FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Mon Sep 29, 2025 10:42 am
Folk-psychology attaches noun and verb words to mental faculties and events. The Will, the Mind and so on being the nouns. Beliveing, choosing, wanting, thinking and so on being the verbs. The Will is a noun when it is being invoked as an object, and to will is a verb when it is invoked as an act of willing. The faculty cannot be split into an actual seperate noun and verb unless I must take back what I just wrote to Belinda about neither of us reifying will.
Folk psychology has no real issue with recalcitrance though, and neither does BDM as an explanation for motivation. It is obvious to all of us that a person can know cognitively that the spider is more afraid of us than we are of it, but also to feel paralysed with fear when seeing spiders. The emotion that arises to confound our intelligence, desires and beliefs is recalcitrant - it does not conform and does not need any specific reason not to.
Similarly you can cognitively know that lending money to somebody is a bad idea based on prior experience, and that it will be regretable, and on top of that know that you don't want to, but still some recalcitrant urge of some sort that runs counter to your motivations. There's room to argue about whether it also evades your will, as the phobia surely does.
None of this can rescue Lessans. The comon sense view of our minds is robust and flexible, his thing is a cut down homespun version that is brittle to survive.
I reify will to some degree, just like folk philosophy does. Not reifying it would mean that it doesn't exist at all..
There's a broad sense in which mind is a thing, it is a thing we can use and talk about. And there's a narrow sense in which is not a thing, it doesn't hover on some external plane of existence as a glowing cloud of thoughts. Reification occurs when we know that an object exists in the loose sense only, but accidentally or otherwise think and reason about it as if it belongs to both.
I don't think either of us is actually crossing that line, but I also never thought that common sense folk psychology does. Belinda is making a mistake to go down this behaviourist line of reasoning in my view. There's no call for Ryle here.
The mind is literally a part of the head. And a part of the mind is the will which is literally a part of the head.
Or if you're a dualist then they are literally things in "mental space".
If it wouldn't exist then it wouldn't do anything and it would be insane to even talk about it.
peacegirl wrote: ↑Mon Sep 29, 2025 11:27 am
STFU, I"m tired of your name calling FD. Maybe when you learn to have a little respect, I'll finish this post, but right now I'm movin' on.
You can have respect only after you learn to read. I put far too much effort into explaining very simple stuff for you, but you are unable to remember what the first sentence was about by the time you get to the third.
You don't need to finish the post, you can just move on.
Imo folk psychology clearly reifies the will of others. We watch their behaviours and assign certain wills to them that can vary from person to person. Judging from the outside. The question is do we reify our own will or not - maybe not.
Atla wrote: ↑Mon Sep 29, 2025 11:28 am
The mind is literally a part of the head. And a part of the mind is the will which is literally a part of the head.
Or if you're a dualist then they are literally things in "mental space".
If it wouldn't exist then it wouldn't do anything and it would be insane to even talk about it.
We can speak of abstract things without them needing to exist per se, no? In the argument Belinda referenced, the visitor tours the colleges that form Oxford University such as Balliol and Merton and maybe a library or something, I dont remember the details. At the end of the tour he asks when he will see the university. The university is of course an abstraction laid over the colleges and libraries etc. Surely mind can be like that, and so can will?
Atla wrote: ↑Mon Sep 29, 2025 10:50 am
You're too confused as always. To some degree we must reify everything that exists, otherwise that would mean that our thoughts and emotions wouldn't exist at all. But we do have thoughts and emotions and in theat sense we also have a will.
But it's unintelligent to go through life making category errors. What you wrote above could have come directly from Descartes.
What category error? Descartes was a dualist I'm not.
Descartes explained how mind is a separate ontic substance from extended matter. All substances are thingy. So-called 'will' is mind stuff therefore it is thingy.
Atla wrote: ↑Mon Sep 29, 2025 11:28 am
The mind is literally a part of the head. And a part of the mind is the will which is literally a part of the head.
Or if you're a dualist then they are literally things in "mental space".
If it wouldn't exist then it wouldn't do anything and it would be insane to even talk about it.
We can speak of abstract things without them needing to exist per se, no? In the argument Belinda referenced, the visitor tours the colleges that form Oxford University such as Balliol and Merton and maybe a library or something, I dont remember the details. At the end of the tour he asks when he will see the university. The university is of course an abstraction laid over the colleges and libraries etc. Surely mind can be like that, and so can will?
University is not an abstraction imo. An abstraction can be said to have no physical referent, while a university is a collection of physical things.
Belinda wrote: ↑Mon Sep 29, 2025 10:56 am
But it's unintelligent to go through life making category errors. What you wrote above could have come directly from Descartes.
What category error? Descartes was a dualist I'm not.
Descartes explained how mind is a separate ontic substance from extended matter. All substances are thingy. So-called 'will' is mind stuff therefore it is thingy.
Even if will was mind stuff in that sense (which it of course isn't because Descartes just pulled that mind/body dualism out of his backside), will would have to be a thing in mental space. A mental object, actually existing.
Walker wrote: ↑Sun Sep 28, 2025 2:13 pm
Yeah, that's too bad. I suppose 50 words was too high a price for my salvation.
Salvation? This has nothing to do with religion.
The New Discovery ignores religion and says because ...
*
Does the following have anything to do with The New Discovery?
Everyone does what they must to support and affirm their self-concept, including the garbage man, therefore the greatest satisfaction is to affirm the self-concept, even if it makes one miserable on a day-to-day basis ... which btw, is why everything that everyone does is what had to be done ... Determinism. (Do those 51 words explain The New Discovery?)
peacegirl wrote: ↑Mon Sep 29, 2025 11:27 am
STFU, I"m tired of your name calling FD. Maybe when you learn to have a little respect, I'll finish this post, but right now I'm movin' on.
You can have respect only after you learn to read. I put far too much effort into explaining very simple stuff for you, but you are unable to remember what the first sentence was about by the time you get to the third.
You don't need to finish the post, you can just move on.
Atla wrote: ↑Mon Sep 29, 2025 11:28 am
The mind is literally a part of the head. And a part of the mind is the will which is literally a part of the head.
Or if you're a dualist then they are literally things in "mental space".
If it wouldn't exist then it wouldn't do anything and it would be insane to even talk about it.
We can speak of abstract things without them needing to exist per se, no? In the argument Belinda referenced, the visitor tours the colleges that form Oxford University such as Balliol and Merton and maybe a library or something, I dont remember the details. At the end of the tour he asks when he will see the university. The university is of course an abstraction laid over the colleges and libraries etc. Surely mind can be like that, and so can will?
Can 'university' be reversed from a noun to a verb? I suppose it can, were the word less clumsy. Take 'college' for instance; e.g. "I 'm colleging this morning---a lecture then a seminar. "
'Mind 'can be reversed from noun to verb. E.g. "mind the low bridge!" or the Lowland Scots " I mind when the teacher gi'ed us yins the strap".
If Ryle does not appeal, why not try David Hume on what we now call reification.
I am confused about who said what---Atla or FlashDP. Anyway, whoever said "the mind is literally a part of the head. And a part of the mind is the will which is literally a part of the head." is wrong. The Statue of Liberty may easily be in the mind but can't be in the head. However some people do think that mind is identical with brain i.e that brain maps identically on to mind.
Belinda wrote: ↑Mon Sep 29, 2025 12:07 pm
Anyway, whoever said "the mind is literally a part of the head. And a part of the mind is the will which is literally a part of the head." is wrong. The Statue of Liberty may easily be in the mind but can't be in the head. However some people do think that mind is identical with brain i.e that brain maps identically on to mind.
I said it. You're confusing the Statue of Liberty with the perception of the Statue of Liberty. You had one too many again.
Atla wrote: ↑Mon Sep 29, 2025 11:28 am
The mind is literally a part of the head. And a part of the mind is the will which is literally a part of the head.
Or if you're a dualist then they are literally things in "mental space".
If it wouldn't exist then it wouldn't do anything and it would be insane to even talk about it.
We can speak of abstract things without them needing to exist per se, no? In the argument Belinda referenced, the visitor tours the colleges that form Oxford University such as Balliol and Merton and maybe a library or something, I dont remember the details. At the end of the tour he asks when he will see the university. The university is of course an abstraction laid over the colleges and libraries etc. Surely mind can be like that, and so can will?
University is not an abstraction imo. An abstraction can be said to have no physical referent, while a university is a collection of physical things.
The bricks and mortar buildings could have many uses such as growing mushrooms or illegal marijuana, or housing refugees. But the buildings would not be a university without people there seeking knowledge and education
FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Mon Sep 29, 2025 11:40 am
We can speak of abstract things without them needing to exist per se, no? In the argument Belinda referenced, the visitor tours the colleges that form Oxford University such as Balliol and Merton and maybe a library or something, I dont remember the details. At the end of the tour he asks when he will see the university. The university is of course an abstraction laid over the colleges and libraries etc. Surely mind can be like that, and so can will?
University is not an abstraction imo. An abstraction can be said to have no physical referent, while a university is a collection of physical things.
The bricks and mortar buildings could have many uses such as growing mushrooms or illegal marijuana, or housing refugees. But the buildings would not be a university without people there seeking knowledge and education
Bad example.
Btw I'm not doing the reification fallacy on will: you or you two are doing the abstraction fallacy on it.
Belinda wrote: ↑Mon Sep 29, 2025 12:07 pm
Anyway, whoever said "the mind is literally a part of the head. And a part of the mind is the will which is literally a part of the head." is wrong. The Statue of Liberty may easily be in the mind but can't be in the head. However some people do think that mind is identical with brain i.e that brain maps identically on to mind.
I said it. You're confusing the Statue of Liberty with the perception of the Statue of Liberty. You had one too many again.
Perceptions of the Statue of Liberty are subjective and may be fallacious and even hallucinatory. States of mind are subjective and also map perfectly on to brain states. Mind is not only perception but is a lot else besides.
