Can you provide any evidence that your body is more real than your intangible thoughts, feelings, sensations and decisions?

[sinnerdexter]

I’m intrigued by this question/challenge from another thread:

Can you provide any evidence that your body is more real than your intangible thoughts, feelings, sensations and decisions? You know your body exists only because you infer its existence from your perceptions. Our mind is our primary datum and sole certainty.

How do we know that we exist as the conscious subject of our experience? If there were no world independent of our minds, we would never find anything determinate in opposition to us, so we would never be able to perceive our own minds as the determinate, continuing, subjects of experience. If there is nothing coherent happening on the stage in front of us, we would lose our bearings and have no awareness of ourselves as a coherent, perdurant perceiver of what was happening on that stage. Instead we would just be lost in a fugue of sensations and have no reason to identify some of those sensations as belonging ‘inside’ to the perceiver while others belonged ‘outside’ to the world. So our ability to know our own mind, our own selves, is parasitic on having some stability in things opposed to us outside of us. On this view, self-knowledge is no more primary than knowledge of the world.

This is essentially Kant’s epistemology. Wittgenstein goes a bit further, saying that unless we were in a community of other people using language, we would never know ourselves as the continuing, inner subjects of experience, since nothing outside and around us would be available to give us any reason to notice ourselves as something equally substantial and real. If I had lived alone on an otherwise deserted island all my life, there would have been no need to distinguish myself as ‘I’ independent of other ‘you’s’ around me, so I would not even know or be aware of myself as ‘I,’ as a subject of experience, or as conscious. Instead I would just have sensations of things inside me and outside of me, but I would have no reason to distinguish ‘inside’ from ‘outside,’ since I would not be living in a community where only some subjects could see the ‘outside,’ while I could experience both my own ‘internal’ experiences and my ‘external’ experiences which I could expect others to know.

Any (name removed by moderator)uts?

 

[Hypatia]

If I had lived alone on an otherwise deserted island all my life, there would have been no need to distinguish myself as ‘I’ independent of other ‘you’s’ around me, so I would not even know or be aware of myself as ‘I,’ as a subject of experience, or as conscious. Instead I would just have sensations of things inside me and outside of me, but I would have no reason to distinguish ‘inside’ from ‘outside,’ since I would not be living in a community where only some subjects could see the ‘outside,’ while I could experience both my own ‘internal’ experiences and my ‘external’ experiences which I could expect others to know.

Even in the desert island senario, I already experience myself as one of many possible egos or selfs, with a particular, finite and unique standpoint.

This would be based upon the fact that I always experience things from a particular “here”. That “here” is mobile (e.g., at one moment in I am in one place, at another time I experience things from another place), and the nature of my experience varies depending on where my “here” is at any given time.

So, apart from the experience of any actual Other, my experience is structured such that I recognize the relativity of it, along with the possibility of Others, with each other having its own unique “here” (which, for me, of course, would be “there”).

Notice that this description also entails the reality both of the ego, as the subject of and condition for experience, but also body, which designates that by which we are “here” and not elsewhere.

salaam.

 

[antroji]

(name removed by moderator)ut: Toneyrey is on the right track, and if he goes one step further back will trip on himself and be free. Only one word in the bolded type is a diversion in his statement and reveals how he mistakes the image in the mirror for himself. You are sipping at the same nectar, Sinnerdexter, with your island analogy, but you haven’t realized how close you are to Soul food.

 

[AntiTheist]

Your body isn’t “more real” than your thoughts and feelings. There’s no such thing as degrees of reality. Something either is real or it isn’t.

When it comes to thoughts, a thought can be real while the content of the thought is not. For example, when I think about leprechauns, I’m having a real thought about leprechauns, but the content of that real thought is not real.

Similarly, when I’m angry, I’m experiencing a real emotion, but the thing that I’m angry at might not actually be real (my anger is real, but I’m getting angry at someone’s motives that I’m imagining – now my imagination of those motives is a real imagination, but the content of that imagination might not be real).

 

[JohnDamian]

From Scotus; Ordination II. d.3, Part 1, qq1;28

“… even if no intellect existed; fire would still generate fire and destroy water; and there would be some real unity of form between the generator and the generated; according to which unity univocal generation would occur. For the intellect that considers a case of generation does not make the generation be univocal, but recognizes it to be univocal”

Clearly; these particulars however occur as a less than numerical unity; although through some real unity; present in individuals. That is to say; by question our body as a numerical unicity is substantially really distinct from our thoughts etc.

It follows from this then; that whilst your thoughts and emotions exist in a real way; this form of existence is distinct from “material” forms of existence. As both are real things; one is not more “real” than the other.

However; that is not to say that the objects of your thoughts are real; because this would be equivocation; whilst the thoughts themselves have some real unity; the objects of these thoughts do not have a real unity with the world itself; and are substantially and wholly distinct. In that; the objects of thought can be incorrect; wheras the thoughts and the material objects cannot in any sensible sense be incorrect. It is thus clear therefore; that as the objects of thought lack a substantial unity they are not real in any necessary sense.

Thoughts & Material objects are necessarily real things; distinct really though numerical unity.
Objects of Thought are not necessarily real things.

 

[tonyrey]

Your body isn’t “more real” than your thoughts and feelings. There’s no such thing as degrees of reality. Something either is real or it isn’t.

You are right! My statement was in response to those physicalists who regard only the body as real and the mind as an epiphenomenon - some sort of product of matter which does not exist independently and does not control the body.

When it comes to thoughts, a thought can be real while the content of the thought is not. For example, when I think about leprechauns, I’m having a real thought about leprechauns, but the content of that real thought is not real.

Similarly, when I’m angry, I’m experiencing a real emotion, but the thing that I’m angry at might not actually be real (my anger is real, but I’m getting angry at someone’s motives that I’m imagining – now my imagination of those motives is a real imagination, but the content of that imagination might not be real).

You need to explain what you mean by “a thought” and “an emotion”. Are they the result of neural activity in the brain or something more? Will neuroscientists eventually be able to interpret what you are thinking and feeling from an EEG machine? Are thoughts and imagination located inside the skull?

 

[tonyrey]

I’m intrigued by this question/challenge from another thread:

How do we know that we exist as the conscious subject of our experience? If there were no world independent of our minds, we would never find anything determinate in opposition to us, so we would never be able to perceive our own minds as the determinate, continuing, subjects of experience. If there is nothing coherent happening on the stage in front of us, we would lose our bearings and have no awareness of ourselves as a coherent, perdurant perceiver of what was happening on that stage. Instead we would just be lost in a fugue of sensations and have no reason to identify some of those sensations as belonging ‘inside’ to the perceiver while others belonged ‘outside’ to the world. So our ability to know our own mind, our own selves, is parasitic on having some stability in things opposed to us outside of us. On this view, self-knowledge is no more primary than knowledge of the world.

This is essentially Kant’s epistemology. Wittgenstein goes a bit further, saying that unless we were in a community of other people using language, we would never know ourselves as the continuing, inner subjects of experience, since nothing outside and around us would be available to give us any reason to notice ourselves as something equally substantial and real. If I had lived alone on an otherwise deserted island all my life, there would have been no need to distinguish myself as ‘I’ independent of other ‘you’s’ around me, so I would not even know or be aware of myself as ‘I,’ as a subject of experience, or as conscious. Instead I would just have sensations of things inside me and outside of me, but I would have no reason to distinguish ‘inside’ from ‘outside,’ since I would not be living in a community where only some subjects could see the ‘outside,’ while I could experience both my own ‘internal’ experiences and my ‘external’ experiences which I could expect others to know.

Any (name removed by moderator)uts?

If what you state is true it is difficult to understand how God could be aware of Himself before He created anything! I grant that the Supreme Being is a special case but your argument suggests that we need a body to be aware of ourselves - unless we can communicate with others without words or physical gestures…

 

[tonyrey]

(name removed by moderator)ut: Toneyrey is on the right track, and if he goes one step further back will trip on himself and be free. Only one word in the bolded type is a diversion in his statement and reveals how he mistakes the image in the mirror for himself. You are sipping at the same nectar, Sinnerdexter, with your island analogy, but you haven’t realized how close you are to Soul food.

I must admit I’m baffled by your remark.

 

[AntiTheist]

You are right! My statement was in response to those physicalists who regard only the body as real and the mind as an epiphenomenon - some sort of product of matter which does not exist independently and does not control the body.

Well, the mind does appear to be the product of matter, but it’s just as “real” as matter.

Coffee is a product of a coffee bean, but it’s just as real as a coffee bean.

You need to explain what you mean by “a thought” and “an emotion”. Are they the result of neural activity in the brain or something more?

Well, they appear to be a result of neural activity.

 

[tonyrey]

You are right! My statement was in response to those physicalists who regard only the body as real and the mind as an epiphenomenon - some sort of product of matter which does not exist independently and does not control the body.

In what way is it real? It cannot be observed like material objects.

Coffee is a product of a coffee bean, but it’s just as real as a coffee bean.

Can a product be an independent agent? Surely it cannot because all its activity will have physical causes. Thoughts and emotions will be determined by previous events and beyond our control. Free will becomes an illusion and we become biological machines…

You need to explain what you mean by “a thought” and “an emotion”. Are they the result of neural activity in the brain or something more?

Well, they appear to be a result of neural activity.

The difficulty with this view is that mind and brain seem to interact. There are good reasons to believe the mind can control the body and does not consist solely of a set of results. It seems to have powers the brain does not have. There is also a vast difference between an emotion and a collection of electrical impulses.

 

[AntiTheist]

In what way is it real? It cannot be observed like material objects.

We observe its effects, in the same way that we can’t directly observe black holes or electrons but can observe their effects.

Free will becomes an illusion and we become biological machines

An illusion is still a real illusion. Or, conversely, if free will is not an illusion, then it’s a real phenomenon.

Either way, we put the label “free will” on our decision-making faculty. Whether or not that decision-making faculty is “illusory” or not, we still experience it, and it is thus real, just as real as our bodies, our minds, our emotions, and everything else that is real.

The difficulty with this view is that mind and brain seem to interact. There are good reasons to believe the mind can control the body and does not consist solely of a set of results. It seems to have powers the brain does not have. There is also a vast difference between an emotion and a collection of electrical impulses.

If you say so. I’ve not come across any evidence to suggest that what you’re saying is the case.

 

[Luke_K]

Your body isn’t “more real” than your thoughts and feelings. There’s no such thing as degrees of reality. Something either is real or it isn’t.

When it comes to thoughts, a thought can be real while the content of the thought is not. For example, when I think about leprechauns, I’m having a real thought about leprechauns, but the content of that real thought is not real.

Well we know that at least some of our thoughts contain true content. I have the thought “truth exists” and obviously it must, otherwise everything including that statement itself would be false, which leads to a paradox.

Truth itself must be something real before any other truth/reality can be deduced by logic or empirical means. And, it can only be perceived by thought.

We observe its effects, in the same way that we can’t directly observe black holes or electrons but can observe their effects.

Well, technically we don’t observe the effects, either. No one has actually seen a photon. The only thing we have “seen” is a cis-trans isomerization of a chemical in our eyeballs.

You don’t see the computer in front of you. You see the photons coming off of it. You don’t see the photons coming off of it, you are aware of the structural change of a chemical in your eyeball. What exactly is aware of that change, though? Now there’s the question!

 

[tonyrey]

We observe its effects, in the same way that we can’t directly observe black holes or electrons but can observe their effects.

An illusion is still a real illusion. Or, conversely, if free will is not an illusion, then it’s a real phenomenon

Either way, we put the label “free will” on our decision-making faculty. Whether or not that decision-making faculty is “illusory” or not, we still experience it, and it is thus real, just as real as our bodies, our minds, our emotions, and everything else that is real…

We have experiences when we are dreaming. Does that make them real? Is what we imagine just as real as what we see normally? Your solution disposes of the distinction between appearance and reality.

The “decision-making faculty” could indeed be a term which refers to nothing. Where could it be located? In the brain? If so precisely where? Does it have to be located anywhere? Precisely where is a thought? I pose these questions not to be awkward but out of genuine curiosity.

The difficulty with this view is that mind and brain seem to interact. There are good reasons to believe the mind can control the body and does not consist solely of a set of results. It seems to have powers the brain does not have. There is also a vast difference between an emotion and a collection of electrical impulses.

If you say so. I’ve not come across any evidence to suggest that what you’re saying is the case.
How do you explain hypnosis? Consciousness of oneself? Does the brain know what it is doing? Does it function as an entity? If so how? As for emotions, don’t take my word for it. You will find a substantial bibliography at:

plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/

[/QUOTE]

 

[Sarpedon]

Instead we would just be lost in a fugue of sensations and have no reason to identify some of those sensations as belonging ‘inside’ to the perceiver while others belonged ‘outside’ to the world.

Wittgenstein goes a bit further, saying that unless we were in a community of other people using language, we would never know ourselves as the continuing, inner subjects of experience, since nothing outside and around us would be available to give us any reason to notice ourselves as something equally substantial and real. If I had lived alone on an otherwise deserted island all my life, there would have been no need to distinguish myself as ‘I’ independent of other ‘you’s’ around me, so I would not even know or be aware of myself as ‘I,’ as a subject of experience, or as conscious. Instead I would just have sensations of things inside me and outside of me, but I would have no reason to distinguish ‘inside’ from ‘outside,’ since I would not be living in a community where only some subjects could see the ‘outside,’ while I could experience both my own ‘internal’ experiences and my ‘external’ experiences which I could expect others to know.

Not all the things we identify with self are sensations or observations. The physical world imprints itself upon us. I suppose we could also say that emotions imprint themselves on us in a like manner. Thinking, however, can be directed and controlled. A person raised on a desert island might make little or no distinction between internal perceptions like emotions, and external perceptions like sights, but the rationality that apprehends them both is not a perception. It is a consistent faculty that can be controlled and directed by the will. A desert island person could identify himself as the “I” that receives and apprehends the perceptions, regardless of whether those are “outside” in “inside” what we typically take as a personal psyche. It is the intellect that does the apprehending, and the mere fact of apprehension is enough to justify its distinctness, depending on what is meant by the term.

Note- I’m not an idealist.

 

[sinnerdexter]

Not all the things we identify with self are sensations or observations. The physical world imprints itself upon us. I suppose we could also say that emotions imprint themselves on us in a like manner. Thinking, however, can be directed and controlled. A person raised on a desert island might make little or no distinction between internal perceptions like emotions, and external perceptions like sights, but the rationality that apprehends them both is not a perception. It is a consistent faculty that can be controlled and directed by the will. A desert island person could identify himself as the “I” that receives and apprehends the perceptions, regardless of whether those are “outside” in “inside” what we typically take as a personal psyche. It is the intellect that does the apprehending, and the mere fact of apprehension is enough to justify its distinctness, depending on what is meant by the term.

Note- I’m not an idealist.

However, even if the person on the desert island could sense his own will in directing his rationality, would he have had any capacity to develop a concept of self to which he could attribute that sensation of directing his thoughts? Without an opposing community of other selves to throw his own self-awareness of himself into relief as a self-awareness of a self like those around him, he would lack any sense of self and thus only experience his wilful direction of thought as another sensation, no different from the wilful actions of standing up or sitting down.

Or is there something about the exercise of will in directing rationality which says that there is an existent, thing-like self behind it which we would not experience in exercising our will to stand up or sit down? Descartes must have thought something like this in his cogito, ergo sum argument, that thinking somehow specially relates to self-awareness. But I suspect that while there might be a special sensation in wilful direction of thought, the person on the desert island could not associate it with a concept of selfhood rather than just seeing it as an unusual sensation.

 

[Timothy17]

Seeing as, if called to witness this under threat of death (let’s suppose), I would have to answer the judge asking, “Can you provide any evidence that your body is more real than your intangible thoughts, feelings, sensations and decisions?” I would have to confess that I would not know of any body, if I did not have intangible thoughts, feelings, sensations, and decisions ; however, if I were to stretch my mind, as it were, I could admit to the possibility - beyond my experience - that it may be possible to know of things without having ever seen, experienced, felt, touched, etc., of those things ; therefore, the “I” of “me” is independent of material things, it seems, as it is - at least as far as I know - capable of being aware of things “real” independent of me actually experiencing or sensing those things.

This seems to boil down to the kind of question like, “When were you born ?” How many men are liars for stating they knew it ? We take it on good faith, for no man knows his own birthday, as if he experienced it given the criteria of the topic, yet it would be absurd if any man were to tell you that based on the fact he did not experience it, he thus must never have been born.

 

[Hypatia]

However, even if the person on the desert island could sense his own will in directing his rationality, would he have had any capacity to develop a concept of self to which he could attribute that sensation of directing his thoughts? Without an opposing community of other selves to throw his own self-awareness of himself into relief as a self-awareness of a self like those around him, he would lack any sense of self and thus only experience his wilful direction of thought as another sensation, no different from the wilful actions of standing up or sitting down.

Or is there something about the exercise of will in directing rationality which says that there is an existent, thing-like self behind it which we would not experience in exercising our will to stand up or sit down? Descartes must have thought something like this in his cogito, ergo sum argument, that thinking somehow specially relates to self-awareness. But I suspect that while there might be a special sensation in wilful direction of thought, the person on the desert island could not associate it with a concept of selfhood rather than just seeing it as an unusual sensation.

I am not sure focusing on an actual experience of an Other, or the community of Others as mediated through an actual language, as a condition for us experiencing the self as a self, is very productive.

The whole world is experienced as an other (even if not an alter-ego) insofar as it resists the human will. It does not present itself as either the product of my desire or as completely conforming to my desires. That already provides you with the basis of the distinction between the I and the not-I. And as pointed out earlier, the finitude of my standpoint already entails, for me, not only that a certain, relative, “here” is mine through all the flux of experience, but also the possibility of other egos than my own, with standpoints of their own, without any actual experience of an alter-ego. In other words, I am always one among (at least, a possible) many, even when alone.

salaam.

 

[colmcille1]

A very interesting thread!
Can I suggest, and I hope I am not straying off topic, that perhaps a somewhat crude proof could be gained from the sight of one’s own blood? If I cut myself shaving, I now see that what has always existed within is now outside of its familiar domain. Can I do the same with my thoughts, feelings etc? Can I turn them inside out? And does this question presume (as an earlier poster stated) that there is a location for said thoughts and feelings? And does this physical blood “contain” thoughts given its quantifiable nature and that upon death this blood ceases its functions one of which could possibly be the generation of thoughts, feelings emotions etc?
(It would be an interesting topic viz CC teachings on sacramental Blood of Christ.)

 

[tonyrey]

A very interesting thread!
Can I suggest, and I hope I am not straying off topic, that perhaps a somewhat crude proof could be gained from the sight of one’s own blood? If I cut myself shaving, I now see that what has always existed within is now outside of its familiar domain. Can I do the same with my thoughts, feelings etc? Can I turn them inside out? And does this question presume (as an earlier poster stated) that there is a location for said thoughts and feelings? And does this physical blood “contain” thoughts given its quantifiable nature and that upon death this blood ceases its functions one of which could possibly be the generation of thoughts, feelings emotions etc?
(It would be an interesting topic viz CC teachings on sacramental Blood of Christ.)

Thoughts are generally associated with the brain and, traditionally, feelings with the heart. The reductive materialist believes blood is nothing more than a multitude of atomic particles which have been arranged into a fluid which delivers necessary substances to the body’s cells and carries away waste products. In our secular society the mind seems redundant if thoughts and feelings are said to be located in the blood. So it is important to stress that they do not **originate **in the blood but in the mind.

 

[colmcille1]

Thoughts are generally associated with the brain and, traditionally, feelings with the heart. The reductive materialist believes blood is nothing more than a multitude of atomic particles which have been arranged into a fluid which delivers necessary substances to the body’s cells and carries away waste products. In our secular society the mind seems redundant if thoughts and feelings are said to be located in the blood. So it is important to stress that they do not **originate **in the blood but in the mind.

Yes, very true. I did have the distinct feeling that I was perhaps straying into a mediaeval
contemplation of the body viz the " humours" of man: the phlegnatic man etc.
Thanks for that.