Okay, so I got this new guy to post once. Hopefully he'll post more. He's got a good head on his shoulders, but even better, he's gonna be the next Hemingway, which means there should be lots of stories about his adventures drinking and fucking and fighting and loving and hating and feeling and thinking and truth and pain and perception and killing himself. Well, maybe not the last one, but if it happens, I'll be sure to let you know. Regardless, he's got the doors of perception flung upon and a wide wind is blowing through his house. Hopefully he'll share with us.
So thought has more dimensions that its application to the physical realm and precludes every physical thing, eh? At first I was struck by how incredible anthropocentric this was. Descartes can be reasonably employed when trying to verify one's existence (though not others', mind you) but even then, all it proves is that the thought exists, not necessarily the thinker. Perhaps you just verify the existence of the thought, not the other way around.
Then again, maybe you are on to something. Thoughts plainly exist, just as unicorns and dragons exist, if only in our thoughts. At least thoughts of dragons and unicorns exist. The words unicorn and dragon are undeniable!! Yet thoughts fail to meet certain criteria of existence. Perhaps this means that our criteria for existence are faulty?!?
Physicists, trying to make sense of physical reality, have discovered and invented incredible worlds of magical particles endowed with peculiar properties that don't play by the rules of reality as we know. Some have suggested that there are more dimensions to reality than we initially perceive. Sal suggested that thoughts have more dimensions than we can apply to reality.
Pirsig argued that qualia or quality is the fundamental attribute necessary for existence. But for differences in qualities must be observed and perceived to exert any force or power. When we add up what Feynman, Heisenberg, Hawking, Dirac, Sal, and Nute say, we end up with the universe as a massive thought energy form that owes its existence to the (human?) lifeforms that are there to think it up.
Damn. Sal, you better stay on here.
Minding my own business, I really was, a Sunday with empty bottles and laundry calling, web surfing, a mess of several days all nagging but the internet talking to me and this guy says, join me.
I panicked and said, I can't, I won't, leave me. I fought a slightly good fight, but really I caved but fast, this guy creating accounts and giving instructions and the icing, the cake, the have and eat it too: welcome to Diablog.
It's because of thought. Are they real? What are your thoughts on the subject? This is what I think. Thinking about whether thinking is real, and if it isn't, you become less real for the doing, and if it is, you become more.
It's Descartes of course, and I don't care if "cogito ergo sum" is cliché, it remains philosophically valid. I think, therefore I am.
What if everything we can measure is less real than our thoughts? I'm talking about the sensation of heat, cold or hangover that you're experiencing right now, that's less real than the thinking behind it. I am cold? I feel cold, therefore I am cold. Are your five senses the only route to sensory percetion? Brain mapping has told us the answer, and it is no. Thoughts as reflection of an ultimate realness in a half-real universe, and perhaps transcendentalist thinking is an expression of this utter reality.
It's possible to disagree with the spiritualist conception of thought as an expression of the spirit or soul, and the soul's purpose being one of surpassing a physical world that is ethereal into a spiritual existence that is fully real and the natural realm of thought. Disagreement is an option, dismissal is not.
I would posit this: that thought is the first reality, that thought has more dimensions than its applications to the physical realm, and that thought is equal to spiritual awareness, that life is about the ascension of thought above the limitations of matter.
En masse, humanity has built several civilisations that depended firstly upon the thinking of them, the conception of the possibilities. Thought flows from whatever elemental substance feeds it, and becomes the most important human action. Thought precludes every physical thing.
The guy clearly won because here I am. I'll see you now and then, engaging in a diablog. My name is Sal.
S.