[MD] WHY MoQ IS PARALYzED

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Krimel]
I know I sound dense here but I don't see how you are avoiding 
circularity and I don't see how emotions, sensations, the fireman who 
saves his crew, the scientist with the revelation of the snake etc. 
are not examples of thoughts that are unconscious and non-symbolic 
but thoughts none the less.

[Arlo]
I could accuse you of the same thing. If all these things are 
"thoughts", then I have no idea what differentiates a "thought" from 
a "non-thought". If thoughts are even "unconscious", then praytell, 
Krimel, what _isn't_ a thought? From what I gather, every time one of 
my neurons fires, that constitutes "thought". To me, you've extended 
the term to so many areas as to render it useless.

As I've stated, "thought" as I use the term is a specific conscious 
activity involving the willful manipulation of symbols, and as humans 
we are so enmeshed in an intensely rich language-textual-verbal field 
as to make our semiosis, while maybe not always originating in verbal 
language, ubiquitously verbal. We see a flashing red light and we 
stop because we have learned via language that this is a symbol for 
"danger", or maybe we have made associations on our own that we've 
mediated with language to build semiotic referents. And while I grant 
that we can make these associations non-verbal, as did Pavlov's dog, 
the very nature of our language-rich being makes even these events 
very quickly understood verbally (even if its a Homer-esque "Ooo... 
donut" upon seeing his favorite treat).

Certainly we have powerful, pre-intellectual sensory experiences. 
Certainly our bodies respond without language to "iron deficiences". 
But these are not acts of "thought", again as I use the term. Those 
moments of intense emotional "experience", when time stops and our 
minds empty and we are inflated with a sense of Oneness and beauty, 
when our glands pump adrenaline and pheromones into our bloodstream, 
when the hair on our necks stands up and our skin goosepimples, these 
are all non-thought experiences. Yes, absolutely as humans we very 
quickly move to mediate that experience with thought, with language, 
to encode that in some form of wordage, even if its to think "I can't 
encode that in words". Yoga is, among many other things, an attempt 
to hold on to the pre-intellectual experiential state and stave off 
mental verbage. But one is not "thinking" when one is so 
meditating... one is simply "being", "experiencing". Thought comes 
later, as we attempt to encode and make sense of that experience.

So this is beating a dead horse a bit, and I've lost the reason we 
are even arguing this out, and cluttering SA's tiny skull, and if 
semiosis is your word of choice, then semiosis it is. But you won't 
get me to agree that unconscious, non-symbolic neural activity is 
"thought" any more than I can apparently get you to agree that it's not.

So, endgame?