[Krimel] I know I sound dense here but I don't see how you are avoiding circularity and I don't see how emotions, sensations, the fireman who saves his crew, the scientist with the revelation of the snake etc. are not examples of thoughts that are unconscious and non-symbolic but thoughts none the less.
[Arlo] I could accuse you of the same thing. If all these things are "thoughts", then I have no idea what differentiates a "thought" from a "non-thought". If thoughts are even "unconscious", then praytell, Krimel, what _isn't_ a thought? From what I gather, every time one of my neurons fires, that constitutes "thought". To me, you've extended the term to so many areas as to render it useless. As I've stated, "thought" as I use the term is a specific conscious activity involving the willful manipulation of symbols, and as humans we are so enmeshed in an intensely rich language-textual-verbal field as to make our semiosis, while maybe not always originating in verbal language, ubiquitously verbal. We see a flashing red light and we stop because we have learned via language that this is a symbol for "danger", or maybe we have made associations on our own that we've mediated with language to build semiotic referents. And while I grant that we can make these associations non-verbal, as did Pavlov's dog, the very nature of our language-rich being makes even these events very quickly understood verbally (even if its a Homer-esque "Ooo... donut" upon seeing his favorite treat). Certainly we have powerful, pre-intellectual sensory experiences. Certainly our bodies respond without language to "iron deficiences". But these are not acts of "thought", again as I use the term. Those moments of intense emotional "experience", when time stops and our minds empty and we are inflated with a sense of Oneness and beauty, when our glands pump adrenaline and pheromones into our bloodstream, when the hair on our necks stands up and our skin goosepimples, these are all non-thought experiences. Yes, absolutely as humans we very quickly move to mediate that experience with thought, with language, to encode that in some form of wordage, even if its to think "I can't encode that in words". Yoga is, among many other things, an attempt to hold on to the pre-intellectual experiential state and stave off mental verbage. But one is not "thinking" when one is so meditating... one is simply "being", "experiencing". Thought comes later, as we attempt to encode and make sense of that experience. So this is beating a dead horse a bit, and I've lost the reason we are even arguing this out, and cluttering SA's tiny skull, and if semiosis is your word of choice, then semiosis it is. But you won't get me to agree that unconscious, non-symbolic neural activity is "thought" any more than I can apparently get you to agree that it's not. So, endgame? 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/
