On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 8:56 AM Noam Chomsky <
wrote:
From the point of view of a jihadi, Klan, evangelical Christian, my ultra-orthodox grandfather..... it's the rest of the world that's crazy. I think we can do better than just to take the fall-back position that craziness is a value judgment, but not so easy.
On consciousness, my suspicion is that we'll never do much better than Russell's picture: what we understand with highest confidence is our own immediate conscious experience. The rest of our intellectual efforts (science especially) are an attempt to make sense of that (and in the course of doing so, instructs us that our experience is a construct of our internal modes of cognition acting on an external world that we (naively?) assume to exist. And it also tells us, I think, that consciousness is a thin and superficial fringe of an internal mental life that is inaccessible to introspection.
On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 11:39 AM J <jeevacation@gmail.com> wrote:
.. cultures swept by craziness, isnt it the same for an individual. the brain sends signals based on faulty sensors or information. to see if the brain is functioning. there are word tests. memory tests. etc. why isnt conciousness the property of those things. like culture is to fads etc.
On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 8:09 AM Noam Chomsky
> wrote:
Cultures unfortunately can be swept by craziness. Nazism for example. Or the Great Awakening. We're in one of those phases now.