Matt: (By the by, I don't take "musings" to be a particularly unfortunate choice on your part because, from my angle, the disturbing weight is on the "interior" half of "interior musings.")
[Krimel] My problem with "musing" was exactly that is implies language driven thought and what I was shooting for was something like the inverse of language; memories, sense impressions etc. Why is "interior" a problem. If we can handle the difference between your nervous system and mine via reference to special location why can't my impressions be "interior" to me? Krimel said: I have some sympathy to the notion of belief being manifest in action. This was productively pursued by the behaviorists for more than 50 years. But I suspect there are problems with confining belief to outward manifestations and I am more than a little suspicious of the notion of belief as motivation. I eat because I AM hungry not because I believe I am hungry. Matt: But when you say "I am hungry," I attribute to you the belief that you are hungry because a) it allows me to predict your behavior (I'm guessing you are going to look for food) and b) it allows both of us to be wrong (you might eat a little something, and find that, it turns out, you aren't actually hungry, lending credence to the then apropos "Well, he _believed_ he was hungry, but wasn't actually hungry.") Our choice in language is just as much a behavior to be tracked and predicted as other behaviors, like eating and running from tigers. [Krimel] My problem with this business was the idea of belief as motivator. I eat or don't eat because I am hungry not because I believe I am hungry or I say I am hungry. I can see emotions and physiological states as motivators. Belief might arouse these states but I have a hard time seeing how they can motivate in and of themselves. Matt: No, you might be right about Dennett. I often read philosophers, like Dennett and Davidson, through the eyes of Rorty because that's where I first heard of them. However, to cast doubt on the idea that the intentional stance is metaphorical, and not real (a dispute that Rorty has with Dennett, if not about the ontological status of the intentional stance, then about something related in the area--specifically Dennett's use of "real patterns"), let me say that if the question of whether computers will someday have thoughts, have consciousness in some sense that we (used to) think was only the province of animals, perhaps even only humans, is an _empirical_ matter--as I believe you are arguing in a different thread of conversation--then it is paramount that one has a metaphilosophical stance like Rorty's and not like Dennett's: the intentional stance, a.k.a. consciousness, is as real as anything else because why else would we spend our time arguing about whether computers will someday be able to, or never be able to, attain a position that is only metaphorical? [Krimel] I think Dennett proposes the intentional stance as a way to think about intentional systems. I don't think he equates this with consciousness, merely as a mode of thinking when it is useful. But I'm not sure that the fact that people are willing to arguing about something confers upon that something any special status metaphorical or otherwise. Folks around here will argue about darn near anything. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
