Inflate or destroy self?

@fresco,

There you go with you claim my view invokes a "God" I can post you a youtube video which claims the opposite your view begs for a "God" a ultimate mind...mine implies "God" is dead, itself an object without any free choice ! It is what it is, fixed timelessly, no degrees of freedom, none, makes it mute and powerless to change anything, in sum not alive, just dead ! Its a damn SET, not a "god"...

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@Olivier5,

No doubt we can go on rallying like this ad infintum.

I don't think it worth reponding to arguments like fresco1 is the same as fresco2 because they are physically and temporally connected. (Fundamental requirements of causality) As far as I understand "sameness" it can only be assessed functionally and contextually. Any two entities are trivially simultaneously "the same" (because they are both objects a comparison) and "different" (because there are two of them). My thesis requires me to stress differences...yours the similarities.

I note with some surprise that you are prepared to evoke "brain science" at this stage having seemingly rejected it earlier on.Allow me to suggest you look at the "second generation" cognitive scientists such as Varela and Rosch (also rejectors of brain science) whom I could cite in defence of the disunity argument.

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@JLNobody,

Quote:

When one attempts to relieve himself of his sense of separateness from the World, he suffers inevitable frustration until the time when he realizes that he has never ever been separate from his experience--the very ground of his being.

I think I buy that. In my experience, one can only feel strongly connected to (i.e. fully experiencing) the world if one first accepts as a fundamental fact the separation that exists between oneself and the world. If you try to loose yourself into the world, you loose your self and you loose the world too. You can only truly love something different from you. Or to use a metaphor, there no electrical current between two electrodes that have the same charge.

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Quote:

I don't think it worth reponding to arguments like fresco1 is the same as fresco2 because they are physically and temporally connected.

I cannot help but wonder what a psychiatrist would make of this comment!

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@Frank Apisa,

Unlike you, psychiatrists tend to take the whole communicative context into account in order to understand the significance if a statement.

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@fresco,

Quote:

I note with some surprise that you are prepared to evoke "brain science" at this stage having seemingly rejected it earlier on.

I never rejected science. What I reject is the idea that scientists are always right.

Evidently, we have a brain, and evidently, it supports somehow our mental activity... Since we have one single, interconnected brain, it is reasonable to assume we have one mental space.

Quote:

Allow me to suggest you look at the "second generation" cognitive scientists such as Varela and Rosch (also rejectors of brain science) whom I could cite in defence of the disunity argument.

Rather than citing them, you could summarize their argument. That would look less like an appeal to authority and more like a contribution to the debate.

I totally support "second generation cybernetics" if that mean Batenson's idea that any theory of the mind has to account for how a theory of the mind can be produced. Ergo, it has to account for the existence and worth of those mental processes who produced the theory, rather than deny the existence or worth of such processes. That's why no scientist in his right mind can postulate that reason is a worthless epiphenomenon, since that would mean their own theory is a worthless epiphenomenon.

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@Olivier5,

Quote:

Evidently, we have a brain, and evidently, it supports somehow our mental activity... Since we have one single, interconnected brain, it is reasonable to assume we have one mental space.

Funnily enough, within the brain, we can use difference spacial locations as we think. I suppose it's like saying the fish is in the fish tank, but what part of the fish tank is it in (exploring the sunken pirate ship I hope).

And people use the term self-destructive, because self is viewed as a construction. What you can build you can destroy.

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@Olivier5,

Let you and I stick the phrase "appeals to authority " in the non-readers bin where it belongs. Summarization is somewhat beyond the scope of an a2k thread but tomorrow I will try to dig out some primary references.

I concur with the general Bateson argument, but I think the phrase "theory of mind " is a can of worms. We might note that iconoclastic philosophers like Wittgenstein and Rorty have argued that philosophy can have nothing to say about "theories".

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

Unlike you, psychiatrists tend to take the whole communicative context into account in order to understand the significance if a statement.

Yeah.

I'd like even more to hear a psychiatrists reaction to the entirety of your thesis in this thread.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

Fil, I don't recall saying my experiences are not real (is that what you mean by objective?); I stressed that they are me. I agree that the abstract categoory, wine, is not me. But the actual experience of a glass of merlot was me about an hour ago. Now I am the touch of typing this to you. Because of the social and intellectual quality of your recent posts I'm glad we are no longer on "ignore".

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@fresco,

Quote:

Let you and I stick the phrase "appeals to authority " in the non-readers bin where it belongs.

As long as you remember that name dropping and making an argument are two different things. There are many different possible interpretations of any text or author, especially in philosophy, so just naming one source means nothing without stating how you interpret that source.

This sort of dissonance already happened to us once, about Capra's Web of Life. I followed your link, read a dozen page pdf, found that it was perfectly coherent with my position... And then you said you disagreed with my interpretation but that was because "you had read the entire book"... without even stating what your interpretation was! That's simply too facile, sorry.

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@JLNobody,

JLNobody wrote:

Fil, I don't recall saying my experiences are not real (is that what you mean by objective?); I stressed that they are me. I agree that the abstract categoory, wine, is not me. But the actual experience of a glass of merlot was me about an hour ago. Now I am the touch of typing this to you. Because of the social and intellectual quality of your recent posts I'm glad we are no longer on "ignore".

In the experience of a glass of merlot there is nothing on which you were free to choose anything...you see the reason why you had an experience is precisely because such experience is itself a fixed object accounting your subjective relation...subjective refers to a very clear very objective intertwine between the specific particularities of Jl with a glass of merlot in hands...I truly don't know and I don't care much about what a "glass of merlot" per se is...I need not to to assert your very own experience is a crystal clear very specific very precise object...and that alone suffices to make my point.
Whatever I come to imagine about your experience of a glass of merlot wont change a dime on your very own real experience of a glass of merlot ! (just imagine if it did)
I am glad we can both speak in a civil manner like proper gentleman should, unfortunately it has become out of fashion these days...I'm guessing and hoping you as I don't share a great taste for fashion anyway...

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@Fil Albuquerque,

Let me suggest that "subjective" may refer to experience that is anywhere on a spectrum between "crystal clear" and conscious and obscure and less than conscious. I too am not concerned about the "objective", abstract or "absolute" nature of merlot, only the concrete experience of it then, but now I have let it go. That is part of the Heraclitian nature of my true Self, an on-going range of sensations. It is more a question of "becoming" than it is of a "being." I consider Heidegger's Being to be a gerund verb, a moving process rather than a static entity.

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@Olivier5,

The lie is that i said you had imposed anything. I was pointing out that you were attempting to impose a flawed definition, not that you had imposed it. The liar is you--or perhaps you can take refuge in poor English skills. Don't feel bad though. Fresco, whose native language is English, one supposes, doesn't seem to understand that whence and when are not cognates. If one asks "whence the idea," one is asking where does the idea come from, not when the idea arose.

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@Olivier5,

Come on now...If I wanted to indulge in "name-dropping" we would be here all day ! Different interpretations of text are inevitable becxause of different perceptual sets. Perception is active not passive..and appropriately that is the essence of Gestaltism which is central to the thesis I am discussing.

With that point in mind, regarding my earlier reference to Varela, it might be best if I recommended this as a starting point from which you my be inclined to proceed at your own convenience,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition

I add one proviso....that references to "the body" do not necessarily imply the physiological structure described by biologists since that description has evolved forparticular "scientific purposes".

Finally, I am perfectly aware that my style is traditionally "academic" and can seem pompous on a forum geared to quick fix short responses. In an area where the interesting stuff is counter-intuitive (as indeed it is in mainstream frontier science) , I expect a certain degree of resistance and complaints about stylistics.

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@Setanta,

Ok, so you are not lying, you're just paranoid, going around suspecting other posters of trying to impose **** on you. That's perhaps what buys you some amount of patience from other posters. They know you can't help it...

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@JLNobody,

Whatever moves has first to be somewhere...if something could be anywhere or everywhere it wouldn't need to move...if things change, any of the conditions, naturally the outcome of the experience changes also...none of it proves me wrong on the contrary it helps make my point on precision !

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@fresco,

Quote:

I add one proviso....that references to "the body" do not necessarily imply the physiological structure described by biologists since that description has evolved forparticular "scientific purposes".

Now that's a good example of personal interpretation of a source. Since the thesis is called "embodied cognition", what you mean by "body" may be worthy of some elaboration, don't you think? The wikipedia article seems to take the word at face value.

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@Olivier5,

The source is a blanket one. If you follow up the Varela line you encounter the Merleau-Ponty argument about the nebulous boundaries of the body e.g. in consideration of the status of the blind man's stick. What you call my interpretation was given as a short cut some of the reading, but you could not know that from the article alone.

I admit to attempt to cash in on your dissatisfaction with 'Brian science' Embodiment theories are but the first step away from the brain. Extrapolation beyond that tends to follow.

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Is the self permanent? To me it cannot be permanent because everything I examine is constantly changing.

Is the self impermanent? To me anything that changes is not the same thing. If its color, shape, extension and location change at all then it is not the same thing. This would mean there would have to be as many selves throughout my life as there were moments in my life. The self does not seem to be like that it seems permanent but it can't be.

Every moment can be divided into smaller moments and those moments can be divided ad-infinitum.. there is no such thing as an irreducible moment.

When looked for the self cannot be found. It can't have the characteristics of permanence or impermanence, also there is no momentary existence.

There is no evidence of a reality separate from perception and no self can be found. Appearances appear without the need for a self.

Nothing whatsoever can be said about reality and clinging on to an unfindable self and an unfindable separate external world just leads eventually to confusion as the axioms that created these mistaken worldviews, create a 'closed box' misunderstanding of reality which will always fail to produce 'truth' and will just give rise to paradoxes, infinities, contradictions etc.

We all seem to experience a 'self' but it's just an illusion made more tangible by language.

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Inflate or destroy self?

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