Unintelligible Fundamentals

A cat does not do a physical computation before jumping onto a high wall.

We do not do 'grammatical computations' before speaking.

A robot which could speak might be astonished to be shown its circuitry and programming. How could it map its thoughts to this organised equipment?  (It could not have been programmed to do this.)

A cat could make nothing of the physics associated with wall jumping.  Why do we expect to be able to understand the 'grammabiology' of speaking?  (We are puzzled that we cannot say what it is without talking nonsense.)

What is needed here is not 'more science' but a better understanding of what science is.

We think that reconciling our machinery, our phenomenological condition, and what we can intelligibly say is a kind of amalgam of anatomical, psychological and computational tasks.  We don't even want to think about how different these conceptions of ourselves are, never mind explore the consequences of them all being, themselves, explorations of what can intelligibly be said.

We might want to say there is some kind of mystery here - a ghost, 'something of which we cannot speak' - but even this is a misunderstanding.  The only purpose of trying to point at these things is to reveal the limits of pointing.  Mechanisms of the spirit are still mechanisims; ghosts are just hazy sorts of people; things of which we cannot speak turn out to be things we can say something about - that we cannot speak of them.  Incomprehensibly.

There is not some secret, especially deep, kind of explanation that shows our explanations to be reliable.

A paradox is not a puzzle, nor is it a special kind of road sign.  It isn't even a place where the road comes to an end.  It is like the twist in a moebius strip - we feel our way along it and find ourselves in a place we cannot understand, because to 'undrestand' is to draw a map, and no map can be drawn of this surface.