What do you know you know?

by zensim 36 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  BenV

  Holy Sh*t! You guys are deep!

  I'm sure I'm wading into an ocean that is way over my head, but *gulp*-- "Miz Scarlet, I don' know nuthin' 'bout birthin' no babies ... and even less about philosophy."

  So I readily defer to all of the intellectuals here. All my 'learnin' comes from watchin' TV and reading tabloid trash. But I did come across some quotes from Socrates recently. First he reportedly says: "Know thyself." Then, somewhere else he says: "True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing." Hmmmm? So how does one reconcile both of these?

  OK, this was allegedly written down by his disciple Plato and then translated and possible "fingered" by, well, who knows? And yes, according to some texts the original Greek for "know thyself" might be understood as meaning "being the best you can be." And please, to anyone who might have the "straight-up," please shake me and let me know if I've taken a wrong turn down the misinformation highway.

  But having been a JW and "truly" believed that the WTS knew the great-big-shiny cosmic truth about the past, present and future -- and then, having painfully fallen off the mountain top and "conjectured" that everything I thought I knew was smoke and mirrors, well, maybe I had one of them epiphanies? a Buddhist satori? or maybe I just sobered up -- but, all of the preceding leads to my asking "what is consciousness, anyway?" I can't really hold on to the idea of dualism, or the idea that the mind is a separate entity from the brain. Narkosis (sp? and gawd, smart dude!) mentioned Descartes maxim: "I think, therefore I am." Maybe I'm a degenerate, because for me it's "I blink, therefore I am." (What's the Latin for "I blink"?) Yes, I'm really burned out on EVERYTHING.

  There was a really smart guy on this site, sorry I can't remember his name or the title of his post. (But I think he listed Japan as his country) He was discussing Richard Dawkins book "The God Delusion" -- gawd, that was tough read. He also mentioned Dawkins much older book "The Selfish Gene" and the idea of "memes" a kind of intellectual/cultural virus that can spread from one individual to another. And this brings me around to the original intent for posting: Isn't religion really a kind of cognitive virus? a communal hallucination? some bad Kool-Aid?

  So "what do I know I know"? You got me.

  Ben (confused)
• 

  Narkissos

  Welcome to the fun BenV

  A laconic sentence like know thyself (supposed to be written in the temple of Apollo in Delphi long before Socrates, cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Apollo_%28Delphi%29) lends itself to many interpretations, none of which can be definitely termed "right" or wrong" I suppose.

  I'm quite wary of dualism too, but in a sense I believe our "mind" exceeds our (individual) "brain" through language and culture. What "we" think is actually the product of a network of brains extending over many generations and places. And it will go on when "we"'re no longer around -- imperceptibly but really modifed through "us," too.

  On your questions: Nicto ergo sum might be a decent translation. And dorayakii is the guy.
• 

  Free

  I'm not rich but not poor , Not the best looking but not ugly, Not fat but not thin. I do know that I am bitter and not yet totally free from the WT because I still come here.

  Oh, I can make a Fender Strat talk,Scream and whisper better then anyone I've ever met.

  p.s. I'm horrible @ grammar also.
• 

  BenV

  (This is my second attempt to send a message. I hope the first one doesn't drag it's tired ass home in the wee hours of the morning. I'll try and rewrite what I wrote.)

  Thanks for the response, Narkissos. That's N-A-R-K-I-S-S-O-S, right? (Sorry I misspelled your name in the previous post. Don't hate me because of the lobotomy, OK?)

  Thanks for the Latin lesson. Now I can impress my friends by casually dropping into a conversation, "Oh, by the way Nicto ergo sum."

  I liked what you wrote:

  I believe our "mind" exceeds our (individual) "brain" through language and culture. What " we" think is actually the product of a network of brains extending over many generations and places. And it will go on when "we"'re no longer around --

  Are you kind of talking about Jung's idea of the collective unconscious and recurring archetypes? Anyway it made me think of a stanza in a poem by Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai.

  To live is to build a ship and a harbor/ at the same time. And to complete the harbor/ long after the ship was drowned.

  A couple of years ago, I was riding around with some other JW guys. Just goofing off. When one of the guys excitedly began talking about a TV program on cannibals. He said: "They ate everything! They ate the eyeballs; they ate the penis; they even ate the mind!" At the time, it brought forth a humorous image for me. A family sitting down to dinner and the dad says, "Honey, would you pass me some of that mind." Anyway, lately, I'm thinking, maybe the guy was right.

  Hey, N-A-R-K-I-S-S-O-S, thanks for the info and your kind response.

  Ben (thinkin')
• 

  Narkissos

  Hey Ben,

  Sorry for the lost post.

  "Narkosis" highlights my soporific side . A helpful reminder to keep it short (if not simple).

  Are you kind of talking about Jung's idea of the collective unconscious and recurring archetypes?

  No, but they may well be the two sides of the same coin. The daily side (the "conscious" network of culture) and the nightly side (the "unconscious" realm of Jungian archetypal images) -- which, according to Lacan, both reflect the basic structure of language, only in different ways.

  Your beautiful quote reminded me of another poem by Machado (from the opposite perspective, as it were):

  Érase de un marinero
  que hizo un jardín junto al mar
  y se metió a jardinero.
  
  Estaba el jardín en flor
  y el marinero se fue
  por esos mares de Dios.

  (There once was a sailor
  who made a garden near the sea
  and became a gardener.

  The garden was flowering
  when the sailor went away
  over God's seas.)

  Re: your story, Jacques Derrida once observed that there is something "cannibalistic" in necrological tributes (which by extension may be true of culture in general): we do feed on the dead in many ways, and pay forward...
• 

  Superfine Apostate

  i know many things, but i also know that i have no basis to be sure that what i know is actually true.
• 

  FreedomFrog

  I know what I believe in the spiritual sense but it's too deep to actually verbalize it. When I try, I find myself saying "I believe this, well, not exactly but I don't know how to explain it in words".

  I'm studying 3 theories, psychoanalytic, humanistic, and diversity. Each one of them talks about the sub-conscience mind and by storing what we "know" causes us to act on things even though we think we don't know why we do things.

  I'm amused by this because the brain is a very complicated "machine" and we may hear and understand the words but the processing conflicts with our beliefs (or what we have collected in the past) with the actual words we are learning. From birth on we store information, experiences, beliefs and such in our sub-conscience mind. On certain days we may recall what we know but it may slip back in the mind and then we don't "know" it for a while again. So in reality we "know" but we don't really know. Does that make sense...LOL

  Sort of like "who's on first, what's on second" situation. Makes the mind "twist"...heehee....and I'm LOVING it.