North Cali Sammy
Registered Senior Member
A simple poll and an open thread.
How do You Define Your Existence?
- Thread starter North Cali Sammy
- Start date
In terms of trying for the lowest amount of philosophical baggage or extended theorizing?
As a flux of different types of manifestation that reciprocally deal with each other in a governed or at least semi-regulated way. For instance, when a visual scene presents itself there may be accompanying auditory thoughts discerning and identifying what is there, adding a background of understanding for it. Or a reverse situation of sounds, odors, and tactile sensations that evoke visual memories that add meaning to what those probably are.
Everything else that I might believe falls out of those interacting presentations (including a contingent speculation that there is a "self" or owner of the flux of shown events). Since the rationalized opposite of a non-phenomenal "dark" manner of existence cannot even verify itself (i.e., the futility of the invisible trying to affirm the invisible). But thought activity unfolding as the manifested kind can propose and theorize the blank alternative as a provenance of and explanation for the phenomenal content (thereby demoting such to the status of representations).
So metaphorically, it's akin to climbing up to the roof of a building and then kicking the ladder away, and pretending you have always been standing on the roof (believing that materialism or the absent, non-conscious style of existing is fundamental). Or acquiring a (pragmatic) metaphysical stance that the roof is more primary than the ground which one started on (the manifestations), prior to the reasoning and inferences.
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DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
Human? That seems specious.
TheVat
Valued Senior Member
Cats just scratch. They don't consider the meaning. They don't define. Humans seem to approach existence in a more reflective way, where the whole of it is pondered. Hence my use of "recursive," where a process of thought is able to consider a process of thought. Where existence can include a consideration of existence. Since the thread was directed at "your existence," I was riffing a bit on the human sort of existence. (and the faraway look in a cat's eyes after it licks itself in that special place is beyond my finite powers of understanding...)
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
I was thinking of some animals that pass the mirror test (cats do not), suggesting they possess theory-of-mind - crows, dolphins.
But never mind, that's pretty nit-picky.
Minus the necessary elaborate enough language, I'd agree that most animals can't grapple with "big scenario" concepts. As Temple Grandin (who is autistic) suggests, they may think primarily with images (those creatures that can see).
But Joe Hutto's experiment with turkeys reminded me how animal vocal vocabulary can be more complex than assumed. So some animals might occasionally have crude thoughts expressed privately as auditory sounds (perhaps even scents). But still concerning particular things rather than abstractions.
When I first heard about her ideas in the first decade of the 2000s, I felt Grandin must surely be wrong in her assumption that all or most autistic people thought visually to the degree that she did. She later realized that herself.
- Animals in Translation: In Grandin's second book Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism, she explained how her brain receives input as a typical person's brain does, but rather than converting it into words it remains visual. Animals in Translation expands on this concept, suggesting that her autism allows her to focus on visual details more intensely, which allows her to "take in the world as animals do".
Grandin suggests that people with autism are similar to animals, as they "see, feel and think in remarkably similar ways". Based on this idea, Grandin goes on to explain that all animals are more intelligent and more sensitive than humans assume them to be, and should be given a "good life...with something useful to do".
In Animals in Translation, Grandin's explains her theory of why people with autism and animals are so similar. Grandin's theory is that the frontal lobes of people with autism do not function the same as those of typical people, and the brain function of a person with autism falls "between human and animal".
Grandin goes on to explain that while typical people are good at seeing the "big picture", people with autism are more detail oriented. Grandin's sensitivity to details has allowed her to see things that humans have been doing to animals for years that are "traumatizing" them, even maintaining a list of "18 tiny details that scare farm animals". The list includes things such as reflections on smooth metal, jiggling chains, and one-way gates.
Temple Grandin: In her later book, Thinking in Pictures, the neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote at the end of the foreword that the book provided "a bridge between our world and hers, and allows us to glimpse into a quite other sort of mind."
[...] Grandin has said that when her book Thinking in Pictures ... she thought that all individuals with autism thought in photographic-specific images the way she did. By the time the expanded edition was published in 2006, she had realized that it had been wrong to presume that every person with autism processed information in the same way she did.
In the 2006 edition, she wrote that there were three types of specialized thinking. They were: 1. Visual Thinkers like she is, who think in photographically specific images. 2. Music and Math Thinkers – who think in patterns and may be good at mathematics, chess, and programming computers. 3. Verbal Logic Thinkers – who think in word details, and she noted that their favorite subject may be history.
In one of her later books, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, the concept of three different types of thinking by autistic individuals is expanded...
VIDEO LINK: Learning to speak turkey (Joe Hutto)
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Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
North Cali Sammy
Registered Senior Member
I thank each of you for your replies. 
Ken Fabian
Registered Senior Member
I don't spend much time or energy thinking about it. I haven't noticed my life is affected by my failure to think about it.
I figure that I'm a bunch of atoms that got lucky enough to become configured in a particular way, such that the overall pattern is self-aware. The chances of that happening are almost unimaginably small.
I don't know why the atoms got here in the first place. At least, not the whole story.
So, I'm muddling along like the rest of you.
I don't know why the atoms got here in the first place. At least, not the whole story.
So, I'm muddling along like the rest of you.
That's a good question. There is this, but it's pay or subscriber walled, and actually sounds like a New Scientist interview rendered into a Science Direct offering. If that's the case, similar could be accessed for free here: Extensive interview with Joe Hutto (PBS)
There's the published book "Illuminations in the Flatlands". And the documentary that meticulously set-up and replicated the original project, with similar events and data falling out of it. The whole thing ("My Life As A Turkey") is probably on YouTube somewhere (like here), and certainly various segments from it.
Even prior to Hutto's project, Turkey vocalilzations had been decoded to a great extent: https://trailblisshub.com/what-does-a-turkey-say/
If the YouTube example doesn't work out, and should PBS videos not be accessible in the UK, then the doc was also co-broadcast on BBC's "Natural World" Series 30, Episode 1 (if that can be tracked down on BBC's site).
PBS: the episode, and clips from it
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/my-life-as-a-turkey-introduction/7268/
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TheVat
Valued Senior Member
A common experience, though it's also true that I could live on the side of a hill, never think about mudslides, and experience no effect until I wake up one morning buried in mud. So, while I agree that philosophy questions may be happily ignored and possibly without consequence, one's present bliss is not a guarantor of the future.
TheVat
Valued Senior Member
Apparently your Dad got lucky, too.
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
Presumably then, you came into this world via the birth canal.
Ken Fabian
Registered Senior Member
I am trying to imagine what possible consequences and coming up short. The threat of people with strong beliefs not leaving me in peace seems very real but that is people threatening my bliss. It is not caused by my lack of certainty about the nature of my existence.
