Because if you don’t you’ll fail to see what is doing all the thinking, you can’t strip a car of all it’s parts and still expect it to run, if you do, you’re left with saying “nothing is making the wheels turn”.
This comment and the quote make absolutely no sense to me. Splitting a mysterious things like a “me” concept into less mysterious things like a smaller “me” and a “queryable reason store” is the heart of reductionism and explanation. Doing that doesn’t remove the wheels from the car, it just relabels the car into “wheels” and “smaller car which is also up for decomposition.” When you break the “car” concept down, you’re not left with nothing, or with wheels that turn on missing axles; you’re left with a bunch of parts that all work together, which were all parts of the original car but which all now have different names. Names like engine, exhaust manifold, spark plug, carburetor, wind shield fluid, map of Florida, fiberglass, electron. We can talk about all of these things and never reference “car”. “Car” vanishes, but the actual car does not.
And at any point in that reduction, it’s possible (in principle, if not cognitively realistic) to draw a boundary around the parts to reintroduce the car concept. Whether I say “I am beliefs, desires, plans, intentions, wayfinding algorithms, multisensory categories, image schemas, a hippocampus, the concept of digital publishing, a lateral geniculate nucleus, some belief propagation and reinforcement learning, post-synaptic potentials, and everything else science knows about minds” or just “internal dialogue”, there’s nothing erroneous about a small self concept. And even if I don’t stop the reduction to draw a boundary, the imagery doesn’t “shrink back to a singularity”, it just bottoms out at physics.
I think you have misunderstood my point. The quote—or my comment is not disputing reductionism, but rather that the act of deconstructing the mind removes the person—one has to recognize that person or car for that mater consists of parts.
We can talk about all of these things and never reference “car”. “Car” vanishes, but the actual car does not.
Agreed, I expressed myself poorly but by “strip” I meant “not include into concept car”, so more over if you assign driving as a function of a car, and then reduce the car into parts, finding that the engine, wheels and so on, are in fact the the things that do the work, it is a fallacy to conclude “AHA the car is not doing the driving it’s the engine, wheels. . . .” since car = it’s parts. That is how many people with dualistic intuitions approach the mind.
there’s nothing erroneous about a small self concept. And even if I don’t stop the reduction to draw a boundary, the imagery doesn’t “shrink back to a singularity”, it just bottoms out at physics.
That depends on what you include in your concept of self—we don’t want this to turn this into a discussion about trees falling in the forest. But I was assuming that a lot of people have the same sens of self as I have, we are all human after all. I think “shrink back to singularity” is a metaphor, not a physical singular point.
Because if you don’t you’ll fail to see what is doing all the thinking, you can’t strip a car of all it’s parts and still expect it to run, if you do, you’re left with saying “nothing is making the wheels turn”.
This comment and the quote make absolutely no sense to me. Splitting a mysterious things like a “me” concept into less mysterious things like a smaller “me” and a “queryable reason store” is the heart of reductionism and explanation. Doing that doesn’t remove the wheels from the car, it just relabels the car into “wheels” and “smaller car which is also up for decomposition.” When you break the “car” concept down, you’re not left with nothing, or with wheels that turn on missing axles; you’re left with a bunch of parts that all work together, which were all parts of the original car but which all now have different names. Names like engine, exhaust manifold, spark plug, carburetor, wind shield fluid, map of Florida, fiberglass, electron. We can talk about all of these things and never reference “car”. “Car” vanishes, but the actual car does not.
And at any point in that reduction, it’s possible (in principle, if not cognitively realistic) to draw a boundary around the parts to reintroduce the car concept. Whether I say “I am beliefs, desires, plans, intentions, wayfinding algorithms, multisensory categories, image schemas, a hippocampus, the concept of digital publishing, a lateral geniculate nucleus, some belief propagation and reinforcement learning, post-synaptic potentials, and everything else science knows about minds” or just “internal dialogue”, there’s nothing erroneous about a small self concept. And even if I don’t stop the reduction to draw a boundary, the imagery doesn’t “shrink back to a singularity”, it just bottoms out at physics.
I think you have misunderstood my point. The quote—or my comment is not disputing reductionism, but rather that the act of deconstructing the mind removes the person—one has to recognize that person or car for that mater consists of parts.
Agreed, I expressed myself poorly but by “strip” I meant “not include into concept car”, so more over if you assign driving as a function of a car, and then reduce the car into parts, finding that the engine, wheels and so on, are in fact the the things that do the work, it is a fallacy to conclude “AHA the car is not doing the driving it’s the engine, wheels. . . .” since car = it’s parts. That is how many people with dualistic intuitions approach the mind.
That depends on what you include in your concept of self—we don’t want this to turn this into a discussion about trees falling in the forest. But I was assuming that a lot of people have the same sens of self as I have, we are all human after all. I think “shrink back to singularity” is a metaphor, not a physical singular point.