Frances to Michael and others... This reply of mine likely does not address all the points in your response, but it may offer some clarification. Pragmatism needs to connect the continuing metaphysics of ontology with the evolving physics of cosmology, in order to make a vast philosophy of realism that likely reflects the true nature of the whole wide world. The one thing that permeates the whole menal world is hence feeling, which comes before acting to include acts of sensing and willing and thinking and knowing. All phenomenal things in nature, from mechanisms of matter to organisms of life, must however feel in order to act. Even matter therefore is effete mind that engages in quasi thought to some degree. The thought is a mind full of sign systems, and the mind is a brain full of signs, and the brain is a body full of senses, and the body is a being full of life, and the being is a soul full of spirit. Even single celled microbes with the spirit of life that makes them a living soul are conscious with a feeling of their own existence to some extent. The point in using subjective phantom pain is as a way to show that the pure feeling of consciousness is a sign that stands for some other object, because both pain and consciousness are prone to interpretive inference in that the signer can be wrong about them in that they are never exactly known for sure. The normal human person for example can therefore never know for certain what they consciously feel is actually real or clearly true. All the human thinker can do is make a good guess at what they feel is so, and this guessing game requires signs. There simply is no absolute state of pure feeling or sure consciousness that is not a sign. For all phanerisms and be they mechanisms or organisms the most primal kind of raw concrete sign needed for their continued existence is an indexic signal. If for example a live adult human who is mature but mentally abnormal has a brain with only such signals, then they have no mind nor a mind in any thought, and are in effect mind dead. The mental psyche of the normal human being is held by pragmatism to be of the unconscious self and the private subject and the public person. In any event, the full psyche of brain and mind and thought is phenomenal, and must therefore be permeated with signs. If the signs in mind furthermore are the symbols of verbal languages, then the thought may be discursive, which is the highest kind of intelligent thought now known to exist. Now, it is posited by early pragmatists in a probing manner that the phenomenal world is made of representamen that are either not signs or that are signs. Representamen that evolve into phenomenal continua or things that are not signs are deemed metaphysical representations in the continuing ontos. Representamen that evolve into phenomenal existentia or objects that are signs are deemed physical representations in the existing cosmos and epistemos. For a sentient being to sense menal things other than phenomenal objects, it must be done with representamen that are signs by way of say metaphorical analogy. It is not clear to me if this scheme was intended to be directly applied to the human psyche, but if it were then the inner subjective self of the cerebrum would act as an unconscious kind of representational thing that even the human being itself as a signer would not be aware of nor be able to sign with.
Michael wrote... Frances 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; Michael wrote: 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"? Frances wrote: > 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. Michael wrote: 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.) Frances wrote: > There is therefore nothing in the life or being or body or brain or > mind or thought that is other than signs. Michael wrote: 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.
