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Could you imagine something higher than thinking?

I am still going through some old thoughts I may have posted a year or two ago.

If one grants that thinking is higher or more complex than simply being an organism without perception, higher/more complex than perception, higher/more complex than reason.  If these are all on a continuum, then it would seem that there's another point beyond reason along this continuum.  But what would that be?  (smirk here)

Comments

Eternitatis said…
Meta-thinking would be a "functorial" operation. If the experience of human consciousness and thinking is just a "new group law of composition" among the cosets of a quotient group, then the question you are asking is whether there could be a meta-consciousness or meta-thought produced from a higher embedded quotient group producing "cosets of thought" where the cosets of thought would have yet another new law of composition. I know none of this is clear to you, but I would doubt that this could exist. Why? Because to be a quotient group, the "dividing group" (that which produces our image of the world by the action of our self-identity = "dividing the world by our consciousness" so to speak) would have to be normal, and there are restrictions on nesting normal subgroups. It is an interesting question, and I don't even know the answer in the context of the abstract math in which I'm formulating it because examples of abstract groups at this level are few and far between.
10:14 AM
Leo White said…
Thank you for your comment! Of course, I am not entirely sure of what you're saying, but it provokes the following reply.

Your argument assumes (rightly, I believe) that meta-thinking would be characterized by "aboutness." But that anything with that characteristic would seem to be thinking.

Thought is, at least sometimes, about everything. And by "everything" I mean to include potential and actual being, and by potential I mean to include not only what can be extramentally but the imaginable and anything akin thereto.

"Thought" is, therefore, a term that includes anything that an operation can be about. So if there is, perhaps by definition, no operation that somehow surpasses "aboutness," then there is no operation beyond thinking. That would include mathematical thought, which is what I think you're talking about.
6:33 AM
Eternitatis said…
I think the "aboutness" comes about (excuse the pun) from Heidegger-ian roots; namely, our being is always "towards" or "about" something (Dasein). On the other hand, the notion of supervenience would seem to offer a meta-thinking possibility where for example your thinking becomes just one component of a greater cyborg like entity with super-thinking ability applied to all those plugged into the Matrix. In other words does parallel processing of a 1000 different streams of consciousness confer/amount to/create a new level of supervenient consciousness? Defined in that way, the technical issue becomes the same one that justifies "thinking" as an emergent property. Super-thinking is just another level up the supervenient ladder as yet another "emergent property."
10:03 PM
Leo White said…
To propose "super-thinking" as you do is not trivial: it's interesting.

But it pretty much makes the point that I am trying to make here, which is that one who recognizes something like emergence can't posit something beyond thinking. To posit super-thinking, is to posit a kind of thinking.

I suppose someone could rebut this point by saying , 'Well, there might be something beyond thinking, but you just can't think (!) of it." At which point I would point out that if there is something beyond thinking, this rebutter has not offered an argument in support of it: he or she has merely made an appeal to ignorance.
8:34 AM
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