of our representation.
And that's not really true about the mentally ill/people on drugs. The purpose of many kinds of meditation and the explicit goal of, for instance, Japanese budo training, is to place your mind equally everywhere. And it can be done.
Prove it.
Not being a physical entity, it has no physical location.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
You've mistaken your representation of reality for reality.
Damn! I hate it when that happens.
TruXta
tired
The fact that embodiment is plastic and culturally shaped only bolsters the extended/embodied/enacted mind argument. The mind isn't just in the head, it's in whatever part of us is active, and even extends to tools we use and limbs that aren't even attached anymore. And that's not representation - there's no Cartesian Theatre. Cognizing is a collective, complex, social effort.
TruXta
tired
You're doin it again, assuming that there's something really real with which we can never really truly engage...
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
This isn't quite right. It's nearly right, but not quite.
It's basically a variant on the Russell Paradox, I think: The set of all sets that do not have themselves as a member cannot be complete. There cannot be a compete set of sets without contradiction.
Where I think Godel is useful is in the fact that although you cannot prove the 'Godel statement' of a particular set of axioms, you can know that it is true! Godel statements take a self-referential form: to simplify, X says that 'it is not possible to prove X', and Godel's theorem proves that every system has to contain a statement of this nature. But X is a well formed expression, whatever it is, so it has to be true if the system is consistent. So you do indeed find that you cannot prove X - which itself shows that X is true. This is true of all systems of logical axioms. It is true of mathematics itself, which must always contain a Godel statement.
The leap you now have to make is something of a leap of faith, and it is this statement:
Mathematics, a complete system of all possible logical axioms, is formally equivalent to the universe, the set of all things including itself.
Santino has already mentioned a reason for this to be true: every event has a cause. If this is true, then it must also be true that mathematics provides a complete description of that system of cause and effect.
Now, this is a hunch on my part - an intuition perhaps - but I strongly suspect that many of the apparent artefacts of the universe - the relative strengths of the four fundamental forces, for instance - which need to be exactly what they are in order for any universe to exist at all, are necessarily as they are in just the same way that π is necessarily exactly what it is and not another number.
This does away with the necessity for a multiverse in order for it to be true that 'everything that can happen happens'. That is already true - that's what the universe already is.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I suggest you reread what I've written. I'm not assuming anything.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
If you are aware of your mind, if you are aware that 'what is is', then that is representation. There is no Cartesian theatre, no, but that's not what I'm saying.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I'm not assuming anything, but yes, from my point of view, you have not understood what I've been saying.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
You're trapped within this misapprehension, I'm afraid. That's why you make so many mistakes.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I think you're slightly misunderstanding me here. I'm not talking about thinking as such, but the way in which we are aware that we are thinking. There is a crucial difference - thinking is a physical process; we represent that physical process to ourselves without the meaning 'physical' attached to it, which, to us, has a specific meaning: extent in space. But 3D space in the way we perceive it is our own construction. There is no such independent entity as 'space'. There is, rather, 'space-time', and even this may not quite be the 'fundamental' reality.
At our scale, our models, which are essentially Newtonian in their nature, are very good approximations. They produce very good results for our purposes. That's why we've evolved to have them.
Hegel. Self-consciousness as definitive human characteristic.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Because 'meta-cognition' is cognition of cognition, not cognition of 'reality' - it is awareness of all the calculations we're making and meanings we're attaching to the information that's coming in (or not coming in, if we are simply hallucinating), including all the filling in that we do, guesswork, and internal constructions, in order to live. Thus, the distinctly unphysical nature of our awareness of our thoughts is simply due to the fact that we don't attach the meaning 'physical' to our thoughts. It would serve no practical purpose to do so, but it is perfectly possible to imagine that we could - and this has indeed been reported by people whose cognition has gone haywire - that we could perceive our thoughts as solid entities.
It's important to remember, I think, that everything we experience in our conscious representation is an after-the-fact construction. It is the story we tell ourselves about what is happening, the story that enters our memory - the first layer of memory, in fact.
This is mystic nonsense. All evidence suggests, for instance, that elephants are self-conscious. You go wrong right at the beginning of your thought about this, I'm afraid, which means that pretty much everything you say about it is wrong.
TruXta
tired
That's empirically dubious what with recent results coming out of animal cognitions studies. Data beat musings every time.
TruXta
tired
Again, you're confusing terms. Cognition is not the same as what we in everyday lingo call awareness, it's much broader than that, including all the stuff that goes on just below and far below the threshold of meta-cognition.
Besides, you already (rightly) stated that cognition is a physical process, ergo it is part of reality. Stop this carving nature at its joints - we are as much reality as anything else in existence. Your basic sin is that you privilege representation as the only mode of apprehension. This allows you to posit a correlational dialectic between an sich and an dich which extends beyond the trivial fact that we each have a unique POV in virtue of being semi-autonomous sentient beings and elevates it to a bizarre kind of dualism.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I'm not confusing terms at all. I am talking about that which we are consciously aware of, everything that we can be consciously aware of.
You are misunderstanding me still if you think I am saying that we are not reality. Of course we are reality. That's not what I'm talking about, though.
I'll leave it there for now because we are at crossed purposes. Also, noting your edit, I think the very strength of such a way of thinking about this - which I don't just think is a way; I think it is the way - is that it is not dualism, or at least it doesn't rely on dualism to make sense.
You are misunderstanding me still if you think I am saying that we are not reality. Of course we are reality. That's not what I'm talking about, though.
I'll leave it there for now because we are at crossed purposes. Also, noting your edit, I think the very strength of such a way of thinking about this - which I don't just think is a way; I think it is the way - is that it is not dualism, or at least it doesn't rely on dualism to make sense.
TruXta
tired
You don't think you are, but you really are. I'm not saying you say we are not reality, I'm saying the representational stance allows for a basic carving of the joints wherein what we represent in our consciousness isn't reality proper. Which is a bollocks semantic trick. We simply have no clue what we can and cannot be consciously aware of - aside from the fact that it cannot but be reality in one of its many aspects. Yes, even hallucinations are real in that sense. Not real for anyone else but the one having them, but still real.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Ok, last go. Conscious awareness isn't awareness of the world around us. It is, rather, awareness of particular aspects of the state of our brains (and perhaps other aspects - even the state of other people's brains if recent research is to be taken seriously). We do not consciously perceive a chair. We consciously perceive our internally generated 'chair'. For the purposes of what I'm saying, that is all you need to accept.
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