To be honest, it seems very superficial to me - like most philosophy. It starts with an arbitrary premise ("the brain wants to process symbols"). Since the premise is arbitrary, it doesn't help me at all.
To me the interesting bit is "why does the brain want to process symbols". Which is probably better answered by evolution theory than by philosophy.
Another example of the shallowness of philosophy: "I think, therefore I am". Again, an arbitrary premise. What does it mean to exist? Again, philosophy does not seem to be interested.
I realize it is easy to pick on philosphy, but if you're going to write off one of our oldest disciplines it should at least come from an informed place: "I think therefore I am" is not Descartes' premise, but one of his conclusions. Even as a conclusion, it is mostly misunderstood. The point is not that it is the thinking that brings one into being, but that there is something there that must exist in order to do the thinking. Other translations I have read have it "I am deceived, therefore I am," again the point being that something must first exist in order to be deceived. His original "arbitary premise" is that he must first discard everything he thinks he already knows.
Still, he dodges the question as to what it means that something exists. But I admit I haven't really read him. It is just that whenever I pick up a philosophy book (very rarely), I tend to hit upon false premises immediately.
Whenever I pick up a maths book, I read all these symbols that have no explanation whatsoever - it's obviously self-indulgent wanking. I admit I don't actually read the book, though, I just open it. But I can tell the symbols aren't english, or any other language I learned before my mind closed, so I can tell it's dross.
To jump in with the others, I think you'd enjoy Bartley's The Retreat to Commitment, where he raises similar sort of criticisms to the ones you talk about, but in a much more systematic way.
Generally speaking, people who were lucky enough to be born later in time have the advantage over people born earlier, since they can learn from those who come before. This isn't something you have to remember when looking at science since science in the news is if anything too focused on speculation or the latest result over what has been well confirmed - but philosophy has the opposite problem. People still talk about philosophers with ancient names, heavy with dignity even though their ideas have been challenged or extended since their time.
Really, nobody talking about truth should be failing to make a distinction between what is true and what is know since Godel did his work, but Descartes had the disadvantage of being born to early to know about that. In particular, his justifications fall afoul of the third horn of the Münchhausen Trilemma, by resorting to assuming some things as axiomatic. In particular, on reflection I'm baffled that Laplace can take "I think" as axiomatic but not "I am". Existence without though isn't hard to imagine (and some Laplacian demon might be imposing its thoughts on us), but thoughts without existence is. Perhaps if Laplace hadn't set out to prove the existence of God he wouldn't have had to make such odd assumptions.
Well, meditations wouldn't be a bad place to start. And philosophers differ a lot in their views of teh significance of philosophy. I regard it as self-indulgent, but interesting to those so inclined. Like Mathematics, it's an a priori subject anyone can do from an armchair. Unlike Mathematics, it isn't that useful for science. But unlike mathematics, it will help you achieve understanding about the structure of how you ordinarily think about the world (if not the world itself).
You can construe the cogito as an argument:
P1 I think.
P2 If I think, then I exist
C1 I exist.
P1 and P2 are premises, C1 is derived.
The interesting point is that P1 is not arbitrary, in the sense that if one grasps it, then it is true.
That's a really interesting property for a claim to have - especially for a contingent claim to have (e.g. 2+2=4 is necessarily true, and so if one grasps it, trivially it is true, but that's not interesting in the same way).
Further, D thinks that if one grasps it, then one knows one grasps it, (and that it is true).
So for D we have a priori certain knowledge of a contingent claim.
If course, you can question 2, and some people have. Quine is one person to read on that.
Re 'what does it mean to exist' - what do you mean by that? Your criticism demonstrates some ignorance of Descartes, as Descartes makes substantive claims about the nature of his existence as revealed by the reasonining in Mediations. For example D would say he knows that he exists as a thinking subject - a substantive claim about his nature. He goes on to make lots of controversial claims about his nature (some of which get us to Cartesian Dualism).
Given your comments, I'm would recommend W.V. Quine (staunchly realist, writes wonderfully clearly, very rigorous, a logician at heart). A good collection of basic essays is Quintessence, and a good first essay might be 'On What There Is'[1][2]. (Arguably his most important book-length work is Word and Object, but I wouldn't recommend starting there.) Here's the first paragraph (complete) to give you a sense of how well he writes:
>> A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: ‘What is there?’ It can be answered, moreover, in a word—‘Everything’—and everyone will accept this answer as true. However, this is merely to say that there is what there is. There remains room for disagreement over cases; and so the issue has stayed alive down the centuries.
Gotta side with Tichy on this one. That sounds exactly like self-indulgent nonsense. Talk around the question, sound cute, but don't answer anything or even inform how you plan to proceed.
Don't think in terms of sides. I'm not "against" Tichy. He asked for reading recommendations, and I gave him one. I wasn't trying to prove him wrong about anything. I suggested Quine because he often appeals to mathematically minded realists, and I think he's very smart and writes well.
As for the article, try the whole thing before you judge it (it's not very long at all). Quine is not being frivolous, and he takes pains to explain exactly what he means as the piece goes on.
> Well name a philosophy book that is worth reading.
Plato's Dialogues and the Pre-Socratics, written 2500 years ago. By reading the above works you'll see that they contained all the important questions.
"Well name a philosophy book that is worth reading."
Asking what philosophy book to read is sort of like asking which math book to read.
The answer really depends on what you already know. You're probably not going to recommend that someone completely unfamiliar with math read a calculus textbook, much less an advanced math monogram.
Likewise, it's probably not a good idea to recommend that someone unfamiliar with philosophy read Heidegger. You're probably going to get some very basic recommendations.
Even then, you probably won't get much out of reading them without taking a class on the subject in which someone with vastly more experience and understanding than you can guide you and your peers to gain a greater appreciation of what you read, and to stimulate critical thought and discussion about the books you are reading. That's really the ideal setting for getting introduced to philosophy: as part of a class led by a talented teacher, and with some intelligent peers open to talking about the issues.
That said, you should not allow yourself to be misled in to thinking the toe that you dip in to the ocean of philosophy is going to be in any way representative, much less the "best" that philosophy has to offer.
Even were you to read a "great" book when you just start out, you're probably not going to understand much of it or get much out of it on your first go. Even professional philosophers go back again and again to classics, as they get more out of them each time, with the benefit of greater understanding, and being able to apply the insight and methods they've gained in the meantime to the books they've already read.
What I'm trying to say is that reading philosophy in a way that does justice to the topic is a lifetime endeavor. A one-time bite at any philosophy book just isn't going to give you even an inkling of an idea of what it's about.
Still, for an introduction to Western philosophy, you probably won't be able to do better than starting with the Socratic Dialogues. They are the source and the foundation of much of Western philosophy that's come afterwards, and you really can't properly understand most of the rest without reading this source.
I would strongly encourage you to read them as part of an Ancient Philosophy class at a university, for the reasons mentioned a few paragraphs earlier. Unfortunately, the philosophy departments of universities in the English speaking world tend to be dominated by the Analytic school of philosophy. So what you'll get from class will probably be biased in that direction. Just keep in mind that there are other ways of approaching and understanding the issues you read about than the ones you are exposed to in class.
"What does it mean to exist? Again, philosophy does not seem to be interested."
Seriously? A monumentally vast number of volumes have been written by philosophers on what it means to exist.
I find this sort of academic partisanship bizarre. There are no rigid distinctions between philosophy and science. They are both attempts to gain knowledge and insight about the universe, and their methods largely overlap. It could be argued that science is a subset of philosophy.
By the way, your critique of philosophy is itself a piece of philosophy. Critiquing philosophy is one of philosophy's favorite pastimes.
In the example you yourself gave of 'I think therefore I am', the claim following 'therefore' is a conclusion, not a premise. So no, Descartes didn't start with the premise that he existed.
He seems to assume that because he (what?) can think, he exists.
Either he has an implicit assumption about what it means to exist (which he never describes, and which is therefore useless to me), or his definition of exist is "can think", in which case the famous proof would be trivial and useless (it would boil down to "I exist therefore I exist").
I already see many people here don't understand what I mean, but this is the kind of thing that makes most philosophers useless to me.
Such arrogance from someone who clearly has no understanding of what he critiques. I hate to add to the dogpile, but seriously take a step back and realize that maybe there's something you're missing rather than everyone else being fooled.
Your issue here seems to be "this doesn't answer the question I want therefore this is useless". This is just a lack of imagination on your part. Sure, he doesn't delve into the nature of what it means to exist, but "I think therefore I am" crosses a huge chasm in its own right. It establishes existence. One needs to do this before you can begin to discuss the nature of existence.
The "uselessness" of philosophy for most people, and I think this is where it fails for you, is that it provides far more questions than it provides answers. Philosophy doesn't package the world into a neat little box; it provides you with a framework to develop your own understanding of it. You still have to do much of the mental legwork yourself. Contrast this with science, where it does provide you with neat little bite-sized answers to satisfy ones superficial curiosity (E=mc^2? Cool!)
You also seem to think that Descartes needs to provide an accont of what it means to exist. Why think that? You speak English. 'Exists' is a perfectly intelligible English word. And so we can understand the conclusion and the explicit assumption.
Of course, it is an interesting philosophical question as to what existence amounts to. Quite a hard one. But it's a different philosophical question.
You seem to be criticising Descartes for not answering that question, but that's just to conflate distinct issues.
It's also a little incoherent to say that philosophy is useless because it ignores certain questions, which then turn out on inspection to be further philosophical questions.
And philosophers do grapple with what existence amounts to. Go read some Quine if you're actually interested.
In fact, Quine provides an account of existence which vindicates teh implicit premise I've outlined above. But Quine is writing 400 years after Descartes, after the great philosophical revolution brought about by the logical developmenets of the philosopher Frege (which incidentially had an impact on computing and so on). So we might say that Descartes doesn't answer the questions you raise fully. But only someone a little up their own arse would criticise Descartes for failing to deal with questions it took 400 years of philosophical, logical and mathematical development to make substantive progress on.
I thought, "I think, therefore I am" was an answer to the question, "how do I know what is real and what is not?"
So, for example, we're all stuck in some virtual reality world and everything is fake, how would we know? How do we even know, for that matter, that we ourselves our real?
Well, we're wondering about it, so therefore we ourselves are definitely real in some way, even if everything else is fake - "I think, therefore I am"
Although most philosophy never draws a conclusion, I actually quite like this "proof".
And further, just because philosophy rarely draws conclusions, it doesn't mean it's not worth thinking about, if just for the fun of it.
I have studied maths, and I enjoy thinking logically. The difference is that while mathematical axioms are also arbitrary, they never claim to not be arbitrary. Therefore it seems more honest to me.
Mathematics axioms aren't arbitrary in the same way philosophical axioms aren't arbitrary. Mathematical axioms are chosen for many reasons, one of which is that they are useful.
Actually, philosophers do seem to be interested in questions of existence. For example, Bertrand Russell probably mentioned that "I think, therefore I am" is wrong — what does "I" mean? Particularly if the mind is a collection of things, and the notion of "I" is a useful illusion, an oversimplification. Maybe an improvement is, "Something thinks, therefore it is."
I think that there's various parts of philosophy, and not all topics will interest any given person, nor will the work of all philosophers. Maybe various institutions (like universities and priesthoods of professional philosophers) promote practices one doesn't like, like big software companies enforcing only Java-the-language. But I think the subject naturally attracts people who ask themselves why they're doing what they're doing, and other such questions.
It starts with an arbitrary premise ("the brain wants to process symbols"). Since the premise is arbitrary, it doesn't help me at all.
I think you are far off the mark. Want may well be tangential.
The brain is a symbol processor; that's all it knows how to do. If there aren't positive feedbacks in place to encourage it to do what it does, this sole ability will atrophy and decay. Here's is your much vaunted evolution, in 36 words. The philosopher in me would much rather interrogate the implications and dynamics that this situation creates, and accept apriori what I see as self evident facts of creation.
Very cool! I sometimes wonder what's so special about the concept of a 'symbol'. A stream of symbols make up a message. A message contains a thought or an idea which we wish to express. We definitely find it hard to communicate with symbols alone. It would be very interesting to find answers to
1. What processes convert ideas to symbols and messages.
2. Is there a notion of an optimal symbol set?
3. How much are these symbols and messages created by the human brain dependent on the person's environment?
And as long as philosopher will refuse to dig a bit into mathematics or computer science for answers to questions they call "philosophical", I'll have a hard time being interested by philosophy.
Nice try troll. Philosophy plays a larger role in the lives of mathematicians than in the lives of natural scientists. Many mathematicians have domain expertise in philosophy. Your "philosopher" is a straw-man by comparison.
And as long as mathematicans will refuse to stop asserting that their holy science is the one and only correct answer to all problems on this earth, I'll have a hard time being interested in mathematics.
What a sloppy, ignorant brush with which to paint such a complex subject as abolition. Religion was, and is, used to justify slavery every bit as much as abolition. In the U.S. for example, every major southern church organization was founded explicitly for the purpose of supporting slavery; the Southern Baptist Convention didn't officially renounce this support until 1995.
To this day, religion continues to be a powerful driver of racism, classism, and slavery. In case you need examples, may I point you to the Hindu caste system and the Muslim doctrine of Dhimmitude.
Philosophy went nazi? No, nazism went philosophy, and poorly too. They raped Nietzsche's philosophy until it fit their needs, with the help of his decadent Missgeburt of a sister. Heidegger is perhaps a much more problematic case, but also not a matter of black-and-white.
Philosophers _produced_ logic? Wittgenstein is lolling at you in his grave right now.
> Philosophy went nazi? No, nazism went philosophy, and poorly too.
Yes, the Nazis looked for "intellectual" support, but you're ignoring that they got it. If you want to argue causality....
> They raped Nietzsche's philosophy until it fit their needs, with the help of his decadent Missgeburt of a sister.
Ah yes, the "Nazis were unpopular in Germany" defense.....
>Heidegger is perhaps a much more problematic case, but also not a matter of black-and-white.
Heidegger is "problematic" only if you choose to ignore his actual positions at the time in favor of post WWII revisionism. (In other news, early 1900s progressives were eugenicists and segregationists.)
We can argue about whether that alone make Nazism popular with philosophers of that era or they came to that support on their own, but to deny that there was widespread agreement is simply absurd.
To be fair, Nazism was very popular across all social classes in the 30s, so the intellectual support wasn't way outside the mainstream. My point is that isn't an example where the intellectual class got it right. Do you want to blame that on the influence of the rest of society? (They didn't at the time, but surely we shouldn't believe what philosophers say about their reasons.)
I'm not sure what anamax meant, but the abolitionist movements were highly religious. It's not just that they happened to be religious; their religion drove their activism. Wilberforce and Rankin are good examples.
I'm not sure this is what the parent meant, but in America at least, the antislavery movement was part of a broad social reform movement which was strongly tied to the popular Christianity of the day. For example, see the connections between Charles Finney (a prominent theologian) and Oberlin College (one of the first integrated universities). Also, look up the full lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic- it sounds like nonsense outside of the context of 19th century revivalism. The reform movement and its consequences make an interesting historical topic.
I found it misleading to praise religion for motivating the winners but not blame religion (in fact almost all of the very same denominations) for also motivating the losers. Also interesting because I still can't imagine how people used the same sources but got such wildly different answers.
> found it misleading to praise religion for motivating the winners but not blame religion (in fact almost all of the very same denominations) for also motivating the losers.
My comment was about what caused the change, and the losers didn't do that.
Why do you think that these losers deserve as much attention as these winners? Or, is this a general rule?
In other news, the folks pushing 3/5 person (or less) rule were the anti-slavery folks while the slave states wanted slaves counted just like everyone else. (That rule was part of how congressional representation was determined. The "not slave" states were trying to minimize the representation of the slave states and the slave states were trying to maximize their representation.) So, anyone who brings it up as evidence of "not valuing them as people" is either dishonest or ignorant....
Yes, and support for slavery was also strongly tied to the popular Christianity of the day.
The fact that religion so permeated debates in those times makes it easy for us to cherry-pick people and places to support our positions (this applies to me as much as you).
Enjoyable article, probably true for many; making me further happy I just picked up a stack of James Hillman & other Archetypal Psychologies & symbol books.
Regarding why we dream, I've always thought that it's got something to do with exercising our right brain. We feed our left brain when we're awake, we feed our right brain when we're asleep ...
During sleep both hemispheres show large scale inactivity. There's no different in activity between the two hemispheres. All of our brain needs sleep. Just because only one half of our brain is responsible for speech doesn't mean we don't use it when we're awake.
It is my understanding that we have two different future-predicting brains: the limbic system (mammalian brain) and the neocortex (primates and dolphins brain). The r-complex is a purely reactive brain, and tries to predict little.
The neocortex is incredibly powerful, but the limbic system notices stuff that the neocortex misses on our day-to day routine. Things like micro-gestures (emotions drawn by our faces for mere fractions of a second), non-spoken language, etc.
This neocortex-unperceived stuff is perceived by us as 'feelings', the operating material of the limbic system.
The REM dream stage is the limbic system putting all those feelings as requests to the neocortex, in the way of: "give me a logical and understandable explanation for this feeling I've been having all week".
Then we experience crazy stuff that actually matches the limbic sensation, or we get the right answer. This also helps/interacts with learning processes.
For the rest of the dream state, I have no current theory/explanation.
Not proof that araneae's statement is accurate, of course, but a demonstration that science continues to encroach on the domain of philosophy in ways that the philosophers of old could never have imagined:
Back in the 17th century there was an argument between Descartes and Spinoza about how knowledge was formed. Descartes said that we heard a proposition, judged it on the evidence, and then either believed or rejected it depending on its merits. Spinoza said that, instead, our tendancy was to at first believe anything we heard and then only later reject it after some reflection. Over the centuries most people agreed with Descartes, but recently neuroscience has shown pretty conclusively that Spinoza was right. [1][2] So be very careful in assuming that science will never swallow any particular part of philosophy.
That's rather trite, especially considering it follows that standard wise-mystic pattern of "two statements which contradict each other." Someone wrote a comic about it but unfortunately I can't find it.
There's nothing inherently contradictory about an unknowable truth. Disagree: it's merely trite, not incorrect, and in spite of being trite it still brings a grin to my lips.
Neurethology for one thing assumes the existence of matter, in particular neurons... It may not be your cup of tea (or mine!), but I very much doubt philosophy will ever become obsolete as long as there is a functioning mind ;-).
A characteristic aspect of philosophy is to question essentially every assumption. You and I may find other things much more interesting, even if they require some basic assumptions, but that's another story.
Edit: I don't know why araneae's comments are being downvoted (despite my upvotes). His points are constructive and on topic...
I wouldn't downvote anyone, but perhaps because it's a paradigm example of a particular strain of thought you see a lot amongst techie/engineering types with limited experience of philosophy, and a line of thought that doesn't stand more than a cursory examination.
You've already answered it with your neurons example. Someone else has pointed out that neuroethology will not touch on normative facts (although will presumably uncover empirical facts that have normative significance).
People have been predicting the death of philosophy for hundreds of years. It hasn't happened yet, and it is unlikely to, as there are always fundamental questions to ask (even though progress on them is difficult, if possible - but that's another question).
I think you underrate this line of thought. The existence of neurons is, of course, not justified in the philosophical sense - but its hard to argue that anything is justified in the philosophical sense. Reason might be a source of justification, but for that to be so you first have to assume that reason is justified. Senses might be a source of justification, but first you have to assume that knowledge derived from senses if justified. If you do not make either of these assumptions you have to retreat form justified to probabilistic or tentative knowledge, and in those terms the existence of neurons is a rather more reasonable assumption.
It's not like philosophy is interested in some special notion of 'justified' - philosphy tends to be interested in our ordinary notion of justification.
We normally think that the belief that neurons exist is justified. Philosophy will ask what that amounts to. It may turn out that the belief is unjustified - but most philosophers will reject this. They will argue over different accounts of what that justification consists in.
Modern philosophy has indeed moved beyond this notion of justification, but for a long time it was the central project of Western philosophy. What were the rationalists, empiricists, Kantians, and positivists arguing about other than the justification of knowledge (in this sense).
EDIT: Maybe I'm going overboard here in attributing to philosophy in general what is only true of epistemology, my favorite branch of it. In that case, I should have been referring to "epidemiological justification".
There has been a strand of 20 cent philosophy that has regarded justification as that which together with truth and belief yields knowledge - if you do that, you're individuating justification in terms of a particular epistemic role, and that so it's a theoretical notion. That might be what you're getting at.
But most philosophers nowadays use the notion of 'warrant' for that. So for them, the notion of justification doesn't have that particular theoretical role.
Generally, why be interested in a theoretical notion? The fundamental questions in Epistemology are questions like:
* What is knowledge?
* What is justification?
* Which beliefs are justified?
* What do we know, and how do we know it?
etc etc
Those are the starting points, and they are phrased in English. They use ordinary notions. Given that, no answer to them which first redefines the terms to yield distinct questions is going to suffice as an adequate answer.
Philosophers use a lot of technical jargon, and are interested in technical questions. But generally, those questions have pretty clear connections to our ordinary ways of thinking about the world.
> Sometimes you can go too far in questioning everything to get any practical result.
That's the thing, philosophy doesn't have to be practical, it stands by itself above everything else, with maybe only Maths as a worthy companion. You can either make fun of this, like Aristophanes already did 2,500 years ago in The Clouds, or you can take it as it is.
Does neuroethology tell us whether neuroethology can account for all of the human mind? Probably not, and if we just assume that is the case, then we waste a whole bunch of time if we're wrong.
Philosophy has only been displaced if physics can account for all of reality, but whether it can or cannot is a philosophical problem. So, since you can't appeal to physics to determine whether physics is a comprehensive answer, it isn't.
It won't, it will show that there are no normative questions. (exaggerated on purpose, of course, but it's The Final Frontier - once we know how the brain works, we will have a real insight into the nature of morality and we will have 'proof' for the objective nature thereof - all this IMNSHO of course ;) )
I think you're confused. There are clearly normative questions; "Should I do X?" for any value of X is a normative question. You might have intended to contend that there are no normative facts: that there is no "right answer", as it were, to normative questions, merely what we choose to do.
However, this is not something that science can prove, at least without adding the claim that the only facts there are are physical facts. You're basically suggesting that we open up people's heads, look around, go "Nope, no norms here!" and take that to be evidence that they don't exist. This is problematic at best, since were they to exist, normative facts would seem to have properties quite at odds with physical facts, and your assertion starts to look question-begging.
Metaethics is not my area, so I'm afraid all of this is rather rough and ready, but the SEP article [1] is a pretty decent starting point.
Yes of course there's the distinction between the normative question and the underlying reality that question is about; my point doesn't require a distinction so I found it useless to make it and just went with the phrasing of the post I was replying to.
My point was that there is nothing science won't be able to prove; and that there is only physical reality, and facts, and that once we crack the 'code' (as in 'security code', not 'programming code', although in another discussion I'd posit that it's both) we will learn about the fundamental nature of morality - as humans perceive it; it's exactly this realization (that moral issues stem from interpretation by man) that will show that most things we consider 'moral issues' really aren't.
(the above may make it seem that I'm a moral relativist but I'm not - au contraire, once we peel away the human-induced layers of morality we will find the fundamental nature of it at the core)
Neurology and related sciences can help illuminate what our interests are, but cannot resolve the moral problem of what to do when those interests come into conflict. Science can tell me what kind of diet a child needs to grow into healthy adulthood, but it can’t tell me under what circumstances it would be moral to take money from the wealthy (or, heck, the middle class) in order to feed starving children.
but it can’t tell me under what circumstances it would be moral to take money from the wealthy (or, heck, the middle class) in order to feed starving children.
Sure it can. Take north western Europe, notoriously secular (when compared to the US) yes quite socialist with an extensive social safety net. Economics, sociology, etc, all help you identify what you need to do to reach what ever goals you are aiming for.
And ethics and fairness have been studied and are well known in other social species, like the great apes. They are not uniquely human.
Morality is just the formalization of a whole set of instinctive emotional desires for fairness. Most often it is enforced by using another emotional foundation, the respect for alpha leaders, as in it is God's law you do this and that.
There is no domain which will eternally be out of the reach of reason and science, not morality, not love, not spirituality, nothing. I find this wonderful!
I have an instinctive emotional desire to keep what I possess. You have an instinctive emotional desire to feel compassion for someone who is suffering. Because of your emotions, you want to raise taxes on my property to support the poor. Because of my emotions, I want my taxes to stay the same, if not lower. How can science decide between us?
Social game theory is complex but not impossible to understand. If it were impossible, countries not ruled by the pope any more would be all like Somalia.
Game theory helps you decide, given a game with certain rules and a scoring metric, how to maximize your score. Political philosophy helps you choose the rules of the game.
I believe some of us have an intrinsic desire to build things. Just like birds build nests and bees build hives. Some of us have a desire to build and are probably rewarded with some chemical brain fix as a result.
At this point though, we've simply changed the medium from sticks and mud to Python and Minecraft.
And problem solving, which to me, was the greatest driving force that allowed me to overcome my natural aversion to arbitrary conventions and strictness, both essential in learning how to code.
The power of being able to solve pretty much anything by simply commanding this very fast machine is intoxicating. Once you learn “the code” you are hooked for life.
I imagine that if there wasn't such a steep learning curve (specially for the more “liberal arts” inclined), no one would escape its pull.
BTW, also worth checking is Heidegger's “Poetry, Language, Thought”.
Realizing what gives you award stimulus is important for reinforcing behavior you want and discouraging what you do not want. It is also good to know for all you app and game developers out there.
I would use the word create as it reminds me of both utility and aesthetics. Create also has an ex nihilo conotation, which really seems to fit abstract thought-stuff.
Humans don't have "intrinsic" desires, and we don't have instincts (except arguably as babies), like building nests and hives. Instead, our desires become shaped over time by the process of thought and past experiences we've accumulated.
I agree more with my grandparent post than my parent post. We have (as individuals) learned to value certain particular kinds of achievement, and when we do achieve those achievements, it makes us feel satisfied.
Humans don't have "intrinsic" desires, and we don't have instincts
Says who? Based on what?
You are seriously underestimating one of the hardest questions ever posed and for which there is no (and there may never be) definitive answer. Tabula rasa, genetic determinism, nature vs nurture, etc are all deep, hard problems.
As a matter of fact, can you even significantly define “desire” or “instinct”?
A lot of smart people have tried in the last 2500 years and there is no consensus yet.
Instead of responding to your parent directly, i'll just add that this is exactly why I prefaced my post with "I believe".
That said, I'm not implying we have built in instructions to go create a townhous. Simply that there is possibly a driving force that compels us to create, then a reward for doing so.
What part of the brain is missing in humans, then? The human brain adds on functionality, but it doesn't take anything away. We have the same instincts and desires most primates have, and maybe a few of our own. On top of that we have a mind that can add its own desires, or rationalize the ones already there.
"our desires become shaped over time by the process of thought and past experiences"
How does, for example, sexual arousal fit into that theory? Sure, it's a desire, but can you argue it's not an instinctive desire that evolution has given us for pretty obvious reasons?
To me the interesting bit is "why does the brain want to process symbols". Which is probably better answered by evolution theory than by philosophy.
Another example of the shallowness of philosophy: "I think, therefore I am". Again, an arbitrary premise. What does it mean to exist? Again, philosophy does not seem to be interested.