If all you're saying is that there are great variations in phenomenological experience, I do think that's an interesting scientific fact, but I don't know how it matters to this philosophical question any more than the well accepted fact that there are great variations in how well different people's perceptions work as well as their intellect in deciphering the meaning of their experiences. — Hanover
Do they, though? Aren't they like beetles-in-boxes? Indeed the machinery of the world seem to have little room for them. — The Great Whatever
ndeed the machinery of the world seem to have little room for them. — The Great Whatever
I also heard that Dennett claimed the reason when people imagine say a zebra, that they don't imagine it with an exact number of stripes, is because they learn the word 'some' and have the capacity to imagine amounts of thing without an exact numeral attached by thinking about 'a zebra with some stripes.' To anyone who is a good visualizer, of course, this explanation is not only going to sound absurd, but like an alien has said it. — The Great Whatever
What I thought was odd about Dennett's explanation was the bizarrely verbal way he'd put it, as if he himself 'imagines' things by repeating words to himself in his head rather than concocting a quasi-visual image. — The Great Whatever
I have no language-based thoughts at all. My thoughts are in pictures, like videotapes in my mind. When I recall something from my memory, I see only pictures. I used to think that everybody thought this way until I started talking to people on how they thought. I learned that there is a whole continuum of thinking styles, from totally visual thinkers like me, to the totally verbal thinkers. Artists, engineers, and good animal trainers are often highly visual thinkers, and accountants, bankers, and people who trade in the futures market tend to be highly verbal thinkers with few pictures in their minds.
<snip>
Access your memory on church steeples. Most people will see a picture in their mind of a generic "generalized" steeple. I only see specific steeples; there is no generalized one. Images of steeples flash through my mind like clicking quickly through a series of slides or pictures on a computer screen. On the other hand, highly verbal thinkers may "see" the words "church steeple," or will "see" just a simple stick-figure steeple.
http://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html — Temple Grandin
I wonder if men are worse visualizers than women, or tend to have more p-zombie tendencies. It wouldn't surprise me if women generally had a greater depth or subtlety of feeling than men. — The Great Whatever
Also relevant is certain empiricists, like Berkeley, claiming to be unable to visualize e.g. triangles in the abstract, and so claiming to have no general idea of them. — The Great Whatever
Step 1 in avoiding philosophical mistakes:
Resist the urge to generalize from yourself to all others. — Marchesk
The thing about women being 'earthy' and men having their 'heads in the clouds' – women as unified bodies and men as souls attached to bodies – is an old stereotype. The general consensus among modern Westerners is that it's highly sexist and demeaning of women (as is I take it the notion of 'feminine wisdom,' which is supposed to be more earthy, less abstract wisdom). But who knows? Maybe men tend naturally to dualism and abstraction away from their embodied circumstances. — The Great Whatever
When talking about psychological gender differences, there are many folk ones that might be right, but the differences statistically that have been discovered, though existing, are way too slight to be predictive. Like the greatest differences are like 60/40 one way or the other. — Wosret
Well, in their defense, whenever early modern philosophers pulled this sort of thing, they entreated others to see whether they could not do it in their case, and said for their own cases only they couldn't. But there was always an air of irony in this entreaty, i.e. the implication that they did not actually expect anyone else's capabilities to differ significantly from their own. — The Great Whatever
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.