I just wrote and submitted a Philosophy paper and managed to discover a logical paradox that will now haunt me forever (that or I’m stressed and being stressed is making me think dumb):
The mind cannot conceive a scenario it cannot conceive.
That is, if there is something the mind cannot think of, the mind would not be able to produce a thought about thinking about it, because it would first have to produce the thought it can’t think of. However, by making this statement, I am showing that I have thought of something I cannot conceive.
After all, the definition of “conceive” is “able to be thought of” (first Princess Bride joke gets a punch… or a cookie, can’t decide which). That is, the very concept of inconceivability is, in itself, wrapped up in a meta-recognition that the brain cannot think of something.
If you acknowledge that the brain can, indeed, conceive of something inconceivable – that it cannot think of something inconceivable, you’ve reached what amounts to a logical absurdity. However, if you deny this property, and say the mind cannot conceive what the mind cannot conceive by definition and tautology, then you must explain exactly why inconceivability is not, by its nature, a conscious recognition of something inconceivable.
Yeah, but you haven’t really thought about what it is in detail, so there’s no paradox. Imagining the title of a book isn’t the same as writing one.
ETA: and you can create a description of something that is impossible to exist or visualise (a square triangle). But again, there’s a distinction between summary and detail.
I’m not sure I get what you’re trying to say here – I can think of any number of things I can’t conceive of: square circles, reddish green, god, smells (I can’t smell, and never could)… Thinking about these does not necessitate conceiving of them.
No, you are showing that you have thought of something you can conceive: the possibility of not being able to conceive of X, where X is unknown. Since you have not specified X, there is no paradox. You suspect an unknown X through induction: you can conceive of X’ due to mental tool Y’, and therefore conclude there is probably an unknown X’’ that you cannot conceive of without a mental tool Y’'. You have merely thought of the possibility of thinking of something you cannot conceive; you have no way of unambiguously verifying that X exists without first conceiving of it.
I’m not sure I like these “square circle” examples, because in those cases you aren’t really thinking of anything: “square circle” is an incoherent concept. It’s not fair to just write down words and say you are “thinking” about them if they are not well-defined. You could argue that you are thinking about the possibility of the words having meaning, but in that case you can conceive of what you are thinking (the conception of a logical argument)!
For many years studying music, I have “heard” or “felt” the shape of a musical phrase or a musical progression. Atonal music seems to touch on an inconceivable concept, but my brain (and I suppose millions of others) “sees” this concept as real, but it simply is not.
And I dont mean “shape of music” as connecting the dots on a written stave of music and saying, “that looks like a trapezoid”, I mean hearing “No Woman No Cry” and seeing a shape of concordance; something logical from an illogical method.
I think they’re OK, as long as we only consider them to be one simple example of a concept that cannot be concieved - due to a logical contradiction in the definition. Other things may be inconcievable for other reasons, but ‘square circle’ is useful shorthand to get us to the nub of whether or not we really are thinking about the unthinkable, or just thinking about thinking about it.
Also you don’t need paradoxical concepts like square circles. One of the examples Half Man Half Wit gave was smell, because he has congenital anosmia.
To broaden it for the rest of us, consider the scenario of having my eyes and visual cortex modified so I have (full) tetrachromatic vision. I can conceive of this scenario, and any higher-level meta-conceive, but I can’t actually conceive the scenario itself because I’m unable to imagine a larger colour space.
Somehow you are distinguishing between “conceive of” and “actually conceive”. You should just put different words there, so that the fact that there is no paradox is manifest. I think in this example when you say “actually conceive” you mean “experience the qualia in,” which I think inserts a definitional ambiguity (you don’t mean the same thing when you say “conceive of”). In this case I guess that when you say “conceive of”, you mean that you experience other qualia, and so by induction you can feel confident in proposing the existence of other qualia X which themselves you cannot conceive. You do not “conceive of X”, rather you “conceive that the possibility of an unknown X exists.” Since you are not conceiving of X itself, there is no paradox.
You wrote, "The mind cannot conceive a scenario it cannot conceive."
If it’s my mind, I’m male, so I absolutely can never even begin to imagine the experience of childbirth. Yes, I understand how it works, have seen pregnant women, have seen a birth, so yes, I can conceive the idea, but certainly not from a personal standpoint. So the FEELING of a birth can’t even be conjured for me.
My only other attempt for this is dreams. Are dreams inhibited only to life experience? Couldn’t dreams be considered thought the brain has but can’t conceive or think about before they are conceived? Don’t remember my infant dreams, but I could believe our subconscious could create thoughts such as you describe.
Uuuurrrrgh, I’m confused! Every example I come up with is a thought I’ve already conceived, therefore cannot dispute what you ask.
No, I think this is right. The OP defines “concieve” as “think about.” Is there anything you can’t think about? No–because for any candidate for a thing that can’t be thought about, it can be thought about by considering it under the label “the candidate for the thing I can’t think about.” Ergo, there’s nothing you can’t think about.
Now there may be things you can’t think about “effectively” (I’ll define that one later… ). No paradox arises from that possibility.
One thing that worried me was a “think of”, “think about” distinction, as in the following.
[QUOTE=Jragon]
That is, if there is something the mind cannot think of, the mind would not be able to produce a thought about thinking about it, because it would first have to produce the thought it can’t think of.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Jragon]
After all, the definition of “conceive” is “able to be thought of” (first Princess Bride joke gets a punch… or a cookie, can’t decide which).
[/QUOTE]
If someone says “think of”, I take it to mean something involving a somewhat detailed understanding of the thing in question (e.g. a thought of a ball must at least involve something basic to being a ball, such as roundness, or bounciness), whereas “think about” can be met by just finding anything true of the thing in question. This may be just my idiolect. If we collapse these meanings to the “think about” meaning given, I agree with the below. (And even if it isn’t what the OP meant, it is neat nonetheless.)
But if “candidate for a thing” is undefined, the statement is vacuous. And “candidate for a thing” must necessarily be undefined, for to define it would be to imply “thinking about” it.
I don’t understand why you would think the following sentence could be vacuous (which is why I wanted to know more about what you meant by undefined; aside from the fun of asking).
[QUOTE=Frylock]
…for any candidate for a thing that can’t be thought about, it can be thought about by considering it under the label “the candidate for the thing I can’t think about.”
[/QUOTE]
I read this as, roughly, of the following form; for any x such that ~Px, Px, because “blah”. (Where Px means “can be thought about”, or “conceivable”.) Or, for all x, if ~Px, then Px (because “blah”).
“Candidate for a thing” need not be undefined simply because defining it would imply thinking about it–for if, in fact, I’m right that there’s nothing you can’t think about, then there’s nothing wrong with the fact that defining “candidate for at hing” would imply thinking about it.
Here’s another way to illustrate the reasoning in the post you were responding to:
Suppose there were something you couldn’t think about.
Did you suppose it? Well then, you just thought about something you can’t think about.
But would you argue that it’s actually impossible to suppose there were something you couldn’t think about?
(BTW I’ve got a notion that it’s impossible to suppose A is false where A =def “A is false.” so I’m sympathetic to the idea that there can be strings which fail to represent anything that can be supposed. But I’m not convinced that “there is something you can’t think about” is such a string.)
). No paradox arises from that possibility.