Rather, a desire seizes you as soon as you perceive the object.
False. A pregnant woman desires specific nutrients thus they might crave a weird food that has them at 2.am at night without even seeing the object.
Similarly, animals that are deficient of minerals "magically" get attracted to specific kinds of rocks and start licking them.
A cat without learning from anyone will lick itself to clean. It will rub itself against a human to get what it wants. It will wrestle playfully with your hand much like it is another cat. These are instincts governed by nature's autopilot.
The value-laden theory of life explains why in real life the objects are seen as desirable, rather than reasoned as such.—Most often, a thing's desirability is perceived, not deduced.
Every living body is made up of cells that need specific fuel to function. Every single desire, every single nutrient stems from their functions. Our perception is nothing than the overall aftermath of that process.
Against Subjectivism
If a pregnant woman desires to eat ice-cream, from her friends point of view she desires something sweet. From her body's point of view she needs to regulate her insulin. Subjectivism suggests that there is no external or objective truth because we are all observers of a multifaceted process. There is no single objective endgame. It cannot be or exist since everything in the universe changes. For objective truth to exist the entire universe will have to stay still. What was objective truth 10 billions years ago for gravitational forces in our solar system, are not today and will not be 10 billion years from now.
That's from here.
Doesn't really matter though, I'll assume you're right (and you may well be, I haven't read anything else on this subject other than that). What you did basically was give a causal or physiological explanation for why certain needs arise. I wouldn't argue against any scientific explanation like the one you just gave.
In fact I say elsewhere that our values arise partly from our genes, roughly speaking, and partly from our environs.
So basically your scientific explanation can coincide with my "values" explanation. In fact, our values must come from somewhere! They're not just created out of thin air. We value X because our body needs X (or whatever other scientific/causal explanation you may care to mention). The scientific explanation just shows why values exist, just as genes would have showed Darwin (if he had lived to see their discovery) why, or how, his theory works.
So, for instance, instincts show why we value certain females above certain other females, or certain foods above certain other foods. As soon as I perceive a certain female, she already possesses a value for me: she arrives to my consciousness already "painted" as, say, a sexual object, or an object that can mother my children, just like she arrives similarly "painted" to the lion's consciousness, dressed in gravy, with an apple stuck in her mouth, ready to be eaten. She literally appears differently to me and to the lion, because we perceive her through our value-specs, that we can never remove. The scientific explanation for why those value-spectacles are the way they are can be whatever you want it to be, it won't clash with my view.
There is no such point of view! Just like there's no "from the rock's point of view" or "from Natural Selection's point of view" or "from the Universe's point of view". It's just us projecting.
Subjectivism should better be left for the next installment.
I know you don't share this view, but to me (and many others) consciousness is just baffling. I just don't understand why, say, the woman in your example, who craves ice-cream, must crave it. Why doesn't she just seek it out like metal shards seek out a magnet? Why doesn't she go to the fridge and pick up a container and dip her spoon in and eat ice-cream just like a wound-up toy soldier moves forward? Why does she need consciousness to do all that? The toy soldier doesn't crave to go forward: it just does. At which point during evolution did Nature say "fuck it, I can't do all this by myself! it's too complicated to do it mechanically! I must enlist the help of Consciousness!" I don't understand why consciousness exists, especially considering that our choices are made for us before we're even aware of them. Some philosophers say consciousness is an epiphenomenon. But that still doesn't explain why it's here.
I never brought consciousness to the discussion. Consciousness is bullshit. I am just saying that each individual sees thing from a different angle depending on his unique aggregate of different life experiences/lessons.
basically this but add a couple thousand more versions. (or more)
Yeah it's just the way you differentiated between let's say 'what the person wants' and 'what his body wants', and tried to collapse the former into the latter, brought up in me the thought of consciousness, which I think is a more interesting issue, and thought I'd might ask you how you see consciousness - specifically, why aren't we as unconscious as rocks? Why does 'complexity' have to give rise to consciousness? Etc. It seems to me what you're doing is what the logical positivists were trying to do: whatever question they didn't like, they said it was 'meaningless' (literally the words had no meaning). They did this with questions such as 'does God exist?' and 'what is the meaning of life?' It seems to me you're doing the same but using the word 'bullshit' instead of 'meaningless statement'.
I understand the pic and it's actually how I view subjectivity/objectivity. I.e. there is in fact objective truth! (it's being pointed at with the bottom arrow!)
I gave a simple example of subjective perception. I could given smaller comparisons but I wanted to make a point about how non-objective the world is.
Because our bodies are able to carry electrical signals. It gives random variation to our carbon molecules.
it doesn't. consciousness is a just a subjective narrative for those signals.
everything IS meaningless. Life has no meaning. It just is. Meaning is simply a narrative, a story, hence why our species likes them so much and why motivational speakers bust our balls with them.
they are meaningless. i know you are trying to defend your book and that there is no such thing as a "nihilist" but you need to get over it. You can continue being without finding any meaning because your body is much different than your "narrative" process. You realize that when you try to close your mouth and asphyxiate yourself .
Wrong. lol. the point is that this picture is part of another picture, that is part of another picture. This is why you see so many fractals in nature that slowly take other shapes as you step back and as time progresses.
Also remember that being a philosopher means accepting one's mistakes. You are too stubborn.
I always admit my mistakes!
Right back at you!
I may disagree with this, but at least I know what you mean. I don't know what you mean when you say the following:
It's like you're basically saying that consciousness is an illusion. Like I'm just dreaming I'm conscious. In reality I'm just like a rock, but somehow I've fooled myself into thinking I'm conscious. It's like you're showing me one of those pictures they use in psychology to show how our eyes fool us sometimes, and you're telling me "you think you are seeing X, but actually you're just seeing Y".
There are philosophers who share your opinion, like Daniel Dennett, but then again he's the guy who believes free will exists. And that our actions are 100% determined. Go figure.
Anyway maybe I should try and write something about consciousness in the future, but it's gonna take a while.
yes. Consciousness is for the most part an illusion and there are pretty good evidence for this. Even in times we think we get it all "clear" our past experiences are so full of false concepts and perceptions that make the current experiences complete delusions (not just illusions). Consciousness is based on memories and past experiences. If memories are mostly made up shortcuts, mixed up with dreams and false perceptions (i will let you google it) then the sheer clusterfuck of the sum of all people's beliefs become nonsense.
As a "philosopher" you shouldn't make these logical fallacies. I am an atheist, Stalin was an atheist, therefore I support mass killings? :) come on. don't let me catch your leg that easy.
"For the most part", you say, so I would ask about the part that remains. I'm aware of all the ways our minds trick us, but that's a different question. There is one thing about which it's impossible to be wrong - the one thing in the world we're certain about - and that's that we exist. That's what Descartes proved with his famous line (there's a whole passage and a whole book wrapped around that single line), even though it's fashionable sometimes now to challenge it, but really no one could ever prove him wrong without contradicting themselves. I could be a brain in a vat, you could be a robot, this could all be happening in my mind or in a dream, I could have been created just a millisecond ago and all my memories could be implanted - but there's one thing I can't be wrong about: I AM. (And by that, we mean consciousness, we mean our qualia to use the philosophical term.)
Let me rephrase that for you. "Alex is a philosopher. Therefore he should be very aware of this fallacy - just because Dennett is wrong about one thing, doesn't mean he's wrong about another thing. Therefore, it's reasonable to assume that Alex wasn't making that fallacy. If that's true, then what else could he be trying to illustrate with that paragraph? Maybe he was trying to say 'There are great philosophers who share your opinion. But don't get all jolly just yet: just because they're great doesn't mean they're right. After all, the same philosopher, despite his greatness, is a compatibilist about free will.' Yes, that seems like a far more reasonable interpretation."
Or maybe, even better: "That was just a side-thought, after all Alex always tends to talk too much."
(I am also aware the fallacy of which you have accused me is a different one than the one I used in my rephrasing.)
[I'm having an almost identical discussion in another post and I thought you'd love to read @heretickitten's response, which is like your own, and I love the way it's worded:]
No, I'm saying that consciousness doesn't really exist. The illusion is just a bubble surrounding a machine.
We are already living in the illusion. What IS consciousness? It's hard to define, right?
It's just the idea of taking in sensory information and processing it, isn't it?
It's mechanical and stilted. Smarterchild, that old chat AI, is like the most thin bubble. A few words, and you realize it's just a machine. Pop.
Cleverbot is a bit better, the bubble of consciousness illusion is thicker. You might be fooled for a bit. Even it might be fooled, from its own perspective. But with prodding... Pop.
Introduce: The Human Machine. Me or you.
How mechanical are we? Of course it seems complex, just complex enough to fool us into thinking we're free-willed or something, or that we're not a machine. But we can't see the code that we're running on. The system architecture is too complex to fully comprehend.
Yet, it is still a machine. That means our consciousness is just another bubble, and if poked enough, it could pop, revealing that we are just mechanical beings, and that the real pilot is our genetic code. Not the brain.
Pop.