Re: the silliness of such things as mental effects

From: patty (pattyNO_at_SPAMicyberspace.net)
Date: 08/15/04 

Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2004 18:04:55 GMT

Allan C Cybulskie wrote:

> "patty" <pattyNO@SPAMicyberspace.net> wrote in message
> news:yhORc.276395$XM6.221963@attbi_s53...
>
>>John Casey wrote:
>>However from my internal perspective there is still no amount of mental
>>activity that will move my body in the world in the slightest amount.
>>Ever! I cannot think myself to action!
>
>
> David Hume promotes this very effect when claiming that you can't have a
> reason-based morality, since reason itself cannot motivate you to action.
> He ends up arguing that it's passion -- or emotion -- that you can actually
> use to promote actions in the world and a morality.
>
> The problem, however, is that even with emotion it seems very much like
> conscious thought and reasoning and beliefs can affect our behaviour and
> emotions. We seem to be able to reason or perhaps condition our behaviour
> in advance and then when we "act", we simply act in accordance with those
> things. This is one reason why I find a lot of the approaches dangerous,
> since they focus on producing the right behaviour without going through the
> mediation of the right thoughts about the right behaviour.
>
>

Thing is that if you are acting right, your thoughts will eventually
reflect that right action. However if you are thinking right, your
actions will not necessarily ever reflect your thinking. Now i concede
that there are times where one fakes right action and still maintains a
shitty attitude. But where the right actions are reinforced, it is
difficult to maintain that shitty attitude and eventually it will
disappear. Maintaining the right action and its reinforcement for a
sufficient amount of time for the attitude to change is, of course, the
trick. But i do not think that working on the attitude first is a
winning strategy.

patty