@Krumple,
Krumple wrote:
Razzleg wrote:Oh, JLN, please provide an example of "choices" without "choosers"...Please disprove agency via meaningful agrammatical practices...Please describe the circumstance that allows "you" to "agree" with Krumple v. an alternative, sans agency...
Your understanding of both grammar, usage, and context is weak...
There are several ways to examine it. But if it never goes examined it is easy to be mistaken for agency. I'll attempt to show you what I mean using my re-occurring thought experiment.
Imagine you are born without any of your senses working. You are blind, deaf, can't taste or smell and your sense of touch all don't work. Your body is kept alive but you have absolutely no way of experiencing anything. The concept of self would never arise because the concept relies on the concept of "other".
This is me and this is not me.
Here is another example. If your arm were severed from your body and lay on the ground at your feet. Would you say that is still your arm? After all it is just a mass of cells laying on the ground. If it decomposed and became nutrients in the soil would you still say it is your arm? If those nutrients were adsorbed into plants would you still say it was your arm?
What is the point of these thought experiments? They are an attempt to turn your examination inward to look for where the self exists. If you examine it long enough you will discover there is no place that a self persists. There is an inflow of information through the senses but we are NOT this data. However; we react as if we are the data. This is why you say things like, I see this, or I hear that. You are trying to claim that you are experiencing a piece of data. No the data arises flows and ceases. No where is there a self that is experiencing the data.
We are taught the concept of self through our sense data. We attach to this concept as if it were real and important. The fact of the matter is, all there is, is the data. Nothing else.
i'm beginning to think that you misunderstand me..."agency" isn't "self-hood", and it certainly doesn't depend upon a sense of self. If anything, "selfhood", as well as "consciousness" in general, is a by-product of agency.
i also note that neither you nor JLN has provided an example of choices without choosers, per my request...
But let me address the points you did adress:
"Imagine you are born without any of your senses working. You are blind, deaf, can't taste or smell and your sense of touch all don't work. Your body is kept alive but you have absolutely no way of experiencing anything. The concept of self would never arise because the concept relies on the concept of "other"."
How would you seek to prove that assertion, given your inability to communicate with the hypothetical, senseless subject? And to be practical for a minute: would a person born without any external senses realistically be likely to survive, given the holistic way the nervous system operates?
"Here is another example. If your arm were severed from your body and lay on the ground at your feet. Would you say that is still your arm? After all it is just a mass of cells laying on the ground. If it decomposed and became nutrients in the soil would you still say it is your arm? If those nutrients were adsorbed into plants would you still say it was your arm?"
This is just a boring semantic argument that misses my point. It doesn't even hold water as an argument against selfhood, much less against agency. Ask me about Theseus' ship next...
JLNobody wrote:
My choice to answer your last challenge is a foolish one, but I see no chooser behind it, only a grammatical convention, the convention that suggests an agent behind rain; when rain falls we see and think that "it rains". Nietzsche rightly called grammar the metaphysics of the masses.
Cute callback. You do understand, of course, that i haven't been arguing for the distinction between agents and actions, but for agency. (i feel i that i have explained this a few times, now, to little avail.) Does the difference escape you? Rain doesn't fall without clouds, right? And precipitation is a local event that involves many, global players.
Krumple wrote:
We are taught the concept of self through our sense data. We attach to this concept as if it were real and important. The fact of the matter is, all there is, is the data. Nothing else.
Nope, on all counts. I'm sure that all of that fits in with your ontological model, but none of it is actually, psycho-historically observation based.
