philosophy and insanity

[Arto_Vallivirta]

When I look in the mirror, there's no one there. Just a picture of me that has no thoughts, no personality (or even a backside). Therefore I do not exist...No no... This is a bit hard to say: There is not me that does not exist. Or in the simple logical form ~E~(a)->E(a). So it seems that I do exist after all. And don't. At the same time. Except it's not me.

/Arto

[Wombat]

We speak as though there are persons;
There is nothing in reality denoted
by 'chariot' ; it's a useful fiction.
Same with "jim,' 'Bloomfield,'
and 'Cranberry.'

Who or what finds it useful? A useful fiction of use only to other fictions?

A friend of mine tried to turn all terms into feature placing terms, ie to show that you could consistently speak as though there were no things to speak about and in some sense still say everything. So every sentence was a bit like 'It is raining.' There isn't a thing which rains and there doesn't have to be. The trouble with that project is when there are two simulaneous things of the same kind happening. It gets seriously weird. Instead of 'I am thinking' we say 'it is thinking' or 'there is a thought.' So far so good. But what if we are all thinking? Now we get something like 'It is thinking Wombattily, Stonishly, Bloomfieldilly, Emmliniarly .... '

My friend had to be institutionalised for a while. No, I'm not joking. He doesn't do philosophy any more.

[jenaceae]

I'm sorry I didn't feel like reading through the last 3 pages. Cranberry you are not crazy. Philosophy is an interesting pastime, but boils down to mental masturbation. Read Seth Speaks by Jane Roberts, very informative.

Other than that, take your mind with a grain of salt and follow your heart, its the true guiding light.

Jenn

[Wombat]

I'm sorry I didn't feel like reading through the last 3 pages. Cranberry you are not crazy. Philosophy is an interesting pastime, but boils down to mental masturbation. Read Seth Speaks by Jane Roberts, very informative.

Other than that, take your mind with a grain of salt and follow your heart, its the true guiding light.

Jenn

Yeah, right. Every invention, every creature comfort, the technology that plays the CD soundtrack to your heart-following quest, all of these things can be traced back to numerous people who asked 'why?' with no interest in, or expectation of, material reward. But you don't have to know that. You only have to hand over your dollars to the guy who now owns the patent.

[buddhu]

Cran: if it's the Bertrand Russell book that you're wading through it's a great choice. An easy place to start, and makes a good doorstop when you're done reading it.

Whether or not you exist is probably one of the least helpful questions to ponder. Whether you exist or not, you still perceive that you have a life to live, bills to pay, whistles to play, sex to have, beer to drink, friends to love etc etc etc. To my simple mind, ole Rene's cogito is all the existence I need: I seem to exist, so I might as well make the most of it.

Stick with it, there's a lot of interesting stuff that is far more productive to consider: Bentham, Mill and even mad old Freddie N are good for a laugh. My favourite stuff isn't really covered in the Russell book (if that's the one you've got) - Satre, Merleau Ponty, Camus etc, a bunch of European existentialists and phenomenologists. In these 'interesting times', ethics are probably a more relevant aspect to explore than metaphysics - and not so hard on the brain.

[Jack]

I'll reply anyway (but only because I got asked questions, of course). The book was Sophie's World.

It only touched on a lot of things and people and didn't go into more than a couple pages on each person's thought...I read all 500+ pages in a few hours so I'm sure I didn't absorb some things.

I don't think just because something can and does think that it necessarily exists just because there are thoughts. Mabey the thoughts exist, but not me (but of course I'm not very learned).

Jerry, I personally can't be occupied with what I am if I'm not sure that I am. I can look in the mirror and see myself but I'm still not sure that's proof I exist. I look at a straw in a glass of water and it looks as if it's bent but really it's not at all. Human senses lie. And if my body does exist, "I" still may not.

My original question wasn't about that, though. It was how the feeling of knowing you may not exist (which I felt all day yesterday) is any different from being psychotic (which I've also been *smile, possums*). Nobody really answered that, but I found the answer on my own, so nevermind.

[Jerry Freeman]

I personally can't be occupied with what I am if I'm not sure that I am.

OK. That's fine with me. But I'm a little confused. What is it exactly that you're not sure exists?

Best wishes,
Jerry

[Will O'B]

I can look in the mirror and see myself but I'm still not sure that's proof I exist. I look at a straw in a glass of water and it looks as if it's bent but really it's not at all. Human senses lie.

Ah... there's the rub. (See my *mirror test* on page 2). Is the image that you see in the mirror really you, or is it actually someone else playing around with your sanity and just pretending to be you? Must give us pause...

Will O'Ban

PS: My son would like to know how you formulated the question or typed it into the computer if you do not, in fact, exist?

[lixnaw]

I'll reply anyway (but only because I got asked questions, of course). The book was Sophie's World.

...I read all 500+ pages in a few hours so I'm sure I didn't absorb some thing

all your energy goes to your brains, you become very intelligent that way, but your body gets nothing.
time to do something fysical...

[jim stone]

jim stone wrote:
We speak as though there are persons;
There is nothing in reality denoted
by 'chariot' ; it's a useful fiction.
Same with "jim,' 'Bloomfield,'
and 'Cranberry.'



Who or what finds it useful? A useful fiction of use only to other fictions?

Yes, or, to put it more precisely, there are desires and
interests that are served by such talk.

Cranberry, I don't know if there is any special feeling
to being psychotic--but the bottom line is what makes
the difference between whether one is or is not
psychotic is what one actually does.

Darwin, myproblem with churchland and to some extent,
Dennet, is that they are so anti- CartesianCartesian that they either explicitly or implicitly deny the existence of consciousness.

as to philosophy being mental masturbation, a lot of my work as a philosopher has been in nursing homes developing resuscitation policy. best

[lixnaw]

I'll reply anyway (but only because I got asked questions, of course). The book was Sophie's World.

...I read all 500+ pages in a few hours so I'm sure I didn't absorb some thing

all your energy goes to your brains, you become very intelligent that way, but your body gets nothing.
time to do something fysical...

but the real world is the dreamtime, the daytime is not the real world

[Darwin]

Darwin, myproblem with churchland and to some extent,
Dennet, is that they are so anti- CartesianCartesian that they either explicitly or implicitly deny the existence of consciousness.

Not as I understand them. They only deny the existence of a core self who is conscious--the guy or gal who sits in the control room, looking at the world on a screen and making decisions.

Of course, even processes as objects of thought are constructs--and that includes "consciousness". The edges and persistence of "processes" are not different from those of "things". So, consciousness--as an object of thought--is no more (or less) real than a cockroach.

Just as the nervous system binds color, edges, and motion--all perceived via different sets of neurons--into a unitary whole, it binds other mental modules into a unitary self.

For those who doubt the equivalence of "mind" and "brain", all you have to do is explain how disconnecting the right hemisphere of the brain from the left produces two independent "selves"--that independence being experimentally demonstrable, as shown by the work of Michael Gazzaniga and others. One entire book that relates to this point is available on the 'Net, Conversations with Neil's Brain[/] at http://williamcalvin.com/bk7/bk7.htm

[Darwin]

We speak as though there are persons;
There is nothing in reality denoted
by 'chariot' ; it's a useful fiction.
Same with "jim,' 'Bloomfield,'
and 'Cranberry.'

Who or what finds it useful? A useful fiction of use only to other fictions?

It is not, by the way, that there is nothing there. It is just the organization of what is there into unitary mental objects that is fictitious. I believe that this is an unavoidable problem. As soon as we start talking about the world, we have to use words that "assume" objects. That's why Zen teachers try to short-circuit the explanatory use of language in training.

A friend of mine tried to turn all terms into feature placing terms, ie to show that you could consistently speak as though there were no things to speak about and in some sense still say everything. So every sentence was a bit like 'It is raining.' There isn't a thing which rains and there doesn't have to be. The trouble with that project is when there are two simulaneous things of the same kind happening. It gets seriously weird. Instead of 'I am thinking' we say 'it is thinking' or 'there is a thought.' So far so good. But what if we are all thinking? Now we get something like 'It is thinking Wombattily, Stonishly, Bloomfieldilly, Emmliniarly .... '

Some of these problems are language-specific. In Chinese languages, for instance, we just say "falls rain" (but Chinese verbs aren't inflected, so its more like "fall rain", and in Mandarin it could even be seen as "down rain"). Japanese permits the omission of the subject--and this happens to the extent that it can make translation into languages like English a bit tricky. This feature is used a lot to produce poetic ambiguity in Japanese writing.

My friend had to be institutionalised for a while. No, I'm not joking. He doesn't do philosophy any more.

(or should that be ?)

[jim stone]

delightful that you are studying this great stuff.

Churchland, Dennett, Hume and the Buddha agree that there's no homunculus doing any work in the human animal. In this all four of them are anti-Cartesian.

But hume, the Buddha, and Descartes agree that there's something it is like to be a human animal,
something it is like to see red, something it is like to taste sugar and feel pain.

These qualitative aspects of human experience, called qualia, present a difficulty for naturalistic psychology, because even though they are realized by the brain, it is hard to see how they can be explained by neural processes. That is, when my brain is in this or that physical state, why does any quale arise, and why does the one which does arise arise and not another?

There seems to be an explanatory gap between physics and phenomenology; David Chalmers has called this "the hard problem." Even though the qualitative aspects of experience are realized by the physical brain, the hard problem is to explain why and how the physical properties of the brain realize the phenomenal features of experience. This is a big part of the problem of consciousness.

The churchlands, at least in the 1980s, try to solve the problem by a position known as Eliminativism. Finally, there are no mental states, experiences, beliefs, and so on. As these cannot be reduced to brain processes, they don't exist. We think these states exist because we have learned a theory when we learned our language, folk psychology, which, like most folk theories is fundamentally mistaken. Human animals cannot be explained by appealing to desires and believes, experiences and sensations., because there aren't any mental states. As mental states
can't be reduced to brain states, there are no mental states.

Dennett's view is not eliminativist, but he seems to avoid the hard problem about
consciousness. But here I would have to read him more: I believe one of his books is called consciousness explained. I am a Cartesian about consciousness, and an eliminativist about the self.

[Will O'B]

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