Matt: Yeah, I think the looseness of caring about definitions is a trait that comes from not caring about creating a systematic metaphysics. I'm definitely a culprit. The way I perceive philosophy is as a therapist, seeing problems and wanting to solve/dissolve them. Some problems are created from differing contexts, and though having family resemblances, they require one to stand differently (use different definitions) to see them.
[Krimel] Ok, but in this instance I am puzzled as to what the problem is. The problem from my perspective had more to do with ideas than with words. By restricting ideas to only what can be expressed verbally and then identifying ideas as words I was fearful that you were ruling out those things that I would specifically identify with the pre-intellectual; sensation, emotion, memory etc. I'll come back to that later. [Matt] I'll give you this--if we are going to talk about ontological distinctness, then I would say that every word picks out something ontologically distinct. This has, of course, the same disastrous effects on "ontology" as a distinct area of discourse as Pirsig's claims about Quality have for aesthetics. [Krimel] I agree that most words point to some ontological distinction but in some instances it might be hard to say just what they are, articles for example are fairly nonspecific and pronouns of intentionally ontologically open ended. But in most instances the power of words is their ontological vagueness. So for example _red_ works because mutual agreement on _redness_ sidesteps the issue of whether or not we have identical experiences or not. Our experiences of _red_ are close enough that we do not have to have Matt-red and Krimel-red to communicate. [Matt] By the way, when Descartes was creating what we moderns know of as the mind (which was not what the Greeks knew of as the mind), one of his key moves was in putting sensations together with concepts in an "inner space." For the Greeks, sensations were bodily. But in Descartes' concept so often taught to Philosophy 101 students, "clear and distinct ideas," the "ideas" is just as often translated as "perceptions." [Krimel] I don't know what would constitute a good translation of Descartes but in my world perception is the very specific process of making sense of sensory input. It straddles the intellectual and pre-intellectual as the process of integrating and classifying present input with the past experience. [Matt] Part of the problem some philosophers have with the idea of a "mind" as an inner space is what kind of criteria we would use to determine what was "in" it. Take two paradigmatic examples of things we consider in the mind: beliefs and pain. Beliefs are in the mind because they are intentional, and we take physical objects to be devoid of intention. A rock is a rock, whether or not I believe it to be a baseball. [Krimel] I am of "the mind is what the brain does" school so I don't exactly have that problem. I don't think that all physical objects are devoid of intention either. My wife is a physical object and she is very good at making her intentions clear. I too am a physical object but apparently I am less good and making my intensions clear. [Matt] And pain, what is pain but an example of the sheer phenomenal experience of something? Showing you which neurons are firing does nothing to tell you what pain _feels_ like. But what do beliefs and pains have in common except that aren't physical? For instance, my beliefs are located in my mind, but why isn't my beauty? Both are functional states, things that have physical components (certain neuron makeup, bodily makeup) but cannot be reduced to those components, but why isn't a person's beauty in their mind? Sure, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but does that mean that _my_ beauty exists in _your_ mind? That's a possible answer, but it is strange, don't you think, that something of mine is not something in my possession? At any rate, the substance of the problem is that the only thing beliefs and pain seem to have in common is that they are immaterial, yet so are adjectives like "beauty". [Krimel] It is this individually distinct nature of personal felt experience that leads some to claim that there is more going on than neurons firing. I don't agree. If the neurons stop so does the pain, so do my ideas. As for your beauty I suspect that it does reside in your head. Although to be fair we haven't met. But we all have properties that are uniquely ours that reside in the perception of others. By the way _beauty_ is a noun. Beautiful is an adjective. [Matt] But there you go. One thing I'd think about in your proposal that "within languages word order carries meaning. Syllables carry meaning as prefixes and suffixes" is the verb "carry". It's a metaphor. People carrying something makes literal sense, but a word? [Krimel] Radio and television waves carry signals imbedded in them. But words have meanings or even words are meaning if you like. [Matt] Granted, it's a dead metaphor that makes obvious sense, like the "mouth of a river," but if we become atomistic in assigning bits of meaning to be carried by parts, like syllables, where do we stop? Why not go to individual letters and phonemes? But what continued sense is carried from the letter "I" between "I," as in "_I_ am Matt," to the "I" in "My _i_nstincts tell me to run from the t_i_ger"? (And that's not even going into the problem of converting visual letters to auditory phonemes: the I-as-in-ego and I-in-the-word-tiger are more or less the same visually, but not when you hear them.) This kind of atomism is, I think, what is standing behind your desire to say "that the word idea applies to less complex things as well." [Krimel] Languages are rich enough that reducing them to units of meaning would indeed be problematic. But when I said less complex things, I was referring to sensations, emotion and memory which I take to be more physiological and conceptually less complex than language. [Matt] Whether or not ideas _are_ words in any exciting sense (as I seemed so excited to say earlier), I am a holist and not an atomist, and the fact that words are so obviously contextual (to understand one word is to also understand an entire, whole web of words) is probably why I'm so quick to assimilate an "idea," which sounds like a discrete chunk of mind-stuff, to them. Hence, "words are ideas" _plural_, not "a word is an idea." But either way--holism over atomism, wherever the chips fall on the other questions. And that's why SOM is relevant: traditionally, atomists have been SOMic. I'm not even sure how an atomist wouldn't be one. [Krimel] My point still is that words and ideas are distinct. Words convey ideas and there may indeed be ideas that are purely linguistic but I think languages tell us about the structure of thought and ideas. They are the vehicle not the whole shebang. I think in fact that linguistic ideas, important though they may be, are shadows of the vast a-linguistic world of ideas that we live in. This can and has been demonstrated in a number of ways. The most obvious are the split-brain studies of Sperry and later Gazzaniga. Gazzaniga uses the term non-conscious rather than the Freudian unconscious to describe this. All this leads up to my basic problem with your blog on the pre-intellectual. I had high hopes when you talked about senses of pre-intellectual. Turns out you were using the wrong sense of sense. We know enough about how the brain works to talk about very specific meanings of pre-intellectual. Sensation and emotions are certainly pre-intellectual and easily account for Pirsig's hot stove example. These are brain functions that are indeed only directly knowable. Non-conscious ideas are pre-intellectual in your second sense. Here is a really old account of some of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lmfxQ-HK7Y Your third sense of unlensed I think works a little better if instead we consider our ability to use multiple lenses; sunglasses outdoors, reading glasses indoors, rose colored ones for self reflection... This ability to shift perspective, to take another's point of view, to see ourselves as others see us, seems to be a uniquely human characteristic and has definite developmental markers in infants as they mature. Like you I have real problems indentifying the pre-intellectual as some highly desirable state. Pre-intellectual ideas are unsorted, unclassified and essentially meaningless. If our processes of constructing meaning are so rigid as to miss novelty and new ways of thinking perhaps we need new lenses. But extolling the pre-intellectual seems a bit retrograde for my taste. I get some of the feeling for this from your comments on meditation and certainly from what you say about betterness. I think the chief difference between us is that I don't see a lot of this as abstraction. I think most of these notions can and have been operationally defined and studied. The problem has more to do with interpreting existing data than speculating about meaning. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
