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Dunamis
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Posted 04/24/08 - 06:49 PM:	#176
For those that are interested, I repost the page from which the relevant text concerning this is debate can be drawn. The significant portion can be found in latter part of the first full paragraph from the left hand page: We depend on the linguistic interactions with others to yield agreement on the properties of numbers and the sort of structures in nature what allow us to represent those structures in numbers. We cannot in the same way agree on the structure of the sentences or thoughts we use to chart the thoughts and meanings others, for the attempt to reach such an agreement simply sends us back to the very process of interpretation on which all agreement depends. "The Varieties of Knowledge", Donald Davidson What Death Monkey would like to do is reduce the meanings of our thoughts to agreed upon physical brain descriptions. It is precisely that these meanings cannot be made objective facts which we can agree upon, in the way that we agree upon how many degrees it is outside, or how many kilograms an an elephant weighs, that prevents such a "translation" or "reduction" as he wants to put it. Rather, mental predicates especially, point to the plethora of possible causal descriptions, rather than the One Cause of the brain. Edited by Dunamis on 04/24/08 - 07:02 PM
_____________________ Tractatus theologico-politicus [is a] work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil and issued with the knowledge of Mynheer Jan de Witt. - Church Council of Amsterdam If no man ever thinks alone, then we might say that to know really is to think ever less by oneself - Balibar

Dunamis
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Posted 04/24/08 - 07:28 PM:	#177
Besides the conceptual dualism that distinguishes mental predicate descriptions (causal concepts) from physical, objective descriptions, there is in Davidson's claim a very important subtlety, one that actually evaded as perceptive a reader as Richard Rorty, who finally claimed that for many years he had failed to understand the above quoted material. Rorty wrote: I did not understand the second sentence ["We cannot in the same way...] in this passage until I read it in [Bjorn] Ramberg's way. Read in that way, it can be paraphrased as saying "Whereas you can, in the course of triangulation, criticize any given claim about anything you talk about, you cannot ask for agreement that others shall take part in a process of triangulation, for the attempt to reach such an agreement would just be more triangulation "Response to Ramberg" For our considered debate what is important is that while we may dispute each other regarding objective theories about states of the world, and the causes therein, looking for empirical evidence that one theory is bettter or worse than another, when it comes to the realm of mental predicates and their attribution as causes of intentional behavior, the very processes of attribution play into the cultural fabric of communal interests and valuations, which make up the social facts of what we will ascribe. The Norms of behavior. That is, as we say of a person (and by extention, an animal or a machine), "he fears..." "he believes" "she desires..." "she hopes..." what helps us constitute the content of such claims, is our own experience of those mental predicate verbs, as they are used to describe and prescribe our own intentional behaviors. And these experiences and meanings are culturally contingent valuations, part of the very fabric of triangulation which produces objective facts about the world, in the first place. To ascertain the truth value of those mental predicates, not only must shifing cultural valuations be appealed to, but the very meanings of those terms must return to our own experience of "I fear..." "I love..." "I hope..." as they have come to be coherently expressed (and theorized) in a way distinct from report about an objective and shared world. The meanings of those terms, in context, and therefore the facts of their matter, cannot be grounded in an objective description of the brain, for "He loves..." sends us back to the very social milieu which generated it, triangulation. It is for this reason that "He/she/it loves, fears, desires, believes..." is ultimately a social fact, constitutive of the domain of the social to which it ultimately returns, no matter how desperately Death Monkey would like to reduce it to, make it derive from, make it founded on, a physical description. The consequences of this are great, of course, for this makes physical description itself, our objective descriptions of the world, themselves more supervenient upon our communial status, as describers, that is those that share affects, and in the end, intentions. This is perhaps the ultimate reason behind why one can never, or should never confuse the map for the territory. It is because the act of mapping is conditioned first by our culturally normative and contingent relations to each other. Further though, in address to Death Monkey's plea, the case of mental predicates and their truth values plays straight into the very substantive relations which make our mapping of the world (physical descriptions) possible in the first place. That is, there can be no ultimate mapping of the process of mapping, for it will just point you back to the process of mapping on which it depends. Edited by Dunamis on 04/24/08 - 07:47 PM
_____________________ Tractatus theologico-politicus [is a] work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil and issued with the knowledge of Mynheer Jan de Witt. - Church Council of Amsterdam If no man ever thinks alone, then we might say that to know really is to think ever less by oneself - Balibar

rakis
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Posted 04/25/08 - 05:15 AM:	#178
I agree. The "biological" is determined and filtered by the social. Some sort of a "pure biological" is a chimera

Dunamis
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Posted 04/25/08 - 08:37 AM:	#179
rakis wrote: I agree. The "biological" is determined and filtered by the social. Some sort of a "pure biological" is a chimera Here is a valuable article on the nature of functions that are implied in functional biological descriptions. Notice, even under a biological functionalism extended to the domains of sociology and technology, there is a irreducible split between "function" (organization) and "teleofunction" (intentional behavior). It is really this split which is at issue in this discussion. Function and Functionalism: A Synthetic Perspective, by Mahner and Bunge (sorry, the first file host didn't work, this one seems to, taking a 30 second delay). Edited by Dunamis on 04/25/08 - 03:08 PM
_____________________ Tractatus theologico-politicus [is a] work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil and issued with the knowledge of Mynheer Jan de Witt. - Church Council of Amsterdam If no man ever thinks alone, then we might say that to know really is to think ever less by oneself - Balibar

astaire1
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Posted 04/25/08 - 12:22 PM:	#180
Skylander : [(paraphrased) there's no evidence memory is stored in the brain ] Astaire (then): I guess you haven't read any recent books on scientific studies of how memory is stored in the brain. Skylander: Of course I have. Astaire (now): Can you provide a list of titles and authors ? Skylander: The conclusion that it is stored there is made by the researchers/thinkers - it is a typical sort of assumption assigning cause and effect status to events that merely accompany one another. Astaire: What were these reaserchers/thinkers basing their conclusions on? Were they perhaps examining scientific evidence ? If not, then you weren't reading the types of books I was referring to. (I specifically mentioned scientific books as I recall). Skylander: There input is ignored until they just go away. That is close minded and rude. Astaire: Right. So grow up, and stop ignoring my input. -Astaire
_____________________ Heaven, I'm in heaven, and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak. And I seem to find the happiness I seek. When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek.

CypressMoon
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Posted 04/25/08 - 02:12 PM: Subject: Freudian model as a prescription to neurological description	#181
skylander wrote: Re: Freud, it's amazing to know there are still people out there who still use his models for "therapy". Anyone considering such should avail themselves of Alice Miller's literature. She is an M.D., Freudian trained analyst (former) who, while undergoing her own analysis discovered how radically flawed Freud's ideas are and then set about to explain why such a repressive, distorted model could be taken so seriously for so long. Her belief is that a psychoanalytical approach is nearly a foolproof way to repress real early childhood memories and which causes far more serious damage to the client than they started with. Having practiced clinical psych for many years, I agree with her findings and also point to the fact, which I found in my research for my master's thesis, that Freud was in such shocked disbelief of the possibility that so many people were sexually abused via incest as his clients were continuously claiming that the only thing he could come up with, when he decided the reports couldn't possibly be true, was projection of repressed desires on the part of the claimant! Interesting... Now I'm certainly no Freudian expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I find that the repression / suppression model, however mythological its explanation may be, is a thorough, coherent, and holistic explanation of behaviors, and speech. One could look at Mourning, and Meloncholia as the essential "root" of psychoanalysis. Perhaps Freud didn't realize this (I'm not sure), but meta-psychological disorders (not neurological disorders) could be explained by loss, and the reaction to it. In the case of the loss of a loved one, grief will prevail and emotions will become supressed by the super-ego, in an attempt to preserve the ego - so much of which was constructed and preserved by the passed loved one. The loss of the loved one, (or the loss of a toothbrush, for that matter) is essentially a loss of identity. It's interesting to note that people with "borderline personality disorders" have a particularly difficult time with the process of loss. To my thinking, this is a result of an unhealthy ego, insofar as their sense of self is heavily founded on an economic valuation of things and people. I've found that this "unhealthy ego" in thses people is due to traumatic events in their childhood, such as moving, or their parents splitting up etc. What happens is that, as a child, the Freudian structure of the unconscious has not been developed / enculturated to a degree where grief can be "properly" expressed. So, to my thinking, what occurs is a repression of what would be the expression of grief - this emotional energy that transforms itself in the unconscious and becomes manifest in various, highly potent forms of expressed emotions, such as rage / jealousy / envy / - these can take on the behavioral forms of rebellion against anythin that may have been a cause of that particular traumatic loss. Now, "borderline personality disorder" is a polarized example of what can happen to a person who undergoes loss as a child. But I use this example, primarily because (even if pre-disposed) the loss, which is a physical "phenomenon", will alture the structural make-up of the brain. The Freudian model, in this sense, is a pre-scription to the neurological descriptive effects. Thanks for the response.
_____________________ "We stand before the world, not in it." - Rilke "MAD, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual." - Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary) If you have a small child, gently pull the mask over them first, and pull at the ends to tighten the straps.

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Posted 04/25/08 - 02:57 PM:	#182
Dunamis, Wouldn't we get into the problem of relativism with the claim that, all knowledge is historically and culturally contingent? If I am sitting in a room with you, and I say to you, "that chair is resting," wouldn't this be a universal claim considering the predicate verb "resting" is an anthropomorphic metaphor that will not change its meaning when predicated upon the noun, "chair"? Won't chairs always "rest"?. And, Havn't they always "rested"?
_____________________ "We stand before the world, not in it." - Rilke "MAD, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual." - Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary) If you have a small child, gently pull the mask over them first, and pull at the ends to tighten the straps.

Dunamis
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Posted 04/25/08 - 03:03 PM:	#183
CypressMoon wrote: Dunamis, Wouldn't we get into the problem of relativism with the claim that, all knowledge is historically and culturally contingent? All knowledge IS historically and culturally contingent, just as the meaning of any homo sapiens communicative action (including this claim). Pragmatism of effects is what resolves "the problem" of such. If I am sitting in a room with you, and I say to you, "that chair is resting," wouldn't this be a universal claim considering the predicate verb "resting" is an anthropomorphic metaphor that will not change its meaning when predicated upon the noun, "chair"? A "universal" claim? I never realized that the Universe spoke English. Please, I will not follow anyone down the Relativism thread path, it gets astaire1 all worked up.
_____________________ Tractatus theologico-politicus [is a] work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil and issued with the knowledge of Mynheer Jan de Witt. - Church Council of Amsterdam If no man ever thinks alone, then we might say that to know really is to think ever less by oneself - Balibar

CypressMoon
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Posted 04/25/08 - 03:36 PM:	#184
Dunamis, Barring the relativism path for the time being, I agree with you on most everything you have mentioned in this thread. The socially-culturally conditioned responsibility (to respond, that is) does not exist in us, the way that brain states exist in us, or the way a rock exists outside of us. The social-cultural reponsibility to respond exists in the spaces in-between a communally shared world. Being-in-a-community-in-the-world, is really a way of putting, "we exist outside of ourselves within the communally shared world." If this is what you're getting at, then I have found, through your posts, Wittgenstein and Davidson, a rather uplifting philosophy of a shared world. The totality of propositions that shape our world, even ones about brain states, form a group solidarity, or nexus between the community-in-the-shared-world. It is linguistic, and behavioral triangulation that forms communities. I wonder, Dunamis, how revolt (however subtle it may be) comes into being. Sartre, at the end of his life was striving for this quasi-anarchism in which revolutions required a perpetual revolt - a perpetual thinking for oneself. Obviously, acording to Davidson, this is impossible. Freedom, as Sartre insisted upon searching for is impossible. Under davidson's communally shared world, thinking for oneself by any absolute measurement, is impossible because of the confines of our community, or culture, and the historical continuance of concepts, and ideologies. I suppose my ultimate question, is (as stupid as this may sound), how do humans move? A while back, I developed a theory of micro-communities, within a broader network of micro-communities that compose the whole of the macro-community, but how does one develop discrepancies between concepts; how are these micro-revolts possible if there is a communally shared world? It is the discrepancies amongst concepts, aquired through learned behavior (e.g. Wittgenstein's language games) that make me question exactly how far we can trump convention. In other words, what are the limits of the revolting over-human when norms / conventions are trumped? It seems as though the limits are epistemological limits - yet even these epistemological limits, our knowledge of them, is historically and culturally contingent. There will never be an ultimate map of the infinite maps... I think all of these questions point to an analysis of language, it seems to me. Edited by CypressMoon on 04/25/08 - 03:40 PM
_____________________ "We stand before the world, not in it." - Rilke "MAD, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual." - Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary) If you have a small child, gently pull the mask over them first, and pull at the ends to tighten the straps.

Dunamis
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Posted 04/25/08 - 05:16 PM:	#185
CypressMoon wrote: Dunamis, Barring the relativism path for the time being, I agree with you on most everything you have mentioned in this thread. The socially-culturally conditioned responsibility (to respond, that is) does not exist in us, the way that brain states exist in us, or the way a rock exists outside of us. The social-cultural reponsibility to respond exists in the spaces in-between a communally shared world. Being-in-a-community-in-the-world, is really a way of putting, "we exist outside of ourselves within the communally shared world." If this is what you're getting at, then I have found, through your posts, Wittgenstein and Davidson, a rather uplifting philosophy of a shared world. This is the essential Davidson/Wittgenstein message, I think. The totality of propositions that shape our world, even ones about brain states, form a group solidarity, or nexus between the community-in-the-shared-world. It is linguistic, and behavioral triangulation that forms communities. I wonder, Dunamis, how revolt (however subtle it may be) comes into being. By changing descriptions. It can be as sublte as using verbal nouns in a new way (poets create revolts), to redescribing the causes of social structure (Marx), or redescribing the origins of man (Darwin). Revolt is everywhere redescription occurs. Sartre, at the end of his life was striving for this quasi-anarchism in which revolutions required a perpetual revolt - a perpetual thinking for oneself. Obviously, acording to Davidson, this is impossible. Revolt always occurs in the context of a shared world; I believe this is what Davidson would say. Freedom, as Sartre insisted upon searching for is impossible. Under davidson's communally shared world, thinking for oneself by any absolute measurement, is impossible because of the confines of our community, or culture, and the historical continuance of concepts, and ideologies. I suppose my ultimate question, is (as stupid as this may sound), how do humans move? To me Sartre had a very inexact conception of consciousness. He attributed far to much to the powers of presencing, and ignored causal explanation to an inappropriate degree. A while back, I developed a theory of micro-communities, within a broader network of micro-communities that compose the whole of the macro-community, but how does one develop discrepancies between concepts; how are these micro-revolts possible if there is a communally shared world? This is easy. The mode of expression is unanchored, you can make it anyway you wish. It is just that the world, as it is experienced to be shared, works as ballast to whatever creative tendencies in redescription you wish to create. It solidifies action. It is the discrepancies amongst concepts, aquired through learned behavior (e.g. Wittgenstein's language games) that make me question exactly how far we can trump convention. Why does one want to "trump" convention? Convention is a wonderful thing. We are using it right now as we discourse across distances and immediacy that not even the furthest thinkers of 100 years ago would have dreamed. And we don't have to "trump" it to do so. Does biology "trump" convention? In other words, what are the limits of the revolting over-human when norms / conventions are trumped? It seems as though the limits are epistemological limits - yet even these epistemological limits, our knowledge of them, is historically and culturally contingent. There will never be an ultimate map of the infinite maps... Yes, there are epistemological limits, but there are aesthetic limits as well, and moral limits, and ethical limits, and economic limits, and biological and political limits. It depends upon which surface of which bodies you want to inscribe your change. Like paint on a canvas, the brush stroke "tells". I think all of these questions point to an analysis of language, it seems to me. I don't know.
_____________________ Tractatus theologico-politicus [is a] work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil and issued with the knowledge of Mynheer Jan de Witt. - Church Council of Amsterdam If no man ever thinks alone, then we might say that to know really is to think ever less by oneself - Balibar

astaire1
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Posted 04/26/08 - 01:14 AM:	#186
Dunamis wrote: If we, a set of scientists, decide that a set of behaviors is "loving" (and our defintion is entirely culturally based, for scentists in the future or in a different country might decide that another set of behaviors is "loving"), ascribing "love" to subjects is not "metaphorical". In fact all the behavior can be scientifically recorded and theorized about, empirically tested, without the criteria itself (which behaviors are or are not love) having a basis in objective fact (that is, there is no objective standard for what "loving" is even if we want to make one up). This is a very helpful description. I'm not sure how strongly or broadly the claim "there is no objective standard" is to be taken. I suppose I'll have to study the anomalous monism links you've provided in order to answer that. Off hand, I don't see why loving couldn't be made objective (apart from practical considerations). That is, for scientific purposes, we could have a list of a dozen scientific definitions for loving (all of which would be provisional like all scientific definitions are). Dunamis wrote: DeatMonkey wrote: Brain activity is behavior. But it is not the behavior being DESCRIBED by mental predicate attribution. This is a mistake you constantly make. Right. And this is the crux of the issue. Can the act of loving(7) or loving(11) be redescribed as brain behavior. Ordinary people can make judgements as to whether person A is loving(7) person B. Future scientists could have a defintion of loving(7) that includes brain activity which has been scientifically determined to correlate with the criteria that ordinary people used to judge loving(7). Perhaps then the question would be whether that future scientific definition should be considered loving(7) or loving(7a) (that is do we agree that its the same kind of loving or do we agree that its a different kind of loving). Dunamis wrote: It is no longer at play for the working of the theory, but it is at play if you want to reduce a truth statement in the theory to a description of the brain, that is, two theories that have different "no longer at play" uses of mental predicates, will in principle, have contradictory statements in regards to the same brain states. This seems to be your answer to my above query, i.e. loving(7) and loving(7a) are necessarily different. Using your example, there can certainly be cases where the 2 ways of making the judgement will arrive at the same conclusion. But your phrase "in principle" perhaps implies that the 2 ways of making the judgement must ALWAYS give the same result. Indeed it would seem perhaps impossible to validate such a claim of ALWAYS. On the other hand, your claim could be full established if it can be shown that some of the criteria for making the judgement necessarily reside OUTSIDE the brain and body of the person doing the loving(7). For example, if the definition of loving(7) is that person A offers a valentine which is then carried for 1 week in the pocket of person B (the one being loved), it would be impossible to make the judgement based solely on the brain activity of person A. (This is probably not the best example hopefully it can be improved). -Astaire
_____________________ Heaven, I'm in heaven, and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak. And I seem to find the happiness I seek. When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek.

Dunamis
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Posted 04/26/08 - 10:31 AM:	#187
astaire1 wrote: Me, to Death Monkey: But it is not the behavior being DESCRIBED by mental predicate attribution. This is a mistake you constantly make. You: Right. And this is the crux of the issue. Can the act of loving(7) or loving(11) be redescribed as brain behavior. There are two things going on here. The intentional ascription has a particular motivation, and that motivation is to describe intentional action as meaningful, NOT to describe brain states. WHAT IS BEING described (that is, the thing that is attempting to be explained) is a kind of behavior which is not the behavior of the brain. Now whether this behavior can be redescribed as being caused by the behavior of the brain is a very different question. That is another. The Explanandum is intentional behavior, the explanans is mental predicate attribution. The Explanandum is not brain activity. That would be another explanans. But it is not just if the "act of loving" can be explained by brain activity, that is, the idea that it somehow caused by brain activity, but for Death Monkey's claims to hold, the very truth of the sentence "Sue is being loving" (under some such contingent relationship) has to be made true by "Sue is in brain state x" (where x is seen to be a function of the brain, as loving). There simply is no way, especially for the host of incredibly varied claims of the kinds of things that Death Monkey imagines can be found in the brain's states (reasons, intentions, beliefs, hopes, meanings), to connect down from intentional predicates to physical descriptions of the brain, and that is because such predicates involve social information, information which is not included in descriptions of the brain. Now Death Monkey would like to bridge the gap between a physical description of the brain, and a social valuation by talking vaguely about functions of the brain. That is, defining brain states/structures according to the functions the supposedly perform. But this approach, being a very long way from a strict physical (that is causal) description, plays a bit of a philosophical trick, one has to keep an eye on. Nietzsche pointed this kind of thing out when critiquing Kant's notion of "faculties". He cited Moliere's doctor, Bachilierus, who was attempting to (not) explain how opium puts people to sleep, "it is due to its dormative power (virtus dormitiva)". Death Monkey's universal appeal to finding the meaning of sentences, all the thoughts and desires one supposedly has, there, inside the functions of the brain, is exactly the same kind of non-answer. Brain functions can be defined willy-nilly to have the "virtus" of producing intentional state "x" or "y", without having any law-governed causal chain connecting them. They, by simple virtue of their defintion, now have the power to explain the presence of intentional state "x" or "y". Of course one can then put as part of the criteria of whether person z is loving, such a functional defintion of the brain, that is, that no matter what behavior they are manifesting, if they are not in funcational brain states "x" and "y" they cannot be said to be "loving" or "desiring" or "hoping for for this or that, but this is a runaround, because already one is losing just what such attributions do, they connect us and our valuations to the behavior as meaningful. Further, if you really want to go in that direction, not only must the fact that they are in some intentional state be in evidence by the criteria of a descrption of the brain (counterfactual to how we use such terms), the content of that intention also must be provided, that is, "they are hoping for what" "fearing exactly what" "desiring precisely what" derived (as Death Monkey likes to say), from our description of the brain. In fact, not only is such a brainstate=equals meaning and intention impossible, it actually undoes the relational information that such intentional descriptions provide, really a kind of "what do we think of that behavior" kind of information. Brain descriptions indeed can add to the information about any particular behavior, but what we think of such behavior in the first place, the social source of our criteria in the first place, is not founded on, or reducible to brain descriptions. But your phrase "in principle" perhaps implies that the 2 ways of making the judgement must ALWAYS give the same result. Indeed it would seem perhaps impossible to validate such a claim of ALWAYS. Not at all. The "in principle" is simply that the possibility ALWAYS remains. For example, if the definition of loving(7) is that person A offers a valentine which is then carried for 1 week in the pocket of person B (the one being loved), it would be impossible to make the judgement based solely on the brain activity of person A. (This is probably not the best example hopefully it can be improved). Yes. In no way can the criteria of "she loves him" (or "fears bees" or "wants water") be reduced to a brain description. It lies beyond such a description. And insofar as one wants in Moliere fashion define the functions of brains to be that which produce the stated mental predicate, you have simply gone in circles. With new social criteria of what constitutes mental predicate "x", the functions of the brain said to supposedly define such a state, are given new functional powers, the powers to produce the new criteria. At the extreme of this logic, one merely says, as Death Monkey likes to do, "Sam is hoping that Clinton makes a gaff, but believing that she will win" is shown because his brain function state "x" is is defined by the power to put him into the mental state, "He is hoping that Clinton makes a gaff, but believing that she will win". There is nothing more that Death Monkey means when he says, "The brain is thinking". Using the term "function" makes one sound very scientific, just as Moliere's learned doctor Bachilierus sounded rather scientific, speaking of the dormative power of opium. Ah, the "function"! Why didn't you say? What function? What power? At least with opium we know the causal relation now, the "dormative power" explanation was just a fill-in for ignorance. But with the functional power of the brain, it is of another kind, it is a stand in for the very breech between intentionality (and valuation), and physical descriptions of the brain. It is an empty and circular definition. The fact of the mental state (its propositional content) comes from outside the events, and is not defined by the brain being in one state or another. Edited by Dunamis on 04/27/08 - 11:45 AM
_____________________ Tractatus theologico-politicus [is a] work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil and issued with the knowledge of Mynheer Jan de Witt. - Church Council of Amsterdam If no man ever thinks alone, then we might say that to know really is to think ever less by oneself - Balibar

CypressMoon
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Posted 04/26/08 - 07:14 PM:	#188
Dunamis wrote: Why does one want to "trump" convention? Convention is a wonderful thing. We are using it right now as we discourse across distances and immediacy that not even the furthest thinkers of 100 years ago would have dreamed. And we don't have to "trump" it to do so. Does biology "trump" convention? Yes, biology did extend the limits of convention at several "points" in time. And also, this interface of the internet, most certainly kicked convention out of the ballpark, so to speak. Now, it merely became convention. The story of history is the story of overhumanity dunamis wrote: I don't know. Suprising. Edited by CypressMoon on 04/26/08 - 07:19 PM
_____________________ "We stand before the world, not in it." - Rilke "MAD, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual." - Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary) If you have a small child, gently pull the mask over them first, and pull at the ends to tighten the straps.

Dunamis
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Posted 04/26/08 - 07:24 PM:	#189
CypressMoon wrote: Yes, biology did extend the limits of convention at several "points" in time. And also, this interface of the internet, most certainly kicked convention out of the ballpark, so to speak. Now, it merely became convention. The story of history is the story of overhumanity. Convention "trumped" by establishing, and then following new convention. The fantasy of pure non-conventionality is the transition of the "signal" into pure noise. I have no idea why you are so sour on "merely becoming convention". Convention is the wholeness of communal action. It is the right hand blade of the sizzor.
_____________________ Tractatus theologico-politicus [is a] work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil and issued with the knowledge of Mynheer Jan de Witt. - Church Council of Amsterdam If no man ever thinks alone, then we might say that to know really is to think ever less by oneself - Balibar

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Posted 04/26/08 - 07:46 PM:	#190
Dunamis wrote: Convention "trumped" by establishing, and then following new convention. Sure. We must establish criterion in order to break it. dunamis wrote: The fantasy of pure non-conventionality is the transition of the "signal" into pure noise. I have no idea why you are so sour on "merely becoming convention". Because, convention, criterion by which one must abide by, that is, is a pragmatic issue with me. Throw this in the dustbin with labels of "deep-rooted", "untenable by default", or "occultish fetishes" if you wish, but we are all slaves to pragmatism. We must eat and survive in this socialistic-capitalism of America. (that is, it is socialistic amongst the bourgiousie - the parasites of the economy) Because of these necessary practices, we are slaves to spatio-temporalness. This is detrimental to thinking, precisely because no-one can think for themselves. Within a community of technology, as I believe strengthens the nexus of a community imnmensely, one can no longer think for oneself. Pragmatically, in America, it becomes a manifold of distributions of power, and activities entailed, that ultimately promote convention, and the maintenance of this convention. Have you been to a university lately? It's merely just a bureaucratic "distribution" of power, in which the education commity has nearly ALL of the power. You're right, Dunamis, Marxism has immigrated its way to America in the form of a vastly distant academic expidition that has no practical use whatsoever. The "socialist organizations", are merely just prosthetics of the government in America, ultimately because of the way America is set up to maintain its own economy. This assesment of pragmatism is why, Dunamis, Convention must be trumped - for the wealth of knowledge. There must be more experimentation, not in the form of analytical philosophical monsters, but in the form of artistic creativity. The artist is the forrunner of thought, and action, it seems to me, Edited by CypressMoon on 04/26/08 - 08:06 PM
_____________________ "We stand before the world, not in it." - Rilke "MAD, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual." - Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary) If you have a small child, gently pull the mask over them first, and pull at the ends to tighten the straps.

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Posted 04/26/08 - 08:17 PM:	#191
I think you have lost the original meaning of the pragma. The pragma, the pramata, are "the things that matter", the "deeds", the "acts", "the situation", "the affair", the "matter at hand". Because you have lost this meaning, I think you have lost what pragmatism is. Perhaps though, start a thread, since this one deals with slightly different pragmata.
_____________________ Tractatus theologico-politicus [is a] work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil and issued with the knowledge of Mynheer Jan de Witt. - Church Council of Amsterdam If no man ever thinks alone, then we might say that to know really is to think ever less by oneself - Balibar

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Posted 04/27/08 - 02:06 AM:	#192
Its worthwhile reading the few paragraphs that lead up to the folowing excerpts (highly relevant to the issue). excerpts from The Anomalous Monism link provided earlier wrote: "Can intentional human behaviour be explained and predicted in the same way other phenomena are?" (320) I.e., are the human sciences the same sort of enterprises as the physical sciences? Davidson’s answer is "yes and no". "On the one hand, human acts are clearly part of the order of nature, causing and being caused by events outside themselves. On the other hand, there are good arguments against the view that thought, desire, and voluntary action can be brought under deterministic laws, as physical phenomena can." (320) In fact, the social sciences have produced only statistical correlations between intentions and actions. But might we hope for more precision as neurosciences advance? Davidson says no. The best we can ever hope for is statistical correlation. The human sciences are "nomologically irreducible" to the physical sciences. Intentional talk requires reference to consciousness: to the beliefs and desires of the agent. Any time you describe a specific intentional event, you make reference to the beliefs and desires of the agent. And every single individual intentional event no doubt can be correlated with a physiological event. But there is no general way to correlate beliefs and desires with physiological events or actions. Different persons may have different beliefs and desires, which nevertheless might produce the same actions. In other words, beliefs and desires (intentions) supervene on the physical world: the same physical world could be correlated with more than one intentional state. [...Newton...] Thus for Davidson two parallel discourses – one deterministic, one non-deterministic – are inevitable. Thus the human sciences are never going to be swallowed up completely into the "hard" sciences. The "nomological irreducibility" of the human sciences to the physical sciences "does not mean there are any events that are in themselves undetermined or unpredictable; it is only events as described in the vocabulary of thought and action that resist incorporation into a closed deterministic system. These same events, described in appropriate physical terms, may be as amenable to prediction and explanation as any." (320) Dunamis wrote: But with the functional power of the brain, it is of another kind, it is a stand in for the very breech between intentionality (and valuation), and physical descriptions of the brain. It is an empty and circular definition. The fact of the mental state (its propositional content) comes from outside the events, and is not defined by the brain being in one state or another. I'll need some time to reread your posts and the Anomlous Monism article and to think this issue over. So far, I haven't seen DeathMonkey make statements that indicate that he has understood and dismissed the notion you seem to be describing or the notion I have vaguely incorporated into my worlview regarding the nature of truth and meaning. That is, what interests me in Davidsons triangulation is that it seems entirely compatible with physicalism. So far, I have never seen any justification for assuming that there are non physical phenomena at play in the world. Davidson's argument doesn't seem to imply a contradiction to physicalism. -Astaire
_____________________ Heaven, I'm in heaven, and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak. And I seem to find the happiness I seek. When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek.

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Posted 04/27/08 - 07:17 AM:	#193
It might be of interest to some to look into Robert Rosen's work. I just found this on the science forum, and it seems relevant to this discussion. He suggests that biology is not reducible to physics, and gives an analysis of models that is quite convincing.
_____________________ The observer is the observed. J Krishnamurti "Philosophy, to the Philistine, is an evolutionary process, watched over by some sort of brisk dynamic Providence, and culminating in the supreme insight of modern thought." John Cowper Powys

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Posted 04/27/08 - 10:52 AM:	#194
astaire1 wrote: So far, I haven't seen DeathMonkey make statements that indicate that he has understood and dismissed the notion you seem to be describing or the notion I have vaguely incorporated into my worlview regarding the nature of truth and meaning. Thus far, Death Monkey has refused to read anything on the matter of Davidson's position. At one point in the discussion he mistakenly said that his disinterest in Davidson was that Davidson was too "metaphysical" (I have no idea where he got this, as he was unable to expand the thought). As the thread has gone on, instead it seems that Death Monkey simply has retreated from even the possibility of understanding Davidson's position, satisfied much more with vague talk about philosophical authority of The "scientific" Community (of which he considers himself a member in good standing), intentional events having to be redefined solely in terms of Behavioral Psychology (the only REAL psychology) while providing no literal examples of such a rediscription, and a broad appeal to the powers of functionalist descriptions as somehow being "fundamental" "reductions" from which intentional event descriptions are "derived". Honestly, despite my great respect for Death Monkey, his refusal to engage Davidson is much more a case of not understanding, rather than not agreeing with what is being said. Indeed, Davidson allows for physical causes of all mental events, but not to the point where the intentional description of those events is "reduced to" or can be "derived from" those physical causes. Perhaps this fence around, limiting the "natural sciences" is really what Death Monkey objects to, since the natural sciences for him should have no limits in what they can more fundamentally redescribe, telling us what things "actually" are. But when someone is arguing against something that they don't even bother understand, as Death Monkey has in terms of Davidson, what can one really make of such arguments? "I don't understand Davidson, but if he is saying that my claims are wrong, he must be wrong" is a curious statement.. Edited by Dunamis on 04/27/08 - 11:23 AM
_____________________ Tractatus theologico-politicus [is a] work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil and issued with the knowledge of Mynheer Jan de Witt. - Church Council of Amsterdam If no man ever thinks alone, then we might say that to know really is to think ever less by oneself - Balibar

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Posted 04/28/08 - 11:43 AM:	#195
unenlightened, Even a sentient computer is more likely to understand Dunamis's posts by reading them rather than by reading my brain, and will need to understand them to know what I have understood, particularly as I seem to be unable to articulate it clearly enough for you to understand it. I don't understand how likelyhood is relevant. My point is that, in principle, a sufficiently powerful computer could be able to understand what you understand by analyzing your brain. Of course, again, I don't think such a computer will ever actually exist, nor that we could make one. But again, that is beside the point. I'm not sure what your objection is here; words are usually used with the intention of conveying meaning, aren't they? And this is verbal behaviour,no? So the meaning of a question is the intention of the behaviour of asking it, unless it is rhetorical. If the question is 'what's the time?', the intention is to learn what the time is, and that is the meaning. Am I being stupid or something? I don't think you are being stupid. I think you are just mixing up the meaning of a question with the intention behind asking the question. They are different things. I am saying that science is intentional behaviour. But it doesn't mean anything, apparently, because it can be reduced to a brain state. Clearly doing science is intentional behavior. But again, there is a difference between the intention behind a behavior, and the meaning of a statement or question. DM
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Posted 04/28/08 - 12:27 PM:	#196
Dunamis, Then what is it? If it is not an objective fact, then it is not a claim about the way things actually are, It is an intersubjective fact. I have no idea why you would think that "He fears bees" is a metaphor. I don't think it is a metaphor. Not usually, anyway. I think that it is a statement about his behavior. And as such, whether he does or does not fear bees, could in principle be determined from the information stored in his brain, by assessing whether his expected behavior is or is not consistent with the behaviors that constitute "fearing bees". Of course, some people may use such a statement to mean more than just a claim about behavior, in which case whatever that extra stuff is could not be considered to be a "true fact" about the person. To do so would be to make a category mistake. Such extra stuff could be taken metaphorically, though. And sometimes the statement could even be intended in a completely metaphorical way, such as when somebody says that his baseball bat is afraid of curve balls. Again, it all depends on what the intended meaning is. And this is, by construction, an example of the truth value of the mental predicate claim being empirically determinable. In fact, you just specified in your post that it is. Absolutely not. You are not following closely. It is not empirically determinable, the results of the application of a contingent defintion can then empirically measured, but the mental predicate claim is DEFINITELY not empirically determinable. No amount of observation, apart from the mental predicate valuations, DETERMINES that the truth of the application, that is, just because this set of scientists say that this behavior is "loving" there is nothing in observation which keeps other scientist defining love such that it is not. So what? In that case all you are doing is redefining the words used so that the sentence means something different. The claim is not changed by this, because the claim depends on what was meant by the sentence. What you are describing would be no different than if a scientist proved that the acceleration due to gravity at the surface of the Earth is 9.8 m/s^2, and somebody else came along and said "no it isn't, because I define the word 'meter' to mean the length of a football field." If I empirically determine that Bob loves Mary according to some definition of "loves", and then you redefine the word "loves" to mean something else, that does not invalidate my results. Unfortunately, the notion of "function" is the importation of a teleology, and is not a strict physical description of the brain, it is a description of the brain colored by purposes. Those purposes, insofar as they are thought to reflect culturally contingent mental predicate valuations, are not objective facts. So long as functions are defined properly, there is no problem to objectively say that a physical process does, or does not, implement a particular function. Functionalism would not be terribly useful if one cannot specify what it means to say that a system is implementing that function. It is, in part, this referential opacity which sets the conceptual kind of mental predicates apart. It is what keeps mental predicate descriptions from becoming physical descriptions. I don't see the point in this example. So John does not believe that his brother is the spy. So what? For any behavioristic definition of "believes", it will be an objective fact that he does or does not believe it. For any non-behavioristic definition, it will not be a fact about the real world at all, and to interpret it as such would be a category mistake. I don't care whether you call it a "metaphor" or not. That is irrelevant. The point is that it cannot be meaningfully said to be a true fact about reality. You seem to agree with this, because you say it is not an objective fact. I agree, if you mean anything more by "believes" than just behavior, then it is not an objective fact, and not reducible to brain activity. But since it is not an objective fact, the fact that I cannot reduce it to brain activity (or anything else real), is both trivial and irrelevant. Mental predicate descriptions, like nearly all descriptions, include what I would call "metaphorical" baggage, but which you may prefer to refer to as non-empirically verifiable content. Either way, this additional stuff will, of course, change when you redescribe it in terms of a different type of description. It gets replaced with the "metaphors" of the other description. That's what makes a redescription. If nothing at all changed it would just be the same old description. Again, it doesn't matter whether you want to call it "metaphorical" or not. Call it whatever you want. The point is that any part of the claim that cannot be considered to be an objective fact, is not something that needs to be preserved by the redescription, because what is being described is supposed to be something real. To illustrate what I mean, let's go back to the statement "thinking is brain activity". The term "thinking" is used in mental predicate models to describe something that actually exists. The term "brain activity" is used in the neuroscience model to describe something that actually exists. Saying that "thinking is brain activity" does not mean that the various true facts about thinking in the mental predicate model that are not objective facts, are also true facts about brain activity in the neuroscience model. What it means is that the true facts about thinking in the mental predicate model that are objective facts, are also true facts about brain activity in the neuroscience model. Likewise, saying that "the mind is reducible to neuroscience" does not mean that true facts about the mind in the mental predicate model that are not objective facts, can somehow be derived from neuroscience. It just means that the facts about the mind that are objective facts, can in principle be derived from neuroscience. DM
_____________________ Pseudoscience makes Baby Jesus cry.

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Posted 04/28/08 - 01:37 PM:	#197
Death Monkey, I'll let you have the last word on this matter. I have provided the relevant information for others to make their own decision. Thanks for the discussion.
_____________________ Tractatus theologico-politicus [is a] work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil and issued with the knowledge of Mynheer Jan de Witt. - Church Council of Amsterdam If no man ever thinks alone, then we might say that to know really is to think ever less by oneself - Balibar

reincarnated
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Posted 05/04/08 - 06:08 AM:	#198
Death Monkey wrote: Likewise, saying that "the mind is reducible to neuroscience" does not mean that true facts about the mind in the mental predicate model that are not objective facts, can somehow be derived from neuroscience. It just means that the facts about the mind that are objective facts, can in principle be derived from neuroscience. Death Monkey - Whilst I tend to agree with almost all of what you say in your last post, I think your comment about reductionism (above) depends on how one defines reductionism. To me, reductionism is "a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents." Now it seems to me that an account of the subjective aspects of phenomenal consciousness cannot be reduced to accounts of individual constituents, therefore (from this definition of reductionism) it follows that the mind is not reducible to neuroscience.
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Posted 05/04/08 - 02:55 PM:	#199
reincarnated, Death Monkey - Whilst I tend to agree with almost all of what you say in your last post, I think your comment about reductionism (above) depends on how one defines reductionism. To me, reductionism is "a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents." Now it seems to me that an account of the subjective aspects of phenomenal consciousness cannot be reduced to accounts of individual constituents, therefore (from this definition of reductionism) it follows that the mind is not reducible to neuroscience. Well, I guess it's the second part there that poses a potential problem. I would not include that, at least as you have posed it, because then the argument you have presented against the reducibility of the mind to neuroscience would apply to any example of reducibility. For example, I have no problem saying that a chemical like glucose is nothing more more than a combination of atoms interacting in a particular way, so for the reducibility of glucose to atomic physics, your first criteria would be met. But what about the second one? What constitutes "an account of it"? If I present an account of glucose that includes statements that are not objective facts, then that account clearly will not be reducible to accounts of interacting atoms. So then it ends up not being reducible to atomic physics (by your standards). On the other hand, if I present an account that does include any such statements, then I have no problem. So which account is the one that needs to be reducible? All of them? That would be impossible. That is why I think that it is only the objective facts that are relevant. Anything else in your "account" of it, is just conceptual decoration. Now that's not to say that it plays no purpose, or that it is not useful in some cases. It just means that it is not anything that we can coherently say is a true account of the part of the world we are trying to describe. So why should a criteria for reducibility include the reducibility of these additional model-dependant claims that are not actually claims about what is being described in the first place? As was discussed previously in this thread, reducibility means that you can redescribe something which is currently described in terms of one model, in terms of some other, more fundamental model. The key issue here is what is being redescribed. It is not the first description that is being redescribed. That does not even make any sense. It is whatever the first description describes, that is being redescribed. The mental predicate descriptions are supposedly describing some part of this world. If that is the case, then the only criteria that must be met for another description to qualify as a redescription of that part of this world, is that it describe the same objective facts that the original description does. The non-objective claims of the original description are not, strictly speaking, claims about the part of the world being described. So they need not be included in the new description. DM
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reincarnated
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Posted 05/05/08 - 02:19 AM:	#200
Death Monkey wrote: That is why I think that it is only the objective facts that are relevant. Anything else in your "account" of it, is just conceptual decoration. Now that's not to say that it plays no purpose, or that it is not useful in some cases. It just means that it is not anything that we can coherently say is a true account of the part of the world we are trying to describe. So why should a criteria for reducibility include the reducibility of these additional model-dependant claims that are not actually claims about what is being described in the first place? One may call a subjective account “conceptual decoration” – but doing so does not avoid the conclusion that such “accounts” are not reducible to accounts of individual constituents. One may also say this conclusion is unimportant, but perhaps we don’t all share this opinion. I also do not agree with the implication that a subjective account is not a "true account" of the part of the world we are trying to describe. Death Monkey wrote: The mental predicate descriptions are supposedly describing some part of this world. If that is the case, then the only criteria that must be met for another description to qualify as a redescription of that part of this world, is that it describe the same objective facts that the original description does. The non-objective claims of the original description are not, strictly speaking, claims about the part of the world being described. So they need not be included in the new description. This seems to assert that only objective claims qualify as claims about a part of the world being described. Why so? Why does a subjective claim (such as “the sensation of seeing red” ) not qualify as a part of the world being described? Edited by reincarnated on 05/05/08 - 04:17 AM
_____________________ �If one pays attention to the concepts being employed, rather than the words being used, the resolution of this problem is simple.� (Stuart Burns)

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