--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, turquoiseb <no_reply@...> wrote: > > > Good example of what is known as "intellectual masturbation" or > > "pseudo intellectualism." :-D > > It's not even *Robin's* masturbation. He needs > other people's ideas even to do that. :-)
The more I think about this, the more I like it. I've always been fascinated by the relative absence of original thought on this forum, among people who laughably talk about developing their "creative intelligence." I'm beginning to think that some people's fondness for appropriating the ideas of others is not *only* a cover for not having any ideas of their own as a way of posing for other people. It may also be a way of hiding the fact that they don't have any ideas of their own *from themselves*. If they can trip on the ideas of others with enough enthusiasm or faux enthusiasm ( let us not forget that a few months ago the person who is trying to present Nagel's ideas as the best thing since sliced bread was trying to do the same with Lady Gaga :-), other people may be taken in by the enthusiasm and not realize that it's all for Other People's Ideas. But a secondary purpose IMO may be to keep *themselves* from realizing that they don't have any ideas of their own. In a sense, appropriating Other People's Ideas is a lot like viewing porn while masturbating. Some people have sex with other real, live people. The closest others can get to having sex is by whacking off. And even in the realm of masturbation, there are some who can get by just fine with their own imaginations, and there are others who can't even whack off without looking at porn. I guess I'm suggesting that people who have ideas of their own are like the former self-sufficient masturbators, and those who can only borrow ideas from other people are more like the porn-dependent masturbators. On the left is what the minds of those who borrow ideas from others to masturbate to think their minds look like to others. On the right is what those minds really look like. :-) --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, turquoiseb <no_reply@...> wrote: > > > Good example of what is known as "intellectual > > masturbation" or "pseudo intellectualism." :-D > > It's not even *Robin's* masturbation. He needs > other people's ideas even to do that. :-) > > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Bhairitu noozguru@ wrote: > > > > On 10/25/2012 04:30 PM, Robin Carlsen wrote: > > > MIND AND COSMOS: WHY THE MATERIALIST NEO-DARWINIAN CONCEPTION OF NATURE IS ALMOST CERTAINLY FALSE by Thomas Nagel > > > > > > But to explain consciousness, as well as biological complexity, as a consequence of the natural order adds a whole new dimension of difficulty, I am setting aside outright dualism, which would abandon the hope for an integrated explanation. Indeed, substance dualism would imply that biology has no responsibility at all for the existence of minds. What interests me is the alternative hypothesis that biological evolution is responsible for the existence of conscious mental phenomena, but that since those phenomena are not physically explainable, the usual view of evolution must be revised. It is not just a physical process. > > > > > > If that is so, how much would have to be added to the physical story to produce a genuine explanation of consciousness--one that made the appearance of consciousness, as such, intelligible, as opposed to merely explaining the appearance of certain physical organisms that, as a matter of fact, are conscious? It is not enough simply to add to the physical account of evolution the further observation that different types of animal organisms, depending on their physical constitution, have different forms of conscious life. That would present the consciousness of animals as a mysterious side effect of the physical history of evolution, which explains only the physical and functional character of organisms. . . > > > > > > For a satisfactory explanation of consciousness as such, a general psychophysical theory of consciousness would have to be woven into the evolutionary story, one which makes intelligible both (1) why specific organisms have the conscious life they have, and (2) why conscious organisms arose in the history of life on earth. . . > > > > > > [S]ome kind of psychophysical theory must apply not only nonhistorically, at the end of the process, but also to the evolutionary process itself. That process would have to be not only the physical history of the appearance and development of physical organisms but also a mental history of the appearance and development of conscious beings. And somehow it would have to be one process, making both aspects of the result intelligible. . . > > > > > > This would mean abandoning the standard assumption that evolution is driven by exclusively physical causes. Indeed, it suggests that the explanation may have to be something more than physical all the way down. The rejection of psychophysical reductionism leaves us with the mystery of the most basic kind about the natural order--a mystery whose avoidance is one of the primary motives of reductionism. It is a double mystery: first, about the relation between the physical and the mental in each individual instance, and second, about how the evolutionary explanation of the development of physical organisms can be transformed into a psychophysical explanation of how consciousness developed. > > > > > > The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astonishing things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world. There must be a very different way in which things as they are make sense, and that includes the way the physical world is, since the problem cannot be quarantined in the mind. . . > > > > > > This dissatisfaction with an explanatory stopping place that relates complex structures to complex structures is what underlies the constant push toward reduction in modern science. It is hard to give up the assumption that whatever is true of the complex must be explained by what is true of the elements. That does not mean that new phenomena cannot emerge at higher levels, but the hope is that they can be analyzed through the character and interactions of their more elementary components. Such harmless emergence is standardly illustrated by the example of liquidity, which depends on the interactions of the molecules that compose the liquid. But the emergence of the mental at certain levels of biological complexity is not like this. According to the emergent position now being considered, consciousness is something completely new. > > > > > > Because such emergence, even if systematic, remains fundamentally inexplicable, the ideal of intelligibility demands that we take seriously the alternative of a reductive answer to the constitutive question--an answer that accounts for the relation between mind and brain in terms of something more basic about the natural order. If such an account were possible, it would explain the appearance of mental life at complex levels of biological organization by means of a general monism according to which the constituents of the universe have properties that explain not only its physical but its mental character. > > > > > > > > > > Good example of what is known as "intellectual masturbation" or "pseudo > > intellectualism." :-D > > >
