Well, I see I do have to clarify.


I never said that all of human behavior is will. Gorgias by Plato.


Will, as even Confucius stated in his statement about the rectification of names, is a product of language, analogic, like emotion, and logic, like reason. It is not the product of errant reason, which is not reason at all. It is typical to only think of reason as the branch of logics, like common grammar, arithmetic, algebra, however analogics are also a branch of reasoning, like geometry, chemistry, wood working, etc.

My use of the term "language" includes both branches, logics and analogics, unlike what one will find in most works on reason.

Will is the product of the human mind, not all human action can be said to be human will. This is why it was also stated that people who do wrong, do so unwillingly. In other words, a dysfunctional mind cannot put out the product it was designed to.

So human behavior is not the product of the human mind?

If you can define the human mind, as I did, and show how it is different from itself, you win that point, however, I don't think you can.

I don't think misbehavior and behavior are the same thing.

Definition determines class membership and class exclusion, it also determines the principles of predication, what can and cannot be asserted of and denied of a thing.

And so, instead of my having to clarify what I said, it was up to you to refer back to the definition.

I like Frank Channing Haddock's book "Power of Will."


http://arfalpha.com/PowerOfWill/PowerOfWill.pdf

Complete nonsense.

Try quoting what I have said, chop out EXACTLY what you are responding to . . . this ought to be interesting.

You also did not respond to my post which clearly shows the contradiction of your quoted prior statements.

Behavior is behavior.

Misbehavior is behavior with someone's judgement attached.

I think you had better start studying Aristotle,not Plato!

That about sums it up!
If you have no answer,Obfuscate!

I couldn't agree more JB.

Behavior is a set that encompasses ALL actions taken by living creatures that is not a reflexive or automatic response.

Thank you for the clarification. I don't know if we can be positive that we are responsible for how we express our emotions (all the time).

In a previous post John, you pointed out that much of man's behavior is less attributable to will than to survival processes. For example, while it is possible to will away the pain of hunger even to the point of death, I've never heard of someone being able to will away the natural act of defacation.

Similarly, when a human is in a position of immediate danger with only seconds to act, I do believe such a moment is highly emotional. However, I don't believe that our actions at such a time are entirely guided by will. As in the example above, the body does what it needs to in order to relieve itself of 'extra baggage' while immediately switching internal gears chemically.

Obviously I have an issue with your broad statment " that we are responsible for how we express our emotions."

However, I am in agreement with your previous statment suggesting that emotion is subjective and not shared. What is shared are the behaviors we choose to exhibit in order to create and maintain (or lose) relationships of any kind.

I think what might be at issue is considering the definition of behavior. We have behavior which is an objective action. I think what John is trying to say is:

What then is a misbehavior? An action that did not occur?

Now if you want to define 'good-behavior' in detail that would be a specific action taken in a specific situation, then we could define 'mis-behavior' as an action that is different than the one we consider to be good.

Do you see where that's going? Behavior is one thing: Objective action. We either will our behavior or we are driven, by internal processes, to a particular behavior for survival.

What I am saying refers back to the definition.

It is what Plato called virtue, and if you would like a very nice dialog on the stance I am defending, it would be Plato's Gorgias,

The human mind, like every environmental acquisition system of our body is responsible for a product.

If it makes something other than its designed product, it does not do so because it is functional, but dysfunctional. In that case, it is not a "this" but a "broken this." The same as the human mind.

Most importantly though, emotion is an analogic-meaning it is a material difference over which one must apply form (form of behavior) in order to render a product.

The human mind is linguistically based, language cannot contradict language, it simply is not possible. Contradiction happens when we violate the principles of language, not when we are linguistic.

This is why, doing what we please, and doing what we will is not the same thing.

No one in their right mind would consider a broken TV or other appliance the same as a functional one. Nor would they say that a TV or radio that only puts out static, as an out put of a TV or radio, but as a broken radio, and no radio at all.

Mankind is still so young, a person often asks, why were they born, what is their purpose. They do not see themselves as a system like several systems of a living organism--as something that has a well defined job to perform.

Egocentricity is a sign of lack of awareness. What I am advacating is a psychological shift to being craft-centric. Or as once stated in Scripture, if one is to rule over all, one must be a servant of all.

I have read and reread this concept a few times now to try to find what I find so generic and what I find washes out the amazing detail of human emotional interaction, and sweeps away the depth of love.

I think what I disagree with most is that emotion "We can not share emotion, but we can share our efforts to attain to common goals."

I disagree. We can share language, and you believe human intellect is based -as in foundational- on language (I disagree that language is foundational, communication may be, but not language)

It is this distinction, and maybe others, which have eluded this conversation and illustrates this simplistic notion of love. So in this regard you are not wrong except in the sense you claim this concept is authoritative and dismiss the greater details as invalid.

Love is shared. In the same way that a telegram is shared communication even when it is nothing but bits of 0's and 1's floating over the internet.

The information is shared, after all the brain stores this data, it responds to this data, it creates this data, and it shares this data via not only verbal communication, but body language, shared experience, touch, tender moments, even knowledge of ones personality and character shape these emotions.

You can read a book, learn of the fictional persons "character" and fall in love with an idea of a person. The human mind is far more rich than this functional survival assessment could ever capture. Hence my umbrage.

Its this ability to abstract that highlights the simplistic nature of this conceptual structure for love.

None of this requires us to explore function from dysfunction, that is a red herring which requires subjectivity to plague the concept and muddle the understanding.

Ultimately we can reduce any set of behaviors down to function, however the reduction removes the abstraction and self actualization beyond the physical.

For a moment imagine what takes place when two people share a conversation in an art gallery about a particular painting.

Light rays are emitted from the light source, they bounce off of the painting they enter the eye, they are encoded into pulses, sent to the brain, they are then decoded and recognized by the consciousness. The abstraction occurs, meaning is derived or created, and then an opinion is formed, one of the two people will have a compulsion to communicate this process, or its outcome to the other. (the light rays are not the painting, the mental imagery is the not the painting, all of these components are translations, or representations of the data of the painting.)

Now what is really interesting is that often times another very different interaction is occurring nearly simultaneously. The person standing next to our original observer may not be looking at the painting but at their partner. The light rays that are emitted from the light source bounce off of the face, posture, ect of the examiner of the painting and bounce back into the eye of the examiners partner, the encoding and decoding occur again now in the partner.

If the partner knows the character of the examiner to a great enough degree they can use the data of posture, facial expressions, and maybe even tone of sub vocalizations, mmmm, ughh, hmf ect to determine the outcome of the very emotional mental process occurring in the examiner without any language being used at all.

As an actor I have seen this occur, and an entire audience experience the emotional content that the actor on the stage is portraying, and perhaps actually even experiencing but not actually vocalizing nor communicating via language.

Emotions ARE shared even though there is no magical medium they travel via. Interpretations exist everywhere, even in the mind of an observer. All imagery that is seen is first encoded into pulses, do you think these pulses ARE the image? No they are a translation of the image. The translation of visual imagery may be a better 1-1 relationship more often then the translation of emotional imagery, but sometimes not.

The translation is the same kind of event occurring. The reference used is what determines its accuracy. The knowing of the character of the person is the reference for emotional imagery, the reference for visual imaginary is the combined knowledge of your environment.

A plastic bag floats on the wind across the road, its movement triggers an evolved hyper agent awareness reflex and it is "seen" as an animal running across the road and the driver starts to evade, a split second later a second analysis determines its a plastic bag.

This is the EXACT same process, but with different reference maps. Emotions are clearly a more organic, more instinctual part of our awareness, but they are filtered through the EXACT same cognitive systems in the brain.

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I think it is easy to see why Plato would have not been able to consider the richness of human cognition, nor truly understand morality either as a subjective perspective based, or an objective survival based concept. He didn't have the knowledge of science.

Dan Dennet a modern philosopher understands that you cannot make progress in philosophy by ignoring science, and to think Plato has special knowledge is a bit absurd.