Very likely.

Yes.

So what then is producing thoughts? 'Where" are they coming from?

I don't understand the objection at all. Of course intentionality seems like nonsense to me too, and the "problem" only seems to be of the "indeterminacy of translation" type, not of the "brain!=mental" type. And if you posit that a perfect understanding of his brain nullifies any indeterminacy of translation issues , then I don't even see a "problem" at all.

You're asking not about thoughts as brain activity, but the brain activity of which we're conscious or can be identified as influential to what's conscious, right?

Yes, can you please elaborate?

I have to think about it more.

It is a good question. I'll get back to this thread when the thoughts on this of which I'm conscious are less jumbled.

I don't think intentionality is nonsense. Intentional ascriptions constantly feature in explanations and predictions of the behavior of organisms and artifacts. If it was just nonsense, these explanations and predictions wouldn't be successful.

Indeterminacy of translation is not a separate issue from the reduction of mental concepts. Mental concepts are laden with intentionality and the indeterminacy of translation issue arises from intentionality. If intentionality fails to reduce, then our mental concepts fail to reduce.

I mean you can always argue that our mental concepts are just bad and muddled and we're going to get rid of them instead of reducing them, but that's a different position that has other problems (iyam it's basically science fiction).

I don't follow. Why do I posit this? This is the contentious issue.

This all has to do with your concept of "self". If you think that your "self" is co-extensive with your consciousness, then this is all very confusing. You just have to accept that a lot of what you are is unconscious, and consciousness is just something that "you" (you the primate, not you the abstract ego) do some of the time. When you fall asleep, it isn't someone else who does the sleeping. I don't know if this answers your question.

First there is a mountain.

Then there is no mountain.

Then there is

This form of objection has nothing to do with brains though. The guy can articulate something verbally, but unless we share enough with him, we'll have no idea WTF he's talking about, and even if we do share enough to think we know what he's talking about, we can't be sure. Removing the neuroscience completely and perfectly translating his thoughts to his language still doesn't solve the problem.

But none of that is evidence against the position that intentional mental states are just brain states.

Intentionality as anything special, sorry.

I understand that a large portion/aspect of "me" is unconscious, subconscious etc, and that it is quite possible that my conscious self is the "smallest" aspect of the body as a functioning system.

If a majority of the thoughts that I become aware of, at a conscious level, were emitted/emanated from "deeper layers" of myself prior to my becoming aware of them consciously (in real-time), then is it possible that the thoughts that are being produced are in a sense "creating" the external 5-sensory world that me, as an organism, is experiencing and interacting with on a conscious level?

From the dictionary, a thought is a subjective state of consciousness.

Are all subjective states reducible to (as opposed to merely dependent on) objective, i.e. measurable, states? Some people's belief systems take this for granted, but it has not been demonstrated by science.

What is a Thought?

Consider that "thoughts" are not produced by the soul or brain (if materialistically speaking) but are those entities to which the human being becomes united.

"In thinking I experience myself united with the stream of cosmic existence".

The "cosmic existence" is "thought beings", a reality, in which one can say the “you are being thought" , not that you are producing "thoughts".

The "thoughts" we experience, in our present consciousness, are more vague, ill defined, or more like a "phantom" of the 'thought beings" to which one becomes united. The "thoughts" appear almost lifeless, a shell of a living cosmic being, a "thought". In Man's present state of being he is protected from coming into direct intercourse with these beings (as one does with the senses) for the experience would be overwhelming without proper preparation.

The above is probably a lot to absorb but another perspective will help. As one "thinks" concepts are formed which in our times appear as abstractions. These are the "thoughts", ostensibly devoid of "life" or "warmth" or "being" itself. The question becomes; how do the thoughts entertained by the human soul relate to our sense bound reality or extra sense bound reality?

In the modern age, ala Hume, Kant and the skeptical and critical thinking of the day the connection is wanting, separated, and divorced, from all that is external to the human thinking soul. The drift of modern thinking and knowledge, illusioned by the mischievous Kant and his sisters, science and religion, is that there is a disjunctive separation, not to be known because it never was connected or at the very least we were incapable of manifesting the connection in reality of thought and thinking. At best, they would say that when one "thinks" in science the mathematical exegesis stands tall while in the religious "faith' is divorced from knowledge, and never the trains shall meet, for they are not allowed to meet because we are incapable of meeting them, etc.....such is the deeply laden reality of modern scientific and religious thought, a tragedy of illusion.

When a man perceives a tree we are really seeing the sensual expression of the tree and in that Man thinks he combines the “thought’ with the sensual presentation and in this Man’s Ego becomes manifest. If one could “look behind” the tree one would see the “thought” and in particular “see” that the “thought’ was and is the tree. This is the suprasensible being to which presents itself to our senses.

Due to the limitations of the human being we only see a “partial’ reality and the” real” reality is the combination of the suprasensible “thought” with our sense bound nature. This combination is our “Ego” work that to which is our highest spiritual manifestation. Our “Ego’ manifests itself and in fact comes into reality by this combinatory activity and in this “thinking” is a spiritual activity.

At death we become membered into the cosmic “thoughts” or “beings” and having lost our earth bound senses, through grace, we perceive in a different manner. The work on earth of the human being is to self create higher senses so that as we travel through the spiritual world at death we are able to hold our being (read-maintain our Ego) and act as spiritual beings among other spiritual beings.

Our scientific work on the earth in which one obtains strength in being (strengthened Ego) and our religious to which we bring overflowing Love to the world in Faith act in combination for the regeneration of Man or the “New Man” in which not only he but the earth is transformed into a new higher state.

Religion and science manifesting within the soul of the individual Man.

The etymology of "confused" may help you understanding that dilemma.
In its latin "root", it means something like "to fuse/mix/join together".
Here's where that's analogous to your question.

You have "brains", the left and right hemispheres. There is a communication bridge, sure (the corpus callosum), but there must be some mechanism which lets the one win over the other. Now if you were to remove the connections between the hemispheres and told one hand to recognize an object while preventing the other side from seeing it and then asked the one side to show you the result, while the one which didn't see it to tell you the result, the hand which is responsible for the right hand (the one which touched the object) should be able to answer (by showing a number using fingers for example), while the other should have no answer. But that's not what happens.
The side which actually touched the object and had a data input, gives the right answer (for example, showing you three fingers after it recognized the shape of the "3"), but, the other side tells you (with the same confidence!).............the wrong answer. It had no input, but it still acts as if it had an input. It guesses/lies (!!!) to you.
So there's a subconscious battle in your brain going on, but most of the times, a normal brain will never show this behavior. After all, the sides get along and decide together.

Now if one side says "I see 3.4" and the other side sees "4.7", then the answer should be "4. something", but it's not. Most of the times, the 3.4 side (the left side) wins and "you" say, you see a 3. Sometimes the other side wins and you see a 5. So there are decisions going on, without us watching them. "You" are not "your house", you are just living in it and "you" need to go down in order to find out what's really going on in the "basement". There are organs quasi-independent of each other and "lopsidedness". Your brain is the same, while we think it is a monolithic "instrument".

Certain thresholds have to be reached, before you are told to "show up" and focus your "point of view" on a certain task.............until you master it subconsciously. That's why trained pianists don't need to watch either the piano, or their hands, in order to play the music. You don't need to watch every single step, going down the stairway. Now if the piano suddenly was moved a couple of inches to one side, or some of the steps on the stairway made intentionally bigger than others, a "script" would alarm "you" and ask you to analyze the situation in more detail.
If you were taught to sit down if you are tired, or while thinking, then an automatism ("script") would probably initiate the "sitting down" sequence.
But it wouldn't suddenly drop the heart rate if you decided to "chill out", laying on the couch. So there must be also different levels of importance and different kinds of "surfaces" the data needs to get through, before "you" are being made aware of it. "I think, therefore I am" is a incomplete statement. "I think, therefore I know I am" is more like it. The whole "conscious/unconscious" debate is confusing.
But it is obvious, as with the left/right hemisphere example above, that the "conscious" side wins rarely. "You" are only called when you are needed, not, "you" take a step back, as long as "someone" else is doing the work. So the consciousness must be a side-product of your intellect. In fact, "just do it" sums up the whole discussion. If the brain (all "players") always knew what it does, "you" would never be needed. And when "you" are present, the other parts (besides the fundamental functions), listen more and do less. "You" are the product of these two schizophrenic "personas", not their creator. And there are still fundamental "scripts" at work. No matter how hard you think about mathematics, sitting in a cafe, when a attractive woman passes by, your focus automatically tells "you" to step back and let the "scripts" take over.
You lose the "train of thought" and sometimes it's hard to recover it.
That's how dominant these underlying mechanisms are.

In order to understand more about what goes on "up there", we need to study more abnormal brains, not normal ones.

I perused the above posts, and a couple of points come to mind.

Mostly, you are all trying to look at two different ways of understanding a problem that are not mutually exclusive, but are mutually uninformative.

As an analogy, what blue "looks like" does not inform on the set of wavelengths that encompass blue, and vice versa.

Also, and I think more importantly, thoughts are something to cherish. It is self-evident that every person will have a certain number of thoughts between birth and death. Some are destined to have many thoughts, and some will have a precious few. Whatever the number is for you, you will die upon having your final thought. So, if you would like to live longer, you should try to save your thoughts so you don't run out of them and die prematurely.

Liar!!!

This is quite the post and I imagine can be interpreted and digested from about 20 different angles.

You make it sound like thoughts are like money/currency of a sort, and that we all have a finite/set amount, and therefore we need to save so that we have a good amount saved as we get older.

But then could we not "invest" in our thoughts, and make them grow, as we would our savings, so that as we, along with our brains, grew older, we would actually accrue and produce more and more thoughts?

Can you explain the evidence in favor of the view that representational mental states are reducible to brain states?

Thank you for sharing these thoughts. I'll need a few read-throughs to absorb it well. These are very interesting points and ideas.

I implore you to stop trying to make me use up my thoughts. I only have so many left.

The first point about one thing being uninformative about another thing is probably the important part. You were wise to ignore it.

Aah, okay. You are against methodological reductionism. I could agree with you to some extent about this. The attempt to reduce a phenomenon to lower and lower levels of explanation is not necessarily the most fruitful approach in science. In fact many times it's pretty stupid (like trying to explain a cognitive process in terms of protons, neutrons, electrons, etc.) I think the biggest reason for this is that we don't know enough (that's putting it mildly) about the mechanisms of cognitive processes.

However, in this thread I am arguing for epistemological reductionism. There it is:


The point I am trying to make is that intentionality is not an argument against reductionism, since computer programs are pretty reducible. The reason we know how to do it is that we were the ones who created the programs (and the hardware that substantiates them). We are having difficulties with the brain because we were not the ones who created it and we don't know how it does everything it does (like being intelligent). But our lack of knowledge cannot be an argument against reductionism.

But if he knows your brain perfectly, he would know all these things. He would know a lot more than "you are imagining a city and the name London also got activated in relation it it". He would know precisely what you are imagining. He could even draw it pixel by pixel on a screen. He would know everything you know about the thing you are imagining (all factual information). If you are imagining New York but thinking that it's actually London, he would simply see that you are imagining a different city than the one you think you're imagining. If he himself doesn't know anything about London and New York, of course he is going to be fooled. But then again, you are also being fooled by imagining New York and thinking it's London, so it's obvious that he would follow you in your confusion.

But please note that I am not claiming we can do this now. We are very far from being able to do it. Just think about what it means to have perfect knowledge of the brain however.

What makes you think you can't find the information about all those things (his language, his environment, etc.) in his brain?

But why can't we explain the interaction between the music and the "mind" using the brain? For example, when certain sound waves having a certain of frequencies and amplitudes enter your ears, they produce a certain pattern of activation in the receptor cells in your ears. This is all the information you have about what you are currently hearing. This pattern of activation is further transmitted to many areas of your brain (A1 being one of the first stops). Your emotional reaction to the song is explained, for example, by the activation of certain memories you have (which is also a pattern of activation over your neurons), the activation in the amygdala, the release of certain neurotransmitters, and so on. Other types of reactions are also explained in the same manner.

I still don't see what you don't like about this type of explanation.

Depends on how you define the terms in relation to the problems described ITT. It's possible that there isn't and can never be any. To me, it's like having a theory of physics, or that same theory of physics with an extra dimension that never does anything ever. Which one is right? Who knows, who cares? As long as the extra dimension is completely useless to everything you can talk about, there's no point in talking about it when attempting to explain other things. And unless you invoke gobbledygook a priori, does considering brain/mental different get you anything?

This is a bad attempt at shifting the burden of proof imo. So many things that we know the brain is responsible for are known to be brain states. Why shouldn't "representational mental states" (though I am not sure what you mean by this) not be. What are they, if not brain states?

Is it possible that what is experienced at a conscious level as thought, is the product/byproduct/communication that is occuring between the two hemispheres of the brain? (When I use the word between, I do not mean it spatially, but rather as two "entities" communicating with each other).

Why would you think that?

But the answer is 'no'. Split-brain patients also have thoughts.

You think that there are no successful explanations in the psychology of perception that essentially involve distinctively mental kinds?