Can the heart think?
The mind is paramount, at least in the present scheme of things, although by present I mean more than 2000 years old from the time philosophy began with Thales of Miletus. Western philosophy of course.
I have nothing against intellectual enterprise. Engaging the brain usually results in good productivity - science, philosophy, technology, etc.
I also don't know what other means of understanding are there at our disposal excepting our brains, the seat of our minds.
However, I've seen some people approach the question of knowledge from a different angle. ''The heart has reasons the mind knows not'' and ''There are many things in heaven and earth than can be dreamed up in your philosophy''.
Even well-known Buddhism, supposedly based on reason rather than faith, has spawned Zen Buddhism filled with exercises (koans) designed to attack reason itself through paradoxes.
Another interesting condition to note is our propensity to seek out paradoxes - evidently states of logical failure. This inclination for the strange and mysterious, the unsolvable, the enigmatic is, to me, evidence that the mind is not in full control. Why should the mind, the seat of reason, even have the slightest liking for problems that defy it.
Could it be that the heart has, somewhere in its biology, a neural network capable of thought, just like the mind/brain itself?
What do you think?
Can the heart think?
What if it could?
There are so many implications to that answer, right?
What if thought is a process that engages the whole body, head to toe? The brain could be some sort of center but the process of thinking could be generalized (some say men think with their dicks), involving the entire organism.
Your views...
I have nothing against intellectual enterprise. Engaging the brain usually results in good productivity - science, philosophy, technology, etc.
I also don't know what other means of understanding are there at our disposal excepting our brains, the seat of our minds.
However, I've seen some people approach the question of knowledge from a different angle. ''The heart has reasons the mind knows not'' and ''There are many things in heaven and earth than can be dreamed up in your philosophy''.
Even well-known Buddhism, supposedly based on reason rather than faith, has spawned Zen Buddhism filled with exercises (koans) designed to attack reason itself through paradoxes.
Another interesting condition to note is our propensity to seek out paradoxes - evidently states of logical failure. This inclination for the strange and mysterious, the unsolvable, the enigmatic is, to me, evidence that the mind is not in full control. Why should the mind, the seat of reason, even have the slightest liking for problems that defy it.
Could it be that the heart has, somewhere in its biology, a neural network capable of thought, just like the mind/brain itself?
What do you think?
Can the heart think?
What if it could?
There are so many implications to that answer, right?
What if thought is a process that engages the whole body, head to toe? The brain could be some sort of center but the process of thinking could be generalized (some say men think with their dicks), involving the entire organism.
Your views...
Comments (50)
On the other hand, it is said that the digestive system possesses its own self-governing system that is not dependent on the brain.
The brain is part of the organism as are the heart, the lungs, ....treating parts as the whole is a fallacy.
You do realize, don't you, that the term "heart" in this context is a metaphor? It doesn't refer to the actual heart muscle. It's a representation of the emotional aspects of our internal lives. Although all aspects of our selves take place throughout our bodies, a primary seat of both emotions and thoughts is the brain.
According to current biology not so. I think it's called the limbic system - the part of the brain that does emotions.
People (it's a hunch of mine) like paradoxes. It seems to stimulate them somehow. Some of these pardoxes are unsolvable and even if answers are found they're, on the most part, unsatisfactory.
Why is this? What about the obviously irrational (paradoxes are contradictions) is appealing?
I don't think it's our rational side. It must be something else. For lack of a better term I call this side of our personality, which finds paradoxes appealing, the ''heart''.
Some have mentioned that ''heart'' is a metaphor and they're not wrong but are they completely right?
Why can't the heart (the actual biological organ) think?
I know most think that the heart organ lacks the neural network to be capable of thought but the mind-heart connection is hard to ignore. Thoughts give rise to emotions and vice versa. Most think this connection is unidirectional brain-->heart but what if it goes both ways like brain<-->heart?
That would be interesting right?
Quoting ?????????????
Taking this one step further...what if the environment itself is part of the thinking process? It is in a sense right? Without the environment providing the stimulus there could be no thinking and that's a passive interpretation. I'm talking more of a direct and active involvement of everything in the process of consciousness or thinking.
Quoting Cavacava
:up:
Quoting aporiap
The problem is that we're so certain about what we know. I think we're not warranted to be so.
I guess biologists have ''proof'' that the brain is the thinking center. My advice, not that I'm an expert, is to, once in a while, revisit the pages we've read and ''understood'' from the book of knowledge, just in case we might've missed something.
Quoting T Clark
I understand the metaphor and I used ''heart'' as a matter of convention. For my purposes ''heart'' means anything non-brain and capable of thought.
Quoting Cuthbert
Please read above. Thanks.
Oops,I must have been half asleep when I wrote that. Let me try again once I get off work.
How about 'subconscious'. Intuition, for instance, may be an example of subconscious thinking.
Quoting TheMadFool
From what I understand it does go both ways, in a way. If, for example, you were given a drug that instantly sped up your heart rate whenever you smelled a rose, eventually you'd be conditioned to where you no longer needed the drug for your heart rate to increase with the same stimulus. You may have heard of Pavlov's dog. The basic interoception of an increased heart rate is high arousal, so if you like the smell of roses you might experience a generally stimulating and pleasant affect. How you interpret this feeling is determined by past experience and your cultural upbringing, but there's probably some room for free association as well. Anyway, in this scenario the emotion originated from an artificially stimulated heart.
Okay, what I was trying to say was that a lot of the time people say things in reference to the heart when they really mean emotions. It doesn't literally mean that the heart thinks, they just say that for whatever strange and unusual reasoning they have. It seems they use the "heart" to justify illogical conclusions when they don't have a rational answer to the problem at hand. The blood-pumping muscle really has nothing to do with it.
I am more inclined to think that the heart receives transmissions from the brain for physical matters. If one is anxious, for instance, the brain would send signals to the heart to pump faster, and so forth.
As for paradoxes, it may be a resistance to accept a more "rational" claim or an intuition that the new claim isn't rational and the old belief seemed better. Basically, habit.
I completely agree it's good to be skeptical and questioning of orthodox thought. But I think the underlying circuitry of basic perceptual processes is so well known and characterized that it would be extremely unlikely for a nervous sytem without that circuit organization to have perception involving capacities like thinking .
There are a small number of cells in the Medulla (the brain stem) that control heart and lung function. There is also a network of nerves in the heart that coordinate it's sequential contraction and relaxation. There aren't any nerves running from the limbic system to the heart. Chemicals, yes -- nerves no. (The vagus nerve - Cranial Nerve #10) doesn't traffic in emotions with the heart. it carries instructions, mostly, like "beat now". )
The whole body is involved in the brain, so everything from your heart to your anus is involved in emotion. But there are good rhetorical reasons to focus on the heart. A bleeding-ass hole liberal is even less attractive than a bleeding heart liberal. "From the bottom of my heart" sounds better than "from the heart of my bottom". A rectal throb is more ambiguous than a heart throb. The anus is a critically important structure (just wait until it clamps down for a week) but it doesn't get good PR.
The heart gets gobs of great PR. Why aren't they working on rectal transplants? It would be better than messy colostomy bags. But no, it's all about heart transplants. Heart this, heart that.
Fuck the heart. Up with assholes.
Literally? No, obviously not. Figuratively? Conventionally, no, obviously not. You think with your head and feel with your heart.
Quoting TheMadFool
What if fish could fly planes and kangaroos could recite the alphabet?
"When Carlos tapped out his pulse, for instance, he followed the machine’s rhythms rather than his own heartbeat. The fact that this also changed other perceptions of his body – seeming to expand the size of his chest, for instance – is perhaps to be expected; in some ways, changing the position of the heart was creating a sensation not unlike the famous “rubber hand illusion”. But crucially, it also seemed to have markedly altered certain social and emotional skills. Carlos seemed to lack empathy when he viewed pictures of people having a painful accident, for instance. He also had more general problems with his ability to read other’s motives, and, crucially, intuitive decision making – all of which is in line with the idea that the body rules emotional cognition."
And: "Along these lines, Furman has found that people with major depressive disorder (but without other complications like anxiety) struggle to feel their own heart beat; and the poorer their awareness, the less likely they were to report positive experiences in their daily life. And as Dunn’s work on decision making would have suggested, poor body perception also seemed to be linked to measures of indecision – a problem that blights many people with depression."
Super cool stuff.
:lol:
Quoting ?????????????
By that I mean like the neurons in the brain - involved in thinking actively rather than say a lung cell, a passive background upon which the neurons think.
Forget the heart for the moment.
We're drawn to mystery and the unknown. Does the proclivity for paradoxes originate in our minds? Why does the mind, seat of rationality, like an unsolvable riddle?
Is it because we want to find the fallacies within them or is it another part of our brains, a non/i-llogicaly dimension, that finds these paradoxes interesting and worth visiting.
Note, some of these paradoxes are literally unsolvable.
The accepted truth is that the brain, the thought machine, is made of neurons. I question this too but what I'm really interested in is whether other cell types (muscle, connective tissue, lung, etc) can have thinking functions similar to neurons.
Yes and yes. I don't know what you're getting at though.Quoting Sapientia
''This sentence is false''.
The accepted solution is to call it nonsense - that it's not a logical proposition. Isn't that convenient? I could do that to all paradoxes too but surely that would be avoiding the problem rather than providing a solution.
Kurt Godel employs it to undermine, validly, mathematics. Despite labelling it nonsensical, the liar statement is useful right?
This situation is a paradox in itself, a meta-paradox if you like.
I think we have an innate drive to resolve kinks or contradictions in our knowledge. Feeling of dissonance and/or confusion, or feelings of knowledge incompleteness I think fuel the drive. Fixation on paradox is an extension of this I think.
I'm not sure the mind likes anything, but insofar as you mean "how do paradoxes arise"? perhaps Kant's suggestion is worth thinking about: that it is a result of us taking principles of theoretical reason that apply only to actual and possible experience, and trying to apply them beyond all possible experience.
There are many different types of solution to the liar paradox, I don't think any one of them qualifies as "the" accepted one. The Tarski-style response, that truth cannot be part of the content expressed by a sentence in any given language, would make the sentence nonsensical, I agree, but there are other responses, including some that involve rewriting classical laws of logic - such as getting rid of the law of excluded middle - which would leave the sentence expressing something meaningful.
You're right. Our logical mind is driven to solve the paradox. But what if there's truth in these paradoxes that some other part (non-logical) of our minds can understand?
The gut feeling that there is a truth behind some apparent paradox seems to me to stem from either of two things:1) it's not actually a paradox, we just haven't figured out the logic of it yet, but when we do it will be something our rational side will be able to comprehend; 2) our gut feeling is wrong.
No. 2 could happen for logical reasons. Like there being logical reasons why I want to eat a whole tin of brownies at once (yummy fat and sugar are hardwired into my senses by evolution), but it is illogical to do so (unhealthy, and I know I will feel like heck afterwards).
Whether this is 'thought' is another matter; perhaps not 'thought' in the sense of discursive intellection but more of a unitive intuition, a true 'seeing' that, as the saying has it, 'goes to the heart'.
In transcriptions of talks by Buddhist teachers of the Thai/Burmese 'forest tradition', the Sanskrit word 'citta' which is usually given as 'mind' is often translated as 'heart' or 'heart-mind'. Actually the root of the word is 'cit-' (????) which literally means awareness or consciousness, "true awareness", "to be aware of", "to understand", "to comprehend".
Some of these paradoxes have defied solution. It's probably true that the best minds have been working on them for centuries. In other words some paradoxes are unsolvable through logic.
Give up logic, its laws, and paradoxes vanish.
Realization is different from comprehension. The latter is brain and the former is heart (whatever ''heart'' is a metaphor for).
Well spoken for one confident in the status quo. However, what of ongoing research? Do you think all new discoveries will fit perfectly with the current framework of knowledge?
Is there no room for the new and TRUE in your world?
If only I knew.
See my option #2--unsolvable through logic and that just means you're wrong and the paradox is wrong somehow.
Quoting TheMadFool
Giving up logic is illogical. And that's simply a rabbit hole down which I am not willing to follow you.
But perhaps all this abstract talk would be more fruitful if you gave a specific example of a paradox you think has some merit despite it's apparent logical incongruity.
Also, I'd like to point out that per the definition of a paradox what I said above holds true: either it is only an apparent contradiction, or it is simply not true.
I mentioned the liar paradox a modified version of which is used by mathematician Kurt Godel for his incompleteness theorems in math.
Plus there a different kinds of logic out there. I hear that paraconsistent logic accepts contradictions unlike the predicate logic.
sld
We can question. Healthy skepticism is part of wisdom and wisdom tells us to question our most cherished beliefs.
I don't remember typing that.
Quoting ?????????????
How are you so sure? I know ''current'' scientific knowledge has no room for my theory but science is a work in progress right?
I don't mean "merit" as in "it helps us think about x," but as in your claim that "paradoxes can make "sense" even if they are illogical." You don't seem to actually have found a way to make the liar's paradox sensible, just useful--and really it's only usefulness is to show that you can say stupid stuff with language. ;)
So can you tell me a paradox you believe is sensible, or that you think the "heart" can "understand," despite being illogical?
Paraconsistent logic is, simply put, humbug. It tries to make A=~A work, which is just wrong.
Mayhaps, but you should base your arguments on what you can most reasonably assume to be true. Your best bet is to go with what established science does say and not what you wish it might say someday in the distant future.
Just a hunch. Nothing experimentally suggested or proven. Sorry if that puts you off.
I'm tinkering around with the establishment (science and philosophy specifically). Testing the forum knowledge base for anything that may either encourage me or close down my shop.
I'm very skeptical of the system, especially when it becomes dogma and science is approaching that threshold where I begin to question it.
That's all.
Well, if nonsense can be useful I don't know what else can ''prove'' there's something interesting about the illogical.
There must be some value in nonsense. It shocks the brain into exploring different dimensions.
Brain A in Human A. Brain A is in state S in 2018. Human A is wondering where his phone charger is.
Brain B in Human B. Brain B is in exact same state S in 1967 - every neuron, every chemical reaction identical. Human B is not wondering where his phone charger is.
Yes, that's right. Same neuron-state, different thoughts. Therefore neuron-state does not equal thought.
Isn't that like saying two cars of the same make aren't identical just because they're going in different directions?
Some differences are relevant, others not so.
Thanks.
Yes, well, I've already agreed to that. But that's very different from making sense out of nonsense, or understanding nonsense.
You seem to be avoiding defending your original claim: that the heart, or non-logical part of the mind, could "understand" something about paradoxes. You haven't yet explained an example of that.
Making use of the lessons from dealing with paradoxes is something the rational mind does. But that doesn't involve making sense out of the paradox per se.
I wish I could explain it. Let me show you a different side of logic.
Paradoxes are places where logic breaks down. I've seen two types of logical paradoxes:
1. Physical world itself e.g wave-particle nature of light. This type of paradox must be accepted. It can't be otherwise.
2. Part of the system itself e.g. the liar paradox. These can be set aside by modifying definition and the rules
So, you see, even iur rational side must accept some paradoxes let alone our nonlogical side.
Must I though? Must I? Clearly not, because mine hasn't as of yet :lol: In part, I'm just not finding your arguments or your examples very convincing.
Re: #1: Wave-particle duality is a phenomenon that has not yet been fully researched. Sure it challenges our current concepts of waves and particles, but that doesn't mean it's an actual paradox. It just seems paradoxical, because we have more to learn about how things work.
Re: #2: I'll reiterate--it's NOT a real paradox either. It's just word play. You can say all sorts of gibberish with language, but that doesn't make it an actual paradox.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180423-how-a-s
why not though? You can imagine both these brains and humans being in 2160. Why wouldn't they both still be thinking of phone chargers?
Quoting TheMadFool
Probably not, but some heart transplant recipients have claimed gaining new memories. I'm not sure if that is given any credence at all though. There are 40,000 neurons in the heart but I'm not sure if they have any relation to thinking, like at all. (Searle didn't think so in one of his lectures).