surreptitious57 wrote:

hackenslash wrote:
I think they should be mandatory

Making them mandatory would remove freedom of choice. It would also by implication increase the number of negative experiences - which can have devastating consequences - so for those two reasons I would be against it.

I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek, but I'd be prepared to defend the statement nonetheless.

What I actually advocate is a broad range of experiences for everybody. People tend to be narrow-minded and provincial. Any experience that extends the cognition of the individual is a positive thing, IMO.

I've done just about every drug on the market, and each one has given me a perspective I couldn't have obtained any other way.

Samuel Langhorn Clemens wrote:A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

The same is true of just about any experience.

hackenslash wrote:

surreptitious57 wrote:

hackenslash wrote:
I think they should be mandatory

Making them mandatory would remove freedom of choice. It would also by implication increase the number of negative experiences - which can have devastating consequences - so for those two reasons I would be against it.

I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek, but I'd be prepared to defend the statement nonetheless.

What I actually advocate is a broad range of experiences for everybody. People tend to be narrow-minded and provincial. Any experience that extends the cognition of the individual is a positive thing, IMO.

I've done just about every drug on the market, and each one has given me a perspective I couldn't have obtained any other way.

Did you ever have a 'spiritual' experience?

Define 'spiritual'.

hackenslash wrote:Define 'spiritual'.

A penchant for enjoying black pudding.

jamest wrote:

hackenslash wrote:

surreptitious57 wrote:

hackenslash wrote:
I think they should be mandatory

Making them mandatory would remove freedom of choice. It would also by implication increase the number of negative experiences - which can have devastating consequences - so for those two reasons I would be against it.

I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek, but I'd be prepared to defend the statement nonetheless.

What I actually advocate is a broad range of experiences for everybody. People tend to be narrow-minded and provincial. Any experience that extends the cognition of the individual is a positive thing, IMO.

I've done just about every drug on the market, and each one has given me a perspective I couldn't have obtained any other way.

Did you ever have a 'spiritual' experience?

Blue Easter Egg. 1300 micrograms. Except the damned things were green. But that was only the beginning!

hackenslash wrote:

Samuel Langhorn Clemens wrote:A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

The same is true of just about any experience.

Maybe so, but is it a better world in which everyone carries cats by the tall?
The same could be said of any cruel act.

A man who shoots a child land something he can learn in no other way.

I'm not suggesting equivalence here, obviously.
Perhaps there are experiences it is better not to have.

Teuton wrote:...I know that some philosophers such as Galen Strawson, who is a very intelligent man, disagree with me. He now claims—astonishingly—that there is no real difference between the subject, the act, and the content of experience. So it seems we have a clash of fundamental intuitions here, which can hardly be resolved consensually through further argumentation.

Perhaps 'fundamental intuition' is the wrong basis to approach this subject. It seems likely that our intuitions about experience will be very biased and ill-equiped to delve into the issues.

Ideas that challenge your fundamental intuitions are perhaps more valuable than those that reinforce them.

I like Strawson's take. Thanks for posting the video.

Teuton wrote:A world containing nothing but subject- or substratumlessly free-floating experiences is unimaginable and inconceivable to me indeed. That's why I think such a world is an impossible world. Could there really be a world where nothing exists but a visual impression of red, a sensation of heat, a pang of hunger, an urge to pee, a feeling of loneliness, a mood of depression, and the thought that 1+1=2? I really don't think so.

If you try to think of the entirety of existence in those terms then of course it will seem absurd. But why look at it that way?

Consider a virtual world. It subsists in a physical world, but contains only virtual objects. Image that a virtual world is constructed where experiences are represented. There can be seeings, hearings, feelings and thinkings. Any entity/system that can probe this virtual world can determine what is happening to / in the subjective world. These experiences can be tracked and reacted to by any real system/entity that can access the virtual world. The creator of the virtual world is obviously prime candidate to have such access. Let's say that creator is the brain. This brain selects what to render in the virtual space, and in rendering it can respond to subjective experience. It calssifies and responds to experience. As the organ that encodes the semantics of everything a person knows it would 'know experience' and it would know itself as experiencer. But what you mean by experiencer does not exist. There is nothing here that literally has experiences. This experiencer is not literally internal and is mute. It does not generate thoughts or understand things.

There is no need to demand that this virtual world chould exist in it's own right. By definition it doesn't exist in it's own right. It exists connected to the 'centre of understanding', which seems a much better prospect in every regard than 'a subjective self' plus experiences 'it can have'.

GrahamH wrote:Maybe so, but is it a better world in which everyone carries cats by the tall?
The same could be said of any cruel act.

A man who shoots a child land something he can learn in no other way.

I'm not suggesting equivalence here, obviously.
Perhaps there are experiences it is better not to have.

Certainly, and I don't advocate carrying cats by their tails, or any other such act, but I do advocate as broad a range of experiences that do not cause harm to others as possible.

GrahamH wrote:

Teuton wrote:...I know that some philosophers such as Galen Strawson, who is a very intelligent man, disagree with me. He now claims—astonishingly—that there is no real difference between the subject, the act, and the content of experience. So it seems we have a clash of fundamental intuitions here, which can hardly be resolved consensually through further argumentation.

Perhaps 'fundamental intuition' is the wrong basis to approach this subject. It seems likely that our intuitions about experience will be very biased and ill-equiped to delve into the issues.

Ideas that challenge your fundamental intuitions are perhaps more valuable than those that reinforce them.

I like Strawson's take. Thanks for posting the video.

I'm with Strawson on that one. To get to this you have to alter, considerably, what kind of thing you believe you are. You have a viscous disagreement with my em-bodied and en-vironed nature of mind. It is due to mine alteration, radically, of what kind of thing I think I/mind is.

GrahamH wrote:I like Strawson's take. Thanks for posting the video.

He has written a whole book on selves, which is intellectually brilliant:

* Strawson, Galen. Selves. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Here's a paper titled "The Self" from another book: http://www.imprint.co.uk/strawson.htm

Teuton wrote:

GrahamH wrote:I like Strawson's take. Thanks for posting the video.

He has written a whole book on selves, which is intellectually brilliant:

* Strawson, Galen. Selves. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Here's a paper titled "The Self" from another book: http://www.imprint.co.uk/strawson.htm

Bought it. I think it's interesting that we may all have slightly different ideas about self and mind. Not the surface idea but something deeper in the fabric of how we think. My neuroscience journey and the foray into embodied cognition has changed my fabric I think. Considerably.

So a philosophical problem is figuring out how to discuss and maybe formalize that fabric so we could communicate our differences to one another. Or maybe see where we have it all wrong. If it is even possible to be right or wrong about it.

Teuton wrote:

GrahamH wrote:I like Strawson's take. Thanks for posting the video.

He has written a whole book on selves, which is intellectually brilliant:

* Strawson, Galen. Selves. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

It looks somewhat interesting.

The central task of phenomenology, when it comes to the problem of the self, is to
analyse the complex, cognitive experience-determining element

that is active in

-experience and that gives it its distinctive character. Once one has determined the
content of this experience-structuring element, one can go on to ask the ontological
question ‘Is there anything in reality to which it applies?’. What is perhaps peculiar about
the present project is the proposal that one can and should identify the content of

by
a partly—largely—phenomenological method. It may be thought that this can’t be the
right way to proceed—to move from phenomenology to ontology.

I think this is the wrong way to start, because it assumes too much about the self. In particular it assumes that the 'cognitive experience-determining element' is adequately represented phenomenologically. That seems an unsafe assumption.

The mission to determine 'the content of this experience-structuring element' seems futile, because surely there is a lot of 'content' involved in structuring experience, that is not experienced. Has he got a clever method of seeing the hidden content?

For those interested, here's another book, which contains a paper by Strawson:

* Siderits, Mark, Evan Thompson, and Dan Zahavi, eds. Self, No Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

GrahamH wrote:

Teuton wrote:

GrahamH wrote:I like Strawson's take. Thanks for posting the video.

He has written a whole book on selves, which is intellectually brilliant:

* Strawson, Galen. Selves. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

It looks somewhat interesting.

The central task of phenomenology, when it comes to the problem of the self, is to
analyse the complex, cognitive experience-determining element

that is active in

-experience and that gives it its distinctive character. Once one has determined the
content of this experience-structuring element, one can go on to ask the ontological
question ‘Is there anything in reality to which it applies?’. What is perhaps peculiar about
the present project is the proposal that one can and should identify the content of

by
a partly—largely—phenomenological method. It may be thought that this can’t be the
right way to proceed—to move from phenomenology to ontology.

I think this is the wrong way to start, because it assumes too much about the self. In particular it assumes that the 'cognitive experience-determining element' is adequately represented phenomenologically. That seems an unsafe assumption.

The mission to determine 'the content of this experience-structuring element' seems futile, because surely there is a lot of 'content' involved in structuring experience, that is not experienced. Has he got a clever method of seeing the hidden content?

You need a guideline. A ruler with marks. Neuroscience MotherFuckers!!

Teuton wrote:For those interested, here's another book, which contains a paper by Strawson:

* Siderits, Mark, Evan Thompson, and Dan Zahavi, eds. Self, No Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Ah yes. Evan!!! Embodied.

SpeedOfSound wrote:
I'm with Strawson on that one. To get to this you have to alter, considerably, what kind of thing you believe you are.

To lay my cards on the table: I am an animalist.

Animalism: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/animalism/

"Among the questions to be raised under the heading of 'personal identity' are these: 'What are we?' (fundamental nature question) and 'Under what conditions do we persist through time?' (persistence question). Against the dominant neo-Lockean approach to these questions, the view known as animalism answers that each of us is an organism of the species Homo sapiens and that the conditions of our persistence are those of animals."

"Among the accounts of our most fundamental nature that animalism opposes are that we are
• immaterial souls or egos (Descartes; Foster 1991);
• material bodies (Thomson 1997; Williams 1956–57);
• body-soul complexes (Swinburne 1984);
• bundles of mental states (Hume; Rovane 1998; Campbell 2006);
• material simples (Chisholm 1989; Lowe 1996, 2001);
• parts of brains (Puccetti 1973; McMahan 2002);
• persons materially constituted by, but nonidentical with, animals (S. Shoemaker 1999; Baker 2000; Johnston 2007); and
• nothing at all (Unger 1979a,b; cf. Unger 1990)."

Some here favour Hume's mentalistic view, according to which persons/subjects/egos/selves "are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement." (Hume) — This seems to be Harris's view too!
To put it in the language of computer science, for Humeans I am a mental "software entity" rather than a physical "hardware entity" (body, organism, or part thereof, e.g. brain). I find this view false and absurd.

A contemporary defender of Hume's view is Scott Campbell:

"I will argue that psychological theorists should accept what I call the 'series' view of a person, according to which a person is a unified aggregate of mental events and states."
(p. 339)

"According to the series view, a person is a unified series of mental events and states, rather than a physical object. (By 'mental event' I include mental states, capacities and dispositions—I assume that these can all be satisfactorily analysed in terms of mental events only.) Given that some form of materialism is true, these mental events will be identical with (or supervene on) brain events. The issue of how we should characterize the relation between a mental event and brain event—whether it is a necessary or a contingent identity, whether it is token-token or type-type—is not an issue that needs to be dealt with here. Suffice it to say mental events are, in some way, brain events.
A series of mental events (even if these are identical to brain events) is distinct from a human being. In a similar way, we can distinguish computer hardware from the software operations it performs. The claim made by the series theorist is that the series of mental events is itself the person. This series is unified by psychological connectedness and continuity relations, as conceived of by psychological theorists such as Parfit and Shoemaker. These relations determine which events count as a part of the series and which do not.

The human being is the object that the relevant brain events occur in—or to put it in terms of states, the object that the relevant brain states are states of—but it is not the person, because the person is the series of events themselves. Similarly, the computer hardware is the object that the relevant software events occur in (that is, the thing which the software states are states of), but the computer is not itself the series of software operations. Let us adapt the meaning of a term to our own ends to express this fact—let us say that the human body 'instantiates' the mental events in question, meaning that the human body is the physical object that the brain events (which token the mental events) occur in."
(p. 342)

"The series theorist can illustrate his view with an analogy. Suppose we have a sophisticated ‘person-program’ called Your Friendly Software Buddy (‘YFSB’). Running this program creates a ‘software person’. Because of randomizing elements in YFSB and its sensitivity to its environment, every user of YFSB gets a very individual software person. We run this program and call the resulting software person ‘Softy’.‘ The computer can be said to be Softy, in a sense, through running or ‘instantiating’ Softy. But the computer cannot be said to be Softy when we consider it just as a computer, without considering the software operations it is running. The computer ‘is’ only Softy when it runs Softy. It is not any sort of software person at all when it runs, say, a word-processor.

Softy does not have to be run on this particular computer, though. Next week we could take our saved disk of Softy, with all the memories and personality traits that Softy has gained so far, and run Softy on another computer. So Softy is not, strictly speaking, a computer C, even if all the events that comprise Softy are events that occur in C. Softy is the causally connected series of ‘runnings’ of Softy. In the same way, the series theorist holds, a human animal can be the object that a person ‘runs on’, that is, that human can be the thing that the mental events that comprise the person occur in, but that does not mean that the physical object that is the human being is itself the person. If P were to teleport, for example, then P would be ‘running’ on another human, rather than H. So, strictly speaking, the human is not the person."
(p. 344)

(Campbell, Scott. "The Conception of a Person as a Series of Mental Events." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73, no. 2 (2006): 339-358.)

Here's a critique of Campbell's view: Jens Johansson: "Am I a Series?"

I think I may be too. At least today. I frame everything from a physical description and when it comes to me it is the biological description. Then I step into my world of self and subjectivity and look around for shadows of the physical.

What I do not do is both at once or even both in the same sentence. Like Graham.