Consciousness: Where Are Words?
nybooks.com
Consciousness: Where Are Words?
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: Consciousness: Where Are Words?
#2[deleted]
Re: Consciousness: Where Are Words?
#3I'm 3 sentences into the interview, and this seems absurd on its face. Does anyone take this seriously?
"When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal relations with past events, objects that we have encountered before, to see what happens when we combine them. We don’t need a mental sofa to put next to a mental armchair. We allow the sofas and armchairs encountered in our past to exert an effect in the present, in various combinations."
Re: Consciousness: Where Are Words?
#4I'm 3 sentences into the interview, and this seems absurd on its face. Does anyone take this seriously? "When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal relations with past events, objects that we have encountered before, to see what happens when we combine them. We don’t need a mental sofa to put next to a mental armchair. We allow the sofas and armchairs encountered in our past to exer…
I had the same reaction, but you have to keep reading. He's building a stack. He's not saying that thoughts and mental images don't actually exist, it's that they don't exist before the game of language is played. And the game of language is turning sensations of physical objects into auditory representations of them. There's no reason to start constructing the abstract objects yet, we're not at that layer of the 'stack'.
It's kind of like saying that when you dive down to the network layer, video doesn't exist. It's up to the application running the network to assemble all the packets to turn it into video.
Thoughts are constructed from the stream of physical experiences that get formed into words, not the other way around. It's perfectly possible for the brain to still operate without thoughts the way we experience them, in fact, deaf people think visually rather than auditorially like most of us do.
Re: Consciousness: Where Are Words?
#5How about this question:
What is consciousness?
What is existence?
They seem to be duals of each other.
I have found that, if you are careful to state the subject and object of a sentence, then it's really hard to pose any question that doesn't have a trivial and obvious answer.
TRY IT!
So could many of these things just be an artifact of language?
Re: Consciousness: Where Are Words?
#6I'm 3 sentences into the interview, and this seems absurd on its face. Does anyone take this seriously? "When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal relations with past events, objects that we have encountered before, to see what happens when we combine them. We don’t need a mental sofa to put next to a mental armchair. We allow the sofas and armchairs encountered in our past to exer…
I had the same reaction, but you have to keep reading. He's building a stack. He's not saying that thoughts and mental images don't actually exist, it's that they don't exist before the game of language is played. And the game of language is turning sensations of physical objects into auditory representations of them. There's no reason to start constructing the abstract objects yet, we're not at that layer of the 'st…
That reasoning completely falls on its face though. AFAIK, Stroke patients whose language areas have been destroyed are still able to perform complex tasks.
You can think visually and procedurally (imagining actions) without putting things into words. IIRC Broca's area (which is responsible for grammar) may be related to the temporal planning of non-verbal actions though, so the above may be limited to Wernike's aphasia.
Re: Consciousness: Where Are Words?
#7I'm 3 sentences into the interview, and this seems absurd on its face. Does anyone take this seriously? "When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal relations with past events, objects that we have encountered before, to see what happens when we combine them. We don’t need a mental sofa to put next to a mental armchair. We allow the sofas and armchairs encountered in our past to exer…
[deleted]
Re: Consciousness: Where Are Words?
#8I'm 3 sentences into the interview, and this seems absurd on its face. Does anyone take this seriously? "When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal relations with past events, objects that we have encountered before, to see what happens when we combine them. We don’t need a mental sofa to put next to a mental armchair. We allow the sofas and armchairs encountered in our past to exer…
I had the same reaction, but you have to keep reading. He's building a stack. He's not saying that thoughts and mental images don't actually exist, it's that they don't exist before the game of language is played. And the game of language is turning sensations of physical objects into auditory representations of them. There's no reason to start constructing the abstract objects yet, we're not at that layer of the 'st…
I think it’s obvious that brains can operate without thoughts because animals and insects do it.
Re: Consciousness: Where Are Words?
#9Riccardo Manzotti's website:
Re: Consciousness: Where Are Words?
#10I'm 3 sentences into the interview, and this seems absurd on its face. Does anyone take this seriously? "When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal relations with past events, objects that we have encountered before, to see what happens when we combine them. We don’t need a mental sofa to put next to a mental armchair. We allow the sofas and armchairs encountered in our past to exer…
I had the same reaction, but you have to keep reading. He's building a stack. He's not saying that thoughts and mental images don't actually exist, it's that they don't exist before the game of language is played. And the game of language is turning sensations of physical objects into auditory representations of them. There's no reason to start constructing the abstract objects yet, we're not at that layer of the 'st…
He starts from an unfamiliar place, saying "there are no mental objects separate from real objects," and thinking is a process of re-experiencing these objects and rearranging them in our heads. Sounds pretty radical, but when he's done building his stack, it's all much more conventional. He doesn't mean physical objects so much as experiences, and physical experiences aren't replayed exactly in our heads but rather changed, rearranged, organized, and manipulated, and ways of organizing these experiences can be transmitted via language. So when he says, "Simply, there is no need to introduce this new entity, thought, between body and object," it is a little disingenuous because he is using words such as "experience" and "rearrangement" and "reorganization" to describe mental processes. At that point I lose track of what original point he's trying to make. I think when it comes down to it he is just making a big deal out of replacing nouns with verbs (and nouns more obviously made from verbs) to make it sound like he has a unique appreciation for the fact that what goes on in your head is dynamic rather than static.