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In what sense do you exist / are you alive if you are not THINKing that you are alive, that you exist in a certain situation in life, etc.? Can one imagine, i.e.: THINK living that is not THINKing? All things pass away. So if you are not THINKing, then whatever you are doing / not doing is passing away and getting to be gone. But if you THINK that all things are passing away, have you not thereby ceased to just be passing away? Is it possible to imagine a person who is not THINKing existing in any way as an "inside" not just as an intraworldly object perhaps like a bee or definitely like a cinderblock? Is it possible to understand anything except the living process of understanding (contrast with explaining some thing)? Colloquially, what may be going on in the head of a person who is not reflectively thinking about their being alive?
Item: I have to make a big effort to walk up a big hill. I notice I am 10% up the hill. Next thing I notice is I am 40% up the hill. I didn't get from 10% to 40% by some kind of wormhole in space-time, did I? So what happened in the middle that I am not aware of? Is that what the existence(?) of people who are not thinking about their thinking all the time is like? Am I really living among Potemkin people (left)?
What was going on in that head? It certainly was not any THINK ing about my cultural self-formation, although it may have been something about lacrosse balls or what his wife might be fixing him for dinner? ☏
The Headmaster or the "preparatory school" I attended did seem to be an unanswered telephone: Ring him up and you got a dialtone (or maybe a recorded message?) ☏. He seemed, as the saying goes: "thick as a brick" or like a hollow gourd; maybe his cranial cavity was just filled with amyloid plaques. Was anybody home in there (right)? When I greeted the school's Spanish teach, who very well knew I was not stupid, with a cheerful: "Bonus diaz!" he assigned me to write "Buenos dias" 500 times, so it seemed something semiotic was going on in his head and he supposedly had a doctoral degree in corporate law from The Netherlands so what was he doing being a teach in Mr. Dialtone's "prep" school?
Why try to figure it out? Behave toward persons proportionately to the feedback you get from them. Turn the volume up or down depending on the signal strength. It's not a Turing test. If Siri can do what you need, so what? Just THINK how puzzled I would be about "people" if I have not been childreared to not see big elephants in the small room? They probably only taught the dangerous words "no" and "not" because otherwise they could not tell me: "No you can't do [whatever it was I wanted to do]!", nor command me: "Do not do that!" The danger, of course, is that when a person knows negation words they can say: "Hell no, I won't go!"
To repeat a story I heard from a retired cardiologist who had had a patient who worked in IBM Research: He said that when John Akers became CEO of the company, everybody was ordered to take the THINK(sic) signs (above) off their desks. Everyone complied with the order, and stopped thinking.
 Invenit et fecit |
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