Wyman wrote:cladking wrote:Philosophy Explorer wrote:It would seem so. A famous example is Kekule's benzene dream. Others may argue you have to be awake to think (a good secondary question is thinking always a part of consciousness?) So I suppose the answer may be how one defines thinking.
So you decide. Do we think in our sleep?
I believe thought is an artefact of modern language. Learning language creates a matrix we use to think. We use this matrix to access memory and to understand things learned by previous generations. It is the root of the conscious mind and exists till death.
It's different for animals and ancient people. For them language is (was) an artefact of thought. Language simply reflected the way the brain was wired.
Today we have two different modes of operation in sleep. In stage three sleep (REM sleep) the modern language matrix processes errant signals which are dreams and partially processed "thoughts". We experience it as thinking in our sleep (dreaming). Like in our waking state this stage of sleep is controlled by our beliefs. If you believe in Freud then you can have freudian dreams. In stage two sleep the language center(s) (broca's area?) are down and the natural human brain can process information. I believe this is when we arrive at answers when we "sleep on it". The language is lost but the processing and wiring still exist.
That's an interesting post. "Controlled by our beliefs" is what I meant in my post above when I said the stimuli is 'interpreted' by our brains. I've often wondered how some philosophers maintain that knowledge involves propositions (Rorty for one) and therefore has language as a necessary condition. This would mean that pre-linguistic humans were incapable of knowledge.
To a large extent our beliefs are based on knowledge but we still act on our beliefs. Our knowledge is all determined by language and our beliefs are in language. Language is the be all end all of human existence and always has been. We can't see this from our perspective.
Ancient people, modern people, and animals all have knowledge. Most "true" knowledge is visceral knowledge but modern people have a great deal of knowledge with which they have little or no experience. We know there is nitrogen in the air but few people know this viscerally because it lies outside their experience. Ancient people and animals hold much of their knowledge as language because the languages are metaphysical in nature; they contain learning and are the definitions and processes by which new learning is found. These metaphysical languages mirror the way the brain is wired and are natural to each species.
There's no such thing as "pre-linguistic humans". It's a contradictionin terms because it was solely complex language that allowed learning to be passed down from one generation to another. It's this accumulation of knowledge that defines humanity. Without language there are no humans.
I think that knowledge should be explained at a deeper level as a kind of activity, which our early ancestors, and perhaps some animals, were capable of. Language is just another activity.
The activity of language on an individual basis is thought. It's untrue that we think therefore we are. More accurately this idea is a perversion of human animalhood. By believing this we are removing out animal characteristics and placing ourselves in a different realm. We don't exist because we think, so much as think because we exist. The act of learning language allows us to think but we exist with or without language and we exist and think with or without modern language. Ancient language was easier to learn but sleep stages would have been the same. Perhaps we could remember the stage two dreams better but brain segments sleep in shifts and apparently memory tends to be sleeping in stage two sleep so we don't remember how we arrive at answers in our sleep. Ancient people wouldn't have needed to sleep on so many things since the concepts were at hand; they were already on the top of the tongue. They were a part of the metaphysical language.
