Great essay, thanks. And here’s the rub: while intuition is non-inferential in its direct manifestation, it may still emerge from prior inferences or learned patterns that operate below the level of conscious awareness.
The internal conflict ends when we finally accept that what we think and do is what we want, and we move through life with awareness of the wholeness, interdependence and complexity of that reality.
Yeah, I agree. Intuition operates like a deep learning module that’s influenced by prior inferences and past experiences. But the internal conflict, I think, doesn’t end until you end. That conflict is life’s battery. It’s the engine of change. It ends when your battery is depleted and you return to the synthetic world that spawned you.
Desire just is the gap between intuition and reason. Desires are inconsistencies between the world as you represent it and the world as you wish it were. The closest you can come to death (without actually dying) is getting what you want.
As i read through this i kept thinking “wow this dichotomy approach, analysis and synthesis, is very Kantian and reminds me of a great essay i read a while back” and then i realised that that previous essay was also written by YOU. Beautiful, thank you for writing.
I stumbled upon your blog through Lance Bush’s recommendation. I’ve read three of your essays so far, and each one was fantastic: informative, well-crafted on a sentence level, and funny.
This essay was my favorite. I’ve been thinking and lightly reading about the unity problem since (at least) grad school. How does the brain unify our experience? And why does this sense of unity break in people with dissociative identity disorder? If indeed it is a valid disorder, as I think, some psychologists would argue against?
Thanks! That essay is my favorite too. I'm pretty skeptical of modern clinical psychology, but I do think that the various split personality conditions they've identified, as well as the idea of being "on the spectrum," could be explained on the analytic/synthetic (reason/intuition, mind/soul) model.
While this is an interesting discussion of reason and intuition, from my POV it just makes matters worse. Instead of mind and body or soul and body, now we have mind, soul, and body.
I take a holistic view. We are not a mind, soul, and/or brain + a body, but an integral self. One thing, not two or three. And I have a formal definition of "person" to fit my view: a person is "a conceptually conscious physical entity, alive and moving in a directly perceived world with other things and persons."
Likewise, reason and intuition are not at war with each other unless you embrace rationalism or subjectivism. They ideally work together. I call this "robust reason."
I am working on a book with these ideas, and parts of it are published on Substack. I'm not going to link them here without your go ahead because I think it would be rude to barge in and toot my own horn.
Those are not "things" in the sense of being distinct entities, as mind, soul, brain, and body are supposed to be. They are attributes of one thing: a person. A red round ball is not two "things," red and round.
I think you might be able to make your case stronger if you were to abandon the talk of entities like mind and soul and stuck with talk of faculties like reason and intuition. Fewer ontological encumbrances that way!
Like all distinctions, the object/attribute distinction makes sense only if you don't ask too many questions.
I'm using "mind" and "soul" as more colorful ways of referring to reason and intuition, respectively. But the key idea is that intuition is holistic whereas reason is analytic (it divides wholes into parts). Your definition of a person, for example, is an attempt to analyze a holistic intuition by dividing it into parts. And for me it doesn't matter whether those parts are "attributes" or "objects" -- that distinction is your metaphysical baggage.
Anyway, a question for you. If people, as you say, are holistic and integrated, why is it that we so often find ourselves internally conflicted? Why do we dither, procrastinate, contradict ourselves, will the ends but not the means? And why do we laugh?
Ah, I didn't realize you were just being colorful. I took your language literally.
And I see no problem with an integral being having internal conflicts. Thought is complicated, all the more so when it is mixed up with feelings as it usually is. We rarely can hold the whole picture in "mind" at once, so the smaller pieces we can grasp have their own seeming existence. With work, sometimes a lot of work, we can integrate them.
Self is the story we tell about how we got into the world and society. There is an internal and an external version and either can be factual or fantastic.
I think it´s time to bring back the various words into the classical framework: Thought!. Not mind, not soul, no intuition, no reason. Just thought!.
I have two posts that go along the way of A mind being A soul claimed to be attached to a brain, and the consequences of believing the mind is real. One is informal logic:
There is only reason. Bacteria moves towards the energy source and away from the damage, as a most basic reasonable structure. Naturally, it’s because life has emerged from this principle: it can replicate behavior, and then further select traits that produce reasonable behavior. Plus mutations.
Together this equals: organisms that explore the space of possibilities and natrow down to a those that work.
We are it, too.
Dichotomy issue: same input can have deep instinctual reaction, what is close to your case for the soul. Then lighter thinking may produce different action. Then deeper thought can be more precise yet. Then deep analysis can produce very specific course of action.
All of this is us, all of this is mind/soul layers which are plenty. There are some quanta there, as brain has distinct structures. But they are intertwined and fuzzy, as all but most basic primal feelings (fear, rage, lust, seeking, care, panic/grief, and play) are combinations of perceptions.
Organisms that explore the space of possibilities eventually create their own possibilities -- their own conceptual schemes -- and some of them even go on to create new organisms inside those schemes. "Pregnancy," you could say, occurs both biologically and at the level of conceptual representation. Synthesis (i.e. the soul) creates analysis (i.e. reason) inside of itself, and is eventually consumed. And then the cycle begins anew.
If we define soul roughly as a attraction/avoidance neural energy blob, then yes, it can create nodules of historical reasoning that crystallize into heuristics and then logic.
But it’s not one or the other, I believe. It’s quite a smooth continuum.
Yeah, we might just be using different words, but I see the soul more like a pattern-recognizing deep learning module, like how my dog knows that I'm going out of town even before I've started packing. Over time that deep learning module develops concepts (e.g. table, chair) and eventually it develops the concept "me" -- a representation of itself within itself. And that's when the fun begins.
Great essay, thanks. And here’s the rub: while intuition is non-inferential in its direct manifestation, it may still emerge from prior inferences or learned patterns that operate below the level of conscious awareness.
The internal conflict ends when we finally accept that what we think and do is what we want, and we move through life with awareness of the wholeness, interdependence and complexity of that reality.
Yeah, I agree. Intuition operates like a deep learning module that’s influenced by prior inferences and past experiences. But the internal conflict, I think, doesn’t end until you end. That conflict is life’s battery. It’s the engine of change. It ends when your battery is depleted and you return to the synthetic world that spawned you.
I’m not sure that “mental conflict” is required. Desire is life’s battery. Internal conflict—this or that, now or then, good or bad—drains it.
Desire just is the gap between intuition and reason. Desires are inconsistencies between the world as you represent it and the world as you wish it were. The closest you can come to death (without actually dying) is getting what you want.
Close the gap and be free.
As i read through this i kept thinking “wow this dichotomy approach, analysis and synthesis, is very Kantian and reminds me of a great essay i read a while back” and then i realised that that previous essay was also written by YOU. Beautiful, thank you for writing.
Thanks, I really appreciate it!
I stumbled upon your blog through Lance Bush’s recommendation. I’ve read three of your essays so far, and each one was fantastic: informative, well-crafted on a sentence level, and funny.
This essay was my favorite. I’ve been thinking and lightly reading about the unity problem since (at least) grad school. How does the brain unify our experience? And why does this sense of unity break in people with dissociative identity disorder? If indeed it is a valid disorder, as I think, some psychologists would argue against?
Your essay was definitely a unique take.
I’m looking forward to following along!
Thanks! That essay is my favorite too. I'm pretty skeptical of modern clinical psychology, but I do think that the various split personality conditions they've identified, as well as the idea of being "on the spectrum," could be explained on the analytic/synthetic (reason/intuition, mind/soul) model.
While this is an interesting discussion of reason and intuition, from my POV it just makes matters worse. Instead of mind and body or soul and body, now we have mind, soul, and body.
I take a holistic view. We are not a mind, soul, and/or brain + a body, but an integral self. One thing, not two or three. And I have a formal definition of "person" to fit my view: a person is "a conceptually conscious physical entity, alive and moving in a directly perceived world with other things and persons."
Likewise, reason and intuition are not at war with each other unless you embrace rationalism or subjectivism. They ideally work together. I call this "robust reason."
I am working on a book with these ideas, and parts of it are published on Substack. I'm not going to link them here without your go ahead because I think it would be rude to barge in and toot my own horn.
By your definition we're not one thing but many things: conceptual, conscious, physical, alive, perceptive, and in motion.
And I say toot away!
Those are not "things" in the sense of being distinct entities, as mind, soul, brain, and body are supposed to be. They are attributes of one thing: a person. A red round ball is not two "things," red and round.
I think you might be able to make your case stronger if you were to abandon the talk of entities like mind and soul and stuck with talk of faculties like reason and intuition. Fewer ontological encumbrances that way!
Here is a link to the overview of my book on wholeness. Thank you for letting me toot my horn! And Happy New Year! https://kurtkeefner.substack.com/p/for-the-love-of-wisdom?r=7cant
Like all distinctions, the object/attribute distinction makes sense only if you don't ask too many questions.
I'm using "mind" and "soul" as more colorful ways of referring to reason and intuition, respectively. But the key idea is that intuition is holistic whereas reason is analytic (it divides wholes into parts). Your definition of a person, for example, is an attempt to analyze a holistic intuition by dividing it into parts. And for me it doesn't matter whether those parts are "attributes" or "objects" -- that distinction is your metaphysical baggage.
Anyway, a question for you. If people, as you say, are holistic and integrated, why is it that we so often find ourselves internally conflicted? Why do we dither, procrastinate, contradict ourselves, will the ends but not the means? And why do we laugh?
Ah, I didn't realize you were just being colorful. I took your language literally.
And I see no problem with an integral being having internal conflicts. Thought is complicated, all the more so when it is mixed up with feelings as it usually is. We rarely can hold the whole picture in "mind" at once, so the smaller pieces we can grasp have their own seeming existence. With work, sometimes a lot of work, we can integrate them.
I wrote an essay about "robust reason" that might interest you. This is a secret link, so please don't share it. https://kurtkeefner.substack.com/p/14d5e0ae-1a72-45d6-8c3b-5e1c58b00a6c?postPreview=paid&updated=2024-11-26T05%3A35%3A01.574Z&audience=everyone&free_preview=false&freemail=true
What are you?
Matter that matters.
You are a microcosm of Being—an integral part of the cosmos as a whole.
Self is the story we tell about how we got into the world and society. There is an internal and an external version and either can be factual or fantastic.
I think it´s time to bring back the various words into the classical framework: Thought!. Not mind, not soul, no intuition, no reason. Just thought!.
I have two posts that go along the way of A mind being A soul claimed to be attached to a brain, and the consequences of believing the mind is real. One is informal logic:
https://federicosotodelalba.substack.com/p/beauty?r=4up0lp
https://federicosotodelalba.substack.com/p/last?r=4up0lp
Thanks!.
Beautiful and poetic.
Worth a song.
Disagreed on the premise, however.
Unnecessary dichotomy.
There is only reason. Bacteria moves towards the energy source and away from the damage, as a most basic reasonable structure. Naturally, it’s because life has emerged from this principle: it can replicate behavior, and then further select traits that produce reasonable behavior. Plus mutations.
Together this equals: organisms that explore the space of possibilities and natrow down to a those that work.
We are it, too.
Dichotomy issue: same input can have deep instinctual reaction, what is close to your case for the soul. Then lighter thinking may produce different action. Then deeper thought can be more precise yet. Then deep analysis can produce very specific course of action.
All of this is us, all of this is mind/soul layers which are plenty. There are some quanta there, as brain has distinct structures. But they are intertwined and fuzzy, as all but most basic primal feelings (fear, rage, lust, seeking, care, panic/grief, and play) are combinations of perceptions.
We have plenty evidence of water indeed.
Organisms that explore the space of possibilities eventually create their own possibilities -- their own conceptual schemes -- and some of them even go on to create new organisms inside those schemes. "Pregnancy," you could say, occurs both biologically and at the level of conceptual representation. Synthesis (i.e. the soul) creates analysis (i.e. reason) inside of itself, and is eventually consumed. And then the cycle begins anew.
Not disagreeing here, it’s an angle.
If we define soul roughly as a attraction/avoidance neural energy blob, then yes, it can create nodules of historical reasoning that crystallize into heuristics and then logic.
But it’s not one or the other, I believe. It’s quite a smooth continuum.
Yeah, we might just be using different words, but I see the soul more like a pattern-recognizing deep learning module, like how my dog knows that I'm going out of town even before I've started packing. Over time that deep learning module develops concepts (e.g. table, chair) and eventually it develops the concept "me" -- a representation of itself within itself. And that's when the fun begins.
Yes that’s close how I feel it works.
Jeff Hawkins was my source of clarity on many of these concepts.
Wow! Thank you for explaining myself to me!