3 Comments

GV Loewen <verstehen66@gmail.com>

7:30 PM (1 minute ago)

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Appreciate your thoughts and I wholly agree with them.

I'm totally new to substack and have no clue what I'm about so I wonder if I might ask you a few questions?

Neo-Conservative Thought - by Dr. G.V. Loewen (substack.com)

Here's my one and only piece thus far but I don't know how to link it to anyone or anything, and the title of my blog is incorrect as well - makes me sound like I'm Lucy from Peanuts.

Thanks ahead of time and more anon... and can we communicate more directly - I'm at verstehen66@gmail.com

Greg

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In Husserl's 'infamous' 5th Cartesian Meditation the problem of 'other minds' is broached, but as an ontological problem and not as an ethical one. This is likely symptomatic of the rabbit hole contemporary philosophy of mind has gotten lost in. I tend to see the existential 'turn' in phenomenology to have saved this aspect of philosophy from the joyless jouissance the children of the Cloudminder's daughter (the only actually hot actress in the original Gene Roddenberry collection(!)) engage in. Husserl states (p.114 of the Kluwer ed.) that it is only through my own motivational context that such 'appresentations' of otherness are even recognizable at all. A Zombie world would thus not only not have consciousness per se, it would also not have society, self and other, and I think this is where the lens should be shifted; in understanding the problem of a consciousness that is extant in the material relations BETWEEN beings and not as a mere evolutionary outcome of interior doings of a complex neuro-chemical object, we are addressing the chief challenges of our Dasein as it is in the world today. This is what I take Heidegger to have begun and he as a figure is not specifically of interest to the cognitivists. These mental ontologists, in speaking of Zombies, are perhaps engaged in projecting an aspect of themseves with which they should be justifiably uncomfortable. GVL

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Firstly, apologies for the delay in replying - I've meant to, but have been thwarted by circumstance (new job, time zones, trying to keep The Bus on its route, dogs, children, etc.). All those things, in fact, that zombies wouldn't have - and certainly, according to any zombie-leaning cognitivist, wouldn't need to engage in to 'prove' their dubious point. I like thought experiments - they have their place - but not when they become the only way to prove a claim. An imaginary world can be constructed in such a way that allows any possibility - that's one purpose of science fiction - but that in itself proves nothing about reality. And as our Dasein is far more complicated than any reductive imaginary world including zombies allows, I think the whole purpose for these dualists to allow themselves a way of both having their cake and eating it. Which, no matter which world that happens in, doesn't happen in ours.

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