6 ideas
| 21373 | We become objective when we detach ourselves from the world [Janaway] |
| Full Idea: We apprehend the world purely objectively, only when we no longer know that we belong to it. | |
| From: Christopher Janaway (Schopenhauer [1994], II:368), quoted by Christopher Janaway - Schopenhauer 6 'Objectivity' | |
| A reaction: Since we are not actually detached from the world, that makes objective thought an act of imagination. And none the worse for that, I would say, since philosophers don't seem to understand the central epistemological importance of imagination. |
| 16062 | A necessary relation between fact-levels seems to be a further irreducible fact [Lynch/Glasgow] |
| Full Idea: It seems unavoidable that the facts about logically necessary relations between levels of facts are themselves logically distinct further facts, irreducible to the microphysical facts. | |
| From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], C) | |
| A reaction: I'm beginning to think that rejecting every theory of reality that is proposed by carefully exposing some infinite regress hidden in it is a rather lazy way to do philosophy. Almost as bad as rejecting anything if it can't be defined. |
| 16061 | If some facts 'logically supervene' on some others, they just redescribe them, adding nothing [Lynch/Glasgow] |
| Full Idea: Logical supervenience, restricted to individuals, seems to imply strong reduction. It is said that where the B-facts logically supervene on the A-facts, the B-facts simply re-describe what the A-facts describe, and the B-facts come along 'for free'. | |
| From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], C) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be taking 'logically' to mean 'analytically'. Presumably an entailment is logically supervenient on its premisses, and may therefore be very revealing, even if some people think such things are analytic. |
| 16060 | Nonreductive materialism says upper 'levels' depend on lower, but don't 'reduce' [Lynch/Glasgow] |
| Full Idea: The root intuition behind nonreductive materialism is that reality is composed of ontologically distinct layers or levels. …The upper levels depend on the physical without reducing to it. | |
| From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], B) | |
| A reaction: A nice clear statement of a view which I take to be false. This relationship is the sort of thing that drives people fishing for an account of it to use the word 'supervenience', which just says two things seem to hang out together. Fluffy materialism. |
| 16064 | The hallmark of physicalism is that each causal power has a base causal power under it [Lynch/Glasgow] |
| Full Idea: Jessica Wilson (1999) says what makes physicalist accounts different from emergentism etc. is that each individual causal power associated with a supervenient property is numerically identical with a causal power associated with its base property. | |
| From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], n 11) | |
| A reaction: Hence the key thought in so-called (serious, rather than self-evident) 'emergentism' is so-called 'downward causation', which I take to be an idle daydream. |
| 7272 | Maybe lots of qualia lead to intentionality, rather than intentionality being basic [Gildersleve] |
| Full Idea: A common modern reductive view of the mind is that a hierarchy of intentional systems eventually produce qualia, but it might be the other way around. The mind is 'qualia-upon-qualia', with units of minimal qualia building up into intentional thought. | |
| From: Harry Gildersleve (talk [2005]), quoted by PG - Db (ideas) | |
| A reaction: If qualia are seen as existing at the most basic level of the brain, this may well imply panpsychism. It certainly says that basic brain cells are capable of minimal experiences. The idea that thought is essentially qualitative is very intriguing. |