tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post2720639227069899519..comments2024-03-28T13:39:03.094-07:00Comments on Edward Feser: Immaterial thought and embodied cognitionEdward Feserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13643921537838616224noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-47000157033479306242017-02-08T00:48:51.883-08:002017-02-08T00:48:51.883-08:00The determinacy of the immaterial intellect arguab...<i>The determinacy of the immaterial intellect arguably seeps down, as it were, into the body, so as to make determinate even tacit knowledge.</i><br /><br />Until it does thus sweep down, the body is indeterminate. It isn't anything in particular. It isn't anything at all. It isn't. Facts presuppose acts.Kristorhttps://orthosphere.wordpress.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-3438977432663928512017-02-03T05:19:23.120-08:002017-02-03T05:19:23.120-08:00Hey Machine Philosophy is alive O_O!
So that rumo...Hey Machine Philosophy is alive O_O!<br /><br />So that rumour he had dissappeared into the 4th dimension was not true...Eduardonoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-81683604808476780122017-01-31T20:39:26.188-08:002017-01-31T20:39:26.188-08:00Well, Prof Edward Feser, At first blush, what coul...Well, Prof Edward Feser, At first blush, what could be so radical <br />about the "immateriality of thought" per se? What's contentious,<br />I suppose, is that this notion could a lot of philosophers who <br />think otherwise, or cannot believe in such a description of thought.<br />But wouldn't this "immateriality" hold for consciousness and mind<br />too? And, wouldn't this essentially reinforce substance dualism,<br />as described by Descartes, and those who agree with him? Sure,<br />there are many who don't want to contemplate that we are not<br />mere subjects of the natural world, or that we are not like<br />machines. But as persons, we occupy a special and especially<br />vexed place in the natural world (if we want to understand this<br />actuality), and, however much machines may appear to resemble<br />us, the prospect that we might consider ourselves machines too<br />hasn't gained much traction in cultural or intellectual terms,<br /><br />Donald Lindeman, New York Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-76848229765273920742017-01-31T05:27:34.096-08:002017-01-31T05:27:34.096-08:00Is the adjudication of metaphor itself metaphorica...Is the adjudication of metaphor itself metaphorical?<br /><br />Reality's an illusion, for real.<br /><br />How about that beyond the control of God book, wherein abstract objects are used to somehow bootstrap the arbitration of their own ontology, but of course without mentioning that fact itself.<br /><br />Or a moral argument for God, but let's not get into whether or not we ought to think about that one. I dismissed that non-moral good back at the office.<br /><br />Regarding Chalmers and the hard problem of consciousness: what's a problem?<br /><br />Maybe the belief in molecular genetics is just caused by a brain chemical, like belief in consciousness, sensory awareness, problematicness, and significance are.<br /><br />But hey, self-reference avoiders have to make a living like the rest of us.machinephilosophyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07715878687266064548noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-67291442818593414572017-01-30T13:56:46.199-08:002017-01-30T13:56:46.199-08:00But put that aside, because there is a deeper poin...<i>But put that aside, because there is a deeper point. Ross never says in the first place that every single thought we ever have is entirely determinate in its content in the relevant sense, and he doesn’t need to say that in order to make his argument. All he needs is the premise that some thought is determinate in its content. So, even if we were to concede that inexplicit or tacit knowledge is indeterminate, that would not affect Ross’s argument, because all he needs is the claim that some of our explicit thought is determinate in its content.</i><br /><br />Hi Dr. Feser, <br /><br />So, in terms of Thomas and Aristotle, would every sense or phantasm that has gone through the agent (active??) intellect and resides in the possible intellect be an example of a determinate thought, and only those singular phantasms, images, and memories be examples of indeterminate thought? <br /><br />God bless,<br />DanielDanielhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17479435356630882897noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-125140824440814572017-01-30T05:55:58.081-08:002017-01-30T05:55:58.081-08:00I'm also trying to relate this back to a comme...I'm also trying to relate this back to a comment Feser makes in Aquinas on his chapter about psychology that for Thomas, it is intentionality that is irreducible to material things. That the intellect and the will are irreducible to the lower functions of the soul (vegetative and sensory). That intellect differs from sensation, not just in degree, but in kind. And the difference between the will and animal appetite is similarly absolute. Danielhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17479435356630882897noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-27169305987035315622017-01-29T19:17:18.804-08:002017-01-29T19:17:18.804-08:00I found a quote from Scholastics Metaphysics on pa...I found a quote from Scholastics Metaphysics on page 227.<br /><br /><i>Concepts are also determinate in a way no mental image can be. There is nothing in the mental image of a triangle by itself that determines that what it represents is a particular triangle, or triangles in general, or a dunce cap, or a piece of pizza, etc. The concept triangle, by contrast, determinately represents triangles. To borrow a famous example from Descartes, there is no clear difference between a mental image of a chilliagon (a polygon having 1,000 sides) and a mental image of a myriagon (which has 10,000 sides) but the concept chiliagon and myriagon are clearly and distinctly different. We also have many concepts (like logical consistency, law, abstraction, economics, certain, etc) that are so abstract that no mental image at all (except images of the written or spoken words they are merely contingently associated with) corresponds to them."</i><br /><br />All of this is in the context of Chapter 4 Essence and Existence in the section describing moderate realism about essences. I find it this interesting as well:<br /><br /><i>Moderate realism is realist insofar as, unlike Lockean conceptualism, it takes essences really to exist in individual things themselves, so that even though the essences are universal only as abstracted by the intellect, the conceptual product of this abstractive activity has a foundation in mind-independent reality.</i><br /><br />Cheers,<br />Daniel<br />Danielhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17479435356630882897noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-68513027982870898332017-01-29T17:54:21.270-08:002017-01-29T17:54:21.270-08:00Recall that to say that a thought is “determinate”...<i>Recall that to say that a thought is “determinate” in the sense Ross, Quine, Kripke, et al. have in mind is to say that there is a fact of the matter about whether it has one rather than another among a possible range of meanings. </i><br /><br />This comment makes me think of final causality. Can we translate this argument into Thomistic terms? Danielhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17479435356630882897noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-50988587970121079062017-01-28T04:03:38.397-08:002017-01-28T04:03:38.397-08:00What would you say to the critic who favors some f...What would you say to the critic who favors some form of idealism? In other words, apart from the complete source of all reality, everything else exists within the immersion of materiality. Simply put, even an angel would view his or her view of reality as some of the material reality. If that makes sense?<br /><br />Is our experience of existence merely a part of that larger picture of material reality, apart from God?Colenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-75194129945498947362017-01-27T17:54:43.673-08:002017-01-27T17:54:43.673-08:00How would a Thomist respond to the "hard prob...<i>How would a Thomist respond to the "hard problem of consciousness" formulated by David Chalmers? ("How is it that some organisms are subjects of experience?") <br /><br />Does the answer have to do with the immaterial aspects of thought?</i><br /><br />Consciousness, for the Aristotelian, can be a purely bodily thing, though the Aristotelian would think of bodily in a different way than modern philosophers. Thus consciousness per se does not necessarily have any immaterial aspect.<br /><br />So, for example, animals have consciousness, but not an immaterial intellect.Thursdayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13002311410445623799noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-42393460752955412612017-01-27T17:50:29.785-08:002017-01-27T17:50:29.785-08:00But still can't embodied cognition be used to ...<i>But still can't embodied cognition be used to make a positive case for materialism and nominalism?</i><br /><br />Only if you already assume the modern materialist conception of what the body is.Thursdayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13002311410445623799noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-80413692163100951882017-01-27T13:09:39.615-08:002017-01-27T13:09:39.615-08:00Hi Dr.Feser,
Fascinating posts, What I had in mi...Hi Dr.Feser, <br /><br />Fascinating posts, What I had in mind was that as the embodied cognition is a challenge to any realist metaphysics,belief that all abstract concepts,mathematics and even reasoning itself is shaped by aspects of body, a naturalist might not find these arguments persuasive, you do well to point out that here that the arguments premises are not undermined directly here at least and that ATists affirm that cognition if embodied.<br /><br />But still can't embodied cognition be used to make a positive case for materialism and nominalism? Like the way Carroll formulates what he calls Poetic Naturalism, any alleged immaterial aspects and irreducible qualitative/first person features of reality are just different ways of describing reality and any novel features of reality are emergent in the sense of weak emergence. Redhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05569340378356607760noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-16081238027750138992017-01-27T10:31:56.173-08:002017-01-27T10:31:56.173-08:00I wonder if a post on the distinction between '...I wonder if a post on the distinction between 'phantasm' and 'judgement' from an A-T framework could help clarify Ross' argument for some of the naysayers. There seems to be a conflation of the two built in to many of their responses. Stevehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10478365664202149335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-22344390052739820932017-01-27T07:01:34.712-08:002017-01-27T07:01:34.712-08:00@John Rockwell,
No, that only proves that the huma...@John Rockwell,<br />No, that only proves that the human mind needs the chemical processes and cellular activity of a functional brain in order to work properly (under normal circumstances, at least).<br />To borrow one of Dr. Feser's own analogies, suppose we find a message on a piece of paper. The more we smear the ink, the less intelligible the message becomes. It would be silly to conclude that the semantic content of the message is the result of the ink and paper. This also holds if we change the spelling of a few words, and alter the grammatical structure; the meaning changes, but it is not because the meaning is the result of the ink and paper themselves.<br />Insanity can have a material cause, but it would be analogous to how material disturbances can interfere with the meaning of a text.Parádoxohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05501803561895808925noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-84261631890194116282017-01-27T02:10:07.586-08:002017-01-27T02:10:07.586-08:00What's your thoughts on mental insanity like s...What's your thoughts on mental insanity like schizophrenia caused by chemistry in the brain going wrong as well as cases where some men ended up cannibalizing family members because of this?"A voice in his head telling him if he eat of that man that man becomes a part of him"<br /><br />Does that prove that consciousness is the result of the amalgamation of chemical processes and cellular activity?<br /><br />And that anything going wrong with that also seriously changes the nature of consciousness?John Rockwellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15746216376164151386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-64014622064336075482017-01-27T01:41:03.325-08:002017-01-27T01:41:03.325-08:00How would a Thomist respond to the "hard prob...How would a Thomist respond to the "hard problem of consciousness" formulated by David Chalmers? ("How is it that some organisms are subjects of experience?") <br /><br />Does the answer have to do with the immaterial aspects of thought?Paulnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-1279255161875021772017-01-25T20:39:12.295-08:002017-01-25T20:39:12.295-08:00How about this argument?
1. All formal thinking is...How about this argument?<br />1. All formal thinking is either semantically determinate or indeterminate (i.e., can be assessed in terms of properly semantic properties).<br />2. No physical process is semantically determinate or indeterminate. <br />3. Thus, no formal thinking is a physical process.David McPikehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04997702078077124822noreply@blogger.com