So you don't believe in belief?Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Wed Apr 26, 2023 10:49 am Pending evidence for the existence of abstract or non-physical things, belief that they exist is delusional. Lack of evidence may not mean a claim is false, but it does mean that to believe it's true is irrational.
OK. Show us a physical belief. I won't hold my breath.Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Wed Apr 26, 2023 11:48 am Why believe that beliefs are abstract or non-physical things? Ah - they must be. Like minds. Stroll on.
As I had repeated many times, my use of the term 'mind' is not related to 'mind' as in Descartes' dualism.Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Wed Apr 26, 2023 10:49 am VA says I'm a philosophical realist, which means I must believe there is a mind-independent reality.
It is because you are infected with Philosophical Realism [human conditions independence] that you outright reject the concept of the abstract and refusing to acknowledge their usefulness to humanity in some perspectives as a means of communication.Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Wed Apr 26, 2023 10:49 am Just to clarify my position.
Pending evidence for the existence of abstract or non-physical things, belief that they exist is delusional. Lack of evidence may not mean a claim is false, but it does mean that to believe it's true is irrational.
And among the invented abstract or non-physical things - that have been the stuff of philosophical lucubration - is the mind, containing mental things and events. I think 'mentalist' talk is and has always been metaphorical - a way of describing our selves and our experience.
For example, that's why we can change our minds, or be in two minds, or be of the same mind, or share our thoughts, and so on. The myth of the mind is very ancient and potent. It's woven inextricably into our everyday talk.
And here are some physicalist questions: how could a non-physical cause have a physical effect? Or how could a physical effect be evidence for a non-physical cause? What is the causal mechanism?
(An appeal to magic is a childish superstition. Abstract or non-physical things are remarkably like supernatural things.)
From this, it follows that talk of mind-dependence and mind-independence is incoherent.
VA uses the following expressions as though their meanings or referents are clear or obvious: 'the concept of the abstract'; 'abstract objects'; 'abstract concepts'. And my point is that neither VA nor anyone else has any idea what these supposed things actually are. Because we've always done so, we're supposed to think such things exist, somewhere, somehow.Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Thu Apr 27, 2023 7:15 amPeter Holmes wrote: ↑Wed Apr 26, 2023 10:49 am Just to clarify my position.
Pending evidence for the existence of abstract or non-physical things, belief that they exist is delusional. Lack of evidence may not mean a claim is false, but it does mean that to believe it's true is irrational.
And among the invented abstract or non-physical things - that have been the stuff of philosophical lucubration - is the mind, containing mental things and events. I think 'mentalist' talk is and has always been metaphorical - a way of describing our selves and our experience.
For example, that's why we can change our minds, or be in two minds, or be of the same mind, or share our thoughts, and so on. The myth of the mind is very ancient and potent. It's woven inextricably into our everyday talk.
And here are some physicalist questions: how could a non-physical cause have a physical effect? Or how could a physical effect be evidence for a non-physical cause? What is the causal mechanism?
(An appeal to magic is a childish superstition. Abstract or non-physical things are remarkably like supernatural things.)
From this, it follows that talk of mind-dependence and mind-independence is incoherent.
Why? You can show me a physical dog why can't you show me a physical belief.
But I I didn't ask you to show us the physical correlate of a belief.Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Thu Apr 27, 2023 11:40 am I can show you the synaptic firing or brain-state that may seem to correlate, in some way, with our talking about 'having or expressing a belief'.
Actually, you can't.I can show you the synaptic firing or brain-state that may seem to correlate, in some way, with our talking about 'having or expressing a belief'.
henry quirk wrote: ↑Thu Apr 13, 2023 3:10 am https://mindmatters.ai/2020/10/your-min ... s-to-know/
(there are links in the original piece I haven't replicated here)
YOUR MIND VS. YOUR BRAIN: TEN THINGS TO KNOW
1. Is the human brain unique in some way?
Yes, but not so much in its structure as in the things we do with it. For example, the human, mouse, and fly brains all use the same basic mechanisms, which is a bit of a puzzle, considering the different things we do with our brains. The human brain is bigger than most. But then lemurs performed as well as chimps on the primate cognitive test battery (a primate intelligence test) and lemurs only have brains that are 1/200th the size of chimps’ brains. So, what we humans are doing differently from lemurs and chimps doesn’t depend wholly on brain size either. One recent surprise for neuroscientists is that the white matter (connectome) in human brains is quite orderly, not the haphazard accumulations of aeons of evolution that the researchers expected. Another basic assumption has been that the brain operates like a series of switches. But most parts of the brain are involved in, for example, processing signals arising from touch. And that’s just the beginning. So we know that human thinking is different from animal thinking operationally but just how it comes to be different has not been found in the brain.
2. If the brain is so closely interconnected, wouldn’t people lose the ability to think if their brains were split in half or half cut away?
This surgery is done to treat severe epilepsy. The brain adapts to what it must work with and the patient usually suffers only minor disabilities. Roger Sperry’s Nobel Prize-winning split-brain research convinced him that the mind and free will are real. And yes, some people think and speak with only half a brain. Of course, where half of the patient’s brain has been removed due to serious epilepsy damage (that is now threatening the other half), that undamaged half (hemisphere) had probably been doing most of the work anyway. So our brains are both closely connected and yet highly adaptable. That adaptability is sometimes called neuroplasticity.
3. Can people in comas, who show no awareness of their surroundings, really think?
Yes! Modern neuroscience is shedding light on the minds of people in a persistent vegetative state (PVS)? The preferred new term is “disorders of consciousness.” For example, in one study, “Remarkably, five patients were able to wilfully modulate their brain activity, suggesting that, though unable to express any outward signs of consciousness at the bedside, they could understand and follow the researchers’ instructions.” Generally speaking, they can hear us: Researcher Adrian Owen found that brain wave patterns when asked to imagine something, were the same as those of normal volunteers. Can people in comas have abstract thoughts? Stoneybrook neurosurgeon Michael Egnor has some ideas about how we might test for that ability, using scrambled word sequences. Of course, if we are even asking, we are a long way from the “He is now just a vegetable” concept of old.
4. Is a brain really needed for thinking?
That’s a good question. At the animal level, maybe not. The “blob,” now on display at the Paris Zoo, engages in complex behavior without a brain. So does the flatworm and the amoeba and so do the many plant communications networks. One can fairly argue that they aren’t “really” thinking. But the conundrum around consciousness makes it difficult to say more than that they probably aren’t conscious, in the human sense, though many may be sentient (they feel things). Even a human being, as we saw above, can get by with surprisingly little brain or brain function and actually be conscious in the human sense.
5. Can we develop tests of the brain for consciousness?
Well, first, we aren’t really sure what consciousness is. A recent public access paper proposing various tests for consciousness reads like an ambitious but hopeless project that offers some genuinely interesting moments. For one thing, researchers are often limited by their assumptions: We are frequently informed that human consciousness developed so as to enable humans to hunt together more efficiently in groups. But wolves hunt efficiently in packs without requiring anything like that. Microorganisms and body cells hunt efficiently without any brain at all. That’s why consciousness is called a The Hard Problem. That is also one reason that the researchers can’t really give Sophia the Robot a mind. It’s not clear where they would start.
6. But wait. If the mind were real, wouldn’t we be able to control things by thoughts alone?
We do that now with our bodies. And we can do it under other circumstances too if an electrical connection can be established. Neurons can work with electrical signals from electronics. This is especially important for helping amputees and blind people. There are already promising results from a prosthetic hand controlled by thoughts alone and a mind-controlled robot arm that needs no brain implant. Orion, a device that feeds camera images directly into the brain via electrodes, bypassing damaged optic nerves, has enabled some vision in study participants. A vast amount of technical work remains to be done, of course. But, just as you control your natural hand by thoughts alone, electronics should, in principle, enable you to do that if you required a prosthesis.
7. Can brain scans read our minds?
They can — in a dozen conflicting ways. A recent study involving 70 research groups identified sharp limitations in the value of brain imaging (fMRI) in understanding the mind: “Simple task, simple hypotheses, unmissably big chunks of brain — simple to get the same answer, right? Wrong.” There is poor correlation between different scans even of the same person’s brain, experienced researchers say. That’s not to say the technology won’t improve. The main thing to see is that “reading the mind” is more like reading the ocean than like reading the directions on a package. We would need to begin by deciding exactly what we want to know—and then go fishing.
8. Aren’t computer programs being developed that think just like people?
No. There are a number of reasons why computer programs can’t and won’t think just like people. For our purposes here, the brain is not at all like a computer: Seeing the brain as a computer is an easy misconception rather than an informative image, says neuroscientist Yuri Danilov: “But as soon as you assume that each neuron is a microprocessor, you assume that there is a programmer. There is no programmer in the brain; there are no algorithms in the brain…” Nor is the brain billions of little computers: Much popular literature leaves the impression that living organisms are machines or even billions of them linked together. From a Google product manager: “The complexity and robustness of brain neurons is much more advanced and powerful than that of artificial neurons” and “the neurons in the brain are implemented using very complex and nuanced mechanisms that allow very complex non linear computations,” among many other things. He sees the brain mainly as a source of inspiration rather than a model. A clever programmer can develop a routine that sounds lifelike (see, for example, Sophia the Robot at AI Hype Countdown 4). But such ingenuity doesn’t give the robot a mind.
9. Don’t neuroscientists say that the mind is just the brain?
Many scientists believe that, not because of evidence, but because they are materialists. The evidence does not point in that direction. Thinking it through carefully, the idea doesn’t even make sense, as Michael Egnor points out: “How do we believe that there are no beliefs? If eliminative materialism is true, then their own belief in eliminative materialism isn’t a belief. It’s a physical state, a certain concentration of neurochemicals that we (the uninitiated) foolishly call a belief. So a disagreement between an eliminative materialist and a dualist isn’t really a disagreement at all. It’s just two different concentrations of brain dopamine or whatever. Exactly how these chemicals in different skulls get into a “disagreement” is left vague. At this point, you may get a bit uncomfortable, as you would if the guy you’re sitting next to on the subway starts talking about the fact that CNN is broadcasting directly into his brain.”
In fact, the mind’s reality is consistent with neuroscience. It’s not popular with neuroscientists but that is a different matter. Incidentally, the mind cannot just “emerge from” the brain if the two have no qualities in common.
10. Do any neuroscientists doubt the consensus that the mind is just the brain?
Yes, the great mid-twentieth century neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield offered three lines of reasoning for such doubts, based on brain surgery on over a thousand patients. A number of other neuroscience pioneers, some of them Nobel Laureates, arrived at that position due to their research. Here are four examples.
The view that the mind is simply what the brain does is not derived from evidence so much as from a prior commitment to materialism. The more we explore, the more we are likely to see that clearly.
henry quirk wrote: ↑Thu Apr 13, 2023 3:32 am https://mindmatters.ai/2020/02/why-pion ... the-brain/
WHY PIONEER NEUROSURGEON WILDER PENFIELD SAID THE MIND IS MORE THAN THE BRAIN
(there are links in the original piece I haven't replicated here)
In a podcast discussion with Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor talks about how many famous neuroscientists became dualists—that is, they concluded that there is something about human beings that goes beyond matter—based on observations they made during their work. Among them was Wilder Penfield (1891–1976) who offered three reasons for his change of mind.
Michael Egnor: Wilder Penfield was a neurosurgeon at the University of Montreal in Canada, who was really the pioneer in surgery for epilepsy. He worked back in the mid-twentieth century for several decades and he did surgery on probably upwards of about a thousand patients who had intractable epilepsy. They had seizures that couldn’t be controlled. He did brain surgery to remove the area of the brain that was causing the seizure to cure their seizures. And he did a lot of that surgery on patients who were awake during the surgery.
Note: Dr. Egnor goes on to explain that the brain does not experience pain so a neurosurgery patient can comfortably remain conscious with only local anesthetic. The surgeon can then communicate with the patient to be sure that the treatment is not damaging speech or movement.
A partial transcript follows:
08:25 | Penfield’s first line of reasoning for dualism
Michael Egnor: He started his career as a materialist. He thought the whole mind came from the brain and he was just going to study it. And at the end of his career, thirty years later, he was a passionate dualist. He said that there is a part of the mind that is not from the brain. He had several lines of reasoning that convinced him of that.
One line of reasoning was that, in mapping people’s brains—and again he mapped upwards of a thousand people this way—he would hundreds of individual stimulations of the surface of the brain to see what happened. And people would have all sorts of things happen. They would have their arm move or they would feel a tingling or they would see a flash of light. Or sometimes they’d have a memory or they would have an impediment. Sometimes they couldn’t speak for a minute or two after a certain spot was touched.
But Penfield noted that, in probably hundreds of thousands of different individual stimulations, he never once stimulated the power of reason. He never stimulated the intellect. He never stimulated a person to do calculus or to think of an abstract concept like justice or mercy.
All the stimulations were concrete things: Move your arm or feel a tingling or even a concrete memory, like you remember your grandmother’s face or something. But there was never any abstract thought stimulated.
And Penfield said hey, if the brain is the source of abstract thought, once in a while, putting an electrical current on some part of the cortex, I ought to get an abstract thought. He never, ever did. So he said that the obvious explanation for that is that abstract thought doesn’t come from the brain.
09:56 | Penfield’s second line of reasoning
Michael Egnor: The other line of reasoning that he had, which is kind of related to this, is that, since he was a pioneer in the treatment of epilepsy, not only did he study the surgical manifestations of epilepsy but he also studied the presentation of seizures that people would have in their everyday life. So he studied hundreds of thousands of seizures that people had and he never found any seizure that had intellectual content. Seizures never involved abstract reasoning.
When people have seizures, sometimes they have a generalized seizure. Sometimes they just fall on the ground and go unconscious. Or sometimes they’ll have what’s called a focal seizure where they’ll have a twitching of a finger or a twitching of a limb or they’ll have tingling feeling, the same kind of things that he got when he stimulated the surface of the brain. But nobody ever had a calculus seizure. Nobody ever have a seizure where they couldn’t stop doing arithmetic. Or couldn’t stop doing logic.
And he said, why is that? If arithmetic and logic and all that abstract thought come from the brain, every once in a while you ought to get a seizure that makes it happen. So he asked rhetorically, why are there no intellectual seizures? His answer was, because the intellect doesn’t come from the brain.
11:14 | Penfield’s third line of reasoning
His third line of reasoning was the following: He would ask people to move their arm during the surgery. So he’d be playing around with their brain. And he’d say. “Whenever you want to, move your right arm.” The person would move their arm.
And, once in a while, he’d stimulate the part of the brain that made the arm move. And they moved their arm also when he did that. And then he would ask them, “I want you to tell me when I’m making your arm move and when you’re moving your arm without me making you do it. Tell me if you can tell the difference.” And the patients could always tell the difference.
The patients always knew that when he stimulated their arm, it was him doing it, not them. And when they stimulated their arm, they were doing it, not him. So Penfield said, he couldn’t stimulate the will. He could never trick the patients into thinking it was them doing it. He said, the patients always retained a correct sense of agency. They always know if they did it or if he did it.
So he said the will was not something he could stimulate, meaning it was not material.
So he had three lines of evidence: His inability to stimulate intellectual thought, the inability of seizures to cause intellectual thought, and his inability to stimulate the will. … So he concluded that the intellect and the will are not from the brain. Which is precisely what Aristotle said.
henry quirk wrote: ↑Thu Apr 13, 2023 2:45 am https://evolutionnews.org/2015/01/free_will_is_re/
Free Will Is Real and Materialism Is Wrong
Michael R. Egnor, MD
(there are links in the original piece I have not replicated here)
I’ve written before in reply to materialist Jerry Coyne’s assertion that free will is an illusion. The gist of Coyne’s denial, shared by others of course, is that nature is deterministic and that the mind is a wholly material process, yoked to the laws of physics and to an organism’s evolutionary history. Thus, our choices are completely determined and free will is an illusion.
I’ve already pointed out his error on the question of determinism. Today I’ll focus on his error regarding the materiality/immateriality of the will.
We have a variety of mental capabilities (or powers). We have sensation and perception, memory, imagination, intellect, and will. Philosophers since Aristotle have noted that intellect and will differ qualitatively from other mental powers. The difference is in the substrate on which intellect and will act, on the one hand, and sensation, perception, memory, imagination, and desire act, on the other.
The substrates are particulars and universals. Particulars are specific things in nature that are presented to the mind by our senses — an apple sitting on my desk, or a wedding ring on a finger, or a friend walking into an office. Universals, on the other hand, are concepts that do not have physical instantiation in nature. The beauty of the red color of an apple, love for a spouse symbolized by a wedding ring, musings about the nature of humanity occasioned by a friend in an office are all examples of universals. Goodness, truth, and justice are universals.
Our senses present us with particulars. We see and smell the apple, we feel a ring on a finger, we hear a friend. Particulars grasped through sensation and perception, as well as imagination and memory, have an obvious composition with matter. We use our eyes to see, our skin to feel, our ears to hear. There are well-defined regions in the brain whose activity seems to be necessary for the exercise of these sense-perception powers by which we grasp particulars. In that sense, the grasp of particulars is material, or at least depends on matter in a necessary way.
The same is not true of intellect and will. There is not the same intimate link between intellect and will with matter that there is between perception and imagination, etc., and matter. Through our intellect we grasp and comprehend universals, not particulars, and our will carries out decisions made by our intellect. For example, we see (perceive) a picture of Nelson Mandela (particular), we ponder (intellect) injustice (universal) done to political prisoners, and we donate (will) to Amnesty International.
So the fundamental question is this: Are intellect and will material powers, like sensation and perception are material powers?
The answer is no. Intellect and will are immaterial powers, and obviously so. Here’s why.
Let us imagine, as a counterfactual, that the intellect is a material power of the mind. As such, the judgment that a course of action is good, which is the basis on which an act of the will would be done, would entail "Good" having a material representation in the brain. But how exactly could Good be represented in the brain? The concept of Good is certainly not a particular thing — a Good apple, or a Good car — that might have some sort of material manifestation in the brain. Good is a universal, not a particular. In fact the judgment that a particular thing is Good presupposes a concept of Good, so it couldn’t explain the concept of Good. Good, again, is a universal, not a particular.
So how could a universal concept such as Good be manifested materially in the brain?
The only answer possible from the materialist perspective, it would seem, is that the concept of Good must be an engram, coded in some fashion in the brain. Perhaps Good is a particular assembly of proteins, or dendrites, or a specific electrochemical gradient in a specific location in the brain.
But the materialist is not home yet. Because in order for Good to be an engram in the brain, the Good engram must be coded in some fashion. How could Good be coded? A clump of protein of a specific shape two mm from the tip of the left hippocampus? Obviously there’s nothing that actually means Good about that particular protein in that particular location — one engram would be as Good as another — so we would require another engram to decode the hippocampal engram for Good, so it would mean Good, and not just be a clump of protein. Yet that engram for the code for the engram of Good would itself have to have some representation of Good in order for it to mean that it signifies the code for the Good engram, which would require another engram for the engram for the Good engram, ad nauseam.
In short, any engram in the brain that coded for Good would presuppose the concept of Good in order to establish the code for Good. So Good, from a materialist perspective on the mind, must be an infinite regress of Good engrams. Engrams all the way down, so to speak, which of course is no engrams at all.
The engram theory of intellect and will presupposes that which it purports to explain.
Concepts such as Good can’t be material manifestations in the brain. The intellectual grasp of concepts and acts of will based on universals are inherently immaterial.
Of course, specific particulars that we judge to be Good (a good apple, etc.) may have material manifestations of some sort in the brain (even that is problematic, at least from our modern metaphysical perspective), but concepts involving universals cannot have any material manifestation whatsoever in the brain. A concept is an immaterial thing. And of course the normal operation of intellect and will may be influenced by other psychological powers — such as perception, memory, and imagination — that are linked to matter in some fashion.
Good may seem different after a few beers, for sure. The intellect is influenced by matter (in that case, EtOH), but the intellect, which grasps concepts, and the will, which acts on concepts, are inherently immaterial. And promissory materialism is of no avail here — the inevitable materialist segue to "It may make no sense now, but give scientists time…" The immaterial nature of the intellect and will is not demonstrated by experiment, but by logic. It simply makes no sense to say that intellect and will are material, unless one accepts infinite regress as a valid hypothesis. (Given the materialist proclivity to deny the relevance of all philosophy, which would include logic, infinite regress may well become the materialists’ new tactic.)
Free will is the exercise of an immaterial power of the mind, and is not constrained by deterministic processes in nature, even if nature is deterministic, which it isn’t. Coyne’s argument against libertarian free will fails on that basis.
As usual your above is a strawman! the "million+2" times.Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Thu Apr 27, 2023 11:40 amVA uses the following expressions as though their meanings or referents are clear or obvious: 'the concept of the abstract'; 'abstract objects'; 'abstract concepts'. And my point is that neither VA nor anyone else has any idea what these supposed things actually are. Because we've always done so, we're supposed to think such things exist, somewhere, somehow.Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Thu Apr 27, 2023 7:15 am It is because you are infected with Philosophical Realism [human conditions independence] that you outright reject the concept of the abstract and refusing to acknowledge their usefulness to humanity in some perspectives as a means of communication.
It is true that some people believe that abstract objects such a platonic forms [universals] are real and exists by themselves. This is an archaic thinking and not many rational people will agree to this at present.
However in a more practical situation, anti-philosophical-realists believe in abstract concepts that are conditioned upon a specific human-based FSK. As such the mentioned of such abstract concepts must always be qualified to a specific human-based FSK.
While you reject the obvious abstract concepts, you are holding to the mother of all abstract objects to be true, i.e. your abstracted facts.
Yes, your 'what is fact' i.e. a feature of reality, just-is, being so, that is the case, is a naked abstracted thing without anything, illusory, empty, meaningless and non-sensical.
Your 'what is fact' is a thing that is fully abstracted from what is really real, that is why you insist it is just-is, being-so, that is the case, etc.
You keep insisting your abstracted fact is nakedly 'just is'
it is just is what??
being-so,
it is being what??
You are engaging and coupling with the mother of all abstracted objects, i.e. your what is fact that is independent of human conditions, i.e. exists regardless of whether there are humans or not.
What and where are concepts, and in what way do they exist?
Are concepts the same as or different from ideas? If the latter, in what way is a concept different from an idea?
The waffle-bollocks just below talk about abstract or non-physical things is everywhere. And there's often an automatic, moronic response to any challenge to the comfort-blanket myth of abstract things. For example, here's dick-for-brains pumping the stump again:
For PRACTICAL sake, human-based FSK abstract concepts are objective FSK-facts.What and where are concepts, and in what way do they exist?
Concepts differ from ideas.Are concepts the same as or different from ideas?
If the latter, in what way is a concept different from an idea?
I get the irony of the final question, there...In fact we could look at the original quote and we can highlight all the 'new ideas'....Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Sat Apr 29, 2023 5:51 am Here's an example of mentalist blather, quoted by VA:
'Induction is the mental process of taking particular facts or instances and generalizing them to form new ideas. It is also called abstraction. The process omits particular details of the instances, and integrates based on a criteria or set of criteria.'
http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/E ... ction.html
So induction/abstraction is a mental process, which, therefore, der, goes on in a mind. The mind has a criterion or set of criteria, takes particular facts or instances and generalises/integrates them to form new ideas. Or, er, concepts - cos they're different from ideas. Obviously.
This story's been around so long that to question it - to point out it's weirdness - can seem offensive.
An early homo sapien came along, pre-installed with a mind pre-installed with criteria, and the mind came across one damn particular tree after another, took those examples and inductively generalised and integrated them, using the criteria, to form a new idea/concept: 'tree'. And from then on, homo sapien could recognise an example of a tree. Before then - those were just undifferentiated particulars.
Question. Is the mind a concept formed in the way minds are supposed to form concepts?
I included the verbs since they also are general and omit details. An act of taking is an abstraction from whatever particular movements and changes took place in particular instance. To 'omit' is really abstract since it is an action of including that never happened. We are generalizing things that haven't been done as a set. I was tempted to include prepositions, but that seems petty.Induction is the mental process of taking particular facts or instances and generalizing them to form new ideas. It is also called abstraction. The process omits particular details of the instances, and integrates based on a criteria [sic, should be criterion] or set of criteria
My critique is of 'mentalism' tout court. And my claim is that 'the mind, containing mental things and events' is a fiction, or a myth, or a metaphor. In our skulls, there is nothing but physical stuff: brain tissue, gurgling juices and blood, and electrochemical processes - synaptic firing of neurons.Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Sat Apr 29, 2023 6:25 amI get the irony of the final question, there...In fact we could look at the original quote and we can highlight all the 'new ideas'....Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Sat Apr 29, 2023 5:51 am Here's an example of mentalist blather, quoted by VA:
'Induction is the mental process of taking particular facts or instances and generalizing them to form new ideas. It is also called abstraction. The process omits particular details of the instances, and integrates based on a criteria or set of criteria.'
http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/E ... ction.html
So induction/abstraction is a mental process, which, therefore, der, goes on in a mind. The mind has a criterion or set of criteria, takes particular facts or instances and generalises/integrates them to form new ideas. Or, er, concepts - cos they're different from ideas. Obviously.
This story's been around so long that to question it - to point out it's weirdness - can seem offensive.
An early homo sapien came along, pre-installed with a mind pre-installed with criteria, and the mind came across one damn particular tree after another, took those examples and inductively generalised and integrated them, using the criteria, to form a new idea/concept: 'tree'. And from then on, homo sapien could recognise an example of a tree. Before then - those were just undifferentiated particulars.
Question. Is the mind a concept formed in the way minds are supposed to form concepts?I included the verbs since they also are general and omit details. An act of taking is an abstraction from whatever particular movements and changes took place in particular instance. To 'omit' is really abstract since it is an action of including that never happened. We are generalizing things that haven't been done as a set. I was tempted to include prepositions, but that seems petty.Induction is the mental process of taking particular facts or instances and generalizing them to form new ideas. It is also called abstraction. The process omits particular details of the instances, and integrates based on a criteria [sic, should be criterion] or set of criteria
In any case without the abstractions, the paragraph is less than communicative.
On the other hand, the idea in this paragraph seems ok, unless it is, for example, used in an argument saying that induction is wrong, abstraction is wrong.
In any case, I felt like I was missing something, likely how it was used by VA.
I've now read the context in the VA post. I always come away thinking that VA is an unwitting solipsist, the ultimate idealist, that is, though that's a side note. It seems he is always encountering concepts, which would be in his mind, and nothing else. He does act as if other people exist, but I'm not sure why he does given his only encountering abstract instances of FSKs.
But I'm still not quite sure what your critique is here in this post. Given that I have trouble following VA in the post above, I am likely missing something obvious or at least there.
So, I am assuming that 'your critique' is only on our screens. If you mulled over your critique, before writing it down, where was it?Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Sat Apr 29, 2023 6:47 am My critique is of 'mentalism' tout court. And my claim is that 'the mind, containing mental things and events' is a fiction, or a myth, or a metaphor. In our skulls, there is nothing but physical stuff: brain tissue, gurgling juices and blood, and electrochemical processes - synaptic firing of neurons.
If we look, we won't find thoughts, ideas, concepts, and so on. So - of course - thoughts, ideas, concepts and so on must be non-physical or abstract things. Eh, voila: the mind.
Moronic demand: okay, show us a physical belief. (Mind-warp.)
I think my question - is the mind a concept formed in the way concepts are supposed to be formed? - blows the whole shebang sky high. A yes or no answer is a lose lose.
But just trying to understand. Is yours a brain mind identity position or something else?)Moronic demand: okay, show us a physical belief. (Mind-warp.)
Show us a physical dog - not a moronic demand.