But all you know about their thoughts and feelings, you have to infer from their actions. If you define a person through their thoughts and feelings, but you infer their thoughts and feelings from their actions, then you essentially define a person through their actions.
That depends on what you mean by "all that matters". As I've said before, I'm not saying people don't have thoughts and feelings - I'm just saying you can't know anything about them without inferring from behaviour, which means that everything you know about someone's thoughts and feelings is ultimately derived from their behaviour - so in that sense, yes, behaviour really is all that matters, at least from an outside observer's point of view.
Of course, it's often useful to ask yourself "do I really know what this person is thinking?" Other people can always surprise you, act in ways you never expected; that's why judging people is often a bad idea, at least when you do it too early. But the reality is that there's only one way to find out what someone else is thinking: considering their behaviour. It's not a foolproof method, but it's the only one.
Other people (presumably) have thoughts and feelings, but we can never actually access them. Yet at some point, you're simply going to have to stop considering other people to be completely unknowable, because that just isn't fruitful. No, you can't know for sure that your best friend actually likes you and enjoys your company - maybe he secretly hates your guts - but based on his actions, it's reasonable to assume that he does. Inferring from behaviour is the only reasonable thing to do.
The trait theory isn't "inferring personality based on behaviour", it just describes personalities using traits. Hence the name. As I tried to explain in my previous post, I don't actually believe people can be described as "generous" or "stingy" precisely because we don't always act consistently - I was trying to illustrate a point, namely that it is meaningful to think of other people as having personalities, and therefore it is meaningful to try to determine what that personality is, by inferring from behaviour.
Regardless of what theoretical approach you take to the concept of "personality", the fact remains that the only way you can know anything about it is by studying the person's behaviour. All personality theories infer from behaviour. What conclusions you then draw is another matter.
Okay, I agree with you that the only way you can know anything about a person is by their behavior. I don't have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is the paradigm of viewing a
person as the way they behave. Subjective experience is infinitely more important than objective truth, and you won't be able to convince me otherwise on that. Because if there is no subjective experience, there might as well be
nothing at all.
People are completely unknowable, as is
everything, but it doesn't make a difference, because making assumptions is a reasonable thing to do.
Again, there is no problem with inferring based on behavior. I just don't like when people then put the behavior on a pedestal, and regard thoughts and feelings as just a logical consequence. The logic here is really simple.
Subjectivity is more important than objectivity.
Behavior is objective, experience is subjective.
Therefore, another person's mind is more notable than another person's brain and behavior.
I agree completely, but the thing is, you don't know what their motives are - unless you infer based on the person's behaviour. So even if you try to judge a person's motives, it's really still their actions you're judging.
That still doesn't make their behavior more important than their thoughts and feelings, which includes their motives.
Still not buying it. "My conscious self" is not identical to "other people's conscious selves". They are not interchangeable. "My conscious self" cannot be "someone else's conscious self" because then it's not the same conscious self any more. Unless you're saying that all "conscious selves" are identical.
Why can't they be? They obviously can't be the
same conscious self, but why can't they be in nature identical? If two things are identical, they are interchangeable.
A fascinating psychological phenomenon can be seen with split brain patients, whose corpus callosom, connecting the left and right hemispheres, has been severed. One optic tract goes to each hemisphere, so if they stare at a center point, and then we flash, say, "ice" on one side and "cream" on the other, one hemisphere will see "ice" and the other "cream". If we ask them to point with their right hand to the picture of what they saw, they will point to the word "ice", and if we ask them to point with the left hand they will point to "creme", but never icecream. It gets weirder: since language is controlled by the left hemisphere, if we ask the person why they pointed to a picture of "creme" with their left hand, which is controlled by their right hemisphere, they will rationalize their response by associating "ice" with "creme".
Each hemisphere goes on living a life of its own. That means a lot for conscious selves. There are now two people living in the same head, which were at one time one person. What if I had a split brain disechtomy? Would "I" live in the left brain or the right brain? The answer is
both, which is freaky to think about.
Why does it matter whether it had anything to do with luck or not?
Because how can you judge someone for something that
fundamentally isn't their fault?
The limits of the human mind are not the limits of the universe; there's a difference between what we can wrap our minds around and what is actually true. I have no proof that the brain causes consciousness, but there is an obvious connection between the two, and I have no reason to assume that anything else causes consciousness, especially not something non-physical; until I find a good reason to change my mind, I'll stick to that belief. I'm not a huge fan of arguments that go "I don't understand it, therefore it's supernatural".
For one that is a huge oversimplification of my argument, which regarded simplicity; I think you need to read it again. Also I don't like the word "supernatural" because of its false connotations, namely that something supernatural is mysterious and non-understandable. Supernatural doesn't even have to imply non-physical. Non-physical is
not the same as non-mechanical. Subjectivity fundamentally is supernatural, where supernatural simply means it can't be described from an objective viewpoint. Hence the word "subjective".
Also, I'm not a huge fan of the notion that there are some things that are beyond human comprehension. Sure, there could be something so complex that I don't have enough neurons to understand it fully, but colors are not complicated.
That's not what I'm saying - that wouldn't make any sense. Acting differently from a conscious person completely defeats the point of a philosophical zombie, since they are explicitly defined to be entities that act like humans in all given situations.
But if it acts exactly like a conscious human in all conceivable circumstances, then it must necessarily be conscious, because it is physically identical to a conscious human and I have no reason to believe that there is something beyond the physical that causes some things to be conscious and others not to be. If it's physically identical, how could it not be conscious? I don't believe in the supernatural.
You believe in subjectivity though. Would you agree that there is a
fundamental difference between subjectivity and objectivity? One is alive, one is dead.
It wasn't really that important, just something I thought might interest you.
It does, thanks for mentioning it!
But "he" could have been a completely different person? That doesn't make any sense. He could have been any conceivable conscious entity, but it wouldn't have been possible for him to be non-conscious? Why?
Because when he stops being conscious, he stops being a person. When I die, I am no longer myself. There is no "me" anymore. Like when I sleep, only unreversable. That's just the way I define "self". Like the "self" in the right hemisphere could have been the self in the left hemisphere (in fact, is!) he could have been someone else. I'm not sure if the barrier to understanding what I'm getting at is the concept, or if you're getting hung up on the definitions.
Your argument goes like this.
An uncle is an uncle.
An aunt is an aunt.
An uncle is not an aunt.
Therefore, an uncle's consciousness is not interchangeable with an aunt's consciousness.
Which is non sequitur. If A =/= B, but A has C, and B has C, A's C is interchangeable with B's C.
Well, yeah. I never said anything about beauty or morals existing in any objective sense of the word, so I'm not sure where you're going with this.
Well, if we both realize that there is no such thing as a "bad person", we don't really disagree on much.
But he crashed because of bad weather, not because he wanted to kill hundreds of innocent people. There's a pretty huge difference there; just a few paragraphs ago you mentioned you would rather judge a person's motives than their actions, am I right?
Right, but here's the card I was saving: everyone's motives are understandable.
Why would someone go homicidal? I can think of the following reasons: (feel free to add more)
-They want to cleanse the world of bad people or otherwise make the world a better place
Who would judge a knight templar? They're trying to do what they genuinely believe is right and good for the world, probably risking everything in order to do it. Pure good doesn't get more pure.
-It's life or death
Problem?
-They want to get revenge
Emotions have come into play. If you're at the point where you want to kill someone, they have agitated you
extremely. You might regret it later, but they have somehow pushed your buttons so much that they make you
actually believe it would be better if that person was dead. A revenger is a knight templar guided by emotions. You might blame them
for being guided by their emotions, but how can you? Emotions are not bad things. The consequences are bad, but in the moment they were not, and had no ability to, think about the consequences.
-Material gain, because they get pleasure out of it, or other totally selfish reasons
Can you judge a 3 year old for being selfish? Then why can you judge any such adult with extremely mal-developed psyche? This is the most convoluted, and, not accidentally, the most detestable. The exact reason would differ with every case, but with enough tracing of motives, it would become understandable. No one does evil for evil.
If the plane crashes as a result of an unexpected storm, I will not blame anyone.
If the plane crashes as a result of the pilot being inexperienced and unskilled, I will judge him, or possibly whoever hired and/or educated him.
If the plane crashes as a result of the pilot being a homicidal maniac who wants to murder hundreds of innocent people, I will judge him harshly.
All three cases are purely the result of "random luck" - circumstances leading to other circumstances. But the difference lies in the nature of the person I am judging.
But how can you negatively judge something that is
understandable?
I know nothing about the pilot who got caught in the storm, so I will not judge him.
The pilot who crashed because he was a bad pilot is irresponsible or ignorant, to the point of costing other people their lives, which I do not appreciate.
The pilot who crashed because he wanted to kill everyone aboard the plane is a homicidal maniac, which disgusts me.
I don't care at all about whether or not the homicidal maniac pilot actively chose to be a homicidal maniac, but the fact of the matter is that he's a homicidal maniac, and that makes me justified in judging him because I don't like homicidal maniacs.
Well since we agree that people are not objectively good or bad, I think we don't really have a disagreement here, so long as you realize that your judgement is irrational.
And that kind of leads us back to our consciousness argument; I said I'm okay with being irrational about liking people but not hating people, because it's good to be loved and bad to be hated, and I might as well have been that other person. Hating someone is potentially good for modifying their behavior, but it is not the only way or the best way. If someone is hated, they will have a very low self-image, which will only make them live up to that expectation.
Yeah, sure. But there is absolutely no point in saying "I don't know anything at all about the universe, I just perceive things but can't know for sure! Everything could be an illusion!" For all intents and purposes, it is reasonable to assume that we can know things - hence why I believe in defining people through their actions, as opposed to not defining them at all and just regarding them as faceless, unknowable entities.
Point being, don't judge the real person, judge the person in your mind, because
you don't understand why that person did what they did.
The problem with it is, of course, that it fails to consider the entire Chinese-speaking system. The man is just one component. He doesn't speak Chinese, but the system as a whole - the Chinese room - does.
I mostly agree with you. Obviously the system
speaks Chinese, but does it understand it? The primary argument with the Chinese room is that the processing is
syntactical, as in it relies on a bunch of rules, rather than
semantical, which deals with
meaning. Consider a blind man (for the sake of the argument, he also has no sensation of touch) who has memorized a ton of facts about shapes: a line is
one dimensional, there are 360 degrees around a point, a square is made up of four equal lines that intersect perpendicularly, circles have infinitely many angles, etc. By knowing these definitions, he can answer any question you ask him regarding geometry. (What is the area of this shape, does X square fit inside circle Y, what is this line's curvature, does X jigsaw shape fit Y jigsaw shape, etc.). If he is creative and intelligent, he can come to have an intuitive understanding of shapes,
but he doesn't need to. You can know a bunch of rules and definitions without having any idea what those rules or definitions
reference.
Well, yeah. You can't be another person because then you're not you any more. It's a self-contradiction. It just doesn't make any sense. I don't how else I can put it, but there you go.
I don't see why you equate the entirety of a person with their conscious self.
That doesn't make any sense. There is more to a person than that: their body, their actions, their unconscious mental processing… All I'm saying is the conscious bit is interchangeable, and in that case "I" (referencing the conscious part) might have been someone else.
