Religion Makes Complete Sense

@fresco,

Show me a monkey that can do the can-can then fresco.

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@fresco,

Quote:

tactile

• adjective 1 of or connected with the sense of touch. 2 perceptible or designed to be perceived by touch. 3 given to touching others in a friendly or sympathetic way.

I'm presuming you mean 'sign language' by such?

And again, the problem I have with your position, is the formation of these words/symbols relies on the minds ability (ie a genetic ability) to form an association between the word and a concept/memory/visual....thereby every word you speak/write/etc causes the flash of a 'concept' in your mind. The remarkable thing is that we can then string those concepts together to form a 'new' concept.

Along the path of the conceptual/visual ability of the mind - the mind also has the ability to form new images that have never been seen before (dragons come to mind, as do demons, black holes, wormholes, time travel, teleporter beam, fantasy magic, God, etc). They come from the self...and how are they related to language?

The very ability that allows language - a genetic ability, you appear to believe has no bearing on self.

Lets talk about the body - how can the body not have a bearing on self? It's proven that a fit body has more energy, is more immune to disease, and the person is more confident, assertive, and more likely to go after what he wants. The energy, strength, and health do not come from language, and yet have a remarkable bearing on 'self'.

Let's talk about spirit - this can be evoked purely through body language (and also through the mind, but that's not as clear) - team huddle, back slapping, strong eye contact, etc...and this has a remarkable affect on ones sense of self...that you belong, that you have a purpose, etc.

Lets talk about a different aspect of the body - chemicals. It's proven that chemicals/hormones have a profound affect on our behaviour, and consequently on our sense of self (remember, your supposition is that self is evoked by language - I'm saying here, that is not the whole case)

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@vikorr,

The import of the focus on symbolic language (acquired through socialization) concerns grammatical structure in which there are "subjects" (i.e actors) and predicates. Only then is "self" is understood as an actor amongst other actors. Furthermore it may be that all "conceptual thought" requires language (This is the strong form of the Sapir Worf hypothesis) . From this position, language is an a priori relative to its products such as the concepts of "genetics","chemicals" or "dragons".

"Getting it" means understanding the above and the implication that "logic" and "causality" which we generally take for granted in what we call "satisfactory explanation" are themselves subservient to grammatical structure. (Google reference "Is Logic Empirical ?" Putnam)

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@fresco,

Ummm...I doubt anyone disagrees that we are subjects/actors amongst other subjects/actors. Of course what you mean and what I read may be different things.

Quote:

Furthermore it may be that all "conceptual thought" requires language

It may be? You are basing all your certainty on a maybe?

Quote:

From this position, language is an a priori relative to its products such as the concepts of "genetics","chemicals" or "dragons".

For clarification, are you saying that 'images in ones head' are a language?

Whatever you want to do with language, it still fails to be the 'complete former of self' that you want it to be, because the position cannot account for the formative powers on self of things other than language.

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@vikorr,

Just a way to paint a picture of how our mind is conceptual, and the 'talent' of language is reliant on the natural ability of conceptualising :

-how often have you been stuck for a word? How often have you've been unable to express how you feel (because no words seem right)? How often do you struggle to explain 'what's in your head' to another person (when it needs no explaining to yourself)? ...all that is because we can form concepts in our mind (self communication so to speak) without the need for attached language. It is when we need to communicate those concepts to others that we need to attach language to the concept.

Conceptualising is what allows us to 'think quickly' (thinking quickly never involves the language that we speak). Split second decisions do not involve our spoken language (yet we can spend hours exploring those split second decisions 'trying to put the thought processes into words').

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@vikorr,

Vikorr,

I'm accused by some on this forum of referring to external texts rather than answering their "questions". Such an accusation may be appropriate here when I say that I have already dealt with "things which affect self". First I dealt with "things" in a nondualistic manner, which you concurred with. Then I dealt with "self" as a "thing" evoked by language (the mechanism of "thinging"). Finally I dealt with "causality" (affect") as embodied in grammatical structure. My references to these non-standard ideas are supported in various degrees by Piaget, Maturana, and Wittgenstein. JLN would probably throw in Niestzche for good measure. Such references set up an essential "semantic field" between those who wish to discuss those ideas. Without this common field we will tend to talk past each other or go in circles.

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@fresco,

Hi Fresco,

I admire your intelligence and your fascination with philosophy. Yet, some of the things that have always bemused me about your writings include :
- you have an apparent inability to express your ideas using real word examples.
- your writing often, as you say, refers to other bodies of thought, by other people....often proposing concepts, without knowledge of which, your writing is nonsensical (that 'semantic field'). I will always have preferred your thoughts, and references to other peoples work in place of your thoughts always leaves me feeling a little sad.
- your writing often involves words that few people have heard of, requiring a dictionary to understand.

One of the reasons I don't find it necessary to read the more esoteric philosophies is I am more concerned with practicality, accessibility, and utility (plus I have too many other interests...so such is a long, long way down the list of curiosities).

In relation to your statement that you'd 'dealt' with a number of topics - I would disagree, but perhaps that is, as you say, something we could go around in circles with. I get the feeling that I'd also disagree with many of the philosophers that you've mentioned.

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fresco- I don't see how a non-dualistic approach could lead to the use of a word like "remarkable". And "affect" is another word which I don't see fitting your ideas. As is "essential".

I presume a fit animal has more energy and has a strong immune system etc but is unaware of those things and I assume, on what I think is your argument, that it being unaware means it hasn't got those characteristics because it lacks language. And yet, apart from "mind", we are biologically identical with the animal in the sense of the tube with a mouth/anus configuration in a nutrient bed.

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@vikorr,

Vikorr,

Okay, we can agree to disagree. However, you must be at least curious to know why a distinguished bunch of thinkers take this line. As I see it, the floodgates opened with Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason". Trace that line through phenomenology to Heisenberg's "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning" and you have the outline of a position in which "language" as medium of "questioning" becomes a critical element.

Here is an edited excerpt from Von Glazersfeld regarding Maturana's handling of "reality" which may illustrate my point

Quote:

I had come to the same conclusion. My own path (some-what abbreviated and idealized) led from the early doubts of the Pre-Socratics via Montaigne, Berkeley, Vico, and Kant to pragmatism and eventually to Ceccato's "Operational School" and Piaget's "Genetic Epistemology". This might seem irrelevant here, but since Maturana's expositions hardly ever refer to traditional philosophy, it seems appropriate to mention that quite a few of his fundamental assertions can be substantiated by trains of thought which, from time to time, have cropped up in the conventional history of epistemology. Although these trains of thought have occasionally irritated the official discipline of philosophy, they never had a lasting effect and remained marginal curiosities. I would suggest, that the reason for this neglect is that throughout the occidental history of ideas and right down to our own days, two requisites have been considered fundamental in any epistemological venture. The first of these requisites demands that whatever we would like to call "true knowledge" has to be independent of the knowing subject. The second requisite is that knowledge is to be taken seriously only if it claims to represent a world of "things-in-themselves" in a more or less veridical fashion'

Although the sceptics of all ages explained with the help of logical arguments that both these requisites are unattainable, they limited themselves to observing that absolute knowledge was impossible. Only a few of them went a step further and tried to liberate the concept of knowledge from the impossible constraints so that it might be freely applied to what is attainable within the acting subject's experiential world. Those who took that step were branded outsiders and could therefore be disregarded by professional philosophers.

It is not my intention here to examine why the philosophical climate has changed in the past twenty or thirty years. The fact is that today one can defend positions that take a relativistic view of knowledge without at once being branded a nihilist or dangerous heretic of some other kind.

In philosophy the authoritarian dominance of the realist dogma (be it materialistic or metaphysical) has certainly been shaken by the manifested unreliability of political and social "truths" as well as by the revolution in the views of physics. But the aversion against models of cognition that explain knowledge as organism-dependent and even as the product of a closed circuit of internal operations, has by no means disappeared.

According to Maturana, all linguistic activity or "languaging" takes place "in the praxis of living: we human beings find ourselves as living systems immersed in it". Languaging, for Maturana, does not mean conveying news or any kind of "information", but refers to a social activity that arises from a coordination of actions that have been tuned by mutual adaptation. Without such coordination of acting there would be no possibility of describing and, consequently, no way for the distinctions made by an actor to become conscious. To become aware of distinctions, is called observing. To observe oneself as the maker of distinctions, therefore, is no more and no less than to become conscious of oneself.

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@fresco,

Have I not shown my curiosity?

I followed most the excerpt, except the last paragraph, due to this :

Quote:

but refers to a social activity that arises from a coordination of actions that have been tuned by mutual adaptation.

...which needs more explanation (not asking, just mentioning, the rest of the paragraph hinges on that, but it's not clear the line of thought that has gone into the statement)

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@vikorr,

Try the analogy of two resonant pendula suspended from a horizontal string.
http://www.exploratorium.edu/cmp/exnet/exhibits/group8/coupled/index.html

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