You're about to hear a preview of Partially Examine Life supporter exclusive content.

To learn how to get the whole thing, check out partially examinedlife.com slash support.

Hey, you're listening to Partially Examine Life.

It's still episode 378, the fourth part of it, the supporter only part. Thank you for supporting. Just to finish the thing that were originally assigned for our 378 recording, which was a week ago today. But we still have this section left on feelings. That is section 15 in the

Thomas Aquinas selected philosophical writings from Timothy McDermott. Can we review a little bit

from last time? Do we have an overall model of the mind? I mean, I know we talked about whether

it's passive or active, and that's going to be relevant for feelings, which are passive.

That's passio.

They're defined as passive, being affected by something.

But do we have any thicker model of the mind here?

Well, there's a form of passivity to the mind that does not involve loss.

He wants to say that the mind has this kind of general

relationship to objects such that they can actualize its potential, which I think is important.

I think it has kind of an analog in neuroscience, right? For every experience we have, we get certain

changes in the brain in the way. synapses are related to each other.

But it's interesting that for any possible experience, there is a brain state that could be had to encode that experience.

Or at least I suppose that's true.

So that's a way of getting at the kind of universal flexibility of the mind.

Anything that, and here I guess we're talking about thought specifically, anything that can be

conceptualized, the mind can do that. But there's an active way in which the mind is involved. And I think

the brain science gets at that. But despite the fact that there's an activity to the brain,

that activity is somehow a passivity it's a receptiveness and openness to the world isn't it also the case though that there's a structure

...