"Cayuse" wrote:
Stuart wrote:
You want to use "subjective experience" to reference an idealist
picture of the mind
Wrong on two counts. Firstly I'm not making any claims about mind,
but about what some want to call "subjective experience". Secondly,
your assumption of idealism is the kind of metaphysics that I'm
rejecting here. If you wish to uphold a claim for idealism then you'll
have to present your argument.
I've already responded nearby. But here is the relevant portion from
that post:
If mind is not explainable as a function of the physical then it must
either co-exist in what would, at minimum, be a dualist world or it
must be the only real existent with the physical a mere illusion (an
idealist world) or, as you and Bruce have argued (albeit for markedly
different reasons) we must grind to a screeching halt and simply
acknowledge a mystery, that something about the world, namely minds,
is unexplainable. . .
If you think you can divorce your idea of consciousness from Nagel's
idea of "what it is like" then please go ahead.
Already done nearby but to make this easier, here's the relevant
portion of THAT post again -
I am speaking of consciousness as being the agglomeration of features
of subjective experience we recognize in ourselves (and in others)
including but not limited to:
Being aware (consists of a complex of things, some of which are seen
below)
Distinguishing self from non-self (a form of awareness, of course)
Having intentionality (the capacity to think ABOUT things)
Comprehending (the capacity to recognize and link different
representations within various picturing and mapping systems in order
to make constructive new links to form other pictures and maps)
Intelligence (the capacity to operate in the world with foresight,
e.g., thinking ahead, guessing right, etc.)
Thinking (the capacity to have ideas, mental images and the
connections that link them)
Picturing/mapping (the capacity to construct, retain and utilize
complex representations of the inflowing stimuli we get)
Perceiving (awareness of the stimuli we get, consisting of our
sensory inputs)
Memory (the capacity to store and pull up specific thoughts, images,
scenarios, behaviors and put them back into use)
These certainly don't exhaust the features I think we find in our
consciousness and it may also be the case that many of them are
aspects of others in this list rather than stand-alones. It's also
possible that some are more basic than others and that for the less
basic ones to occur we need the more basic ones, etc. Certainly, the
model of the mind I think is best presumes that some very basic
(non-mindlike) algorithmic functions must be performed in order to
get the less basic features listed above though I'm not at all sure
how these layered processes and features fit together. But it seems
to me that mind is conceivable in precisely this way.
None of this, however, has anything directly to do with the idea that
what we know (either conceptually or perceptually) is all of a piece
with the knowing subject [what you are pushing], which is a very
different notion and irrelevant to the model of consciousness I think
makes the most sense . . .
