Heidegger

In a message dated 31/10/2008 23:01:30 GMT Standard Time, jPolanik at nc.rr.com
writes:

snip

Joe:
in any event, the important question whether there is a strategic advantage
to be gained from translating cogitare as ‘thinking’ rather than
‘experiencing’. since some of his analysis indicates that Descartes was inconsistent in
how he defined/used thinking or that thinking is given a privileged place
among all experiences,

Jud:
Where is this *analysis,* which indicates that Descartes was inconsistent in
how he defined/used thinking? And does it really matter what such a
philosopher-manqué thought or did or when he wasn’t in doing his maths which he did
so well?

*Thinking,* like the words: *thing, real, is, experience, phenomena, being,*
and any other of the ontological-escape-hatches and other reificata beloved
of trannies can be defined in a million or more ways, because it is so
ill-defined and useful for obfuscation, and cannot be separated from the
physically active embrained soma.

For example, deciding and then going ahead and hanging Saddam Hussain, or
Heidegger, or teaching Sarah Palin a lesson by squirting her with a plastic
squeezy-bottle full of the blood of one of the animals she allegedly shoots from
helicopters is in a sense *thinking.*

Apart from the cerebration involved in selecting the blood from one carcase
rather than from any of the others she leaves littered around the forest,
there is then the thought involved in considering how dreadful the victim is, and
whether he or she deserves it? The planning involved in the case of the
harridan from Alaska would be in approaching her in such a carefully thought out
way that her minders would be unaware, and making sure the TV cameras are
rolling first.

Who would attempt to try to differentiate any dissimilarity between the
cerebral and somatic coordination involved in such an act? The neuron is the
basic functional unit of the nervous system - not just the brain. Where is the
physiological cut-off point or demarcation zone which *divides the *thinking*
from the *transacting* and *acting? For example, the secondary motor regions
are responsible for planning and initiating motion, and the secondary visual
area, close to the primary visual cortex is involved in interpreting the
colours and movement as a part of the necessary visual information required in
thinking out the detail of the act of squirting the bottle, releasing the
trapdoor beneath Saddam, or in the case of Heidegger - tying the rope around the
lamppost and then his lying Nazi neck.

The tertiary areas, or association cortices, are responsible for the higher
brain functions such as interpretation and remembering Heidegger’s and
Saddam’s call for mass murder. We are talking about a body-wise coordinated system
here - like the ability of a car’s road-wheels to revolve, and the
steering-wheels ability to allow the brain of the driver to guide the vehicle’s
direction, are just as much a part of the moving car as the exploding petrol in the
piston chambers and the high tech computer stuff behind the dashboard.

The only thing fascinating about the Cartesian cogito is the residual
sociological/anthropological interest in the fact that some people still find it
interesting at all. The whole nonsense is predicated upon the fact that there
are still many people around in the 21st-century who continue to accept the
idea that a God and a devil are propositionally viable elements of any
ontological *problem,* and the additional (and coterminous idea) that there is a
completely absurd and totally unevidenced spook which hovers around in the
cranium called a *mind.*

The answer to the crap about Descartes’ cogito and the rest of the reificata
that passes for philosophy, and even in some areas of science itself, lies
in an understanding of human neurology - not diabology, demonology or
parapsychology. Philosophy is supposed to be concerned with wisdom not whimsy.

Jud

Posted on Sunday, November 9th, 2008 at 7:00 am
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