First, just calm down.

Second, you clearly have gotten off on some tangent in your mind and are not communicating it very effectively.

In other words, your thoughts are you, your body is not.

But if you are just trying to be an ass I don't really have any desire to play along. There are already enough asses in this forum to play with.

I am still not getting it, sorry.

And since it is common practice to refer to our bodies as us (keeping in mind that I never denied thoughts can also be ours), I find this statement odd. If I had a glass of water in my hand, wouldn't you acknowledge that it was I who had a glass of water in my hand? If someone asked you if you were typing on the computer tonight, and you in fact had been typing on the computer tonight, would you say "no" to that person because you don't consider yourself to be your body?

Quote:
Originally Posted by north
what I mean is that instinct became anticipation of instictual behaviour of other animals




the behavior of the prey , is understood and therefore anticipated > thought , the origin of thought

No one has disputed this. Only the saying. See somewhere along the line you ASSUMED that the saying and my own beliefs are one and the same.

Read the beginning of our conversation again, I am sure you will see where you went wrong.

It is within your original post, so, it's fair to think that you were considering it true. You also seemed to be defending it, especially with comments such as, "It seemed pretty accurate for a lot of people to say that the stars moved across the night sky as well.", implying that we may be surprised in the future that we are wrong (about my water glass example). All I did was ask for an argument, if you indeed thought I was wrong. But you misinterpreted that as me being hostile and an ass, evidently.

But no matter if it is your position or not, we both should understand why, if your understanding of that quote is correct, that quote is flawed. Right?

Okay well, I am pretty much fine with the quote and my understanding of it. So you think it is flawed?

Is the reason you think the quote is flawed because you think you are your body? so far all you have suggested is that because you need to sustain your body, your body is who you are. Is there more to it than that, or is that your reasoning?

Trismegisto,

Ask yourself the question, what makes you you? There are things such as personhood, quality of being human (as opposed to being a machine, or an animal), or perhaps one might argue, quality of being an animal. There are many things. But all that can be verified can be reduced to things that are of this Earth.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche says, "a thought comes when it wants, not when I want".

To me this says that it is not any I that is in control of much of who I am, but it is the body which is. So, we can at least say that the body does have a contribution towards what it means to be you.

As to whether there is more to it, there could very well be, but then again, I think this mainly depends on what word you wish to define. 'You' is a very vague word and doesn't really get us anywhere. Personhood might be better, because it is less vague, but it remains hard to apply. It might be better to determine what you're trying to understand by describing it first, and then finding the right word to use late.

As far as this thread goes, the "origin of thought" tells what we're trying to understand. To use words like 'you' or 'consciousness' or 'Self', well, if one does want to answer the question of where thoughts come from, we first need a word that can actually contain something.

What I mean is, consciousness is not the word to use, because consciousness is just consciousness. You can't describe consciousness without getting into what isn't consciousness anymore, at least, as long as you want to remain verifiable.

You are keen to keep us on our toes remaining verifiable, and yet I cannot understand some things you're suggesting such as "physical sphere". So there are others. Ok. Why should I believe there are others?

If the thoughts themselves are the thinkers, why do we need to consider things outside of the physical sphere?

Except of course for thoughts, emotions, ideas and other intelligibles. These aspects of ourselves cannot be reduced to things for they are not things.

Well first off, the quote is fundamentally flawed. Secondly, the body is merely the tool for interaction, granted your ability to interact is based entirely on the limits of your body. Just as anything you attempt to accomplish in the physical sphere is limited by the tools available to you.

The definition is only as difficult as we make it.

I would suggest concentrating more on the ideas being conveyed than the words used to convey them. If we accept the words strictly in the context for what they are being used it is much easier for us to effectively communicate.

Again, we have all the words we'll ever need. The trick is to distinguish our personal baggage from what is being communicated to us. For instance, if I say GOD IS GOOD, a I will get a whole host of replies bringing why the judeo-christian god is not good or that first I need to define god.

Verifiable is for scientists, philosophers deal with understandable.
Science has to be proven, philosophy has to be disproven.

I don't think you are quite understanding it yet. YOU are the thought, YOU are the thinker. YOU exist outside of the physical sphere.

Realize that this opinion goes against everything that is happening in neuroscience, psychology, much of nanotechnology, some of hardware engineering, anthropology, anesthesiology, kinesiology, etc.

Perhaps something cannot wholly be reduced to a thing that can be fully defined and completely accurate to what actually happens in reality, but this is because of limits in our ability to put into a language that which happens in reality, not limits in reality's ability to communicate truth into the conduct of our made up language.

Don't we ascribe an "existing noun" with the quality of being a thing, and not that the thing is a thing (or not a thing) innately?

How can we define something, and be able to work with it, without first ascribing it some sort of quality of its having thingness?

Wouldn't anything we talk about have to be put in the context of being considered a thing before it can be, well, talked about? Language will see to it no other way. And therefore if something is not a thing, then, how would we communicate it?

What is the usefulness in calling it the physical sphere when the physical sphere envelops all there is?

But wouldn't you agree that we cannot simply choose the difficulty of the definition when the definition is only meant to serve the purpose of accurately gauging what it is we're trying to say, or in this case, understand?

Quote:

What I am saying is that the person being communicated to must use the definition of the person doing the communication. If the person being communicated to brings their own baggage along the definition gets muddled and the communication gets lost.

Holiday20310401;151208 wrote:

But what if we don't know what they are being used for, let alone how they are being read as?

Then we say, "what do you mean?"

Holiday20310401;151208 wrote:

It's not just a matter of how the words are being used, it also having the ability to stick with what is objectively clear about the word. If an intuition between individuals is enough for making the definition objectively clear, then there is no problem not defining the word, and I agree it may simply do more harm than good to try defining the word further.

Words are tricky, they change over time and you never know which definition for a word a person is using. If a person tried to communicate using only the original definitions of words they probably would not make a whole lot of sense to someone using only the modern definition of words. That's why we have to go with whatever definition the communicator is using.

Holiday20310401;151208 wrote:

I completely agree.

Well, that's always a good start.

Holiday20310401;151208 wrote:

Holiday20310401;151208 wrote:

Maybe we're not ready for philosophy in this topic then, yet.

I don't think you give yourselves enough credit. All it takes is a little conscious contemplation... all the time.

Holiday20310401;151208 wrote:

Yes but how did you arrive at this? If you want me to arrive at the same conclusion you'll have to tell me how to do it.

Knowledge of Understanding is arrived at through Conscious Contemplation of Experience. Anyone can do it as long as they are willing to put in the work.

If I repeated the question, would you think me rude? I have absolutely no clue what you mean. Thoughts are the being? Do you mean thoughts exist? Well, that seems true. So do bodies.

I guess what he is saying is that much like the Dawkins or one of his contemporaries writes, 'the body is a flesh tank for the DNA', Tris is thinking that the body is a flesh tank for the thought. I am assuming from other posts of his/hers that s/he means mind/spirit.

I see, well, I don't think I can agree with that then. I see instinct rather as the autonomic functions of keeping the tool of the body alive and not relating to thought at all other than perhaps be influenced by thought, or, rather, supressed by thought.

The problem with this understanding is that it has no usefulness.

Isn't 'reality' just the Self's method for ascribing a usefulness to truth?

Any pre-existence of reality without a perceiver is really another way of saying what the parameters are which usefulness can have. I know this is not a very well explained statement, but it's practically a truism that we must stick within these parameters if the statement is not only true, but also, of course, useful.

Now I'm really getting vague here, but a way one could "bypass" the parameters issue is to create their own reality, but then, the usefulness of any emerging truths discovered are restricted to the domain of this new reality. In other words, the restriction would be that the truths are at least largely subjective, and as a result, more difficult to be useful.

Though I know I didn't explain myself very well at all, this to me, is the problem here.

Quote:
Originally Posted by north
Quote:
Originally Posted by north http://www.philosophyforum.com/image...s/viewpost.gif
what I mean is that instinct became anticipation of instictual behaviour of other animals




the behavior of the prey , is understood and therefore anticipated > thought , the origin of thought




think of the hunter

As science has yet to provide any evidence as to the origin of thought, what are your thoughts on the subject.

Perhaps the thoughts themselves are the thinkers.

This is probably one of the hardest problems that scientists have in their repertoire of the unanswerable. Right now there is no grand unified theory of brain function, but there is an extreme amount of data from the sciences. However, to think that eventually a theory will spring out of the data would be incredibly naive. Theories are interpretations of data and not merely generalizations over data. Circuit diagrams and flowcharts are not theories. With that being said I know of a few theories regarding brain function and how neural ensembles work.

I think the first idea to come about was Van Heerden's Holographic Data Storage back in the 60's. The idea proposed that information appeared to be distributed among collections of neurons. While intruiging, the idea didnt manage to explain much of anything -not even storage and retrieval among neurons. However, the metaphor did manage to catalyze further theorizing in the PDP models.

Tensor Network Theory seems very prominent in explaining senorimotor control, especially in the cerebellum. This theory is very appealing (to me) because it managed to transform one vector into another vector from any viewpoint or frame of reference via mathematical function into a matrix. Thus being more objective in nature and computationally driven. Pellionisz saw neural ensembles as actually representing coordinate systems.

Francis Crick originated the hypothesis of Attentional Operation which proposes that "sequential bursting activity of thalamic cells is the operation of the 'searchlight', and the effect of bursting response is to enable the formation of temporary cell assemblies by virtue of fine-time coincidence in firing." Basically, the reticular complex of the thalamus controls the searchlight, and its expressed by certain oscillations of the thalamic neurons.

Last, but not least, is the Parallel Distributed Processing model which is also known as Connectionism, which is also known as a Neural Network. These models stress learning algorithms so Im guessing it follows the sentential paradigm or 'rules' but Im not entirely sure. What connectionism is trying to do is abandon conventional methods that the brain/mind is similar to a computer's hardware/software (i.e. sequential symbol manipulation). This view seems to be the most promising. A short read of all of these topics can be found here.

(It should be noted that most connectionists use the recurrent processing models over the feedfordward models because the former seems to represent brain processing more accurately.)

As science has yet to provide any evidence as to the origin of thought, what are your thoughts on the subject.

Perhaps the thoughts themselves are the thinkers.

Thought = the logical or rational organization of consciousness.

Created by that which is the cause: you, the universe, other people, God, etc...

Originally Posted by north
Quote:
Originally Posted by north [URL="http://www.philosophyforum.com/images/PHBlue/buttons/viewpost.gif"]http://www.philosophyforum.com/image...s/viewpost.gif[/URL]
Quote:
Originally Posted by north http://www.philosophyforum.com/image...s/viewpost.gif
what I mean is that instinct became anticipation of instictual behaviour of other animals




the behavior of the prey , is understood and therefore anticipated > thought , the origin of thought




think of the hunter

I don't understand this, can you elaborate?