Jud Evans - Waving Goodbye - - Do Ideas Exist Outside of the Human Brain? - Jud Evans

My philosophical and ontological agenda is to identify and distinguish: *that which exists* from that which some people erroneously believe to exist - but which in fact doesn't.
In that sense I am not so much interested in the MEANING of what is said regarding the surrounding descriptional complexity or situational padding, but whether what is referred to actually exists (is a true denotatum) or not. That is what ontology is all about as far as I am concerned.

I claim that whilst the ideating embrained human exists, his *ideas* do not exist at all - no more than the *movement* of a waver's hand exists. *Movement* and *ideation* are for me existential modalities of the moving ideator. Hence only the ideating hand-waving human exists, and his actions are ways, modes, states of THE WAY he is existing at the moment he ideates and waves. But for the quayside or shipboard ideating waver - the only *product* of their ideation that is communicable is the *Goodbye* signified by the farewell wave - ALL EXTRANEOUS memorised feelings and ideations are incommunicable out of earshot, though there is indubitably empathetic guesswork too, following from the mutual antecedal experience of the emotional feelings of each partner as hitherto revealed during the course of their historical relationship.

To say that signs as breathed sounds [words] are objects that are created by humans is false. For the objects of the production of sounds ALREADY exist - the brain, the tongue, the pallet, the air molecules and the human ear drum. All that the production of a sound does is to produce varying modalities or changes in the activity of these objects, which have an effect on the tymphanic detector located in the hearer's ear, from whence the signals are transferred electrically to the hearer's brain as meaning. [understanding] gleaned from antecedally memorised experience. There is no argument that the physical elements which ALLOW and FACILITATE the transmission of communicable representations of feelings from one human to another exist - but it is an entirely different ontological story to claim that the information carried by this media exists too.

It is the responsibility of those who believe that ideas exist outside the human brain to prove to us that these ideas or statements exist exterior to the human holism, in what form they exist, and where they are to be found in order that we may examine them and confirm their physical presence.

The fMRI or Petscan or Brain imaging device simply registers which part of the brain is active during the processing of various cognitive operations. The equipment does not "record" or *interpret the the content of a human *idea* but only measures the electrical intensity in certain areas of the neuronal network whilst cognition is taking place.

So the idea does NOT "exist" as sound waves - in fact the *idea* doesn't "exist" at all - what exists is the acting, existential, encoding, thinking brain of the holistic ideator.

When the ideator becomes an addressor, as in the case during communication with another person, then what entitically exists at that time are the addressee - the sound-waves - and the existential, decoding, thinking bodybrain of the holistic addressee.

By studying which area of the brain is active we can infer that the incoming codification is of language type signs consisting of differential impulses upon the eardrum. After transmission to the brain these signals are decoded and transacted into an existential modality of understanding on the part of the existing holism. Whilst the differential soundwaves exist as molecular/waveform activity, it is purely as molecular activity that they exist, and not as an "idea." It is the human ideator/addressor and the ideating addressee that exist in a modality of understanding which corresponds to what humans call an idea "HAVING AN IDEA," but in fact is an ideational existential modality of the speaker and the listener who are existing in thinking states.

Maya Pines of The Howard Hughes Medical Institute writes:

"Now several imaging techniques such as PET (positron emission tomography) and the newer fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) make it possible to observe human brains at work. The PET scan on the above shows two areas of the brain (red and yellow) that become particularly active when volunteers read words on a video screen: the primary visual cortex and an additional part of the visual system, both in the back of the left hemisphere. Other brain regions become especially active when subjects hear words through ear-phones, as seen in the PET scan on the right. To create these images, researchers gave volunteers injections of radioactive water and then placed them, head first, into a doughnut-shaped PET scanner. Since brain activity involves an increase in blood flow, more blood—and radioactive water—streamed into the areas of the volunteers' brains that were most active while they saw or heard words. The radiation counts on the PET scanner went up accordingly.

This enabled the scientists to build electronic images of brain activity along any desired "slice" of the subjects' brains. The images above were produced by averaging the results of tests on nine different volunteers. Much excitement surrounds a newer technique, \fMRI, that needs no radioactive materials and produces images at a higher resolution than \PET. In this system, a giant magnet surrounds the subject's head. Changes in the direction of the magnetic field induce hydrogen atoms in the brain to emit radio signals. These signals increase when the level of blood oxygen goes up, indicating which parts of the brain are most active. Since the method is non-invasive, researchers can do hundreds of scans on the same person and obtain very detailed information about a particular brain's activity, as well as its structure. They no longer need to average the results from tests on different subjects, whose brains are as individual as fingerprints"
— Maya Pines The Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

All that we can infer then is that the subject has received [existing] incoming sound-waves which have been converted into electrical nerve impulses which are the subject of cognition by the addressee in his/her modality of decodification has processed, moderated and come to an understanding of what they signify - But what they intend i. e., - THE IDEATION - corresponds with the existential ideational behaviour of the human signaller who sent the oral significations to the subject, and the person who received the message via the perturbations of his/her ear-drum and changed it back into the original representation of the ideational modality of the sender which is being communicated.

The Farewell Wave.

(1) Oral messages - the production of sound waves which impinge upon the ear-drum of the addressee.

(2) Bodily movements [the waving of a hand which means "Go back!" or "Come here!" etc.

(3) Facial expressions conveying existential states of pleasure, anger, surprise etc.

(4) Written signs and significations - an arrow pointing "left" marks on paper or a monitor communication

(5) Other methods not mentioned here.

In what way are they all similar? Answer - they are all ideated and agreed upon IN ADVANCE.

Now let me take the most simple example of a communicative sign, and after reading what I have to say, let us see if you still believe that ideas *exist* independently of the human ideator.

You go down to the docks. There is a ship ready to sail. On the deck you see the figure of a friend. As the vessel pulls away from the quay, the friend raises her hand and waves it up and down. You understand that she is using this hand movement to signal her present mode of existential ideation - which is *Goodbye Fred.*

Now do you think that the hand and its movement *exist* as an *idea,* or do you like me believe that the waving hand exists as part of the human holism, and what exists is the ideating brain of the departing friend and your own ideating bodybrain [or holism] as you stand on the quay ideating the existential understanding that she is existing in a state of ideating the idea of *goodbye?*

The addressor communicates aspects of the way in which he/she exists in his/her present existential modality of thinking *that which is to be communicated,* and also during the period whilst the oral activity of the conveyance of that information takes place.

Once the verbal significations have been received by the addressee as a feature of his/her existential manner of thinking, the information as it is cognised and transacted upon, becomes an existential aspect of the modality of the subjectivised, listening and thinking recipient.

I believe that it is the communicating, symbolising human communicator, the addressee and the legitimate [objectival] nominata that is referred to in a symbolic exchange that exists - not the abstraction. It is by communicating by way of symbolising that the human utterer is expressing himself/herself as he/she speaks. It is by waving one's arm that people signal *Goodbye!*

I am suggesting that the waving-arm conveys a meaning that *only exists for the waver and the waved at/to (and others who are aware of such symbolisation,) and is something that does not exist in itself externally to them. Not many people think that the meaning of *Goodbye* flies over the sea from the arm of the waving waver on the seashore to the waved at person on the deck of the departing ship. You must be aware that the waving-arm triggers a previously learned symbolic meaning in the brain of the recipient of such a visual signal? All agreed symbolisation works this way.

For me it is sufficient that the meaning conveyed by the sight of such a signaling arm is understood antecedally by both involved and the code *is cracked* by referencing the agreed *codes* of meaning internalised socially and *stored* as a neurological template..

For the quayside or shipboard ideating waver - the only 'product' of their ideation that is communicable is the 'Goodbye' signified by the farewell wave - ALL EXTRANEOUS memorised feelings and ideations are incommunicable at such a distance out of earshot, other than by adopting a signalling system used by bookies on race tracks, though there is indubitably empathetic guesswork going on following from the mutual antecedal experience of the shared emotional feelings of each partner as hitherto revealed during the course of their historical relationship.

Therefore to stop communicating when it is the natural part of being human seems to me a bit silly. It is like saying - if you do not believe that Pegasus exists - you should never utter the word, or because the Union Jack is symbolic of Britain you should turn your head away from it and not look at it. Could you please explain why you think that because language is an existential mode of a symbolising human that I should stop using it? If you disagree, and insist that leaned signs or learned language code IS MORE than an existential mode of a symbolising human being and has an existence all of its own. Could you tell me where it can be found when it is not being used?

Thus all the libraries of the world contain written representations of human significations which without a human reader's brain activated in an existential modality of reading and de-coding the content, remain totally meaningless and render the bizarre modern notion of "memes" utterly ridiculous.

Such would be the situation of a radio in an abandoned spaceship on Mars as an earth based newsreader reads the World News to a dead alien world.

The significations [phoneme strings] exist as sound waves, which without a listener to receive and decode them as to their significance are meaningless and immediately cease to exist. An idea can only be thought about whilst the thinker is thinking about the way he exists in relation to the thought. In normal discourse the addressor may be in a modality of retrieval-readiness in anticipation of some response from the addressee, which might necessitate a further comment or additional information. If on the other hand the addressor was [say] an office boss] who delivered some brief instruction to a worker, it is possible that he would immediately revert to another neurological mode as he hands out some other instruction to another person, after dispensing the first "idea" into "memory."

So the human *idea* does NOT "exist" as sound waves - the idea doesn't "exist" at all - not even *inside* the human brain - what exists is the existential, cyphering, thinking brain of the holistic addressor and the sound-waves, plus the existential, decyphering, thinking brain of the holistic addressee.

The thinker simple changes the existential mode of ideating [neural activity] from one mode to another. People say "A person "has" an "idea," but they do not understand that what is REALLY going on, which is that a person exists in an ideational state of thinking and transmitting a representation of the "way it feels" to exist in that state of thinking and communicating, and the other person [the listener] exists in an ideational state of thinking and receiving and making sense of a representation of the "way it feels" for the other person [the speaker] to be in that state, and to access the content of which his/her conversational partner is attempting to communicate.

Richard Sansom writes:

"We are trained from the outset that there is always a correspondence between the signified and the signifier, and in doing so we inculcate very early on a neural mapping that is good enough for starting out in the world of human communication. However, we soon discover that this is not always the case. Language and signification in general has become so rich that not only can the same thing be said, or inferred in many ways it is often easy to get lost in the complexity of interpretations. While the bedrock of the signified/signifier correspondence remains built-in in our brain, with large agreement space, that correspondence is frequently blurred. It is easy to agree on simple things, but quite another thing to agree on complex ones. In particular, abstractions, philosophy and the legal system for example. While one might argue that every signifier has a meaning, it is impossible to accept that meaning as absolute. This being the case, I suggest that meaning itself is one of those abstractions that has little chance of ever having a solid footing in our discourse. (And if meaning has no solid footing, where are we?) The recent squabbles in our political system proves the point: words are so frequently open to a variety of interpretations that sometimes the meaning can be severely twisted. What's interesting to me is the way in which this communicative process becomes instantiated in the very young."

Logic indicates that there is NO MORE information carried by the hand-wave. The observer can *read something into* the movement, but the actual movement of the hand is a signal that bespeaks "goodbye," and nothing more, any concomitant feelings of loss and compassion are NOT part of the information signalled by the movement of the hand. Those feelings may or may not be present as part of the emotional existential state of the girl by the rail as she waves goodbye, or of the man on the dockside.

She may in fact be in an existential state of being glad to see the back of him, or he of her. Alternatively, at the same time the person on the jetty may associate warm feelings of loving attachment to the departing female, which are evoked as part of the existential experience of witnessing the departure and the wave of her hand, but these feelings are an existential modality of THE MAN ON THE QUAYSIDE, and do not EXIST "hovering Platonically somewhere over the waves" in between him and her, as part of the some fantasy characterisation of the independent communicative IDEA of love and loss.

An IDEA that doesn't exist at all independently of/or outside of the brains of the ideating modalities of the two separating protagonists.

Someone might say:

"The gesture, like a sound-word or painting, is also a carrier signal of images and feelings - not as eliciting but sent within the intended-interpreted interpersonal history of the individuals involved. There is no difference between my acknowledgement of her in this state and one of the dock workers! Your analysis lacks intrasubjectivity."

Going along with the assumption that there IS some romantic or emotional congruity between the two principles in this imagined scene, I am not denying that emotional feelings are being felt by both of them at the same time, and that indeed those feelings may roughly correspond - feelings of sadness at the moments of parting, a kind of emptiness felt deep in the body at the thought of the loss of his or her loving ways and physical tenderness, etc. But the actual wave of the hand itself [unless that is it is made with a flourish indicating flippancy] is the only signal that is involved - all supplementary feelings are generated by the neurophysical networks of the two people based upon interpersonal; facts gleaned from the association which indicate HOW SHE IS PROBABLY FEELING right now and how she thinks that I AM PROBABLY FEELING RIGHT NOW.