“fundamental reality” (The Future) → consciousness (The Now) → conceptual reality (The Past) — Carlo Roosen

Okay. I'll bite.

Predictions (Possible outcomes of projections) > Projections (How we directing towards future goals based on understanding of the Map) > Map (What is neurologically mapped out through experience)

And?

it will be impossible to prove or disprove that an AI is conscious, in the sense of “having a first-person experience — Carlo Roosen

I am starting to think you are not conscious and this is a weird experiment pout together by the owner of the site. Meaning, there are endless things that cannot be proven or disproven. So what?

But where does that feeling come from? Can I trust it? — Carlo Roosen

Your body, most likely (if you have one). Trust is not option. Experience is experience. People see and hear things that are not there all the time. Anyone who dreams understands the power our brains have to produce experiences that seem as real as waking ones. A computer being able to draw pictures and produce videos that look real does not mean it can think or that being able to do makes it somehow 'intelligent' anymore than a pocket calculator or a television.

What if a computer starts to express things you can relate to at a very personal level? What if it really starts contributing to new insights? I’d call that consciousness. — Carlo Roosen

I wouldn't. Your point, if there is one?

I’d like to keep intelligence and consciousness as two different terms. The first one, intelligence, we can define (with some debate) and measure. The second one we can really only infer. — Carlo Roosen

Well, no. There is something called 'g' that can vaguely be measured. By our human definitions I do not see how we can have intelligence without consciousness. AI means Artificial Intelligence (fake/simulated). If it does appropriate something more like human intelligence then it would be Alien Intelligence. Still, it is not necessarily conscious in any human sense of conscious.

Here is a general review of book: https://youtu.be/AXRGXX6y-fM

Yes, it is. I still recall the imagery of the waves as forest pines in my head.

No one is forcing a phone in front of them. — Samlw

The problem is no one is banning them. Children having access to these devices is fairly insane.

How has technology changed people being honest? — Samlw

I never said that.

From the way you have worded your response I can tell there is a significant age gap — Samlw

Maybe? I am 46 years old. I grew up without a phone in my pocket. I think I am in a reasonable crossover period to assess better than anyone significantly older or younger as the internet only really picked up decent momentum from when I was 16-18 yrs old.

And there are negatives to technology I am not saying that there isn't. But I think the benefits insanely outweighs the negatives and as technology gets better I believe we will get more connected and more respectful of other people that may not be from our way of life. — Samlw

Possibly. I just see it in classrooms and in the streets. People are hooked to their screens. I think the rate of change is so fast that there is little time to assess anything atm. Maybe it is just a perspective of age and how I noted the changes happening years ago and seeing how things have 'progressed' since then. I guess things could turn sour or sweet just as quickly.

I am certainly not a pessimist about it though, I just think it is going to be a messy transition. I am not entirely convinced by what people like Harari say, but there is some points that are worth paying attention to by the doomsayers.

In real life this is not the case, the amount of people I come in contact with every day that are civil and friendly completely outweigh the odd occasion someone is nasty to me. — Samlw

I do not honestly think being 'nice' or 'nasty' has anything to do with anything. I would rather meet people who are honest than 'nice'. That said, a certain degree of civil grace is no bad thing. I find incessant 'niceness' intolerable :D

I agree it is a very hard issue to tackle, however with our world becoming more and more connected through technology I believe it is only a matter of time until we are all so incredibly connected and diverse that it will simply become normal. And those who oppose it due to others culture's and beliefs will be told to simply get on with it. — Samlw

I think the opposite is happening. People are becoming more disconnected because of technology. The landscapes people spend a lot of their time in is no longer physical and this could likely lead to further disconnection and discontent.

When the sun rises it heats the ground. The causal linkage here seems pretty direct. When the Mets give up a hit it certainly seems like this is caused by the Dodger's players' bats hitting the ball. — Count Timothy von Icarus

When the sun rises it heats the ground. (Causal Perspective)

If played in reverse, when the 'sun rises' the it 'heats' the ground. (reverse-Causal Perspective)

When the sun is up the ground is hot. (Correlational Perspective)

Is our perspective of the world built upon the principles of Correlation OR Causation? Does one come prior to the other? If not, then what?

I would also add that there is a clear difference between inanimate and animate objects when it comes to contemplating causation. The two examples you give are vastly different - which is part of the problem I have with causation.

My question is this: How do you decide who to let in and who to deny entry? — Samlw

It is not a question of WHO is it more or less a question of HOW MANY or WHERE. The tabloids distort the rhetoric more often than not.

If we focus on the WHO rather than the HOW MANY or WHERE, then we find ourselves entrenched in a cultural dilemma.

[url=http://]https://www.statista.com/statistics/283599/immigration-to-the-united-kingdom-y-on-y/[/url]

Population has increased since 1991 by about 17% and net Migration ha spiked over the past 4-5 years after a significant slump. Looking at numbers though tends to do little more than fan the flames one way or another.

I post this just to show I understand the numbers and that omission of some figures in favour of others can favour one perspective over another. I am not concerned primarily with the numbers, but rather the general needs and requirements of UK citizens so as not to place them below the needs of disruptive/illegal immigrants.

Note: I would personally benefit from looser Immigration Laws in the UK so do not jump to conclusions about where my biases lie when reading the following :)

The problem is the human factor and the question of integration. It is absolutely the case that people with vastly different ideals and views are unable to fully integrate and due to people often shouting 'racist' even the police fear intervening.

It is a very difficult problem to tackle. Diversity is certainly beneficial, yet there are traditions and cultural ideologies that are engrained in some people who go to live in other countries that are hard to balance out.

In the UK there are people who are literally squatting in public places and are protected by the law. I do not think people who do not hold a UK passport should be allowed to get away with this. The sad truth is SOME are just unfortunate, but nevertheless, they have to survive and often fall prey to less than legal means of sustenance. Deport. If this was done then I suspect we would see less complaints from the public.

As for the US ... that is a separate issue. I know the UK well enough and have seen the problems firsthand. If the government is struggling to deal with homelessness then they should put laws in place that allow them to remove (deport) foreigners (without passports) if they are living rough on the streets. Obviously, this comes with a whole lot of baggage involving 'human rights' and relations with neighboring nations. I see no real problem in simply shipping them back to their country of origin with threat of jail time if they return illegally.

Turning to Isaiah Berlin in The Hedgehog and The Fox:

Freedom of the will is an illusion which cannot be shaken off, but, as great philosophers have said, it is an illusion nevertheless, and it derives solely from ignorance of true causes. The more we know about the circumstances of an act, the farther away from us the act is in time, the more difficult it is to think away its consequences; the more solidly embedded a fact is in the actual world in which we live, the less we can imagine how things might have turned out if something different had happened. For by now it seems inevitable: to think otherwise would upset too much of our world order. The more closely we relate an act to its context, the less free the actor seems to be, the less responsible for his act, and the less disposed we are to hold him accountable or blameworthy. The fact that we shall never identify all the causes, relate all human acts to the circumstances which condition them, does not imply that they are free, only that we shall never know how they are necessitated.
- I.Berlin, p.

It is the part in bold that can allow us to view the human-centric view (as Baden put it) as something unquestioned.

Note: This is a critique of the Sociology. Something Tolstoy was wholly opposed (whom Berlin is writing about) to in the era of historicism in the 19th century.

You're getting at a human-centric bias? If so, sounds plausible, but can you develop a more specific example? — Baden

In terms of time reversed. The 'cause' of our existence would see us 'born' in a variety of ways (usually after being dug up or rising from ashes), yet all would die under the same circumstances in some woman's womb.

In this situation we could notice patterns that relate to 'prior to' life (the commonality of burning/burying in forwards time) but the actual 'start' of life would be a purely arbitrary matter - death occurs in many ways.

You can also imagine time sped up too if that sits better with you. What occurs immediately prior to would be regarded as the Cause, but if time is appreciated at a faster pace then my hand knocking something off of a table may be regarded as the Cause in a slower sense, yet if sped up the Cause of the object falling form he table may be viewed as the result of someone else putting it there.

The strength or weakness of the cause varies by perspective. Correlation can certainly be a red herring, but sometimes what people have regarded as a red herring for some time turns out to possess some affect upon an outcome through processes previously unknown.

I would say this is also a cultural bias not just a human bias. The way we view time varies from culture to culture. Animism would be regarded as some less apparent 'cause' because there would be particular concept of causation in early cultures (especially if our earliest ancestors were non-languaged peoples). With literacy language becomes more ordered, and prior to literacy of any kind there would be mnemonics as a means of ordering, yet no real concept of ordering in the sense we think today.

In some cultures today we see prepositions of time differ quite dramatically, with some using 'size' to measure time with, "a small time ago" where others view the future as "behind" or "below".

In this sense I am suggesting that causation is a 'belief' rather than a concrete reality. It seems almost like the equivalent of when children acquiring a theory of mind, yet we are still besotted with our Causal view even though it is minimal in scope preferencing the immediate over the long-term. We are temporally short-sighted, and necessarily so, so as to avoid immediate dangers (this would be the human bias part). Our Cultural bias has led us to create a definitive view of Causation, but it is at least partly a construction.

I will think on that. I am inclined to avoid doing so at the moment in fear of straying too far afield.

It might help to think of time 'running backwards' and then looking at how you view this or that as 'causal'?

It appears so. :) It does state they are often regarded as 'real' cause though. Which is primarily what I am questioning here. I am wondering about temporal bias, and it kind of relates to @schopenhauer1 post regarding the responsibility of a Culture.

An example would be the disjoint between a planned action and once taken in the spur of the moment, against items such as physical mechanics. The 'agency' of the human seems to run into conflict with the, how should I put it, 'laws of nature'.

The weight of importance is attributed to us because the immediacy of an action seems to trump the knowledge of the action.

There seems to be a given belief that temporal proximity has more weight to the contributing factors of some given outcome?

If you want to argue that there is Ultimate Causation go ahead. The neglect of the pilot has as much bearing as the inaccuracy of the autopilot. Not having the ship manned was negligence. So it was it lack of a manned deck that caused the incident or the inaccuracy of the autopilot? They cannot BOTH be ultimate causes - there is no such thing in reality only in abstract space.

Pretty much there. Being born can be viewed as the reason you kill someone, rather than some fact that they ran in front of your car whilst you were driving at 90mph. There is infinite regression in reality but not in abstraction.

We can fall into infinite regression. The situation you outlined with dominoes is an abstract reality. If we are parsing up time as beginning from the initiation of the first domino to fall then that is the Distal cause.

In reality this parsing up of time is completely arbitrary. Of course I fully understand the bonus for scientific experimentation.

I was just wondering why because we experience the world the way we do we assume the world is the way we experience it. The appearance of events running as one that follows another does not rigidly define them as causally connected other than by our experiential perceptions - which are artifacts of culminated culture.

We speak the words we speak because we inherited them not because we created them. In around 200,000 years what is pretty much an evolutionary homeostatic position we have moved strides ahead in terms of our dealings with the environment.

What if our species had no formal language? What if it took over 100,000 years to create a minimal form of language? Dr. John Vervaeke refers to our progression as being driven by psychotechnologies (language, writing, reason, etc.,.). Something along the lines of humanity hitting something equivalent to a Cognitive Singularity that propelled us from partly dumb animals to non-dumb animals. Then, as time moved on we dragged and cultivated ideas through generations to the point where they culminated in the explosion of civilization.

Over all this time the next most significant leap was agriculture, which would require a verbal scheme to plan ahead and think about the future, only really tangible as a collective group with the creation of temporal concepts (more diverse prepositions of time and tense). Then, eventually, the written word and literacy also played a major role.

The very concept of Causation is a tool of understanding the world from our perspectives NOT a given. The power of memory allowed for a 're-cognition' of events and a recognition which led to appreciation of some cyclical procedure (from our perspectives). The refinement of this occurs because we then quantified and atomized the world.

Our stories about the world we live in dominate daily life. Causation does not. The idea of causation is a tool that imagines the world as orderly and was more fully taken to be 'real' due to the 'tool' of quantifying/atomization.

The way I see it, there are three main divisions when it comes to conscious appreciation of the cosmos: Material (physical), Formal (Reason) and Social (Intersubjective).

Causation plays between the Material and Formal, but overreaches into the Social.

Bingo! Thanks for that.

I am just playing around with the concept of time here and how our terminology influences our perception of time. Especially in terms of how we approach formal logic and its relations to colloquial language use.

I guess I am saying all Causation is Proximal and never Ultimate (as referenced by Baden : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_and_ultimate_causation

I know this is weird and seemingly obvious. That is what gripped me about it.

I am intrigued by the use and application of these terms both within logic and colloquially. It seems to me that an Event is needed for any such appreciation of reality to exist. The disjoint between reality (experiential world) and the abstract makes me uneasy.

Anyway, off to work. Will see if I can pick at this a little more during the day ...

They do. They are all conscious states.

If the IRA and Palestinians were comparable — BitconnectCarlos

They are not. The IRA were a terrorist organisation and the Palestinians are a population of people. Maybe you meant IRA and Hamas? In which case I would not agree. The IRA were not genocidal.

You have really opened up a can of worms here :D

Next on the agenda .. Race! Is 'race' cultural? Can we blame a 'race' because race=culture in some respects.

I honestly do not think this discussion will get far because people here are too emotional about such topics. Culture is a many-headed hydra! It is an umbrella term that covers pretty much every aspect of human life.

At the end of the day I do not really think you can blame a whole body of people. People are stupid, so it is hardly their fault for coming up with ideas that are mistaken nor it is the fault of the stupid who know no better following them blindly into the fray.

The simple truth is most of us would have been the prison guard at the concentration camp rather than the one standing up against genocide. The best hope we have is to realise the monster we see in others is only possible because we recognise it in ourselves. The more repulsive something is to us the more likely we are to refuse we are capable of such a crime ... unfortunately this is usually a sign that we would be that repulsive monster.

Thanks for your thoughts. I think of 'home' as being a place of memories, usually with other people.

Coccia actually seems to be arguing that now the Earth has become our home. Previously we would create a refuge from nature but now we have gained so much control over what was previously unknown and mysterious that home is literally anywhere humans are able to live (which is everywhere!).

I imagine a space station even feeling like home, but in the vacuum of space no one feels at home ... yet!

What has been your experience with stoicism, or what do you think is the issue here? Thoughts and comments welcome. — Shawn

I think Mencius encapsulates much of what Stoics believed. Not sure if Mencius was into a cyclical universe though?

Simplistically, Stoicism = "amor fati"

In the broader sense Stoicism is about cataleptic phantasia; 'true experience' and 'avoiding illusions/delusions'. You can kind of see where the Que sera sera attitude of stoicism came from I guess :)

These are all very pertinent questions that require multiple approaches.

Articulate your questions carefully. Contemplate the terms used and their meanings in different fields of expertise. For instance, in linguistics those who study animals are quite happy to call what bees do a 'language' but others focused in other areas of linguistics are not. It is an arduous task sifting through the detritus of words and it is necessary to make mistakes.

What I think you may just be beginning to understand (or rather understand more fully) here is that every word you type can mean different things to different people and that this then becomes exponentially more likely once these words are put in sentences, and sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into ...

There is a lot to focus on. Pick something and stick with it to the point where it drives you utterly insane, then switch tack and tackle the next one. Often once you have circled back around to the first thing you began to tackle it has crystalised a little and leaves you to further reexamine it AND other related ideas.

If you want to talk about Language then break that up into parts and tackle them on eat a time. If you want to tackle the concept of Intelligence, likewise.

When I asked some days ago what you hoped to get out of philosophy you said "I don't know".

If you are interested in Language I would recommend you read three books written by different people with opposing views in parallel to each other. Do not read second-hand analysis or interpretations, just read the source material -start with the Conclusions (last Chapter/Page/Paragraph) and then read the Intro. Make a comparison between them. Then read them through jumping between one then another. This should prevent you being too taken in by any one particular view over another.

I would hesitate to recommend any books because my knowledge is limited. Perhaps other can suggest THREE and look at what people suggest as three comprehensive and opposing views of this topic.

Off the top of my head I would suggest:

- The Language Instinct, Pinker (as a general introduction only).
- Any introduction to linguistics book (I have one by Anne McCabe which is alright).

Then:

- Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein.
- The Language and Thought of the Child, Piaget.
- Something about Language by Searle and/or Chomsky maybe?

More nuanced stuff:

- Poetics, Aristotle ALONGSIDE The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche. (This might be a bit too much though as it is more obscure in terms of how it relates to Language).

The gist of what I am saying is you seem serious, so do some serious work. Knuckle down rather than distract yourself with what some people online think or say. It is a place for honing a few individual nuggets or for throwing something randomly out hoping to hit something ... other than that the real understanding and progression lies in your own focused personal time and research, not loose discussions.

btw I have nothing of interest to say regarding what 'intelligence' is. You can study some neuroscience if you want and see what they have to say about it if you want. I took a passing look once, but there is nothing there for me really.

I do not think he is suggesting anything like a revolution. He is more or less assessing how the revolution of Home has already happened.

One interesting point he makes at the start is how when we move house we expose ourselves. In the process of putting stuff into boxes and seeing the house stripped bear of our trappings, we also experience a sense of uprooting of self. We bring ourselves into focus as a 'being' apart from the world rather than as grounded in it to some degree.

I believe people have much the same feeling, of a loss of orientation, when they lose their phone as they have when moving house. There is a feeling of 'loss' as if part of ourselves is left behind which brings into question what we are in and of ourselves in the first place.

The Home is a refuge. A castle. Also, it could be the prison of Plato's Cave too perhaps? At least for some ... maybe?

I don't know whether Plato's Cave is an apt image when talking about phones and algorithms or not. It seems like a bit of a stretch. As for home, does the zombie haze lift when the wasted wanderers, the clochards, get home? Not if they all are sitting at the dinner table eyes still glued on the screen. — BC

I was thinking more or less along the line of the city is cut off from the natural world, the home from the city and then the mobile device from the home. We have retreated further into the Cave. That kinda thing :)

Personally, I see something of the possible reemergence of the clochard in the form of mobile devices.
— I like sushi

It strikes me as just... weird to reference a mobil device as a clochard given the meaning below. I don't see how gadgets limp, sleep under bridges, are Parisian bums, or anything similar. BTW, it seems like everyone everywhere is bewitched by their phones. — BC

That was not what I was doing. Clochards are the people with devices NOT the devices themselves. This should be apparent enough:

Personally, I see something of the possible reemergence of the clochard in the form of mobile devices.I noticed many years ago when I was in Bangkok that everyone I looked at had a phone in their hands or were actively using some kind of electronic device. Even the people conversing did so whilst browsing online or unconsciously clutching their prized phones to the chests.

Will technology replace the home? Is the metaverse already here in a sense and that we just simply have not really noticed that we spend our time'at home' in the 'elsewhere' world of texting and (doom)scrolling? — I like sushi

Please don't turn this into dictionary corner. I just had to check my own sanity with ChatGPT and it understood well enough what I meant. Case Closed!

Reemergence of the Clochard:

The mention of the clochard (homeless person) is intriguing here. The speaker might be suggesting that, just as a clochard has no physical home, modern people could be becoming metaphorical “clochards” by being mentally and emotionally “homeless.” The constant use of mobile devices could be seen as replacing or displacing a sense of groundedness or "home."
The clochard could symbolize disconnection from a traditional sense of place and physical presence. Mobile devices may give us access to virtual spaces, but those are temporary, fleeting, and lack the permanence and stability of a home. — ChatGPT

I would add to that that mobile devices can make it seem like your Home is in your pocket. You are anchored to it and it to you. Remove it and a piece of you seems to be missing.

(C) people who do not think in words at all (do they exist? Is it possible?) — Carlo Roosen

100%. There are plenty of cases where people do not possess any language so they obviously cannot think in words if they have none.

(D) people who believe they do not think in words, but they would discover they do, if they practiced a bit of non-thinking (although you say some cannot, which I doubt in fact. Some proper teaching will help, plus of course the wish to learn it) — Carlo Roosen

I think there is likely a scale of ability as there is with practically all human attributes. Maybe for some the ability is so low as to be unworkable? I do not know.

(E) people who know two modes, and both call them thinking (I am curious as to how they experience thinking without words) — Carlo Roosen

You just said you do not call 'thinking without words' by the term 'thinking' but can do this. So, how do you experience this 'other' mode if not with words? Why do you not call it thinking?

You can answer that question yourself. Why are you curious about the answer if you have it?

I think he is looking at the home as a 'place apart from' rather than somewhere we go about our daily business. Where we retire from the daily events is called home (where we tend to sleep and eat).

In terms of mobile devices, I was thinking that perhaps we have, to some degree, appropriated the social aspect of home-living and taken it deeper into the 'Cave' or even removed it completely from the physical home. The digital nomad still has a home, but the permanence of their world is now abstracted in the web rather than possessing a physical existence (other than through devices that access the web).

Not sure how far this thought can be taken. It is a thought though :)

He was making a point about Philosophy not coming from the City because people do not live in Cities, they live in homes. The only true citizens of a City would be someone Homeless.

It is a fairly interesting read and he takes his thoughts to a conclusion I was not expecting - which is always nice :)

Are you being annoying on purpose. You think I wrote 'the Clochard' meaning 'the homelessness'? Are you mental?

GO AWAY PLEASE. Troll some other post

Bye

1) Beds and tables as they are by their nature, the singular forms.
2) Beds and tables as they are made by the craftsman with an eye to the form
3) Beds and tables as they are made by a maker of images, whose model is the beds and tables made by the craftsman. — Fooloso4

Their Nature is their Law (Natural).

The Soul is its Nature.

The Law (of polis) is an Imitation of Nature.

The Nature of things is what their Truth is.

"Clochard" is a new word to me. I had to look it up .Maybe you should, too. — tim wood

I didn't. Literal quote from book is "the homeless, the clochards."

Give me some credit for knowing the meaning of the word PLEASE! :D

"Clochard" is a new word to me. I had to look it up .Maybe you should, too. — tim wood

It means 'homeless'. I had seen it before in Oscar Wilde I think, and again in the very book I quoted - 'homeless'. I was using it in a dystopian sense of what could come.

If you do not understand, you do not understand.

Someone else can explain if they want to. I already tried.

1) Beds and tables as they are by their nature, the singular forms.
2) Beds and tables as they are made by the craftsman with an eye to the form
3) Beds and tables as they are made by a maker of images, whose model is the beds and tables made by the craftsman. — Fooloso4

1) The purpose.
2) The technique/skill ('techne'/'arete' perhaps?).
3) The sensory impression ('imitation').

To what extent is justice in the soul like justice in the city? — Fooloso4

1) Purpose = Nature
2) Ability = Individual
3) Imitation = Law

The laws of a city is an imitation of natural laws. The human 'soul' is a 'natural law'. The individual is allowed to reconstitute itself in the face of nature and the contraposition of the 'imitative' force of nature embodied in 'law'.

The main problem with the last part is Plato trying to equate the idea of 'imitation' of a 'visible image' with a 'narrative'.

edit NOTE: I am not stating Plato's position here.

It is pretty simple.

Some people (A) cannot comprehend 'thinking' as X and others (B) refuse to define 'thinking' as X. In both cases A and B would, probably more often than not, state "thinking must have words" (A and B are not mutually exclusive either).

It could be possible that someone who cannot comprehend 'thinking' without words would accept the statements from those who say they can. One need not experience something to believe in its possibility. That is why I wrote 'probably more often than not'.

I think there is some truth to that. If I understand him correctly, Damasio makes a distinction between emotions and feelings. Emotions come instinctively while feelings have to be learned. — T Clark

Things get messy when people use the same words within different contexts. I personally see philosophy as being one of those fields of interest that plays a large role in sorting out such messes, whilst often also exacerbating them! It gives with one hand and takes with the other :D

Thinking is not "guided." Guided by whom? — T Clark

'Goal Directed' would have been a better way of framing it. As in, merely having a sense of the word "gradation" as possessing the taste of "blackberries" is not really teleologically significant.

Using Logic is pretty useful. Other than that ... I dunno?

Are you familiar with Schiller? This link might interest you. I have not read it myself but I have read the full work, so assume they pick out the main focus of his work.

If not, there are is some similarity in what he conveys with the ideas of material-impulse (concrete, physical world) and formal-impulse (abstract, rational world) being somewhat bridged by the playful-impulse (aesthetic world).

Maybe I was acting harshly above. My comment to the maker of this thread was simply to keep in mind that some people will not accept that 'thought' can exist without 'words'.

That is all. I can absolutely 'think' without the use of 'words'.

My friend didn't "pretend" to fit in, she wasn't aware until late in life that she was any different from other people. — T Clark

That is not what I meant at all btw. People do tend to conform and if they believe something about how they perceive the world differs from others, and they are viewed with deep scepticism, they tend to just say they experience the world like others do. You know this, as does everyone. That is all I meant; AND I have seen people do this firsthand when quizzed about worded thought versus other thought. One minute they state they cannot visualise and when they realised this was 'different' to me they switched. When pressed further they resorted to stating they cannot 'see' or represent ideas in any other way than through worded thought.

There is the then the further problem of measurable data, in terms of fMRI and such, because they are one particular aspect of the empirical evidence. Empirical evidence and anecdotal evidence are close enough when dealing with subjective experiences in the real world. This is simply because we cannot create a 'controlled' setting if the setting is life experience.

I am not trying to twist the meaning of 'anecdotal evidence' here only state that the more subjective the phenomenon under investigation, the more so-called 'anecdotal evidence' becomes meaningful when some rigor is added - hence the field of psychology.

Synesthesia is another instance where experience and thought can become difficult to grasp. Many people can assign colours to abstract ideas where to others this seems utterly ridiculous. Again, this is a 'thought' in some sense of the word, but not something that utilises 'words'. Some people cannot do this. It can be argued by some that this is not 'thinking' though because it does not appear to be guided ... this is precisely the bias some people hold (maybe correctly) regarding what we refer to as 'thought'. Which seems to be more or less what you are saying. We can agree to disagree here.

There is a psychologist (or cognitive neuroscientist/linguist?) who believes that ALL emotions exist only because we created words for them. Crazy as that sounds we can see clear physical changes in a toddlers brain when they first learn the words for colours. Through fMRI it can be seen clear as day that pre-speaking one part of the infants brain lights up when exposed to and focusing on a particular colour, yet when they learn the words for the colours the activity in the brain dramatically shift to the other hemisphere. Of course, this does not present hard evidence for or against, but it is intriguing nevertheless.

Note: I do think Damasio has a point when it comes to viewing consciousness more in line with 'feeling' and his somatic marker view of consciousness. He did a lot to tear people away from the widely held dichotomy of emotion and reason in the public eye.