Istvan Aranyosi Quotes & Sayings

Evans-Pritchard's confession reveals the way the power advantage of the subject whose definition of a situation prevails in the larger social context (in this case the majority of the Azande) shapes the environment and behavioral constraints that impact the subject who, although does not define the situation the same way, has to behave according to the former subject's definition in order to obtain the needed resources (in this case Evans-Pritchard, who is interested in gaining knowledge of the social organization of the Azande). For Evans-Pritchard, while living among the Azande, the actual world is as if there were magical forces around, true oracles and evil witches, as his whole daily life is structured around those nonexistent entities. — Istvan Aranyosi

The reason I said earlier that the mind is neither the Cartesian, highly intellectualized, cranium-confined firm-and-frozen ego, nor the self-effaced, world-immersed, flowing, field-like non-thingy occurrence, is that even though I was feeling my limbs to be alien to myself, that did not mean that I felt them to be disconnected. Rather, they were intimately connected, yet, merely connected to me, and not phenomenologically proper parts of myself. The mind-world boundary seems to have moved from the skin/environment junction to the innervated/denervated junction within the body. So part of the body has become external to the mind, or 'de-minded'. — Istvan Aranyosi

Self-consciousness is, from a naturalistic point of view (in this case neurobiological), not more than a degree of sophistication of neural processes. The emergence of self-conscious states is not a drastic, extravagant, earth-shaking phenomenon. — Istvan Aranyosi

( ... ) to think that worms and slugs are neurologically simple is another blunder of contemporary, scientifically uninformed philosophy. To take as an example the current "superstar" nematode worm
superstar, because it was the first multicellular organism to have its genome completely sequenced, by 1998, and is widely used as a model organism
the 1 mm long Caenorhabditis elegans, it exhibits a nervous system of 302 neurons and a sensorimotor system with very complex connectivity patterns. — Istvan Aranyosi

In truth, there is no such thing as an "intuitive boundary" of a sensory state. That most philosophers take such states as brain-bound is not an intuition, but a prejudice. — Istvan Aranyosi