andrewducker: (Default)
andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2006-03-17 08:48 am

Things so horrible you never want to be in the situation to find them out #167

Collecting your own stool sample is _exactly_ as unpleasant as you'd imagine.

[identity profile] thishardenedarm.livejournal.com 2006-03-17 04:34 pm (UTC)(link)
well like the man said, the unconscious is structured like a language. sensory organs don't just passively encode (but even if they did, you have even there a rudimentary language) but they are actively informed by inherited and acquired schemas that inform and structure experience so that even in your flow state bliss your experience is still mediated and enabled by language. The conscious mind actually does very little. It processes a vanishingly small amount of our actual ongoing experience. Most experience is unconscious. That doesnt mean that language, the symbolic order, is therefor unimportant. Call it the Lacanian unconscious (structured like a language) or the cognitive unconscious (like the psychologists now do)but it's pretty clear that it is symbolic, representational all the way down. I think you are conflating conscious mental activity with language. Language is much bigger than that.

so it goes like this

and non primates don't "have" experience of the world like us. In fact even primates clearly don't. Heidegger calls the kind of being that is unique to humans Dasein ("being there"); what distinguishes Dasein from any other kind of being-in-the-world is that Dasein is the only being for which Being is an issue. Only Dasein can pose the question of its being, only for dasein is existence a question, only dasein has the notion of being as the horizon of it's experience. To put it more technically, human beings are where ontology happens. With Dasein goes worldhood