To elaborate a bit:
It seems likely to me that our minds work with the mechanisms of perception when appropriate -- that is, when the concepts are not far from sensory modalities. This type of concept is basically all that animals have and is probably most of what we have. Somehow, though, we have more than just this. We have conceptual machinery that works with concepts whose context or origin are so far from sense data that we cannot effectively use that "simulation" machinery on them (these concepts are often referred to as "abstract"). It could very well be that our mental machinery actually operates on these concepts in ways very similar to the sensory simulations, but because their objects are so different from sense processing they are opaque to introspection or at least extremely difficult to describe. Language could be a big part of the "abstraction simulation", churning away the same way our internal theater churns on visual and auditory associations. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=fabd7936
