On Tuesday, September 18, 2018 at 11:51:28 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: > > > > On 9/18/2018 1:00 PM, Philip Thrift wrote: > > > > > https://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/april13/rorty-041305.html : > > > "How did we ever get the notion of the mind as something distinct from the > body? Why did this *bad idea* enter our culture?" > > > [At] some point in prehistory, our ancestors got into the habit of > pursuing projects of social cooperation by making marks and noises at each > other so as to organize themselves, he said. "That turned out to be a > fruitful survival mechanism." Eventually our ancestors developed social > norms—such as if you grunted "p" you had to grunt "q," or else explain why > you didn't grunt "q"—which we call following the laws of logic and making > valid inferences, he added. > > There was doubtless a genetic mutation somewhere in the background that > allowed this neat adaptive trick, he said. But "once that you've seen that > a certain neurological twist was necessary to get the process of using > marks and noises instead of force as methods of enforcing social > cooperation, you have given the only answer that there is to be given to > the question, 'What is the relation between the mind and the rest of > nature?'" > > > *The "mind" simply is the ability to engage in linguistic behavior,* he > said. "If you can talk about things, you can also think about things. But > you don't talk about things because you have first thought about things. > You didn't have any thoughts before you had language to think the thoughts > with." > > > I can imagine things like a play or a diagram without language. My dog > clearly has thoughts about things and even dreams. Octopuses have > curiosity. Rorty is kinda right but too simplistic. He seems to write > polemics instead of philosophy. > > Brent >
Do dogs think about their thoughts? The above was from a talk he gave (about 2 years before his death) filtered through a Stanford News writer. But the "philosophy" is from his (well-known to today's philosophers) 1979 book *Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature *which I would assume anyone with an interest in philosophy in the past 30 years has read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_and_the_Mirror_of_Nature - pt -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
