Philosophy and the rise of science

@kennethamy,

kennethamy;162127 wrote:

Intention is a mental state, all right. But, if mental states are also physical states, then intention is a physical state too. Whether intention is a mental state only; or whether it is a physical state only; or whether it is both a mental state and a physical state seems to me to make difference. As long as a person intends to kill, the person is blameworthy. The law does not say that intention has to be only a mental state for the person who kills to be blameworthy, it says only that there has to be an intention for the person to be blameworthy. So, you are confusing two different issues: whether a person has to intend to kill to be blameworthy is one issue; but whether intentions are mental states is a different issue. You are mixing them up.

I expect you simply assume that intentions can be only mental states, so if the state is not mental, then it is not an intention. But what justifies that assumption? Nothing that I can see.

So, to repeat, as long as you intend to kill, you are blameworthy. But what has whether intentions are mental, or physical, or both mental and physical to do with that. Nothing obviously. Since even it the intention is physical, it is still there, and it is still an intention.

---------- Post added 05-09-2010 at 09:21 AM ----------

Are you joking me? Intention is a mental state! If you doubt it, then you are wrong.

@TuringEquivalent,

TuringEquivalent;162782 wrote:

Are you joking me? Intention is a mental state! If you doubt it, then you are wrong.

I did not say intention was not a mental state. I said it could also be a physical state. That it could be that all mental states were physical states. Here is an analogy: no one says there are no numbers. Of course there are numbers. But numbers are also classes. So to say that the number three is the class of all triples is not to say there is no number three: and to say that intentions are physical states is not to say there are no intentions. See the analogy?

@kennethamy,

kennethamy;162784 wrote:

I did not say it was not a mental state. I said it could also be a physical state. That it could be that all mental states were physical states.

The subjective experiences associated with mental states are non-reducible to physical states.

@TuringEquivalent,

TuringEquivalent;162786 wrote:

The subjective experiences associated with mental states are non-reducible to physical states.

Why can't it be that what is subjectively experienced as a mental state is identical with what is objectively experienced as a physical state? One and the same state, experienced in two different ways? No reduction. Just identification. The wound on my arm is objectively experienced by you looking at it, and subjectively experienced by me, feeling it. It is the same wound.

@kennethamy,

kennethamy;162790 wrote:

Why can't it be that what is subjectively experienced as a mental state is identical with what is objectively experienced as a physical state? One and the same state, experienced in two different ways? No reduction. Just identification. The wound on my arm is objectively experienced by you looking at it, and subjectively experienced by me, feeling it. It is the same wound.

Hey Kennethamy, toss me a piece of pain, will you?

@jeeprs,

jeeprs;162797 wrote:

Hey Kennethamy, toss me a piece of pain, will you?

If pain is, as physiologists believe, the vibration of C-fibers, then I could, but it would be rather gruesome. Are you up to it?

@kennethamy,

I am making a rhetorical point. Pain and other sensations are felt, and what is felt necessarily has an internal or subjective element. It is, I propose, apodictic, not able to be reasonably denied. If this idea that sensation (or intention, or any other activity of consciousness) 'is' the activity of matter, then why can't pain, sensation, intention, and so on, be put on display on a shelf, or packaged and shipped?

@kennethamy,

kennethamy;162790 wrote:

Why can't it be that what is subjectively experienced as a mental state is identical with what is objectively experienced as a physical state? One and the same state, experienced in two different ways? No reduction. Just identification. The wound on my arm is objectively experienced by you looking at it, and subjectively experienced by me, feeling it. It is the same wound.

There is no "why". At the most fundamental level, it is a brute fact. I can make objective observation, and chart all the physiological changes in the body when a person forms an intention, but it is different from having the intention itself. There is a substantive difference, and that is it.

@jeeprs,

jeeprs;162815 wrote:

I am making a rhetorical point. Pain and other sensations are felt, and what is felt necessarily has an internal or subjective element. It is, I propose, apodictic, not able to be reasonably denied. If this idea that sensation (or intention, or any other activity of consciousness) 'is' the activity of matter, then why can't pain, sensation, intention, and so on, be put on display on a shelf, or packaged and shipped?

That pains are felt does not mean that they can only be felt. Not even if you write "felt" in italics. And that pains have a subjective element does not mean that they are only a subjective element. Pain is displayed, as I said, if it is the vibration of C-fibers. Since the vibration of C-fibers can be displayed. I am not denying that pains can be felt. I am denying that they can only be felt.

@kennethamy,

kennethamy;162790 wrote:

Why can't it be that what is subjectively experienced as a mental state is identical with what is objectively experienced as a physical state? One and the same state, experienced in two different ways? No reduction. Just identification. The wound on my arm is objectively experienced by you looking at it, and subjectively experienced by me, feeling it. It is the same wound.

Because to feel something is not the same as to see or describe it. So it can't be identical. It is not the same thing. There might be a single wound, but surely it means something completely different to the person who has it, than to the one who treats it.

@jeeprs,

jeeprs;162826 wrote:

Because to feel something is not the same as to see or describe it. So it can't be identical. It is not the same thing. There might be a single wound, but surely it means something completely different to the person who has it, than to the one who treats it.

Because to feel something is not the same as to see or describe it. So it can't be identical

But that is not only a non-sequitur, it begs the question. How could it follow from the fact that I know something in different ways, that what I know are different things? And the issue is precisely whether if I feel something, I cannot also see that same something. Therefore it is just begging the question to assert that cannot be so. That a wound means something different to the person who has it than it does to the person who has it, does not imply it is not the same wound. In fact, it manifestly implies that it is the same wound. Otherwise I would tell the physician, "No use, Doc. That bleeding hole in my arm is something you cannot feel, so it is futile to try to treat it".

@kennethamy,

Obviously if I go to the doctor with a wound, he can see the wound. But he can't feel the pain. Isn't the pain at least as real as the wound? Yet it does not exist objectively.

---------- Post added 05-11-2010 at 06:56 PM ----------

furthermore, you can have pain without a wound, and wound without pain.

I don't think pain can be described in objective terms at all. There is no pain anywhere in the world, outside creatures.

@jeeprs,

jeeprs;162834 wrote:

Obviously if I go to the doctor with a wound, he can see the wound. But he can't feel the pain. Isn't the pain at least as real as the wound? Yet it does not exist objectively.

But how is that relevant? Your claim is that what he sees, and what I feel, are not the same thing. Don't confuse that with a quite different proposition: namely, that his seeing, and my feeling, the (same) wound, are different ways of being aware of the wound.

I did not say that the pain was not as real as the wound (whatever that turns out to mean).

"We must follow the argument wherever it leads" Socrates.

@kennethamy,

True, but it started out whether 'intention' was mental or physical. It's the same thing, you say. I say not. Intention has in internal or subjective meaning in the same way that pain does.

@jeeprs,

jeeprs;162842 wrote:

True, but it started out whether 'intention' was mental or physical. It's the same thing, you say. I say not. Intention has in internal or subjective meaning in the same way that pain does.

I did not say they are identical. I said we should consider it as a possibility, and not dismiss it out of hand, or as we say in the jargon, A priori. You appear to be arguing that is it is impossible that an intention (which is mental) should also be physical. I am just saying that it is not impossible, and if so, it might even be true. Of course, whether or not it is true is a different issue from whether it is possible. And, again, the fact that something means one thing to me, and a different thing to you, does not mean it cannot be one and the same thing. The term "socialism" no doubt vibrates differently for each of us. But we are still talking about the same political theory. Otherwise, any dispute would be merely a verbal dispute.

@kennethamy,

kennethamy;162790 wrote:

Why can't it be that what is subjectively experienced as a mental state is identical with what is objectively experienced as a physical state?

kennethamy;162849 wrote:

I did not say they are identical.

Gotcha!...........

@jeeprs,

jeeprs;162861 wrote:

Gotcha!...........

Of course, I did not say they are not identical either. As of now, it looks like a good bet that they are.

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