Combining Texts

Ideas for 'Parmenides', 'Gdel's Proof' and 'The Universe as We Find It'

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4 ideas

18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 1. Thought
You can think of tomatoes without grasping what they are [Heil]
     Full Idea: You can entertain thoughts of things like tomatoes without a grasp of what they are.
     From: John Heil (The Universe as We Find It [2012], 08.10)
     A reaction: Lowe seemed to think that you had to grasp the generic essence of a tomato before you could think about it, but I agree entirely with Heil.
18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 5. Rationality / b. Human rationality
The human intellect has not been, and cannot be, fully formalized [Nagel/Newman]
     Full Idea: The resources of the human intellect have not been, and cannot be, fully formalized.
     From: E Nagel / JR Newman (Gödel's Proof [1958], VIII)
     A reaction: This conclusion derives from Gödel's Theorem. Some people (e.g. Penrose) get over-excited by this discovery, and conclude that the human mind is supernatural. Imagination is the key - it is a feature of rationality that escapes mechanization.
18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 8. Human Thought
Linguistic thought is just as imagistic as non-linguistic thought [Heil]
     Full Idea: Thinking - ordinary conscious thinking - is imagistic. This is so for 'linguistic' or 'sentential' thoughts as well as for patently non-linguistic thoughts.
     From: John Heil (The Universe as We Find It [2012], 12.10)
     A reaction: This claim (that linguistic thought is just as imagistic as non-linguistic thought) strikes me as an excellent insight.
Non-conscious thought may be unlike conscious thought [Heil]
     Full Idea: Non-conscious thought need not resemble conscious thought occurring out of sight.
     From: John Heil (The Universe as We Find It [2012], 12.10)