A Myth in Creation

This blogpost is a continuation of a dialogue with Richard Gipps that started with his comments on Anil Seth's book 'Being You'. Here is his latest response . I am grateful to Richard Gipps for his continued engagement with me on this issue. I questioned the value of extending this exchange further, particularly since I greatly admire Gipps and have no desire to prolong a dialogue just for the sake of it. However, I think I do have meaningful things to say in response to the points brought up by Gipps in his last post, and this offers an opportunity for further clarification. #1. Orbits What I have been trying to say is that when it comes to movements of objects, there are aspects , or relationships , or facts (if you will) about how things are that transcend any grammatical rule we may employ to talk about something.  For instance, take this rule as expressed by Gipps: “What's properly said to orbit what (the sun orbits the earth, or the earth orbits the sun) ...

The dialogue continues! Responding to Richard Gipps's post  contra aftab contra gipps contra seth Gipps is quite right to point out that Seth (and other neuroscientists) have not been entirely clear about the sense in which they are using the terms such as "inference" and "prediction" when applied to neurological processes, how this usage departs from "ordinary" usage, and that this lack of clarity leads to confusion, inconsistency, and yes, possibly erroneous inferences. On this issue I am in agreement. While the project of bringing philosophical clarity to these neuroscientific terms is not necessarily easy, it is not impossible. Where I disagree with Gipps is that he seems to think that the entire project of explaining perception is muddled because there is no meaningful question to be answered, and that there is no meaningful way in which brains can be said to "infer" anything other than in a completely metaphorical manner. My own view is...

          “without a constant misuse of language, there cannot be any discovery, any progress”           Paul Feyerabend,  Against Method This blogpost is written in response to a  blogpost by Richard Gipps  in which he critiques the account of perception as a form of prediction and “controlled hallucination” as presented in Anil Seth’s book  Being You . Gipps takes a Wittgensteinian approach here and is concerned with the ways in which Seth fails to define crucial terms and argues that the account as presented by Seth is philosophically confused and muddled to the point of being  not even false . Gipps is very incisive in his analysis and I would encourage readers to read his post in detail. He particularly zeroes in what is ambiguous and murky in Seth’s descriptions and shows how this murkiness leads to philosophical problems.   When I read Seth’s   book last year, I enjoyed it considerabl...

James Barnes is a psychotherapist, mental health advocate, and writer. He lives in Exeter in the UK. He is on twitter: @psychgeist52 Discussion Background This discussion started on Twitter in the context of the last blogpost in which Mark Ruffalo and Ron Pies discuss their views on psychiatric diagnoses and on the definition of “disorder”. James Barnes objected that a non-essentialist, pragmatic definition of disorder misses the entire point of the term “disorder” or “disease”, which for him is to discriminate an empirical object of/in the organism, as it does in the vast majority of cases of unquestioned physical disorders. I responded by saying it is possible to define disease/disorder is many different ways, that each definition has its internal logic, and each has pros and cons, and different implications. A common goal of most definitions is to try to capture the everyday use of this term in general medicine, but other definitions may not care for this goal. ...