Posted by alexandra_k on August 21, 2005, at 20:22:49
In reply to Re: pact, posted by Declan on August 21, 2005, at 20:06:08
> I wanted to learn about conciousness.
You still can...
Consciousness is great :-)
Most especially qualia (short for 'qualitative states' the seems or felt quality.)
Its a hard problem to figure out why on earth there is something that it is like to be us.
What on earth is it for???
Why couldn't we function the same but there be nothing at all that it is like to be us?
Surely it is possible that there be a world that is a molecule for molecule duplicate of this world...
Where you have a counterpart that does exactly what you do
Who says exactly what you say
But who has no conscious experience whatsoever.
But then what hope is there of giving a naturalist / materialist (consistent with the natural sciences) account of consciousness?
It can't be for anything if it doesn't have a function...>And did a lot of analytic psychotherapy (Winnicott style).
Now that sounds really interesting. I'd love to learn more about different psychodynamic / psychoanalytic theories.
>I've always liked reading about wars though. Not realler than anything else, I guess, but good for depressives. To contemplate how....how was it possible.
Yeah. I get you.
I liked to worry about how I might just be a brain in a vat...
Or in a coma...
Or maybe I was the only conscious person in the whole universe...
:-)
Appealling for people who aren't so fond of reality...> Archeology might have been fun.
ANU have a pretty good archeology dept. there is someone there who does phil. of archeology. its thought to be a part of phil. of science... interesting...
deals with retrodictions (predictions about the past) instead of predictions (about the future) which is kind of cool.
a cause has multiple effects. so there are more than one downstream effects. if you have a hypothesis abotu something happening in the past (a retrodiction) then that should deductively imply multiple downstream effects... and you can simulate conditions over thousands of years in a couple months in the lab. interesting to hear about how they take certain kinds of rocks and mimic conditions of compression and movement etc to see whether rocks broke as opposed to people smashed them to make tools etc.
I'd quite to do biology. evolutionary biology in particular. learn about how the universe started and evolved. why various abilities / features evolved. especially language and cognition. and different mental abilities. the function of different parts of the brain etc.
>I went to uni in 1970 and the zeitgeist told us to do sociology. Nobody was interested as it turned out and read about Marx and Freud, which was a fair bit better. Until Foucault and so on came but I'd stopped paying arrention by then.
lol! Haven't read any marx. read a little freud. not much admittedly. mostly beginners guides to type stuff... Foucault is meant to be interesting...
I'd like to read James. thats on my one day not so far in the future list. stream of consciouness. dunno where the flashlight attention metaphor came from but i'd like to know that one too
:-)
poster:alexandra_k
thread:543298
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/subs/20050722/msgs/544978.html