• Deleted User
    0
    1. I taste and touch a "salty" "white" cube, then it is then absorbed into my body.
    2. I point this out to a child and let them have some, saying "salt."
    3. I define salt to the child as the taste and shape/color just experienced (this is a rudimentary (and flawed) way of creating knowledge).
    5. The child now understands taste and sight, and the other basic aspects of its perception (#, form, time, etc.).
    6. The child then realizes it itself is an object.
    7. As the properties shifted so did the object.
    How can salt become body?
    Because it is this salt and this body.
    Salt and body are linguistic abstractions.
    We can never experience the essence of what salt is, nor body.
    This salt and this body is a particular (sensory) of a universal (abstract).
    8. Is it mental or physical?
    Is this analysis free from skepticism?
  • hks
    171
    Sounds like you have gotten a great start on experientialism and Empiricism. Keep going.

    Ultimately you will end up at a mind/body dilemma. Ergo are we mind or are we body?

    All roads lead to the same place.

    And don't forget tabula rasa -- that is the starting point for everybody on this Earth.
  • Deleted User
    0
    What does tabula rasa look like in the brain?
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k
    First, I'd say that you're bringing up at least nine different topics that we could talk about in depth there
    . . . well, and especially because it's at least nine things that I think have some problems as presented.

    Re just the last few--because it's quicker and easier to offer counterpoints to them:

    "Salt and body are linguistic abstractions"--the concepts are abstractions (with concepts not being only or even necessarily linguistic), but the concepts are not the same thing as salt and bodies in general. Salt and bodies--not the concepts, are not abstractions.

    "We can never experience the essence of what salt is, nor body."

    I don't buy the notion of essences beyond "What S (some subject) requires to call x (some object or particular phenomenom) an F (some type-term)." In other words, essences are just about concepts and/or how individuals choose to use language in my view.

    "Is it mental or physical?" That's a false dichotomy on my view. I'm a physicalist. I believe that everything is physical, including minds (which are simply subsets of brains undergoing particular processes).
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