[Gav]:
Thoughts exist without a thinker in books, on websites etc.
originally the thinker was the conduit for them, but as far as
original thoughts go - they were not the source!!! This is the key.
From Miller to Poincare to many others the phenomenology of
thought, especially creative thought, has been investigated quite
thoroughly. We know that thoughts *come to or through us*
from somewhere else. The thinker doesn't create the thought.
The thinker creates the struction (jaynes) - the constructed instruction
- that mind then works with. The struction is an intellectual
construction, it is a well formulated question. The answer, the
new idea, comes spontaneously, surprisingly and quite often
ironically....it is DQ/Tao irrupting into consciousness.
So a thought *does not* require a thinker. ...
I appreciate the effort you put into this response, Gav, but I can't buy any
of it. We are all influenced by the ideas of others, past and present, but
thoughts do not "come to us"; we create them. Nor are original thoughts
necessarily answers to questions. Jaynes' "struction" is garble to me, and
the phrase "...has been investigated thoroughly" always arouses my
suspicion. Finally, the notion of "DQ/Tao erupting into consciousness" is
the weirdest explanation of intuition I've ever heard. As far as I'm
concerned, this epistemological argument is just more fodder for the
collectivist position.
Again I'm reminded of this statement by the leading objectivist of the 20th
century:
"The mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a
collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An
agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn
upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary
act - the process of reason - must be performed by each man alone. We can
divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach.
No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his
brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are
private. They cannot be shared or transferred. "
--Ayn Rand, "For the New Intellectual
Thanks anyway, Gav.
--Ham
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