There are two objects. One is similar to the other. From experience I assume their characteristics are similar to one another as well.
This body has a mind. It is therefore reasonable to assume other similar bodies have minds as well.
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Earlier I said I have direct perception to my thoughts but it is more accurate to say that I have perceptual access to my thoughts.
In the view of Descartes to think is to know that one exists. But the question is to exist as what, as mind or as mind in body? In some ways dualism is correct. There does seem to be these two separate “things”. I will argue that one is an illusion. I will argue that one relies on the other.
The way we have access to the mind is important. I believe without the body we have no mind. I believe this because of the evidence, not because of blind faith.
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I believe many philosophers and philosophies perceptually mis-arrange the internal and external worlds.
This mis-arrangement can be evidenced from their language. The descriptions given usually speak of separate worlds. This in itself is not a problem. The problem is in what way are they separate. The common mis-arrangement is one of internal and external worlds being exclusive, when in reality, the external world, by definition, includes the internal world.
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There is a difference between something being meaningless and something without meaning. The former is emotive and centralizes consciousness. The latter is a description of the neutral nature of the external world.
To be without meaning is to point out that meaning is projected on to the world by a meaning maker. It is a value judgement on the part of a conscious being.
To be meaningless is to forget that there is a judgement call being made. It is the projection of incredulity on to the world.
That is to say, what is being overlooked is that there is a meaning to the act of seeing the world as meaningless. The knee jerk reaction of existentialism separates out the internal world – the consciousness –from the world that the consciousness is inside, namely the so-called external world.
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Ackrill wrote that he believed that categories were about things, not words. I disagree. Firstly, working through Aristotle’s concept of primary and secondary substances by his example, the individual man is both man and animal. The logic would be that there are not three existent entities but one, the individual man under which are entities which can only be termed categorical entities. These categorical entities seem to be endless. The individual can also be mammal among other categories.
If it cannot be (ac)counted (for) it isn’t real.
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I have direct perception of my thoughts, but I have no direct perception of other people’s thoughts. I only have their physical being and actions to judge their thoughts by. I can only assume that other beings have thoughts like my own.
I do not think it is unreasonable to make this assumption. We see an apple, we assume it tastes like the other apples we have eaten. We judge from past experiences.
Memory plays a large role in our understanding of reality. We must however ask what assumptions are we making about things, about the reality. Are we, without realizing it, skipping steps to get to some of our conclusions?
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The theory of an embodied mind is neither new nor original. It is a staple of cognitive linguistics beginning with perhaps Mark Johnson and George Lakoff. The mind is never from any other perspective than the body within which it functions.
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Knowledge is physically or materially based because our senses including the mind are materially based. Reality is material based.2.
I deal with the material reality, or I should only deal with the material reality.3.
The abstract, conceptual, non-material “realities” by definition have no effects upon the material reality. Therefore we should not be concerned with them.4.
We should only concern ourselves with the material which can perform abstraction, conceptualisation, and think about non-material realities, and not concern ourselves with abstractions, concepts and non-real “things”. -
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There is no evidence that we can have any kind of knowledge outside of or prior to sensory knowledge.2.
If only the mind (whatever the word means) is necessary then we should be able to have knowledge through it alone. That is, a person born with no other sense other than the mind (following Buddhism, I take the mind to be the sixth sense) then this person’s mind should be sufficient to allow him access to knowledge.3.
There is also no evidence of a mind independent of the body, either before one is born or after one has died. -
The term perception has a slightly different usage between the West and East. For the West, there is a distinction between sensation and perception. But for the East, perception means both raw sense data (sensation) and processed data of the mind (perception). This East-West distinction needs to be also kept in mind.
theoria 