If the causal mechanism works on a more macro level, maybe it's more a conceptual thing, we select certain features and call it an effect, and certain other features that we call a cause. In some sense it is arbitrary, it's a matter of selection. I agree the concept of cause is ambiguous and problematic. What does it mean that everything is caused? If nothing isn't caused how do we know what a cause is? We need some ground of comparison but there isn't any. It's, as he says, an intuition. So perhaps it's a way of understanding the world as a whole, and of how we select out parts of the world in order to understand the world better. The reason dualism seems to make sense is that the mind doesn't seem to work causally. This too is an intuition. We have ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings. None of them cause us to do anything, because none of them are necessary. We can do things without having these particular thoughts, but we can also do things and have these particular thoughts. We often have no idea what particular thoughts or beliefs contributed to certain actions. Reasons are not causes. It's a different frame of understanding. The sun doesn't have reasons to shine, it shines because of physical processes. We understand ourselves and others by observing or imagining reasons.
@earthjustice01
2 жыл бұрын
@Bagpuss Bagpuss Thanks. I'm impressed by the thoroughness of your answer. Intentions are not things. But they are conceptual referents included in many explanations of human behavior. They are concepts that help us understand behavior, but they are not directly observable. We can infer them from observations, but we are interpreting what someone is doing and why they are doing it. We say our intentions are influenced by reasons, and our saying this is necessarily vague. Bringing in causes does not help but hinders our explanation. Most of the time we want to know why someone did something, not the physical train of events that led up to it. (an exception to this would be a murder investigation where we would want to know both things.) but in ordinary life we are looking for reasons and what to expect next or somewhere down the line, and we do this by generalizing about reasons and intentions, which we mostly infer and Interpret.Causal explanations are beside the point. If you accept the idea of freedom, that humans can act freely without being determined by external causes, and the importance of moral freedom and responsibility, talking in terms of causes gets in the way of any understanding. Or alternatively you could argue that freedom is an illusion and morality is just post-facto justification for power relations. That is a big mistake, in my opinion.
@earthjustice01
2 жыл бұрын
@Bagpuss Bagpuss Sorry about that, I realized right after I posted that I had mistakenly called intentions concepts. What I meant was that intentions aren't discrete things that we can observe externally. We are positing them as parts of our actions, but there isn't something that we can point to when we say we are having an intention. We think we recognize an intention in ourselves, but what is it we are recognizing? We are imagining something going on in the midst of an action, but it is not something we can point to because it is a momentary part of our experience. We are calling it an intention, but it isn't a discrete thing. Therefore, we've overstepped the bounds if we say that our intentions were caused or our intentions were the cause of an action, because we are not observing a discrete thing causing something to happen. We feel an intention as part of the experience of an ongoing action. In experience we can observe something causing another thing. The hammmer smashes the windowpane. But we don't observe things in the mind causing things to happen except by imagining them, and that's not the same as observing something causing an event. In fact, most of the time our beliefs, intentions, feelings, desires, etc. are inferred from out of the flow of experience; We feel or imagine that these are parts of our experience that influence each other, but this influence can only be indeterminate, since we cannot directly observe them as discrete entities, having discrete causes. they cannot be described as causes because they do not exist as discrete entities. They only exist in experience as we feel them and imagine them. The logic of feeling is associational not causal. Also, there is no good causal explanation of consciousness. I believe that that is because consciousness is the framework for experience. It's not a thing that can be pointed to in experience, it's what makes experience possible. I'm not denying that there are causal processes going on in the brain, I'm saying that consciousness can only be understood through our imagination, and as such, there is no warrant for causal explanations of consciousness.
@earthjustice01
2 жыл бұрын
@Bagpuss Bagpuss I'm just responding to your last point right now, I'll say more later. Your last sentence is the point I was making: consciousness frames our experience, it's how we experience, so it's not a discrete thing that we can point to over there. When you are aware of intending and then making a decision in real time you are not aware of some discrete things, things that you could hold constant and study experimentally or observe carefully from afar. The awareness is lived in the moment. The intention is not a discrete entity that's caused or causing things, it's part of your ongoing experience. Smashing a window pane with a hammer is a discrete event. you can observe it even if you are not involved in it. You see how one thing causes another thing. But we experience intentions in the intending, we experience decisions in the deciding. We don't see a decision extruding out of an intention. Our awareness is of doing something, planning to do it, trying to do it, failing to do it, but what else is there other than the doing? This intention that you are aware of when you are intending, is it a discrete thing? If you stop what you are doing in order to note down your awareness of the intention, then you have to use your imagination to see what this intention is. Ordinarily we don't need to use our imagination this way because we don't stop what we are doing when we are involved in things. I think we are talking past each other. The idea I have is not that we always have to guess what we are doing, it's that when we create concepts like intention, action, and decision, they are abstractions. When we are involved in doing them we are not aware of them as some discrete forms. It's just us doing them. What does it mean that an intention causes a decision, and a decision causes an action? How do you explain this in causal terms? Is an intention like a hammer? Is it like a liquid? Is it just a thought? And if it is, how does a thought cause a decision? Does the thought trigger the decision like a Rube Goldberg contraption? We really have to imagine something here because we are dealing with abstractions that we use to explain actions, but where do you find intentions other than in lived experience? Of course our awareness of what we are intending to do can be clear, but that's in the lived experience. Once you stop to reflect on it, you are using your imagination in order to understand abstractions.
@earthjustice01
2 жыл бұрын
The transparency you are talking about is in your lived experience. It's transparent while you are doing them. But you necessarily lose that transparency once you start reflecting on what you are doing, because you are introducing abstractions into what was a particular experience when you reflect on it.
@earthjustice01
2 жыл бұрын
@Bagpuss Bagpuss I'm replying to the first half of your comment. There's two meanings of "cause" here: intentionally caused and material cause. When I cause the chess piece to move, I'm a rational agent who has reasons for doing things. Cause in this sense is a metaphor for my intentional action. It makes no sense to say my intention was caused to intend by some material cause, because the intention initiates the action. Neither do we normally think of intentions being things that are caused by other things. We say, "I decided to do X." We mean we initiated the action, not that the intention was caused by something previous. But, in fact, there are no uncaused things, every event is caused by a previous event. When we "cause" something to happen, it either means there was some material cause that occurred by accident or it means that we intended to make it happen - a metaphorical use of "cause".
@No1WillMakeItOutAlive
5 ай бұрын
20:53 I just don’t see the problem…. The mind is influenced by everything around it, everyone has different mental formations due to their own experiences. I don’t think it’s right to say that two different people can experience the same mental state because everything is unique and always changing
@No1WillMakeItOutAlive
5 ай бұрын
Like the different hardware creates different software but when I say different hardware I mean EVERYTHING not just brain like different time + place in the universe
@No1WillMakeItOutAlive
5 ай бұрын
Like how could two people experience the exact same thing? Even if there is some magical “non material” energy I feel it would be experienced differently… I also don’t get the materialism idealism clash tbh, like if spirits are real wouldn’t you just be able to justify it through materialism, so long as you hold material to mean reality and not “what science says”
@Radegastx0
Жыл бұрын
Very poor lecture, disappointing...
@christopherhamilton3621
Жыл бұрын
Thoroughly agreed. Wrong and misleading in many ways.
@christopherhamilton3621
Жыл бұрын
Not to mention rather painful…
@JSwift-jq3wn
2 жыл бұрын
And the world effects the mind. What is the mind? Philosophy of mind is called psychology.
@JSwift-jq3wn
2 жыл бұрын
@Xaviar 77versus99 Heidegger has no clue. He should have become a Catholic priest, as was the plan for him, but he couldn't do without a woman. The fact that Freud put an end to all idiotic speculation a la German Idealism is still being ignored. A few individual will ask questions. But there are no answer-s...
@JSwift-jq3wn
2 жыл бұрын
@Xaviar 77versus99 it is simple. True philosopher knows that what we call Metaphysics is a dead end. "The entire history of philosophy is nothing more than a series of footnotes to Plato." Alfred North Whitehead (Process and Reality) The so-called revealed religion is the outcome of this realization, namely that we shall never know the first principle, be it physics or our own mind.
@JSwift-jq3wn
2 жыл бұрын
@Xaviar 77versus99 I agree. The priest are like parasites, making something (money) out of nothing. Academic philosophy professors are the same, parasites. Good luck with your endeavors.
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