--- andie nachgeborenen
<andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I don't think this is enough. Everything that has
> any
> kind of intentionality, taking that to mean
> "aboutness" without any implication of
> consciousness,
> so a thermometer that registered the local
> temperature
> has intentionality in this sense -- anyway,
> everything
> like that occupies a particular and generally moving
> spatiotemporal vantage point.
To be technical, I think it would be better to say that they have a spatiotemporal vantage point in which things occur, because (from the POV of the particular awareness), there is no difference between it moving between stuff and stuff moving around it. "I am not the center of the universe" is not inherent in experience per se.
The thermometer has no intentionality fur sich. It has no intentionality at all unless an ovserver comes around and says, "wow look at this level of mercury! It sure is hot." If simply reacting to variations in the environment is intentionality, everything in the universe has it.
Say you
> it
> requires what Kant thought experience requires,
> perceptions of spatially differentiated causally
> interacted substances that continued over time.
I think Kant (and Heidegger) were right about their account of the structure of human experience (or any kind of experience we could imagine being), but I think their accounts presuppose that all beings that experience have a notion of space and time, something I am not sure is true. Probably time, but I can imagine a sedentary, aware creature with no notion of space. Sort of a highly advanced barnacle. I think this depends on the senses with which you are equipped. Hearing for instance gives notions of loudness and softness, but not distance in itself, and direction of if you have more than one ear. Smell gives you intensity, but not distance.
(I
> think dinosaurs had this, at least some of them.)
> The
> fact that the perceptions are located somewhere in
> time and space, that they do not involve a view from
> nowhere, doesn't seem to me to get at the difference
> between "I" and "S/he."
I wsn't saying it did. I pointed out later the difference between experience located in a self, and being aware of the self as such. (I am using "self" and "first-person POV" more or less synonymously.) I think much of animal experience below a certain point (somewhere in the higher vertrebrates, I suppose) would probably, if it could be verbalized, be more of the character of "things are happening" rather than "things are happening to me."
I
> don't think I am assimilating the 1st person POV to
> self consciousness, which is consciousness of myself
> as a self (among other selves who are likewise
> consciousness of me and me of them).
Why does conciousness of myself as a self require the existence of other selves? "Self" requires the notion of "I am not that other stuff," which you figure out once you try to move the sun by force of will and it doesn't work. I've never really bought this line of reasoning by Hegel.
Here I just
> mean
> a sense that there isn't just a bundle of
> perceptions
> from a particular view, but that they are someone's
> -- mine, in particular. I think your account allows
> first personhood to adhere to a Humean bundle of
> perceptions even if there is no one there.
A Humean bundle of perceptions would be a self. It would be a totally incoherent self and wouldn't know it was a self, but that's a different issue.
>
> Some people, like John Searle, have this deeply held
> belief, but I think there is no basis for it. In one
> sense what you and Searle say has to be wrong. We
> think and experience in virtue of the activities of
> out central nervous system (bundles of neurons) and
> unless you believe in magic there is in a way
> nothing
> more to experiencing than the biochemical
> interactions
> of our neurons with each other and the world.
But obviously there is something more to experience, or I (or the POV that is signified by "I") would not exist. The belief that you get awareness out of a bunch of unaware stuff is what looks like belief in magic, in my opinion. I suspect that something is deeply wrong somewhere with the reigning paradigm. Not that I have a better one.
At the same time, I am not sure that
> there is any difference in kind beyond complexity,
> flexibility, ability to adapt to novel situations,
> etc., between us and thermometers.
The difference is that thermometers do not react. There are not a POV.
Hmmm, here's an idea for an essay: "What Is It Like to Be a Thermometer?"
I think that is
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