Hi - I’m listening again to the currently posted ‘states and stages’ talk by kw and I’m getting a lot from it. For example one perplexity I’ve been feeling recurrently is why I have the fairly easy normal ability to understand or assimilate at some depth integral ideas of different sorts, in other words, if given a test I could comment on relationships among facets of the material – yet I feel a gap, a strong “I’m not sure about this” reaction to some assertions. One possible explanation presented here is that I tend to be introspective and around many topics apparently I prefer a subjective mode (for many years I liked a lot objective taxonomies and accumulated knowledge) and ‘structures can’t be seen’ in that way, so there may be a blind spot coming at it from that favored perspective.

I want to mention one aspect of Ken’s teachings that I’m not onboard with yet. He emphasizes strongly in this talk again that thinking/cognition is in fact the only tool that can ascertain structures. He reminds that for many years now there’s been the idea that spirituality is anti-thinking that you have to ‘feel’ your way into it; but feelings are useful only with states. In regard to structures, “You’re going to have to think your way into this one.”

This is an example of where I react skeptically, can’t seem to integrate that, and I look for my reasons why this isn’t so, or not entirely so. On the one hand it may be as simple as what he is pointing to - that I have been inoculated with that anti-intellectual bias. On another hand, when he says what he says, I think he is simplifying and not accounting for the full interrelated complexity. To me, using one of my favorite metaphors, he is again crayoning boldly around a coloring book image, establishing false and reifiable borders, perhaps for cognitively tidy and communicational convenience sake. IMO that’s pretty common in theories and taxonomies, like the DSM, so it’s not an academic sin. But where it allows for further development and manipulation of concepts, it also fudges the full complexity and inter-relating/inter-penetrating/inter-imbuing flow and flux, and sometimes ignores chicken-egg questions.

In this matter, one ongoing skepticism I have relates to the ever-presence of baseline affect, of emotions, of feeling even amidst if not prior to cognition, and though apparently often quiescent, has not and cannot be sacked out of us by most if not all human beings.

What he says is, “Thinking is just the capacity to take the role of other. Your body, feelings can’t take the role of other; that’s a cognitive act. For me to put myself in your shoes, and try to see the world as you see it is a cognitive act. And cognition just means consciousness; and it means perspectives. So if I can see how you’re seeing the world, if I can think in your shoes, then I can also start to feel how you’re feeling. But not before.”

Isn't his is a big topic? Another way to speak to this here is that putting yourself in someone else’s shoes probably starts before cognition, with sensation/perception that often underlies cognition. More particularly, there has been quite a lot of UR research around mirror neurons, specialized sensing/perceiving cells that appear to underlie the human and maybe mammalian capacity for empathy, feeling with. I hope this isn’t hair splitting to say I doubt the exclusivity of this statement: “Your body, feelings can’t take the role of other; that’s a cognitive act. For me to put myself in your shoes, and try to see the world as you see it is a cognitive act.” That seems only partially true to me.

It’s also especially not clear to me yet that we think our way into “egocentric love” as he says as he is talking about developmental centricities – I think that this process, most noticeably in infancy, starts much more fundamentally and priorly than via cognition.

Am I being too nitpicky? Should I just let it go? When he says, “And cognition just means consciousness; and it means perspectives.” Should I not question that phrase equating consciousness with cognition?

With post #22337, in a long and dynamic thread nurtured by David D, http://multiplex.integralinstitute.org/Public/cs/forums/45/8172/ShowThread.aspx , I typed in a quote by Stanley I Greenspan where he talks about the issue of the oft posited primacy of cognition and the misapprehension therein.
[EDIT] - Darn, this link doesn't seem to be getting there, so I paste here a part of the long post:

As you, and apparently Ken, point out so persistently, cognition has an important and I'll say even privileged place in discussions of empathy, of perspective taking, of mutual resonance, of intersubjectivity, of relationship, of love. There seems to me to be a lot of reality in that. Myself, I have not been able to make it primary, say that it comes first, say that that is where we should put most of our attention when we are considering these ideas and words about relationship and love that have been raised in discussion here.

Here goes a tedious task of typing in a, though tiny slice of the whole presentation, fairly concise hint of his scope, from the intro in Stanley I Greenspans' book The First Idea: How symbols, language, and intelligence evolved from our primate ancestors to modern humans

"We will also show that a current view of the way in which the brain organizes emotions, advocated by neuroscientists such as Joseph LeDoux, is incorrect. This view, which sees emotions as states of mind that are somewhat separate from and compete with or influence logical thinking, is not consistent with our clinical observations of growing infants and children. In fact, we will show that this view is based on confusion over the difference between pathological and healthy emotional development. In pathological development, the systems that organize emotions, and logical thinking may remain separate. In healthy development these systems become fully integrated [italicized, bold emphasis is mine] and catastrophic emotions, such as rage, become transformed. Emotional signaling will be seen to provide the missing link between the level of the brain that involves basic emotional circuitry (subsymbolic systems, such as the amygdala) and its highest cortical symbolic capacities.

Similarly, we will show, contrary to the views of Chomsky and Pinker on the genetic origins of language, that language and cognition are embedded in the emotional processes [I hope this bold emphasis of mine is helpful in highlighting this central consideration] that, in our hypothesis, led to symbols.

We will show that while Piaget and his followers made pioneering contributions in formulating the way a child acts on his world to learn to think. they were not able to figure out the mechanism through which symbol formation and thinking occurs. Piaget described stages involved in thinking and discussed emotionally meaningful behaviors such as imaginative play. However, he viewed emotions as more of a secondary phenomenon, useful for motivation and, at times, guided by a child's reasoning abilities. He and his followers, however, did not realize that emotions and their transformations into various levels of emotional signaling and mental representation were a critical mechanism in the development of thinking and that at each level of thinking, emotions lead the way to higher levels of thinking. For example, an infant learns causality through his experience of his smiles leading to his caregivers' smiles months before he learns to pull a string to ring a bell (which Piaget believed was the beginning of causal thinking). "

Any errors in the above three paragraphs are probably my typos. (2004). [Day-after edit: this book was co-authored by Stuart G Shanker, D.Phil] By the way, Greenspan is very respected in contemporary psychoanalytic and research circles, including other child authorities like Beatrice Beebee and Frank Lachmann.

So, it’s hard for me to tell sometimes if I am just being oppositional, obstructive, nit-picky, or a mean bastard person (“Just leave it alone, already; just let it be.”) – or is there maybe something that is actually being breezed over quickly, short-cut, finessed that ought to be pointed out. A big part of me really didn’t want to take the time to do this tonight. But I did and I have a nagging feeling that this is one of those rambly, inelegant posts. Oh well.

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Ambo Suno

I am wondering if the following analogy isn't a good one:

dogs have an environment. They feel, have emotions, sensations, perceptions, none of which are cognitive acts. They are reactors to an environment.

humans have an environment but also a "world." They feel, have emotions, sensations, perceptions, none of which are cognitive acts. But when they make sense of these things, they do so in a "world" and this is a cogntive act.

When a dog is petted, it feels good and begs for more. When I am petted, I feel good and beg for more and also wonder the whole while if I am being set up... etc.

I don't think Wilber is using the word "thinking" in the narrow sense of discursive thought lost in concepts. I believe he is using it in the same of being aware of a human world .... with meaning, rather than simply primary energies we share with animals.

Or to put it another way, that which permits us to be aware of stages is that faculty that distinguishes me from my dog. Call it cognition or thinking of "world-making-capacity."

Yes, Schalk, I think you make a clear distinction between dogs and most animals and humans.

I also thinking that this AM I can embrace what he is trying to say without getting so particular about the details, for example, through cognition we can understand and feel plenty about what might go in another person's situation. Also, maybe I will be able to celebrate more, and again, the marvelous utility, the essential aid of cognition to see, feel, think, discern, differentiate, recognize, identify and label structures and states. This AM as I was responding to chris on another thread, I was able to nod interiorly to the aid that my cognitive processes was offering me and us in tracking and communicating with him.

Furthermore, I think I can follow what you are saying about thinking and world making capacities. Personally, I think that if Ken is using the word "thinking" or "cognition" that broadly, to include the myriad of substrate sensational, perceptual, and physiological responses, he is using it in a scientifically unconventional way, and I don't think that it's necessary to do so or as interestingly precise as having other dynamic, particular words. My guess is that like many of us, he gets on a roll to make a larger important point and gets somewhat casual and light in his rendering, and he may have certain grooves laid down into his teaching patterns that were reinforced in earlier times but aren't quite consistent with wider or newer information. Stuff like that is how I want to see it at the moment.

Thanks for extending yourself into this thread, Schalk. ambo

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Ambo Suno

Ambo ~ the states and stages video is also something that I reviewed again over the week-end, and you have brought up something that resonates for me also.

Cognition may be defined as the only way to understand  and take on the role of another, but empathy for the other can (and perhaps does), precede understanding.  Understanding implies cognition. Empathy suggests something more primary, imo.  Do we have to take on the role of another in order to sense their sadness or their jubilation? 

In "The Sense of Being Stared At," Rupert Sheldrake cites numerous examples of people who've had precognitive experiences of being in the presence of another person whose attention is directed at them without the person upon whom the attention is directed knowing anything about their objective presence.  From his research into this phenomenon, the mere act of directing attention to another and focusing that attention intentionally on them can be felt on an affective and more subtle level of awareness.

My body feelings may not be able to take on the role of another, but taking on the role of another may not precede a more primary awareness of what that other is feeling; however, from that awareness, we may be able then to interpret from the cognitive line the role that the other might be playing. 

If the presence of the person who is directing the attention can be felt by the person to whom the attention is being directed,  can the person who is perceiving the subtle energy that is directed to them also extrapolate from that sense the kind and quality of the person who is sending that energy?   The 'receiver' of this quantum information may not be taking on the 'role' of the person, but they also are not initially cogitating (in KW's sense) the presence of the other either.

 

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The yoga of light and sound is really only one event. It's the frequency of their vibrations that is different.

Yes, I follow you on the importance and status of empathy, and though I am not so certain about the capacity to know when someone stares at your back, I follow your reasoning and your connecting up with questions of cognition. Someone, was it ikarma, posted some research that questioned Sheldrake's idea - obviously the study(ies) are not conclusive, but also for me, ought not be dismissed quickly for the sweeter ideas of special knowing capacities. Does that make sense? To check it out?

I think I'll try to show a little more how important and information-yielding is a lot of pre-cognitive understanding. Yes, I think I'll question the idea that "understanding" can't come about without cognition.

First I'll mention that the question of what we call cognition may be analogous to the pro-life/pro-choice debates about when does a conscious human life begin, along the increasing organismic organization from egg-sperm conception to full-term delivery. One could say that a fair amount of information is made available to an organism via a sensor. Many scientists, along with the general semantics people I believe, make the point that there are increasing degrees of complex linking of front-line sensory units.

There is a huge variety of specialized cells that make first contact with their boundaries outside and in specialization inside, obviously ranging from common tactile information to complex gravity and equilibrium sensors. A lot of information is gotten at this level. For example with the eye, yes, some integration takes place early on, as with the coming together of sensors, rods and cones, immediately behind the retina, and quickly that higher level integration can be called perception, acording to this physiologic model. The complexity of connections and integrated functioning along with some qualitative characteristics that give us processing capacity does reach a point at which we clearly call the process cognition. I am not sure how we would match up the more variably lay-used word "thinking". Also, somewhere along the way images are made and utilized for understanding situations. Animals too probably have images - is this thinking, is this cognition? So the variety and complexity of integration of the nervous system is like a highly ramified tree - many branchings out to the leaves - only way more complex in the brain with those mysterious linkings and resonances as for example occur within neural nets.

I surely am not an expert in this, yet I can see that there are a points along this developmental burgeoning where it would be premature in accuracy or usefulness to want to use the word thinking or cognition.

I believe that we understand a lot, a lot, in the perceptual, pre-cognition states/conditions. Before we or a bobcat, parrot, or dolphin cognizes, with a few glances and scannings, and the invisible  intra-brain multi-sensory processing, harmonies of basic information, much, much is understood. The word "understanding" of course has taken on many connotations over the years. One can see from it's composition that it's at its root a simple word that denotes 'standing' and 'under' - it conveys support from under. That basic meaning fits in well with the points I am suggesting. Before the quite high level thinking, pre-op, form-op, visionlogic, whatever, there is a lot of information that is understood that gives critters the knowledge to respond in effective and creatively adaptive ways. My image is that we, maybe in a microsecond, register so much information before the relatively slow cognitive process is well underway that we know things. Plenty of intelligence happens at the perceptual level in us and in other critters. Krishnamurti and others have made similar points, and that it is out of these fertilely thought-free understandings that then issue really intelligent ideas.

The human capacity for thought, especially in the higher reaches of which I personally am not capable ought to be respected; and the lower reaches, also, before we gloss over them and go to that which we call thinking and cognizing. I'm thinking/feeling that quite effective "understanding" of a myriad of circumstantial conditions and nested contexts maybe be sussed out just by opening the eyes and seeing the tempero-spacial geometries and relationships - not to be too readily relegated to "primitive" functioning.


Maybe this is enough to give us pause before we equate cognition with intelligence, consciousness, or other large categories of human beingness. I hope this isn't too messily presented to follow. Truth be told, after one of these riffs I cross my fingers and hope it isn't totally confabulated drivel. Yikes

Returning to your points, jondavi, I don't want to gloss over too quickly either that there might be connections, collective linkages, quantum activities and possibilities sensed, which are of a whole other order. Though my biases are based more on my sense of physical science and the like, obviously there could be a lot more sensed and known.

What are you thinking now?

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Ambo Suno

HI - I've been thinking more about the words "cognition" and "cognitive" and I want to acknowledge that my favored use of the words, my wanting to save them to mean something psychologically distinctive might be pretty arbitrary. So I probably had more charge around this than is rational. To help myself adjust to this fuzziness, I want to expand on this subject here, beyond just the video States and Stages.

As I look at what Ken says in Integral Psychology and as I look at the Oxford English Dictionary, I see that there are a lot of possible meanings. Languages are always somewhat dynamic and evolve and morph, and so it's hard to make a solid case of a word's usage being highjacked, since that has typically, cutomarily been the situation with words and language all along.

As Ken points out, some people, like myself, want to keep the relatively specialized meaning used by Western psychology. Western psychology is historically pretty new and some word apparently needed to be found to represent particular, specific kinds of mental activity like thinking, as there were more differentiations made in types of mental activity associated with knowing. There isn't strong support for specializing the use of "cognition" from it's etiology that seems to have most basic about it, something about "knowing". Old uses are found all over, well, in many places over the map.

Given that, my attempts to keep the specialized modern psychological meaning need to have more of the status of personal preference and less of correct/incorrect usage. I bow a little humbly; before I make another attempt to justify not mushing, duplicating/triplicating the word together with others, but I make it with way less verve.

In the recent video, in a phrase, Ken makes "cognition" equivalent with  "consciousness". In Integral Psychology (pp 20-22) he makes a similar strong association with the word "awareness", and he also seems to make a case to me that Piaget's terms of operational thought can pick up some slack for differentiating kinds of cognitions.

Ken says, "In this regard, a hotly disputed topic is whether the spiritual/ transpersonal stages themselves can be concieved as higher levels of cognitive development. The answer, I have suggested, depends on what you mean by "cognitive". If you mean what most Western psychologists mean - which is a mental conceptual knowledge of exterior objects - then no, higher or spiritual stages are not mental cognitions because they are often supramental, transconceptual, and non-exterior. [I just want to add something about the way this is framed - I'm not sure that most Western psychologists would limit cognition to "exterior objects". I think it would be included in the word cognition of interior objects as well - for example there could be cognition about cognition. At a glance, conceptual does seem like a good word here for a primary characteristic and product of cognition of Western psychology. Am I missing something, here?] . . ."

So I suppose that I am just accustomed to having that word "cognitive" carry certain dry connotations of limited types of mental activities. I also have the bias that there are plenty of other words than "cognition" to cover "consciousness, "awareness", and the particulars of those, that we don't need to re-highjack the word. It is suddenly reminding me of the question who owns Jerusalem? It depends who says it about what time frame and context.

This was good for me to release my relative self-certainty, if not my bias. Darn.

Any other thoughts on this? ambo

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Ambo Suno

Ambo ~

"The answer, I have suggested, depends on what you mean by "cognitive". If you mean what most Western psychologists mean - which is a mental conceptual knowledge of exterior objects - then no, higher or spiritual stages are not mental cognitions because they are often supramental, transconceptual, and non-exterior."

If someone is in, what Western psychologists call, cognitive consonance or cognitive dissonance, this can have emotional affects that reverberate thoughout the different subtle layers of development.

In essence, from my understanding, to 'cogitate' can mean to affect one's emotional condition through the use of thought in a way that can anchor an emotion to the thought.  If and when one has a 'peak' experience, and at the very height of the experience one visualizes a desire or a goal, is this cognition?  Is it not an affective cognition?  Isn't that what cognitive-affective therapy is?

When thinking of some experience that generates emotional substance, can the thought really be separated from the emotion without literally 'flattening' the experience into a one dimensional mental line?  This might be just what the scientist needs in order to analyze an experiment, and if that is the intention of the scientist then that's exactly what it needs to be.  But what about the kind of cogitation that engages the emotional line when there is the need to experience catharsis so one can move beyond something that might be a stuck state of being?

Jondavi

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The yoga of light and sound is really only one event. It's the frequency of their vibrations that is different.

Not too long back, in another forum, there was a discussion about KW's view that development along the cognitive line was "“necessary but not sufficient” for development of other lines. I responded, rather intuitively, that we should be careful not to confuse or conflate cognition with the intellect. I went on to note that development in the cognitive line was directly related to the capacity to hold various and/or multiple perspectives. Someone else pointed out that perspectives are not limited to the intellectual.

Later, as I sought to explore the validity of these statements, I too found myself headed for the dictionary to check out the definitions of cognitive and cognitive development.  It quickly became clear to me that the common usage of the term “cognitive” had already conflated cognition with intellect. Merriam-Webster online gives this definition of cognitive: “of, relating to, being, or involving conscious intellectual activity (as thinking, reasoning or remembering)”. This confusion is compounded by the medical/scientific community. In an article about cognitive development on Healthline I found the following, “Cognitive development refers to the development of the ability to think and reason.” It goes on to touch on concrete operational and formal operational levels or modes of thinking/reasoning.  The diagrammatical sketch of the cognitive line of development that KW offers in his work relates to this scientific research and, in my opinion, can add to the confusion.

You might rightly ask at this point why I did not just admit my error and accept that cognition and intellect are interchangeable terms. I was fully prepared to do just that but I just felt inside that there was something more here. There was “truth at the root of this intuitive flash”. Yes, the root. That was the key.  I returned to the root of the term cognitive and looked up cognition at Merriam Webster online and found, “ Entomology: Middle English cognicion, from Anglo-French, from Latin cognition-, cognitio, from cognoscere to become acquainted with, know, from co- + gnoscere to come to know — more at know.”  In the definition of know, as it relates to cognition, I see “to perceive directly: have direct cognition of” (emphasis added). With this it is seen that cognition (the noun from which the adjective cognitive is derived) is not the same as the intellect. In fact it is best equated with perception! This clearly supports the insight that “cognitive development is directly related to the capacity to hold various and/or multiple perspectives.”

 

Now, in relation to the observation that "perspectives are not limited to intellectual modes" of knowing I offer the following. Myers-Briggs typology recognizes four modes of knowing; they are thinking, feeling, sensory, and intuitive. For any individual two of these four modes will dominate over the other two. And of these two predominate modes one will be primary (kindly correct me if my memory is incorrect here).These modes can also be understood as different types of perceptual interpretation. Therefore a personality type whose primary mode of knowing is through feeling will see cognitive (perceptual) development as occurring in the emotional line and will probably be resistant to any suggestion that the intellectual development is somehow more important than emotional development (rightly so for them, I might add). It is easy from here to extrapolate for the other types, although intuitive is a little tougher since it refers to (in my opinion) direct perception and therefore is itself subject to further interpretation. Anyway, it seems reasonable that different types of individuals will display their leading edge cognition in different ways.

 

Jerry

 

 

 

Hi, Jondavi - I agree with you that cognition, perhaps all mental activity is imbued with emotion for most of us - and for the rare (if they exist at all) there must be a baseline affective state even though there be almost no mountain/valley like landscape of what we'd call an emotion.

I suppose that in some meditative and other non-ordinary states there might be such a single concentration, radical neuro-chemical isolation, that arises out of a functioning of mind/brain that normal connections to emotional centers are blocked. I think that some of the confusion for me and maybe others around this comes from a few sources scientific and "spiritual". Many of us have heard the injunctions about being "rational", "logical", or "objective". We've heard things like, "You gotta get the emotion out of your thinking to make a good decision." And as you say, to do many types of scientific experiment so much has to be isolated, controled and limited - emotion easily can be as a wild X factor, so that's out. In our scientific culture, maybe efficient industrial culture, isn't it a value that has been promulgated.  Joe Friday's, "Give me the facts, ma'm, just the facts."

I think that I and many of us have translated this culture into thinking that we are actually built that way, and we do also to some extent create ourselves to appear that way. But then we have sub-personalities, 'shadow' rreactions, break-downs, because we are actually born (as acknowledged by Greenspan, et. al. in a prior post) with the emotional impulses and faculties at the very center and beginning of ourselves, and they become folded, blended, stirred, and 'wired up' into most newly created extentions to various parts of ourselves - like frontal lobes and neo-cortex

There is probably a fairly normal distribution, spectrum of noticable emotionality in baseline social presentations of people. Some seem very emotional, others, only a little. Yet it is highly contextual in its loudness, yes?

J Krishnamurti who many of us have been influenced by, and some have cut spiritual teeth on, enjoined people to remove emotion from thinking - "Don't be sentimental about this." "Look objectively." "Make this an experiment" "Can you look at a tree and simply see the tree as it is, without thought about what it is or how beautiful it is. Simply see it." So he asked to sense and perceive without thought or thinking (until this thread and discussion, I would have said without cognition). When you read some of his passages in his notebook and other places, we see that he apparently had an extraordinary capacity to quiet all but the most basic perception. But then he would feel the presence of "the other" and such, which may have been some transformed version of that baseline, irrevocable affective insistance. When you read his story of his early life along the beaches around Madras and his discovery by Leadbetter and the theosophists, you realize that probably he wasn't your averagely proportioned guy to start with.

I'm guessing that some other sages have encouraged such diminution of the presence of emotion, though maybe not in such a scientifically dry, terse way, I'll say. But his Western education may have influenced and amplified his interest and language around being un-sentimental and unemotional, mostly detached from the usual mix and proportion of everyday life. Of course he sought out inner sensations, perceptions, feelings, passions, and awarenesses, including sorties into the sensual, sexual and affectionate.

K did, in a sense, enjoin us to "flatten" in some ways as you say our usual use of ourselves and faculties, and I would interpret so that we would sharpen and escalate other aspects (and he sometimes did seem to separate himself as though a third person object, whereas at other times encourage being condenced into the single moment of "Be the thought!" "Don't separate yourself from the experience. Be it. Fully." And out of that some radical insights could come, as distinct from trying to dtach or get a distant perspective on what was happening.) And catharsis, sure. That also must be a big topic too, no?

This stuff is so interesting to me now because it relates to the questions we ask and assumptions we make about what it means to be human, with all of our faculties including emotion and "cognition" however broadly inclusive we choose to apply that word.

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Ambo Suno

Hi, Jerry. I see that you have gotten into this topic of cognition plenty as have we. It's such a big area of consideration and study, yes. I don't have time to reply more than this right now, but probably will respond more later. So, later, ambo

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Ambo Suno

Hi, Jerry - sorry for my delay in tackling this again.

There is so much here and it seems that we each sort it out in slightly different ways. For me it seems that there is conflation, as you mention, seemingly everywhere. Suddenly I feel in a maize of inter-related for sure, and overlapping, and even entangled, mixed, and conflated meanings. Not so entangled that we can't distinguish at a glance the differences of what we mean when we say, "intellect" and "burn the tongue" in the same sentence, or "cognition" and "safe landing". But all of these central words that we have mentioned on this thread can seem very tangled in their connotations, and not clearly distinct enough from one another in denotations, which seem also fuzzy, and in their etiology soon used in slightly, unstandardized different ways that quickly overlap and conflate with other words.

We are talking about the meaning of the word "cognition" so that we (or I) can know if this highly synthesizing or integrating and integrated faculty of mental activity (is that general enough to cover most everything - mental activity, activity of the mind?) extends so far that it can be said to be equal to consciousness, synonomous with "consciousness" and "awareness" - this was my original pause and questioning.

Your looking into the meaning of it in the past and now feels similar to my impulse to do so. As you point out, (and I don't remember the details) the Meyers-Briggs inventory speaks of "knowing" in 4 different ways. If we use this source as an authority on the meaning of "knowing", and thereby cognition, we go in a certain direction, yes? If knowing = cognition = sensory, I am honestly lost and need to either find my way out with more clearly delimited word use or resign myself to living in the stew of language with limited communication on fine points. Or something. Smile.

Jerry, I like (naturally, sure) my way of understanding these words that I thought came out of some reasonable and organizing discipline of somewhat hard science. Sort of in an aristotelian way of trying to sort in a genus-species kind of way; sort of assuming that if we were able to factor analyze the applicability of these words the areas of accidental overlap would be minimal, or much less. There maybe wouldn't be so much confusion as to whether knowing = cognition = sensation = consciousness = life awareness force = thinking, or which categories/words include/subsume which other categories. I fear that though we can do this with some approximated precision, there is also much crudeness to it. So maybe we must resign ourselves to the fact that our language is inherently sloppy as a tradition and try to grok the most important aspect of what the person is saying. But even there we will run into misunderstandings because each person tends to weigh and value what is important a little differently. I'm sure that linguists and computer code people could say a lot about this issue.

To me, in the way that science has agreed that different kinds of atoms are sufficiently distinct from one another to have a different elemental symbol and name (if we can handle the confusion of anomolies that happens with isotopes and maybe other variations, and apparently we can), can't we try to do similarly with "consciousness", "mental activity", "thinking", "sensing" . Factor analyisis of elements along certain important qualities, there would be very little overlap. Then, it's also clear enough that molecules include/subsume/integrate various atoms. Language stays relatively clear.

We get to the nervous system and the intricate interrelationships and sometimes highly subtle distinctions and specializations of functioning and structure and apparently it is not so clear what includes/subsumes another function, what is distinct enough from another function to give it a clearly different name. Add to this that these pieces, facets, aspects, expressions interface with the fairly clearly though slightly arbitrary (as with oxygen molecules blown in from the mountains that are now brushing up against and passing through our alveolar surfaces and immediately becoming part of a neuron and such) boundaries and what's on the otherside, and we are scratching our heads. It is said that our functioning minds and structural neuro-chemical-bioenergetic systems also interface or interact, are interlinked, interpenetrate with larger spheres like biosphere, perhaps collective unconscious (which is part of the tradition out of which the Meyers-Briggs was developed), and we find ourselves with different traditions of vocabularies and intention.

I don't know so much of these traditions, but apparently I was drawn to the relative clarity of using word to describe different levels of structurally integrative complexity in the neurvous system. As vocabulary, I like differentiating sensation, from perception that is a somewhat incremental increase in connective complexity, and not until enough branchings occur to we choose to call the process cognition. I guess that this is the more modern designation of psychology and science. And I imagine that our taxonomy would get fuzzy at some point as words try to keep up with the almost incomprehensible complexity.

Isn't the confusion clarifying a little (at least for me as I write)? Smile. We use an old word, cognition, that is based on a relatively crude rendering of inner process by the word knowing, or vis-versa, going from more English sounding knowing to latin sounding cognition. Then some meanings of these conflate (I'll say) perception, and then we bring in intellect, intuition, feeling, sensation, and oy vey. And of course within our own totally normally, healthy and yet humanly sloppy linguistically aculturated way we say, well, that makes sense. We know via intuition, feeling, sensing, etc, and that is cognition, and our intellects know, so that's in there too. There's consciousness of all this. There is consciousness in every sensor, sense and thought. Thinking is pure consciousness. Everything is consciousness. We are conscious through awareness. We are conscious of awareness. We know that we are thinking through consciousness. We know that we are conscious through thinking. All these sentences flow together so nicely. Life is awareness. Life is consciousness. Yeah, conflation - a bonfire of meaning, and we are oneness.

Omagod.

One big mess.

Sorry I couldn't be of any help here, Jerry. My mind just burst into flames and I notice that my keyboard is getting hot.

smiling dolt-like, tears on face, in Camarillo, ambo

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Ambo Suno