In so far that a "being" would be defined by what it thinks (which makes sense), thought does imply the existence of a thinking being. Namely, the thinking being that the thoughts define. None of these issues are really about existence at all, they are about the definitions of words.
if we want to group collections of thoughts into "beings" that they "define", then we may. i'm just not convinced there's any reason to do so, apart from convenience/practicality
however, i'm coming more and more to the opinion that a thought must be thought by something the more i think on it. i was probably wrong to question that assumption.
What is a "kind of existence" and why does it matter?
"existence" is a very shaky term. it's a generalization that can be argued to apply to anything that can be conceived. when we talk about "existence", we usually have no clear idea of what we mean by the term, much less can we hope that our conception of "existence" lines up with that of those to whom we are speaking. when i hear somebody speaking about "existence" i find that either their personal conception is muddled, or that they have not adequately conveyed the sense that they attach to the word "existence". either way i cannot understand them and must deem them to be speaking nonsense.
when i ask what kind of existence thought implies, i guess what i'm really asking for is a more particular description of whatever aldaron thinks thought implies. unless we can understand the sense he attaches to "existence", his statement "i exist" has no sense, and is meaningless to us.
Humans are ad hoc machines driven by compartmented beliefs and reasoning. Take any given human, including you and including myself, and I guarantee you that neither their belief system nor their decision-making system are consistent, even if they are otherwise rational. Consistency only matters in so far that it is useful. If the answer to a question doesn't matter, it is an unreasonable constraint to expect a system to agree with itself on it. That's why, on irrelevant matters such as the existence of God, belief systems such as faith can clash with rationality and effectively make for an inconsistent belief system.
i hadn't considered this. you're right, human behavioural systems are not necessarily consistent, nor do they need to be.
The problem is that it is not clear at all that it means anything for anyone to "examine" or "understand" anything outside of human experience. It is not fair to take human concepts such as truth, existence or understanding and transpose them outside of human experience in order to make a point about other concepts. So in the end you're saying that we can never do some undefined thing about some system from a perspective that's outside of that system (a worthless proposition at best).
i'm not sure if it's worthless. maybe pragmatically worthless. i think what i'm trying to say is that we must always remember that human understanding is a system, and not the system. we have no reason to believe that the system exists.
Human intellect only has the limitations that it perceives it has. If we cannot perceive, concretely, any limitations to human intellect, then it follows that it has none,
but i think we can perceive limitations to the human intellect. we cannot conceive of our own non-existence (here i mean existence in terms of our ability to perceive sense-data and think), though it is perfectly sensible to assume that our non-existence is a logical possibility, and will one day become a practical fact.
perhaps it can be argued that not-thinking and not-perceiving are logically impossible to comprehend because the intellect has no substantive, that it is the act of perceiving and thinking. to this objection i can only offer more examples. we cannot conceive concretely of an infinite number, only apply our knowledge of what infinite means in the abstract, rather than making a picture of "infinity" in our minds. we cannot convey a private sensation to another individual.
no human living can remember the name, face and birthday of every human on earth. even if you argue it is logically possible for there to exist someone who could, i would reply that you are no longer talking about the human intellect - rather a platonic, ideal intellect with no basis in fact. attributing miraculous powers, beyond the demonstrated scope of human intellect, to this imaginary intellect would prove nothing: the practical constraints of human understanding are valid objections to the idea that the human intellect is limitless.
because to say otherwise would imply that the words we use are unintelligible for us - and that would be a failure of semantics, not a failure of our intellect.
the words we use are seldom unintelligible to us, but the sense we attach to the sound of a word, or to its shape on a sheet of paper, is impossible to convey to others with complete accuracy. the meaning we experience when we say "virtue" or "red" or "pain" or even "the taste of a banana" is not necessarily the same meaning that our friend experiences when he hears us speak the word. nor is there any way to verify that the two meanings are identical. our only method of doing so would be language, which is flawed in conveying accurate meaning from person to person, so any definitions must only cause more semantic problems.
To put it in another way, should we witness a system which claims that it has no limitations, yet it has from our perspective, we have to understand that it just might be the case that the system indeeds has no limitations with respect to the concepts they can cognize. So from within the system, they would be right to say they have no limitations. Now imagine that they cannot cognize the concept of a system like ours, and they cannot cognize the concept of systems such as ours existing
the fact that they cannot cognize it does not change the fact that it is cognized, independent of their cognizance. what i'm advocating when i bring up kant's goggles is that we should remember that while human understanding is the only understanding we will ever experience, other systems of understanding may exist and we may simply be incapable of comprehending them. human truth and understanding is practical for the human intellect, we should not extrapolate from this that it is a limitless force, capable of knowledge that does not apply directly and exclusively to itself. yes, our system works, and perhaps it's unfair of me to say it's "possibly-flawed", but it is a system with boundaries, handicaps, limitations. it is not necessarily better or worse than any other system of understanding. i think we are in agreement here.
- when they say "system", they don't mean what we mean by "system". When they say "truth" they don't mean what we mean by "truth". When they mean "to exist" they do not mean what we mean by "to exist".
i'm not really sure what you're driving at. if they say "system" and the sense they give to the word is different from the sense we give to it, we are talking about different things, even though we use the same sound or drawing. the fact that both of these senses are referred to by the sign "system" is nothing more than coincidence.
it is impossible that our sense of the word "system" should not be the sense that it is. that is a logical contradiction (well, according to my human intellect it is). your hypothetical race changes the sense of a sound, and all we retain in common with them is the sound. if "when they say 'system', they don't mean what we mean by 'system'", all we know is that they are discussing something entirely different from what we imagine when we hear the word "system". what you might have meant to say is that the sense of "system" does not exist in their language, not that the sense is a different sense, but somehow the same sense (enough that you think they are worth comparing, being somehow the same thing) in their language (which is absurd).
this is a problem of language: forget language, consider only the sense of language for a moment. either this race is incapable of conceiving our sense of the word "system" due to a defect in intellect, or they have relegated our sense of "system" to the dustbin, having recognized it as some kind of nonsense thanks to their superior intellect, or they have simply never conceived of our sense of "system", though they could.
From this, it ensues that from their system we effectively do not exist and they are right to say that we don't. Should we manage to make them understand what we are, they would apply their concept of existence to us and they would conclude that we do not exist.
because their concept of existence is something entirely alien from our concept of existence, and therefore not a concept of existence at all. as far as i can tell, you are saying they could judge us to be non-compliant with a term which we as humans do not understand (and thus cannot be anything like existence, of which we do have some conception).
And they would still be right because what they mean by "to exist" isn't what we mean (and it would be silly to deem one concept "better" than the other - they use theirs, we use ours, everybody's happy, that's where it ends). For these reasons, we might be able, eventually, to conclude that the human intellect has no limitations. And we could very well be right.
we might be able to linguistically manouvre ourselves into a position where we could say that the human intellect has no limitations, where our real sense is "the human intellect is not equipped to be fully cognizant of its own limitations, and this has little practical effect on human life". it would remain that the human intellect cannot achieve some things, no matter how we spun it.
There is also no reason to suppose that "existence" is a viable concept and that objective reality is ontologically necessary. There is no reason to suppose that there is any meaningful difference between "objective space-time" and the perception thereof. There is no reason to suppose that there is only one "correct" way to interpret the universe. When you are up to that point, honestly, everything is kind of arbitrary. "To exist" is very well defined colloquially when you're talking about shoes, a rare edition of a book or a historical figure. For these things I can list criteria to determine existence. When it comes to knowing whether the universe, time or space exist or not, frankly, I'm not sure that's intelligible. What are the criteria to determine that these things exist? I think metaphysical concepts are, for the most part, undue generalizations - a shoe can exist, but "time"? What the fuck does it even mean for time to exist?
since reading your post, i've come to think you're right about everything in this paragraph.
There exists no position from which any truth can be "determined". For any set of observations there exists an infinity of matching models. Hence, uncertainty about truth is irreducible in all cases. Also, what does "flawed" means about human experience? It doesn't seem that anything short of seeing things that make us run into walls and hurt ourselves would qualify as a flaw.
again, i'm convinced.
