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How do I claw my way our of the epistemological void I find myself in?
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2018-10-24 at 6:01 AM UTC
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2018-10-24 at 6:33 AM UTC
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2018-10-24 at 6:46 AM UTC
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2018-10-24 at 1:45 PM UTC
Originally posted by Lanny I've heard this argument before but I never really got how it was supposed to work. Like what is free floating thought without a subject to think? The idea of thought without someone to think is obviously something that's never been encountered in our experience
The idea is simply that the observer isn't some unitary "bottom level" that experiences are delivered to, rather it is a phenomenon that emerges from and supervenes on unconscious phenomena, of which experiences and thoughts are a few.
"You" aren't "using" your thoughts, "you" are just the "narrative center of gravity" for your thoughts (as Dan Dennett puts it).but OK, we're Cartesians, so is it logically invalid? Like it kinda seems like that to me but let's try and abuse the notions of "subject" and "thought" or "doubt" as much as we can and postulate the thought which happens without a mind to conceive it. So what? That thought exists, perception exists, would Descartes even be bothered by this? He just says "ah, that thought over there without a thinker, that's what exists, that's the cogito" and bam, done.And I'm still not convinced perception without the subject is coherent, I think the idea of a subject is embedded in perception and necessitates it, but even if it doesn't what thesis built on cogito ergo sum is overturned?
Descartes would be very bothered, because the idea he is battling is that his thoughts and experiences could be a misrepresentation being "presented" to "him". Descartes was an interactionist who believed that the soul interacted with the body through the pineal gland, and the body was just syntactical machinery for the mind to manipulate.
The whole problem of the evil demon hinges on a notion of an essential identity of experience. Simply accepting that the thoughts are what there are, leaves no problem: if an evil scientist is constructing these thoughts in a jar, there is no "essence" to pull out into the real world and give real thoughts to, any continuity between them would just be the persistence of a "ship of Theseus" blob of mental and physical states which are interrelated and form some kind of collective identity, none of which are at all essential.
If "you" are just constructed out of your experiences, then there is no reason to doubt the validity of your experiences to you.
Imagine if the evil scientist pulls Descartes out of a vat and retains all his memories except he changes the memory of his name in the real world to "Rene Detrolley". Is Descartes or Detrolley having the experience of being lied to about being the other?
There is a reason why he resorted to "uhhhhh, god did it" in his dialogues with princess Elizabeth on dualism.What exactly is this supposed to be a test of?
The fact that your experience isn't happening at some central location in your head, it is distributed throughout your body, and actually felt and experienced in your limbs. The head fallacy is a very easy mistake to make because our eyes and ears are in there, and both are central to determining our position in the world.Descartes would seem to disagree, maybe coordination of sensory information is also a function of the subject and the fact that we experience a variety of qualitatively distinct streams of perception is further evidence for the subject (i.e. the fact that there seems to be something which both sees and hears, even if these perceptions don't reflect reality, suggests there is at least a subject in which they are unified or integrated), but that that is something which "you" do doesn't seem like any kind of argument against "your" existence.
That road leads to what is known as the homunculus fallacy, i.e. it simply transposes the question of how you perceive things and weave these threads together, onto how the little observer in your head does it. They are the same question. Does he have a little observer in his head?
There is no need to reach for such silliness because the premise is just pointless and flawed: to experience sight is to experience sight, you don't need to have the experience and then another experience of the experience. The experience is the experience.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-10-24 at 2:25 PM UTC
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2018-10-24 at 2:30 PM UTCGay
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2018-10-24 at 2:53 PM UTC
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2018-10-24 at 9:43 PM UTC
Originally posted by Anal Turing GayGayGay
buzz catchall regarding your story of
but slowly involk then this spat out. like a buzzphrase which made sense to me. are you trying to play some cody impregnational game?
"Salvador Dali involks the works of Rene Descartes"
the first thing I thought of was an album by the band Talk Talk from the 80s. but their album cover was only inspired by Dali and not a Dali painting.
what game are you playing. is this a down the rabbit hole moment. will I find out Bill Krozby has an IQ of 170 and not the silly goof he comes off as? it's all staged with you people
of coarse it's spelled Renee in English because the "English are never wrong"
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2018-10-24 at 9:45 PM UTChomunculus fallacy=impregnate the egg (mind) with false hopes of existence.
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2018-10-24 at 11:09 PM UTC
Originally posted by totse3.com buzz catchall regarding your story of
but slowly involk then this spat out. like a buzzphrase which made sense to me. are you trying to play some cody impregnational game?
"Salvador Dali involks the works of Rene Descartes"
the first thing I thought of was an album by the band Talk Talk from the 80s. but their album cover was only inspired by Dali and not a Dali painting.
what game are you playing. is this a down the rabbit hole moment. will I find out Bill Krozby has an IQ of 170 and not the silly goof he comes off as? it's all staged with you people
of coarse it's spelled Renee in English because the "English are never wrong"
Originally posted by totse3.com buzz catchall regarding your story of
but slowly involk then this spat out. like a buzzphrase which made sense to me. are you trying to play some cody impregnational game?
"Salvador Dali involks the works of Rene Descartes"
the first thing I thought of was an album by the band Talk Talk from the 80s. but their album cover was only inspired by Dali and not a Dali painting.
what game are you playing. is this a down the rabbit hole moment. will I find out Bill Krozby has an IQ of 170 and not the silly goof he comes off as? it's all staged with you people
of coarse it's spelled Renee in English because the "English are never wrong"
^ Mental illness -
2018-10-25 at 5:38 AM UTC
Originally posted by Anal Turing The idea is simply that the observer isn't some unitary "bottom level" that experiences are delivered to, rather it is a phenomenon that emerges from and supervenes on unconscious phenomena, of which experiences and thoughts are a few.
OK, I'm not sure this is really an well agreed upon fact but I would seem to agree. I'm not sure how that leads to:"You" aren't "using" your thoughts, "you" are just the "narrative center of gravity" for your thoughts (as Dan Dennett puts it).
Why am I not my thoughts? And if I really am not my my thoughts then I can still defend Descartes by saying "well the cogito isn't "me", it's my thoughts".
[quote[
Descartes would be very bothered, because the idea he is battling is that his thoughts and experiences could be a misrepresentation being "presented" to "him". Descartes was an interactionist who believed that the soul interacted with the body through the pineal gland, and the body was just syntactical machinery for the mind to manipulate.
Descartes is an interactionist but his interactionism doesn't really have anything to do with the cogito, he didn't suppose the mechanism of deception was the presentation of false experience to his soul directly or anything. He's not committed to his soul being him, at least for the purposes of meditations. If a contemporary had made this argument, and he was willing to entertain the thought-without-self idea (still not really clear to me) he could just say "look at that thought, even you agree that thought exists, that's the cogito".The whole problem of the evil demon hinges on a notion of an essential identity of experience. Simply accepting that the thoughts are what there are, leaves no problem: if an evil scientist is constructing these thoughts in a jar, there is no "essence" to pull out into the real world and give real thoughts to, any continuity between them would just be the persistence of a "ship of Theseus" blob of mental and physical states which are interrelated and form some kind of collective identity, none of which are at all essential.
Descartes does seem to have believed in an "essential" soul, but again, I'm not seeing how it's critical to cogito ergo sum. If you subscribe to an error theory of personal identity or something you still seem to have very good evidence for at least one of some kind of (maybe) transient (maybe) non-essential thinking being, and that's all that's required here.If "you" are just constructed out of your experiences, then there is no reason to doubt the validity of your experiences to you.
Descartes wasn't doubting the "validity of your experiences to you", he doubted that they represented some kind of external reality. He'd probably say all our experiences are "valid" to us in that we truly experience them.Imagine if the evil scientist pulls Descartes out of a vat and retains all his memories except he changes the memory of his name in the real world to "Rene Detrolley". Is Descartes or Detrolley having the experience of being lied to about being the other?
Well so see above for why I don't think a rejection of personal identity or personal essentialism really poses a problem, but I think this thought experiment fails long before that because even very naive accounts of identity don't rely on names as our essential quality.The fact that your experience isn't happening at some central location in your head, it is distributed throughout your body, and actually felt and experienced in your limbs. The head fallacy is a very easy mistake to make because our eyes and ears are in there, and both are central to determining our position in the world.
I'd argue experience doesn't really happen anywhere. Like sure, we have a sense of locality, like we experience touch as being local to some region of our model of the world, specifically the part we occupy (usually) and that's super interesting but I'd say you're wrong if you point to a limb and say "look there, an experience!", or if you pointed to a head and said the same thing. Asking "where is this experience happening" is a bit like asking "where is mathematics" or "where is Descartes' Meditations". I could point to a number of books or websites or brains that instantiate those things in some way, but it would be comical to pick up one and be like "look, here, this is mathematics. Mathematics weighs 1.2 lbs and is made mostly out of dead trees".
Experience very likely relies (supervenes) on material substance which does have a location and volume and other physical properties but that doesn't mean experience itself is local.That road leads to what is known as the homunculus fallacy, i.e. it simply transposes the question of how you perceive things and weave these threads together, onto how the little observer in your head does it. They are the same question. Does he have a little observer in his head?
There is no need to reach for such silliness because the premise is just pointless and flawed: to experience sight is to experience sight, you don't need to have the experience and then another experience of the experience. The experience is the experience.
I see what you're saying here, and I'll back away from saying sensory integration counts as evidence of a subject, but I still don't think you have a positive argument for rejection the notion of a self here. So sure, experience is experience, it's not some kind of information that's fed into the subject and mystically integrated there. But I still say look, there's an experience, it's thinking, it's the cogito. Maybe there's some kind of relation between some sequences of experiences that gives rise to an essential self across time or maybe there's not, doesn't matter, there's still something that's thinking, that's thinking about itself, and which is asking "can I doubt my own existence?" and concluding, correctly, "no, I can't".
The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-10-25 at 5:44 AM UTCSee what happens when you aren't content hts?
Your punishment is being the OP of a circlejerk thread. I hope you're happy
Ignorance is bliss -
2018-10-25 at 7:03 AM UTCI dun think I said it before I dun think I say it again there's something comforting in seeing that most of us in this community are in, or hanging around, or waving to somebody riding, or just shy of boarding "the bus"
Don't it make ya feel a little less alone?
I told one of the few people I still have real life conversation with who had told me they had agoraphobia years ago and couldn't leave the house, and is still on Lexapro (and believes she will need it until the day she dies), that I think she is like 85% justified in her "irrational" fears in which the way life currently runs and is presented in the modern world. I do consider her of slightly above average female intelligence.
Earlier today I just randomly opened up to an older client of mine, who was venting to me about her various iPhone issues, that I honestly believe its become apparent to some, imperceptible to most, that more-so in the past 3-6 years, we have reached a point of progression that has diverged into increasing, mounting regression, in almost aspects of life. Technology being an important factor, reaching out and stirring into all other earthly divisions.
The worst is having a memory of a younger, alternative, on track, mentally secure, goal driven and rewarded, "normal", ambitious, energetic, confident, unfolding of limitless possibilities, nourishing of precious relationships, etc to remind you of the stark contrast of the totally opposite current day, an ever flowering predicament that just seems to continue to stack, further distancing you from the tranquility and joy and vigor you once had, and with the most precious of assets being time, flying by at full speed and only getting faster, and trying your best to keep it together while also frantically trying to put together the damaged remains of lifes puzzle pieces with the ever present personal negative decisions that occupies your consciousness and suppresses ability to summon positive change, and assemble the scraps of yourself that has managed to survive in tact in such a way that could result in what resembles some sort of meaningful, fulfilling existence, some sort of link to the hope filled past of ignorance of which Ghost refers.
Or learning of some of the solutions but having too many variables and obstacles to make finalize them.
Ah fuck it I dunno how I got to this thread or how much time I spent trying to communicate relateable, shared feelings with these digital eWords but I'm not proofreading I'm hitting submitThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-10-25 at 1:52 PM UTC
Originally posted by Lanny OK, I'm not sure this is really an well agreed upon fact but I would seem to agree. I'm not sure how that leads to:
There will always be crazy guys who believe in hidden spoops in the machine, but contemporary philosophers almost invariably agree on something between functionalism and naïve realism. This also includes people like John Searle, of Chinese Room fame.Why am I not my thoughts? And if I really am not my my thoughts then I can still defend Descartes by saying "well the cogito isn't "me", it's my thoughts".
I think you misread the quote. I would say "I am my thoughts" is a somewhat accurate statement. What I'm objecting to is the idea that you are anything except your thoughts (and what goes into making them), that you are some subject consuming these thoughts rather than just the result of these thoughts "happening".
If Descartes is fine with saying "I am just my thoughts", then there is no more problem left over. His statement is something like "I cannot doubt that I am doubting". Sure "you" can! Descartes's mistake, from which the problem of knowledge emerges, is simply that he stopped one step short: from a perspective of pure doubt, the only
statement you can make is just "there is no doubt that there are doubts", or simply "there are thoughts". If you can just admit that, the problem of knowledge epistemically disappears into just making sure your sensory "thoughts" corroborate one another.
The presupposition of "I" in the foundation is a critical error that creates a space for further doubt.Descartes is an interactionist but his interactionism doesn't really have anything to do with the cogito
Interactionism (or the dualism under it) is a direct and inescapable consequence of the cogito, thus stated.he didn't suppose the mechanism of deception was the presentation of false experience to his soul directly or anything. He's not committed to his soul being him, at least for the purposes of meditations.
He is committed to a "him", and the soul is his model for that, which shows his philosophical commitments. The fact that he recedes to "clearly and distinctly perceiving things because God wouldn't let an evil demon deceive me" to resolve the problem is telling.
His correspondences with Elisabeth are a very worthwhile read (PDF warning).
https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1643_1.pdf
But the point of the discussion isn't Descartes himself, but whether or not his method of doubt produces the outcome of solipsism or the problem of knowledge: it does not, if you just go one step beyond and remove the I from the basis.If a contemporary had made this argument, and he was willing to entertain the thought-without-self idea (still not really clear to me) he could just say "look at that thought, even you agree that thought exists, that's the cogito".
If that were true, he would have no grounding to believe any deception was possible. I am fine with him just arriving to "there are thoughts".Descartes does seem to have believed in an "essential" soul, but again, I'm not seeing how it's critical to cogito ergo sum.
It's not critical to cogito, it just demonstrates what his conception of "I" was, which you have no reason to presuppose the existence of.Descartes wasn't doubting the "validity of your experiences to you", he doubted that they represented some kind of external reality. He'd probably say all our experiences are "valid" to us in that we truly experience them.
The error is "you", and this creates a further error of splitting off external reality from your internal experiences. This is simply not necessary.Well so see above for why I don't think a rejection of personal identity or personal essentialism really poses a problem, but I think this thought experiment fails long before that because even very naive accounts of identity don't rely on names as our essential quality.
The thought experiment isn't meant to show that personal identity fails (although it does), it is simply that he will be left with two sets of epistemically equivalent, irreconcilable doubts simply by any commitment to any "I", which is very simply solved by abandoning anybiota of fundamental idemtity. We can take any property instead of his name, the name is just an easy example.I'd argue experience doesn't really happen anywhere. Like sure, we have a sense of locality, like we experience touch as being local to some region of our model of the world, specifically the part we occupy (usually) and that's super interesting but I'd say you're wrong if you point to a limb and say "look there, an experience!", or if you pointed to a head and said the same thing. Asking "where is this experience happening" is a bit like asking "where is mathematics" or "where is Descartes' Meditations". I could point to a number of books or websites or brains that instantiate those things in some way, but it would be comical to pick up one and be like "look, here, this is mathematics. Mathematics weighs 1.2 lbs and is made mostly out of dead trees".
Is an instance of Descartes's Meditations sitting on your bookshelf? Might you say that an instance of pain is occurring in your hand?Experience very likely relies (supervenes) on material substance which does have a location and volume and other physical properties but that doesn't mean experience itself is local.
If the substrate is local and the content of the experience includes the feeling of being located at the substrate, what might differentiate a nonlocal experience from a local experience?I see what you're saying here, and I'll back away from saying sensory integration counts as evidence of a subject, but I still don't think you have a positive argument for rejection the notion of a self here. So sure, experience is experience, it's not some kind of information that's fed into the subject and mystically integrated there. But I still say look, there's an experience, it's thinking, it's the cogito. Maybe there's some kind of relation between some sequences of experiences that gives rise to an essential self across time or maybe there's not, doesn't matter, there's still something that's thinking, that's thinking about itself, and which is asking "can I doubt my own existence?" and concluding, correctly, "no, I can't".
Well no, this is the same mistake as Descartes: there is no logical reason that "there is doubt" necessarily entails "there is a doubter". All that does is saddle the experience of doubt with the experience of experiencing doubt.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-10-25 at 7:29 PM UTC
Originally posted by Anal Turing If Descartes is fine with saying "I am just my thoughts", then there is no more problem left over. His statement is something like "I cannot doubt that I am doubting". Sure "you" can! Descartes's mistake, from which the problem of knowledge emerges, is simply that he stopped one step short: from a perspective of pure doubt, the only
statement you can make is just "there is no doubt that there are doubts", or simply "there are thoughts". If you can just admit that, the problem of knowledge epistemically disappears into just making sure your sensory "thoughts" corroborate one another.
It seems like the issue you're taking here is that you suppose Descartes is committed to a fairly specific conception of "self" or "I" or "himself" while I'm not so sure that he is. Like you take Descartes to be saying there's some kind of self with a wholly independent existence from thoughts and experiences, to which experiences are presented. And to be fair the way he talks about does lend itself to this reading.
But I don't think his argument relies on it, and in light of this objection his position seems salvageable by simply saying the self is an emergent property of thoughts, there is no "double perception" or "experience of experience". The "I" which doubts is simply a consequence of doubt itself, indeed doubt is position with respect to belief, it doesn't really makes sense to talk about belief just exist, belief by nature of the concept has to be relative to some kind of thing which can hold beliefs. We don't need to posit any kind of essential identity to the doubter, we don't need to say the subject which doubts has this "receives perceptions" quality. The "I" is not presupposed, it's necessitated by doubt itself.The error is "you", and this creates a further error of splitting off external reality from your internal experiences. This is simply not necessary.
Didn't you just say Descartes' method of doubt doesn't lead to solipsism? How do you reject a distinction between external reality and experience but deny solipsism? Are you arguing for a retreat into total skepticism?If the substrate is local and the content of the experience includes the feeling of being located at the substrate, what might differentiate a nonlocal experience from a local experience?
I categorically reject local experiences, I don't think it makes sense to talk about them in a strict sense in the same way I don't think it makes sense to ask "where is mathematics?". As they are non-physical, and quite obviously lack many physical properties like mass, I think it doesn't make sense to assign physical coordinates or volume to experience.
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2018-10-25 at 10:24 PM UTC
Originally posted by Lanny It seems like the issue you're taking here is that you suppose Descartes is committed to a fairly specific conception of "self" or "I" or "himself" while I'm not so sure that he is. Like you take Descartes to be saying there's some kind of self with a wholly independent existence from thoughts and experiences, to which experiences are presented. And to be fair the way he talks about does lend itself to this reading.
But I don't think his argument relies on it, and in light of this objection his position seems salvageable by simply saying the self is an emergent property of thoughts, there is no "double perception" or "experience of experience". The "I" which doubts is simply a consequence of doubt itself, indeed doubt is position with respect to belief, it doesn't really makes sense to talk about belief just exist, belief by nature of the concept has to be relative to some kind of thing which can hold beliefs. We don't need to posit any kind of essential identity to the doubter, we don't need to say the subject which doubts has this "receives perceptions" quality. The "I" is not presupposed, it's necessitated by doubt itself.
I'm glad you said that, because it sets up the problem perfectly; from a pure skepticism perspective, the only thing that you can't doubt is the simple action of doubting (and not it's mechanism). No belief or judgment of truth value is actually needed: all you need is the act of rejection. That's what it boils down to.
The inferences of the mechanism, and thereby the existence of any "I" or subject of doubt follows from that. And that fact, the order, basically deletes the problem.Didn't you just say Descartes' method of doubt doesn't lead to solipsism? How do you reject a distinction between external reality and experience but deny solipsism? Are you arguing for a retreat into total skepticism?
There is no point where the external becomes internal. It's all "external", i.e. phenomena in the world. It is fine to see that action of doubt as the root of our epistemology but in an objective sense, it's just an ontological "peak" that our epistemology trickles down from.I categorically reject local experiences, I don't think it makes sense to talk about them in a strict sense in the same way I don't think it makes sense to ask "where is mathematics?". As they are non-physical, and quite obviously lack many physical properties like mass, I think it doesn't make sense to assign physical coordinates or volume to experience.
If you believe naive realists, then phenomenal experiences (and ultimately even conceptual things, like maths) are simply your acquaintance to the actual, real, accurate properties of the world.
So, as an example, would you consider mass to be nonlocal because it doesn't have any other properties? Or would you consider it a property of the world at the point where it manifests? We can treat phenomenal qualities in the exact same way.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-10-26 at 4:13 AM UTCITT: unpaid student loans
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2018-10-26 at 6:44 AM UTCit is customary in these days for two men who are deeply in love with each other to talk about dead people;s thoughts.
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2018-10-26 at 1:19 PM UTC
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2018-10-30 at 8:09 PM UTCBamp
