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)
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
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.
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.