What I’m trying to suggest is that there is no such thing as your mind and my mind. For purposes of convenience, and for want of a better and more adequate word, I can use the world mind. The world mind is the totality of man’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences passed down to us.
It is that world mind that has created you and me, for the sole, main purpose of maintaining its status quo, its continuity. That world mind, if I may use that word, is a self-perpetuating one, and its only interest is to maintain its continuity. It can maintain its continuity only through the creation of what we call the individual minds – your mind and my mind. So without the help of that knowledge, you have no way of experiencing yourself as an entity. You see, this so-called entity – the I, the self, the soul, the psyche, or whatever word you want to use – is created by that, and through the help of that you will be able to experience these things, and so we are caught up in this circle, that the knowledge gives you the experience, and the experience strengthens and fortifies that knowledge.
So, is it possible for you – let alone the mind, or the entity, or the I, or the self, or the soul, or whatever you want to call it – to experience without the help of that knowledge?
We have only these senses. There is no emanation of knowledge from the sensory perceptions. The knowledge that we have tells us what is happening.
It is necessary for us to have that knowledge; otherwise it is not possible for us to function sanely and intelligently. It helps us to function sanely and intelligently, and we have to accept the reality of the world as it is imposed on us. Otherwise we have no way of functioning sanely and intelligently; we will end up in the loony bin, singing merry melodies and loony tunes. So it is very essential for us to accept the reality of the world as it is imposed on us by culture, by society, or whatever you want to call it, and leave it at that, and treat it as functional in value, and it cannot help us to experience the reality of anything.
I may be starting to understand you. If I’m correct in my understanding, I don’t understand how what you say is any different from what others here have said. We have genetic memory that goes beyond racial memory (race being Homo sapien–although we have racial memory, as well). Our genetic memory is everything that ‘worked’ in our evolution. We pass on what worked–what didn’t work is ultimately lost. In this sense, all human minds are the same.
What I don’t understand is how you can go beyond that to say that any other reality, imposed on our inborn reality, “cannot help us to experience the reality of anything” or that there’s no reality at all.
finishedman, do you not admit that this world mind seems peculiarly associated with human beings? Every feeling, every thought can be correlated with a particular person, and if you happen to have an fMRI lying around, you can even correlate it with specific neuro-chemical activity in that person’s brain.
This also makes me wonder what you think of the (illusory?) separation between certain sets of thoughts, feelings, memories, etc. For example, I have a thought: “It’s damn cold out this morning!” I know that I thought that. I can remember that I did. I remember why I thought it (it was cold out this morning). But no one else knows that I had this thought. Know one else can recollect it. They have no memory of either me or themselves thinking it. I could lie to them and tell them that I never thought it, and they would probably believe me. If there is only this one world mind, why is there this apparent privacy of certain sets of thoughts, emotions, etc. that seems to keep it separate from other similar sets?
Are you thinking of this knowledge as an artifact of culture and civilization–like the idea of “transubstantiation” or “capitalism”–or could it be more of an innately/genetically grounded kind of knowledge–like the idea of “space” or “time” or “object”?
Even what you have to say (what you know) about that inborn reality would not exist to a ‘you’ without the knowledge had of it. You have no way of finding out on your own apart from the knowledge which gives a learned ‘reality’ to ‘you.’ iow, the knowledge does not belong to you; your brain did not create it; it was given to you, told to you.
First , there is an assumption on your part that there is a reality, and then, that there is something that you can do to experience that reality. Without the knowledge about reality, you have no experience of reality, that is for sure.
Society, or culture or whatever it is, is that which has created you and me for the purpose of the continuity of its status quo. To maintain itself is its interest so it is an imposition on us.
The body, is not separate from the totality of the universe or totality of nature, or whatever you want to call it. It is the thought that has created the body, a separate entity, and tells that this has a beginning, this has an end. This is the end that is the beginning. You see, it has created the space. Thought creates the space, thought creates the time. So it cannot conceive the possibility of anything outside the field of space and touch. Actually, the thought is the one that has created the space and experiences the space, but actually there is no such thing as space at all. What is there is a space-time-energy continuum, which is a continuum, but it has no end. You see, the thought cannot conceive of the possibility of a movement without a beginning and without this point where it is going to arrive someday or sometime. So there is the problem of the thought; its actions are limited to its perpetuation, its continuity, its permanence.
When you look at an object the knowledge you have about that object comes into your head. There is an illusion that thought is something different from objects, but it is you who creates the object. The object may be there, but the knowledge you have about that object is all that you know. Apart from that knowledge and independent of that knowledge, free from that knowledge, you have no way of knowing anything about it. You have no way of directly experiencing anything. The knowledge you have about it is all that is there and that is what you are experiencing. Really, you do not know what it is.
So you say the concept of “self” is imposed on us by society, but in saying that
you didn’t say where that thought comes from. From society too?
That would answer my question.
What do you imagine a man thinking if he never comes into contact with other people? Does he think at all? Suppose he does think. What does he think of his body? Does he imagine “This strange objects seems to always accompany and envelope the point of view from which the world is experienced.”? Do you suppose that if “self” is a concept invented by a community, it is a natural outgrowth that emerges early on in any communities history? So, for example, if you dropped off a group of infants on some deserted island, and somehow they were able to fend for themselves, eeking out a survival, would they eventually, and naturally, develop a self of selfhood as a cumulative effect of all the information exchanges that go on between them? A word equivalent to the English “self”? If you think this, I would agree that it could be social, but not without a biological/genetic component.
You didn’t answer my question about how certain sets of thoughts seem to be kept secluded from other sets of thoughts.
Well, I’ve said before that there may be something like ‘mind’ without having the knowledge about it. I guess some kind of primordial form of consciousness (similar to what was there before self consciousness came along … assuming evolution) that is more in tune with nature would guide them. For them, anything beyond the satisfaction of basic needs would probably be something that required past experiences to help them out in understanding. You see, for us now, somebody had those experiences before and as children we were told of them, they’re shared and passed down. That ‘reality’ is a design that has been and continues to be developed as more and more is added to the thought sphere. That’s the sphere of knowledge that makes up the world mind.
The stimulus response mechanism is a unitary movement that happens regardless of an experience of it. I don’t think it can be experienced. Can it be? Thought has to come in between; memory cells (knowledge) have to be activated for there to be a subject there to experience the objects. Otherwise how could you experience something you know nothing about? Now, in that regard I see the brain as a computer machine. Input has to be there. Yet, when we speak of the body and its feelings, thought cannot help the body, which is physical, solve those problems. They are physical in nature like pain and so on. The physical body will only honor a physical solution. You know, sometimes one thought can have an effect on almost every cell of the body. And then the body tries to reject that and absorb the disturbance. The human organism seems to always seek a smooth and peaceful functioning and thought can be an impediment to that and can even destroy you. I don’t know, Gib, there I go blah blah blah … maybe you could answer the question for me … I keep going off.
Well, you seem to be going through all the usually suspects of your beliefs–the scripts in your mind, that is–hoping that an answer to my questions will emerge out of that. I guess that’s your style of discourse. It’s different from mine, and most people’s, which is to put it through a kind of syllogism: I have my beliefs X, you ask a question “under condition Y, what would X entail?” and I go through the syllogism “X is the case. If Y, then…” and see what logic would conclude.
so, for example, if I ask “What would happen if a man is raised in the wild, never once coming into contact with other people? Would he ever have knowledge of anything? Would he even come up with concepts like ‘rock,’ ‘birds,’ ‘food,’ etc.?”
If I’m asking this in the context of your views, I would try to answer: “If finishedman is right, and all knowledge and thought are only possible given a social context into which the individual is plugged, then the answer to my question must be ‘no’–that is, a man raised in the wild having never talked to or seen another human being in his whole life, could not have any knowledge or thought of anything.” ← that, of course, is a direct answer to my question.
Now, of course, many further questions follow (as I know you’re fond of pointing out ), many objections and implications. I would probably ask “Well, then, how does this man survive? How does he know to distinguish between what’s food and what’s not food? What’s a predator and what isn’t? How could he make his way through the world without at least being able to identify and distinguish between things, a skill that would seem to require concepts and knowledge of the world?” And the answer might be: he wouldn’t. It is essential to his survival that man develop within some community just in order to stimulate the development, in his brain, of thought and knowledge. ← but that’s getting ahead of ourselves.
Gib: there have been many cases of feral children, who did attain modicums of "knowledge"
Knowledge can be defined as familiarity with someone or some thing–which can include facts, information, skills, intuition and other things. Animals do have knowledge in some of these respects. The OP implies a universal mind, so who is to say where the real boundaries between types of knowledge lay?
A materialism tries to mediate between an ideal, singular notion of "knowledge qua consciousness) and a realistic, objective, scientific one. There may appear to be if any, only very loosely organized boundaries, if any.
That is a distortion of course of what actually can happen. Recognizing something without naming it is just as effective as being given knowledge of it. Just because we would not know what a mind is/does it does not mean that something like that is not there.
I wasn’t setting you up for anything; I was trying to show you how I expect discourse to unfold. Not that you have any obligation to conform to my expectations, but this was in response to you saying that you “keep going off” and that I might as well answer the question for you.
So for you, knowledge is only something that can be given? And it’s equivalent to “naming”? I agree that if a person were to survive away from civilization, they would have no need for language, and therefore never develop it. If this is what “knowledge” is to you, then I’m in agreement. But I consider knowledge to be an artifact of cognition, not language, and I think one would still have to think about what one needs or can do in order to survive, even on their own. Recognizing what’s food and what isn’t, what’s a predator and what isn’t, is an exercise in thinking, and with enough experiences with the world, one can learn, and this to me counts as knowledge.
I’m not saying that there is no awareness that thought is being used by each individual. We use that world mind, or societal mind (that sphere of knowledge), to be able to experience each other. It provides a ‘reality’ for us to utilize, to have the ability to communicate by means of a common domain of info.
Also, when I use the word ‘self,’ it implies that there is something separate from the functioning of the living organism; an entity which is guiding, operating and taking care of you.
We humans come into the world completely helpless. We know little more than how to breathe and how to cry. Animals, on the other hand, stagger to their feet within minutes of birth and begin to take on the world. They instinctively know how to get nourishment from their mothers. Life is a struggle; only the fittest survive. A human child is ill-equipped to face the world on its own.
Self-consciousness or separation of ourselves from the world around us occurs, they say, — I am not competent enough to say anything — around the eighteenth month of the child. Until then the child cannot separate itself from whatever is happening there inside and outside of itself. What creates the inside and the outside, or what creates the division between the inside and the outside is the movement of thought. Few, if any, children who have grown up in the wild are reported to have ever learned language. Scientists now believe that nearly all babies are born with the ability to learn to speak. But in order to master language, they have to start it during the critical period of their formative years. If they were to lose the ability to communicate, how would any rational structured thought emerge? How would they see the world?
Language is the expression of thought, not the foundation. But it’s true that language helps to build further, more complex and abstract, thought. I doubt I could ever grasp the difficult concepts of time dilation that relativity proposes, or those of superposition and indeterminism that quantum theory proposes, without the language of physics that many experts in the field have used to explain these ideas to me. I doubt I would ever have imagined these concept on my own–much less if I were raised by wolves. I do believe the potential is there in principle, as I believe you can build anything with thought in principle, but it would never happen in practice without being immersed in language and a community that uses it.
Nevertheless, I think the more basic concepts like water, trees, animals, etc. would be furnished without the aid of language. Thought is essential just to survive. The imagination is what we have used to conduct thought experiments, such as how to get coconuts out of tall trees, or how to catch fish, for the longest time. I have wondered about the utility of abstract thought as a tool to solve these kinds of problems, and I’m bit more skeptical about whether abstraction is just as useful to our survival, if at all, as our more concrete thoughts. There is still the question, however, of whether our concrete thoughts can develop completely outside civilization; just because we need them for survival doesn’t mean we were ever pressed to use them outside civilization–that is, having always been outside civilization (I can imagine someone being banned from their tribe, but only after they’ve gone through that critical period of learning language–if an infant ever had to fend for him- or herself outside the tribe, it’s hard to imagine he or she would ever survive even with thought).
So, as I’ve tried to stress previously, this ‘self’ along with its mind, thought, and other such abstract attributes, is mainly a product of culture or society or whatever you want to call it. We have to accept the reality as it is imposed on us by the society because it is very essential for us to function in this world intelligently and sanely. If we don’t accept that reality, we are lost. We will most likely end up being institutionalized. So we have to accept the reality as it is imposed on us by the culture, by society or whatever you want to call it.
Because we have learned about the concept of ‘reality’ from the knowledge we acquired and have been able to verbalize our conceptualizations of it, questions about reality arise out of that knowledge. Apart from that knowledge, we would have no field of info from which a question can be formulated. But life can surely go on without it. So we don’t need to ask the question. We don’t need the knowledge about reality other than what we have been told.
I know you’ve stressed this previously, finishedman. You’ve stressed it a thousand times all over ILP. The problem is not everyone fully agrees with you.
But do you think that a man raised in the wild would never look around at his surroundings and understand that he’s in a world? That there are surroundings? Could he not mentally take in all the elements of his environment and thinking of them collectively, as a whole? Is this not at least a proto-reality?
I’ll agree that society significantly embelishes our concepts of reality. I doubt the wild man would ever contemplate galaxies, quasars, Big Bangs, and an expanding cosmos, or perhaps reality as a divinely created realm with that divinity outside it watching over us, but surely he sould have the mental ability to look at his surroundings and at least recognize a world.
What I think would be from the perspective of a self consciousness that’s formed from what I call a thought-sphere. The thought-sphere is the totality of man’s experiences, thoughts, and feelings passed on to us from generation to generation. In this context I want to mention that the brain is not a creator, but only a reactor. It is only reacting to stimuli. What is called thought is only the activity of the neurons in the brain. In other words, thought is memory. A stimulus activates the brain through the sensory perceptions and then brings memory into operation. It is nothing marvelous. It is just a computer with a lot of garbage put in there. So it is not a creator.
The brain is not interested in solving any of the problems created by us. It is singularly incapable of dealing with the problems created by thought (like your thought experiment above). Thought is outside and it is extraneous to the brain. Just as it is incapable of contemplating or thinking about things more detailed … and inasmuch as your question is born out of answers/knowledge that you already have … the brain cannot and did not create the knowledge or the context from which an understanding can be derived to answer your question. I question whether unprocessed raw data from sensory stimulation can be ‘understood’ without something in the past (memory) to guide or create that understanding.
Thought is very protective of itself, it wants to maintain itself and that is probably why any experimentation concerning raising a human being deprived of its contribution is forbidden and considered abusive.
I’ll take this as a ‘no’ (as in, “no, gib, a man raised in the wild will never understand that he’s in a world as no one has ever taught him what a ‘world’ is”). But then again, maybe I should take it as a “I don’t know” given that you said:
In any case, if the invention of answers to these kinds of questions is never a creative process, how did all these answers and knowledge and thoughts come about in the first place? Someone had to create them in order to deploy them into the thought-sphere in the first place, didn’t they?
We don’t know the beginnings of it. We are caught up in the field of logical thinking, and that there is no beginning, that there is no end, is something which shatters the whole fabric, the foundation of our logical thinking.
), many objections and implications. I would probably ask “Well, then, how does this man survive? How does he know to distinguish between what’s food and what’s not food? What’s a predator and what isn’t? How could he make his way through the world without at least being able to identify and distinguish between things, a skill that would seem to require concepts and knowledge of the world?” And the answer might be: he wouldn’t. It is