Responding to Conundrum
A YouTube user named “Conundrum” posted a series of questions on the video Efilism: Arguing the Argument . I will answer them here. Each question begins with a quote from me, followed by his questions/criticisms. I will put the quote from me in bold font. Pain is the experience of increased desire. So… when you have a leg blown off by a land mine and you scream from pain, what exactly do you desire, apart from the pain to stop? Desire for what has increased? You don’t desire for the pain to stop. That way of thinking about emotion is fundamentally flawed. It’s a kind of homunculus fallacy. Desire doesn’t start out as being “for” anything. It is preconscious. If you break your leg, the nerves in your leg send information to your brain that simply conveys that something bad happened to your leg. They have location information and they signal “injury”. This then generates the motivation to do something. It’s not the conscious recognition that your leg is broken that ca