@Bonaventurian,
Bonaventurian wrote:I think so. The difference between a cat and a man is this:
The cat sees what may be a transgressor, and then it is compelled by its instincts to flee.
A man sees what may be a transgressor, and decides to flee.
The man has the initial compulsion, but he has the ability to refer to past experience, to see the situation in a different way. It is not the man overcoming compulsion with reason, but past experience redirecting the man through other induced compulsions.
Surely you have seen a cat run in one instance, and yet not in another? For instance, if you live with a cat, it becomes startled if you run at it, but it might recognize your scent and no longer perceive you as a threat. If you were not known to the cat it probably still would have ran, just going by observation. I think that the man is working in a way analogous to the cat, but he can think in parallel, bring in more factors and sort more deliberately, however; the final decision is emotional.
Bonaventurian wrote:
The cat could not have done anything except flee. The man, on the other hand, could have decided otherwise and remained in the same position. We see that this is the case when we consider the early Christian martyrs.
See the above. The martyrs may have died for many reasons. If they died for the promise of eternal reward in the same way Muslim martyrs often do in this day and age, then they are still acting towards the same self interest that animals act in.
Bonaventurian wrote: Prove rationality? It can't be thought for a moment that we are not rational. For you to prove that we are not rational, in proving that we are not rational you must use your reason.
Yes..do you understand that what I was saying was more to point out that this is indeed what you are doing, unless you assume it on faith? I do not believe that the human body and the human mind are separate, that is, I am a monist. I believe that there is a good chance that consciousness is a physical phenomena.
Bonaventurian wrote:
When we think, it is necessarily true (as Descartes in his Meditations says) that we are thinkers. When we use our reason, it is necessarily true that we are rational.
Prove that we have a soul? As I have been implying, I direct you to Descartes' second meditation. I can doubt the world, the presence of colors, I can doubt space, extention, solidness...I can doubt all of this. I can doubt even my body. I cannot, however, doubt that I am, that I think, that I will, that I feel, etc. As Descartes says in his Meditations, and as Aristotle anticipates, I am not my body, but rather "I am a thing that thinks."
I direct you to Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico philosophicus
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/tloph10.txt ,you doubt is palpably senseless:"6.51 Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it
tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can exist
only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and
an answer only where something can be said."
"
6.36311 It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means
that we do not know whether it will rise.
6.37 There is no compulsion making one thing happen because another has
happened. The only necessity that exists is logical necessity.
6.371 The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion
that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural
phenomena.
6.372 Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as
something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages. And
in fact both are right and both wrong: though the view of the ancients is
clearer in so far as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the
modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.
6.373 The world is independent of my will.
6.374 Even if all that we wish for were to happen, still this would only be
a favour granted by fate, so to speak: for there is no logical connexion
between the will and the world, which would guarantee it, and the supposed
physical connexion itself is surely not something that we could will.
6.375 Just as the only necessity that exists is logical necessity, so too
the only impossibility that exists is logical impossibility."
You doubt the world, but in doing so you doubt that you doubt, for you are within the world. This is senseless. 'I think therefore I think that I am thinking that I think that I am' You see, that you are is that you experience, not that you think, for thought can be considered from the view that it is simply organized experience, organized by what? Well, maybe by you, maybe not, perhaps you sense of making a decision is an illusion, for is it not possible that the possibility for you to have done something else, never presented itself, but it seemed as though it did?
Descartes is old hat. Read 0)Kant (1)Nietzche(Beyond Good and Evil) 2) Sartre(Being and Nothingness) 3) Frege 4) Wittgenstein (Tracttus Logcio Philosophicus, then Philosophical investigations) and you will surely have a new perspective.
Also, I did not mean to imply that a computer was anything like a human, but that it is POTENTIALLY like a human. That a non-human entity could easily be constructed that makes decisions based on an eveolving system of priorities. If we simply define a set of meta priorities, such as the will to survive, a maximization should occur to create a sub priority in some situation. For instance, the computer in a robot would recognize the potential destruction of its robotic limbs if it were about to fall from a known height. Whether this is a decision is debatable, but os is whether humans in actuality decide by a similar mechanism, consciously or not. Is the conscious a construction of the subconscious?
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