Mandibil wrote: ↑Sat Jan 30, 2021 8:51 pm
I don't understand, can you elaborate plz ?
OK. Before this and the things below, can make sense, one must make the effort to
observe one's own thinking.
The thing is that normally, when we think about something, we experience the meaning of what we think but we are not conscious of the thinking process itself.
But we are perfectly capable of directing our attention to the actual thinking process.
Think of something simple, for example: "I think". But not as if you are thinking about your brain or some other external object but through
livingly experiencing how you speak forth the verbal thought in your mind. You should actually speak the thought in your mind while being conscious of what you are doing, that is - observing the whole process. It helps if one thinks the words very slowly, as if trying to feel them as best as possible. This is the experience we are talking about. Now we not only have an experience of some floating words "I think" but we feel the very process, we feel how we give birth to the verbal thought. This "giving birth of the verbal thought" is what I refer to when I say "thinking". It is not some speculative metaphysical process. It is that
actual experience of producing the thoughts. Just as color is a valid experience, so it is the observation of our own thinking. We are not postulating, not inventing anything. We are simply attaching the word "thinking" to the process that we are able to observe, in the same way as we can attach a word for a color that we perceive.
So here:
Where does that thought come from? From thinking.
this means exactly our ability to livingly experience how we produce the thought.
My point was that the axiom, which is a thought, appears in the contents of our consciousness only through this thinking process (even if we haven't been observing the process itself but only the end product - the thought of the axiom).
Mandibil wrote: ↑Sat Jan 30, 2021 8:51 pm
Meaning is not experienced but a subjective judgment ... meaning would be a part of epistemology or further down the line, not metaphysics
What I mean is something much more elementary. I don't divide the things at all into epistemology or metaphysics. We're talking of the most simple acts of cognition that require no philosophical background or systems to classify them. It's simple observation and describing what we observe.
For example, you look at an yellow surface. Even without explicitly thinking about it, you have the implicit understanding that you are seeing something yellow. If needed you can explicitly think "This surface is yellow". The idea of yellow is the thing that is experienced as meaning, as the understanding, as the thing that makes you be conscious of the fact that you're seeing yellow and not blue. To make this more clear, imagine that after looking at the yellow surface, you look away or close your eyes, and then
think in your imagination about that yellow surface. Now we don't have the sensory perception, nevertheless we experience the
same idea of yellow.
This is the key - there's
one concept,
one idea of yellow, that we can experience in relation to
any yellow perception or even our own thought about yellow. When you look at many different yellow objects, they are separate but you can connect with them the
same concept/idea of yellow. I can have different concepts for the different objects but have only one concept of yellow and I experience it in connection to any of the objects.
Mandibil wrote: ↑Sat Jan 30, 2021 8:51 pm
Thoughts are not perceived, they are in consciousness or meta-consciousness ... based on perception/cognition
They are perceived if you observe the thinking process. Think again of the verbal thought "I think". You actually hear your inner voice speaking forth the thought. This voice sounds like an auditory perception. What differs is that you are aware that this is not just some external perception or a random voice in your head but your own creation.
Mandibil wrote: ↑Sat Jan 30, 2021 8:51 pm
You are equivocating the terms mate. Thinking cannot exist. Ontology of existence must be based on sense data / concepts
I hope that the above already cleared this. Here "thinking exists" must be experienced again into this mode of self observation. You can look at
my other post where I explain that.