“Can you live your life 100% guided by reason?”
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Living according to reason and rationality alone is impossible, because propositional knowledge is only a subset of needed knowledge for an embodied agent (the others being procedural, participatory- and perspectival knowledge)
Calling people “embodied agent[s]” like they’re barely superior to video-game characters is dehumanizing and weird.
This is also borrowed from cognitive science. But what I meant was to point to the fact that there are “pre-conceptual” models, desires, attentional salience etc. that impinge on and filter input to conscious cognition. An example is how brain regions originally used for moving the body through 3D space are repurposed cognitively to “move around” in idea-space. Some anecdotal evidence for this: notice how many movement metaphors structure propositional thinking. We say we’re close to the truth, we understand, we grasp a concept, we arrive at a conclusion.
This is also borrowed from cognitive science.
Yeah, the cog-sci guys don’t understand Popper or epistemology generally. They seem to view minds and brains as input/output machines. But that isn’t how that works.
I think that's pretty accurate. But if you believe reality simply works by executing a formal set of fundamental rules, how can you believe anything else? By this model, any system only ever has input, output, and functions that determine how that output is generated. What else is there?
If strong emergence exist, there can "emerge" other things that have downward causation.
What is the evidence for strong emergence as opposed to just vieweing every phenomena as the processing of fundamental laws?
Even a non-living system, can build up constraints at an aggregate which have downwards causation. After a Crystal is formed the lattice constrains which vibrational modes are possible for individual atoms. In other words being part of a larger strucutre (which follows other rules) has downard causation on "parts" following fundamental rules. There might be other emergent structures that expose other fundamental rules not encompassed by the known fundamental rules.
[A]ny system only ever has input, output, and functions that determine how that output is generated. What else is there?
Minds don’t necessarily output anything. Also, they don’t just run existing functions, they create new ones.