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Well, when you analyse thought as something you experience, you'll come to realise eg. that it can be verbal or visual (check out Temple Grandin) and is always

by aaimnr 10y ago

Well, when you analyse thought as something you experience, you'll come to realise eg. that it can be verbal or visual (check out Temple Grandin) and is always compound. You can talk about thought/belief as something basic on a level of propositional logic, but this level is as abstracted from experience and observation as possible. Thought is always 'made' of some prior experience/perception, when you look at it. It's a very high level of description compared to consciousness/qualia.

naasking 10y ago
> You can talk about thought/belief as something basic on a level of propositional logic, but this level is as abstracted from experience and observation as possible. Agreed, but this will necessarily be true of any objective, scientific account of consciousness. For instance, subatomic particles are as abstracted from our everyday macroscopic world as possible. > Thought is always 'made' of some prior experience/perception, when you look at it. It's a very high level of description compared to consciousness/qualia. I don't think we should conflate experience and perception. Materialists of course acknowledge we have perception, they simply deny the subjective experience that non-materialists infer from it. Of course, this fuzzy boundary is where our natural language often fails us, so when I equate a thought with a proposition, I of course don't mean a proposition in English or any other language, I mean some abstract representation that structurally conforms to a proposition in a given mind. The structure this thought takes isn't objective, in the sense that it's the same for every person, because the correspondence of that structure to that proposition is determined by the mind that interprets it, just like a program in x86 machine code isn't the same program when run on an ARM processor -- equivalent semantics have different structures on different CPUs, and equivalent structures have different semantics on different CPUs.

by aaimnr 10y ago

naasking 10y ago

> You can talk about thought/belief as something basic on a level of propositional logic, but this level is as abstracted from experience and observation as possible. Agreed, but this will necessarily be true of any objective, scientific account of consciousness. For instance, subatomic particles are as abstracted from our everyday macroscopic world as possible. > Thought is always 'made' of some prior experience/perception, when you look at it. It's a very high level of description compared to consciousness/qualia. I don't think we should conflate experience and perception. Materialists of course acknowledge we have perception, they simply deny the subjective experience that non-materialists infer from it. Of course, this fuzzy boundary is where our natural language often fails us, so when I equate a thought with a proposition, I of course don't mean a proposition in English or any other language, I mean some abstract representation that structurally conforms to a proposition in a given mind. The structure this thought takes isn't objective, in the sense that it's the same for every person, because the correspondence of that structure to that proposition is determined by the mind that interprets it, just like a program in x86 machine code isn't the same program when run on an ARM processor -- equivalent semantics have different structures on different CPUs, and equivalent structures have different semantics on different CPUs.