ERIC P. CHARLES wrote at 09/19/2012 07:05 AM: > I am honestly confused at this point about what you are looking for in your > main question.
Hm. I feel like we've wandered down some semantic rat hole. Let me restate my main question: What is the difference between thought and action? The original question involved faith and crazy people because that's the particular context we were in. But I assert that faith is just a specific type of thought. So, I broadened it to thought. And I also asserted that we ascribe "crazy" to people when we can't tell a believable story about their motivations. Nick asserted that faith underlies all justification _and_ that belief is action. That lead me to challenge the combination of those by inferring (from those 2 assertions of Nick's) that faith must underlie all reality. So, the question in full context becomes: What specific actions constitute faith? All the rest of the below are distracting tangents, I think. > I don't think Zombies are any particular help in understand the "standing on" > relationship, and I also don't think they are of any particular help in > understanding the "reacting to" relationship. I brought up zombies solely in the context of distinguishing between some thing that is an "end in itself" versus some thing whose purpose is imputed by another thing. They help in that discussion, but not the one you want to have. A zombie is a person who's actions are perfectly predictable from her inputs and initial conditions. An actor is a person who's actions are only approximable from inputs and initial conditions. This relates to belief and intention only in the sense that some of us claim beliefs and intentions (examples of thought) are reducible to actions. All I want is at least one, preferably many, forward and inverse maps from actions to thoughts and from thoughts to actions. I ask for that because I'm a big believer in Feynman's aphorism: "What I cannot create, I do not understand." It's all fine and dandy to assert that thoughts are actions, but unless we can synthesize at least one thought from some set of actions, we're just blowing smoke. I don't know how to do it. And frankly, I believe thoughts are not reducible to actions. But I'd love to try if I could get some help from those of us who do believe in the reduction. > On other notes: > 1) Your friend clearly wants to tailgate. We know she does because, she does > so > when given the opportunity, and she expends effort to continue doing so (i.e., > she regulates her speed with the person she is closely following, etc.). Now, > I > fully agree with you - it is fascinating that her behavior changes when it is > pointed out. We could have a great time analyzing that. However, whatever our > analysis revealed wouldn't undo the original observation that (until someone > points out the behavior) she clearly wants to tailgate. I disagree. She does NOT want to tailgate. Her want is something else. Her S.O. claims that she tailgates because it frees her up to think about other things. She tailgates because she feels "safer" following someone else down the road. It limits the number of ways she might get in an accident. In fact, what she does is only considered tailgating when the density of cars on the road is low. When it's high and the space buffer between any two cars is, in general, small, she wouldn't be considered to be tailgating. But I suspect if we measured her distance, it would be about the same as it is in low density traffic. The reason I point that out is because ascriptive words like "want", "belief", and "intention" are all inadequate for describing action. They are not actions. They are something more. Merely measuring actions fails to compose a measure for thought (and vice versa). I.e. not only do thoughts not reduce to actions, measures of thoughts do not reduce to measures of actions. They come close, but are not complete. And it's in that incompleteness that I propose "actor status" ... incompressibility ... lies. > 2) This way of thinking leads to suspicion of the often-assumed-to-be-clear > distinction between mental processes labeled with different terms. For > example, > we might see a person raising a full cup to their mouths and ask them why they > were doing it. The person says "because I was thirsty". If we further asked > them, perhaps posing as a person with poor English skills, what "thirsty" > meant, then they might elaborate to "I wanted liquid." But, of course, that > answer alone is incoherent. The raising-cup-to-mouth behavior is not just the > "want" of liquid, it is also the "belief" that raising-cup-to-mouth will > result > in having-liquid. That is, if we are looking at behavior, there might not be > as > clear a distinction between "want" and "belief" as we have been lead to > believe/desire. > > Does that clarify anything? Not to me. What I want is a set of steps, a procedure, for generating a belief (or any thought) from a set of actions. If you said something like: "Forcing/convincing/training a person to raise a full cup of water to their mouth _generates_ the belief that full cups of water satisfy thirst.", then we'd be getting somewhere. The forward map is always easier than the inverse map. Going from belief to the actions that generated it is a much harder problem and tends to lead us down philosophical rat holes. > P.S. In the second note above, we could have gone straight to the "belief" > that > drinking would relieve "thirst", but given our current example, it seemed > better to get the word "want" involved. I don't want "want" to be involved. 8^) I'm trying to simplify the discussion down to an actionable point. Which is why I'll ask again: If faith is a collection of actions, what actions constitute faith? Is there a training program consisting of actions the person should execute that we can put a person through, by making them _do_ various things in a [non]ritualized way so that after the training, they will have faith? If so, what are those actions? -- glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
