STAN: Venturing Out Without A Net

Stan writes. I'll comment later! Take it away, Stan:

"Now that the conversation with Scott has ventured tentatively into the region of intangible entites, it seems necessary to think about what type of objects we might expect to come across in such a place of non-sensuality. When we shove off from the shores of Materialism, what is left to find?

So let's start with Materialism, and then, push off.

Materialism blockades the access to transcendentals, and requires, by definition, that all mental objects actually be physically manifested in the meat of the brain. So the mind is by Materialist definition deterministic, or at least partially deterministic, which amounts to the same thing.

Materialism depends upon a blind, predetermined succession of physical brain events occurring, which result in the mind, the will, and language, all of which are physical and predetermined.

"The brain is a meat machine";

Marvin Minsky


“We and all other animals are machines created by our genes. A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees"

Richard Dawkins

Since thoughts and speech are predetermined, they are not reflective of any personal volition of the owner. As such, the events have no meaning, either to the owner or the listener, and the results of such thought and speech events should also have no meaning.

If these entities are without meaning, can they produce meaning, or project meaning? How could this be decided?

If the mind has no meaning and projects no meaning, then language has no meaning, and these very words have no meaning. Therefore it is left up to our intuition to determine whether or not meaning could exist, either here or elsewhere.

In fact, we might ask ourselves if the word “meaning” itself has a meaning. If we did, we would be using language. So we must have intuited (and believe) that language has meaning, or the exercise would be futile and a waste of time. And we also must have believed that meaning exists, because we asked if that word had any.

So, since we do believe in meaning, we have, then, intuited that meaning exists and that the word "meaning" has meaning. So meaning, and the "meaning of meaning" are now seen to be valid mental objects, and objects which are not physical in any manner.

The same goes for ideas: we all develop the idea of an idea. It is necessary for invention:

"What is required for all other human inventions is the notion that one can actively, consciously construct new ideas. We take this for granted, but it is not a "natural" development. Three-year-old children have lots of ideas and even make up new ideas. But they do not have the Idea of an Idea that they can construct anew; they do not naturally arrive at the idea that making up new ideas is something people do. The Idea of an Idea is a cultural creation that children have to learn."

"It is only with the Idea of an Idea that we get conscious specific intellectual constructions like democracy, science, the number system, the computer, the birth control pill, and so on. The Idea of an Idea is the generative notion behind the very notion of an invention and is causally necessary for all specific inventions."

George Lakoff is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he is on the faculty of the Institute of Cognitive Studies.


Of course, an idea is a transcendent mental entity; it is not measurable by any material, natural, empirical method. It is known to exist in ourselves only by introspection; in others only through either communication (a transcendental), or by inference (also a transcendental). The mind states, or brain states, or electrical activity of the brain will never serve to reveal an “idea of an idea”.

These are just starting points for launching into the portion of reality that is accessible only through intuition.

Are these points acceptable? Can we move forward from here?"