I think, therefore I am.

All I remember of what I wanted to post is the title but I'm hoping the rest will come to me. It had to do with how we have a sense of who we are and it's largely background. The wisdom of the East is that the mind can't be perceived because it's what does the perceiving. (E.g the koan "can a mirror reflect itself?") But we have internal models for who we think we are and who we think others are. They include concepts of thinking and imagery and memory and emotions and the role of physiology. Lately it has been customary to not make a big distinction between our minds and our bodies. It's like the mind/body problem has gotten solved by making the mind just one of many bodily functions like a sense of smell.

I guess the rest didn't come to me because this post has remained a draft for two and a half years.  It's not coming to me now either.  But I'll persist nevertheless.  A smell is in part an experience.  It is a mental event which connects to the physical world by the circumstances of its arising.  We still distinguish the experiential part from the circumstances.  But, if you think about it, all events in the world in which we participate have this same duality.  We both exist, and we undergo awarenesses in the process. The anti-Cartesians would like us to not think about it this way.  They would like awareness  and existence to be the same thing.  For them, thinking and am-ing are one rather than the first being the cause or the proof of the second. They assert that they are the same thing and it is our muddled thinking which interferes with this being obvious.  Or maybe it's our muddled language which allows us to talk about the two as different. Maybe they are also claiming not to be subject to this muddle.  And who am I to say they are? 

There are many philosophical problems which can be disposed of in this manner.  If we could only avoid being bewitched by language these mysteries would never arise.  It's a profound argument and at the same time there's something wrong with it.  Maybe I shouldn't be arguing with Wittgenstein but hey, it's my blog! 

The profound part is that the map, being different from the territory, can have contradictions, but reality, since it exists, cannot.  Philosophical problems then become problems in the map, not the territory.  But at the same time, language is important.  I couldn't be writing all this without it.  You couldn't be reading it either.  It is what we use to express ourselves and to understand reality.  We can't really step outside it to prune away the bewitching parts.  What unbewitched criteria could we use to to do so?  Once our medium of understanding is found suspect, understanding itself becomes suspect.  What we mean by understanding then becomes downgraded to just another aspect of the language game.  We can talk about how we use the word "understand" but understanding itself means something in addition to that which we can't really express except as another part of the game.  As Gödel points out in a similar situation, our understanding must be incomplete or inconsistent.  The mind/body problem is thus replaced with an even bigger problem about which we cannot speak but must pass over in silence.

This has remained a draft for a long time.  Perhaps everything is really a draft and nothing is ever really complete.  Or, equivalently, everything is always complete at a given moment.  This paragraph began over 2 years later than the one above it.  I now think differently about all this stuff.  I am less concerned with language.  I'm a convert to a new way since I read (much of) Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning by Eugene T. Gendlin.  I now "know" that experiencing is a much bigger factor in who we are than was apparent because words are so attractive and beguiling.  The time spent doing lots of experiencing gets lost like a dream when we awaken because the world of language pulls us in as if there's no where else to go.  It has a crispness that makes it seem more real but it is just a still photo that omits nearly everything.  I am and every once in a while I think (in words/concepts) with no 'therefore' about it.  I don't even feel like using words at the moment so I will publish this mess of a draft.  It's not like anyone else reads it.