Let me back up and start with something deceptively simple: Time.
In the real world of physical reality processes, events, take time. Things do not occur instantaneously, although they may seem to. Even light traveling at its remarkably fast speed still is a measurable movement. There is actually a brief moment for events, even those in the body, to occur. Once you recognize and acknowledge that nothing is instantaneous you can begin to conceive and imagine the how and when of processes occurring. And then you have to account for these events.
For example, right now at this moment you have awareness of reading these words and comprehending their meaning. Now look at the printed page and realize that they are shapes of ink upon a page. Now feel the book in your hands. Notice its weight and texture. Feel the seat upon which you sit. Look around you and listen to what is around you.
While you were reading you were not paying attention to the shape of the letters, the color of the print, the color of the paper, nor of the texture of the book, or any aspect of your body and the room around you. The act of reading brought your focus into the act of comprehending symbols on a page. And yet, it was a simple and easy task to shift your awareness to the experience of being somewhere sitting and holding this book. That is how conscious thought works.
Conscious thought is the act of, and experience of, awareness. You can focus your awareness so intently on one thing that awareness of everything else, even your own body, can be forgotten. This is what you were doing when you are engaged in reading the words in this book. But you can pull back and become aware of all sorts of physical experiences accompanying that process of reading. You can go from the one to the other. In a real instant and measurable movement in time you can go back and forth.
So, to begin with certainty, you know that you have a series of sensory and sensual experiences, the experience of reading these words, or the experience of seeing the book, or the experience of feeling your own body sitting on a chair and being in or at someplace, all taking place in a temporal sequence. It is because of, and as a result of, this certainty that you have an awareness of these sensory and sensual experiences that you therefore know with certainty that you exist.
To recall and reframe Rene Descartes famous quote, I would say that: I experience therefore I am. And it is important to note that the explanation of why you have the capacity to experience anything at all is a direct result of you inhabiting, or being a thing with, a body, you have an embodied mind.
I begin with the nonverbal Experiences of sensations while Descartes begins with the verbal thought and thinking. Koestler agrees:
'As modern physics started with the Newtonian revolution, so modern philosophy starts with what one might call the Cartesian Catastrophe. The catastrophe consisted in the splitting up of the world into the realms of matter and mind, and the identification of 'mind' with conscious thought.' [Koestler, Act of Creation, pg. 148]
That is exactly what I have been trying to make clear. In actuality first we have an experience that is before words and is felt. Feelings and sensations are not yet words. It is only when we try to understand what it was that just happened, when we try to reflect on our sensations and to understand what it was that we experienced in the past that we leave the realm of sensations. That is when we translate the nonverbal sensations of the experience into verbal comprehension. That is when we get words that are thinking and thoughts. We go from experience to thought. We go first from a mental experience of sensations to rational conscious thoughts formed in words. We experience first then we think.
This shift is incredibly important and was over looked by Descartes. He failed to or was unable to recognize that there was a process that takes time that is going on. His failing to consider this process of going from nonverbal to verbal created a cascading series of errors and fallacies. To work our way out of these errors and fallacies we need to acknowledge the process of experiencing being without words and then attempting to understand the experience is to utilize words. This fact Korzybski established as one of his foundations upon which to build his Null-A systems.
If the difference between nonverbal experience and the verbal understanding need even more reinforcement, you can demonstrate this by doing the following. Reach over with one hand and grab a bit of skin on your other arm. Now pinch that skin tightly between the two fingers of your hand. Keep pinching until you feel some discomfort. Now, what just happened? You caused yourself to experience pain, if only slightly. Reflect on this. Is it not true that you felt the pain in silence? Did not your feeling of pain occurred without any words. You felt the movements of your body, the touch of your fingers on your skin, the touch of your fingers applying pressure as it squeezed that bit of skin until you experienced an unpleasant sensation. All of that occurred without any words forming in your mind. Words came after you felt the sensation. Words came as you reflected back on what you just did. Reflecting on that event you realized that what you felt has been described by the human word: pain.
This is what I have been telling you, that is how it always is. You see things, you smell things, you hear things, you feel the touch of things, and you taste something you put into your mouth. All these sensory events are experienced first in an instance without words. Words come after that sensory event.
True, first there is silence and then after some process and out of this process comes the song. You need to be absolutely sure of this. It is extremely important to fully and accurately understand the nature of human reality. So, let's do another experiment. I want you to get a nosh, a little something to eat. This will work with anything you eat but I'm going to take a bite out of an apple. So, perhaps you can grab an apple also and take a bite. If nothing else, recall the memory of biting into and eating an apple.
Look at the apple. Bring it to your nose and smell it. Now bite into it. Chew that piece of apple in your mouth and swallow it. Now look again at the apple where you bit into it, smell that spot. This experience borders on the mystical. It is a fleeting moment of delight.
Now, what just happened? By asking that question I have activated your mind and opened the floodgates to words. The event of eating the apple was alive. Even the memory of that event has some life in it. The event and the memory of the event are like a well, from which you can keep return to draw up water. The water in this metaphor is words. You can describe the event of eating the apple with as many or as few words as you choose. It is a matter of focus and talent.
The event can be a source of almost unending collection of words.
We can describe the apple as green. Or as bright green, or as green as sun lit spring grass at noon, or as green flecked with spots of captured sunlight, or on and on I could go. Adding more and more words to try and capture the experience. The flesh of the apple: Was it hard or soft? Soft and pulpy? Hard and crisp? Did the apple taste sweet or tart? Or a mixture of the two?
Do the words do justice to the experience? Do they seem adequate? Do they leave you as satisfied as the actually eating of the apple? They cannot. Eating the apple will fill your soul and your body in ways that reading or speaking about eating an apple cannot equal. Words can satisfy your mind, and perhaps offer some crumbs to the soul, but they offer no solace for your body. Keep returning to the well and draw up more water out of which come more words. But the words by themselves are sterile. Reflecting upon them only gives you more words. Reflecting on words is to define the meaning of words. Reflecting on words is not focusing on the experience, the event. Reflecting on words is examining the experience, the event. To use another metaphor: singing a song is not the same as analyzing the meaning of the song.
By now you should be convinced that experience is not the same as words. Experience is before words.
Experience is the silence. Out of the process of comprehending that experience we sing our song.
Getting back to fundamentals and foundational references, in addition to time there is of course space, the three dimensions – vertical, horizontal, and depth. There is also a sense of inside and outside, inside your mind and outside of your mind. And of course everything all around you has an inside and outside dimension to it. Thus, we live in this four-dimensional referenced physical space-time that can be vectored and mapped by eight vertices: inside, outside, vertical, horizontal, depth, and time with its present, past and future.
Within that physical world are objects and things which came into being not by the actions of humans but are products of the natural world. The natural world is by its definition a world of things not made by humans, a world of things and objects that can be classified as belonging to the genus of mineral, vegetable or animal.
Yet we obviously also live in another world of physical objects and things. A humanly created world of physical objects such as tools, objects of art, furniture, buildings, vehicles, roads, etc. These are the physical objects of human society. These objects are made out of and from the nonhuman physical objects of mineral, vegetable, animal and materials humanly made, previously not existing in nature before the creation by humans, materials made out of plastic, etc.
We live not only in this physical environment but also in a temporal environment. Our physical environment, of five vectored spatial dimensions, is a geographical location which may have rivers, valleys, flat plains, hills, mountains, trees, plants, animals, buildings, roads, etc. We, and all that stuff, also exist in a temporal dimension and environment with three vectors. Time seems to start when we are born and stop when we die. But we are not so egocentric as to ignore the fact that everything has existed before we got here and will continue to do so after we are gone. We know this and we experience the effects of time on our surroundings and on ourselves.
And we cannot overlook that we humans also live, colloquially speaking, through our heads, through our minds. Everything starts off entering our bodies through our physical senses, but when it comes to understanding any of it, we are trapped in our mind, in our limited first person perspective. We live in this fifth dimension. This fifth dimension is perhaps the most important of all, the dimension of humanly crafted symbols. We live through words. We can think thoughts that are images, we can feel sensations and emotions, but anytime we try to understand any of it, we come up against words; a world our making which is contained in the world of our culture's language system. The language we think and speak with is itself an environment that can also be described by using the metaphors of space and time.
We are all products of human culture. To be human is to live and be a member of a human culture and society. If you can read and speak a human language you are a member of a human society, a human culture.
My seminal phrase: 'People shape, and are shaped by, ideas', is a description of what Peter Berger calls: world construction or world building. Here is Peter Berger's seminal idea:
'Every human society is an enterprise of world-building.' [Berger, Sacred Canopy, pg. 3]
' 'Society is a dialectic phenomenon in that it is a human product, and nothing but a human product, that yet continuously acts back its producer.' [Berger, Sacred Canopy, pg. 3]
'The fundamental dialectic process of society consists of three moments, or steps. These are externalization, objectivation, and internalization. Only if these three moments are understood together can an empirically adequate view of society be maintained.' [Berger, Sacred Canopy, pg. 4]
Externalization is a fancy word to describe the fact that what we human beings do is make stuff. Some of that stuff is tangible physical objects and some of that stuff is intangible words, symbols and ideas. Out of all that stuff we build our world. We first internally conceive of an act of creation and then we go about creating something. It is the creating that externalizes our internal conceptions.
Once we have finished the process of creation then we have made and object be it tangible or intangible. It is by creating that we make stuff, objects, which has a physical component, buildings, books, computers, hammers, pencils, nails, paint brushes, clothes, paintings, music, books, etc, and intangible stuff or objects such as words, ideas, symbols, etc. By the act of creation we humans create something that another human being can encounter and interact with and that we the creator can also encounter and interact with. The result of our act of creation is to make an object that then becomes separate from the creator. This is what Berger means by objectivation. Objectivation is a fancy description of the act of making an object that is separate from its human creator.
Internalization is the process that occurs when we encounter and interact with those humanly made objects. We take into ourselves their use and their meaning. We make them a part of our personal external and internal environment. The process all children under go from the moment of birth is a process of internalization, a process of socialization and enculturation. We learn our society's language and thus its culture. It becomes an internal part of us and the acquisition of a human language enables us to form thoughts. That human language defines how we formulate our thoughts. This process of learning and then utilizing that learning is the process of internalization – the process I describe by the metaphor of rose colored glasses.
Every act of communication is an act of externalization. Every act of communication besides conveying information, no matter how trivial, is also an act that helps to sustain and maintain a human culture and a human society.
Participants in a society live their life within the context of a specific society. The history of every specific society is built upon episodes within the biography of the life of the society's participants and members. Society is metaphorically the first tool and first product of the early primates who began the transition from the animal into the proto-human.
Ever since then society was an external reality that preceded and survive its members and participants. Society and as a results of the enculturation of the individual in the society is how a human becomes a person. Infants at birth are potential humans, they are potential members of society and as they are raised, taught and interact by and with their parents, siblings and elders those infants become members of a specific society and thus take on an individual identity defined by the context of that society.
This is the process of people being shaped by ideas.
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Comments: 7
Sedickah
Descartes and SPINOZA are inextricably linked. Spinoza's earliest works had to do with correcting the Cartesian duality, or 'error' if you wish to so define (implicit) dualism. That's what MONISM is all about : a one substance theory of the universe. GOD and US as ONE, and that ONENESS as a CREATING ALLNESS!
Its interesting to speculate on the ideas of 'models of experience' and 'thinking and 'am-ness'". When I was a youngster I 'fell iin love with' Descarte's ANALYTIC GEOMETRY. His mathematics is significantly important in terms of making 'experiience' into more understanding for all of us, via abstract creation of mathematical type 'models' of the real world.
Spinoza's MONISM is the likely output from a deep understanding of the genius of Descartes. That MONISM helped later major philosophers like KANT and HEGEL to make major moves in introducing into history and the history of philosophy, the powerful insights of the 'categorical imperative' and the 'dynamics of the dialectical reasoning system', because -- I think -- they saw the intellectual and aesthetic freedom gained from understanding far more thoroughly three paramount philosophic/theological/scientific issues: (1) finiteness and infiniteness, (2) materiality and spirituality, and (3) time and eternity.
The Descartes-Spinoza works are sort of a basic Cartesian GIFT to us all : "I THINK (because my mind is able to order my perceptions and conceptions from experience and mysterious innateness) and, THEREFORE I AM (because I come to know, through those ordered and abstractly represented experiences, that the logic built into me is and always was and will be a deep a priori and mysterious capacity of my (materially linked) fundamental eternal (GOD-linked) spirit)
Thanks for giving us an interesting article,
Dick
Thanks for the suggestion! I started checking out Heuristic devices in cognition and came across a collection of spefic cognitive biases - I will check these and general heuristic devices.
Presumably since I beleive we are 'hard wired' for order that there is a tendency to find order even in patterns that are actually random according to true statistical analysis.
Peace,
libramoon