• Pie
    1k
    It also gives me the feeling of someone backed up against a wall rather than someone in control of the situation so to speak.Agent Smith
    As I see it, scientists and philosophers are both constrained by facts and the way their beliefs and hypotheses are expected to fit together. An exalted submission is perhaps involved in the pursuit of objective knowledge. As someone put it once, freedom is just living by norms that make sense to you (the right kind of prison).
  • Pie
    1k
    But reality does contain extended things. It's a self-evident fact my reason presents to me, so the burden is on you to disprove it.

    I have two self-evident facts of reason. The world contains extended things, and you can't divide things forever. Therefore you can't divide extended things infinitely.

    It's on you to prove that wrong, and you can't just say "it isn't" to either of my premises, because they're self-evident facts of reason.
    Isaac

    Excellent and succinct parody, which'll probably leave no scratch (I speak from recent experience.)
  • Janus
    15.4k
    That's not an argument. Explain why an extended thing could not be divided.Bartricks

    It wasn't intended to show that, but to show that there are different reasonable ways of thinking about it. In other words your blanket mantra "reason tell us" is a vacuous nostrum.
  • Janus
    15.4k
    Nothing Democritus - and it is Democritus, not DemocritiusBartricks

    Now you're reduced to pointing out typos?

    Your "students" have my sincerest sympathies.180 Proof

    :lol: OMG, it's the lecturer from Hell! This thread has become the 'comedy relief sandbox'.
  • Bartricks
    6k
    Well, I will wait until you can provide an actual refutation of the self evident truth of reason that any extended thing will be capable of division.
  • Janus
    15.4k
    Well, I will wait until you can provide an actual refutation of the self evident truth of reason that any extended thing will be capable of infinite division.Bartricks

    Why would I bother trying to refute something that does not seem self-evident to me, just because you claim it seems self-evident to you? On the contrary I would be wasting my time, wouldn't I? In such a situation we could not but talk past one another. You'll say I can't see what is self-evident, and I'll say that you can't see what's self-evident (that neither the infinite divisibility nor the finite divisibility of extended things is self-evident). Where will that get us?
  • Pie
    1k
    Well, I will wait until you can provide an actual refutation of the self evident truth of reason that any extended thing will be capable of division.Bartricks

    Perhaps without realizing it, you are coming off somewhat like the theist who knows God 'directly.' It also makes no sense to refute a self-evident truth, since no inference is involved, just glowing and divine intuition.
  • 180 Proof
    14k
    No doubt, words both of us can profit from in circumstances such as this ...
    Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience. — Mark Twain
  • Pie
    1k
    This thread has become the 'comedy relief sandbox'.Janus

    :up:

    That's how I'm taking it. It's fascinating, such complete incorrigibility.
  • Janus
    15.4k
    Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience. — Mark Twain

    :lol: :up: Brilliant!

    That's how I'm taking it. It's fascinating, such complete incorrigibility.Pie

    Yep, it's pretty unique.
  • Agent Smith
    9.5k
    As I see it, scientists and philosophers are both constrained by facts and the way their beliefs and hypotheses are expected to fit together. An exalted submission is perhaps involved in the pursuit of objective knowledge. As someone put it once, freedom is just living by norms that make sense to you (the right kind of prison).Pie

    On second thought, the reason philosophers tend to grab at anything within reach, the closest object as it were, when doing philosophy (of mind) is due to the fact that they (we) are by and large ignorant, we're in the dark and it shows.

    That said, the efforts are laudable and there maybe a grain or two of truth in what is essentially fumbling (for the keys) and stumbling (towards the door with the sign TRUTH).

    Bonam fortunam o philosopher! We must presss on, we must!
  • Agent Smith
    9.5k
    Yes, reality is numero uno, but coherence is the next best thing!
  • Pie
    1k
    the reason philosophers tend to grab at anything within reach, the closest object as it were, when doing philosophy (of mind) is due to the fact that they (we) are by and large ignorant, we're in the dark and it shows.Agent Smith

    Well said !

    I try to know when I don't know, and this is largely a matter of discipline, because

    With a hot pad under my ass I can play the braggart or the buffoon as good as any man, no matter what sign he be born under. — H. Miller

    I view what Brandom is doing as something like fixing Descartes' starting point. I don't start as a ghost in the machine, but I do start after Socrates, which is to say as a philosopher among philosophers, all of us subject (ideally anyway) to 'the force of reason', and only to that force (not [directly] to gods or states, etc.) If you ask me to prove this, because you refuse to take it on faith, then you support my point by challenging it.
  • Pie
    1k
    the efforts are laudable and there maybe a grain or two of truthAgent Smith

    Influenced by the pragmatists, I look to our practical/technological power as a species and think that we have more than a grain or two of truth or knowledge or whatever you want to call it. Various neo-Kantians accepted the existence of a science as a fact and went on from there. I think they were correct to do so. That doesn't mean we can't articulate what's going on better and better, etc. And it doesn't mean we aren't in the dark or talking nonsense as we get farther away from practical life in our talking (so I sympathize with the idea that lots of metaphysics is pointless, not even wrong.)
  • Isaac
    10.3k
    It is because you are wed to a false worldview- one not endorsed by reason, but conventionBartricks

    No. I double checked the label (the one which, of course, is attached to all our thoughts) and it said 'intuition', not 'convention'.

    Not quite fully satisfied though (because I knew I was speaking to an Actual Philosopher) I checked the small print telling us where our beliefs come from (which again, as us experts know, is attached to all our beliefs), and it said 'made in Reason'.

    So yeah, I've done my due diligence. Definitely an Intuition, and definitely From Reason.

    Have you double-checked yours? Because your belief that extended things ought to be infinitely divisible sounds a bit like a Convention to me. You know you have to turn the beliefs upside to see the label properly, right?
  • Isaac
    10.3k
    Excellent and succinct parody, which'll probably leave no scratch (I speak from recent experience.)Pie

    Thanks, though I suspect the far greater parody is being played on us by @Bartricks himself, who'll reveal, on his 6,000th post, that his contributions were all a work of performance art lampooning the self-assurance of cult religion... It's very deep.
  • Pie
    1k
    Thanks, though I suspect the far greater parody is being played on us by Bartricks himself, who'll reveal, on his 6,000th post, that his contributions were all a work of performance art lampooning the self-assurance of cult religion... It's very deep.Isaac

    Nice theory!

    He also tempts me to think he's a bot in his apparent failure to assimilate and respond to criticism. I imagine a bot that looks for a few keywords to choose between a small set of responses. I enjoy the insult responses most, because these are occasionally creative and surprising.
  • Agent Smith
    9.5k
    Influenced by the pragmatists, I look to our practical/technological power as a species and think that we have more than a grain or two of truth or knowledge or whatever you want to call it. Various neo-Kantians accepted the existence of a science as a fact and went on from there. I think they were correct to do so. That doesn't mean we can't articulate what's going on better and better, etc. And it doesn't mean we aren't in the dark or talking nonsense as we get farther away from practical life in our talking (so I sympathize with the idea that lots of metaphysics is pointless, not even wrong.)Pie

    I couldn't have said it better mon ami, I really couldn't have!

    As you are already aware, philosophers are, how would you say it?, frontline personnel - I compare them to explorers and as we all know, explorers are the ones who take all the risk - losing an eye, even dying are part of the job description - operating as they are in what in the game universe is known as the fog of war. Hic sunt dracones comrades, hic sunt dracones. Careful now, careful! :snicker:
  • Isaac
    10.3k
    He also tempts me to think he's a bot in his apparent failure to assimilate and respond to criticism.Pie

    Ha! I think AI has moved on. It takes a human to be quite so dogmatic!
  • Agent Smith
    9.5k
    Dissociative identity disorder (DID), previously known as multiple personality disorder (MPD) and colloquially known as split personality disorder,[7] is a mental disorder characterized by the maintenance of at least two distinct and relatively enduring personality states.[3] The disorder is accompanied by memory gaps beyond what would be explained by ordinary memory issues. The personality states alternately show in a person's behavior; however, presentations of the disorder vary. Other conditions that often occur in people with DID include post-traumatic stress disorder, personality disorders (especially borderline and avoidant), depression, substance use disorders, conversion disorder, somatic symptom disorder, eating disorders, obsessive–compulsive disorder, and sleep disorders.[3] Self-harm, non-epileptic seizures, flashbacks with amnesia for content of flashbacks, anxiety disorders, and suicidality are also common. — Wikipedia

    :snicker:
  • Pie
    1k
    As you are already aware, philosophers are, how would you say it?, frontline personnel - I compare them to explorers and as we all know, explorers are the ones who take all the risk - losing an eye, even dying are part of the job description - operating as they are in what in the game universe is known as the fog of war. Hic sunt dracones comrades, hic sunt dracones. Careful now, careful! :snicker:Agent Smith

    Nice ! This squares with Nietzsche in the sense a 'moral pioneer' (this is the stuff that scares people and gets Spinoza in trouble) and with Popper in the sense that metaphysical theories sometimes ripen into science...so it's a bad idea to hide from everything that's ambiguous (like a stereotypical positivist who thinks anything fancy is nonsense.*)

    *A healthy dose of positivistic skepticism is not so bad though.
  • Daniel
    458
    It follows that minds are not extended things.Bartricks

    How can something that has no extension be able to have states, as in the states of mind? Are they states of an expanse-less thing? Try to imagine that.
  • TiredThinker
    819
    It seems like this forum needs functions for drawing out what one is describing including venn diagrams.
  • Bartricks
    6k
    How can something that has no extension be able to have states, as in the states of mind? Are they states of an expanse-less thing?Daniel

    I do not know what you want by way of an answer. Our minds are immaterial: that's what the argument from indivisibility appears to show. And our minds have states. So, the evidence is that immaterial things have states. I do not owe an account of 'how' that could be the case - it clearly 'is' the case.

    Furthermore, when it comes to some sensible object - a piece of cheese, say - it makes sense to wonder what it might feel like, or taste like, given that one can see it (or of something one is only touching, it makes sense to wonder what it might look like). But it clearly makes no sense to wonder what it thinks like.

    So, it seems that our reason represents sensible objects to be things that have states such as shape, and size and colour and so on, but not mental states.

    And when it comes to our minds it seems to make no sense to wonder what they look like, or smell like, or taste like, or what colour they are. And so our reason seems to represent those things that have mental states positively not to have sensible states.

    Try to imagine that.Daniel

    I imagine you have a mind. And you imagine I do. When you imagine that, what colour and size and texture do you imagine my mind to have? None,yes? You imagine a thing that is in a state of thought, rather than something that has sensible states.
  • Agent Smith
    9.5k
    I imagine you have a mind. And you imagine I do. When you imagine that, what colour and size and texture do you imagine my mind to have?Bartricks

    And the question of the year award goes to Dr. Bartricks. Most excellent, monsieur, most excellent.

    Allow me to attempt at an answer. The mind isn't an object like a mandarin which is orange, roundish, and rough to touch. It's more like walking (function) and has none of these properties. Nevertheless, the mind, for this reason amd this reason alone, can't be considered nonphysical. Plus, pick up a Gray's anatomy book and turn the page to ambulation - you'll get an idea of how walking is divided into, well, parts, the swing phase is one such part.
  • unenlightened
    8.7k
    I imagine you have a mind. And you imagine I do. When you imagine that, what colour and size and texture do you imagine my mind to have?Bartricks

    Small and dark with a thick fibrous skin and many prickles, like a somewhat browned off horse-chestnut still in its outer covering.
  • Cuthbert
    1.1k
    Small and darkunenlightened

    I went to an Alternative Health Fair with a friend who spent £20 (at that time about half his weekly welfare benefits) on a 'kirlean' aura photograph together with character analysis. It said he was a very warm purple and rather too trusting and gullible. Typical Aquarius, of course.
  • unenlightened
    8.7k
    I went to an Alternative Health Fair with a friendCuthbert

    The only alternative I've found to health is sickness; and a pile of horseshit at £20 is pretty alternatively invigorating even at todays' prices. A fair that does what it says on the tinfoil hat.
  • Agent Smith
    9.5k
    Solvitur ambulando. — Diogenes

    If the mind is divisible, show me the pieces its divided into!
  • 180 Proof
    14k
    If the mind is divisible, show me the pieces its divided into!Agent Smith
    Cognitions, subcognitions and metacognitions.
bold
italic
underline
strike
code
quote
ulist
image
url
mention
reveal
youtube
tweet
Add a Comment

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum!

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.