On Feb 7, 2013, at 9:27 PM, joseph berg <[email protected]> wrote: >> "If we used a different vocabulary or if we spoke a different language, we >> would perceive a somewhat different world." >> >>> Agree/disagree? >> >> How would we know? > > What about the multi-lingual?
Your questions sound like the questions heard in a college all-nighter debating the solipsistic view of existence. Does a person have a German mind and memories and an English mind and memories? Or does a person have only one mind and memories, constructs, etc., which are an inseparable mixture of both: one "reality" constructed with two (or more) languages? I don't subscribe to the idea of a disintegrated experience--left brain this and right brain that, "as an artist, I think X," etc. It's an all-brain, all-body experiential unity. It may be a matter of convenience to speak in those terms, and it may be a matter of pragmatic technique (which brain areas are active during the execution of certain tasks), but as sterescopic vision or stereophonic sound perceptions indicate, the brain fuses these separate sensory inputs into a single whole, which is experienced as the "normative" mode of the experience. Yes, we can see with only one eye or hear with only one ear, but we behave as if the contributions of both eyes and ears necessary--and one-eyed sight or one-eared hearing seems to be incomplete. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
