Missing in action: Where is the mind?

We do not assign the meaning of heat and danger to fire, but find it... The color red means blood, and if I see red I stop for no reason I have assigned, but one I recognize... The notion that mankind makes symbols is wrong in all but the most abstract senses of physics, and there they must be taught because they are unnatural... The rest of us simply make free association based upon our cultures which do have their universal elements, believe it or not...

If I say ache, or ague, or acute, I am literally referencing A Cut... If some part of your body becomes inflamed it is as though burnt... We never make things up, but only see things more or less symbolically... This is no mystery to me, and when I was an English major and wished to learn to write I soon found myself reading hard about anthropology and myth and magic... It ended up being a back door into philosophy for me, but in the process I found the symbols writers and other artist consciously manipulate are to most people a sort of unconscious language...

Opposition, which plays such a large part of myth also plays a huge part in most thinking though this does not always result in a view of truth... Just consider high and low from the perspective of a tree dweller, or day and night to a cave man, or good and evil to a medievalist... Is it any wonder the tree of knowledge is the tree of death and the tree of life is the cross of Jesus where he alone died...

Do you think it strange that people could so like a song called Along the Watchtower -calling angels riders and the devil a wildcat without the artist ever mentioning that he is telling a story about a conversation between Jesus and the two thieves he was crucified with??? People do not know why the song appeals to them, but it works as a song because it is using a theme and symbols familiar to all: Jokers, wise men, thieves and honest men, high and low, life and death... It is a serious work and it does not have to be a mile long and a quarter thick to work... In fact; it tells us little that is new and it tells us with no new symbols, but if the message, which is clearly stated were framed as religion it would be rejected out of hand by the very people it is meant for because religion has been so exploited for personal gain and political power...

The mind too is just a symbol...To talk of it rather than what is symbolized only confuses the issue... The conscious brain is a mind, and the brain is conscious of symbols and uses symbols consciously... If we were to agree that the unconscious, even voiceless parts of the brain can communicate with the conscious brain by way of signs and signals, then it is enough reason to take them seriously, but it is still not an invention of the mind, or of man... That ability has made us more than we have made it... We recognize symbols, we see patterns, we see signs..

Lets kill the subject once and for all...

...the question of the mind is and can be reduced to the question of free will...the argument against it is precisely the argument of distinguishing the alleged possibility of free will making sense, from perception of free will on the self, which bottom line is a correlation in between what we necessarily want to want, and the free choice of the conditions, for our wanting being what it is, which obviously is fallacious, since we being what we already are, makes us unqualified for the very act of choosing freely what we want to be in order to chose what we want to do...the argument is intricate and technically can be made backwards in the sense that given what we are, our choices predictable or not are always freely chosen, since the premise condition for choice is logically established from the self point of view...but then again, we were n´t free of being what we are, were we ? and thus our choice, free from our point of view, still is perfectly conditioned from an external point of view, which constrained the cause of our particular being and consequently its a priori very volitional freedom of willing as truly legitimate first cause...
...in that sense it follows the necessary conclusion that the mind is an submersible "phenomena" to which we assist much as spectators in a film onto the unrolling of ourselves in the world...what we want to freely do, is not for us to want, even if our volition seems to be the condition of our wanting...it remains to be proven that given extreme detail, the causes of our wanting are not emergent from conditions which cannot be find behind and beyond the phenomenal integrated faked perception of "self" and "mind" as a legitimate independent entity autonomously capable of action on itself...

...bottom line what is meant above is that "self" and "mind" are non legitimate willing actors arising as emergent phenomena in the brain, an apparatus which necessarily processes information accordingly with the parameters and the conditions imprinted in it, be it a priori, as an particular organ who could not create itself, or a posteriori, as it unwillingly, fully must conditionally react to the non chosen stimuli it computes moment by moment...

...in that light precisely comes the old claim that I so often have done, regarding the legitimacy on classifying the origin of data as external or internal to a "subject" which subjectively establishes itself and the world from a non independent point of view, thus rendering the claim invalid since mind and the exterior world are not legitimate separate entity´s that can be internally established...

...further it follows the false problem of the legitimacy of truth, as a valid correlation of experience to the world, given that the questionable origin of the judging point of view on what the experience of being as a "self" and the "reality" as external background can conceivably mean once not being independent but necessarily framed in a circular phenomenal process...on that regard the only needed correction it follows is not upon the legitimacy of truth thus being true, but as truth not being a correlation of knowledge with reality but the very unfolding of reality in the processed experience of knowing !

Regards>FILIPE DE ALBUQUERQUE

...of course one can reason two different conclusions from what was previously established regarding epistemology... either the epistemological problem is solved because there is no valid knowledge from the subjects point of view since subject and world are dissolved, or knowledge is framed as an ontological necessary unfolding process expressed on the very motion of reality in its intrinsic internal relations, from which the subject is a valid constituent since the very concept of reality to which we can possibly refer is no longer separate from the subject in the judging...nevertheless irony of the gods, it all very much says the same not matter what side you reason to stick with...

...it is not the case that finally I come to agree with the "liberal" pro mind side on the forum, as it is n´t and was not the case that I fully agreed with the native "conservatives" in pro realism...to my view today as always both sides presented incomplete comprehension, be it in the definition of concepts like "observation", "knowledge" or "mind", reducible to process, motion, cause, or correlation, be it on the very conception of what world means and refers to beyond the scope of our experience as subjects in the idea of realism...

So you are saying that the meaning of an object is intrinsic to that object?
If that were so, a person who had never seen a boat would immediately grasp the meaning of an anchor. But we both know that isn't so. If you'd never seen a boat, and had found an anchor you would not know what it was.
You might, however, have found another use for it, which would make it meaningful to you in some other way.



Don't be silly. That's your association, and by no means universal.



More silliness.
Do you have actual arguments to support your belief that meaning is intrinsic to the universe and not an aspect of human perception and understanding? So far you've just written a lot of words that don't really say anything relevant.

Of course meaning is intrinsic to universe, at least a set of possible operating meanings, unless of course you believe you are apart of it which is odd...what you mean is that a particular meaning is not exclusive.

No, fil, don't put words in my mouth.

What I am saying is that meaning is something of perception. Meaning is invented by humans who have a practical need to relate to things around them. The concept is so integrated in our perception and understanding that we tend to think of it as something we perceive.

Meaning is our relation to objects... It does not exist apart from us and we do not exist apart from the meaning we find... All forms, concepts, notions and ideas are meanings.

Is that what you've been trying to communicate all along? If so, we are more in agreement that it seemed like at first.

Meaning happens in the relationship between perceiver and the perceived. Even this relationship is a context defined by us.

The question of free will is a philosophical dead end. The term comes from christianity, and was used to account for all the **** going on despite the belief that god was all good. I've explained my view of it in enough posts on a2k that I don't feel the need to go into it again.

Fido is trying to say something important, i.e., that we live in a world of meanings. I agree; that's what culture is about: the meaningfulness of our world. But culture is a matter of invention, or artifacts. I see just about everything (i.e., meanings) in my world as artificial, but that's good not bad. Art refers to human creation or invention, and that's good.
By the way, the color white in some societies "stands for" death and black does that in other cultures. Neither has intrinsic meaning, like all else their meanings are invented and assigned. To think otherwise is to do Naive Realism, to live in a world of reifications.
Remember the joke of the farmer who congratulated the astronomer on his discipline's discovery of planets not visible with the naked eye. But then he added: "But I don't understand how you learned their names."
He possibly also assumes that the meanings of heat and danger to fire are only found as they objectively are, never taught.

I kind of got hung up on the part where Fido seemed to be saying that meanings were intrinsic to whatever they are about. I agree, of course, that we live in a world of meanings, and that we relate more to those meanings than we do the things they represent.
But I also think that to many people, my view is increasingly esoteric; I believe that reality, even physical objects, are merely perceptions validated by our "desire" to relate to them. I no longer see consciousness as something that grew out of the physical world. I see the physical world as something that grew out of consciousness...

So you believe that if I give you an electric shock every time you say something like that the meaning of the shock to you is invented and not found ? mind that you are not even saying the meaning is relative to a background context and a state of affairs in your mind...you are saying the function is not a function at all but a complete construction of the subject...you are not only advocating for free will within parameters but you are advocating for wild open free will...kind like you might get in flight if you truly want to...well super, knock yourself out and jump of a window...

...you speak as if meaning was independent from the function, a construction of the subject totally independent of the event when in fact it is not, it cannot be...meaning arises necessarily as a secondary effect within the function, it results from the operation established between a particular state of affairs of the mind and an object in relation with it...it is a consequence and not the product of will...the effect of the object relation with the subject becomes the meaning of the object for the subject, the object becomes its particular function, in such X given situation in the eyes of the subject, not as a choice but as a consequence of the true objective relation established in there...now what does that has anything to do with constructions will and choices ?

You truly are the master of assumptions, fil.
Try to distinguish between what people say and what you think... The inability to do so is a classic mark of the naive realist.

...are you not clearly stating that reality and its experienced meaning are the product of will in here ?
...you say both reality and meaning are the product of the subject, which thus must be free of any other constrains, given the very world is assumed also as a construction and not as an external background...if you had in turn said that it was a shared two ends connection you would never use the misguiding term "construction" but obviously something like "function" instead...

...people don´t even seem to understand that consciousness cannot be the bedrock of consciousness, it is a circular argument !
...if they argue for the subject as the bedrock of consciousness, without noticing, they are making the subject represent the very physical world they aim to deny ! The subject becomes "the physical world" from which consciousness emerges...a mess !
In turn if they aim for consciousness without a subject, as a collective, they already imply the existence of a world, which being "physical" in the sense of true experience, does not need to create anything as another background world, and thus consciousness becomes mechanic mindless process in itself, not the product of a central will...will comes out of something which is external to will itself ! (the damn world is necessarily assumed)

I would agree with this if there were not so many examples to the contrary... The sun to a man mired in mud and rain for days on end will never have the same meaning as to that one suffering draught; nor will it have the same meaning as one growing crops for his survival who need not only rain, but sunny days... We are a part of nature, in every sense natural ourselves, and meaning like all relationships between subject and object will always by a dynamic rather than a static quality... We can only in part define the context, and then the context defines us..