In a message dated 11/5/08 12:53:25 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
> How does the form of a question make your mind or anyone else's mind > do anything? > > I realize you may be asking that in a spirit of rhetorical skepticism, but, optimistically, I'll take the query seriously. Any "how" question can be tricky -- entailing as it does mutual agreement to accept certain notions of "causation". This query touches on the critical question of how language affects "thinking". And maybe something even more fundamental. Why did brains arise in fauna at all? We assume plants don't have them, and there are a lot more surviving flora than fauna. I often talk of the mind's "associating". Why did the brain evolve into an lump of links? Why does the brain/mind do this "connecting"? Not just human minds. Our domestic animals "connect". If our dog sees us pick up the leash, he hurries expectantly to the door. Consider that pregnant word, 'expectantly'. What is it to "expect"? It's the result of association. Peirce said, to "believe" is just this: to anticipate potential future experience. So dogs -- and other non-human animals "expect"? Bertrand Russell used to tell the tale of a chicken. Since she was a chick, every morning she heard the sound of the farmer's steps on the gravel followed by a spray of corn on the ground. She made the connection: that sound meant breakfast was coming! Then one morning she heard the farmer's footsteps on the gravel and it was followed her head's being chopped off. Russell's lesson? The fallibility of induction. So dogs and chickens "expect? "Believe"? Does this suggest "consciousness"? Aristotle believed lower animals were not "rational" because they don't have a soul -- so no induction for them? Descartes, who did a lot of vivisection in pursuit of "knowledge", apparently didn't believe animals "feel" such things as grief or even "pain", and he even waffled about about "consciousness", saying, well, maybe animals had consciousness, but not SELF-consciousness(?) In the wild, the animal who associates the smell of a tiger with this big cat who eats you has a "Darwinian" advantage over the animal who doesn't. Never mind asking how come it ever began, there's no doubt it has its uses. In any case, let's momentarily conjecture we have become the top dog among animals because our capacity for associating is by far the most advanced. As very little kids, learning our language, most of the words we're deliberately taught are nouns, "substantives": milk, doggy, bird. Most -- not all: We learn no, hot, bad! My son's first word was 'light'. As kids, we associate the sound of the word with a "thing" (even if it's an attitude in an annoyed parent). To put it in "adult" terms, we come to accept that substantives have "referents". Just hearing the adults use the words repeatedly juxtaposed with a particular thing was apparently enough for me to accept words "referred to" a "referent". So as a boy being brought up Catholic, I didn't question it when the clerics used words like 'soul' and 'angels' and 'heaven' and 'hell', I accepted there was an entity out there, a "referent", even though -- unlike with 'milk' and 'horsey' -- I never actually "observed" the alleged referent. There --that's at least the beginnings of an answer to the question, "How does the form of a question make your mind or anyone else's mind do anything?" (Given the persistent impulse of listers solely to look for something they can object to, I ask the following out of sheer curiosity: Has anything at all above prompted the thought, however evanescent, "Hm. I never thought of that -- and it's sort of worth thinking about"? I truly don't ask that to fetch approval. I'm genuinely interested in other minds. (I'm definitely not a solipsist.)) ************** AOL Search: Your one stop for directions, recipes and all other Holiday needs. Search Now. (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1212792382x1200798498/aol?redir=http ://searchblog.aol.com/2008/11/04/happy-holidays-from -aol-search/?ncid=emlcntussear00000001)
