Hey Krimel, Matt said: (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 said: 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? Matt: It is a subtle problem, one I'm not sure I have quite the skill to explain well, that revolves around _where_ this special location is if we get rid of the notion of "mind-stuff." There's nothing really wrong with the notion of a mind and consciousness in common parlance, but the kinds of things that philosophers have wanted this notion to do, the kind of roles they've wanted it to play, these considerations have led some philosophers to take all the things we tend to "put" in the mind apart and see what's going on. A lot of it has to do with taking the mind to be a mirror of reality (hence the title of Rorty's book), such that the mind _represents_ reality to us, thus pitting something in between us and reality (our minds). This general notion of what an idea (a representation of reality) and a mind (where the representations are located) is, found in Locke and Descartes (not explicitly, but kind of taken as given by the way they use the words/concepts), then sees Berkeley go, "Well, shit, then all we really know is the crap going on in our minds, and--BY OCKHAM'S RAZOR!--there's no logical reason to keep this 'reality' thinger around." This is the birth of modern idealism, which only has superficial similarities with any kinds of Greek idealism (like Plato's Forms). I will be right back around to this with your next point (from the other post). Matt said: I don't like "shadow" metaphors (guess, guess!) because I prefer to think of us as having a direct connection to all things, words, sensations, concepts, rocks, people, dreams, whatever (give up? because Plato uses shadow imagery). Krimel said I forgot to address this earlier but what do you mean by us having a direct connection to all things. I would say that is precisely what we don't have. We are physically disconnected and limited to whatever sense data we can accumulate. Matt: What I mean by "direct connection," and why--in a philosophical context--I want to say we have a direct connection to everything is because of the above problem of representationalism. Engendered by the modern notion of the mind being between us and reality, Dewey suggested that, on the contrary, experience _was_ reality. However, his philosophical opponents (loosely called "realists") thought this was tantamount to idealism. After all, wasn't it Berkeley who said, absurdly, that our only actual reality was ideas, i.e. experience? Dewey, however, was making a more subtle point than that--he was rejecting the (philosophical) _distinction_ between experience and reality (and thus rejecting the then raging realism/idealism debate, which mirrors the now raging realism/anti-realism debate, rather than staking a position in those debates). Another way of putting this is that representationalists believe our connection to reality--as a whole--isn't direct because the mind mediates between us and it. Dewey, in counterposition, was saying we have a _direct_ connection to reality, as a whole. Pirsig is saying the same thing. And so are neopragmatists like Rorty. That's why I say "direct connection to all things." Better would've been "to _everything_," and then understanding by "everything" to mean "reality, as a whole" (what are two words that encompass everything--reality and universe). The biggest trouble I've had with Pirsig, and which DMB has had with me, is that, after saying that we are always directly connected to reality--to dispose of the realism/idealism debate and pernicious representationalism--Pirsig insists on using a direct/indirect distinction in talking about experience. I've always thought this weird, and many of the attempts to gloss Pirsig I've thought unsuccessful in allaying fears that we are regressing. However, there are ways to use the distinction, and I've read some interpretations of particularly Dewey (and, oddly enough, ancient Greek thought) that have begun to make sense of what they were trying to say. Krimel said previously: I eat because I AM hungry not because I believe I am hungry. Matt said: 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 said: 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: Ah, see, but this notion of "attribution" dodges right around the issue of "in and of themselves"--beliefs are largely those kinds of things we _attribute_ to others to explain/predict their behavior (and our own when we don't understand it). That's why, I would say, we almost always are able to easily translate between "I am hungry" and "I believe I am hungry" without much loss. And--I should add--it is the process of attribution that dodges around the whole idea of solipsism that you seem attracted/resigned to. Solipsism only makes sense under a certain view of the philosophical landscape--roughly represenationalism gone crazy, whereby you feel you don't have the right to say anybody else exists. In my view, these are all practical concerns, and practically speaking, of course other minds exist because we have to attribute the same kinds of things we have to predict them well. Krimel said: 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. Matt: As I understand it, the intentional stance is an important piece of Dennett's redescription of consciouness, roughly because there are two unrelated things, the phenomenal and the intentional, that we stick in the mind/consciousness. Krimel said: 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. Matt: Sure, the arguing itself doesn't confer importance, but I'm suggesting that, if you are going to argue at all, why not make it about something important? If there is nothing important hiding underneath the argument, why have it? 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