I think that this deserves a new thread of its own.
Yeah, I avoid this portion of the forum because I usually talk about psychology, and Magsj hates my attempts to post, as any meaningful attempt to talk about psychology is off topic.
Plato’s dialectics tries to balance out and sort this sort of stuff. Patanjali does something similar. I assume the latter cane first, but we are still stuck with it being historically Mesopotamian.
Your tackling reflective movements of the mind… logic, our hard wiring, over defined assumptions (such as Turtle’s constant request ‘So What is your definition of God’ grafted to an Axiomatic Structure, which itself is limited and contradictory.
Many people believe definition and word formation is intelligence. For them, it is. They don’t think visually. Other people think visually, but can’t hear that damn voice in their head talking, thinking.
Some people do both, about 40 percent of the population.
Depending on your meditative exercise, certain things you can and can’t do… they were each developed by a different style thinker. I literally get no value from Zen meditation… once the light drops, my visual cortex lights up with hypogogic hallucinations of one form or another, and I can literally see my frontal eye fields. A constant stream of visual information is extremely easy for me, no concentration at all, and I can manipulate and morph it.
Alot of Swedenborg’s fake as shit visions was him just writing what he imagined, I wrote out his work “Conjugal Love” as a screen play, scene by scene, noting the people he saw and their numbers, environment… it all came out as gibberish when I looked at it and imagined it as he would… he was lucid imagining at a slow pace, hyperfocusing on aspects, but logically filling in the sequencing for the rest.
Some people do daydream continuously though, but behaviorally they tend not to fit in… very impulsive, stunts… running amok. Get into trouble… they don’t know why they do things, very excitable socialites good mannered people know to avoid… they like to get Stoked. Rad, awesome, high five, this would really look great on you, styling kind of guys.
I don’t like to use the word ‘think’ in this context. I prefer to see it as a brain process activity, (a small but important) part of which involves ‘thinking’, that is, rational or more or less deductive reasoning, as is commonly understood. I say that because a lot of brain processes are arational. But are all brain processes goal oriented or have a purpose? That is my question. Does day dreaming, for example, have a goal? Can a brain process be a “blind/disconnected” program running in the background? For example, there are cases where a person, perhaps due to his childhood programming, repeats the same self-destructive behaviors. Is there a purpose to such repetition-compulsion, as Freud would call it, or is it a case of a broken record, playing and playing simply because it was programmed to do so? Is there some kind of intelligence running behind the awareness and on some level knows what it’s doing? Or not.
The process of communicating is usually not rational or language based: an artist may attempt to communicate his state of mind through a painting or music; and a big part of person-to-person communication occurs though body language. Is such communication a type of thinking? I would say that instinctual reflexes or other forms of non-language based communication are not ‘thinking’ in traditional sense of the word. If there is some kind of thinking going on I would be more comfortable calling it a goal-oriented brain process, in which traditional language based thinking is only small part.
I am not talking about the reflections only. That is why i gave the examples of deaf and dumb people and animals. What is their language of mind?
Definition and word formation is certainly intelligence but that is not all that forms intelligence.
There is not much difference in seeing and hearing, or even touching, smelling or tasting. Mind has only one language for all those sensations. We use to see it differently beacuse we have sepcialized body parts to sense specific sensations. For mind, it does not matter whether body sees anything or hear anything. It is all the same.
The actual and the only language of the mind is feeling.
Our invented languages are the medium of communication, not thinking. Having said that, they become handy when it comes to detailing.
For normal persons (those are not blind), the default medium of the feeling is vision. They have no option but to think via vision. For blinds, sound becomes the default medium. Note that by sound, i do not mean words or language. And, in the same way, for those who cannot either see or hear, touch becomes the default medium.
It looks a bit odd how touch can be a language of the mind, but it is true in the case of blind and deaf persons. They understand everything but touch only.
If you do not believe that we think via vision, i would like to offer you a simple experiment.
Take any sentence of some words, like i do not believe in the God. Now, close your eyes and mouth, repeat it very slowly in your mind and try to see how you hear it.
As soon as you try to hear it, those words will automatically pop up in your mind.
You just cannot hear those without seeing, no matter how hard or many times you will try.
Now, take a different route and choose any picture or the face of any person.
Just as you have done before, close your eyes and mouth and try to see that picture in your mind. Now, in this case, you will be able to see it without any words.
This proves that the vision is more important for the mind than sound.
No surprise.
As meditation is nothing but concentration, thus it would be very difficult to get anything from it for the any person of your nature. It needs a lot of patience, which you lack the most.
CN, do not go there. That is not your forte and it would be difficult for you to comprehand all that.
What i mean by Visions is not the same as you are assuming. It is not about imagination or day dreaming.
with love,
sanjay
Sanjay, Zen meditation requires neither Concentration or Patience. If you think this, your doing the various systems in use wrong. Reason why is because I can literally see my frontal eye fields. Most people can’t. When I zone out, they take center stage. This is a very perplexing issue, similar to voltage vs amps issues when wire is coiled. Just where I sit naturally in the mind. You confuse my personality with where imagination… your images themselves are generated, and the receiving apparatus. I literally don’t think as the receiving apparatus when I meditate via Zen instruction… but can feel five different brain centers eradically puttering, and two of them are in competition in my frontal eye fields while a third shines through. I also get blinding white light here too sometimes. I followed their stupid lateralization methods, sat in the posture… I was already aware of the symmetrical dissonance when you move various parts out of alignment. It’s literally what the SMA does, it’s at the forefront of my thinking style in the first place.
Anyway, Indian texts blow too, been through the forest treatises, and its elementary, prefrontal SMA stuff I nailed when a little kid. I am telling you, with more authority than you can ever muster in your life, the Zen variety of meditation doesn’t do squat. I read more Dogen than you, guaranteed. No more silliness in this regard. I’m still waiting from San Jose at the Nicheran Temple a monk is doing research on this issue… they have a text with forty different cognitive meditation techniques, yet to be translated from Japanese. So maybe. I am a very rare personality type, it appears most meditative techniques actually try to GET TO my area of he brain. I can’t help that.
And your assumption sound overtakes vision is a Vedic assumption. This isn’t correct, save as a historic factoid of a Sensorium of Vedic literature (Sensorium is a fairly recent term coined to map out the anthropology of the senses in theological texts, a kind of proto-hermeneutics).
It was mentioned at the beginning of the Srimad Bhagavatam, by the commentator Swami Prahbupada. I did research into the underlining assumption, it comes from the main source of the transmission of knowledge used in Ancient India, writ memorization of works chanted between teacher and students. Few learn this way anymore. Clearly sound has been overcome by vision, but never completely. We mix it up.
It seems like the main point of the OP is that one can think without words (grammar, etc.) This seems clear to me. In fact one can ‘find’ this underneath and around linguistic thinking. Dreams are a kind of thinking or processing or one can come up with another term if one wants. A lot of people identify with their linguistic thinking and think that this is who they are and also that what is written on the page in their minds - iow the words and concepts they are conscious of - is a good representation of what they believe and think and how they draw conclusions and so on. I think this is not the case. This is the tip of the iceberg.
But one point I would like to make is that language has incredible effects on the non-linguistic portions of the mind. Though there are parts that are outside of these effects also.
It can only have effect on aspects of the mind… hence Kriswest and my squabble on language. For example, in christian mysticism, the theoria-theosis divide is where language stops as we know it in the mind, but some of the operations we assume naturally to be linguistic, such as apophatic or cataphatic thinking can still occur without language, as well as its paradoxical opposite, a feeling of space in terms of dimensions, minus a visual representation.
Sorry Pandora,
I do not know i missed your post and replied to CN first.
Thinking does not ential philosophy and needs not to be goal oriented all the time.
As you rightly mentioned, day draming, imagination and fantasizing are also thinking.
I would like to ask the same question again.
Can any blind and deaf person think or not, consodering that he does not know any language?
I did not say that language is the only way of communication but one way of communication. There may be many others also, as you rightly mentioned. But, communication is not an isolated phenomenon but the result of thinking.
There cannot be any communiation possible without thinking. One has to think before he communicates. Comunication, whether language, art or even body language is merely an expression of one’s thinking.
with love,
sanjay
CN,
I am extremely sorry but have to say that sometimes your posts become so impertinent and childish that i just find myself unable how to deal with those. This very post is the prime example of that.
Well, that is even below being childish.
It is bit like saying that 1 and 0 are not necessary for the mathematics.
CN, you are really a unique piece and like a jewel in the crown of ILP.
with love,
sanjay
Exactly. That is what i am trying to say but i do not know why people cannot grasp this simple thing.
I am surprised why the example of a blind and deaf person does not come to their mind!
Words and languages are not real but artificial and can be replaced easily by other alternatives. We experience or feel something and either for reference, memory or communication, we give it an mutually agreed artificial audible sound. That is language, nothing else. It has nothing to do with thinking.
The mind cannot manifest language or even thinking out from the blue. There must be something to provoke the mind and start the process of thinking. That is sensation or feeling and that is precisely the only language of the mind.
Then mind finds those agreed sounds from the memory, which correspond that particular feeling. And, after going through those in the context of the latest feeling and making any adjustments or amendments if required, the procdess reverses and latst entry of feeling is saved in the memory in front of that particular sound or set of sounds. Thus, the process continues, back and forth. But, this happens so instantly that we cannot realize that in normal conditions but only in extraordinay circumstances, but only if we are competent enough.
Furthermore, this translation of feeling to sounds and sounds to feeling is a never ending process. Language is some kind of software that first mind learns to present its feeling and then amends it continuously. There cannot be any better and more efficeint software programmer than the human mind.
But, over the time in the life, we become so habitual of these outer languages, that they become some sort of our identity. Our real identity is that part what feel anything, neither think nor communicate.
I think that Desecrates got is wrong when he said - I think, therefore I am. It should be rather - I feel, therefore I am.
It is slightly different, not completely.
Language helps in thinking. It speeds up the process and allows complexity too, because in some cases, a single word represent a lenthy or complicated feeling. Though, its opposite is also true.
And, there is no part of the mind that is outside the influence of our spoken languages. Actually, for our convience of understanding, we can say that the mind is devided into two parts. it is something like a two layered ball. The inner core part feels while outer part does all other related works and there is a connector between those two. But, no important event can be addressed by outer mind only. All important information, that deserves thinking, has to travel at the core of the mind and only then allows to rebound.
with love,
sanjay
Well it is a part of a kind of thinking, it’s just not the limit of thinking.
sensation including potentially all the sense and certainly images are important.
For me it is not that one is real and the other is not. I consider boht part of the self, but what is kept in language is often a small part. And the non-linguistic parts of the self have reasons often for going along with this self-image. (My thoughts on this get a lot more complicated, but that’s a tastes)
Yes, I have said that myself. If I think something, I may on another level think the opposite. This can also be true of emotions. If I think I am angry I may in fact be afraid. But to me that latter seems more easily unraveled, given how much our thoughts get jammed into us by parents, media, and so on.
I more or less agree, though my metaphors would likely be different.
But not all communication is conscious. Most of non-verbal body language happens below the level of conscious awareness. It is made up of instinctual reactions produced by limbic brain. They are hardwired and purely reflexive (involuntary), therefore they are not considered a process of thinking.
I found this pertinent with the thread hence including.
Like many his other permises, Freud got this wrong too. That is not the reason for the lessening of the patients suffering from personal problems. The actual reason is very simple, actually too simple to be noticed. And, Intellectuals presumed that it cannnot/should not be that simple.
Let me take an simple anology to explain my point.
- Say that you are in a dark room and someone lights a bulb of 10 watts. As there is no other light there, thus even that light bulb of 10 watts appears very bright.
- Now, someone also lights another bulb of 100 watts alongside that previous 10 watt bulb. It is quite obvious that now that first bulb will not be appeared as bright as it was looking alone.
- Now, a halogen light of 2000 watt is also lighted along with those two bulbs. Now, what will happen? One can perhaps see the 100 watt bulb to some extent but certainly not the first 10 watt bulb, even though it is still lighting there.
That smallest 10 watt bulb is still omitting light, which is still hitting the ratina. Thus, going stictly by the theory, the mind is still seeing that bulb, but in reality, the observer cannot see that.
Why?
Exactly the same happen with any type of feeling/emotions/sensations.
[b]The fact of the matter is that there is only one feeling entity/portion in the mind, not many and that is different from the analyzing entity. This is the precise point where Freud faults as he assumes that mind is a single unified entity.
it is not possible for the mind to focuss/feel many things at the same time. It has to choose and the decision always favors the strongest feeling. It is not much different from what happens in gravitation in physical objects. As we all know that if we place a small object just between two other heavy objects having different mass, the original object will ignore the less heavy object and move towards the heavier one.
Feeling also respect gravitation and not only that, all [true]laws of physcis also applies to metaphysical entities also.[/b]
with love,
sanjay
I’d hazard a guess that mood is the language of the mind.
Not part exactly but something like that.
Once there was DOS. then XP comes, then Vista and now windows 8.1. The software becomes more advanced and complex but still they use binary language, 1 and 0. That does not changed a bit.
It all starts from feeling. When feeling becomes complex, thinking is menifested. And, when thinking becomes complex and needs to be communicated, the languages are invented. And, when language becomes complex, we started giving names to them. The basic pemise never changes but gets more and more complex after every stage.
Take a word, rape. It is single word but if you will break it down to the level of linguistic explanation, it would need a sentense or even some sentences. For explaning rape, first you have to explain sex, then the pleasure one gets from it, then how power is misused for it and so on. Now, you have to think of every word of those sentences. Then, you have to imagine the corresponding feeling of every word in your mind.
And, all this actually happens but while dealing with the concept of rape for the first few times. Then, by practice and in due time, mind registers the sum of all those feeling in the front of the rape world and thus some sort of bypass is created in order to save us from going through the whole process again and again.
This is what we call learning or memory.
People are confusing software with binary, feeling with our invented languages. Any software still cannot work with 1 and 0.
Images are not only important but even necessary. Our all feelings, gets translated into memory of images by mind, no matter with which organ they are related. Sound, smell, taste, pleasure, pain everything. This sees a bit odd to hear but this really happens. There is a valid reason for that but i do not want to go there in this thread.
Actually, the mind embeds a particular picture or even event with every particular feeling and note it down in order to recognize it later. Though, they are not pemanent and open to change with time and reqirement.
Take any thing, like an egg or pain. When you came the sound of the word egg, any of its seen priviously seen picture would immediately flash in your mind and thememory of the egg would be refreshed again. The same is with pain. Hearing pain, some event related to pain, in which you experienced pain the most, would be digged out from the memory.
And, the more you refreshed any particular thing, mind will automatically keep it ungrading in the priority list, and it would become more and more easily accessible. Then a time comes, when mind becomes so familiar and sure with it, mind stops it going upto the inner core, to the feeling entity and start dealing it with outerself only.
These are what we call default actions.
Like, when you drink water, you need not think how you are going to do it. It just happens because for this, outer mind need to be take order from feeling entity. The same is the case of all ragualr practices, even typing at the keyboard. Mind knows very well which letter is located where.
There may be some difference in the methodolgy here and there but it is true by and large.
Moreno, this is amazing, if one thinks of it seriously and objectively. There is so much to investigate and learn within humans itself yet.
Know thyself is still not completed and we are going to mars.
with love,
sanjay
The “language of the mind” is emulation.
Though we are analogue so I get itchy around these metaphors. We can only reverse engineer fairly simple life, let alone make it ourselves from scratch. We may one day, God help us, but I find the computer analogy for the human mind an almost offensive one. I understand that with some people it can help clarify things.
It all starts from feeling. When feeling becomes complex, thinking is menifested. And, when thinking becomes complex and needs to be communicated, the languages are invented. And, when language becomes complex, we started giving names to them. The basic pemise never changes but gets more and more complex after every stage.
I think a useful word in here would be associations.
Memories change, associations change. Pride, fear and all sorts of motivations affect how we relate to the memories, or you could say how one part of the mind relates to other parts. The mind can have a caste system and even untouchables. The mind can have prisoners and exiles. The mind can call some people nobility (metaphor here for memories, ideas and self-sense) considered correct and pleasant. Parts of the mind not considered noble can be shunned or worse.
There is a way in which we polish many memories and distort them, even by simply remembering which is to some degree reconstructing.
Going to Mars? Yes, I get you. But it is worse than that. The scientists and corporations are going to fix (read: gradually ‘upgrade’ and replace) us. Before it is even understood it will actively be removed.
No, Pandora.
Nothing is harwired or parmanent. Mind makes some very basic or very repeatitive actions as default.
Secondly, what we call thinking cannot happen unconsciously and that applies even to impulsive reactions.
Like when a thorn pinches in the bare foot, body reacts immediately and removes the foot. Right.
But, does that actually happen unconsciously?
And, how exactly the term unconsciously should be defined?
Literally read, unconsciously refers to something that happens without realizing and thinking.
But, is that possible in reality?
If something in the mind cannot realize the pain of the foot and not decide that it should be removed right now, how will the foot ever moves, given that the foot cannot make the decision on its own?
Does this phenomenon not indicate that some portion of the mind ordered that?
with love,
sanjay
No, James.
That comes later. It is not from where the process initiates.
For emulation, one must has a priori capacity of feeing/sensing. Otherwise, there is no way that one can even emulate.
Everything starts from feeling, no matter how you look at it.
with love,
sanjay
Some instinctual reactions are hardwired. When you have an opportunity, take a look at a book written by an ex FBI-agent called “What Every Body is Saying”. The reason law professionals can detect when a person may be lying is because some of the reactions in our bodies are indeed hirdwired (there are parts of our brains that do not have the ability to lie), and when people try to control them they create cognitive dissonance which can be seen as an increased brain activity. This involuntary reaction, the part of the brain that ‘wants’ to tell the truth is the key to lie detection.
The unconscious and conscious do communicate: some things emerge from the unconscious into conscious awareness and some are deposited into unconscious by the conscious mind. Sometimes, external stimuli bypass conscious awareness and go directly to unconscious. Sometimes, the reverse is true. With the exception of when real-life danger is present, it is a fuzzy kind of communication. I say this because some things that come out of unconscious do not make to a rational mind that likes to organize everything in an orderly manner. The rational mind likes to put everything neatly into boxes and shelves, the unconscious is a lot more fluid and takes input from a wider range of sources. People are still learning how this back-and-forth feedback loop works, it is a process, with different separate parts of the brain engaged. But it is a process of communication, not thinking. The term thinking is reserved to a (willful), rational, conscious process.