The Human Question

I recently heard someone talk of our minds as using internal models (of items in the world) when we perceive. Obviously, there is a way in which this must be at least half-true. For each time we approach an individual,say, for the first time, our expectations are guided by what we have perceived in similar individuals in the past. Certainly, these expectations go beyond what is given through the external senses. And since, they in some sense provide clues as to what things in the world are like, some would call them "models," but I wouldn't. For such a characterization seems to amount saying that one is primarily aware only of internal objects, which serve as representations of things outside oneself. Consider what we mean by "model" when we use this word in everyday life. If it is large, I can walk around it, or if is small enough, I can turn it in my hand. I can compare it side-by-side with the thing it represents. I can look only the thing that has be...

Emergentism states both that the mental is irreducibly different from the physical, and that the mental is founded upon the physical. But I think it errs in calling all mental activity (even perception) non-physical. For its understanding of "physical" is as whatever-can-be-the-object-of-study-in-the-natural-sciences. And it tends to reduce the object of natural science to what can be measured. And the criterion "what can be measured" tends to be combined with the false assumption that they have thereby totally de-anthropomorphized physics. As in getting rid of substance, qualitative differences and teleology. But what if all of the objects to be measured by the natural sciences are derived from analogy with human action? And what if all science is to that degree anthropomorphic? If the answer is that they are the case, then there isn't really such a gulf between the mental and the physical, and the so-called divide between the objective thing and the sub...

I pulled out part of the previous post and edited it: [Hi Tim! If you're looking for your comment(s) and my reply, they're in the post that follows!] Thomas Aquinas and other premoderns would be quite comfortable with the claim that a stone, if not impeded by an extrinsic force, falls to the earth. They would have described this process in teleological terms. The stone by nature inclines toward the earth and heads toward this goal unless something else, (which is also acting to achieve another goal), interferes with the trajectory of the former. Things necessarily act for an end, but don’t necessarily achieve them. But doesn’t every thing in nature act upon another so that the other behaves differently than it would have otherwise behaved? Does that mean that everything is frustrating whatever it interacts with? On the contrary, if any natural processes involve teleology, then the interactions involved in these processes are fullfilments rather than frustrations of pur...

Let's pick up where I left off above... by the way, the comments below are probably more closely related to the previous post If humans, as animals, have bodily movement that follow the laws of physics, and human choices as well as the execution of those choices are in part biological events, then how can human actions be free? Possible approaches to answering this question: 1. note that the very act of knowing necessary truths can't be explained in terms of purely physical laws. For the object of knowledge, as a universal truth, is not a purely concrete event. So that if the act of knowing these truths is in part a biological event yet this does not prevent knowing from operating at the same time on a plane that transcends the merely biological, something similar should be true for the operation of human rational appetite (the operations of which include free choice) 2. note that the way the question sets up the problem assumes that every whole is the sum of its parts, so t...

Can you program a simple calculator with an algorithm and make it so that it does at least some arithmetic problems incorrectly? (Important here is the supposition that the errors be non-random)? I suppose Yes. Can you make a program that uses an algorithm to detect whether or not the said calculator's program is set to work correctly? Let's suppose the answer is yes. But can you make that program defective so that it fails to catch some programs? If the answer to the other two is yes, then Yes to this question as well. In such a case, can a calculator, relying on algorithms in any sense be said to know that it knows when it has the right answer? No.

She argues that laws of nature are false but useful. No mass behaves exactly according to Newton's law of attraction because no body is acted upon solely by gravity. The law of gravity, rather, describes a tendency which, along with other forces, influences the behavior of the body in question. Yet Nancy C. is a necessatarian.... ...to be continued, maybe.

Suppose one thought that qualitative differences (or at least some of them) are accounted for by material differences in neurons. Seeing and hearing are different because of differences in neurons... neurons, that is in the visual cortex and the corresponding auditory site and/or differences in the receptor neurons (rods, cones, etc). We'll call this material/qualia theory. Such a supposer could not at the same time agree that that functionalism is true. I.e., that the same cognition can be had in different media as long as, from the perspective of logical circuitry, they are equivalent (same combination of nand gates, etc., whether they are made of buckets with water or radio tubes or whatever). We'll call this formal/qualia theory. The two ways of accounting for differences in cognition are inconsistent with each other: which is not the same as saying that one of them is true.