Mr.Samsa wrote:

Chrisw wrote:
But saying that "external behavior is a good indicator of the mental state" is just a kind of methodological behaviourism.

Do you mean 'methodological behaviorism' as in the actual position held by Watson, or do you mean just the general methodology put forth by behaviorist thinking?

Chrisw wrote:Philosophical behaviourists, like Ryle, went further than this. They wanted behaviouristic analyses to tell us something about what mental states were (or weren't). I think Ryle essentially did believe mental states were ultimately reducible to outward behaviour.

But I don't think that is obviously wrong, not if we can (as Ryle did) talk of dispositions to behave. So your mental state consist of not only your current behaviour but your dispositions to behave in certain ways if circumstances were different. So you might be angry but not show it for fear of offending, but we can imagine circumstances in which this disposition to overtly react angrily would be expressed. Actors have a disposition to stop acting when the director shouts "Cut!". A pretence that was maintained in all conceivable circumstances would not be a pretence at all.

Was that Ryle's position? I haven't read enough of his stuff, I've only read parts but I found him fairly intelligent on the topic. The "dispositions" thing sounds a little odd - I suppose if he's discussing context, in that the actor has different contingencies operating on his behavior in some circumstances compared to other situations, then I would definitely agree and this is empirically demonstrable.

Chrisw wrote:

Mr.Samsa wrote:
Do you mean 'methodological behaviorism' as in the actual position held by Watson, or do you mean just the general methodology put forth by behaviorist thinking?

I'm just saying that observing that external behavior is a good indicator of the mental state says nothing about what mental states are. Philosophical behaviourists want to say something about what mental states are.

Chrisw wrote:
I've not read much Ryle either. Quite possibly his position is more subtle that I'm portraying it here. Which just lends more weight to my argument that people commonly attack simplistic strawman versions of behaviourism that no reasonable person would subscribe to.

Chrisw wrote:I think this always happens when a philosophical idea is believed to have been "discredited". Ideas need living advocates to develop and defend them or we all just lazily skip past them without much thought. I guess that's why philosophy is so prone to fashions and why ideas are often cast aside and then later "rediscovered".

Ilovelucy wrote:As an admin on joshtimonen.net I didn't really get stuck into debate because of my duties. I felt it best for my position of impartiality not to do so, it helped me to sit back and look at things from a detached perspective. However, there were plenty of things that I felt at odds with that the majority of RDFers took as accepted. One of them was definitely Daniel Dennett. It always seemed like the Philosophy section was the Dennett.net Philosophy section rather than the Dawkins one.

So what have I disagreed with? I think that I really liked Dennett's ideas about freedom, and also had a lot of time for the multiple drafts idea of consciousness. At the same time, I've never been swayed by Dennett's denial of qualia, subjective experience or the Hard Problem. I also thought that his seminal text, engaging as it is, should really be called "Consciousness Explained Away". Dennett's sole way of responding to thought experiments such as Mary's Room seemed to be "well if I turn the dials on the intuition pump a little..." before telling an absurd alternative to the thought experiment. He then raises a strawman objection before replying to it with "...aah but the absurdity of my response points out the absurdity of the original thought experiment"

So, where does that place me in the consciousness scale? Well, I would say that I still reject dualism and idealism on logical grounds but the same grounds lead me to reject the deflationary, eliminative materialism of Dennett, Hoffstadter and the Churchlands. So, where does that lead me? I agree with some of Chalmers on the problems but don't agree with his dualistic solutions or his calls for a first person science. I guess it leaves me somewhere between the Neutral Monism ( mind and matter are both manifestations of the same ultimate reality) of Ramachandran and Russell and the "naive materialism" or "New Mysterianism" of Pinker, McGinn and IMO Richard Dawkins. Susan Blackmore seems to come somewhere between EM and New Mysterianism, acknowledging the sensations of Qualia but using the Great Doubt of Zen as an escape passage into EM, this was pretty much my escape route too. It was always quite interesting when I looked over the old forums and people used the names I just quoted to defend Eliminative Materialism. I was very much a big fan of Dennett, with nagging doubts, and I finally sort of gave up on him after reading eight books and countless essays of his. I just found him to be chief obfuscater for the epistemologically insecure, spouting out verbiage to distract from real problems that have not been solved and may never be solved.

So, I think I will obviously end up engaging with some Dennett heads, but I am interested to see if there are any others that reject some of his claims without flying off into the worlds of dualism and idealism. I fear I may be on my own here!

P. D. Ouspensky
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

P. D. Ouspensky (1878-1947)
Born Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii
March 4, 1878(1878-03-04)
Moscow, Russia
Died October 2, 1947 (aged 69)
Lyne Place, Surrey, England
Nationality Russian
Ethnicity Caucasian
Religion Christian

Peter D. Ouspensky (March 4, 1878–October 2, 1947), (Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, also Uspenskii or Uspensky), a Russian philosopher,[1] invoked euclidean and noneuclidean geometry in his discussions of psychology and higher dimensions of existence.

Ouspensky has a reputation for his expositions of the early work of the Greek-Armenian teacher of esoteric doctrine George Gurdjieff, whom he met in Moscow in 1915. He was associated with the ideas and practices originating with Gurdjieff from then on. In 1924, he separated from Gurdjieff personally, and some, Rodney Collin among others, say that he finally gave up the (Gurdjieff) "system" that he had shared with people for 25 years in England and the United States, but his own recorded words on the subject ("A Record of Meetings," published posthumously) do not clearly endorse this judgement nor does Ouspensky's emphasis on "you must make a new beginning" after confessing "I've left the system"; all this happened in Lyne Place, Surrey, England in 1947, just before his demise. While lecturing in London in 1924 he announced that he would continue independently the way he began in 1921. All in all, Ouspensky studied the Gurdjieff System directly under Gurdjieff's own supervision for a period of ten years, from 1915 to 1924. Ouspenky's book In Search of the Miraculous is a recounting of what Ouspensky learned from Gurdjieff in those years between 1915 and 1924.

FACT-MAN-2 wrote:
Has anyone read his book "In Search of the Miraculous"? And if so what do you think of his construct of there being four levels of consciousness?