Jeffrey Luk's Blog

About two years ago, I was staunchly against the freud/jung mode of analyzing personality. It seemed too esoteric to me to say that the collective unconscious existed, and certain personality aspects (ego, id, superego) and archetypes (the hero, the old man, the seductress) existed. Even now, I wonder whether nominalism about these concepts is a better fit for these theories rather than them existing in a platonic realm.   However, the more I read about these concepts, the more I believe that they should be treated as universals. Take platonism about chairs, for example. The classical problem is how we can best define a chair. Is it a legged platform that one can sit on? No, because couches are chairs, and couches do not necessarily have legs. Is it simply a platform that one can sit on? No, because a ledge, like a cliffside, is not typically considered a chair. It is difficult to specify what constitutes the platonic form of a chair. But nonetheless, I think it exists: the pl...

lukj: We ought to do good!    Felix: What is goodness? Is it just survival?  lukj: No, I don't think so. I don't think goodness is reducible to survival.    Felix: Then is goodness reducible to some other terms? Can we measure goodness as simply psychological pleasure? Or fitness? lukj: I don't think so. I think goodness is irreducible! We might ask, what is goodness, but we cannot put it into any other terms. There is no further fact of the matter.  Felix: Isn't that incoherent? Doesn't that make goodness transcendent? And because there are no observable transcendent things, it doesn't actually exist?  lukj: I think there are transcendent things, and we can observe them in everyday life! Take love, for example. If I were to tell my significant other that I love them because it fires chemicals in my brain, or because I am evolutionarily wired to love them, or any other non-transcendent meaning, then I devalue the concept of love.  Felix: Then why ...

 Discussion in the philosophy of animal minds over what constitutes empathy (and what kind of behavior defines it) typically defines it in one of two ways.  1) Emotional Contagion: Emotional mirroring/matching. Just a biologic impulse, no rationalization involved. You see, you associate with an emotion, and your body produces physiological markers of the same emotion.  2) Perspective taking: "Putting yourself in another person's shoes".  Does the second definition of empathy require emotions? I don't think so. Here's an argument that perspective taking can be achieved by pure practical reason:  P1. I have a perspective.  P2. I am made up of biological systems.  P3. The external world exists, and other biological systems exist.  P4. Other biological systems act as though they have an inner life (or subjective experience).  P5. Other people also have perspectives.  My intuitions tell me that empathy is an emotion rather than an exercise in...