So if someone does not doubt that 2+2 is 4, do we discount this as a belief becasue it is indubitable? — Banno

"Indubitable" summons Descartes, so from Mediations:

“I clearly and distinctly perceive that existence is contained in the idea of God, just as clearly and distinctly as I perceive that the equality of its three angles to two right angles is contained in the idea of a triangle.”

This speaks to the logically necessary and therefore indubitable (which he includes geometry and God), which i suspect is different from a Wittgensteinian hinge indubitable, meaning those things we can't question in a game playing arena. Those would be foundational rules. And I think of Kantian intuitions, also indubitable (e.g. time and space), but only insofar as necessary to provide us any ability to understand the world.

The point is you're asking about "on certainty" and how that is a different category than belief, and this question seems central to Western philosophy in terms of asking what we can debate and what we cannot across different founding father philosophers (as it were).

But nothing is straight forward because some do challenge whether the indubitable can be doubted. Consider transubstantiation, that miraculous concept pondered for thousands of years how the trinity can be a unity, leaving us with a word called 'triunity."

And I do think the major challenges will come from religion because it posits a very different view toward knowledge justifications (i.e. faith versus rationalism/empiricism).

Or do we say instead that because he will not act on what he holds to be true, that he doesn't really believe? — Banno

My father, despite his very scientific background, would not fly on airplanes, would not ride glass elevators, and insisted upon lower floors in hotels so he could make it out before being consumed by the one in a million hotel fire. I truly don't know what he believed. Curiously, he died a fiery death when an airplane struck him on the 40th floor of a hotel while, you guessed it, in a glass elevator (a joke). Phobias don't strike me as beliefs as much as just irrational fear, rooted in the psyche, maladapting to something in the past. I once asked him why he'd get on a ship and not a plane. He told me he could swim but couldn't fly, and he was super proud of that retort. Beats me.

Given her desire to stay with her lover, the decision to trust is rational. — Banno

Playing the lotto is rational if you wish to win because you can't win if you don't play. Believing you will win is a different matter. Maybe some believe they'll actually win, like some believe they'll one day become a princess or rock star or whatever fantasy one might have. And let's not overlook the pessimists who are sure they'll fail despite all they have going for them.

I suspect this has to do with the J of K=JTB, where it is inherently subjective. That is, if I give a justification for my belief, it can count as knowledge, and my justification is valid if I subjectively accept it. If I believe I'll win the lotto because I believe myself God's special creature, then it's belief. I dont think McCormick can deny certain justifications for belief as invalid justvbecause they contain an emotive basis. I can believe for whatever stupid reason i want. . That won't make a non belief. That will just make it a stupid belief. But a belief nonetheless.

David's belief is not to be subjected to doubt. What are we to say here - again, that it's not a proper belief becasue it is indubitable? — Banno

This is faith based belief, the topic of a whole other thread. Those of certain religious worldviews would see this one as so obviously intertwined with the mystical, the emotive, the super rational, that McCormick 's thesis would appear elementary. That is, no kidding, my belief in God relies upon justifications a non-believer would never accept?

Everything that is consciousness is directedness. Ergo, there is always emotional content. What we feel is driven and what is driven is felt.

what part of belief is cognitive, what is connotative, and how do they relate? — Banno

You believe this is a valid question. I do not believe it is a valid question. I may be taking the 'part' as a literally distinction. Do you you believe the left hemisphere of your brain is logical and your right hemisphere is emotional? Some people still believe this. It is massive misrepresentation of brain function.

If I attempt to read into what you are asking as meaning "what is it that moves us more towards logical analysis than to listen to our intuition" I would probably say the novelty of the experience and the time we have to think about it play a major role in this. Low resolution heuristics that work on multiple fronts are a good stop gap. With more time to mull over and get to the bottom of something undoubtedly we apply more rigour if the set of circumstances allow.

Maybe you are referring to unconscious brain activity? Even there I would be sceptical, but a little more open maybe (not a lot).

If I am way off the mark of what you are asking questions about let me know. Good chance I am :)

Everything that is consciousness is directedness. Ergo, there is always emotional content. What we feel is driven and what is driven is felt. — I like sushi

Does my air conditioner fit that, then? It intends to keep the room at 22ºc. Does it feel satisfied when it achieves it's goal, and frustrated by the frost?

A hackneyed argument to be sure, but it carries some import.

Perhaps we might avoid equating some brain state to "believing that..." at least until we have a clear way of setting out what a brain state is? No need to jump the gun.

So you are asking about what consciousness is then? I have no answer for that.

This from the link:

What does it mean to believe? The traditional philosophical view of belief is that it's a rational cognitive affair, evidence based and directed toward truth. According to this account, things like delusion and religious belief are "edge cases", exceptions that prove the rule. But this week we're considering not only that belief may be closely tied to emotion, but that it may actually be a form of emotion itself.

Is gibberish. No neuroscientist would pay any real attention to what is being said here because it is so wide of the mark.

The hidden premise is that rational thought and emotional thought are separate entities. This is, as I said initially, equivalent to people believing the left hemisphere is rational and the right is emotional.

Lots in that.

So if something... some statement, be it form Descartes, Kant or Wittgenstein, is indubitable, will we count it as a belief? Seem to me we do. Should we? I'd have supposed that the statements of which we are certain form a subset of the statements which we believe. Am I mistaken?

You father seems an eminently sensible fellow. If being in an upper room causes anxiety, it would not be conducive to a good night's sleep. It would be irrational to do so.

I had hoped to keep the god bothering at bay.

emotional thought — I like sushi

Not too sure what that is.

Why should we give the last word on this to neuroscience?

Why should we give the last word on this to neuroscience? — Banno

Because it makes us feel better about the argument. :wink:

I'm not claiming that that's your position, you're just telling the eliminative materialist side of the story. It's not a compelling story. — RogueAI

Right on both counts. But I think part of a philosopher's job is to understand, not merely refute. To me, eliminative materialism/physicalism is not compelling, but Daniel Dennett (to pick one) was an extremely smart guy, and if we don't put ourselves in his mental shoes and try to work out his perspective, we'll just be creating a strawman to call "not compelling." We'd also be committed to the position that Dennett was the sort of thinker who is compelled by something obviously not compelling . . . hmm, not too likely.

So, no offense, but "That's absurd" and "Come on!" and "But you don’t believe that. Nobody does" doesn't get us very far. You raise an interesting point about the ethical implications of possible P-zombie-hood: Is it tragic (and morally abhorrent) when a zombie is tortured, if the creature can't feel anything? Well, let's say the answer is no. What would you say should follow from that, about the plausibility of physicalism?

I don't really object to the idea that what goes on in the mind is a blending of cognitive and non-cognitive states. @i like sushi's position was stronger: They claimed it to be a fact that "Reason and emotion are not discrete entities." That is quite different, indeed contradictory to your position. You can't have a blend of A and B if they are aren't discrete in some way. Similar to the point Banno makes here:

The obverse and reverse sides of a coin are inseparable, but that does not prevent us considering them separately as required. We might map how they relate and how they differ. — Banno

A possible middle ground might be that there are no "entities" called reason and emotion, and that we can separate them only conceptually, not physically. If that's what sushi meant, I'd to hear more about the conceptual distinction. To what does it correspond?

If that's what sushi meant, I'd to hear more about the conceptual distinction. To what does it correspond? — J

Are you going to ask for the conceptual distinction between Hesperus and Phosphorus too. I am not being facetious here, maybe there is value in this? I have been interested in phenomenology for a long time now.

Right on both counts. But I think part of a philosopher's job is to understand, not merely refute. To me, eliminative materialism/physicalism is not compelling, but Daniel Dennett (to pick one) was an extremely smart guy, and if we don't put ourselves in his mental shoes and try to work out his perspective, we'll just be creating a strawman to call "not compelling." We'd also be committed to the position that Dennett was the sort of thinker who is compelled by something obviously not compelling . . . hmm, not too likely.

So, no offense, but "That's absurd" and "Come on!" and "But you don’t believe that. Nobody does" doesn't get us very far. — J

No, but eliminative materialism is just so out there you reach an axiomatic level where further argument is pointless. What more can you say when someone denies consciousness, other than 'you can't actually believe that?' There's no evidence or arguments you can muster at that point. The person is denying one of the few indisputable truths about reality.

ETA: And an eliminative materialist, if they're being honest, would get the eyeroll. They would know it's coming. They know what they're proposing is extremely counterintuitive. They might then say, "wait, think about these intuition pumps" and to give Dennett credit, he is very clever.

Would a rational AI, one with a programmed “drive” for self-preservation, ever choose to do something totally reckless—like snort fentanyl—knowing it could likely die from it? No. Not unless it was explicitly programmed with some bizarre override to ignore its self-preservation "instinct". But if that’s the case, you’ve stopped modeling a rational agent and started writing sci-fi code. That’s not a human—it’s a toy robot with bad instructions. — RogueAI

AIs simulate, they aren't rational agents outside their ability to simulate of agents who may, sometimes, be rational. If we made AIs that modeled the range of human behavior, there would absolutely be AIs that snort fentanyl.

AIs simulate, they aren't rational agents outside their ability to simulate of agents who may, sometimes, be rational. If we made AIs that modeled the range of human behavior, there would absolutely be AIs that snort fentanyl. — hypericin

But a pzombie is supposed to be a non-conscious duplicate of me, and I am a rational agent, so if the pzombie isn't a rational agent, it's not a pzombie.

So can we always seperate out the affective and cognitive aspects of a belief? Is there a method, rule or algorithm that does this for us? I'm thinking not. — Banno

Maybe not a failsafe rule. But I think we can reasonably analyze many cases.

Anna cognitively believes her husband is an impostor, in a way that is inflexible to evidence. But affectively she does not, since she does not behave accordingly.

Balthazar cognitively believes the skywalk is safe. But affectively, at least when he is on it, he does not.

Charu cognitively and affectively believes their lover, despite evidence.

David cognitively and affectively believes in his god, despite evidence.


But generally, no. That is why we pay therapists for years to try (and usually fail) to figure out this kind of stuff.

If it is a p-zombie of you, then presumably it wouldn't snort fentanyl either, just get shitfaced.

A possible middle ground might be that there are no "entities" called reason and emotion, and that we can separate them only conceptually, not physically. — J

But that’s the way it works. We humans create entities with fixed boundaries while the world moves around like a swirl. Much of the thinking we do is going back and reworking some of those boundaries.

The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.

The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. — T Clark

So even the eternal Tao is not the eternal Tao.

So even the eternal Tao is not the eternal Tao. — Jamal

You betcha.

McCormick's paper reminds me a lot of the distinction between Bayesian prediction and Bayesian decision theory. (Very briefly: In all statistical inference there is a parameterized model and some data. From these we can make a likelihood. Frequentist statistics stops here and does what it can with the likelihood. Bayesian prediction adds a prior. Bayesian decision theory adds a prior and a utility function.)

There's a lot of talk these days about Bayesianism in relation to the brain by neuroscientists and psychologists and some AI researchers. Bayes' theorem provides a way of updating your prior beliefs when given new evidence. We're told the brain is a prediction machine. And so on.

A lot of this talk ignores the utility function that is essential for Bayesian decision making. The brain is NOT a prediction machine. It is a decision machine. The brain must have something which serves the same kind of purpose as a utility function. It seems that when we are conscious of a value that is calculated by this utility function it is experienced by us as a feeling. I do not know the answer to the question "How does something compute so hard it begins to feel?". But I'm pretty sure I do know the nature of the computation that is taking place when we feel.

This means I kind of like the direction in which McCormick is going in her paper.

I don't like the notion of a 'blend' of cognition and feeling. In Bayesian decision theory the posterior is analogous to cognition or knowledge, and the utility function to feelings. They are both essential to the decision making process in the same way that the rim and the spokes of a bicycle wheel are both essential to the proper functioning of the wheel. But we are not talking about a puree of rim and spokes. Their roles are very distinct. I do not expect the brain, a complicated, messy product of the very inefficient optimization process known as evolution, to contain any nice neat separations, but just calling it a blend is not good enough.

There is something - you might call it "a subjective justification for a decision" - which combines cognition and feelings. I don't know (and I don't much care) whether 'belief' is a sensible name for this something.

A possible middle ground might be that there are no "entities" called reason and emotion, and that we can separate them only conceptually, not physically. If that's what sushi meant, I'd to hear more about the conceptual distinction. To what does it correspond? — J

The idea that we can seperate reason and emotion physically is surely a category error?

Hesperus and Phosphorus rigidly designate Venus. Two names for the same thing. Is the suggestion that reason and emotion are the same thing?

It would be interesting to see this filled out.

A possible middle ground might be that there are no "entities" called reason and emotion, and that we can separate them only conceptually, not physically.
— J

But that’s the way it works. We humans create entities with fixed boundaries while the world moves around like a swirl. Much of the thinking we do is going back and reworking some of those boundaries.

The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. — T Clark

Well, yeah, but . . . at the level of the Tao, of course all the boundaries and categories are arbitrary. More mundanely, we're happy to talk about some things being physical entities and others not. It may not be eternally true, but it's how we do business, so to speak. At that level, I'm suggesting that rational processes and emotions could be discriminated either as actual physical events, or as "two sides of one coin"-type events, with only conceptual discrimination. I don't think jumping to the Tao level is much of an answer, since it would settle any question whatsoever about discrimination, and we're wanting something more specific.

I don't think jumping to the Tao level is much of an answer — J

Yes, as per our PM conversation.

The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao... — T Clark

...says nothing. In explaining everything, the Tao explains nothing. There's still the work to do; we still carry water, gather wood. That's why this:

Everything in our minds is a blending of cognitive and non-cognitive states. — T Clark

contributes nothing.

In explaining everything, the Tao explains nothing. There's still the work to do; we still carry water, gather wood. — Banno

Sure. The Tao Te Ching is metaphysics, not science. Metaphysics doesn't explain anything. Good metaphysics gives us hints about where to look for answers. By your logic, materialism, idealism, realism, anti-realism, and all the other isms also explain nothing.

That's why this:
Everything in our minds is a blending of cognitive and non-cognitive states.
— T Clark
contributes nothing. — Banno

No. As I noted above, Taoism is metaphysics. The way our minds work is science. I'll repeat part of the quote I used in an earlier post in this thread:

Antonio Damasio discusses the connection between feelings, reason and the body. His hypothesis is that the three are completely interconnected and that it is impossible to discuss the functions of one without realizing that the other two play a role.

If you think this incorrect, fine. It's still a statement of fact. Science. If it is true, it provides a pretty good answer to your question.

Are beliefs emotions? Of course not. That doesn't even mean anything.

By your logic, materialism, idealism, realism, anti-realism, and all the other isms also explain nothing. — T Clark

Now you're getting it.

Is Damasio's idea an hypothesis, as your quote says, or a fact, as you claim?

Well, yeah, but . . . at the level of the Tao, of course all the boundaries and categories are arbitrary. — J

It was probably a mistake for me to bring up the Tao in this thread. It sometimes, often, throws a monkey wrench in the machinery of discussions, but I have a hard time helping myself. I recognize that's not much of an excuse.

No, the boundaries are not arbitrary at all. Setting up distinctions and boundaries is something humans do.

I'm suggesting that rational processes and emotions could be discriminated either as actual physical events, or as "two sides of one coin"-type events, with only conceptual discrimination. — J

You've identified two unrelated possible solutions to this question 1) rational processes and emotions are physical events and 2) they are two sides of one coin.

If 1) is the right answer, I'll repeat what I just responded to @Banno.

Antonio Damasio discusses the connection between feelings, reason and the body. His hypothesis is that the three are completely interconnected and that it is impossible to discuss the functions of one without realizing that the other two play a role.

If the position I attributed to Damasio in previous posts is correct, they can't be discriminated at all, at least not when they function as mental processes.

As for 2), isn't this just another way of saying what I did with different words?

I don't think jumping to the Tao level is much of an answer, since it would settle any question whatsoever about discrimination, and we're wanting something more specific. — J

I can find quotes from the Tao Te Ching and Chang Tzu that address this issue, but they would likely confuse things more and I've already gotten in enough trouble. Any distinction, not matter how specific, is made, as I said, by humans.

I’m interested in the idea of a blended state, where a belief is seen as consisting of both cognition and feelings. — Banno

I have yet to read the article, but, as just an initial response, I would think we need to consider the topic in relation (say apart from) the classic, problematic division of (certain) knowledge and (irrational) “belief”, also termed “emotivism”. I do think there is a distinction (and thus a connection) to be made between what is believed and something more, say, our relation to it.

I appreciate @Hanover pointing out that “belief” is used as a catch-all phrase for what is actually different things (hope, resolve, etc.). Wittgenstein claimed that belief works as a hypothesis (I believe it is raining), PI pp. 190-192. In relation to the discussion @Banno brings up, I would suggest that the “emotionality” of belief, put another way, is that something matters to us, because one thing belief is singular for is that it is me that is believing in it (my reasons is categorically different than the idea of rationality). So the way it works is that: I will stand up for my beliefs, I can be compromised in relation to them, I must evidence my faith in them by my actions; I am responsible for what I belief in a different way than a fact, which is true without me. The “truth” of belief is my willingness to remain true to it.

Is Damasio's idea an hypothesis, as your quote says, or a fact, as you claim? — Banno

I used the wrong words. I meant it is subject to being judged as true or false.

Is Damasio's idea an hypothesis, as your quote says, or a fact, as you claim? — Banno

My use of words was unclear. What I meant to say was that what Damasio claims is subject to judgment as true or false as opposed to metaphysical statements that have no truth value.

Ok, that makes more sense.

Frankly I'm not sure we have a point of disagreement. I'd put silentism were you put the Tao.

I don't think we would have the terms cognitive and the connotative if there were nothing to be saidhere. And that 's what this thread is about mapping out.

Frankly I'm not sure we have a point of disagreement. — Banno