I suppose you're right, in essence the idea that created this thread was an abstract idea arrived to by means of language. Abstract speculative ideas and logic most likely can't exist outside of the scope of language. I definitely worded that wrong, thanks for bringing it up.
I don't however believe that abstraction and categorization are necessarily a good thing. And in my eyes our minds are totally linguistic, and wouldn't exist they way they are without language. The mind in language go hand in hand.
At any rate, why try to explain something myself when I can have Aldous Huxley do it for me?
"Language permits its users to pay attention to things, persons and events, even when the things and persons are not present and the events are not taking place. Language gives definition to our memories and, by translating experiences into symbols, converts the immediacy of craving or abhorrence, of hatred or love, into fixed principles of feeling and conduct.
In some way of which we are totally unconscious, the reticular system of the brain selects from a countless host of stimuli those few experiences which are of practical importance to us. From these unconsciously selected experiences we more or less consciously select and abstract a smaller number, which we label with words from our vocabulary and then classify within a system at once metaphysical, scientific and ethical, made up of other words on a higher level of abstraction.
In cases where the selecting and abstracting have been dictated by a system that is not too erroneous as a view of the nature of things, and where the verbal labels have been intelligently chosen and their symbolic nature clearly understood, our behaviour is apt to be realistic and tolerably decent.
But under the influence of badly chosen words, applied, without any understanding of their merely symbolic character, to experiences that have been selected and abstracted in the light of a system of erroneous ideas, we are apt to behave with a fiendishness and an organised stupidity, of which dumb animals (precisely because they are dumb and cannot speak) are blessedly incapable."
Mindwanderer: I believe that last paragraph is what juroara is referring to. We create our own personal realities unconsciously by selecting the few bits of stimuli that fit our conditioned mind's beliefs. The stuff that doesn't fit we either ignore, change to our liking, or react negatively to. This tunnel reality occurs entirely because of language. A neurological process known as called latent inhibition.
The only reason people fight is because they're living in different (ultimately linguistic) realities, just as the only reason you call someone 'ignorant' or 'stupid' is because they're living in a different linguistic reality that doesn't agree with and possibly threatens yours. People are the way they are because of unconscious processes that we are ALL subjected to. I'm just as much of an ignorant schmuck as the guy next to me.
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