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Given how hard it is to pin down the nature of consciousness, I can't imagine it would be productive to discuss consciousness without explicitly considering its
by maldusiecle 9y ago
Given how hard it is to pin down the nature of consciousness, I can't imagine it would be productive to discuss consciousness without explicitly considering its definition. If you want to defend a position, you have to make clear what that position is. If you're writing about the Enlightenment, of course you have to know what it was.
- psyc 9y agoMy point is more that there will always be people who insist that a definition isn't clear or doesn't have a basic consensus. I think they're usually wrong in the very assertion. In any case it is negative-productive to discuss definitions if you never stop discussing them and move on to the real content.
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoI think that the opposite is true, at least much of the time. I think that many arguments are because the two sides have different definitions of a word, and neither side states the definition. This leads to arguments that are a complete waste of time.
- glenstein 9y agoI'm with psyc on this one. We study a lot of things, like consciousness, or intelligence, or life, because we don't have a convenient definition of them, because we want to know what they are. Instead we set up broad conceptual parameters that capture the right kinds of problems, the kind that, when solved, would bridge us from our current state of knowledge to a definition. That's the real work, and some people who have this real work in mind pursue the problem in an open-ended way, that's the right shape of open-ended to fit the type of problem being considered. And then they get scolded for not having started with a definition.