Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'works', 'Is Hume's Principle analytic?' and 'What is an Emotion?'

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3 ideas

18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 3. Emotions / a. Nature of emotions
Rage is inconceivable without bodily responses; so there are no disembodied emotions [James]
     Full Idea: Can one fancy a state of rage and picture no flushing of the face, no dilation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action? …A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
     From: William James (What is an Emotion? [1884], p.194), quoted by Peter Goldie - The Emotions 3 'Bodily'
     A reaction: Plausible for rage, but less so for irritation or admiration. Goldie thinks James is wrong. James says if intellectual feelings don't become bodily then they don't qualify as emotions. No True Scotsman!
18. Thought / B. Mechanics of Thought / 6. Artificial Thought / c. Turing Test
A fast machine could pass all behavioural tests with a vast lookup table [Block, by Rey]
     Full Idea: Ned Block proposes a machine (a 'blockhead') which could pass the Turing Test just by looking up responses in a vast look-up table.
     From: report of Ned Block (works [1984]) by Georges Rey - Contemporary Philosophy of Mind 5.3
     A reaction: Once you suspected you were talking to a blockhead, I think you could catch it out in a Turing Test. How can the lookup table keep up to date with immediate experience? Ask it about your new poem.
18. Thought / E. Abstraction / 7. Abstracta by Equivalence
An 'abstraction principle' says two things are identical if they are 'equivalent' in some respect [Boolos]
     Full Idea: Hume's Principle has a structure Boolos calls an 'abstraction principle'. Within the scope of two universal quantifiers, a biconditional connects an identity between two things and an equivalence relation. It says we don't care about other differences.
     From: George Boolos (Is Hume's Principle analytic? [1997]), quoted by Michèle Friend - Introducing the Philosophy of Mathematics 3.7
     A reaction: This seems to be the traditional principle of abstraction by ignoring some properties, but dressed up in the clothes of formal logic. Frege tries to eliminate psychology, but Boolos implies that what we 'care about' is relevant.