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Unthinkable thoughts - Magical Realist - May 23, 2015
Neurologist David Eagleman has an interesting insight on this.
"As far as thoughts that we’re not able to think, that’s an idea that I just love to explore, because there’s all kinds of stuff we can’t see. Just as an example, if you take the electromagnetic radiation spectrum, what we call visible light is just one ten-billionth of that spectrum. So, we’re only seeing a very tiny sliver of that, because we have biological receptors that are tuned to that little part of the spectrum. But radio signals, and cell phone signals, and television signals, all that stuff is going right through your body, because you happen not to have biological receptors for that part of the spectrum.
So, what that means is that there’s a particular slice of the world that you can see. And what I wanted to explore in the book is that there’s also a slice of the world that you can think. In other words, because of evolutionary pressures, our psychology has been carved to think certain thoughts—this is the field known as evolutionary psychology—and that means there are other thoughts that are just like the cell phone signals, and radio signals, and so on, that we can’t even access.
Just as an example, try being sexually attracted to something that you’re not—like a chicken or a frog. But chickens and frogs find that to be the greatest thing in the world, to look at another chicken or frog. We only find that with humans. So, different species, which have otherwise pretty similar brains, have these very specific differences about the kinds of thoughts they can think. (…)"====http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post/7722763662/david-eagleman-on-how-we-constructs-reality-time
It doesn't take much to wonder if many of these unthinkable thoughts aren't vital to our understanding of reality. We place so much stock in the coherence of thoughts we CAN have into a self-locking system of logic, but how many just as axiomatic logics could there be besides this one. What if we aren't just constituted to realize certain concepts that would make reality totally clear and understood? If such is even possible.
RE: Unthinkable thoughts - C C - May 24, 2015
Converting the experience of three spatial dimensions to abstract description enabled the formulation of higher dimensions from the latter's rules. While those new dimensions can't be converted into non-compromised experiences, it nevertheless demonstrated that reasoning carried out by symbol manipulation can transcend the regulating forms of empirical realization which we're confined to. But this still falls within the limitations of the Understanding which Kant outlined. For though the Understanding may have the potential to conceive endless novelties that surpass what the Sensibility can manifest, or be brought indirectly into connection with it by experiment.... Without such another complementary faculty for exhibiting those speculative affairs they cannot be made empirically real or so validated in that context.
RE: Unthinkable thoughts - elte - May 24, 2015
Maybe there are some who can think unthinkable thoughts. Those might be some of the people who might be seen as crazy or maybe eccentric.