For years I've been touting the concepts of Roy Harris, the highly noted Oxford linguist whose iconoclastic or somewhat deconstructive "Integrationist Linguistics" is a broad attack on the very notion that words (or chiseled marks) can convey a intended meaning from one person to another like a postman delivering a letter from a sender to a receiver. The cause-effect process does not work with language. The best that can be done is to create a context within which the word is translated into some more or less commonly understood meaning by at least two people for a while. The word is not a stable sign for Harris. The context (which could be anything chosen at all) comes first and then the sign is created too. Obviously the neurons are always 'firing off" or the brain would be dead or incapacitated. That means that thoughts are always present as 'language' chatter in the brain, maybe not always consciously. Another person's communicative expression can turn our attention to our contextualizing our chatter in a more or less specific way, like a flash of light can cause us to turn our head toward it. This contextualizing of inner thought chatter enables us to organize thoughts to create an as-if fictional interpretation of another person's communicative expression. "Mirror neurons" (see Ramachandran) enable us to project our consciousness in a way that imitates what is outside of ourselves. Empathy. Empathy is probably necessary to any communication.
Is there an immaterial, purely spiritual reality, in the mind and thus in the world? I hope so but I can't find it. Yet because I act on the make-believe of a spiritual reality it might as well be identical to the physical computer I am now using. If all consciousness is permeated with make-believe, as i suspect it is (we create contextualized narratives for ourselves moment to moment) then there may be no difference at all between the material and the so-called spiritual. One is also the other. Dualism may turn out to be a false distinction of what is indivisible. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thu, May 17, 2012 6:30:16 AM Subject: Re: "...The realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation." It's not all wet and bloody and you can go read it somewhere the brain that made it up isn't. Or some other brain can tell it to you or chisel it on a wall or something. When someone does that presumably the synapses etc of the person being told fire off-caused by the thought being told. I am beginning to feel like Basil de la Roche here,missing the point and shouting loudly anyway. Perhaps Conger could devote some of his contempt to explaining the problem clearly -why a brain is not material giving rise to something immaterial and exciting(or annoying)other brains with it. Kate Sulivan -----Original Message----- From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Wed, May 16, 2012 11:59 pm Subject: Re: "...The realm of emotion and conscience, of memory andB intention and sensation." On May 16, 2012, at 10:14 PM, [email protected] wrote: > Awful lot of stuff bumping around then. And what kind of corpus anyway. > All I mean is that if a lot of wet ware produces thoughts then what is > the difference between that and "something material giving rise to > something immaterial" except a more felicitous phrasing? How can you discern the difference between an 'immaterial' thought and the pattern of synapses and other neural activity that creates/gives rise to/is coextensive with the thought? As far as we can determine, the thought is equivalent to and coincident with the neural activity. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
