Why do we have Consciousness?

[Le People]

So why do we have it? This kind of relates to the free will thread in that how conception of counciousness is drastically altered by our concept of free or determinism. Is it evolutionary benefical? Why do we experience feelings such as remorse and depression, feelings which evolutionary speaking, seem unneccessary? Feel free to philosophise about it, for I can only conjecture.

[casper]

an organism's emotional state effects its actions, its actions effects its environment and survival, which in turn affects the organism's states.

possible evolutionary benefit of self-awareness:
could lead to better knowledge, knowledge is power.

possible evolutionary benefit of remorse:
if a animal exist in a social structure, remorse could be useful in a social sense, by feeling regret, we're likly not going to do the action again, even if it was individually beneficial to do the action, it may of been destructive to the group, which in the long run is potentially destructive to the individual. Also, a destructive action against the over all group, could make the group exclude you, making it harder to survive.

evolutionary benifit for depression:
mmm... difficult. lets define depression as prolonged hoplessness and sadness. so what are the benifits of hoplessness and sadness? it could be a possibility that its not neccassarly detrimintal to the development of a species, so it could of just..happened? but i'm sure hoplessness and sadness even have their benifits to survivial in some situations, but i don't feel like making my brain hurt searching for an example at the moment, maby it'll randomly come to me during my next bath... ??

court room? connected to remorse maybe... something.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Depression might have once had an evolutionary role that is now obsolete (civilisation, especially modern civilisation, has arisen in a timescale much, much quicker than natural evolution), or it might be an evolutionary quirk that never impacted enough on the survival of the species for it to be selected against, even though it can drive an individual to end their life.

In short, the advantages presented by consciousness outweigh the disadvantages. At least so far.

[Lynx]

We have consciousness because we have memory and sensory abilities and a nervous system capable of reacting to external and internal stimuli.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

How do we know there is such a thing as 'consciousness'? The evidence in favour of its existence is about as good as that which supports belief in the 'soul'.

[butterfly]

Because of a collective understanding?

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

How do we know there is such a thing as 'consciousness'? The evidence in favour of its existence is about as good as that which supports belief in the 'soul'.

There may not be a thing called "consciousness" (as in a discrete object, phenomenon or process), but there is certainly a collection of somewhat related processes and phenomena that we call "consciousness".

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

On what basis do 'we' do this? Answer: the same basis that the god botherers also call it the 'soul'.

In other words, it's an ancient superstition.

-----------------------

Butterfly:


Because of a collective understanding?

Well, I doubt this, but even if you were right, it has been a 'collective understanding' for thousands of years that we have a 'soul'. That hardly makes it true.

[benhur]

How do we know there is such a thing as 'consciousness'?.

Pretty self-evident, isn't it? Your question itself indicates that you're conscious enough to pose such questions!;)

[davidasearles]

r.l.:

How do we know there is such a thing as 'consciousness'?.

b.h.:

Pretty self-evident, isn't it? Your question itself indicates that you're conscious enough to pose such questions!

d.s.:

a machine could be programmed to deliver a similar response every time it encountered an improper noun not appearing on a list of approved words. I would say that much of what we think is a result of consciousness is simply our explanation for it.

This is a true story. I lived on a narrow street that had no street lights on it so I put up a motion detector light on my back porch. There was a small parking lot across the street that also had no lights. The parking lot was used by people who drove school busses so they got there well before light. On day, perhaps 6 months after I put the motion detector up, during the day I met one of the bus drivers who would park in that lot at night time. This gentleman was so happy to be able to meet me and thank me for turning on that light every time he drove down the street!

People do it all of the time. A gentleman who was trying to post to a list that I am a member of was having his posts rejected. He was sure that he was being censored - a conscious act - until he finally figured out that the posts were being automatically being rejected because they were too long.

I can do the same thing with a balky computer. I become obsessed with the idea that an evil spirit has invaded the machine whole sole purpose is to fuck me up. And how many people talk to their cars, or talk to others in traffic who couldn't possible hear them? A car is 50 yards down the road at a side street - "Don't pull out in front of me you dirty so and so."

[Iowa656]

There are many theories that speculate on the evolutionary benefits of depression or in fact any other seemingly detrimental behaviour. Pick up any book on evolutionary psychology and your question will be answered. But I will try and briefly explain.

Firstly, in case you are unaware, there are two types of depression. The first is called "Unipolar". This a prolonged state of negative emotion and thoughts combined with lack of motivation together with a collection of other minor symptoms. The second is called "Bipolar" Depression. In this type there are 2 stages; one where the symptoms are very similar to Unipolar and another where the sufferer has a dramatic increase in production, heightened state of emotion etc. A sufferer of bipolar will move between the two stage though a time period of anything between a few days and several months. A sufferer of bipolar is almost never in a "normal" state, that is they are either in the depressive state or the over productive state.

I will briefly explain one theory for each type of depression.

Unipolar: The Social Competition Hypothesis.

In this theorem depression can be explained as a damage limitation devise. Imagine a situation where two humans are competing for territory/females/food etc. Evidently one is going to loose and one is going to win. We are interested in understanding how the one who looses copes with his loss. Most likely he will be somewhat damaged by the fight. So if he decides to fight again in a "rematch", there is an almost certain chance of him loosing again and a severely increased chance of him becoming critically injured. Now if after he first looses the fight he enterers a state of depression, that is looses motivation, he will be at an advantage in the long term, because he is not gambling with his already injured body. This increases his chance of survival and so increases his chance of passing on his genes, so the trait gets magnified over the generations. Acting in a state of depression decreases the chance of further damage and so increases the chance of survival.

Bipolar:

This theory doesn't have a name, it's more a generic observation. It is simply a case of the pro's out weighing the con's. In the increased state of production the sufferer shows a dramatic increases in creativity, lack of inhibition, charismatic leadership skills, etc. This are clearly adaptive behaviours, that is they will be a benefit to the sufferer. In the long term, over many years, the progression made in the increased state is greater than the progression lost in the decreased state. Thus the chances of their survival are increased, so they are more likely to pass their genes on, so the trait is magnified though the generations.


Of course, as with any social scientific theory, there are limitation to these explanations. However you can clearly see how in some circumstances these apparently maladaptive traits have some benefit.

I knew 3 years of psychology would come in useful somewhere :p

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

On what basis do 'we' do this? Answer: the same basis that the god botherers also call it the 'soul'.

In other words, it's an ancient superstition.

That's funny, I thought it had something to do with our ability to self-reflect, experience emotions, recall memories, think thoughts and other processes generally considered to form part of conscious thought.

[DesertShark]

Perhaps we need to define consciousness? I always thought of it as self-awareness, which would mean we would not be the only animals to possess it (this could explain the benefits from an evolutionary stand point; although I'd like to say that not all things that have evolved have been completely beneficial and its a sort of a naive stand point to look at it as such, mostly because evolution does not mean progress and it sometimes feels that such questions are trying to turn evolution into something that means progress).

If consciousness is self-awareness, then RL's arguments are void because the fact that we are self aware is how we know.

How do we know there is such a thing as 'consciousness'? The evidence in favour of its existence is about as good as that which supports belief in the 'soul'.

On what basis do 'we' do this? Answer: the same basis that the god botherers also call it the 'soul'.

In other words, it's an ancient superstition.
Also, a soul is separate from the body and controls it, whereas consciousness is part of the body or a charateristic of some bodies. Even having the concept of 'I' ('we' - I plus others) shows self-awareness. It appears that there is in fact no evidence (justification) for the soul, and lots of evidence for consciousness. Also, if consciousness is self-awareness, then it is testable (mirror test) which would make it valid in the scientific sense. While a soul is not a testable phenomon.

Consciousness could be more then self-awareness:

That's funny, I thought it had something to do with our ability to self-reflect, experience emotions, recall memories, think thoughts and other processes generally considered to form part of conscious thought.
Which is why it is important to define terms. This link (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/) breaks down the philosophical issues of consciousness, from concepts (definitions and uses) to common theories. It also includes a history and biblography of resources.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BenHur:


Your question itself indicates that you're conscious enough to pose such questions!

Where did I deny that human beings can be conscious?

You need to read what I actually write more carefully.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Noxion:


That's funny, I thought it had something to do with our ability to self-reflect, experience emotions, recall memories, think thoughts and other processes generally considered to form part of conscious thought.

As I said, any evidence you can reel off can equally well be used to show we have 'souls'.

However, none of this shows that something called 'consciousness' exists, any more than it would show that the 'soul' exists.

[Lynx]

The definition of 'soul' contains supernatural elements that some consider to be excess baggage.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

DS:


Also, a soul is separate from the body and controls it, whereas consciousness is part of the body or a charateristic of some bodies. Even having the concept of 'I' ('we' - I plus others) shows self-awareness. It appears that there is in fact no evidence (justification) for the soul, and lots of evidence for consciousness. Also, if consciousness is self-awareness, then it is testable (mirror test) which would make it valid in the scientific sense. While a soul is not a testable phenomon.

Not necessarily; there are those who believe in the mortal soul.

But, even if you were right, as I have said to Noxion: any evidence you can reel off can equally well be used to show we have 'souls', immortal or not.

Recall, I am not denying we are aware of things, or that we can sometimes be said to be conscious (if, say, a doctor is examining us after an accident, or an operation). What I am denying is that there is something called 'consciousness'.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


The definition of 'soul' contains supernatural elements that some consider to be excess baggage.

Yes, but so what?

[Lynx]

So, fewer people have a problem with the definition of consciousness, which is a 'sum of things' and does not carry religious or spiritual connotations.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


So, fewer people have a problem with the definition of consciousness, which is a 'sum of things' and does not carry religious or spiritual connotations.

Are you suggesting that truth is arrived at by a show of hands?

[Lynx]

Are you suggesting that truth is arrived at by a show of hands?
In a way it is - acceptance is arrived at by a lack of objection to a definition.

When a definition exists, there must be (or must have been) some need for that definition.

[mikelepore]

Nobody knows. We know that each cell in the brain is capable only of only the simplest kinds of communication with its exterior, consisting of the diffusion of positive and negative ions across its membrane. No one has yet established a neurological model to explain why billions of these sparking capacitors have the aggregate effects that we call mental processes. Many localizations are now known, such as the visual cortex and auditory cortex, but this doesn't answer the question.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


In a way it is - acceptance is arrived at by a lack of objection to a definition.

In that case, there must be a 'god', since most people believe in 'him'.

-------------------------------

Mike:


Nobody knows. We know that each cell in the brain is capable only of only the simplest kinds of communication with its exterior, consisting of the diffusion of positive and negative ions across its membrane. No one has yet established a neurological model to explain why billions of these sparking capacitors have the aggregate effects that we call mental processes. Many localizations are now known, such as the visual cortex and auditory cortex, but this doesn't answer the question.

Cells cannot communicate since they do not have a language, nor are they persons, and nor are they social beings.

And the alleged localisation of a particular function does not show that that part of the brain is where we 'see' or 'hear', since it is human beings who see or hear, not brains.

On localisation, see the following:

Uttal, W. (2001), The New Phrenology. The Limits Of Localising Cognitive Processes In The Brain (MIT Press).

Here is the author's summary:


On the Limits of Localization of Cognitive Processes in the Brain.

In the latest Hot Science piece, William Uttal takes on one of the most fundamental issues in cognitive neuroscience: Can cognitive functions be localized in the brain? Using the past as a guide, Uttal argues that it is critical for modern neuroscientists to re-open the entire localization debate. Uttal's goal is not to derail cognitive neuroscience, but rather alert us to the dangers implicit in asking questions at the wrong level...

Psychology has always been in search of metaphors and explanatory theories. Earlier we had to do with hydraulic, mechanical, electrical, and eventually computer models to serve as heuristics to help guide our thinking about the nature of cognition. In this century a new science- neurophysiology -- and a remarkable collection of new physiological recording tools have become available as an alternative to these older metaphors. We have gone through a series of physiological measures including, the galvanic skin response, the electroencephalograph, and the evoked brain potential, each of which promised to provide a material key to understanding mental activity. All of these methods were especially exciting for psychologists because they promised to provide a noninvasive means of correlating brain activity with mental actions. In the main, however, none of these methods has been successful in answering even the most basic questions of how the brain produces or encodes mental activity. The main reason for this failure has been the fact that these measures are asking questions as the wrong level. The ultimate basis of mental activity must be the informational state of a huge collection of neurons interacting, not en masse, but as an intricate web, a network in which the details of the intercommunicated information are salient. Measures of integrated activity such as the EEG or the EVBP simply do not assay the essence of the relationship between mind and brain.

The latest "new" methodology

Now there is another entry in the search for a metaphorical model. The availability of the PET and fMRI scanning procedures in the last decade has once again excited psychologists. Indeed, it has more than just excited them. Entire sections of experimental psychology in some of our most prestigious university departments have abandoned purely cognitive studies in favor of correlative studies of these images and behavioral tests. Furthermore, some departments have frighteningly over committed their resources to this single line of research. I believe this to be a programmatic error that is based upon an inadequate consideration of the basic assumptions and logic of the research that is emerging willy-nilly from this breathless attack on one of the most fundamental questions of psychobiology - the issue of whether or not mental processes can be localized in particular regions of the brain. It seems to me that there should be a cooling off period before we charge ahead into a research paradigm that has many unanswered questions and faces many conceptual, technical, and logical problems.

In the following paragraphs, my goal is to raise some cautions and to stimulate a bit of reflection about what is currently going on in many neuroscience laboratories. Some of the cautions are age-old ones, but some are associated with the most modern technical matters.

Six suggestions

First, perhaps the most difficult challenge that has to be faced by those who are comparing brain images and cognitive processes is the uncertainty involved in precisely defining the components of mental activity. Throughout the history of psychology, we have tried to define mental activity in an enormous number of different ways. Other than the antique and persisting trichotomy of "input-central-output", efforts to develop sharp definitions of mental modules have been notoriously unsuccessful. Every century defines their own mental components and few of these definitions are perpetuated into the next. A few very general terms persist - memory, emotions, percepts, etc. - but even these are fraught with lexicographic difficulties. Arguably, the mental modules that psychology currently uses are either a priori or ad hoc hypothetical constructs or are operationally defined by the experiments we use to study mental activity. At least one survey (Grafman, Partiot, and Hollnagel, 1995) goes on for seven pages listing the variety of cognitive processes that have been associated with the frontal cortex in particular! Clearly, an adequate classification of mental processes is not yet at hand.

Second, the findings that have emerged from the scanning-cognitive laboratories are not yet stable. Pulverm|ller (1999) has pointed out that the cognitive processing of word meanings has been "located" in all of the major lobes of the brain! Few studies are replicated under the same conditions, and often those that are do not support each other.

Third, there is ample evidence, especially that emerging from some of the newer event-related scanning procedures that the cognitive processes are not localized but the result of widely distributed action in the brain.

Fourth, there is a host of technical uncertainties and a highly fragile logical chain between neural activity and the scanned outputs from fMRI and PET systems and even more concern about what these signals mean. Experts in the field are well aware of these difficulties, but often we psychologists take at face value some highly dubious steps in the logic. At the very least, it must be appreciated that it is a mathematical truism that any bounded field will exhibit a maximum. This means that there will always be a peak of activity someplace in, for example, a fMRI image. Correlations between behavior and cognitive activity are, therefore, guaranteed regardless of the actual biology of the situation. The emphasis on "hot spots" incorrectly directs attention away from critical changes of activity in other regions - both increases and decreases.

Fifth, The statistical and experimental design aspects of the scanning procedures are also matters of deep concern. Small shifts in criterion levels can force drastically different interpretations of data. Normalization and averaging procedures may produce spurious conclusions concerning localization. The frailty of the subtraction and double dissociation methods, and the elaborate processing necessary to see anything at all raise serious concerns about whether this new approach will fail in the same way that the older methods did to answer the most basic questions faced by cognitive neuroscience.

Finally, despite its implicit acceptance by many researchers in this field, the localization versus distribution issue remains unresolved. There is a theoretical bias toward "localization" abroad in cognitive neuroscience these days that may be totally unjustified. The entire scanning-cognition effort is based upon the assumption that mental processes or modules are actually localized in particular regions of the brain. However, there is abundant evidence that this may be a misreading of the data. The brain is a highly interconnected, redundant, and nonlinear system that is more likely to use a distributed representation scheme than a highly localized one. Localization is an easy way out for experimental design, but it may be fundamentally incorrect in principle. Not in the sense of any obsolescent idea of "mass action" but, rather, in terms of a complex network of interacting parts. There is, in this regard, a great confusion in this field over such a simple matter as the necessity versus the sufficiency of a brain region's role in a cognitive process. Experiments may quite properly show that one region of the brain is necessary to carry out some mental task, but that does not rule out the possibility that many other regions are also required for the process to occur. The "necessary" region may not be "sufficient" to encode the cognitive act. The emphasis on associating one or a few regions with some cognitive task may thus produce an illusion of localization where none, in fact, exists.

Conclusion: The Challenge

I hope that my readers will not do the field of cognitive neuroscience the disservice of dismissing this essay as just a "pessimistic" view. Given the state of the science, it may be more realistic than pessimistic. At the very least, it seems to me that we should be considering these issues rather than plunging ahead into what may be an enormous waste of resources and time. Whether, my point of view is correct or not, there is an obligation to at least consider the questions that are raised here.

In this brief opinion piece, it is not possible for me to provide the scientific citations to support the assertions that I make. A much more complete rendition of the argument against an assumption of brain localization, and, thus, the importance of a considered evaluation of what psychologists are doing in scanning laboratories is presented in my forthcoming book - The New Phrenology: The Limits of Localizing Cognitive Processes in the Brain. (MIT Press.Spring 2001)

References:

Grafman, J., Partiot, A., & Hollnagel, C. (1995). Fables in the prefrontal cortex. In Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 18, 349-358.
Pulvermüller, F. (1999). Words in the brain's language. In Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 253-336.

by William R. Uttal
Professor Emeritus (Psychology) University of Michigan
Professor Emeritus (Engineering) Arizona State University

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/psychology/courses/1010/mangels/Uttal.html

This is, of course, quite apart from the philosophical difficulties there are in attributing to the brain what are properly human traits -- a confusion on a par with imagining that, say, our hearts do indeed break when we are wounded in love.

These are covered in detail here:

Bennett, M., and Hacker, P. (2003), Philosophical Foundations Of Neuroscience (Blackwell).

Bennett, M., Dennett, D., Hacker, P., and Searle, J. (2007), Neuroscience And Philosophy. Brain, Mind And Language (Columbia University Press).

The latter can be accessed as a .wav file here:

http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/original1.wav

http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/RecentConferencePapers.html

See also:

http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/Relevance%20of%20W's%20phil.%20of%20psychol.%20to% 20science.pdf

http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/Emotions%20-%20conceptual%20framework.pdf

[Lynx]

In that case, there must be a 'god', since most people believe in 'him'.
I can accept that most people believe in God.
I can accept that nearly everyone is familiar with a concept of God.
I can choose not to believe in God.
How does my choice allow me to deny the existence of the concept?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx, the point was that popularity, or a show of hands, cannot determine truth.

[Lynx]

Lynx, the point was that popularity, or a show of hands, cannot determine truth.
It can't, but neither can an objection.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


It can't, but neither can an objection.

Who said it could?

[mikelepore]

Mike: Cells cannot communicate since they do not have a language, nor are they persons, and nor are they social beings.

In saying "communicate", I couldn't think of a word to express what I meant. I mean that small building blocks of larger systems do their jobs by each one being a black-box device with certain terminal characteristics, in the way a diode is a 2-terminal device, a transistor is a 3-terminal device, etc. The terminal interface of a single brain cell is that ions diffuse across the membrane due to a concentration gradient, and that ion separation has the effect of producing a small voltage across the membrane. Somehow it's only this simple kind of interfacing of one cell with the outside world, multiplied by billions of cells, that makes up the mind. Science is nowhere near being able to explain how that happens.

[mikelepore]

And the alleged localisation of a particular function does not show that that part of the brain is where we 'see' or 'hear', since it is human beings who see or hear, not brains.

I wouldn't claim that mental experiences are localized.

The only think I want to say about it is that the limited localized effects that they do know about don't help to explain what awareness is.

I've heard about two kind of local effects. One is stimulation at will. when I poke your brain here you will hear a twang sound, and when I poke your brain there you will feel your toe hurt. The other has to do with monitoring. An fMRI shows increased blood flow in the visual cortex when I shine a light into your eyes. But what it means to be conscious of these things, no one reports that they have any clue.

Some very specific memory recall triggers were discovered. For example, researchers found a "see the face of Bill Clinton" switch in one human subject. They could make the visual image of Clinton's face appear to this person at any time, by electrically stimulating a particular neuron in his brain. [Jeff Hawkins, _On Intelligence_, 2004, page 108] This kind of data has fooled some people into saying that science is getting close to knowing how the mind works. I don't believe it means that at all. This false optimism is like that of the 19th century people who commented on the chemistry of amino acids by saying that science was close to creating life in a beaker.

Michael A. Lepore

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Mike:


Somehow it's only this simple kind of interfacing of one cell with the outside world, multiplied by billions of cells, that makes up the mind.

This seems to take for granted that there is something called 'the mind' -- which is in effect just a left-over from Platonic/Christian/Cartesian ideas on the 'soul', and thus has nothing to do with materialism.


I've heard about two kind of local effects. One is stimulation at will. when I poke your brain here you will hear a twang sound, and when I poke your brain there you will feel your toe hurt. The other has to do with monitoring. An fMRI shows increased blood flow in the visual cortex when I shine a light into your eyes. But what it means to be conscious of these things, no one reports that they have any clue.

The article I posted above deals with these points. Moreover, it is controversial whether or not increased blood flow is connected with the function that is alleged to be initiated in that region.


Some very specific memory recall triggers were discovered. For example, researchers found a "see the face of Bill Clinton" switch in one human subject. They could make the visual image of Clinton's face appear to this person at any time, by electrically stimulating a particular neuron in his brain. [Jeff Hawkins, _On Intelligence_, 2004, page 108] This kind of data has fooled some people into saying that science is getting close to knowing how the mind works. I don't believe it means that at all. This false optimism is like that of the 19th century people who commented on the chemistry of amino acids by saying that science was close to creating life in a beaker.

I agree; every ten years or so we read things like: 'Recent advances in brain science are beginning to reveal the secrets of consciousness...', but then they never do. I have heard this sort of thing more times than George Dubbya has dropped a clanger.

And the example you give of stimulating parts of the brain merely tells us that people do odd things if you screw around with their heads, and no more.

[Decolonize The Left]

Recall, I am not denying we are aware of things, or that we can sometimes be said to be conscious (if, say, a doctor is examining us after an accident, or an operation). What I am denying is that there is something called 'consciousness'.

Is not "consciousness" merely the state of being conscious?

- August

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

AW:


Is not "consciousness" merely the state of being conscious?

Well, when we look at how we use the word 'consciousness' (etc.) it typically appears in sentences like "The patient has regained consciousness, nurse", or "Mr Bloggs is conscious, doctor", which describe a medical condition, not a general state.

So, it would be misleading now to describe you as conscious unless we knew you had just woken up from say a coma, or an operation -- any more than it would be right to say of Usain Bolt, for example, that he is now in a 'state of winning', just because he got three Gold medals at the Olympics.

So, I deny that there is a 'state of being conscious', except in the medical sense noted above.

[DesertShark]

DS:



Not necessarily; there are those who believe in the mortal soul.

But, even if you were right, as I have said to Noxion: any evidence you can reel off can equally well be used to show we have 'souls', immortal or not.

Recall, I am not denying we are aware of things, or that we can sometimes be said to be conscious (if, say, a doctor is examining us after an accident, or an operation). What I am denying is that there is something called 'consciousness'.
Like I said before, perhaps we should define our terms. What do you mean by 'consciousness'?
Also, will you please give an example of how any evidence can equally be used to show we have 'souls' (immortal or not). I'd really like to hear the argument for it.


Mike:



Cells cannot communicate since they do not have a language, nor are they persons, and nor are they social beings.

And the alleged localisation of a particular function does not show that that part of the brain is where we 'see' or 'hear', since it is human beings who see or hear, not brains.

Yes, cells communicate because not all communication needs language, just as not all thought needs language. If cells (in a multicellular organisms) could not communicate, they would not be able to organize a response to stimuli and you would not be able to move or interact with your environment. Also, since when are persons the only things that can communicate? Animals, which may or may not be persons (depends on which animals and how you define 'person') communicate, especially the social ones.
We may not 'see' or 'hear' with a part of our brain, but if we did not have that part to interpret and/or organize and respond with we wouldn't be able to interact with our environment and others the way that we do. Also, without that part of your brain you wouldn't see or hear anything (there's a bionic eye (basically a low megapixel camera, with a low color scale) that is inserted in the eye and hooked up to the optic nerve (the nerve that sends information from the eye to occipital lobe of brain) which allows blind people to have crude vision; this would not be possible without having a part of the brain that can receive and interpret the information). Any critters with sensory organs also have a brain (or centralized nervous center) which allows for quick interpretation/organization and response.

[S. Zetor]

So why do we have it? This kind of relates to the free will thread in that how conception of counciousness is drastically altered by our concept of free or determinism. Is it evolutionary benefical? Why do we experience feelings such as remorse and depression, feelings which evolutionary speaking, seem unneccessary? Feel free to philosophise about it, for I can only conjecture.

Probably what is called consicousness gives a degree of flexibility when the organism reacts to outside phenomena. Animals have various degrees of consiousness, some more mechanical, some less.. homo sapiens I guess is the most conscious, though I don't believe it's as conscious as enlightment would have it.

With the degree of flexbility I believe there is a certain "fixedness" too, like "mental adaptations" (just like there are "physical" adaptations like the hand, the eye etc.). The argument for mental adaptations that I find convincing is that with a more or less blank slate, you would need to learn how to react to lethal phenomena, when already the first time could prove fatal.. If you have a kind of semi-built it system that experience just needs to refine and train to an extent, probably the odd of survival are better. That's how I see it anyway.

I think feelings like remorse have everything to with group dynamics of social beings.. and not all of them (like depression) need to be adaptations to anything, they can be more or less accidental too, and nonfunctional.. in the sense that a person's interaction with the outside world (both physical and social) can make you feel very mixed messages and choices at the same time, so that it becomes difficult to handle them.

Some of the literature that I've read on evolutionary psychology is:
- Barkow, Cosmides, Tooby: The Adapted Mind. Has a great intro, even though some of the essays in the book seem a bit far fetched in their degree of determinism
- Richard Dawkins: The Blind Watchmaker. Good book on how evolution workd in general.
- Matt Ridley: Origins of Virtue. Ridley is much more deterministic than I'm comfortable with, but I found the book informing nevertheless, on how the evolution of social traits comes about..

BTW there's also a "marxist" or left-radical school that tends to go agaist evolutionary psychology, represented mostly by the late Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin. They have some good stuff too, to straighten up some of the crap the determinists put out, though I'm not sure what their positive agenda is. And not all EP supporters are conservative either.. check out Robert Trivers for example, who cooperated with Huey P Newton (of the Black Panthers).

Rosa Lichtenstein's post which included the text from a cognitive science book was good.

[Hit The North]

Well, when we look at how we use the word 'consciousness' (etc.) it typically appears in sentences like "The patient has regained consciousness, nurse", or "Mr Bloggs is conscious, doctor", which describe a medical condition, not a general state.



These are extremely limited examples. The word 'conscious/ness' is used in other ways. For example, I could say, "I'm conscious of your opinion on dialectics."

Whilst Marx used it like this:



It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
Preface to a Critique of Political Economy

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


These are extremely limited examples. The word 'conscious/ness' is used in other ways. For example, I could say, "I'm conscious of your opinion on dialectics."

I am well aware there are many uses of the word "conscious"; what I deny is that there are any other uses of "consciousness" in ordinary discourse.

And Marx uses of this word in a specialised sense to mean something like "ideology".

It is not connected with its use in ordinary language; if it were, he would not have had to tell us this:


It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

since we would already know it.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

DS:


What do you mean by 'consciousness'?

I am in fact using this word in two ways; 1) in its ordinary, medical sense, and 2) In its philosophical sense.

I claim that in the latter it is either meaningless, or if it means anything, it is indistinguishable from the more ancient word 'soul'.


Also, will you please give an example of how any evidence can equally be used to show we have 'souls' (immortal or not).

I don't have any, nor do I want any -- what I claim is that any evidence you can produce to show that there is something called 'consciousness' can equally well be used to show that there is something called 'the soul'.


Yes, cells communicate because not all communication needs language, just as not all thought needs language.

I think, in these comments you are confusing signalling with communication.


We may not 'see' or 'hear' with a part of our brain, but if we did not have that part to interpret and/or organize and respond with we wouldn't be able to interact with our environment and others the way that we do. Also, without that part of your brain you wouldn't see or hear anything (there's a bionic eye (basically a low megapixel camera, with a low color scale) that is inserted in the eye and hooked up to the optic nerve (the nerve that sends information from the eye to occipital lobe of brain) which allows blind people to have crude vision; this would not be possible without having a part of the brain that can receive and interpret the information). Any critters with sensory organs also have a brain (or centralized nervous center) which allows for quick interpretation/organization and response.

You need to read that summary article I posted a little more carefully, since it deals with these points.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

S Zetor, I think you will find that 'evolutionary psychology' will go down here rather badly.

Perhaps you need to read:

Buller, D. (2005), Adapting Minds. Evolutionary Psychology And The Persistent Quest For Human Nature (MIT Press).

Dupré, J. (2001), Human Nature And The Limits Of Science (Oxford University Press).

--------, (2002), Humans And Other Animals (Oxford University Press).

And:

Stove, D. (2006), Darwinian Fairytales (Encounter Books, 2nd ed.).

I have posted a copy of the first edition here:

http://rapidshare.com/files/163090803/Darwinian_Fairytales_complete.pdf.html

[Lynx]

Who said it could?
If your objection convinces us that consciousness doesn't exist, you will have succeeded in doing so.

But consciousness is a concept and it is subjective. It would take hard evidence to convince enough people that this conceptualization is way off the mark, or just an illusion.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


If your objection convinces us that consciousness doesn't exist, you will have succeeded in doing so.

My claim is that popularity cannot determine truth, not that argument and evidence cannot.


But consciousness is a concept and it is subjective. It would take hard evidence to convince enough people that this conceptualization is way off the mark, or just an illusion.

Is 'consciousness' really just a 'concept'? Are the scientists who believe in this 'entity' simply studying a 'concept'?

Recall, I am not trying to persuade you that 'consciousness' does not exist, only that the supposition that it does is empty and devoid of meaning -- except, of course, for mystics, since it is the modern-day equivalent of the 'soul'.

[Hit The North]

I am in fact using this word in two ways; 1) in its ordinary, medical sense, and 2) In its philosophical sense.


How is the medical sense more akin to ordinary language than the philosophical sense? You also seem to imply that there is no connection between the medical usage and the philosophical, whereas it seems obvious that the medical designation of someone being conscious flows into the philosophical (and scientific) enquiry of what consciousness actually is.

Further, how is it possible to ring fence the "ordinary language usage" from the more specialised medical or philosophical usage?


I claim that in the latter it is either meaningless, or if it means anything, it is indistinguishable from the more ancient word 'soul'.
Except when Marx uses it? Or is Marx equally culpable?


I think, in these comments you are confusing signalling with communication. When is signalling not a form of communication?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


How is the medical sense more akin to ordinary language than the philosophical sense?

Because we too use the medical sense when we talk about anyone who has just come round after an operation, or a blow on the head.


You also seem to imply that there is no connection between the medical usage and the philosophical, whereas it seems obvious that the medical designation of someone being conscious flows into the philosophical (and scientific) enquiry of what consciousness actually is.

Well, that will need to be demonstrated. However, it is just as plausible that doctors appropriated the ordinary use of this word, and put it to use in the way I described.

But, anyway, the philosophical use of this word is demonstrably part of the Platonic/Christian/Cartesian dualist tradition, and as such is not susceptible of scientifc analysis. So, good luck in trying to show that doctors are all Cartesians!


Further, how is it possible to ring fence the "ordinary language usage" from the more specialised medical or philosophical usage?

It clearly isn't possible to 'ring fence' ordinary language from the medical use of words (nor would I want to), but it is possible to do this from philosophical language.

I'd suggest you read my explanation how here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2012_01.htm

but we both know you prefer to remain in stygian darkness.

But, there is a clue in the next point. See if you can spot it...


Except when Marx uses it? Or is Marx equally culpable?

Well, when Marx followed his own advice, he was immune from such errors:


The philosophers have only to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, in order to recognise it, as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realise that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life.

German Ideology p.118. Bold added.

When he didn't, when he used the "distorted" language of the philosophers, he fell into error.


When is signalling not a form of communication?

When it is not based on a translation manual into language.

Deary me; I really do have to do all your thinking for you...

[Hit The North]

R:

Because we too use the medical sense when we talk about anyone who has just come round after an operation, or a blow on the head.In ordinary usage we use it interchangeably with the word "aware/ness". The examples you use imply that you think the word "conscious/ness" designates only that moment when "someone comes round" from an operation, blow to the head, sleep, etc. However, the common usage of it designates a state of being - being conscious as opposed to being unconscious. During the day I am conscious until I go back to sleep and become unconscious. When I'm asleep I am unaware of what goes on around me. If I am suddenly made aware - by a loud noise as my door is kicked in by the police, for instance - I become conscious, and remain in that state until the police kick my head in down at the police station. Consciousness is what I have when I am aware of my surroundings.

But this is not all. Beyond being conscious of my surroundings, I am also conscious of things not in my immediate environment, such as my social relations or the mores of my culture. This is because, as a human being, I have self-consciousness. I can monitor my behaviour, contextualise my activity, reflect on my situation, modify my approach to problems; learn; make judgements; analyse my past, my present, my future. I have a theory of mind and can intuit the consciousness of others, and this, too, contributes to my own conscious being. In fact, without this level of consciousness, communication with others would be impossible.


Well, when Marx followed his own advice, he was immune from such errors:So let's try to do this. What - in ordinary language - does Marx mean by "consciousness" when he writes: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their social being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness"?

You've already attempted to answer this by stating that the term "ideology" may be interchangeable. But how does the highly technical term, "ideology" translate into ordinary language usage? We could maybe argue that we could substitute the word "ideas", but how do we know that ideas exist any more than consciousness does?


Deary me; I really do have to do all your thinking for you...While we're throwing the term "consciousness" out with the bath water, it seems pertinent at this point to ask exactly what you mean by "thinking" and how you could do it for me?

[Lynx]

My claim is that popularity cannot determine truth, not that argument and evidence cannot.
Yes, but in the absence of evidence, 'common sense' prevails and serves as the determinant of truth (or, if you prefer, serves as a substitute for empirical evidence). Therein lies your popularity contest.
A positive example: there is no evidence for the existence of Unicorns, so most people believe that Unicorns do not exist.

Is 'consciousness' really just a 'concept'? Are the scientists who believe in this 'entity' simply studying a 'concept'?
Unless they've turned it into a hypothesis and made predictions, then yes.

Recall, I am not trying to persuade you that 'consciousness' does not exist, only that the supposition that it does is empty and devoid of meaning -- except, of course, for mystics, since it is the modern-day equivalent of the 'soul'.
Well, if we are talking about common sense as the primary means of conceptualization, then evidence (and perhaps logic) are not required.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


In ordinary usage we use it interchangeably with the word "aware/ness". The examples you use imply that you think the word "conscious/ness" designates only that moment when "someone comes round" from an operation, blow to the head, sleep, etc. However, the common usage of it designates a state of being - being conscious as opposed to being unconscious. During the day I am conscious until I go back to sleep and become unconscious. When I'm asleep I am unaware of what goes on around me. If I am suddenly made aware - by a loud noise as my door is kicked in by the police, for instance - I become conscious, and remain in that state until the police kick my head in down at the police station. Consciousness is what I have when I am aware of my surroundings.

You may mean this, but those who talk about 'consciousness' mean far more than this. When theorists refer to this as one of the hardest of the unsolved problems of science, they are not just talking about awareness.

Anyway, being conscious and being aware are not quite the same. One can be conscious but unaware of what one is doing. For example, someone could say to you "Stop tapping, it's annoying me". You might then respond "I am sorry, I wasn't aware I was doing that!" Or, you might regain consciousness, but be unaware of where you are, or who you are.

And, I covered the fact that being conscious is not a state, above.


But this is not all. Beyond being conscious of my surroundings, I am also conscious of things not in my immediate environment, such as my social relations or the mores of my culture. This is because, as a human being, I have self-consciousness. I can monitor my behaviour, contextualise my activity, reflect on my situation, modify my approach to problems; learn; make judgements; analyse my past, my present, my future. I have a theory of mind and can intuit the consciousness of others, and this, too, contributes to my own conscious being. In fact, without this level of consciousness, communication with others would be impossible.

If you want to use 'concious' as a synonym of 'aware' (which would be a more appropriate word to use in many of the examples you give), then fine. But, you will then find it hard to discriminate those occasions in which you are conscious from those in which you are not also aware, and vice versa.

And, some of your uses of 'conscious' above depend on a theory, which now puts your employment of it in the philosophical camp.

You seem to be unaware of the fact that ordinary language is not a theory, nor does it depend on one. So, your use cannot be an ordinary one in some circumstances.


So let's try to do this. What - in ordinary language - does Marx mean by "consciousness" when he writes: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their social being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness"?

He is trying to tell us in inappropriate language that the beliefs that human beings can form are deeply affected by their social and class origin


You've already attempted to answer this by stating that the term "ideology" may be interchangeable. But how does the highly technical term, "ideology" translate into ordinary language usage? We could maybe argue that we could substitute the word "ideas", but how do we know that ideas exist any more than consciousness does?

As you will see, I have rendered what Marx meant in ordinary language without this technical term -- I could have used it, but I didn't. Ordinary language is quite sufficient for most important tasks.

Moreover, ideas do not exist (any more than numbers do) -- unless, of course, you are an Idealist; but we already knew that.:)

Next question...

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


Yes, but in the absence of evidence, 'common sense' prevails and serves as the determinant of truth (or, if you prefer, serves as a substitute for empirical evidence). Therein lies your popularity contest.
A positive example: there is no evidence for the existence of Unicorns, so most people believe that Unicorns do not exist.

Maybe so, but that would not make it true. Most people believe in 'god'. According to you, 'he' must exist, therefore.


Unless they've turned it into a hypothesis and made predictions, then yes.

I think you will find it hard to convince scientists that they are studying a concept, and not a phenomenon of nature.


Well, if we are talking about common sense as the primary means of conceptualization, then evidence (and perhaps logic) are not required.

I'm, not sure what 'common sense' has to do with this. Anyway, common sense does not exist either (any more than the average family does).

[Hit The North]

Rosa:

He is trying to tell us in inappropriate language that the beliefs that human beings can form are deeply affected by their social and class origin...

Next question... If, as you claim, ideas, like consciousness, do not exist, then there is no reason to suppose that "beliefs" exist either. How then is substituting the word "consciousness" with "beliefs" any more appropriate?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


If, as you claim, ideas, like consciousness, do not exist, then there is no reason to suppose that "beliefs" exist either. How then is substituting the word "consciousness" with "beliefs" any more appropriate?

Why do you assume that I believe that 'beliefs' exist?

[S. Zetor]

S Zetor, I think you will find that 'evolutionary psychology' will go down here rather badly.

Yes I know, I won't be pushing it.

Thanks for the book recommendations, I'll try to check at least one of them out.. I once read an essay on the topic by Dupre which didn't convince me at the time, maybe he's better in book lenght. Also Lewontin/Levins criticism I've found good and well-placed, though they haven't convinced me as much I would have liked.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

You might like this criticism of Pinker:


Meet The Flintsones

By Simon Blackburn

The Blank Slate:
The Modern Denial of Human Nature
By Stephen Pinker.

I.

When the hoary old question of nature versus nurture comes around, sides form quickly. And as Leavis once remarked, whenever this is so, we can suspect that the differences have little to do with thinking. Still, the question certainly obsesses thinkers, and crops up in various terminologies and under various rubrics: human essence versus historical accident, intrinsic nature versus social construction, nativism versus empiricism. In the ancient world the nativist Plato held that we come into the world equipped with knowledge obtained in a previous life, while the empiricist Aristotle denied it. In our own time Chomsky has revived the nativist doctrine that our capacity for language is innate, and some ultras have even held that our whole conceptual repertoire is innate. We did not ever have to learn anything. We had only to let loose what we already have.

There is a standard move, call it the Demon Move, in such a debate. First we establish our own reasonable credentials. We, the good guys, are not taken in by the labels. We recognize, of course, that any human being is the result of both nature and nurture. There is the biological or genetic endowment and there is the environment in which the genetic endowment gets expressed. We good guys understand that it is meaningless to ask whether iron rusts because of the nature of iron or because of the environment in which the iron is put. We know that the rusting requires both. It is the deluded others, the bad guys, who forget entirely about one of these components.

So if you wish to demonize theorists on the nature side, present them as genetic determinists, holding that there is no more to growing up than following a formula written in the genes. These dangerous fools think that iron is programmed to rust wherever you put it, as if oxygen and damp had nothing to do with it. And if you are demonizing theorists on the nurture side, then portray them as holding that human beings have no characteristics at all except those that are inscribed by environment and culture. These dangerous fools think that the chemical nature of iron has nothing to do with whether it rusts. (There is also a second-order or meta-demonizing move to make. Not only have the dangerous fools got themselves into an extreme position, they also have the gall to paint people like us as ourselves extreme. They are not only blind to their own extremism, they are blind also to our moderation. The things they call us! They must be doubly demonic.)

The irony is that having satisfactorily trashed the other side, people tend not to stay in the reasonable middle that they claim to occupy. The fig-leaf of moderation is very quickly discarded. Just as in football a defeat for one side is a victory for the other, and in politics a defeat for the left is a victory for the right, so here a defeat of the others is a victory for whichever extreme appealed in the first place. We want simplicity, and our binary thinking is not hospitable to compromise or to pluralism. George W. Bush can woo the people by saying that you are either with us or against us. He cannot do so by saying that you are either with us or against us or somewhere in between. It appears that only fitfully and with effort can we keep it in our heads that iron rusts owing to a number of factors. In our hearts, we are pulled one way or the other.

This is certainly so with the debate about human nature. The dichotomy between nature and nurture rapidly acquires political and emotional implications. To put it crudely, the right likes genes and the left likes culture, although there are cross currents even in this scheme. (Chomsky is a left-wing nativist.) But the natural thought is that if, say, crime is scripted in the genes, then there is no reason on that score to work for the equality of wealth and the eradication of poverty, because you will get crime anyhow. If mad jealousy or rape are evolved strategies for unsuccessful males, then there is no reason on that score to promote an atmosphere of respect for women, because you will get mad jealousy or rape anyhow. Steven Pinker insists that politics needs first and foremost a view of human nature, since only unrealistic politics will be the consequence of unrealistic views.

Pinker presents himself as entirely reasonable, naturally; and for large parts of his book he succeeds in being so. He is certainly a skillful expositor and a persuasive writer. He is intelligent and humane. There is a lot to be learned from The Blank Slate. Pinker seems to know everything (the bibliography runs to nearly thirty pages of very small print). He certainly has opinions about everything, and answers to all the questions. The panache and the promise are intoxicating. It is difficult to talk with perfect certainty of human nature, but where Shakespeare and Proust could only crawl, Pinker gallops, He is the messianic prophet of a new world, in which a confluence of sciences finally delivers us the truth about ourselves.

Students of rhetoric will also admire his mastery of the Demon Move. As is clear from the book’s title, it is the nurture side of the debate that is Pinker’s demon. He hails from the citadel of nativism, the linguistic and philosophy departments at M.I.T. The enemy is empiricism, and the blank slate of the title is the “tabula rasa” or white paper to which John Locke famously compared the human mind. The doctrine of the blank slate is taken to deny that we have a nature at all. The blank slate is the universal human endowment, which waits passively to be written on by experience and environment. It has no nature; or to put it another way, nothing in its nature determines the upshot when experience does its work. It is the clay waiting for the sculptor to form it, and the sculptor can make anything at all of it. It is this model of the mind, and its political and practical implications, that are Pinker’s target.

We might feel some disquiet about Pinker’s polemic when we remember that Locke himself held no such view and intended no such view by his famous analogy. He is perfectly happy with the idea that the nature of the slate or paper may determine what can be written on it. As a good Christian, Locke believed that an All-Wise Maker has granted us a very definite constitution, enabling us to know what we need to know and not much more. We can know what matters to us and know how to do what is good for us. But Locke also believes in our fallen nature, and he is constantly harping on “the narrow measure of our capacities” and the ways in which we are not fitted for various kinds of understanding, whereas better endowed creatures, such as angels, might be. Locke, in other words, thought that basic powers and limitations of our human nature determined the scope and the limits of our understanding. You cannot think that, if you also deny that we have a human nature at all.

Locke wanted only to deny innate ideas and innate knowledge, not innate powers or tendencies, nor innate limitations, nor innate cognitive and emotional capacities. This may sound like a mere historical quibble, but it arouses a powerful doubt about Pinker’s diagnosis of modernity. If Locke did not hold the doctrine of the blank slate, then Leibniz and Hume and Kant, not to mention the massed ranks of churchmen declaiming about human depravity and Freudians declaiming about the nature of men and women, most certainly did not hold it either. And then its status as a central and unsalutary determinant of modern thought looks a little shaky.

Still, Pinker insists that the doctrine of the blank slate is one of a trio of views that have dominated modern life, wreaking havoc in education, politics, and culture generally. Skipping for a moment, the third member of the Pinker’s malign Trinity is Cartesian dualism: the notorious separation of mind and body expressed for the modern era by Descartes. This doctrine, that of the ghost in the machine, strictly separates the mind or soul from the body. And by doing so it takes the soul outside the sphere of mechanical or scientific explanation. It splits the world of the mind from the world of science. It is often supposed to protect our cherished free will. Pinker thinks that this bad idea has obstructed the emergence of a genuine science of the mind, which is still struggling to emerge from its oppression. Here he is on stronger ground, since Cartesian dualism has surely influenced many people, and goes on doing so. It is the philosophy that makes the survival of the soul after bodily death intelligible. It is also a philosophy that makes downward causation, from mind to body, impossible to understand, enabling the cruder kind of theorist to deny that it happens.

The second Pinker’s unholy Trinity is in some ways the most interesting. It is Rousseau’s doctrine of the noble savage, or the view that human beings are naturally unselfish and peaceful and happy, and that our greed and violence and misery are entirely the products of culture or civilization. Early in the book Pinker writes:

"Nobody can fail to recognize the influence of the doctrine of the Noble Savage in contemporary consciousness. We see it in the current respect for all things natural (natural foods, natural medicines, natural childbirth) and the distrust of the man-made, the unfashionability of authoritarian styles of childrearing and education, and the understanding of social problems as repairable defects in our institutions rather than as tragedies inherent to the human condition."

Here we may feel another stirring of discomfort. The passage and its tone of certainty nicely illustrate the way the Demon Move works. For on the face of it the features of contemporary thought that Pinker here highlights admit of much more nuanced, and sensible, explanations than any simple doctrine of the Noble Savage. Perhaps we like natural foods because artificial foods taste so ghastly by comparison, as anyone returning to the United States from almost anywhere else will testify. Perhaps we like natural medicines because we mistrust the influence of the drug companies on what are presented as results in pharmacology. Perhaps we like natural childbirth (unless things go wrong) because we think that in this area at least evolution might have resulted in something fairly optimal, or perhaps like my own daughter we have a parent who strongly resented being forced to take unpleasant and dangerous drugs like pethadone by a profession bent on making things easy for itself. And perhaps we dislike authoritarian styles of childrearing not because we think children are naturally saintly, but because we have learned to doubt whether violence is the best way to eradicate violence. Finally, perhaps it is our policy to think of social problems as repairable because sometimes there is just a chance that they are, and if there is, hand-wringing over their tragic inevitability will not find the repair. Or perhaps we are just more careful about inferring tragic inevitability from science. To avoid such a mistake it is good to remember examples like this. Our susceptibility to cholera is a result of our genome, but the repair lay outside, in the public health provision of clean water.

In other words, right from the start there is a question-mark over Pinker’s historical method. It may be that an extreme view, the doctrine of the Noble Savage, has influenced some people at some times. But few parents retain the belief that their infants are angels for very long, and the ruthless European extermination of indigenous peoples everywhere scarcely testifies to the general belief in their superior nobility. A more detailed history, either of parenting or of colonialism, would uncover a whole tapestry of shifting and conflicting attitudes. So we ought to worry about the ease with which Pinker conjures his demons.

This is especially so given that the doctrine of the blank slate is inconsistent with the doctrine of the noble savage. The latter talks of innate tendencies to peace, happiness, and altruism, whereas the former denies innate tendencies at all. Can people really have held both? Pinker notices the problem, but minimizes it on the grounds that if you think there is nothing there to begin with, then at least you think there is nothing harmful there, and that is half-way to accommodating the idea of innate purity and nobility. Perhaps, but the association remains imperfect, and the more we test it, the harder it is to see modern life as really dominated by the diabolical Trinity. Pinker indeed quotes, very effectively, some hair-raising blank-slate claims, especially from the behaviorists J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner, who claimed to be able to turn anyone into anything with sufficient conditioning But then these behaviorist advertisings had nothing whatever to do with belief in the noble savage, nor in free will, with both of which they fit badly.

Still, it is not for its cultural history that people are buying this book in alarming numbers, but for the promise of a new synthesis, a science of the mind that finally tells us who we are, what is possible for us, how our politics should be organized, how people should be brought up, what to expect of ethics, or in short, how to live. In the old days, philosophers, dramatists, historians, anthropologists, writers and poets monopolized these subjects. Now behavioral economists, biologists, cognitive scientists, evolutionary theorists and neurophysiologists occupy the territory. A brave new dawn is upon us.


II.

If we imagine a score from 0 (genes have nothing to do with human nature) to 10 (culture has nothing to do with human nature), I should guess that Pinker scores about 9. He holds, for example, that the way children turn out is almost wholly unaffected by how their parents bring them up. This is mostly certified by studies of identical twins brought up apart, although here he does not refer to Cyril Burt, the British psychologist who wrecked the education system on the basis of such evidence, having made it all up.

Actually, there is a whole lot more to worry about with twins studies. Their results are expressed in terms of the heritability of properties, or proportion of variance supposed due to genetic factors. There is already a worry, since by the time of birth the twins’ genes have been expressing themselves in identical environment for nine months, and the time of separation and its extent are confounding factors (many “separated” twins are brought up within the extended family). The results of this research have included such gems as the heritability of milk and soda intake (high) or of fruit juice and diet soda (not so high). What is not usually stressed, and not stressed here, is that any measure of heritability is highly contextual. In a world of clones, the heritability of properties is zero; in a world of absolute sameness of environment, it goes to 100%. That is, if iron is put in a uniform environment, differences of rust are 100% due to difference of composition, but if identical samples of iron are put in a variety of environments, differences of rust are 100% due to environment. Heritability has also little or nothing to do with the malleability of the trait in question. In Swedish twins studies, heritability estimates for regular tobacco use was given as three times as great for men as for women, but for women it also ranged from zero to sixty percent in three different age cohorts, presumably because of changing cultural pressures on female smoking. Pinker is either not aware of the health warnings attached to this kind of research, or suppresses mention of them.

Anyhow, he thinks that violence in America is not to be approached in terms of media violence, childhood abuse, guns, discrimination, poverty, divorce, alcohol, drugs, or indeed anything except Hobbes’s view of the inevitable nature of human aggression. Indeed, he writes as if any explanation of human phenomena that invokes culture is positing a “superorganism” or a free-floating “cloud” lying above and beyond the individual.

Pinker believes that anybody who scores around 5 on my scale is in the grip of his demon myths, and really scores 0. So he routinely sets tests for the other side and parades their inability to meet them, without revisiting the question of whether his side can meet them. Thus he makes much of the fact that if exposure to the media were implicated in violence, we might expect Canada’s homicide rate to be about the same as that of the United States, while in fact it runs at about one quarter. But Pinker is silent about the fact that if nothing but a shared Hobbesian human nature were the explanation, we would also expect an identical homicide rate. (To be fair, in a different part of the book Pinker does mention an explanation of the difference in the different history of expansion of the two nations_a geographical and cultural explanation that leaves you wondering about the efficacy of his otherwise cherished biological explanation). There is also a rather startling absence of countervailing evidence, such as the recent Surgeon-General’s report about media violence , or the well-known meta-study of studies of violence by Haejung Paik and George Comstock, which found in 1994 that media violence affects young peoples’ chance of being violent about as much as smoking affects the chance of lung cancer.

In sum, Pinker is an unblushing proponent of “evolutionary psychology,” the descendant of sociobiology that has swept campuses and bookstores alike for the last decade or so. The building blocks of this addition to science are well-known. At its simplest, we find some allegedly common human trait, and we explain why we have it by imagining how a propensity towards it might have been beneficial in the Flintstone world, or in the Pleistocene conditions in which apes evolved into humans. Suppose, for instance, a finding that women typically prefer richer and taller men. We take such a fact, or factoid, and then hypothesize that this preference is an adaptation in the biologist’s sense. It contributed to increased reproductive success. That is, there is some mechanism (at its simplest, a gene or two) that increases the probability of that preference, and women who have it reproduce more successfully than women who do not. Their mate’s riches enable their children to survive in greater numbers, and their mate’s height makes them better hunters (ignore the fact that they are presumably worse gatherers). Women without the gene gradually lose out. Only those with it produced lineages descending as far as the present.

Such stories go nicely with other views about the mind. One is the doctrine of the “modular mind”, often known as the Swiss army knife picture of the mind. The mind is not one huge general-purpose information processor, but an agglomeration of modules specifically dedicated to particular tasks. It is not so much one tool as a commonwealth of little tools. So Pinker likes to talk of a faculty such as sympathy or of a propensity to aggression as switches and knobs that can be turned on or off, or set at one level or another.

Pinker rightly notices that if we go in for these stories we must be extremely careful to distinguish our overt psychologies, which he calls proximate mechanisms, from their underlying evolutionary function. I can illustrate this little trick with the juicy case of sexual desire. The evolutionary rationale is reproduction. But the overt objects of desire need have nothing whatever to do with that rationale: just think of the huge variety of non-reproductive sexual pleasures to which people are so irresistibly drawn, and the precautions that they take in order to avoid reproduction. People want sex without wanting to reproduce, and for that matter they sometimes want to reproduce without wanting sex. We should also notice that the example puts a question mark in front of the idea of a single human nature, since the overt objects of desire are so extraordinarily various. Indeed, evolutionary stories about psychology should embrace this, since evolution can only happen where variation exists and selection works on it, which fits badly with the generally monolithic ambition of finding one “real” human nature within.

Pinker can be admirably clear about these things, but he falters when it comes to their applications. Consider one of the poster-children of evolutionary psychology, the robust finding by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson that step-children are more at risk from parental abuse than natural children. Pinker writes:

"Daly and Wilson had originally examined the abuse statistics to test a prediction from evolutionary psychology. Parental love is selected over evolutionary time because it compels parents to protect and nurture their children, who are likely to carry the genes giving rise to parental love. In any species in which someone else’s offspring are likely to enter the family circle, selection will favor a tendency to prefer one’s own, because in the cold reckoning of natural selection an investment in the unrelated children would go to waste. A parent’s patience will tend to run out with stepchildren more quickly than with biological children, and in extreme cases this can lead to abuse."

Well, maybe. Actually, it is not clear that evolutionary psychology predicts good fathers at all: back in the Pleistocene, gadabout cads presumably fathered more offspring than stay-at-home dads. I seem to recall that Wilma Flintstone was a jealous and possessive wife. But in any event, we might agree that if Abel and Bertha have a child, and then Abel disappears and Chuck hooks up with Bertha, it seems plausible that Chuck should care less for the child than for one that he himself had fathered with Bertha. This is what the statistics bear out. But now we may reflect that if Abel and Bertha bought a dog or a sofa, and then Abel disappeared and Chuck hooked up with Bertha, it seems equally plausible that Chuck should care less for the step-dog or the step-sofa than if he had bought them together with Bertha. My bet would be that an incomer’s abuse of step-dogs and step-sofas is worse than abuse of dogs and sofas couples buy together. Conversely, when the genetic link is absent but the togetherness is present, as when couples decide together to adopt children, parental love seems to function perfectly well: at least Pinker does not suggest otherwise. Normal people take pleasure in the doings of children in general. The mothers at a playgroup do not typically snarl at one another’s children for being genetic competitors to their own.

The point is not that parental love is anything other than an adaptation: such a notion is absurd. The point is that its strength and its direction can be quite independent of any belief in a genetic link with the object of love. It may be that, as Pinker says, in the cold reckoning of natural selection Chuck’s investment in his adopted offspring goes to waste. How fortunate, then, that Chuck’s own reckoning is not that one. Indeed, if Chuck is anything like a good parent, he will not be thinking in terms of investment and return at all. Supposing that Chuck’s reckoning has to be that of natural selection is no better than supposing that strength and direction sexual desire is proportionate to the expectation of reproductive results. From Augustine onwards, generations of churchmen have wished that this were so, but it isn’t.

Once we become properly alert to the huge distance between our overt psychologies and the evolutionary rationales that can be offered to explain them, the messianic promise of evolutionary psychology in general, and The Blank Slate in particular, begin to look awfully thin. Pinker says, and I am sure that he is right, that some faculties, or modules, incline us to greed, lust, malice, envy, anger and aggression. Others incline us to sympathy, foresight, self-respect, desire for the good opinion of others. And then we can exchange information with others, and personal and social change can come about when we do.

But suddenly the notion of a faculty or module starts to evaporate. The Swiss army knife may have a corkscrew that works however blunt the knife is. But if there is one thing clear about our psychologies, it is that the functioning of one module can affect the delivery of another module. Our tendency to anger is suppressed by our prudence. Even at the sensory level, how we smell something is affected by what we are told it is. In the right cultural climate, our greed is checked by our desire for the esteem of our fellows. We imitate and respond and adapt ourselves to the expectations of others. And this leaves scope, to put it mildly, for culture and ethics. It means we will no longer respond in the same way. We will no longer be made angry by what might have made us angry in a different milieu, or desire what we would have desired, or envy what we would have envied.

In his less doctrinaire moods, Pinker does not deny this. He quotes with approval Peter Singer’s image of the expanding circle, whereby our concerns can come to embrace not only ourselves but also our family, tribe, class, nation, race, humanity, and eventually animals, or even plants. The circle of our concerns can widen, and indeed has done so: “once the sympathy knob is in place, having evolved to enjoy the benefits of cooperation and exchange, it can be cranked up by new kinds of information that other folks are similar to oneself.” This sounds about right to me, apart from the mixed metaphor. And apart from the lingering sense that the evolutionary rationale of sympathy, the “benefits of cooperation and exchange” taint the purity of our concern for others, even at our best, which, to flog the horse once more, is like supposing that even sodomites and foot fetishists are secretly trying to reproduce.

III.

It sounds, then, as though there remains plenty of room for education and culture, conceived of as natural devices for turning up the good knobs, and turning down the bad ones. We would look to the inherited experience of history, or the experience of parents and educators, to find how to replace competition with cooperation, or aggression with peaceability. We would try to think seriously about why the homicide rate in Canada is one quarter that of the United States, and we would welcome narratives from historians or anthropologists telling us of similar variations. We would applaud the way in which peaceful Scandinavians have descended from bloodthirsty Vikings (Pinker’s example), and we would hope to reproduce whatever factors enabled this to happen. Biological theory cannot provide the answers, or the descendants would resemble the ancestors, since evolution has had too little time to act.

We might try saying that the Scandinavians and their ancestors share a psychology. They both seek to maximize their utility. <I>Homo Economicus<I> is each of us, a simple fellow, always and only asking: what’s most in it for me? The environment is relevant insofar as it means that sometimes peace might be the answer, and sometimes violence. Our human natures are not so much a blank slate as a slate with a single scratch on it. Pinker does not really believe this, and after all it would mean that blank slate theorists were very nearly right. But neither is he prepared to avoid it by admitting the vast variety of psychologies that history parades before us, and by celebrating the cultural transformations that give us some control over them. He insists on a one-way street: culture is the product of individual psychologies. You should not explain individual psychologies by reference to culture. We need to see “culture as a product of human desires rather than as a shaper of them.”

This is a very surprising ideology for a professional linguist, and so far as I can make out Pinker does nothing to defend it. Faced with the question “do we explain language in terms of individual language speakers, or individual language speakers by reference to language?”, the only possible answer seems to be that we have two-way traffic. We learn at our mothers’ knees, and when our generation grows up we transmit what we learned, modified by us individually and collectively, onwards to the next generation. The English language is a cultural resource, and there is nothing unscientific about invoking facts about it to explain facts about individuals. The trick is to remember that facts about culture are not facts about some cloudy superorganism, some transcendental spirit of the age hovering around in hyperspace. They are summaries of facts about ourselves and our interactions. What they summarize is the very, very important part of our environment that concerns our interactions with other people. Those interactions shape the way we speak, but also the way we hope and fear and take pride and feel shame. They summarize what we imitate and emulate and eventually what we grow to be.

So the Viking has ambitions, fears, conceptions of esteem, pride and honor, all of which he gets from his culture and which determine his bloodthirstiness. All of these are lacking to his pacific descendants, while other values have been put in their place. In other words, their psychologies are indeed different, and the interesting thing for politicians, educators, and parents is the question of how those differences came about, and how the progress that they represent can be cemented and duplicated. That is what culture is. Explaining the Scandinavian progress by reference to it is just as proper as explaining my accent by reference to the prevailing sound of English where I grew up. The Viking is bloodthirsty because he lives in a bloodthirsty culture. And the culture is bloodthirsty because of the people in it. You can have both, and there are no demons anywhere.

Once we get past the demonizing and the rhetoric, take proper notice of the space between overt psychology and evolutionary rationale for it, and lose any phobia of cultural phenomena, what is left? There are plenty of sensible and plausible observations about human beings in Pinker’s book. But it is not clear that any of them are particularly new: Hobbes and Adam Smith give us more than anybody else. And at least their insights have stood the test of time, unlike that of some more recent work. Consider again the example of media violence. Here it seems that psychologists cannot speak with one voice about its effects. But worse than that, much worse, they cannot even speak with one voice about what psychological studies find about its effects. That is, the meta-studies that Pinker cites flatly disagree with the meta-studies that I mentioned earlier. If this is the state of play, we do well to plead the privilege of skepticism. We also do well too not to jettison other cultural resources too quickly. The depressing thing about The Blank Slate is that behind the rhetoric and the salesmanship, I suspect that Pinker knows this as well as anyone else.

Simon Blackburn is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. His books Think and Being Good are published by Oxford University Press.


http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/reviews/Pinker.htm (http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/reviews/Pinker.htm)

Now, I do not endorse everything Blackburn says, but he is right about Pinker.

[Hit The North]

BTB:
Why do you assume that I believe that 'beliefs' exist?

I don't care whether you believe it or not. The point at issue is the quote from Marx, which you claim to have presented in ordinary language by substituting the inappropriate (your word) philosophical term "consciousness" with the plainer, more appropriate term "beliefs". But if "consciousness" and "beliefs" are both words which name things which don't exist, where is the advance in clarity in your substitution?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


I don't care whether you believe it or not. The point at issue is the quote from Marx, which you claim to have presented in ordinary language by substituting the inappropriate (your word) philosophical term "consciousness" with the plainer, more appropriate term "beliefs". But if "consciousness" and "beliefs" are both words which name things which don't exist, where is the advance in clarity in your substitution?

You must care, or you would not ask this odd question.

But anyway, my question was this:


Why do you assume that I believe that 'beliefs' exist?

Nothing there about 'caring'.

Perhaps you are too used to seeing things that do not exist? :rolleyes:

[Lynx]

Maybe so, but that would not make it true.
Correct.

Most people believe in 'god'. According to you, 'he' must exist, therefore.
I'm saying only the concept must exist. If nobody believed in God, there would be no objection, just as there's no objection to the consensus regarding Unicorns - until now.

I think you will find it hard to convince scientists that they are studying a concept, and not a phenomenon of nature.
Why? Is a phenomenon a step up from the conceptual dungeon?

I'm, not sure what 'common sense' has to do with this. Anyway, common sense does not exist either (any more than the average family does).
If a concept has no evidence or logic behind it, yet remains popular, one possible explanation is 'common sense'. Or Plato had too much time on his hands. Or whatever. The vacuousness of an idea's origin has nothing to do with its validity.

The average family, if defined vaguely, could exist.

[Hit The North]

Nothing there about 'caring'.Wtf are you talking about? There doesn't have to be for me to state I don't care either way.


But anyway, my question was this:


Why do you assume that I believe that 'beliefs' exist? Yes, but your question is besides the point. I didn't assume you believed 'beliefs' exist, I merely pointed out that by substituting one word which names something which doesn't exist for another gets us nowhere in clarifying Marx's statement.

My question to you was
How then is substituting the word "consciousness" with "beliefs" any more appropriate?Your response was mere avoidance. But then you're probably just having a laugh with me.

Another question for you to take the piss out of:

You seem to be fond of denying the existence of many things, including consciousness, common sense, wormholes (which you claimed could never materially exist). What is your understanding of existence? How do we determine what exists from what doesn't exist?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


I'm saying only the concept must exist. If nobody believed in God, there would be no objection, just as there's no objection to the consensus regarding Unicorns - until now.

Even so, scientists are not studying a 'concept', but an alleged state, or process.


Is a phenomenon a step up from the conceptual dungeon?

You already know the answer to this; you say god is a 'concept' but 'he' does not exist. However, i am sure you agree that, say, sunsets exist (or take place). They are phenomena.


If a concept has no evidence or logic behind it, yet remains popular, one possible explanation is 'common sense'. Or Plato had too much time on his hands. Or whatever. The vacuousness of an idea's origin has nothing to do with its validity.

You keep appealing to this vague thing called 'common sense'. Why?


The average family, if defined vaguely, could exist.

So could 'god', but what's the point of that?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


Wtf are you talking about? There doesn't have to be for me to state I don't care either way.

If you didn't care, you'd not get het up and throw your toys out of the pram, as you seem to be ready to do here.


Yes, but your question is besides the point. I didn't assume you believed 'beliefs' exist, I merely pointed out that by substituting one word which names something which doesn't exist for another gets us nowhere in clarifying Marx's statement.

It's not beside the point, for you are assuming I believe that beliefs exist, when I have not indicated either way whether I do or not.


Your response was mere avoidance.

Yes, I copy you far too much for my own good.


But then you're probably just having a laugh with me.

No, just giving you a hard time, as I told RS2K that I would do when he invited me here to annoy you mystics.

Having a laugh at your expense would be far too easy. No fun in that.


Another question for you to take the piss out of:

Thanks; I appreciate the practice.


You seem to be fond of denying the existence of many things, including consciousness, common sense, wormholes (which you claimed could never materially exist). What is your understanding of existence? How do we determine what exists from what doesn't exist?

I'll leave that to the scientists, but I reserve the right to point out if and when they are talking nonsense.

[DesertShark]

I am in fact using this word in two ways; 1) in its ordinary, medical sense, and 2) In its philosophical sense.

I claim that in the latter it is either meaningless, or if it means anything, it is indistinguishable from the more ancient word 'soul'.
I don't know the meaning you are referring to in the second instance, which is why I asked for a definition. What you said here does not clear that up.


I don't have any, nor do I want any -- what I claim is that any evidence you can produce to show that there is something called 'consciousness' can equally well be used to show that there is something called 'the soul'.
Then how is your claim justified? It isn't.


I think, in these comments you are confusing signalling with communication.
Which is a form of communication...


You need to read that summary article I posted a little more carefully, since it deals with these points.
Actually it didn't. All it talked about was scanning the brain and psychology, I don't know anything about the brain through pyschology, I know about it through neuroscience. In neuroscience, they know what parts of the brain do what from early brain surgeries (and the fact that brains all turn out the same, something to do with genetic patterning). Since they do those with the patient awake, Brodmann asked his patients (this back in the early 1900s) if they would allow him to send electrical impulses in different areas to find out what they did and because a lot of patients agreed to it he was able to map out motor and sensory areas of the brain (Brodmann's areas). Almost all of them have different names now, but you can still find his numbered areas - he labeled around 50 or more. Your article didn't address the fact that we know all this already.

[Hit The North]

Rosa:
It's not beside the point, for you are assuming I believe that beliefs exist, when I have not indicated either way whether I do or not.You keep saying this without a shred of proof. This is what I posted:
Rosa:


He is trying to tell us in inappropriate language that the beliefs that human beings can form are deeply affected by their social and class origin...

Next question...
If, as you claim, ideas, like consciousness, do not exist, then there is no reason to suppose that "beliefs" exist either. How then is substituting the word "consciousness" with "beliefs" any more appropriate?


Nowhere do I imply that you believe in the existence of "beliefs", I merely follow your reasoning, supposing that if ideas cannot be said to exist neither can beliefs as they equally immaterial - implying that your correction to Marx's alleged "inappropriate" use of language is no correction at all.

Now feel free to disagree, but don't pretend you don't understand.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

DS:


I don't know the meaning you are referring to in the second instance, which is why I asked for a definition. What you said here does not clear that up.

Indeed, and I do not think it is possible to clear this up. But, it's not a word I would wish to use, so perhaps you are asking the wrong person.


Then how is your claim justified? It isn't.

It's more of a challenge (or it was originally presented that way) to those who think they mean something by this word. So, I do not need to justify anything.


Which is a form of communication...

No more than a communicating door is a form of communication.


In neuroscience, they know what parts of the brain do what from early brain surgeries (and the fact that brains all turn out the same, something to do with genetic patterning). Since they do those with the patient awake, Brodmann asked his patients (this back in the early 1900s) if they would allow him to send electrical impulses in different areas to find out what they did and because a lot of patients agreed to it he was able to map out motor and sensory areas of the brain (Brodmann's areas). Almost all of them have different names now, but you can still find his numbered areas - he labeled around 50 or more. Your article didn't address the fact that we know all this already.

Well that article did handle that point; it said that certain areas may be necessary for this or that function, but they are not sufficient.

But, I would go further and say that people report odd things if you screw around with their brains.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


You keep saying this without a shred of proof.

I do not need to prove it since it is part of your own assumption. You'll be asking me to prove your name here is BTB next.


If, as you claim, ideas, like consciousness, do not exist, then there is no reason to suppose that "beliefs" exist either. How then is substituting the word "consciousness" with "beliefs" any more appropriate?

Once more, your question is inappropriate since it is based on an assumption I do not hold. Ask it to someone else if you are that desperate for an answer.


Nowhere do I imply that you believe in the existence of "beliefs", I merely follow your reasoning, supposing that if ideas cannot be said to exist neither can beliefs as they equally immaterial - implying that your correction to Marx's alleged "inappropriate" use of language is no correction at all.

But you are assuming, once more, that I believe that beliefs are the kinds of things that can be said to exist -- and I have passed no comment on that. You deny this now, but this is what underlies this question of yours:


If, as you claim, ideas, like consciousness, do not exist, then there is no reason to suppose that "beliefs" exist either. How then is substituting the word "consciousness" with "beliefs" any more appropriate?

The consequent cannot be attributed to me, nor inferred from anything I have said, unless you believe that I believe that beliefs are the kinds of things that can be said to exist.

Recall, I am not denying that human beings can be said (at appropriate times) to be conscious, so why would you think I would deny they can have beliefs?

Note, that my saying that we can have beliefs does not commit me to the existence of something called 'beliefs'.

Nor am I claiming that 'consciousness' does not exist, only that it makes no sense to suppose that it does.


Now feel free to disagree, but don't pretend you don't understand.

I rather think it is you that fails to understand here.

[casper]

... i skimmed though, of the things that stood out was the claim that ordinary language doesn't depends on a theory? yes it does, or rather, there is a theory explaining human language, however you'll like to look at it.

human language depends on the theory that experiences and objects can be given a "pointer" or symbol for something in our minds and that a general agreement can be found in correlations between the symbols and objects/experiences and thoughts that allow for the symbols to be reproduced to represent those things. if that was impossible, i'm sure you wouldn't understand this string of markings your reading now. of course there are other symbols that can be used, and if those symbols arn't in place then the language is unreadable. an example is my inability to read Japanese, they use different symbols.

[Le People]

All the response have been very interesting. The one question that they have brought up to me is directly toward Rosa Litchenstien. If counciousness is unreal, why do we as humans, as marxists even, have consideration towards the welfare of others. Obviously if all we are is just the summing of nerves, then a little bit of pain and suffering doesn't do any harm in the grand scheme of things.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Casper:


yes it does, or rather, there is a theory explaining human language, however you'll like to look at it.

Not so. For every indicative sentence there is in language, there exists its negation. No theory can have all its sentences negated.

So, language cannot be a theory.

And I deny there is a theory accounting for language, too. There are several contenders, sure -- but then, since science has more failed theories to its name than George W Bush has failed utterances, I rather think we can take these with a pinch of salt.


human language depends on the theory that experiences and objects can be given a "pointer" or symbol for something in our minds and that a general agreement can be found in correlations between the symbols and objects/experiences and thoughts that allow for the symbols to be reproduced to represent those things. if that was impossible, i'm sure you wouldn't understand this string of markings your reading now. of course there are other symbols that can be used, and if those symbols arn't in place then the language is unreadable. an example is my inability to read Japanese, they use different symbols.

I do not see how this establishes what you allege it does.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Le People:


If counciousness is unreal, why do we as humans, as marxists even, have consideration towards the welfare of others. Obviously if all we are is just the summing of nerves, then a little bit of pain and suffering doesn't do any harm in the grand scheme of things.

Where have I said I believe any of this stuff about 'nerves'?

All I did was say that this word is a hang-over from Platonic/Christian/Cartesian mysticism.

I did not deny that the word 'conscious' had a use (and I gave examples).

[Lynx]

Even so, scientists are not studying a 'concept', but an alleged state, or process.
At this point, I imagine scientists are studying bits and pieces of more fundamental things. Can you be more specific - give an example of science studying the process or state of consciousness?

The point of this part of our discussion was to compare one concept (Unicorns) with another (God) in the context of a search for truth. One is dismissed, the other is argued - both in the absence of evidence.

You already know the answer to this; you say god is a 'concept' but 'he' does not exist. However, i am sure you agree that, say, sunsets exist (or take place). They are phenomena.
Sunsets are observable and understood. Ok, I see the difference now. But if consciousness is a phenomena, then sunsets should be promoted as an event?

You keep appealing to this vague thing called 'common sense'. Why?
You wrote:

Recall, I am not trying to persuade you that 'consciousness' does not exist, only that the supposition that it does is empty and devoid of meaning -- except, of course, for mystics, since it is the modern-day equivalent of the 'soul'.
So yes, the supposition can be empty, as a result of 'common sense', which also accounts for its popularity.

So could 'god', but what's the point of that?
That things can exist even if they are useless or pointless.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


At this point, I imagine scientists are studying bits and pieces of more fundamental things. Can you be more specific - give an example of science studying the process or state of consciousness?

Help yourself:

http://consc.net/online


So yes, the supposition can be empty, as a result of 'common sense', which also accounts for its popularity.

Well, the rewason I asked is that I deny there is such a thing as 'common sense'.

On that, see these threads:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/common-sense-t62239/index.html

http://www.revleft.com/vb/commonsense-t63497/index.html

[Lynx]

Help yourself:

http://consc.net/online
Lots and lots of bits and pieces. My imagination has been confirmed. In these endeavors consciousness serves as the holy grail, their inspiration, their muse.

Well, the reason I asked is that I deny there is such a thing as 'common sense'.
When something appears to make sense to a lot of people, I call it common sense. Alternative explanations for the widespread acceptance of an idea lacking evidence: memes, abductive reasoning, contingency, disinterest. In the case of God, an explicit request for faith.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


When something appears to make sense to a lot of people, I call it common sense. Alternative explanations for the widespread acceptance of an idea lacking evidence: memes, abductive reasoning, contingency, disinterest. In the case of God, an explicit request for faith.

Fine, but then a better phrase would be "widely held belief". This is to be preferred since beliefs can be false, and the way we use the term "common sense" suggests it has little to do with beliefs.

[Lynx]

Fine, but then a better phrase would be "widely held belief". This is to be preferred since beliefs can be false, and the way we use the term "common sense" suggests it has little to do with beliefs.
Well I do assume that common sense is based on some form of logic or inference. Perhaps abductive reasoning is the source for it. Logical arguments can be just as false.

[DeLeonist]

While I think at present it is an open question whether consciousness is 'for' anything (ie whether it has effects on behaviour or is merely epiphenomenal), I agree with contemporary philosophers such as Chalmers, Strawson and Searle that it is a real, natural phenomena which is in need of explanation.

Regarding some physicalist philosophers such as Dennett and the Churchland's, whose views seem to amount to a denial of the existence of consciousness or experience, I think Strawson says it well:



‘They are prepared to deny the existence of experience.’ At this we should stop and wonder. I think we should feel very sober, and a little afraid, at the power of human credulity, the capacity of human minds to be gripped by theory, by faith. For this particular denial is the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought, not just the whole history of philosophy. It falls, unfortunately, to philosophy, not religion, to reveal the deepest woo-woo of the human mind. I find this grievous, but, next to this denial, every known religious belief is only a little less sensible than the belief that grass is green.


( from Consciousness and it Place in Nature - unfortunately I haven't got enough posts to put in links)

David Chalmers' paper "moving Forward on the problem of consciousness" is well worth a read.

Strawson's proposed solution to the problem is panpsychism - the view that that consciousness or 'proto-consciousness' is a fundamental property of matter.

This view initially seems absurd but I think it does have some merit. It seems to me that some form of panpsychism could plausibly be attributed to Engels and Lenin. E.g. Plekhanov's remark that Engels said 'Old Spinoza' was right that thought and extension were two attributes of one and the same substance, and Lenin's view that "matter possesses a property which is essentially akin to sensation, the property of reflection."

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


Well I do assume that common sense is based on some form of logic or inference. Perhaps abductive reasoning is the source for it. Logical arguments can be just as false.

Logical arguments may be valid or invalid, but never false.

And if you have a look at the threads I linked to above, you will see that I deny what you say of 'common sense', and why.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

DeLeonist, I see you haven't read this thread!

The philosophers you quote have clearly bought into the Platonic/Christian/Cartesian myth that there is such a thing as 'consciousness', and have confused the ordinary words we use to describe those we deem conscious (in almost exclusively medical conditions) for a mysterious state, and one that resists analysis to this day.

[And that is because it is based on a misuse of language, as Wittgenstein argued. To such pseudo-questions there are no answers.]

[mikelepore]

Rosa, Dec. 29th:


This seems to take for granted that there is something called 'the mind' -- which is in effect just a left-over from Platonic/Christian/Cartesian ideas on the 'soul', and thus has nothing to do with materialism.

It's inevitable that a name will be given to the fact that we see intelligible patterns in what people do. When we type these words, the energy extracted from food doesn't go straight to moving our fingers without any sort of processing, which could produce only random motions. To show the meanings of word patterns, you could type a message telling me to pick up a pencil and then I could respond by doing it. At each end of that transmission each of us has an information processing unit, which is the brain, using inputs from sensory receptors and memory. This processing is known as the mind or consciousness or several other names. I don't see any Cartesian dualism involved in naming the mind.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Mike:


It's inevitable that a name will be given to the fact that we see intelligible patterns in what people do. When we type these words, the energy extracted from food doesn't go straight to moving our fingers without any sort of processing, which could produce only random motions. To show the meanings of word patterns, you could type a message telling me to pick up a pencil and then I could respond by doing it. At each end of that transmission each of us has an information processing unit, which is the brain, using inputs from sensory receptors and memory. This processing is known as the mind or consciousness or several other names. I don't see any Cartesian dualism involved in naming the mind.

Well, of course, we can all remember, and express emotions, and so on -- but how this shows there is something called 'the mind' is still unclear.

And the question of dualism depends on how the details you mention are spelt out. However, in view of the comments below, your attempt to do so either collapses into an infinite regress, or it implies that the mind is a surrogate non-material agent. But one thing is for sure, had it not been for the Platonic/Christian/Cartesian myth, we would not be referring to the 'mind' to begin with.

And this cannot be correct:


At each end of that transmission each of us has an information processing unit, which is the brain, using inputs from sensory receptors and memory. This processing is known as the mind or consciousness or several other names.

No information is processed in the way you indicate (unless you are using this word in a technical sense that is unconneccted with its usual sense), since that would require the brain to be populated with language speaking agents -- and that is because this is what the ordinary use of 'information' would connote.

If this is so, then an infinite regress will be initiated as you try to acount for the operation of these little men/women in the head, these homunculi.

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

If, on the other hand, you try to forestall this regress by postulating that these agents do not also have their own material inner processors, then those agents will be different in name only from the Cartesian 'soul'.

The only other way to respond to the above is to claim that by 'information' you mean something technical; but in that case, you will not have explained how we deal with information in the ordinary sense, but something called 'information', and we are back at square one.

[S. Zetor]

You might like this criticism of Pinker:

Yes, I think it was quite good, I don't really disagree with it, as I've never bought into that determinism thing anyway.

I used to think very much like a Blank Slater when I was younger, and in my opinion that is really pretty common in the do-good activist scene where I used to hang out (probably as common as the gene-for-this, gene-for-that thought is in pop science pages of newspapers nowadays).

With a background like that, reading e.g. Pinker's Black Slate and How the Mind Works was a good experience for me. (And just in case: no, I didn't swallow them uncritically etc.) That's why I don't think he's all crap, even though Blackburn's critique is pretty much right in my opinion too.

The reason I've (and will) read EP stuff is visible in Blackburn's essay as well, though. He concedes that Pinker makes good points, that he doesn't disagree with this or that in Pinker etc.. but IMO that's precisely the problem of "anti-EPers" (if I may call them that), they don't have a positive agenda. Besides some Levins & Lewontin's Dialectical Biologist, all I've come across (and I don't claim to have come across too much) is mostly reacting to what EPers are saying with the formula identical to Blackburn's: "they make some valid points and good observations, but".

So what is the substance behind the valid points some EPer makes..? Most often that's left hanging in the air for the poor reader to figure out him/herself.

If someone knows a good book that is not mostly a philosophical critique of biological determinism (i.e. has a negative agenda), I'm more than happy to take more recommendations. Some time ago I bought Anne Fausto-Sterling's Myths of Gender. Biological Theories of Women and Men, I hope it's good some good stuff in it.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

SZ:


they don't have a positive agenda

I'm not sure what you mean.

[Hit The North]

Rosa:

Note, that my saying that we can have beliefs does not commit me to the existence of something called 'beliefs'.Then why do you have an objection to saying that people can have consciousness?


Nor am I claiming that 'consciousness' does not exist, only that it makes no sense to suppose that it does.But, surely, the very existence of the concept of "consciousness" and its historical durability, means that it makes sense for most people to think in theses terms. Marx certainly found it useful in The German Ideology to work out his theory of historical materialism - which incidentally holds class consciousness as a central concept. At the very least, the term "consciousness" serves as a handy catch-all for other, more discreet types of mental phenomena - one's stock of knowledge, one's beliefs, one's sense of self, one's sense of place, one's sense of the 'other', one's sense of self-interest, etc.

Anyway, what do you mean by "exist"? Does something only exist if it has an existence independent of human beings? Isn't it legitimate, for instance, to believe in the existence of power relations? Or is your objection that these things are immaterial?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


Then why do you have an objection to saying that people can have consciousness?

I do not object to saying that a certain individual is conscious (but only in specific medical conditions); what I object to is the reification of this word into a state called 'consciousness', which is a throw-back to Platonic/Christain/Cartesian myth.


But, surely, the very existence of the concept of "consciousness" and its historical durability, means that it makes sense for most people to think in theses terms. Marx certainly found it useful in The German Ideology to work out his theory of historical materialism - which incidentally holds class consciousness as a central concept. At the very least, the term "consciousness" serves as a handy catch-all for other, more discreet types of mental phenomena - one's stock of knowledge, one's beliefs, one's sense of self, one's sense of place, one's sense of the 'other', one's sense of self-interest, etc.

As I said earlier, Marx got into dificulties when he ignored his own advice:


The philosophers have only to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, in order to recognise it, as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realise that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life.

I think it is possible to recast what Marx thought he meant in less class-compromised terms, ones that make no concessions to Platonism.

Of course, we could always regard 'class consciousness' as a technical term, which can be paraphrased into ordinary words should we want to, but the danger with that is that those who want to retain this phrase will begin to think along Cartesian lines.

And it is demonstrable that Marxists who have theorised in this area (Marx himself, Engels, Lenin, Voloshinov, and others -- and some in the SWP, or associated with it, like Alex Callinicos, John Parrington, Marnie Holborow, Paul McGarr, John Rees, etc.) have fallen headlong into this trap -- further illustrating the truth of comment of Marx's:


The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.... Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.

BTB:


Anyway, what do you mean by "exist"? Does something only exist if it has an existence independent of human beings? Isn't it legitimate, for instance, to believe in the existence of power relations? Or is your objection that these things are immaterial?

There are indeed several senses of the word 'exist'. I have no objection to speaking of power relations in the way you have done here. But they do not exist in the same way that, say, you or I do.

Even so, I am unsure of the relevance of all this.

Finally, I do not like the modern habit of using the word 'mental' in this way:


mental phenomena

We have mental patients, mental hospitals, mental wards, mental health. Here the word "mental" has a clear use. But, what the dickens does 'mental phenomena' mean? Deranged phenomena perhaps?

[KC]

As I said earlier, Marx got into dificulties when he ignored his own advice:

Quote:
The philosophers have only to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, in order to recognise it, as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realise that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life.
I think it is possible to recast what Marx thought he meant in less class-compromised terms, ones that make no concessions to Platonism.

Of course, we could always regard 'class consciousness' as a technical term, which can be paraphrased into ordinary words should we want to, but the danger with that is that those who want to retain this phrase will begin to think along Cartesian lines.

And it is demonstrable that Marxists who have theorised in this area (Marx himself, Engels, Lenin, Voloshinov, and others -- and some in the SWP, or associated with it, like Alex Callinicos, John Parrington, Marnie Holborow, Paul McGarr, John Rees, etc.) have fallen headlong into this trap -- further illustrating the truth of comment of Marx's:

Could you clarify this?


There are indeed several senses of the word 'exist'. I have no objection to speaking of power relations in the way you have done here. But they do not exist in the same way that, say, you or I do.

Even so, I am unsure of the relevance of all this.

Sorry for the lengthy quote, but I found this all relevant to this discussion:

"Marx's scholarly concern was with capitalism, and in studying this society he naturally operated with social Relations, his vocabulary reflecting the real social ties which he uncovered. What remains to be explained, however, is how Marx could conceive of social factors as Relations where physical objects are involved. For in his discussions, machines, the real articles produced, the worker's person, etc., are all components of one social Relation or another. We learn, for example, that "capital is, among other things, also an instrument of production, also past personal labor" (Marx, 1904, 270). According to the definition given earlier, every such component is itself a Relation. It follows from this that Marx also conceives of things as Relations. Unless this conclusion can be defended, the interpretation I have offered of social Relations will have to be drastically altered. By drawing together the relevant evidence and tracing the history of the broad philosophical position that underlies Marx's practice, I shall try in this chapter to provide such a defense.


Most modern thinkers would maintain that there cannot be relations without things just as there cannot be things without relations. Things, according to this "common sense" view, constitute the basic terms of each relation and cannot themselves be reduced to relations. However, this objection only applies to Marx if what he is doing is caricatured as trying to reduce the terms of a relation to that which is said to stand between them. But his is not an attempt to reify "between" or "together". Instead, as we saw in the previous chapter, the sense of "relation" itself has been extended to cover what is related, so that either term may be taken to express both in their peculiar connection.


No one would deny that things appear and function as they do because of their spatial-temporal ties with other things, including man as a creature with both physical and social characteristics. To conceive of things as Relations is simply to interiorize this interdependence—as we have seen Marx do with social factors—in the thing itself. Thus, the book before me expresses and therefore, on this model, relationally contains everything from the fact that there is a light on in my room to the social practices and institutions of my society which made this particular work possible. The conditions of its existence are taken to be part of what it is, and indicated by the fact that it is just this and nothing else. In the history of ideas, where every new thought is invariably an old one warmed over, this view is generally referred to as the philosophy of internal relations.1 (http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/a_ch03.php#1)

(http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/a_ch03.php#1)
There are four kinds of evidence for attributing a philosophy of internal relations to Marx. First, Marx makes statements which place him on the side of those who view things as Relations. He declares, for example, that "the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man" (Marx, 1959a, 103). Marx also calls man (who, after all, has a body as well as a social significance) the "ensemble [aggregate] of social relations" (Marx and Engels, 1964, 646). Elsewhere, this same creature is said to be "a natural object, a thing, although a living conscious thing" (Marx, 1958, 202). Marx can refer to man as a thing as well as an ensemble of social relations, because he conceives of each thing as a Relation, in this instance, as the ensemble of social relations. Engels' comments are often more explicit still, as when he maintains that "the atom itself is nothing more than a Relation" (Marx and Engels, 1941, 221).


To be sure, Marx also speaks—particularly when treating the fetishism of commodities—of social relations which are taken for things. However, it is not difficult to interpret these instances as attempts to make a distinction between two kinds of Relations, one of which (in conformity with ordinary usage) he calls "things". The view I am proposing does not require that Marx cease speaking of "things", only that they also be grasped as Relations. While statements indicating the existence of things can be interpreted relationally, his statements which present things as Relations cannot be interpreted as easily in a way that accords the former their customary independence.


Second, even if Marx's direct comments on the subject of things as Relations are ambiguous, his treatment of man and nature (or its material components) as Relations with internal ties to one another is not: "That man's physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself" (Marx, 1595a, 74). Likewise, when he declares that man "is nature" or that his objects "reside in the nature of his being", the ties to which our attention is drawn are clearly not external ones (Marx, 1959a, 156). Rather, the individual is held to be in some kind of union with his object; they are in fact relationally contained in one another, which requires that each be conceived of as a Relation.


The same inner tie is presented from the other side when Marx declares that he views "the evolution of the economic foundations of society" as a "process of natural history", or includes among the forces of nature "those of man's own nature" along with "those of so-called nature" (Marx, 1958, 10; Marx, 1973, 488). Unless we accord Marx a conception of things as Relations, those comments (of which I have quoted but a few) which reveal man as somehow an extension of nature, and nature as somehow an extension of man, can only be understood metaphorically or as poetic utterances.2 (http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/a_ch03.php#2)

(http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/a_ch03.php#2)
Third, if we take the position that Marx drew an indelible line between things and social Relations we are left with the task of explaining what kind of interaction he saw in the physical world and how the two worlds of nature and society are related. Does Marx view natural development on the model of cause and effect? He specifically states his opposition to seeking for first causes in economics and religion, where it is the relations in which the so-called first causes stand that still require explanation (Marx, 1959a, 68-9). In a rare instance where he records the connection he sees between two physical objects, his adherence to a philosophy of internal relations is evident. "The sun", he says, "is the object of the plant—an indispensable object to it confirming its life—just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the life awakening power of the sun, of the sun's objective essential power" (Marx, 1959a, 157). The sun's affect on the plant, which most of us are inclined to treat causally, is considered by Marx to be an "expression" of the sun itself, a means by which it manifests what it is and, in this way, part of it.


To clarify this, Marx adds that "A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being, and plays no part in the system of nature" (Marx, 1959a, 157). Each physical object, by virtue of being a natural object, is more than whatever part of it is apparent or easier to isolate. As natural objects, the sun and the plant have their natures—as Marx puts it—outside themselves, such that the relation between them is conceived as appertaining to each, and is part of the full meaning conveyed by their respective concepts.3 (http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/a_ch03.php#3)

(http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/a_ch03.php#3)
It is not only the difficulty of attributing to Marx a causal explanation of physical phenomena but also—as I have indicated—the problems raised by combining a common sense view of nature with his conception of social relations that argues for his having a philosophy of internal relations. Sidney Hook offers the arresting case of a critic who makes a clean break between Marx's social relations, of which he gives one of the better accounts, and the objects of nature. Hook claims "the Marxian totality is social and limited by other totalities", and that "For Marx there are wholes not the whole" (Hook, 1962, 62). This raises the practical problem of how to explain the affect of the physical world on social phenomena. For example, how are we to interpret Marx's claim that the mode of production determines what occurs in other social sectors when the mode of production includes machines and factories (physical objects) as well as the way people use these objects and cooperate among themselves (social relations)? The former suggests a causal interpretation of this claim, for this is the kind of explanation into which physical objects generally enter; while the latter suggests one that emphasizes reciprocal action between the parts, for this is the kind of explanation into which social relations generally enter.4 (http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/a_ch03.php#4)

(http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/a_ch03.php#4)
In From Hegel to Marx and Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx Hook wavers between these two incompatible explanatory models. Under pressure to choose, in his most recent work, Marx and the Marxists, he has finally settled on a causal account, and Marx's conception of history is declared a "monistic theory" with the mode of production held solely responsible for all major social developments (Hook, 1955, 37, 36). In the last analysis, the division of Marxism into separate wholes simply did not allow Hook to use his own considerable insights into Marx's social relations to explain the complex interaction which he knows is there. This is not to dismiss the fact that for a variety of reasons Hook's views on Marxism have changed over the years. I have simply indicated the position taken in his early works which allowed for and even rendered likely this later development.


Fourth and last, I believe I am justified in ascribing a philosophy of internal relations to Marx because it would have required a total break with the philosophical tradition in which he was nourished for this not to be so. Hegel, Leibniz and Spinoza had all sought for the meanings of things and/or of the terms which characterize them in their relations inside the whole (variously referred to as "substance", "nature", "God", etc); and, judging by his voluminous notebooks, these are thinkers the young Marx studied with the greatest care (Marx/Engels, 1932, 99-112).


It is chiefly because the philosophy of internal relations is currently held in such disrepute that it is assumed Marx could not have accepted it, and, consequently, that the burden of proof rests upon me to show that he did. In presenting evidence from Marx's writings which places him in this tradition I have agreed to play the role of prosecutor. I should now like to suggest, however, that if Marx inherited this conception from his immediate predecessors, the burden of proof rests with those who believe he discarded it; in which case we are also entitled to know the conception of things and social factors with which he replaced it—an atomist outlook, such as is implied in the interpretation of Marxism as "economic determinism", or something completely different for which no name exists as Althusser claims, or what? In the remainder of this chapter and in the one that follows I shall briefly sketch the history of the philosophy of internal relations, and respond to some of the "devastating" criticisms which have kept writers of all persuasions from even taking seriously the possibility that Marx might have shared this view."


Ollman, Bertell. Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

KC:


Could you clarify this?

In what way?

And thanks for the Ollman quote, but I can't take this guy seriously. He makes so many mistakes, his work is a joke.

[DesertShark]

It's more of a challenge (or it was originally presented that way) to those who think they mean something by this word. So, I do not need to justify anything.



No more than a communicating door is a form of communication.



Well that article did handle that point; it said that certain areas may be necessary for this or that function, but they are not sufficient.

But, I would go further and say that people report odd things if you screw around with their brains.
If you make a claim like that ('all these explanations can be used to show a soul exists'), but then do not give an example or justify it any way, it does no one here any good. If you were trying to bring it up as a challenge (which I think is a good thing, we should challenge our ideas all the time), then you need to actually challenge it for anyone to benefit and attempt to make an argument against it. Otherwise, its just a statement that you use as justification, and it fails to help anyone on here.

I didn't know a door could communicate (mostly because its not living)...that sentence is very odd, you should think about explaining it.

But would everyone report the same odd thing everytime? I doubt it.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

DS:


If you make a claim like that ('all these explanations can be used to show a soul exists'), but then do not give an example or justify it any way, it does no one here any good. If you were trying to bring it up as a challenge (which I think is a good thing, we should challenge our ideas all the time), then you need to actually challenge it for anyone to benefit and attempt to make an argument against it. Otherwise, its just a statement that you use as justification, and it fails to help anyone on here.

I am not trying to 'help' anyone; I am challenging ideas that the vast majority of human beings have accepted for thousands of years:


The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.... Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.

And, I am not trying to present an alternative theory, since I reject all philosophical theories as so much hot air.

So, I am saying: you try to justify the belief in 'consciousness', and I will show you how that also supports belief in the 'soul'.

Of course, if no one wants to take up my challenge, so be it.


I didn't know a door could communicate (mostly because its not living)...that sentence is very odd, you should think about explaining it.

They connect rooms, mainly in Hotels:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/2470770.html

http://partners.static.cityvoter.com/GetImage.ashx?img=00/00/00/15/01/84/150184-228087.jpg&w=377

[gilhyle]

Traditionally - and quite apart from philosophy - a phenomenon of awareness which is distinctively human has been postulated as part of the explanation of some unique human behaviour patterns, particulary in the extent of teaching of skills from generation to generation (not uniquely human, but distinctively extensive among humans), of handling death and of postulating explanatory theories - behaviours of which we observe nothing similar among other living things. We are not always well placed to oberserve these and the observation of the distinctive treatment of death seems the most well grounded of these.

However, once accepted we should not run in such fear of the religious fethishisation of the supposedly distinctive nature of humans (in the image of God etc.), that we rush to delete the postulation of such a distinctive awareness because it is open to abuse.

What appears on the surface as a distinctive level of awareness characteristic of humans should be analysed in two ways. Firstly, it should be pinned down - in much of our behaviour there is good reason to believe that there is no distinctive awareness at play. Secondly as we pin down which kinds of awareness we are talking about we can analyse it at various levels - the neurological, the social and the evolutionary.

We have some interesting speculative theories on that and some suggestive but inconclusive data - which is expanding at an incredible rate at the moment - but we dont have good scientific theories.

However, once we have refused to be bounded by our fear of religion and acknowledged that there is potential here for scientific work and - meanwhile - taken advantage of some fun opportunities for harmless speculation....what else is there to this question ? Why would anyone at this point in history need to know the mechanism and functional efficacy of any distinctively human awareness?

[Lynx]

Logical arguments may be valid or invalid, but never false.
Logical arguments may be true or untrue, but never illogical.

And if you have a look at the threads I linked to above, you will see that I deny what you say of 'common sense', and why.
I've given you my personal definition of 'common sense', please feel free to correct it. In order to avoid using the term, I provided alternative explanations: memes, abductive reasoning, contingency, disinterest. You may select your poison, propose additional explanations or eliminate the explanations I listed.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Gil:


Traditionally - and quite apart from philosophy - a phenomenon of awareness which is distinctively human has been postulated as part of the explanation of some unique human behaviour patterns, particulary in the extent of teaching of skills from generation to generation (not uniquely human, but distinctively extensive among humans), of handling death and of postulating explanatory theories - behaviours of which we observe nothing similar among other living things. We are not always well placed to oberserve these and the observation of the distinctive treatment of death seems the most well grounded of these.

Ah, the old nominalisation fallacy.

Good to see you too have fallen for it.:lol:

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


Logical arguments may be true or untrue, but never illogical.

Not so; premises and/or conclusions may be true or false, but arguments can only be valid or invalid. Check this out in any logic text if you do not believe me.

Or try here:

http://philosophy.hku.hk/courses/200809/phil1006a/faq.html

http://www.utm.edu/staff/jfieser/class/120/logic-chapter.htm


I've given you my personal definition of 'common sense', please feel free to correct it.

I have no desire to correct it since it is your idiosyncratic 'definition', and of no more use than if George W Bush were to re-define capitalism as 'just and fair'.


In order to avoid using the term, I provided alternative explanations: memes, abductive reasoning, contingency, disinterest. You may select your poison, propose additional explanations or eliminate the explanations I listed.

I wish you hadn't used the word 'meme', which is another empty neologism.

And abductive reasoning is based on an invalid logical form.

[DeLeonist]

So, I am saying: you try to justify the belief in 'consciousness', and I will show you how that also supports belief in the 'soul'.



Postulating the existence of a soul occupying the nether regions of an imaginary spirit realm is of an entirely different order than the self evident truth that consciousness exists. No third-person objective criteria for justification of this belief is needed (or possible).

While Descartes overshot the mark in attributing his experiencing to a unitary self or "I", he was surely not mistaken in the certainty that experiencing (i.e. consciousness) exists, even if the imperfections of language can lead to the mad conclusion that this is not the case.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

DeLeonist:


Postulating the existence of a soul occupying the nether regions of an imaginary spirit realm is of en entirely different order than the self evident truth that consciousness exists. No third-person objective criteria for justification of this belief is needed (or possible).

1) It is not self-evident that 'consciousness' exists -- it is a 'philosophcial' conclusiohn based on over two millennia of Platonic/Christian mysticism.

2) Everything you can tell me about 'consciosuness' is also true of the 'soul'. Indeed, 'consciousness' is no less non-material than 'spirit' are.


While Descartes overshot the mark in attributing his experiencing to a unitary self or "I", he was surely not mistaken in the certainty that experiencing (ie consciousness) exists, even if the imperfections of language can lead to the mad conclusion that this is not the case.

Descartes sham arguments were demolished here (by yours truly):

http://www.revleft.com/vb/certain-t70369/index.html

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Anyway, off on the march. I'll post my pics later...

[DeLeonist]

Descartes sham arguments were demolished here (by yours truly):

Sorry, while that thread highlighted the limitations of language, I couldn't find any demolition of the certainty that experiencing exists there.

[mikelepore]

as you try to acount for the operation of these little men/women in the head, these homunculi.

...

you will not have explained how we deal with information in the ordinary sense

Account for, and explain? I would only want to do that if I claimed that I know how it worked, which no one knows, and perhaps no one will know for another three hundred years.

Someone who doesn't know how a car works could still say that the general topics of "how reliably does this machine start", "how smooth is the ride", "how noisy is it", etc. are all part of something that goes on beheath the cosmetic outer covering of the machine. And it's something that's individual to this one machine, so that how easily my car starts is a characterization that's noticably distinct from how easily your car starts a thousand miles away. The same with the mind. There are a many patterns that are unique to one person's behavior, I always put pepper on my food, and I watch a lot of old monster movies, etc. We don't have to know how any of it works in order to recognize the existence of individual differences. And they are differences that are consistent from day to day. Not physical differences like my big nose, but behavioral characteristics. Not automatic behaviors like the heartbeat, but results of decisions. To require any more than that when identifying that each person has a mind or consciousness is unnecessarily to attach more connotations to such words word than the connotations that most speakers of this language would attach to them.

[DesertShark]

I am not trying to 'help' anyone; I am challenging ideas that the vast majority of human beings have accepted for thousands of years:

And, I am not trying to present an alternative theory, since I reject all philosophical theories as so much hot air.

So, I am saying: you try to justify the belief in 'consciousness', and I will show you how that also supports belief in the 'soul'.

Of course, if no one wants to take up my challenge, so be it.
I'll take up the challenge if you actually do it, but you haven't. You have yet to show how it supports the belief in a soul and you refused to earlier:

Also, will you please give an example of how any evidence can equally be used to show we have 'souls' (immortal or not). I'd really like to hear the argument for it.

I don't have any, nor do I want any -- what I claim is that any evidence you can produce to show that there is something called 'consciousness' can equally well be used to show that there is something called 'the soul'.

Actually challenging ideas helps people to think. Just making statements and never backing them up does nothing but add to the number of posts in a thread, it doesn't even challenge anything because they're just statements.

[DesertShark]

Well that article did handle that point; it said that certain areas may be necessary for this or that function, but they are not sufficient.

But, I would go further and say that people report odd things if you screw around with their brains.
I forgot to mention, they also know what areas of the brain do what because of people who have damaged areas or diseases that destroy/effect the brain. One famous example is the guy that had a railroad spike go through part of his head and his family said he had a significant change in personality, so we know that some aspects of personality come from the frontal lobe. That was a long time ago and there have been similar cases since then that have had similar effects, that was part of the reason they used to do lobotomies. Another example (not involving trauma damage but damage from disease) is Parkinson's disease. Because of this disease we know how the motor pathway works and where it is in the brain. We also know these effects from experiments on non-human animals where they kill off different areas of the brain to see what happens (create specimens that are born without certain areas).

[benhur]

BTB:



I do not object to saying that a certain individual is conscious (but only in specific medical conditions); what I object to is the reification of this word into a state called 'consciousness',

You believe that an entity could be conscious, yet you don't believe in consciousness?:rolleyes: Can you explain your position (without going through the usual verbal gymnastics)?

[benhur]

I forgot to mention, they also know what areas of the brain do what because of people who have damaged areas or diseases that destroy/effect the brain.

You seem to be knowledgeable about this. Can you please tell me which area of the brain is responsible for the following problem that some people may experience? THey say they can read (and write) normally, but they often mistake certain words for other words that 'appear' similar, like 'word' for 'world' 'man' for 'mad' and suchlike. It happens often, so it's not an error in eyesight, or even impatience. Is this a form of dyslexia, and if so, which part of the brain is responsible?

[Lynx]

Not so; premises and/or conclusions may be true or false, but arguments can only be valid or invalid. Check this out in any logic text if you do not believe me.
They are referred to using those words in order to make a distinction. I have no use for this distinction or for bogus arguments in favor of usage guidelines.

I have no desire to correct it since it is your idiosyncratic 'definition', and of no more use than if George W Bush were to re-define capitalism as 'just and fair'.
It is of use to me and of possible use when I communicate with others. The best I could do is categorize it as a meaningless generality and refrain from using it - but that would not help with the definition.

I wish you hadn't used the word 'meme', which is another empty neologism.
Consider it stricken from the list...


And abductive reasoning is based on an invalid logical form.
That leaves contingency and disinterest as possible explanations...

[Le Libérer]

Depression might have once had an evolutionary role that is now obsolete (civilisation, especially modern civilisation, has arisen in a timescale much, much quicker than natural evolution), or it might be an evolutionary quirk that never impacted enough on the survival of the species for it to be selected against, even though it can drive an individual to end their life.

In short, the advantages presented by consciousness outweigh the disadvantages. At least so far.
Sure the advantages out weigh the disadvantages, thats why the human mind evolved to include consciousness.

We are conscious of vision, thoughts, feelings, pain, emotion, ourselves, or we would like to think so.

I think consciousness allows us to keep ourselves in check, (insert Rosa's Platonic/Christian mysticism here) allows a means to settle disputes, and for social reasons, how we relate to others and our need to connect with them.

I however do not equate the above statement to correlate with having a soul. I do however see a need to define such brain functions.

[Dean]

Depression might have once had an evolutionary role that is now obsolete (civilisation, especially modern civilisation, has arisen in a timescale much, much quicker than natural evolution), or it might be an evolutionary quirk that never impacted enough on the survival of the species for it to be selected against, even though it can drive an individual to end their life.

In short, the advantages presented by consciousness outweigh the disadvantages. At least so far.

Conceivably, lethargy and disinterest could benefit the human being during periods where their energy is low and there is no clear hunt / shelter / social issues to be resolved.

[Lynx]

If I accept there is no distinction between consciousness and the soul, then I wouldn't have an objection to the use of the latter word. 'Soul' and 'consciousness' become interchangeable.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

If I accept there is no distinction between consciousness and the soul,

But why do that? As far as I'm aware, consciousness is an entirely natural process that typically arises as part of human biological function - the fact that human consciousness can be altered by certain chemicals (among other things) is if anything a refutation of any "supernatural" element such as a soul.

I don't see that accepting the existance of human consciousness is "dualism" anymore than accepting the existance of software is.

[Lynx]

But why do that?
Someone has to do it in order to examine the implications.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

I will be replying to comrades who have responded to me over the next few days

[DesertShark]

You seem to be knowledgeable about this. Can you please tell me which area of the brain is responsible for the following problem that some people may experience? THey say they can read (and write) normally, but they often mistake certain words for other words that 'appear' similar, like 'word' for 'world' 'man' for 'mad' and suchlike. It happens often, so it's not an error in eyesight, or even impatience. Is this a form of dyslexia, and if so, which part of the brain is responsible?
I would think that its a problem of wiring/firing (which probably is localized to one area, I don't know what that area is). It might be dyslexia, but I don't know enough about that disorder to make any real claims either way.

I've misread things before, as I'm sure other people have too. A lot of the time our minds are trying to predict/anticipate what's going to happen next, so it will fill in sentences or musical phrases before they finish and sometimes the brain isn't right. [I read somewhere, that at least with music, your ability to anticipate what note is coming next is a factor in if you like the music or not; and if every once in awhile the music has notes that you wouldn't expect (the first time you hear it), its more interesting/stimulating to your brain.]

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Deleonist:


Sorry, while that thread highlighted the limitations of language, I couldn't find any demolition of the certainty that experiencing exists there

The idea is that unless Descartes can express this alleged 'certainty' in language, it is an empty claim. But, as soon as he does that, his argument disintegrates.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Mike:


Account for, and explain? I would only want to do that if I claimed that I know how it worked, which no one knows, and perhaps no one will know for another three hundred years.

That's not the problem, The difficulty is that in attempting to explain human 'cognition' in terms of 'little men in the head', the explanatiion is circular.


Someone who doesn't know how a car works could still say that the general topics of "how reliably does this machine start", "how smooth is the ride", "how noisy is it", etc. are all part of something that goes on beheath the cosmetic outer covering of the machine. And it's something that's individual to this one machine, so that how easily my car starts is a characterization that's noticably distinct from how easily your car starts a thousand miles away. The same with the mind. There are a many patterns that are unique to one person's behavior, I always put pepper on my food, and I watch a lot of old monster movies, etc. We don't have to know how any of it works in order to recognize the existence of individual differences. And they are differences that are consistent from day to day. Not physical differences like my big nose, but behavioral characteristics. Not automatic behaviors like the heartbeat, but results of decisions. To require any more than that when identifying that each person has a mind or consciousness is unnecessarily to attach more connotations to such words word than the connotations that most speakers of this language would attach to them.

But, this assumes there is something called 'the mind', which is a Platonic/Christian/Cartesian assumption (and thus derived from ruling-class Idealism) that has yet to be justified.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

DS:


I'll take up the challenge if you actually do it, but you haven't. You have yet to show how it supports the belief in a soul and you refused to earlier:

But this is my challenge:


you try to justify the belief in 'consciousness', and I will show you how that also supports belief in the 'soul'.

DS:


Also, will you please give an example of how any evidence can equally be used to show we have 'souls' (immortal or not). I'd really like to hear the argument for it.

Well, I haven't seen any yet, and I am certainly not going to help you out.


Actually challenging ideas helps people to think. Just making statements and never backing them up does nothing but add to the number of posts in a thread, it doesn't even challenge anything because they're just statements.

Perhaps you need to re-read my challenge, since I have made no 'statements'.


I forgot to mention, they also know what areas of the brain do what because of people who have damaged areas or diseases that destroy/effect the brain. One famous example is the guy that had a railroad spike go through part of his head and his family said he had a significant change in personality, so we know that some aspects of personality come from the frontal lobe. That was a long time ago and there have been similar cases since then that have had similar effects, that was part of the reason they used to do lobotomies. Another example (not involving trauma damage but damage from disease) is Parkinson's disease. Because of this disease we know how the motor pathway works and where it is in the brain. We also know these effects from experiments on non-human animals where they kill off different areas of the brain to see what happens (create specimens that are born without certain areas).

I am not denying that the brain is a necessary component here, only that it is sufficient.

Moreover, I deny that statements about the brain, or about processes in the central nervous system, mean the same as those about 'belief', 'remembering', 'anger', 'fear', 'feeling', 'seeing', 'being aware', etc.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BenHur:


You believe that an entity could be conscious, yet you don't believe in consciousness? Can you explain your position (without going through the usual verbal gymnastics)?

Not to you, since you can't be civil.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


They are referred to using those words in order to make a distinction. I have no use for this distinction or for bogus arguments in favor of usage guidelines.

That is about as clever as denying the difference between acids and alkalis in Chemistry.


It is of use to me and of possible use when I communicate with others. The best I could do is categorize it as a meaningless generality and refrain from using it - but that would not help with the definition.

But, you fail to communicate when you make such basic errors, just as if you used the word 'stop' when you meant to use the word 'go'.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Noxion:


We are conscious of vision, thoughts, feelings, pain, emotion, ourselves, or we would like to think so.

We are aware of them from time to time; but we could only be said to be 'conscious' of them if we had suffered a medical problem of some sort.


I however do not equate the above statement to correlate with having a soul. I do however see a need to define such brain functions.

The problem is that this is exactly what it does imply.

[DesertShark]

But this is my challenge:


you try to justify the belief in 'consciousness', and I will show you how that also supports belief in the 'soul'.

Then show it already.



Also, will you please give an example of how any evidence can equally be used to show we have 'souls' (immortal or not). I'd really like to hear the argument for it.
Well, I haven't seen any yet, and I am certainly not going to help you out.
If you haven't seen any yet, then how can you make your above challenge ("you try to justify the belief in 'consciousness', and I will show you how that also supports belief in the 'soul'.")? Oh right, you can't.


Perhaps you need to re-read my challenge, since I have made no 'statements'.
Actually you have only made statements, you have made no valid claims since you have not backed any of them up. Your challenge is not a challenge, just a statement. It would be a challenge if you presented an argument, but for some reason you refuse to. If you don't want to back it up, don't bring it up.

Perhaps you should let the soul believers speak for themselves? Or take your nonsensical god-talk to the religion forum.

[DesertShark]

Forgot to say:


Also, will you please give an example of how any evidence can equally be used to show we have 'souls' (immortal or not). I'd really like to hear the argument for it.

Well, I haven't seen any yet, and I am certainly not going to help you out.
Fulfilling your claim wouldn't be helping me out, it would be helping you out because it would give substance to your argument. You keep making this claim:
you try to justify the belief in 'consciousness', and I will show you how that also supports belief in the 'soul'.
But never follow through with it. Which makes it not a challenge, but a statement with no justification.

[benhur]

BenHur:



Not to you, since you can't be civil.

Usual cop-out.:D

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

We are aware of them from time to time; but we could only be said to be 'conscious' of them if we had suffered a medical problem of some sort.

I can concentrate on the fact that I am sitting in a seat (which involves tactile and positional senses), even though most of the time I don't notice it. I don't need to have a medical problem to be aware of facts like that.


The problem is that this is exactly what it does imply.

How so?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

DS:


Then show it already.

As I said, you have to do the first part first. That has yet to be done.


If you haven't seen any yet, then how can you make your above challenge ("you try to justify the belief in 'consciousness', and I will show you how that also supports belief in the 'soul'.")? Oh right, you can't.

Very easy; I just did it.

[For example, I could say, you try to jump over the Darwen Tower, and I'll show you where you will land. I can make that challenge even if you haven't even heard of the said tower.]


Actually you have only made statements, you have made no valid claims since you have not backed any of them up. Your challenge is not a challenge, just a statement. It would be a challenge if you presented an argument, but for some reason you refuse to. If you don't want to back it up, don't bring it up.

I have advanced statements, but not as part of my challenge.


Perhaps you should let the soul believers speak for themselves? Or take your nonsensical god-talk to the religion forum.

No need to, we have our very own believers in 'consciousness' right here.


Fulfilling your claim wouldn't be helping me out, it would be helping you out because it would give substance to your argument. You keep making this claim:

But never follow through with it. Which makes it not a challenge, but a statement with no justification.

Once more, comrades here have yet to take my challenge up; so pick a fight with them, not me.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Ben Hur:


Usual cop-out.

Usual cop-in.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Noxion:


I can concentrate on the fact that I am sitting in a seat (which involves tactile and positional senses), even though most of the time I don't notice it. I don't need to have a medical problem to be aware of facts like that.

I am not denying you are aware of all sorts of things. But, unless you have just woken up from a coma, or an operation, or a blow on the head, you cannot be said to be conscious.


How so?

Read this thread.

[Lynx]

That is about as clever as denying the difference between acids and alkalis in Chemistry.
If I insist that acids and alkalis are chemicals, am I denying their difference?
If I say that arguments and beliefs are assertions, am I denying their difference?
More to the point, what happens to the distinction between arguments and beliefs when we compare them?

But, you fail to communicate when you make such basic errors, just as if you used the word 'stop' when you meant to use the word 'go'.
When I use the term 'common sense', what range of meanings do I convey?

Communicating our personal interpretation of various words is the norm.
Assuming them to be identical to our own interpretation is a time saver.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


If I insist that acids and alkalis are chemicals, am I denying their difference?

That's no help at all. You clearly do not know of the technical distinction between validity and truth/falsehood, just as non-chemists do not know of the difference between acids and alkalis.


If I say that arguments and beliefs are assertions, am I denying their difference?

This is even worse. An argument cannot always be an assertion, since it might be hypothetical. Most arguments are hypothetical.


More to the point, what happens to the distinction between arguments and beliefs when we compare them?

I am not sure what this has to do with the distinction between truth and validity.


When I use the term 'common sense', what range of meanings do I convey?

None at all to me.


Communicating our personal interpretation of various words is the norm.

In that case, you'd lose all capacity to communicate, since you'd have to say the same of words such as "word".


Assuming them to be identical to our own interpretation is a time saver.

But, if you go down that route, you have no idea whether you mean the same by "same" as anyone else.

[Lynx]

That's no help at all. You clearly do not know of the technical distinction between validity and truth/falsehood, just as non-chemists do not know of the difference between acids and alkalis.
I'm aware of the distinction.

This is even worse. An argument cannot always be an assertion, since it might be hypothetical. Most arguments are hypothetical.
Aren't most beliefs hypothetical?

I am not sure what this has to do with the distinction between truth and validity.
The distinction between truth and validity is of no use in a comparison between argument and belief. It is discarded.

None at all to me.
Good, this will require a poll.

In that case, you'd lose all capacity to communicate, since you'd have to say the same of words such as "word".
Then my personal interpretation does fall within a certain range? or there is no such thing as a personal interpretation?

But, if you go down that route, you have no idea whether you mean the same by "same" as anyone else.
I don't, but it hasn't stopped me, nor has it appeared to have stopped anyone else.

[Lynx]

you try to justify the belief in 'consciousness', and I will show you how that also supports belief in the 'soul'.
If there were no distinction between 'soul' and 'consciousness', would that be sufficient grounds to dismiss both concepts?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


I'm aware of the distinction.

Your rejection of it suggests you do not understand it, though.


Aren't most beliefs hypothetical?

Hypotheticals are distinguished by "If..then" connectives (or they are expressed in the subjunctive mood, etc.). Beliefs are all in the indicative mood. So beliefs are never hypothetical.


The distinction between truth and validity is of no use in a comparison between argument and belief.

Why on earth are you comparing these anyway?


Then my personal interpretation does fall within a certain range? or there is no such thing as a personal interpretation?

Even a 'personal interpretation' will have to use words the understanding of which you share with the rest of us, or it won't be an interpretation to begin with -- unless, of course, you mean by 'interpretation' something other than the rest of us -- and even then it will be an 'interpretation' not an interpretation.


I don't, but it hasn't stopped me, nor has it appeared to have stopped anyone else.

That certainly explains an awful lot of confused thought in this area, then.


If there were no distinction between 'soul' and 'consciousness', would that be sufficient grounds to dismiss both concepts?

For a materialist, yes.

[Lynx]

Your rejection of it suggests you do not understand it, though.
My rejection is based upon the usefulness of these distinctions. If we are examining the formal components of arguments, beliefs or hunches, then such distinctions are employed.

Hypotheticals are distinguished by "If..then" connectives (or they are expressed in the subjunctive mood, etc.). Beliefs are all in the indicative mood. So beliefs are never hypothetical.
So, in form, some arguments can be assertions while all beliefs are necessarily assertions?

Why on earth are you comparing these anyway?
I compare them to see what they share in common. For example, comparing their form, their purpose and their function.

Even a 'personal interpretation' will have to use words the understanding of which you share with the rest of us, or it won't be an interpretation to begin with -- unless, of course, you mean by 'interpretation' something other than the rest of us -- and even then it will be an 'interpretation' not an interpretation.
My interpretation, as in my perspective, which is unique to me. The particular interpretation itself is, of course, derivative.

That certainly explains an awful lot of confused thought in this area, then.
A finite range of possible interpretations and the degree to which they are shared by large numbers of people might explain it.

For a materialist, yes.
Why? Is a concept rejected only when it is shared by a certain group?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


My rejection is based upon the usefulness of these distinctions. If we are examining the formal components of arguments, beliefs or hunches, then such distinctions are employed.

Beliefs and hunches have nothing to do with formal arguments.

Have you actually seen a formal argument?

Here is one (in Natural Deduction):

http://www.danielclemente.com/logica/dn.en-node57.html

Plenty more at that site.


So, in form, some arguments can be assertions while all beliefs are necessarily assertions?

Categorical arguments can contain asserted premisses, but the argument itself cannot be an assertion.

And I fail to see how beliefs can be assertions. I might believe it is raining but I do not assert it is unless I know it is.


I compare them to see what they share in common. For example, comparing their form, their purpose and their function.

This seems to me to be no more illuminating than comparing a bottle of cola with a road accident.


My interpretation, as in my perspective, which is unique to me. The particular interpretation itself is, of course, derivative.

The you are dealing with "perspective", "unique", "derivative", etc, and not perspective, unique and derivative. If so, you have not communicated anything to me, nor, I suspect, even to yourself.


A finite range of possible interpretations and the degree to which they are shared by large numbers of people might explain it.

How might you determine that if everyone undertstands, say, 'explain' in their unique (or even 'unique') way?


Is a concept rejected only when it is shared by a certain group?

Why is that so surprising?

[The 'concept' makes no sense anyway.]

[Lynx]

Beliefs and hunches have nothing to do with formal arguments.

Have you actually seen a formal argument?

Here is one (in Natural Deduction):
I have not seen one using that kind of notation.
What I have not seen are deconstructions of beliefs and hunches into their constituent parts (ie. premises, propositions, etc)


Categorical arguments can contain asserted premisses, but the argument itself cannot be an assertion.

And I fail to see how beliefs can be assertions. I might believe it is raining but I do not assert it is unless I know it is.
If God exists then {I believe}... qualifies as an argument?

This seems to me to be no more illuminating than comparing a bottle of cola with a road accident.
You simply answer the question and proceed from there.
What do arguments, beliefs, and hunches have in common?

The you are dealing with "perspective", "unique", "derivative", etc, and not perspective, unique and derivative. If so, you have not communicated anything to me, nor, I suspect, even to yourself.
I have defined my perspective as the only one I can hold. I do not possess the perspective of others, nor can I read their thoughts telepathically.

How might you determine that if everyone undertstands, say, 'explain' in their unique (or even 'unique') way?
By the presence of confusion or miscommunication during conversation.

Why is that so surprising?
I don't know if it's surprising, it does seem illogical.

[The 'concept' makes no sense anyway.]
Then what purpose is served by hoping to associate it with 'soul'? Convince us that 'consciousness' makes no sense on its own terms.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


I have not seen one using that kind of notation.

The notation was invented about 100 years ago. The system was invented by Gentzen (who, alas, was a Nazi sympathizer!) 70 years ago.

http://www.maartensz.org/philosophy/Dictionary/L/Logic%20Notation.htm

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/log/loghome.htm

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-classical/

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

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


What I have not seen are deconstructions of beliefs and hunches into their constituent parts (ie. premises, propositions, etc)

And no wonder, these have nothing to do with logical arguments.

Perhaps you are confusing formal logic with informal logic?

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-informal/

This is the study of everyday arguments, which will incorporate beliefs, etc.


If God exists then {I believe}... qualifies as an argument?

No, it is a conditional.

God exists.
--------------
Therefore...

Might be part of an informal argument.


I have defined my perspective as the only one I can hold. I do not possess the perspective of others, nor can I read their thoughts telepathically.

Ah, but you are using 'define', not define, here.


By the presence of confusion or miscommunication during conversation.

And 'confusion', not confusion, here, too.


I don't know if it's surprising, it does seem illogical.

Not if it is based on a clear set of presuppositions.


Then what purpose is served by hoping to associate it with 'soul'? Convince us that 'consciousness' makes no sense on its own terms.

I have been, above. The proper sphere of application of the word 'conscious' is in medical circumstances -- period.

And, the Cartesian paradigm (within which the vast majority of theorists and cognitive scientists operate, and which everyone who has posted here seems to accept) has already loaded the dice:

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/Mind/Descartes.html

It is a ruling class form of thought that has been with us for millennia.

So, no wonder Marx said:


"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.'"

From this, you can see too, that Marx had not fully escaped from this ruling idea!

[Lynx]

Perhaps you are confusing formal logic with informal logic?

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-informal/

This is the study of everyday arguments, which will incorporate beliefs, etc.
It uses words to describe the elements, so this is likely what I've seen with regards to arguments.

No, it is a conditional.

God exists.
--------------
Therefore...

Might be part of an informal argument.
That sounds harsher than a hypothetical - would that make it an assertion? As with rain, which can be confirmed.

Belief in God requires a premise, I would hope.

Ah, but you are using 'define', not define, here.
And 'confusion', not confusion, here, too.
For others perhaps, not for myself. I can try to be flexible when interpreting other people's 'words', but mostly I just assume their meanings are equivalent to my own. It saves time.

Not if it is based on a clear set of presuppositions.
Which presuppositions?

I have been, above. The proper sphere of application of the word 'conscious' is in medical circumstances -- period.
Brain science has yet to enforce the 'proper sphere of application', as you put it. People use this word and variations of it all the time, and it is rarely challenged or even second guessed.

And, the Cartesian paradigm (within which the vast majority of theorists and cognitive scientists operate, and which everyone who has posted here seems to accept) has already loaded the dice:

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/Mind/Descartes.html

It is a ruling class form of thought that has been with us for millennia.
I don't accept mind/body dualism.
As for ruling class forms of thought, which ones should we worry about and seek to challenge?

From this, you can see too, that Marx had not fully escaped from this ruling idea!
What you term a ruling idea, I consider to be a contingent belief. Marx used it to convey his argument, rather convincingly, I might add.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


That sounds harsher than a hypothetical - would that make it an assertion? As with rain, which can be confirmed.

Premisses can be confirmed, as can conclusions, but arguments can only be valid or invalid.

It's a bit like, say, a clock. You can tell the time with a clock, but not with any of its parts. So, an argument has properties that its parts (its premisses) do not have, and vice versa.


Belief in God requires a premise, I would hope.

An argument to that end might, sure.


For others perhaps, not for myself. I can try to be flexible when interpreting other people's 'words', but mostly I just assume their meanings are equivalent to my own. It saves time.

Here you are using "'For' 'others' 'perhaps', 'not' 'for' 'myself'. 'I' 'can' 'try' 'to' 'be' 'flexible' 'when' 'interpreting' 'other' 'people's' ''words'', 'but' 'mostly' 'I' 'just' 'assume' 'their' 'meanings' 'are' 'equivalent' 'to' 'my' 'own'. 'It' 'saves' 'time'", but not: "For others perhaps, not for myself. I can try to be flexible when interpreting other people's 'words', but mostly I just assume their meanings are equivalent to my own. It saves time."

And this will always be the case whenever you post anything here, if you insist on maintaining the indefensible position that you supply your own interpetation to words in the public domain.


Which presuppositions?

Basic materialist ones. You should know these, surely?


Brain science has yet to enforce the 'proper sphere of application', as you put it. People use this word and variations of it all the time, and it is rarely challenged or even second guessed.

'Brain science', as you call it, cannot force anything on us.

And my reference to medical conditions was in the sense I used it in earlier posts in this thread. Perhaps you missed them?


As for ruling class forms of thought, which ones should we worry about and seek to challenge?

Too many to list here, but dualism and the jargon it has passed down to us will do for starters ('consciousness' and 'mind' (used theoretically) being just two of these).


What you term a ruling idea, I consider to be a contingent belief.

Your term then will not allow you to distinguish the contingent beliefs of, say, workers (which are not part of ruling ideology) from ruling ideas.

[Lynx]

Premisses can be confirmed, as can conclusions, but arguments can only be valid or invalid.

It's a bit like, say, a clock. You can tell the time with a clock, but not with any of its parts. So, an argument has properties that its parts (its premisses) do not have, and vice versa.
If one can draw a conclusion from a belief or a hunch, does that mean beliefs are composed of constituent parts similar to those found in arguments?

An argument to that end might, sure.
Can we say that beliefs possess implicit arguments?


Here you are using "'For' 'others' 'perhaps', 'not' 'for' 'myself'. 'I' 'can' 'try' 'to' 'be' 'flexible' 'when' 'interpreting' 'other' 'people's' ''words'', 'but' 'mostly' 'I' 'just' 'assume' 'their' 'meanings' 'are' 'equivalent' 'to' 'my' 'own'. 'It' 'saves' 'time'", but not: "For others perhaps, not for myself. I can try to be flexible when interpreting other people's 'words', but mostly I just assume their meanings are equivalent to my own. It saves time."

And this will always be the case whenever you post anything here, if you insist on maintaining the indefensible position that you supply your own interpetation to words in the public domain.
I do supply my own interpretation to all words in the public domain which are ambiguous in meaning. Every individual does.

Basic materialist ones. You should know these, surely?
I do not know them. I see a distinction between 'consciousness' and 'soul', and as a consequence accept the former while rejecting the latter.

'Brain science', as you call it, cannot force anything on us.
If we aren't receptive, then no.

And my reference to medical conditions was in the sense I used it in earlier posts in this thread. Perhaps you missed them?
I didn't miss them, but they seem too restrictive.

Your term then will not allow you to distinguish the contingent beliefs of, say, workers (which are not part of ruling ideology) from ruling ideas.
Isn't that what revolutionary politics is for? "Determining worker's interests and finding ways of awakening mass consciousness"

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


If one can draw a conclusion from a belief or a hunch, does that mean beliefs are composed of constituent parts similar to those found in arguments?

There are logical systems devoted solely to beliefs: i.e., Doxastic Logic (a variant of Epistemic Logic, which is a sub-branch of Modal Logic):

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

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-epistemic/

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

But Classical Logic (that is, logic derived from Frege and Russell) does not concern itself with such things.


Can we say that beliefs possess implicit arguments?

If they were part of an Enthymeme, then perhaps so:

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


I do supply my own interpretation to all words in the public domain which are ambiguous in meaning. Every individual does

What you mean is: "'I' 'do' 'supply' 'my' 'own' 'interpretation' 'to' 'all' 'words' 'in' 'the' 'public' 'domain' 'which' 'are' 'ambiguous' 'in' 'meaning'. 'Every' 'individual' 'does'", but not "I do supply my own interpretation to all words in the public domain which are ambiguous in meaning. Every individual does", and so you have failed to communicate once again.

You are now trapped in this lingusitically-solipsistic world, with no way of escape, except you reject the idea that you supply your own interpretations to words in the public domain.

In future, to indicate this, and to save myself a lot of time and hassle, I will preface and postface sentences like this: "I do supply my own interpretation to all words in the public domain which are ambiguous in meaning. Every individual does" with a "qu". This will mean that every word between these "qu"s turns, for example:

qu "I do supply my own interpretation to all words in the public domain which are ambiguous in meaning. Every individual does" qu

into:

"'I' 'do' 'supply' 'my' 'own' 'interpretation' 'to' 'all' 'words' 'in' 'the' 'public' 'domain' 'which' 'are' 'ambiguous' 'in' 'meaning'. 'Every' 'individual' 'does'".

That will allow me to keep you trapped in a linguisitic prison of your own making until you wise up, at minimum cost to myself.


I do not know them.

The most relevant here is that there is only matter and motion in the universe. This therefore rules out all idealist theories (including those that talk about 'consciousness').

This is not, however, done dogmatically, since it is based on our ordinary, pre-theoretic use of language


I didn't miss them, but they seem too restrictive.

And yet that is how this word is typically used non-theoretically.


Isn't that what revolutionary politics is for? "Determining worker's interests and finding ways of awakening mass consciousness"

Well, I am not sure about the use of 'consciousness' here. Are workers all in a coma? Or under anaesthetic? Or have they all suffered a bang on the head?

[Lynx]

There are logical systems devoted solely to beliefs: i.e., Doxastic Logic (a variant of Epistemic Logic, which is a sub-branch of Modal Logic):
Modal logic seems to be the form of logic I am concerned with, at least subconsciously.

If they were part of an Enthymeme, then perhaps so:
Considering beliefs in this way makes them appear more reasonable. Perhaps it is better to assume they are part of an enthymeme.

Alternatively, I could consider the conclusion and work from there, with the belief, argument, etc having served its purpose.

What you mean is: "'I' 'do' 'supply' 'my' 'own' 'interpretation' 'to' 'all' 'words' 'in' 'the' 'public' 'domain' 'which' 'are' 'ambiguous' 'in' 'meaning'. 'Every' 'individual' 'does'", but not "I do supply my own interpretation to all words in the public domain which are ambiguous in meaning. Every individual does", and so you have failed to communicate once again.
I have communicated. If there are any misconceptions among 'signal-receivers', I am willing to try and clear these up.


You are now trapped in this lingusitically-solipsistic world, with no way of escape, except you reject the idea that you supply your own interpretations to words in the public domain.
I am limited by what I have learned, and by what I can infer. I am trapped by my own mortality.

In future, to indicate this, and to save myself a lot of time and hassle,
If you were to convey what it is you wish us to do, that would save time for each participant.

The most relevant here is that there is only matter and motion in the universe. This therefore rules out all idealist theories (including those that talk about 'consciousness').
I would take that to mean I should refrain from concerning myself with abstractions, not to go as far as ruling them out. (Perhaps this is the reason I am now considered a Zionist?)


This is not, however, done dogmatically, since it is based on our ordinary, pre-theoretic use of language
A loophole, then!

And yet that is how this word is typically used non-theoretically.
Is it a medically useful term?

Well, I am not sure about the use of 'consciousness' here. Are workers all in a coma? Or under anaesthetic? Or have they all suffered a bang on the head?
Nothing as dramatic. They are not challenging their assumptions.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


I have communicated.

In fact, you have 'communicated', not communicated, since none of us has a clue what you mean by "communicated" in your 'special sense'.

And worse: any words you use to try to tell us will be impossible for us to understand, since you put your own 'interpretation' on them, about which we have not the slightest clue.

Even telepathy, if there were such a thing, could not help, and for the same reason.

So, it looks like you are not ready to wise up yet.


If there are any misconceptions among 'signal-receivers', I am willing to try and clear these up.

In fact, what you have said here is:

qu'If there are any misconceptions among 'signal-receivers', I am willing to try and clear these up'qu,

not:

"If there are any misconceptions among 'signal-receivers', I am willing to try and clear these up."

This is becasue I have absolutely no idea what you mean by the use of these words, since they have an idiosyncratic sense for you, about which I am totally in the dark.

And it's no good asking you 'to clear things up', either -- since I do not know what you mean by these very words, or by any words you will use to try to rectify the situation, and for the same reason.

Once more: until you wise up, all your words are incomprehensible.

In fact, it is not worth me replying to you, or the rest of what you say here, since I do not know if my words mean the same to you as they do to the rest of us. And I do not understand anything you say.

So, in future, all I can do is make this point to you, repeatedly, if necessary.

Until you wise up...

[Lynx]

In fact, you have 'communicated', not communicated, since none of us has a clue what you mean by "communicated" in your 'special sense'.

And worse: any words you use to try to tell us will be impossible for us to understand, since you put your own 'interpretation' on them, about which we have not the slightest clue.
The process is quite simple: you assume the meaning of my words is what your interpretation of them is.

For the most part, you are capable of doing this.


In fact, it is not worth me replying to you, or the rest of what you say here, since I do not know if my words mean the same to you as they do to the rest of us. And I do not understand anything you say.
Well I'm sorry. If asking questions won't help, I don't see what else can be done.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


The process is quite simple: you assume the meaning of my words is what your interpretation of them is.

For the most part, you are capable of doing this.

Well I'm sorry. If asking questions won't help, I don't see what else can be done.

I am sorry, but since you seem to understand words in your own idiosyncratic manner, I have absolutely no idea what you are on about.

Unless, of course, you wise up...

[Lynx]

I am sorry, but since you seem to understand words in your own idiosyncratic manner, I have absolutely no idea what you are on about.
a) I assume what other people are saying is what I think they are saying.
b) I assume everybody is making this assumption.
They assume what I'm saying is what they think I'm saying.

This is the process of a conversation where everyone assumes they are on the same page. Until someone realizes they aren't...

Are we on the same page?
Is there something about the previous words that leads you to believe we are not on "the same page"?

Unless, of course, you wise up...
I am trying to be more concise!
Just because you believe I'm being idiosyncratic is not a reason to question the meaning of every single word I write!

Bill Clinton - That would depend on what the meaning of the word 'is', is.
And not: 'That' 'would' 'depend' 'on' 'what' 'the' 'meaning' 'of' 'the' 'word' 'is', 'is'.

p.s. thank-you for answering the questions you did

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


a) I assume what other people are saying is what I think they are saying.
b) I assume everybody is making this assumption.
They assume what I'm saying is what they think I'm saying.

This is the process of a conversation where everyone assumes they are on the same page. Until someone realizes they aren't...

You appear to be using English words, but since you understand them differently from the rest of us, I cannot follow what you are saying.

Perhaps you missed this earlier:


In fact, it is not worth me replying to you, or the rest of what you say here, since I do not know if my words mean the same to you as they do to the rest of us. And I do not understand anything you say.

So, in future, all I can do is make this point to you, repeatedly, if necessary.

Until you wise up...

But then, if you comprehend my words in your own idiosyncratic way, that might explain why you failed to understand this.

In fact, I do not know why I am telling you this, since the same will apply to these words...

Unless, that is, you wise up...

[Lynx]

You appear to be using English words, but since you understand them differently from the rest of us, I cannot follow what you are saying.
Perhaps someone else can?

In fact, I do not know why I am telling you this, since the same will apply to these words...
You are telling me this in hopes I will realize the futility of conveying this particular point (to you), and give up. Meanwhile, I am ignoring your advice because I have yet to give up.

Unless, that is, you wise up...
Am I being disingenuous?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Lynx:


Perhaps someone else can?

In my idiolect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiolect), this says:


Anyone for tennis?


You are telling me this in hopes I will realize the futility of conveying this particular point (to you), and give up. Meanwhile, I am ignoring your advice because I have yet to give up.

And this says:


I am desperate for a date with Golda Meir!

http://kamnez.blox.pl/resource/Golda_Meir.jpg

Looks like you have wised up. She's a doll...

[Lynx]

My Idiolect says:
Anyone for tennis?
Indeed, this invitation includes complimentary strawberries and cream.

And this says:
I am desperate for a date with Golda Meir!
~ or with anyone who may or may not have finished your essays ~


http://kamnez.blox.pl/resource/Golda_Meir.jpg

Looks like you have wised up. She's a doll...
Ad hominem?
I'll bet she was an optimist too!