"I am most certainly a conscious being (some of the time), but do I have some mystical magical property, consciousness? I do not think so. This book is an attempt to argue this in enough detail that specialists can see where I am coming from but the general reader isn’t bored to death."
That seems quite correct, otherwise we're in an abyss of regress we can't escape; an "I" that has that "thing". But i think it's because even adjectives are verbs as are nouns. Or rather, while i can find a conceptual distinction between the three, i can't find a phenomenological one. The concepts seem to simply be three different ways of classifying an undivided reality. Useful, but not true.
I mostly agree, but I think the problem lies in the other direction. We divide these things up for socially conventional reasons (the law requires those at fault are agents, for example) but when you get down to the neuropsychology it appears we don't divide things up *enough*. I've heard some specialists say there are at least 50 variables in functional psychology, and of course the structure of the brain doesn't map nicely to semantic categories. So I think that we should look at awareness as a folk psychological group of notions, and treat them the same way we treat folk physics or folk biology, as mere starting points.
You think we need to classify the subjective even more granularly? That may be useful, but wouldn't those classifications then also be conventions? Do you mean look at what is said about awareness as "folk psychological notions"? What about observing awareness sans notions?
Think we're stuck with what's useful for whatever purpose. Been working on an encyclopedia of qualities for awhile for the purpose of understanding what wellbeing is like from the inside out. What comes to the fore having made that choice is how we relate to some quality coming up.
"I am most certainly a conscious being (some of the time), but do I have some mystical magical property, consciousness? I do not think so. This book is an attempt to argue this in enough detail that specialists can see where I am coming from but the general reader isn’t bored to death."
That seems quite correct, otherwise we're in an abyss of regress we can't escape; an "I" that has that "thing". But i think it's because even adjectives are verbs as are nouns. Or rather, while i can find a conceptual distinction between the three, i can't find a phenomenological one. The concepts seem to simply be three different ways of classifying an undivided reality. Useful, but not true.
What do you think?
I mostly agree, but I think the problem lies in the other direction. We divide these things up for socially conventional reasons (the law requires those at fault are agents, for example) but when you get down to the neuropsychology it appears we don't divide things up *enough*. I've heard some specialists say there are at least 50 variables in functional psychology, and of course the structure of the brain doesn't map nicely to semantic categories. So I think that we should look at awareness as a folk psychological group of notions, and treat them the same way we treat folk physics or folk biology, as mere starting points.
You think we need to classify the subjective even more granularly? That may be useful, but wouldn't those classifications then also be conventions? Do you mean look at what is said about awareness as "folk psychological notions"? What about observing awareness sans notions?
Think we're stuck with what's useful for whatever purpose. Been working on an encyclopedia of qualities for awhile for the purpose of understanding what wellbeing is like from the inside out. What comes to the fore having made that choice is how we relate to some quality coming up.
What's your purpose?