display all the ideas for this combination of texts
4 ideas
2553 | The mind is a property, or it is baffling [Rorty] |
Full Idea: All that is needed for the mind-body problem to be unintelligible is for us to be nominalist, to refuse firmly to hypostasize individual properties. | |
From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 1.3) | |
A reaction: Edelman says the mind is a process rather than a property. It might vanish if the clockspeed was turned right down? Nominalism here sounds like behaviourism or instrumentalism. Would Dennett plead guilty? |
2550 | Pain lacks intentionality; beliefs lack qualia [Rorty] |
Full Idea: We can't define the mental as intentional because pains aren't about anything, and we can't define it as phenomenal because beliefs don't feel like anything. | |
From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 1.2) | |
A reaction: Nice, but simplistic? There is usually an intentional object for a pain, and the concepts which we use to build beliefs contain the residue of remembered qualia. It seems unlikely that any mind could have one without the other (even a computer). |
19355 | The soul doesn't understand many of its own actions, if perceptions are confused and desires buried [Leibniz] |
Full Idea: The soul does many things without knowing how it does them - when it does them by means of confused perceptions and unconscious inclinations or appetites. | |
From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Note L to Bayle's 'Rorarius' [1705], [L]) | |
A reaction: This increasingly strikes me as a wonderful and important insight for its time. He's really paid attention to his own mind, and given up the simplistic view that derives from Descartes. Are birds conscious? Yes or no! Silly. |
2554 | Is intentionality a special sort of function? [Rorty] |
Full Idea: Following Wittgenstein, we shall treat the intentional as merely a subspecies of the functional. | |
From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 1.3) | |
A reaction: Intriguing but obscure. Sounds wrong to me. The intentional refers to the content of thoughts, but function concerns their role. They have roles because they have content, so they can't be the same. |