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Ahh, I see. I originally thought you were trying to smuggle in a fully general argument against willful inconsistency, which so far as I've seen, produces very
by Kamq 3y ago
Ahh, I see. I originally thought you were trying to smuggle in a fully general argument against willful inconsistency, which so far as I've seen, produces very bad results.
But (and correct me if I'm wrong here), your problem seems to be more of a category disagreement. That is to say, your complaint is that the meta-thought (the thought about the thought), doesn't belong in a separate category from the original thought. And therefore the process of observing thoughts also generates them, and is fundamentally different than other types of observation. Do I understand you so far?
Is there still room, in the way you're conceiving things for, say, an amped up version of mind/body dualism to separate a sub-set of thoughts into a category of "thoughts that come from the body" as opposed to the meta-thoughts as "thoughts that come directly from the mind"? I think the ancient stoics called these "impressions" (or, more accurately, they called them the greek word for impressions, but I cannot recall it at the moment) to get around the category problems you're talking about.
- nickelpro 3y agoYa absolutely, and thus my preference for "lenses" or "abstractions" of thoughts. I think people are expressing something real and felt when they talk about their "lizard brain" doing something independent of their "human brain". I'm quibbling with the authors rejection of Descartes. "I observe therefore I am" and "I think therefore I am" are isomorphic, as an unthinking observer, a truly passive mechanism, would be unable to express or even meaningfully experience the former. A rock is a passive observer, shaped by its environment purely experientially without reflection or commentary. A human mind and consciousness, whatever set of forms you might want to fit it in (dualism, materialism, whatever the hell Chalmers is doing), is not passive, it is reflective. Now, the mechanisms by which qualia are passed to that reflective mind are passive or at least involuntary, and these give rise to certain involuntary thoughts, experiential thoughts. I cannot refuse the thought of the form "the air is hot", because I cannot refuse the experience of being hot. For that I'm just along for the ride. But when I reflect on how I nickelpro will logically place my self-satisfaction due to the heat, that's not a passive act. And all of these reflective and experiential thoughts are mixed up in the soup of my single consciousness, not strictly delineated within my narrative.
- Kamq 3y agoInteresting. Thanks for indulging me. I appreciate the conversation.