Meno
Right, I think we can understand both outer, and inner reality directly, without processing or filtering it through labels or categories, or making comparisons.
We use categories to infer things about stuff, or for convenience, because sometimes it’s too much trouble to understand things as they are, in their entirety, we need to simplify them, or for the purposes of communication, to make things articulable, we attempt to assign them the right category or word, often pre-emptively, before we’re going to talk about them with others.
Yea, I think we can think about stuff without being very aware of our thinking, or how we’re thinking about it, the thought processes involved, or why we’re thinking about it.
And we may think about something briefly, and then forgot we were thinking about it shortly afterward.
Right, just as we can be aware of things without assigning them labels, we can be aware of our consciousness without assigning it labels, or we can be partly, perhaps even fully unaware of our consciousness, we may be so caught up in the contents of consciousness, we kind of forget ourselves in the process.
I think we can understand things directly, literally as they are, the stuff of sensation, and the stuff of introspection, sensually, introspectively.
We also symbolize things in dreams, in poetry and poetric thinking, but that’s something a little different than what I’m talking about, I was talking about direct, unfiltered awareness.
But there is a kind of dream language, poetry, and it may be partly innate, partly malleable.
It’s a more sensual form of labelling, to symbolize groups of images, sounds, smells and so on with archetypal things, like how a sunset symbolizes enlightenment, or a river change.
Kind of like how the Egyptians wrote in hieroglyphs, pictographs, it’s more primordial and, organic to symbolize stuff artistically than with words and numbers.
We probably thought like this way before language evolved, and every night during REM we return to this mode of thought, which is often difficult for the linguistic brain to decipher, to make heads or tails of in the morning, that is if it can even recall any of it.