AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Nov 27, 2021 9:25 pm Anyway, the key questions I want you to ask you at this point, and would appreciate a reply to, are as follows - are you aware that when you write reasoned conclusions about "energy", "esthetic knowledge", etc. that you are, in fact, thinking, even if you normally don't pay attention to that activity while you are engaged in it? Do you acknowledge that the thinking voice in your head is always present in these situations? For ex., when you say "energy is more fundamental than consciousness", or "reason and rationality evolved for a different purpose than aesthetic knowledge", does "energy" or "aesthetic knowledge" relay this conclusion directly through your speech-organ, or is it that thinking voice in your head which arrives to it first? Thanks.
Just so it's clear this isn't a 'trick question', but really at the heart of this entire discussion, as is so often the case in modern philosophical debates, I will provide a helpful quote:
The reason why it is impossible to observe thinking in the actual moment of its occurrence, is the very one which makes it possible for us to know it more immediately and more intimately than any other process in the world. Just because it is our own creation do we know the characteristic features of its course, the manner in which the process takes place. What in all other spheres of observation can be found only indirectly, namely, the relevant context and the relationship between the individual objects, is, in the case of thinking, known to us in an absolutely direct way. I do not on the face of it know why, for my observation, thunder follows lightning; but I know directly, from the very content of the two concepts, why my thinking connects the concept of thunder with the concept of lightning. It does not matter in the least whether I have the right concepts of lightning and thunder. The connection between those concepts that I do have is clear to me, and this through the very concepts themselves.
This transparent clearness concerning our thinking process is quite independent of our knowledge of the physiological basis of thinking. Here I am speaking of thinking in so far as we know it from the observation of our own spiritual activity. How one material process in my brain causes or influences another while I am carrying out a thinking operation, is quite irrelevant. What I observe about thinking is not what process in my brain connects the concept lightning with the concept thunder but what causes me to bring the two concepts into a particular relationship. My observation shows me that in linking one thought with another there is nothing to guide me but the content of my thoughts; I am not guided by any material processes in my brain. In a less materialistic age than our own, this remark would of course be entirely superfluous. Today, however, when there are people who believe that once we know what matter is we shall also know how it thinks, we do have to insist that one may talk about thinking without trespassing on the domain of brain physiology.