'Xian' - what's all that about then?

[flamingjimmy]

The I that made the pragmatic decision when you were a toddler to make the leap of faith to break with solipsism is an I in a purely physical sense? a sense that makes sense to you as purely the interactions between chemicals and neurons etc in the brain? If so, then I find that truly remarkable.

Well yeah, there's no reason to suspect otherwise. Also like I said I don't know what my thought processes were when I was a baby, but I doubt solipsism would occur to a child, we have things like grip as instinct so a child is already interacting with the world and believing in it probably before they have a concept of self, but obviously I'm just guessing there.

 

I can't speak directly for anyone else of course but in my experience most people think of themselves differently, on a different level of understanding they talk about themselves in a metaphysical way as having a mind that they own, distinct and more comprehensible than simply a summation of parts. I know that is how I think. If I was to view my mind as purely neuro-scientific processes I am not sure it would be possible to conceptualise on a higher level of understanding. We need as shorthand perhaps, but need all the same these metaphysical conceptions to understand ourselves and organise and interact with our sensory experiences.

Yes words like mind are good tools for communication, but I see nothing wrong with viewing my mind as the sum of the parts of my brain, and more importantly, I see no reason to think otherwise. I think you're doing your own brain a disservice to think of it otherwise. In this day and age now that we know that we evolved from incredibly simple life forms I don't see the room for that kind of thinking.

[six45ive]

The I that made the pragmatic decision when you were a toddler to make the leap of faith to break with solipsism is an I in a purely physical sense? a sense that makes sense to you as purely the interactions between chemicals and neurons etc in the brain? If so, then I find that truly remarkable. I can't speak directly for anyone else of course but in my experience most people think of themselves differently, on a different level of understanding they talk about themselves in a metaphysical way as having a mind that they own, distinct and more comprehensible than simply a summation of parts. I know that is how I think. If I was to view my mind as purely neuro-scientific processes I am not sure it would be possible to conceptualise on a higher level of understanding. We need as shorthand perhaps, but need all the same these metaphysical conceptions to understand ourselves and organise and interact with our sensory experiences.

 

I see your finally getting it, only I don't accept that there is a higher level of understanding than the knowledge we gain from science.

Also your summing of the term 'shorthand' to explain your metaphysical conceptions I would exchange for laziness.

That's not aimed at you personally but to anybody who takes a 'shortcut' to attempt to rationalize personal experiences independent of evidence to the contrary.

[Wildcat]

Well yeah, there's no reason to suspect otherwise. Also like I said I don't know what my thought processes were when I was a baby, but I doubt solipsism would occur to a child, we have things like grip as instinct so a child is already interacting with the world and believing in it probably before they have a concept of self, but obviously I'm just guessing there.

 

I did kind of doubt your pragmatic answer earlier.

 

Yes words like mind are good tools for communication, but I see nothing wrong with viewing my mind as the sum of the parts of my brain, and more importantly, I see no reason to think otherwise. I think you're doing your own brain a disservice to think of it otherwise. In this day and age now that we know that we evolved from incredibly simple life forms I don't see the room for that kind of thinking.

 

I think you will find through most of that passage you are talking about your mind as being more than a sum of parts. For example:

 

When you say: "I" Why do you not say "the combination of neurons and chemical processes in the brain and body sat before this keyboard" ? Surely you are doing yourself a disservice by your own argument?

My answer to my question is that you would not be communicating what you want to say. Your mind operates on a different level using concepts above and beyond the physical scientific processes that may or may not be their cause.

 

Ps this also addresses Six45ive's point.

 

We all use 'shorthand's' to describe our experience... even Scientists.... eg. do electrons exist in a literal sense or are they mathematical constructs that are said to exist because they work? do they take the form of a wave? do they have velocity and position at the same time? Depends how you look at them and what experiment you are doing. They don't really exist like we do, they are convenient constructs that have validity because of their utility.

[six45ive]

Well that's a shame, because it's probably the most important sentence of all.

 

Which is why I highlighted it.

 

Science does not explain, 'in a way that is available to anybody', the experience and meaning someone might find in a Dylan Thomas poem or the intricate and complex emotional and cognitive cocktail they go through staring at a Monet or a Michaelangelo. Even the theoretical deconstruction of colour theory, ratios etc cannot encompass the X factor that transcends explanation in the greatest art.

 

This simply highlights your misunderstanding of science. You have an interpretation that it's simply a reductionist process which it certainly can be but as it's the mechanism that gives us the highest and most accurate form of understanding then the 'complex emotional and cognitive cocktail' I get from understanding what's really going on in the world is just as intense as the one you may get from observing a Michaelangelo.

 

If a scientist did try to scientifically explain the neuroscience or whatever other technical micro data you might want to employ in getting across the experience of right-brain matters, they would in the process kill the experience stone dead.

 

In a large part they have. That may be a problem for or you as an individual but for me one of the redeeming features of science is the fact that it aims to take human interpretation and fallibility out of the equation when it comes to knowledge and understanding.

 

It would not be accessible to anybody because it would on a very important level be missing the whole point. Many things are far more than the sum of their parts in ways that can't be measured, and can only be understood implicitly, and forensic analysis cannot replace a live and instinctual experience. Even if the neuroscience is known, it still cannot replace the experience itself.

 

The problem with your assertions here is that you don't know what can and cannot be measured in some empirical way in a months time, a years time, 100 years time or 1000 years time. On top of that it's not about 'forensic analysis not being able to replace a live and instinctual experience'. My scientific understanding of certain phenomena enhances my 'complex emotional and cognitive cocktail' of something I enjoy doing or experiencing.

 

But even as you apparently try to score points by ramming home the idea that everything must be viewed only in purely scientific terms, you seem determined to denigrate anything that relates to the 'right brain' aspects of life, to trap the totality of experience into a logical straitjacket. You don't appear to know what I mean about integrating the left and right side functions in the optimum way I explained, in a post that you claim to agree with, which is odd. You just don't seem to understand what it was I was saying.

 

Unfortunately then I'm afraid you've got me pretty much wrong in every respect and you seem to be projecting a very simplistic idea of the scientific method. The reason that I was agreeing with your 'prickly goo' analogy is that I personally can only see a positive effect in the left side of the brain being able to understand the right side of the brain better thereby bringing the two closer together.

Like you I'm not sure if I've got the left and right the right way round.

[Waldo]

Science does not explain, 'in a way that is available to anybody', the experience and meaning someone might find in a Dylan Thomas poem or the intricate and complex emotional and cognitive cocktail they go through staring at a Monet or a Michaelangelo. Even the theoretical deconstruction of colour theory, ratios etc cannot encompass the X factor that transcends explanation in the greatest art. If a scientist did try to scientifically explain the neuroscience or whatever other technical micro data you might want to employ in getting across the experience of right-brain matters, they would in the process kill the experience stone dead. It would not be accessible to anybody because it would on a very important level be missing the whole point. Many things are far more than the sum of their parts in ways that can't be measured, and can only be understood implicitly, and forensic analysis cannot replace a live and instinctual experience. Even if the neuroscience is known, it still cannot replace the experience itself.

 

Fantastic! Bravo!

 

It's the same thing with dancing, the more you try to mentally grasp, to understand on a mental level, what you're doing; the more you lose the essence and pleasure of the thing. The best way to dance (or do many other things), is without forethought or calculation (which is quite hard in fact, to let the mind quieten down, esp, when you have a job than involves a lot of thinking).

 

I'm sure there's a thing in science too, where the mere act of observing a particle, will have an effect on that particle.

 

Of course, none of this is to say that science (by that I mean man's capacity to think and rationalise) isn't a very wonderful and valuable process.

 

... but isn't it just human mental process, activity of the mind?

 

If scientific understanding and cause and effect explain all the phenonema of the universe, how does science account for 'free will'? Do we have the ability to consciously choose one thing, or another; or, are we just predetermined robots (following strict rules, along with the rest of the cosmos), incabable of making descisions; and only labouring under the illusion that we can? Any thoughts...

 

p.s. Did anyone notice how far off-topic we've gone?

[six45ive]

Interesting article here about EI and its limitations.

 

http://everydaypsychology.com/2008/12/emotional-intelligence-im-not-feeling.html

 

:)I'm so glad you linked to that article because it highlights a problem I have with EI and that's that it tries to put emotional intelligence on the same footing as, if not superior to, IQ. However it simply does the job of showing that we have a scientific understanding of something that you've claimed can only be understood metaphysically.

As for the 'reason with emotion' fallacy that you quoted from Edwin Locke, I'm sure you understand perfectly that I'm not saying you reason with emotion, I'm simply saying science has an understanding of emotion and the human need for it. You seem to be getting more desperate wildcat.

 

I feel sorry for you.

 

Please don't. After all I get a double whammy of emotions. The same as you do from experiencing something 'artistic' that I have an appreciation of and an understanding of why I'm feeling this way opened up to me by scientific understanding.

 

I imagine you in your lab coat dissecting the latest Korn album into progressions and cadences and deploring other peoples appreciation of the music as superficial.

 

Way off the mark I'm afraid but anytime you want to meet up and find out what the real me is like then please don't be afraid to ask.

Seriously.......PM me and we can discuss it over a drink in a place of your choosing. I'm really a nice person when you get to know me.

 

Alternatively I'll probably be here http://sheffield.skepticsinthepub.org/Event.aspx/367/Five-Bad-Reasons-to-Believe-in-God on November the 15th.

 

Anyway it's been good discussing with you all but it's time for beddy byes. 'Night all.

[Plain Talker]

Yeah people just tend to do it by accident because they can't help it.

 

It's not a coincidence that pretty much all pop songs use the same chord sequences over and over.

 

Probably why they tend to sound so dull.

 

you can't call this "autotuned" modern rubbish Music!!!

[flamingjimmy]

I did kind of doubt your pragmatic answer earlier.

I don't. How does what I've just said contradict it?

I think you will find through most of that passage you are talking about your mind as being more than a sum of parts. For example:

 

When you say: "I" Why do you not say "the combination of neurons and chemical processes in the brain and body sat before this keyboard"?

No my mind does not operate on a different level. I am absolutely not talking about my mind as if its more than the sum of it's parts. To me when someone says 'more than the sum of its parts' they mean 'not fully understood'. I'm perfectly happy to use I as a clumsy imprecise word to refer to myself, by which I do mean a slab of meat and chemicals sat in front of a lump of a general-purpose programmable machine that receives input, stores and manipulates data, and provides output in a useful format. whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end user with no intervening computer operator*. The concept of 'me' or 'I' is extremely complex and I is just a shorthand. There's nothing 'beyond physical' about it.

 

When you talk about a computer do you not call it a general-purpose programmable machine that receives input, stores and manipulates data, and provides output in a useful format. whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end user with no intervening computer operator *?

 

No you just call it a computer or a PC. Does that somehow magically mean that it is more than the sum of its parts? No, and nor does it mean that when I say 'I'.

 

*taken from wiki's 'PC' and 'computer' pages.

[purdyamos]

Which is why I highlighted it.

 

 

 

This simply highlights your misunderstanding of science. You have an interpretation that it's simply a reductionist process which it certainly can be but as it's the mechanism that gives us the highest and most accurate form of understanding then the 'complex emotional and cognitive cocktail' I get from understanding what's really going on in the world is just as intense as the one you may get from observing a Michaelangelo.

 

 

 

In a large part they have. That may be a problem for or you as an individual but for me one of the redeeming features of science is the fact that it aims to take human interpretation and fallibility out of the equation when it comes to knowledge and understanding.

 

 

 

The problem with your assertions here is that you don't know what can and cannot be measured in some empirical way in a months time, a years time, 100 years time or 1000 years time. On top of that it's not about 'forensic analysis not being able to replace a live and instinctual experience'. My scientific understanding of certain phenomena enhances my 'complex emotional and cognitive cocktail' of something I enjoy doing or experiencing.

 

 

 

Unfortunately then I'm afraid you've got me pretty much wrong in every respect and you seem to be projecting a very simplistic idea of the scientific method. The reason that I was agreeing with your 'prickly goo' analogy is that I personally can only see a positive effect in the left side of the brain being able to understand the right side of the brain better thereby bringing the two closer together.

Like you I'm not sure if I've got the left and right the right way round.

 

 

 

I was right, you don't understand what I was saying at all.

 

You appear to need to see me as somehow anti-science, which I'm not at all. From reading your posts here and elsewhere there appears to a gap in your emotional or right brain understanding. You actually proclaim the left brain superior and that it's the left brain that makes the right side better understood. Yet you cannot credit the right brain with anything valuable to increase understanding of the left brain. They inform each other, any distortion or assumed supremacy of one over the other is not a position that results in wisdom but prejudice.

 

You have made quite contemptuous remarks about right side experiences of whatever kind, here and elsewhere over time. I recall, for instance, that you dismissed some variety of right-brain activity as 'pretentious nonsense', which as I said would be more due to its inherent indescribability than its being worthless. You evidently think the right brain is intrinsically inferior, which as I also mentioned, is like an echo of the age old attitudes which viewed traditionally feminine functions as inferior.

 

You claimed that science could explain to anyone the qualitative experience of right brain activity and meanings. How would science measure and explain the total experience of all the meanings and feelings I get when reading a favourite poem, for instance, and why would that be better than simply being within the experience itself and savouring it for its own sake? Some analysis and knowledge certainly does enhance appreciation, but that's still no replacement or explanation of what it feels like as a lived experience.

 

And anyway why would a scientific explanation be automatically better? What is wrong with the arts and humanities approach when appropriate? You say that empirical science is the most accurate form of understanding - as a longstanding observer of psychiatry I can tell you that humanity is the last thing that 'science' understands, and the best psychiatrists are in fact fully fluent in their right brain, giving full importance to the emotional, lived experience of a person. It's their humanity that makes them good psychiatrists as much or often more than pure scientific knowledge of brain chemicals or drugs.

 

The arts and humanities are the counterbalance to the sciences. They represent the two symbolic sides of the brain. Even if things can be empirically measured, it doesn't mean that that type of knowledge is the superior form of understanding, as you claim. Or at least not across the board in all situations as you seem to imply. They each have their role to play in life, or at least they do in healthy societies/families/individuals.

[Asif]

It's a place in China...Where the terracotta army is.