Associations
June 29th 2010 18:34
* What is a mental association? The idea seems to embrace any sort of connection at all, including causation, proximity, similarity. So to say that something is connected "by association" seems little better than saying that it's connected.
* In our own experience, in the flux of our thoughts, we can ask, "How did we get from x to y?" -- and we assume that there's an answer on the level of thought, a content-level explanation. We assume a connection to be found.
And yet we know how ingenious the mind is at rationalizing.
* Similarly, in matters of free will -- and perhaps more obviously contradictory. We want to say, "I did x, because of reasons y and z." But we are also proud of our physiological knowledge -- "I did x, because of neurons y and z."
Why do we insist that these are two sides of the one coin, and that the results must meet?
* The suspicion, therefore, that "associations" are not the full story, and that our mental life is ultimately obscure to us.
* In our own experience, in the flux of our thoughts, we can ask, "How did we get from x to y?" -- and we assume that there's an answer on the level of thought, a content-level explanation. We assume a connection to be found.
And yet we know how ingenious the mind is at rationalizing.
* Similarly, in matters of free will -- and perhaps more obviously contradictory. We want to say, "I did x, because of reasons y and z." But we are also proud of our physiological knowledge -- "I did x, because of neurons y and z."
Why do we insist that these are two sides of the one coin, and that the results must meet?
* The suspicion, therefore, that "associations" are not the full story, and that our mental life is ultimately obscure to us.
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Comment by Associations
Contradictories' ideas or similarities' ideas. My biggest phylosophy result about this one comes in my observation on human behavior while in associotion. This would occure on earth unstandard born condition. I mean, the "meeting" term also similar would better use on this thought. We would always find different ideas or thoughts as different earth weather condition, speaking phylosophically..............