Philosophy: books and discussion

[beppe]

Originally Posted by TimMason

but I suppose I'm arguing with myself : here's something I wrote about this some ten years ago.

Thank you Tim. This helps me to understand in some measure why the two of us tend to collide.

Our spheres of interest appear to be quite disjointed.

[beppe]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

I suspect that this post figures into the current discussion somehow.

Nature occupies all possible degrees of freedom, eventually. Poor monkeys. Thrown out of their refuge by their curiosity. Life of Pi describes this quite well.

[beppe]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

I agree with what you say of the value of reading Aristotle's Ethics. It's been a while for me. Perhaps it's time for a re-read.

Yes Tom, I know that you love the Ethics, but I am really in love with that chapter of Rethoric. I am much lazier and simple minded than you, big and pretty lawyer (luckily benevolent).

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by beppe

Yes Tom, I know that you love the Ethics, but I am really in love with that chapter of Rethoric. I am much lazier and simple minded than you, big and pretty lawyer (luckily benevolent).

I only play one in Poohbear_nc tales! ...but one of my grandfathers was a lawyer.

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by TimMason

Language is made anew by each generation. Pinker and other Chomskyans claim that most of language is already there, and is at most triggered by what children hear. They argue that children never hear enough instances to be able to construct the language in the way they do. They call this the 'poverty of stimulus argument'.

There may be truth in this (in fact I'm sure there is, how much I don't know), but how do you account for the fact that I learned French as a child, and you learned English (presumably)? Neither of us invented a new language. We learned the sounds we heard from adults around us, and we learned to repeat them. Then we learned words, and we learned to make sentences with them, also based on what we heard. Based on repeating what we heard, inferring rules from it, and applying them to other words to create sentences we never heard before. Imitation is by far not all there is to learning, but it's one of the basic bricks.

[TGS]

Originally Posted by MartinParish

To some degree, advances in science and our understanding of the natural world have probably made certain questions that philosophers argued for centuries virtually irrelevant; consciousness, for example, is now generally recognized to be an emergent property of the brain that has its origins in biochemistry,

Indeed that's right, but it is not clear how claiming that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain explains much - in particular it seems to have a hard time explaining intentionality, how brain states can be "about" something that is not a brain state.

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by TGS

Indeed that's right, but it is not clear how claiming that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain explains much - in particular it seems to have a hard time explaining intentionality, how brain states can be "about" something that is not a brain state.

Is it possible to give an example of a brain state being about something that is not a brain state?

I'm probably imagining it to be something it isn't.

[TimMason]

how do you account for the fact that I learned French as a child, and you learned English (presumably)? Neither of us invented a new language.

What some linguists believe happens is that children re-invent the language. Up until the age of about 8 or 9, they are able to take even rather poor language input and turn it into a flexible, working language. That's how you get from a pidgin to a creole. One interesting example is how deaf children in Nicaragua were able to create a sign language once they were brought together. The government decided to round up all the deaf children, and put them in a specialized school where they would learn Spanish. They didn't learn Spanish very well, but the younger ones took the rather basic signs that the adolescents had worked out for themselves, and turned them into a language. You can read about this in Pinker's 'The Language Instinct' which, once again, I do highly recommend. (There is a French edition, published by Odile Jacob).

Children don't directly imitate their parents when they speak. They have their own grammars (often, parents will correct this, but the children resist correction). Gradually, their grammar comes to resemble that of the parents, but they get there by their own route. That's why Chomsky and Pinker argue that the grammar is innate (although this is a simplification of their position).

If anything like this is actually the case, then it has philosophical ramifications. It suggests that human beings are far more autonomous than earlier models of learning would have it. But at the same time, it also suggests that the child needs to be placed within a sufficiently rich network of social relations with both adults and other children (for bilingual children like mine, it is the language of the school that usually becomes the dominant tongue, rather than the language of one or the other of the parents).

[TimMason]

consciousness is an emergent property of the brain

Isn't this a *philosophical* position? I think john Stewart Mill argued this, and now scientists have 'caught up' with the philosopher. There's an interesting article on emergence by Goodenough and Deacon. They write :

By contrast, our emergent mentalities to date lack reductionist explanations, even if most neuroscientists are confident that such explanations will be forthcoming. As with life, moreover, analysing all the pieces is just the first step, not the final explanation.

If that is the case, it leaves plenty of wriggle-room for the philosopher.

BTW, Deacon has written an interesting (and non-Chomskyan) account of the development of language. It's called "The Symbolic Species." You'll catch glimpses of his argument in the article I've linked to.

[TGS]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

Is it possible to give an example of a brain state being about something that is not a brain state?

I'm probably imagining it to be something it isn't.

At its simplest I guess the question resolves into how can a brain state mean something. If my brain is in state A (or, for that matter, has emergent physical property A), how can that brain state mean what it does to me.

[FlorenceArt]

The way we think is by association, as I understand it.

We start by associating certain brain states to certain external conditions. For example, if I see a donut once, I will be able to recognize it later as something I have seen later.

Then we create associations between different brain states / between different external conditions. For example, I eat the donut and find that it satisfies my hunger, or that it tastes good, or both. Then, next time I am hungry, I might thing that eating a donut would be good. Or if I see a donut, I might become hungry and anticipate the pleasure of eating it. Then someone tells me this is called a donut, so that next time I am hungry, I can say "I want a donut".

Probably not a very good explanation, but I hope you see what I mean. We build an internal world of association inside our brain, by connecting different brain states together, these brain states being representations of external things.

Well, something like that...

[Sparrow]

So hunger is a brain state that causes my brain to act out a behaviour to deal with it?

Isn't it just an evolution thing - a random development that turned out to be beneficial??

[TGS]

But then isn't "associating" a brain state, and "recognising it" another brain state, and knowing that I've recognised it yet another brain state and so on towards a dangerous infinite regress? But when I see a doughnut I don't recognise a brain state, I recognise a doughnut. If I anticipate the pleasure of eating a doughnut am I anticipating (brain state A) the pleasure (brain state B) - and is that a third brain state A + B +....= brain state X?

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

So hunger is a brain state that causes my brain to act out a behaviour to deal with it?

Isn't it just an evolution thing - a random development that turned out to be beneficial??

Of course it is, our brain was created by evolution.

Originally Posted by TGS

But then isn't "associating" a brain state, and "recognising it" another brain state, and knowing that I've recognised it yet another brain state and so on towards a dangerous infinite regress? But when I see a doughnut I don't recognise a brain state, I recognise a doughnut. If I anticipate the pleasure of eating a doughnut am I anticipating (brain state A) the pleasure (brain state B) - and is that a third brain state A + B +....= brain state X?

I don't know if I can answer that...

Seeing a donut is a brain state: it's a series of stimuli that are sent by my eyes to my brain. Right? Similarly, being hungry, or sated, or tasting a donut, are brain states. Anticipating the pleasure of a donut is a brain state that is compounded of many others: seeing the donut, remembering the pleasure of eating it, feeling the hunger... my brain makes links between all these brain states and creates another brain state. I think...

I'm probably not making much sense, just trying to put words on the vague understanding I have of those things.

[TimMason]

Seeing a donut is a brain state.

A brain state I rarely aspire to. Can we substitute cheesecake? And not the American variety, which is all well and good, but cannot hold a candle to the Polish variety, which is made of potatoes. This confection created a battery of brain states in what I have to call 'me' during the mid-sixties, when "I" was a law-clerk working in Fetter Lane, and discovered cheesecake in its Polish form in a Jewish delicatessen where we used to take our afternoon tea.

There may have been, in my relationship to this suite of cheesecake slices, a series of associated and networked brain states. But it seems to me that there was also a series of associated and networked confectioners of cheesecake, servers of cheesecake, and makers of pots of tea, and that these associations and networks reached back into Poland, and from Poland made their way across the centuries during which cheesecakes were fashioned and perfected.

That is to say that this "I" or "me" which thinks of itself as fixing a cheesecake - rather than a donut - in its regard, is, at least in so far as cheesecakes rather than donuts are concerned, an artifact of interconnections in which "my" brain plays an important (to what "I" think of as "me") but nevertheless minor part.

And the cheesecake which my wife served us after lunch - which was neither Polish nor American, although, I think, closer to the latter - is part of an informal contract that links both her and me to a multiplicity of worlds, cooks, and writers of recipes.