[MD] moq thought experiment 1.

[gav]

hiya,

> 
> I appreciate the effort you put into this response, Gav,
> but I can't buy any 
> of it.  We are all influenced by the ideas of others, past
> and present, but 
> thoughts do not "come to us"; we create them.

but this is contradicted by experience. you have never had an 'a ha' moment; a 'eureka' a la archimedes? you have never ever had something just come to you? this is how life works. this is how life guides us. significant/relevant data sticks and sticks out. we just need to pay attention. 'we' are the witnessing consciousness, the one consciousness, that is behind all things.

> Nor are original thoughts 
> necessarily answers to questions.  Jaynes'
> "struction" is garble to me, and 
> the phrase "...has been investigated thoroughly"
> always arouses my 
> suspicion.

have you read jaynes?
have you read miller?
if you haven't i guess it will seem a cursory treatment - cos it is

  Finally, the notion of "DQ/Tao erupting
> into consciousness" is 
> the weirdest explanation of intuition I've ever heard. 
> As far as I'm 
> concerned, this epistemological argument is just more
> fodder for the 
> collectivist position.

hmmm, dunno what you are getting at. it's 'irrupting' by the way - slightly different - to enter (into consciousness) suddenly. this is how intuition operates...you don't think so?
> 
> Again I'm reminded of this statement by the leading
> objectivist of the 20th 
> century:
> 
> "The mind is an attribute of the individual. 

no it's not. Mind is the one consciousness that we partake of.

There is
> no such thing as a 
> collective brain. 

no there isn't i guess. but the concept of a collective consciousness is valuable and proven (100th monkey; novel crystallisations becoming easier)

 There is no such thing as a collective
> thought.

no - wrong. every thought is collective because it relies on language which is a collective phenomenon. 

   An 
> agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or
> an average drawn 
> upon many individual thoughts.  It is a secondary
> consequence.  The primary 
> act - the process of reason - must be performed by each man
> alone. 

reasoning is an individual intellectual processs that relies on a common language for general comprehension to exist.

 We can 
> divide a meal among many men.  We cannot digest it in a
> collective stomach. 
> No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man.  No
> man can use his 
> brain to think for another. All the functions of body and
> spirit are 
> private.  They cannot be shared or transferred. "

jesus this is poisonous stuff! all functions of the spirit and body are private? what about lovemaking? 
what makes the spiritual spiritual is that is a shared archetypal experience common to all humanity, irrespective of culture. myth transfers and shares this knowledge.

hope this helped....



>


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