[Leboman]

Originally Posted by Nate

I defy anybody to find a more random 100th journal page on CGR.

How about this one?

http://www.christianguitar.org/forums/t58073-100/

[Nate]

Originally Posted by Leboman

How about this one?

http://www.christianguitar.org/forums/t58073-100/

I concede.

[Nate]

This may be the most brilliant cover band ever:

YouTube - The Baseballs - Umbrella (New Video) - www.thebaseballs.com

[Nate]

Along the theme of my blog title:

Which way is the dancer spinning?



Are you sure? Are you really sure?

The harm of words images is...

[Nate]

Along the same theme again:

If you drain the oil out of your car, top off your transmission fluid, what will happen next?

If you find transmission fluid draining out of the open oil pan after you top off, what then?

Ah, the perils of perception.

Knowing full well that I had drained the oil, I figured the top-off had only spilled over some.

Knowing no better, I proceeded to drive the car with twice as much oil and no tranny fluid.

Obviously, this was wrong.

Turns out there are two "oil pans" under my hood [who knew!] and one is the transmission.

Turns out I drained the transmission, thinking it was the oil. It looked and smelled like oil!?!

It took a day to figure it out.

Our frame of reference is dependent on what we expect to see, even despite contrary evidence.

Our perception can only "snap" back into reality when we leave the frame for a long enough time.

Until then, we reinterpret data!

I reinterpreted the transmission fluid draining out of the transmission pan [reality] as something else.

I figured that somehow I had put in too much or that somehow it was connected to the oil drain pan.

Neither made sense, but I didn't care.

There was absolutely nothing that could have convinced me at that moment that I had but drained the oil.

There was no reason, as far as I knew, to suspect anything deceptive had happened in my data perception.

Look back at that dancer silhouette above.

Which way is she spinning? It turns out that you're wrong. HA! I bet you feel pretty stupid, as well you should.

Why are you wrong? Because reality is ambiguous. Look away, twirl your finger the other way, then look back.

Freaktastic reference frame snapping!

[Rainer.]

lol. boobs.

[Jeffrey]

I've got a crazy idea. Let's start a blog (non-CGR). About language, logic, whatever. I think it would be enlightening to codify our back-and-forth exchanges into an online dialogue. It'd be formal. Maybe we'd post the result of e-mail exchanges. Maybe we'd switch off weeks where one of us writes a post and the other writes a response post.

Perhaps one of us links to an article, book excerpt, whatever, and we each post our responses.

The CGR Lit forum may be a magical place where our dialogues work best, but it may be fun to do something on a separate site.

[Jeffrey]

Originally Posted by Small

I remember (dimly, but I believe it was in a freshman philosophy course last spring) a similar discussion that focused on the role of language in thought, and whether thought is possible outside of language.

Or perhaps: can we imagine what thought without language is like? This is not to say that thought without language isn't possible. My intuition is that it is. However, we don't want to conflate it with instinct (action without hesitation and deliberation).

As with Wittgenstein's talk of logically impossible worlds ("It used to be said that God could create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic. The truth is that we could not say what an ‘illogical’ world would look like. It is as impossible to represent in language anything that ‘contradicts logic’ as it is in geometry to represent by its coordinates a figure that contradicts the laws of space, or to give the coordinates of a point that does not exist."), whose inconceivability (here I go beyond, but not in terms of surpassing, the Austrian) may not preclude their existence but only our access or understanding of them, perhaps thought without language is either inaccessible or accessible but indescribable to those with language.

Can any sort of complex meaning be assigned to anything without language to describe it?

Can any sort of complex meaning be assigned with language? Not trying to be contrariwise, as I'm generally suspicious of those who are persistently suspicious of language (yes, writing is a pharamakon; no, nothing can guarantee that someone else understand my words as I intended them -- but let's move on past the difficulties of language toward a post-post-modernism). But given the ambiguities of language, does language get us any closer to understanding complex situations?

My gut says "yes." But sometimes I wonder if we neglect the non-linguistic processes going on in our daily lives. After all, formal reasoning (deductive, inductive) is often used after-the-fact to justify a proper conclusion that came in a "eureka" moment.

I honestly hesitate to post anything in this blog, much less poke my head into discussion simply because of the vast difference in intellectual sophistication between myself and the regular posters, but for whatever it's worth, I think the validity of the statement concerning the ambiguity of thoughts is highly dependent on the definition being used.

"Thought" may be something akin to "truth." It is nigh-impossible to pin it down -- however, one can set parameters in a particular discourse for what will be allowed as examples of thought.

I mean, what is a thought, at root? How does one define thought? The generation of a meaning within the consciousness of a given individual?

I like that definition, off-hand, because it implies awareness. Many artificial devices deep within their whirring circuits can recognize stimuli. But is it a thought? Why not let it be a thought?