buylotrogold

subjective experience is an ill-defined Chalmersian fantasy. You will have to give me a theory of phenomenology before I can properly answer it. I agree that in order to answer questions about phenomenology, its theory has to be better articulated.  However... But in any case, the question of whether someone has a subjective experience of emotion is separate from the question of whether they have emotion, [...] Excuse me?  What exactly do you think people have been referring to, through out history, when they have constructed and used the concept and term that we now label as emotion ?  Throughout our history as languaging beings, words corresponding (at least roughly) to what we mean by emotion have been a part of languages. What exactly, other than the experience of emotion, do you think these words refer to? You could argue that it is all external behavior.  But if that is what the word emotions REFERRED TO, then the sentence he was really scared but acted as if he wasn't would be as incoherant as the sensence he was standing up but acted as if he wasn't. Or do you think peoples in the year 2000 b.c. used such words to refer to neurophysiological states? I find your argumentum ad ignorantiam here rather appalling. A familiar example is the opposition between emotional women concerned about their babies debating with cold logical men concerned with nuclear throwweights.  The women are aware of their emotion, as are the rest of us.  The men are unaware of their emotion, as are many with naive psychological models, apparently including yourself, despite the evident clenching of fists, tightening of jaws, etc. as these men calmly , with moderated (moderated vs. what?) voices, respond to the women's concerns, concerns that the men dismiss as irrational ; that such dismissal is in fact what is irrational is very much to the point.  That people who lead live like this sometimes have nervous breakdowns out of the blue is very much to the point.  These people are in highly emotional states, and no amount of *denial* justifies the sort of language-_base_d naivety that you have expressed so, well, emotionally.

Let's drop it, eh? The way to drop it is to drop it, not to speak your piece and then suggest that your correspondent drop it.  You of course are free to drop it or not.

: The rest of us can safely ignore all this flak and continue with our : research, developing and testing explanatory theories which extend : and deepen common sense concepts instead of being hide-bound : (intellectually crippled) by the limits of a particular linguistic : _frame_work beloved by a subset of 20th century philosophers. : The rest of us can safely ignore : research, developing and testing : and deepen common sense concepts : (intellectually crippled) by the : _frame_work beloved by a subset of What's with that Mentifex guy who writes with perfect margins, sometimes for pages at one go?   Longley seems to be a BOT, or *perhaps* a BOT with another BOT editing the results a bit, but Longley's use of cheezy 80's _style_  add   spaces  to get a nice   right  margin   at the  expense   of really   ugly text just makes Arthur I'm A Bot And So Are You Murray look even- more amazing. There is also a schizo genius _title_d The Dave who does the perfect-margins thang for pages and pages...  and his _style_ is much less stiff than A.T.M., and so he shows that whether he is a BOT or just some guy who thinks PERFECT RIGHT MARGINS are hilarious, especially if you never mention how you achieve the feat of 5 posts a day times 2 pages per post times 25 lines of PERFECT RIGHT MARGINS WITH NO     SPACE  DIDDLING   EVER EVER, it is possible to write very natural-sounding prose doing this. The other time I screamed and hollarred about this strangeness I was written a few posts back by some BOT?/guy at Stanford U, who tried to convince me that this was all perfectly normal an    d he did text in triangles and pyramids, just to show (off?) how easy it was... but his return address was something like:       This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it                         ^^^^^^ So who knows.  The nation who elects a BOT president will be rather formidable, don't you think?  Who would want to argue with something that has PERFECT RIGHT MARGINS? VRAI  4:20 27jan97   internet == turingtet == urinetest == irritant

There are all sorts of internal states of which we are not aware (e.g. what we know about the rules of our own language) and these states are not definable in terms of behaviour or situation/behaviour relationships.... [snip...] A lot of these debates about emotions, qualia, and other mental states go on because people make simplistic assumptions such as: if X has a mental state then X must be aware of that state. I'm reading Dr. Antonio Damasio's book Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain and just got through chapters where he proposes his theory of somatic markers as physical emotions , which may affect behavior with or without being consciously noticed , vs. feelings on the other hand, which are conscious perceptions of these somatic marker states. (I'm sure I'm mangling the words in trying to paraphrase, read the original, he's a scholarly researcher not a Usenet kook like me!) Last night I just read a part where he described a case, of prefrontal something-or-other brain damage, which disconnects the decision-maker from feeling his somatic marker states, and vice versa. On his way to a doctor's appointment with the author, the patient drove through an ice storm, watched someone in front of him skid off the ice into a ditch, but calmly proceeded on through, making all the correct driving decisions to navigate the treacherous patch perfectly. In this case, lacking the emotions was an advantage to the guy. He was totally rational and calm in the crisis situation. But then after arriving at the doctor's office, the same guy was stuck for a half hour, unable to decide between two alternative dates for a future appointment, because all he could do was exhaustively enumerate all the possible reasons for and against each choice, until the doctors finally interrupted. In this situation his emotional, somatic markers would have provided the heuristic clues to cut right through and make an arbitrary choice. Also after that there was a discussion of the mechanism in bumblebees, where they choose which flowers to land on, in an entirely unconscious process which is dominated by neurochemical, somatic marker states (i.e. emotional sorts of processes). Their short-term memory can only hold maybe 3 or 4 encounters (landing on a flower of color X, seeing whether any nectar is present). After a couple of positive experiences with color X flowers yielding nectar, their neurotransmitter system (I think it was octamine _base_d, instead of dopamine? spelling?) alters, so their muscular system will execute the landing maneuvers the next time they pass color X again. This would be a good example of a covert mechanism, of an emotional or somatic nature, that can affect a seemingly rational decision-making process. Again, read the book, and follow the references to the bumblebee work etc., don't argue with my mangled paraphrasing here .

But that's just a manifestation of the philosophical disease of essentialism that unreasonaly tries to constrain concepts by saying they essentially involve this or that... Linguistic philosophers only try to point out features of concepts we *already* use and recognize implicitly. For example, I assume you can recognize the sense in which inferring distance from binocular disparity is not an episode in your mental life, and also not something you can be held responsible for if it is done badly. At any rate therapeutic philosophy is only possible if you already have an implicit grasp of certain concepts, but lose your way when you reflect on them. It does not seek to legislate usage from outside, although some if its advocates (myself included) occasionally formulate their points in that way. On the other hand, it does suppose that a person can be self-deceived on occasions when they claim to mean something by their words.