On Tuesday, September 18, 2018 at 11:51:28 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: > > > > On 9/18/2018 1:00 PM, Philip Thrift wrote: > > > > > https://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/april13/rorty-041305.html : > > > "How did we ever get the notion of the mind as something distinct from the > body? Why did this *bad idea* enter our culture?" > > > [At] some point in prehistory, our ancestors got into the habit of > pursuing projects of social cooperation by making marks and noises at each > other so as to organize themselves, he said. "That turned out to be a > fruitful survival mechanism." Eventually our ancestors developed social > norms—such as if you grunted "p" you had to grunt "q," or else explain why > you didn't grunt "q"—which we call following the laws of logic and making > valid inferences, he added. > > There was doubtless a genetic mutation somewhere in the background that > allowed this neat adaptive trick, he said. But "once that you've seen that > a certain neurological twist was necessary to get the process of using > marks and noises instead of force as methods of enforcing social > cooperation, you have given the only answer that there is to be given to > the question, 'What is the relation between the mind and the rest of > nature?'" > > > *The "mind" simply is the ability to engage in linguistic behavior,* he > said. "If you can talk about things, you can also think about things. But > you don't talk about things because you have first thought about things. > You didn't have any thoughts before you had language to think the thoughts > with." > > > I can imagine things like a play or a diagram without language. My dog > clearly has thoughts about things and even dreams. Octopuses have > curiosity. Rorty is kinda right but too simplistic. He seems to write > polemics instead of philosophy. > > Brent >
Do dogs think about their thoughts? The above was from a talk he gave (about 2 years before his death) filtered through a Stanford News writer. But the "philosophy" is from his (well-known to today's philosophers) 1979 book *Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature *which I would assume anyone with an interest in philosophy in the past 30 years has read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_and_the_Mirror_of_Nature - pt -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
