On May 11, 2008, at 9:30 AM, Frances Kelly wrote:
Even consciousness in all its forms from the unconscious to the conscious, which consciousness is deemed as pure illogical feeling by pragmatists, is a mental act;
Does this include the mental processes that monitor and regulate the body? Are those things included in what the mind does or which things define the mind (whichever definition is applied)? Or is the mind only either (a) comprised of ideations, or (b) generated by ideations? What role or relationship does "the mind" have when, in the act of thinking or ideating, it "feels" a connection to something else? or "feels" an emotional response: "I don't want to think about that because it's scary"; or "Every time I think of her, I get warm all over"?
but only by way of signs, because it is prone to error and interpretation and correction on the part of the normal signer. Even a real sense of conscious pain for example can be wrong, when it is referred phantom pain.
It's still pain, isn't it? Pain isn't "wrong," but one's understanding of where it's coming from might be misdirected. Pain is the very attention-getting mental device to direct our attention RIGHT NOW to something amiss one's body. The problem of phantom pain is not that it's not pain, but that the source of the pain, e.g., the injured leg, may no longer exist. (Note: "referred pain" is something else, being a pain whose source is located in one part of the body but the provocation of the pain arises in another part.)
There is therefore nothing in the life or being or body or brain or mind or thought that is other than signs.
To the extent that what is in the mind is a representation, of some kind, of something that is happening or being perceived somewhere else.
