Degringolade

“There are no facts, only interpretations” Nietzsche: I suppose that I am not in the running to be anyone's prophet. M. Uses the word "Explanation" a lot. I tend to lean toward "Interpretation" myself. Not that we aren't "discussing" the same phenomenon, it is just that in the act of trying to make sense of a world that resists such a foolish endeavor, it appears to be the nature of the beast.

I am currently reading Jerry Fodor's "The Language of Thought". I am chewing through the text, but the idea is presented in the usual academic manner, which is to say written by academics for academics and thus it is deliberately obtuse (thought it isn't as bad as many and certainly is vastly easier to understand than folk like Duns Scotus).

When I talk to myself inside my brainpan (and that is my take on where "thought" occurs) I am reasonably certain that (and this is pure conjecture) if science fiction were tried and you could "read my thoughts" it would be in a set of "types and tokens" unique to me and would require a level of interpretation equivalent to what I had to undergo to create the damn thing in the first place.

So, when I natter on here about thought and consciousness and the soul, I am not trying to tell you what is "true", but rather I am trying to explain what the firing neurons are trying to tell me. The analogy I am currently fond of is that of a seventh grader in rural america (english speaker) who is trying to take both german and french introductory classes and is trying to translate a german text into french.