Things I suspect about existence

[Randorama]

+1.

I admit that I have nothing to say in this thread, so I am just reading posts.

[professor ganson]

It's the works on science that fascinate me. The rest is interesting, but the rationalists tend to get carried away too easily. It's amazing, for example, that Descartes got anything at all correct in his scientific work, but he did - he came up with the momentary impulse theory and inertia that Newton adapted for his physics, almost in spite of being a classical no-vacuums-allowed atomist. I like the religious (especially Catholic) philosophers as well, because (even if it is a false hope) they do hold out the promise of solid foundations for deontological ethics. I don't believe it, but it's worth pursuing IMO.

Although I'm an empiricist, I have enormous respect for Descartes and consider him one of the true heroes in the history of philosophy. His greatest philosophical achievement, to my mind, is his attempt to articulate and defend an alternative to the commonsense Aristotelian view of nature-- a modern scientific view of the world as a grand impersonal machine deprived of all sensible qualities as we experience them (i.e. color as we experience it, odor as we experience it, etc.), together with a view of minds as things fundamentally different from the things studied by the natural sciences (i.e. bodies). As a naturalist/empiricist, I reject his view that an empirical science of the mind is impossible, but there's no doubt he raised incredibly difficult questions for naturalists/empiricist-- we're still trying to sort through them.

I can understand your sympathy for non-consequentialist views in ethics, but my default position is definitely consequentialism. I'll hold that view until I find something better. (The only thing that comes close for me is some sort of sophisticated contractualist view, like that of Scanlon.)

[Randorama]

As a naturalist/empiricist, I reject his view that an empirical science of the mind is impossible, but there's no doubt he raised incredibly difficult questions for naturalists/empiricist-- we're still trying to sort through them.

I am interested in this part. Which of the questions raised by Decartes you find the most interesting?

Please keep in mind that I am a Linguist (both theoretical and experimental), so I do take the position that a science of the mind is possible.

[caincan]

ok for liberty of will.. but are you sure to be free ? why would governments hassle us ?

i believe in elder gods...and Descartes in france... is too a leading gaming company which provided the Cthulhu Rpg translated. fun or fate? roll the bones !...

[Ed Oscuro]

Although I'm an empiricist, I have enormous respect for Descartes and consider him one of the true heroes in the history of philosophy. His greatest philosophical achievement, to my mind, is his attempt to articulate and defend an alternative to the commonsense Aristotelian view of nature-- a modern scientific view of the world as a grand impersonal machine deprived of all sensible qualities as we experience them (i.e. color as we experience it, odor as we experience it, etc.), together with a view of minds as things fundamentally different from the things studied by the natural sciences (i.e. bodies). As a naturalist/empiricist, I reject his view that an empirical science of the mind is impossible, but there's no doubt he raised incredibly difficult questions for naturalists/empiricist-- we're still trying to sort through them.

Certainly Descartes is one of the greats, regardless of how Newton treated his work he still made use of that concept of inertia which alone would qualify him. I also find that his stance on the 'last retreat of reason' (whatever it's called) is very reasonable and I don't see how it would be useful to throw it away out of hand.

But moving away from that for a second - I think that given Bacon's concerns about the gap between a processed sensation, and the thing being sensed, means to me that there won't ever be absolute correspondence between a thing and our perception of it - but that is where theory and statistics come into play. We know with some precision the quantum distribution, and on the everyday scale those concerns essentially vanish. However, this is merely a description of what is known, still, and not a description of the thing behind all that. For a starting place in skepticism, Descartes is interesting, Hume is great, and so on, and I know I owe a great deal to them. Right now, though, I find my readings of Quine, Wesley Salmon, Thomas Kuhn even more interesting in their treatments of these subjects.

In one way, I think the whole debate is a bit like Zeno's paradoxes of motion (those being the idea that, if space is infinitely divisible, that you may never reach any given spot because you have to move half the distance, which in turn can be divided in half again, and so it goes forever) which were "solved," in one sense, by calculus (and the general format of the solution known before then), even if it is an answer that doesn't seem intuitive, and in fact people are still arguing about this one (I think it's got a couple potential answers, but they still leave unanswered questions). So promoting understanding of tough problems is a critical component of philosophy, to me, even if it has us dealing with things that don't seem to make sense or don't seem possible to resolve.

I can understand your sympathy for non-consequentialist views in ethics, but my default position is definitely consequentialism. I'll hold that view until I find something better. (The only thing that comes close for me is some sort of sophisticated contractualist view, like that of Scanlon.)

Scanlon is totally new to me. I've been reading (when I find time for it, which is once every other week) last summer's debate on lying. The Catholic deontological stance is not really so far outside the mainstream as people expect, and I have some sympathy for it too. Edward Feser's "Shopper's Guide to Teleology" appears subtly constructed to highlight his view (despite his disclaimer to the contrary) but otherwise it was very useful to get a quick fix on the terminology and some of the common positions of the debate.

[professor ganson]

As a naturalist/empiricist, I reject his view that an empirical science of the mind is impossible, but there's no doubt he raised incredibly difficult questions for naturalists/empiricist-- we're still trying to sort through them.

I am interested in this part. Which of the questions raised by Decartes you find the most interesting?

Please keep in mind that I am a Linguist (both theoretical and experimental), so I do take the position that a science of the mind is possible.

Descartes' most influential attack on physicalism about the mind is his celebrated conceivability argument. More recent versions of the argument have been developed by Saul Kripke and David Chalmers. You might be able to get a sense of the worry by glancing at section 5.5.2 of the following:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/funct ... nZomExpGap

Alternatively, you can look at the entry on Zombies at that same site. These discussions will likely fail to convey the force of the worry Descartes has raised. There are countless books and articles devoted either to developing or to confronting Descartes' argument. But no one has done more to popularize the subject than David Chalmers, whose personal website is here:
http://consc.net/chalmers/

This is a topic I have published on, but it's not my central preoccupation.

[Ed Oscuro]

Descartes' most influential attack on physicalism about the mind is his celebrated conceivability argument.

Of course, Descartes' view is problematic because he (infamously) found it reasonable to assume that the yelps of live dogs being vivisected merely represented the cries of a machine breaking down, and nothing else. Of course, we might well ask what prevents him from applying that thinking to other people, because they may simply be P-zombies.

For anybody who is even remotely tied to finding good outcomes in an empirical sense, it appears that his philosophy of reason and of the mind allows too much.

The conceivability argument more broadly taken is pretty interesting; some people might say that what is possible in reality is merely a subset of what is possible to conceive. We can conceive of a universe with very different values for known quantities, but those might not be possibly existing in worlds described by a modal proposition. I could easily invoke Goodman's new riddle of induction, which seems possible but in practice is unlikely to be true for any rule I wish to apply it to; by saying, for example, "today 2+2=4 but Thursday at 3 AM, 2+2=5, and not merely by definition, but necessarily." The conceivability argument seems to have trouble with the necessity of 2+2=4 in this way.

I believe that Descartes' attack on physicalism only holds if you grant certain things which we are not likely to. From this page:

Where Descartes seems to have erred is in assuming that he has a complete concept of minds and bodies. Thus, while we might agree that thinking is essential to minds, and extension is essential to bodies, it does not follow that "my essence consists solely in the fact that I am a thinking thing [or a substance whose whole essence or nature is to think]" (Sixth Meditation, emphasis added) unless Descartes knows that thinking and extension cannot both be properties of the same substance. In other words, even if we allow that Descartes has shown that consciousness is an essential property of mind or thinking substance, what he needs is a proof that mind or thinking substance cannot have extension as another of its essential properties.

[TLB]

the existence of humans in current times

~btw thanks for giving me lots to laugh at in this thread, guise!~

<3

[professor ganson]

I believe that Descartes' attack on physicalism only holds if you grant certain things which we are not likely

Descartes' version of the conceivability argument isn't going to convince many, but the more recent versions developed by Kripke, Chalmers, and others are much more difficult to undermine. But if you don't like conceivability arguments (and I don't care for them myself much), you can focus instead on Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument or Levine's Explanatory Gap Argument. They are all attempting to articulate a worry about how to make sense of phenomenal consciousness. Almost everyone agrees that there is a hard problem here, though some are more optimistic about the prospects of a solution.

[professor ganson]

Ed, you might enjoy some of the posts on here:
http://fauxphilnews.wordpress.com/
I love the post about bullshit detector in philosophers.