KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA32 (Muller)

Commentary 19 (to C14 by Ernst von Glasersfeld)

ARE WORDS THE MEDIUM OF THOUGHT ?
by Adrian van der Meijden
17 January 2001, posted 27 February 2001

<1>
On para 1 of yours I'd like to know quite how you see this. While some definitions do show up in dictionaries unless they are understood they don't mean much so they have to be somehow correlated to HM's coupling?

<2>
On para 2 of yours that depends on what one thinks of as visualisation. Such a gestalt includes other senses and feelings and we can "tag" this, as we do with rabbit's ears being typical of the animal. Besides visualisation need not exactly match how it shows up with the eyes, graphic and vivid. For years I imagined I could not visualise until it was made clear to me that this comes more like a "ghost" than a photograph, all which has to do with synaesthetic "cross correspondences" for our mind. Thus one may say when thinking of a person one knows one has a clear idea of that identity wherever and however parked in our mind and represented for either thinking or discourse. Children readily visualise as a kind of projective hallucination but when we start talking this changes into another mode. Besides <G> some of my friends are represented to my feelings as animals, as typical of them by a kind of shorthand. We can recall, remember and re-live experiences. I don't know of any research to clarify whether that includes the whole gestalt in all three kinds as done consciously or unconsciously. But it experiences differently. In a same sense I "know" my whole personality but not all at once and together. I know people who can replay as like a video but that is not all that common. All this seems to blur over into fuzzy boundaries for the way you put it. But then a "strict" boundary between conscious and unconscious does not exist at this residence.

<3>
On para 3 I cannot quite align with your "spontaneous" for several reasons. One instance is that I had to learn to remove certain memories from my eidetic recall. I was once an optician and removed the entire habit systems of this and can recall this entire with an effort after which all its details are forthwith available. The same holds for some of my vocabulary which crosses several jargon domains or specialised fields, as well as for different languages. This seems to match how when we enter a Church or a pub our demeanour changes and with it the right things to do and say. This further correlates with us having several kinds of memory which is seldom taken into account. Anything we can forget we can retrieve and what happens to be in the forefront of awareness appears to be what we do most of the time, which can also change. Our very short term memory like "Did I close the door?" or turn off the light, is rather limited. For instance "anfractuosity" which I read in Boswell's "Life of Johnson" and seldom use pops up when I recall the page where I read this, or its rhythm pattern and I could do this readily as student but as my mind got more overstuffed other kinds of memory came into play. Education trains us to immediate recall on questions asked but it does not quite work that way. The question is what size and scope can a gestalt or context be? Even if we count this the Shannon way. It seems one reason at least for our dreaming is, if that is how things are stored in a long tem memory, that dreams are ambiguous because they "act" across many such domains by way of patterns in common, which pattern might well be called a gestalt if not an archetype. Charles Tart discusses this under Alterable States of Consciousness which is more common than suspected.

<4>
As a further example I used to buy my foods and groceries by their taste and smell and recollected while shopping and when goods were opaque packaged with only the label or brandname on it and hence not visible It took me quite a while to figure out why I could not find things and retrain my mentally stored shopping list to verbal storage, which was not needed in a Chinese shop. This is how advertising works too on Television and which matches how education trains us to respond only by or with words. I used to buy soap powder and not Persil or whatever it is branded as. All this appears to be grounded by a theory in common and I question the theory. J. Mancuso's multi-*media collage* fits as I learnt foreign languages by inventing chats with imaginary friends while on my way to and from school and inventing conversations while I looked "asleep". I also compose "speeches" that way and do not need a room full of mirrors to see myself. In fact I do some of my "thinking" in dreams, some strictly verbal, some not. I further have three different ways to pre-program "intuition" to deliver the goods whereas Kekule dreamt for this and Beethoven got all his spontaneously. Tesla imagined his ac system and Einstein used body sensations he translated into math which altogether begs any question as to what we shall call thinking.

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Adrian van der Meijden