From: GEVANS613-AT-aol.com Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 09:56:34 EDT Subject: About Thinking and Thought Ontological Oddities Date: 22/06/2003 From: sdblack-AT-telus.net (Steve Black) heidegger-dialognet-AT-yahoogroups.com Jud: Thinking and breathing do not exist, for thinking and breathing are ways that the body-brain exists, not the way that thinking and breathing exist. If we stop thinking or breathing we soon die unless our lives are extended by means of artificial respiration or others maintain us in a vegetative state. A thinking, breathing human exists but not his thinking and breathing. When he dies he ceases his thinking and breathing, but they do not accompany him into the grave for they never existed to die and be buried in the first place, for actions are ways that an existent exists. I suppose that one the one hand nominalism helps us get a clearer idea of just exactly what it is that we are sharing the world with and what are no more than humanly created chimera, secondly it protects us from being conned, because we tend to ask for more clarification when abstractions are employed by others in order to manipulate us. No, I'm not suggesting for one minute that we should stop thinking or cognising or acting in a logical way just because thought, cognisance and logic don't exist, nor that we should stop all mathematical activity and sack all our math teachers because number and sets and the symbols of arithmetical calculations don't actually exist other than in the brains of mathematicians, but rather that as thinking perceptive human beings at the beginning of the 21st century we should at least BE AWARE THAT THEY DON'T EXIST. Steve: Okay - another try. I have this idea and I am struggling to get it into words clearly - here's another go... The value of hermeneutics is that it places the quester - the investigator herself very much into the investigation. It reminds over and over that the thinker locates a very specific "place" - and that that place is not omniscient. It "owns" this and tries not to forget it. I am going to focus on one point for clarity. I am going to start with the sentence, "thoughts don't exist". There are two ways this could be taken - one - "there are no thoughts" - which is clearly nonsense! The other way also strikes me as forced - but at least I can see some room for affirming it. It (still "undefined") is that way that I want to look at. Jud: I concede that you must be allowed to approach this problem from any direction you wish in order to access the question of “thought.” For my part, I would prefer to investigate the question in line with my own ontology, and here I pause to point out that I don't actually HAVE an "ontology," but rather the action of my brain evaluates problems of what H calls the "ontic," and I call the "the entitic macrocosm" [as a verbal short cut, for I don't believe that the "entitic macrocosm exists either] for those entities which exist in the cosmos, and therefore not to refer to "thought," which is some nebulous reification of my acts of thinking, but to the thinking thinker, also known as: "the embrained body - embodied brain" which is also identified by the name Jud Evans. Steve: As an exercise in hermeneutics I want to hold up this conversation itself as a clear point of study. (I want to also avoid generalizations to obtain clarity - if possible). This debate itself is "thought" expressed in words and grammar in an electronic format. This is what Julia Kristeva(??) calls the "hule" - the physical stuff of letters and ink - or in our case some strange working of electronics. Jud: I too see this conversation as a hermeneutical one, which is the way that I originally approached Heidegger. I have concluded that the nominalist approach to the “question of being and time” allied to an in depth understanding of the BE-word and how it works syntactically and semantically is far superior to Heidegger's, in that it is unburdened with ambiguity, obfuscation and allows a much sharper examination of these metaphysical questions, simply by revealing that there are no metaphysical questions at all because there is nothing metaphysical to be questioned. Heidegger's whole ontological game-plan is dependant on one huge wager, and that is that the “theosophical” gerund “Being” is a viable concept. If the Being-word is removed from his philosophical entablature the whole pack of Heideggerian cards comes crashing to the ground. Now you can see the importance of the admittance of gerundial abstraction into Heidegger's doctrines. Heidegger NEEDS the “departure” of the train to exist, and if it is replaced by the compelling existential truth of the “departing train” his whole Grundbegriffe bites the dust. I choose to think of our debate as the exchange, by means of encoded electronic significations, some results of the thinking processes of our brains which if it pleases you to do so you may call "thoughts." However it is not the thoughts that actually exist, it is simply the activity of your thinking brain thinking they are thoughts instead of the results of the activity of my brain in thinking which now you are thinking about with the help of this electronic medium? Now just why you or anybody else desires [perhaps even feels the need?] to nominalise the activity of my thinking brain, or your own thinking brain and call them thoughts [rather than the process or activity of thinking] and going down the road of turning this activity of thinking into something that exists on some other sort of [presumably transcendental level I just cannot understand? Here are some dictionary definitions of "thoughts" which you will see [and you can check your own dictionary too] all describe thoughts as actions or processes of the brain rather than as an entity that exists. Clearly this is because the compilers of the dictionary realised that the generality of English speakers think of thoughts not as some entitic phenomena that "exist" but the activity of an existing human entity (a) The content of cognition; the main thing you are thinking about. (b) The process of thinking (especially thinking carefully) (c) The organized or recorded beliefs of a period or group or individual. (d) A personal belief or judgment that is not founded on proof or certainty Therefore "thoughts" are clearly the neuronal activity of the human brainmeat with its specialised cells, which actually do the thinking, but it is the thinking brain of the thinking human that exists not the thinking of the thinking. This activity of my thinking brain is then converted to mutually intelligible symbols, which serve to communicate and transfer my thinking processes to your thinking processes. When you read the symbols on your screen your thinking brain decodes the strings of symbols into the meaning that the thinking of your brain thinks the symbols signify. Steve: This hule exists - well perhaps that's more problematic Jud: Sounds very much to me as if Julia has pinched the Greek work hyle, meaning, "matter?" For Heidegger "hyle" is one of the four "ways of being responsible" in Heidegger's model of causality based on Greek concepts; the silver that makes up the material being of the chalice is an example of hyle. The "matter" of the screen on which these symbols of ours in projected certainly exists, and the actual electrons which are fired by the electron gun at the back of our monitors actually exist too, but the results of the electron stream as converted into the squiggles on our screen exist as coded electronic information, they are not "Steve and Jud's thoughts crystallised on the screen" in the way that Marx thought of money as "crystallised labour" for it is the thinking mode of our thinking brains that thinks, and in thinking interprets the squiggles into a thinking about the thinking of the other thinker. This repetitive use of the of the continuous tense of thinking which is necessary to communicate this concept indicates just how useful abstract nouns like “thought” are as communicative and cognitive shortcuts. Well that is fine and dandy EXCEPT when because of constant usage people begin to believe that THEY ACTUALLY EXIST like Bruce has become so used to dealing with mathematical abstractions that he thinks that numbers or numers or numerals, or whatever he and his colleagues choose to call them ACTUALLY EXIST IN THE WORLD AS ENTITIES, rather than just as the activity of using them as symbols during the periods when he is thinking in a mathematical modality. Steve: [Hule] because it only exist electronically for us - but let's pretend that this a regular letter on paper for arguments sake - the ink and paper "exists". (Irony?) Yet the whole point about language - especially written - is that it only works, or it works best when it is "invisible". You read these words and because you have a competence in English you aren't really even noticing the physical stuff (hule) of the language - you are processing these words on a different level entirely. This dynamic is very clear when you learn another language and you really do have to struggle with the hule - the words themselves come only as obstacles to "meaning". The point behind these words is that I am hoping that you "process" them - and construct from them "thoughts" that (if I am doing my part well) have at least some vague connection to what I am hoping to express as I write here from the other side of the planet. Jud: Any medium of communication is concerned with symbols. If we are communicating in Morse-code our thinking embrained body [or embodied brain - take your pick same thing,] converts its thinking [or thoughts] if you prefer] into a series of dots and dashes which exist as dots and dashes on the message pad paper as traces of graphite on the page. The configurations of graphite on the page exist in the world as graphite, and not as the ideas, which the configurations of graphite communicate when the embodied brain of the recipient reads them, after they have been transmitted down the wire and taken down on the pad of the operator on the other side of the country. The “thoughts” only exist as an occurrence of thinking in the brains of: (a) The creator of the message. (b) The operator who sends the message. © The operator who receives the message. (d) The final reader of the message. In other words [and I realise that this is difficult to get one's head around] the thoughts don't exist - it is the thinker of the thoughts that exists, and his thinking we label with the name “thoughts.” The same process applies to words, language, semaphore and any other medium of communication one cares to mention with one exception, and that is the visual presentation of imagery, art and TV pictures and the plastic arts sculpture etc., which warrants a separate discussion which we can perhaps return to at some later date? Steve: Lets pretend that I have with some modesty achieved my goal in writing - and you have taken the hule and have constructed "thoughts". These "thoughts" are (this is my hope, in any event) not something that you agree or disagree with - they are still "my" thoughts that you have constructed for your evaluation - they are "there" only to be evaluated. As it happens I write this clearly with this in mind - in a hope to persuade (not a hope I hold particularly firmly in this case - but nevertheless...) The thoughts "exist" at this point in the evaluation process NOT as true thoughts - but merely as thoughts that "someone else thinks". As such you are in a good position to proceed and evaluate. Jud: For me the thoughts do not exist at all in any way. The thoughts do not “reside” anywhere. They are not stored in the brain as “things” or “mental luggage; or stashed away in the brain as entitic records as in a library. For me “memory” does not exist either, but only the “rememberer” engaged in the human activity of “recalling” which is the manner of existing of the remembering human entity, for thinking and remembering are activities of the embodied brain. "Thoughts," or rather more properly "thinking" are an activity [and “activities” don't exist - only those entities that are active exist] of your brain and mine, and they are an activity of all the of the 200 or more people who are on this list and who are sufficiently interested to indulge in the required thinking which their body-brain needs to engage in which is necessary to read our messages. If they read our messages, they are then engaged in thinking about the things that we are or have been thinking about, but it is THEIR embrained body that is doing the thinking - not our thoughts, which are being “thought” by them. In other words they are thinking about our thinking they are thinking about it as the thinking of another thinker, for it is us that exist as thinkers thinking thoughts, and not our thoughts, which have been thought. When we read, for reading is manner of existing, or a mode of thinking of the thinking body-brain] the strings of phonetic or alphabetic code which enable us to think about another's thinking, we are thinking about another's thinking. It is not necessary to know who the other thinker actually is or where he or she is located, or whether he or she is alive or dead, but whenever we read and think about the thinking of another, we are always aware that our thinking about the thinking is not about some “transcendental “thoughts,” which exist or existed long ago, but of the thinking thinker who exists or existed long ago. The thinking of the thinker and the thinking cannot be separated into “thinker and thought.” The thinker and the thinking are correlates and bear a reciprocal or mutual existential inhered relation as a coincidental existential state of the existing of the existent as a thinking entity. Those list members who haven't the time to read these messages, or who choose not to read them for various reasons. If we conjugate the verb “THINK” into its basic indicators of temporality in the first person we get the following: 1. Think, to think, I thought, I am thinking, I think, I will think or I will be thinking etc. We can see now that the tendency to nominalise this activity - to concretise it into a “thing” called “thought” when all that the word “thought” does is to describe the “process” of thinking, a “process” which doesn't exist either as the “process of thinking” is simply the way that the human body-brain is existing while it is thinking. This temptation or inclination towards the abstractional concretising of action has the same reason behind it that tempts us to concretise the disparate activity of scores [if not hundreds] of people into the single abstraction “dance” when we say: “Tonight I am going to “a dance.” Moreover, to attempt to encapsulate the whole gamut of experiential activity involved in simply being alive as the mystical “Being” which is the cornerstone of Heidegger's metaphysical mysticism. Steve: On we go... So now you have a "thought". Jud: For me we cannot HAVE a thought - we can think or we can experience the activity of thinking. Steve: We are not talking about a Nazi thought - or a 9/11 thought - or a thought about starving children in Africa - I want to try to be more specific - you (hopefully) have "my" thought (at least some rough and ready version of what I'm thinking - I only say this because I think that language can work - but only partially and with a great deal of unavoidable ambiguity.) Jud: I prefer: I am thinking about a version of what I think that you are thinking about the way that you think I am thinking about the way you think. Steve: What does it mean to say you have such a thing as a "thought" from me? Jud: It means that I am thinking about what you have communicated to me [by electronic alphabetic signs] regarding the way you are or have been [perhaps recently - perhaps not] thinking. Steve: I have no problems agreeing that this "thought" is an Existential "modalities" of your brain as much as it is possible. Jud: In reading what you write my existential mode of thinking concerning the way in which you have thought or are thinking it allows me to share, or have an insight into, a particular activity or existential thinking modality of your brain. Steve: Yet that really doesn't tell us much! With this specific "thought" in mind - and not other more sinister global "thoughts" - this modest little thought here as an example - what does it mean to say that it "doesn't exist". (Other than perhaps that it simply cannot be constructed by you in any clarity because of my obtuse manner of speech...) Jud: The sad fact of human communication is that whilst language is a wonderful achievement of humankind it can never faithfully reproduce our thoughts in their entirety or their complexity - it is simply not up to the job. If I sat down for a million years at the keyboard trying to describe the true actuality of the pen I hold in my hand I could never do so, for the existential totality or entitic Gesamtsumme of the pen is changing with every nanosecond as molecules are lost and replaced, as ultraviolet rays degrade the colouring and surface areas and the chemical composition of the ink within modifies its existential nexus, desiccates and finally is transformed to powder etc. Language is simply inadequate for conveying the reality of constant existential transformation, so it is impossible for you or I or anybody else to try to capture the thinking activities of our brains using encoded alphabetic squiggles or sounds which are interpreted as messages by the vibration of our eardrums and passed on as simulative activity for the thinking body-brain. Steve: However you choose to respond to this - you are also using "thoughts". Jud: Again I prefer to conceive of my response to your message as thinking about what you have told me you are thinking about, rather than “using thoughts,” whether those thoughts be yours or my own. I cannot “use” your “thoughts” because they don't exist, although I can think about what I think you are thinking about. The term “using thoughts” is redolent of acquiring “ready-made” thoughts which are “available” simply by reading your messages, when in fact for me my thinking about your thinking is to access not some of your “thoughts,” [which have been packed and parcelled and delivered by cyber-post] but to think about you existential modality of thinking as described by you to me. Steve: This In fact (and I'm sure this will come as no surprise to you) your whole argument is nothing but thought! (This is where the whole hermeneutics thing comes in). Jud: Again from my position “thought” as such does not exist other than as a series of symbols which English speakers agree should apply to describe the past tense of thinking as in:” I thought I saw a fox in my garden last night, but when I shone my torch it turned out to be a stray dog.” Steve: We have NO direct access to the brain! It may be that only the "brain-meat" exists - but we have no direct access to this "brain-meat". This is an important reflection - I think. Our ONLY access to this "brain-meat" is through our thoughts! This is out ONLY WAY IN! Jud: You are partially correct here. The only thing I would quibble about is that neurosurgeons have been able to establish which areas of the brain “process” certain information and are active or inactive in given somatic situations by the observation of the behaviour of patients who have been traumatised etc., I agree though that this is a very limited knowledge. It is introspection that allows us to attempt to understand the workings of our own brains and by watching the performance of others in certain situations. Language is the medium whereby we attempt to communicate our conclusions and the conclusions of others and for it is by examining the nature of this language - its structure, the syntactic juxtaposition of it semantic elements and particularly the BE-word and the linguistic mechanism whereby it mediates and communicates our body-brain's response and understanding of its own existentiality and that of its surrounding environment which offers the only way to understand the modalities of our own thinking and the manner in which others think. Heidegger was never able to grasp the true nature of the cognitive mechanism of existentiality the BE-word in its IS-word conjugate version, and that is why he had to come up with his rather pathetic gerundial plug-in “Dasein” [being there] which let him off the ontological hook and allowed the absurdity of the so-called: “Ontological Difference.” Steve: Even if a surgeon cuts open a skull and touches this flesh - even this does not give us direct access - because even then the sensations at the fingers are sent to the brain and processed and experienced ONLY AND ALWAYS as thought. Jud: I realise I might be seen to be quibbling unnecessarily here but I prefer: experienced ONLY AND ALWAYS as thinking because thinking is an activity of our brains and “thought” doesn't exist [as a completed chunk of thinking] because thinking is an action or behavioural mode not a “thing” on some cerebral floppy-disc or a “mental chip” that can be replayed for if it WERE to be “replayed, it would be in the modality of the thinking of the entity which is the thinking embrained body - embodied brain. Steve: These might not be fully formed thoughts - "Ahh - so this is what the brain of Suzy feels like!" No - the thought might be nothing more than a feeling of - disgust maybe - wonder - whatever - even this emotional experience is "thought". The "simple presence" - besides being a very complicated abstract idea - besides this - it is never known in any way directly - but only and always as thought. Jud: Sorry, but once more I have to ontologically characterise this as the conduct [action/process] of thinking rather that “thought” unless that is you are willing to concede that when you employ the word “thought” you are actually referring to the process or [or in my nominalist lingo] the existential modality of the human entity whilst it is thinking? Steve: Hermeneutics would want to make sure that we have this point clearly before moving on. To miss this is to think that our models aren't just models but the "real thing". It would be to not acknowledge the brain's participation in all that we know and think - that we somehow can approach "reality" immediately and can by-pass thought somehow. Jud: I don't want to get into deep water here but it seems to me you are rejecting the Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenological approach whereby we are “bracketing” a priori knowledge of an entity and just viewing it as what our blinkered senses see it as before our eyes? For me it will always remain impossible to cut the cords of our human senses and view the world as it REALLY IS. Without human and animal eyes to view it the world may well exist in monochrome but who really cares? Whether we like it or not we are stuck with our model of reality as mediated my the particular senses [sensors] with which evolution [in its “wisdom”] has equipped us with in order that we may stand a better chance of survival. Of course our scientists have developed instruments by which we may “see” the worlds of infrared and ultra violet and lots more of nature that we might experience using our own eyes and ears. For me as a nominalist, shearing away the cloying obfuscatory [useful] garbage of abstraction as characterised by [cognitively lazy] abstract nouns, gerunds and adverbial gerundives allows us to venture as close as possible to approach the “reality” of which you speak, whereby the employment of these words and terms a la Heidegger only beckons us away from the exciting exploration of the hinterland twixt human understanding and the wondrous world of reality which lies at the outer fringes of our understanding. For me Heidegger is like some hollow eyes figure of the past who as you venture forward into the unknown tugs at your sleeve and whispers: “Come back” Come away!” Retreat with me to the comfort and contentment of the ancient inception of certainty” Steve: If this all stands - and we wish to affirm your theory of "existence" Jud: I have no theory of “existence,” for me there is no such thing. The only thing that exists [as Parmenides and Kotarbinski says] is that which exists, Steve: We are now if an odd position of affirming what exists from a "place" that does not exist! Jud: Yes, “place” does not exist but only that which exists at or in that place. Steve: This places "fiction" in a higher position than "fact" - which is just weird enough to keep me interested - but I suspect that it will not be acceptable to you. Jud: “Fact” for me equals: “That which has existed or exists in the way in which it really existed or exists.” I much prefer this way of looking at the world to: “Fiction” which for me equals: “That which has not existed or does not exist in the way in which it was said to exist or is said to exist. Are you SURE you prefer to live by the latter axiom? ÷) Take Care Cheers, Jud. <A HREF="http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/ ">http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/</A> Jud Evans - ANALYTICAL INDICANT THEORY. <A HREF="http://uncouplingthecopula.freewebspace.com">http://uncouplingthecopula.freewebspace.com</A> --- StripMime Warning -- MIME attachments removed --- This message may have contained attachments which were removed. Sorry, we do not allow attachments on this list. --- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- multipart/alternative text/plain (text body -- kept) text/html --- --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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