Brice Cummings

I also just realized that in the above posts autocorrect changed "asymptotically" to "asymptomatically" but oh well

Thanks for letting me nerd out!

...that all that's on the gradient from us (and aliens?) to rocks is experience, so that every being has at least some experience of being that thing, even if again rocks would have asymptomatically close to 0 of whatever that experience is

I think some people on the Internet conflate the two tho

So on that view ("pancognitivism"), thinking is basically just a feature of existence. The problem is that it then seems like thought doesn't mean much of anything anymore (if it's everything, it's nothing) so more carefully some other panpsychists ("panexperientialism") say...

Thanks for putting up with the rant :) Depends; for Heidegger, thinking is just existence that lives in language (sorry rocks) but some panpsychists say focusing on language is anthropocentric, so think of thought as a gradient spanning all existence (with rocks asymptomatically near 0 on the scale)

Ah, sort of! But not a physical "process" in the sense of calculation or logic or computing (like Dennett of Consciousness Explained would do) but a "process" in the sense of everything the universe is in the process of becoming (paradigmatic here would be Whitehead's Process and Reality)

Sorry for this unhingedly long thread in reply hahaha

But some kind of harmony in how nature unfolds or the inherent expression of the process of becoming or some organizing creativity or the effect of a way of being in the world or... In short, if thinking is ineffable, then it's hard to say what thinking is, so it's hard to say who/what doesn't do it

But this took away all the wonderful things thought could do for, say, Hegel. So Panpsychism usually draws on some concoction of Leibniz's Monadology, Heidegger's What Is Called Thinking, or Whitehead's Process and Reality to say that thought is neither what an I does nor any kind of calculation...

And once Marx had turned Hegel on his head and pointed out how many of our thoughts come from our material conditions, and Darwin had reduced our minds to epiphenomena of organized matter, some began to rethink thought not as what an I does, but as some kind of calculating using matter...

Thought is not just what the I does, it's not just what I & you do together, it's what all history amounts to as Thought Thinking Itself (Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind).
Hegel didn't actually think that rocks think (held to mind/matter distinction) but he was obsessed with mind's impact on matter...

And ran with the notion that thinking is basically what an I does. Kant tries to calm things down with putting some things (in themselves) beyond our perception and so also beyond our thought, but Fichte and Hegel would have none of limiting the subject's reach in thought and next thing you know...

For Descartes, these have to be "clear and distinct" (his example is watching wax melt and realizing that as the color and shape change, I actually get a clearer idea of what is distinct to was and what was just contingent on light and temperature). Then the whole idealist tradition took Descartes..

In the Cartesian tradition - & god help us, Descartes founded modern philosophy - the basic provable claim is cogito ergo sum, where cogito sneakily (thanks to Latin) includes both "I" and "think" - so to think is to exist as a subject, or thinking is the making of judgements that an I can make, but

By that logic, once one says there's no such thing as special thinking stuff (but there is thinking) then if there's no special stuff that thinks but thinking still happens, then thinking isn't about what kind of stuff something is made of, therefore any stuff might think, ergo rocks might think 3/3

Ofc. a chemist might immediately interject that our minds and rocks are not the same stuff (elements) and biologists might point to our minds' aliveness -- but the panpsychism thing is coming out of very old "science": Cartesian res cogitans (thinking stuff) v. res extensa (stuff in space) so 2/3

I'm not a rocks-are-conscious guy but it tends to be downstream of claims that the mind-matter dichotomy is just our projection onto the universe of stuff: Taking the subject-predicate logic of propositional statements & applying it to stuff in head thinking stuff in rocks. It's all just stuff 1/3

Strategy is fundamentally all about developing a sophisticated theory of the mind of one’s opponent.

With MAGA’s Iran Adventure, guess we’re going to see what a modern war almost totally devoid of anything we’d call “strategy” looks like.

recovering from a bath

recovering from a bath

Power went out all over campus, so I'm reduced to taking notes on the geology lecture being given by this squirrel

it's Pick Your Fighter day in Texas

The U.S. is in a mess, but there are small concrete things you can do, and helping choose who will be on the ballot in November is one of them

Sappho showed up unexpectedly at the local bookstore

good evening

~ Gabriel Marcel, "On the Ontological Mystery" (1933), translated mostly by Manya Harari, but modified by me for clarity, conciseness, and gender neutrality.

"I have said that humankind are at the mercy of our own technics. This must be understood to mean that we are increasingly incapable of controlling our technics, or rather of *controlling our own control.*"

"To the question: what can humanity achieve? we continue to reply: We can achieve as much as our technics; yet we must admit that these technics are unable *to save humanity from ourselves*, and even that they can form the most sinister alliance with the enemy we bear within us."

"we have not ceased to believe in technics, that is, to evisage reality as a complex of problems, yet at the same time the failure of technics *as a whole* is as discernable to us as are its *partial* triumphs.

"From this standpoint, despair consists in recognizing the ultimate inefficiency of all technics, joined to the inability or refusal to change over to a new ground.... It is for this reason that we seem nowadays to have entered upon the era of despair;

"The world of fear and desire... is the kingdom of technics... Every technology serves, or can be made to serve, some desire or some fear; conversely, every desire as every fear tends to invent its own technique.

[here follows a thread from Gabriel Marcel's 1933 reflections on technology...]

if you know your Dr. Seuss ...