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> We don't really know what it is for a human to "think" of something. Introspection of what we think it is does not lead us to understand what it is to think o
by runesoerensen 10y ago
> We don't really know what it is for a human to "think" of something. Introspection of what we think it is does not lead us to understand what it is to think of something.
This doesn't seem right. Introspection might not give us all the answers, but it's a critical (and probably the single most important) aspect of understanding how we think. Entire branches philosophy deal specifically with this and have done so for thousands of years.
I personally found Descartes' thoughts particularly interesting in this regard. Also, here's a pretty good overview on introspection in contemporary philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/introspection/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/introspection/
- keithnz 10y agoI think (heh) introspection allows us to characterise the nature of thinking, but we started making a lot more progress about how our brains work when we started down the neuro science path. Philosophy hasn't answered much in the way of how we think, but it asks a lot of questions about the nature of thinking, what we can know, what constitutes a mind, how a mind relates to a body. How we can recognise that something has a mind. But it has done very little in the way to answer what is it that allows us to think. Descartes dealt with rational thought and what we can know absolutely. He wanted a logical progression so we can prove everything from fundamental truths. Philosophically the philosophy of mind is most related, and I guess one of the famous problems is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room that we can't really resolve yet