http://hypography.com/forums/ A place where would-be philosophers can test-drive their rantings that may not be worthy of discussion, and for other mind-numbing pontification. en Sun, 22 Nov 2009 01:05:48 GMT vBulletin 60 http://hypography.com/forums/images/styles/new_facebook/images/misc/rss.jpg http://hypography.com/forums/ http://hypography.com/forums/philosophers-weightroom/21394-acquiring-database-versus-creation-understanding.html Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:39:50 GMT Acquiring a database versus creation of understanding The success of our production and... Acquiring a database versus creation of understanding

The success of our production and consumption society is structured upon our highly rationalized capacity to develop, organize and utilize knowledge designed to encourage individuals to become highly specialized experts in narrow specialties. Our industrial base demands experts who require little understanding except in very narrow specialties.

Most parents desire that their children graduate from higher education with a credential entitling them to a good job with a high salary. The student of higher education in the United States graduates with a large database of specialized knowledge designed to permit that graduate to immediately fit into a large organization of specialized professionals.

Our Colleges and Universities have successfully met the demands of society and are the envy of the world. Higher education has learned to produce graduates with a large database of highly specialized knowledge.

Unfortunately the intrinsic value of education has been lost as a result. We have facilitated the maximization of production and consumption at the cost of losing contact with the original value of education.

I do not think that efficient assimilation of information into knowledge is our problem; I think our problem is creating meaning from what we do know.

It appears to me that humans have a great propensity to acquire knowledge but a miniscule capacity for understanding the meaning of that acquired knowledge. I would liken the basic human cognitive nature to be similar to that displayed by the United States Intelligence Agency in the 9/11 fiasco. We had the dots but did not have the capacity to connect the dots. Our educational system displays a vast capacity to graduate individuals with extensive databases but little understanding.

I would say that the intrinsic value of education is wisdom. I would define wisdom as a sensitive synthesis of broad knowledge, deep understanding and solid judgment. Our universities produce individuals capable of developing a great technology but lacking the wisdom to manage the world modified by that technology. Higher education has become a commodity.

The relationship of sex to love as compared with the relationship of knowledge to understanding might help to clarify my point.

Sex and knowledge are easily acquired and easily forgotten. Love and understanding requires an intense investment of the person. Sex can alienate, thus making love more problematic; just as extensive specialized knowledge, which leads to intellectual arrogance, can alienate, thus making understanding problematic. One can get sex but one must create love. Love and understanding are something to seek and work for and may or may not happen. Carl Sagan is quoted as having written; “Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.”

When we speak of a cornucopia of information and our attempt to assimilate that info in a coherent manner so as to facilitate our survival I wonder if we might not be missing something important. Our DNA was developed over millions of years based upon the prevailing environment. We have, as a result of our very successful rationalization of knowledge acquisition developed a far different universe than what our genes have prepared us for.

All of our fundamental capabilities make it possible for us to assimilate and organize great deals of information and to react to that knowledge in ways to assure survival in the world of the past. However, what do we do in this very different world of technology?

Conversion of input stimuli into knowledge was sufficient before but perhaps our future success in the world indicates that we may have to seriously modify our response to the world. Up to this point we have been able to successfully navigate a world where knowledge with little understanding is sufficient. Perhaps such a situation is reaching a climax. Perhaps we must adjust to becoming much more adept at understanding.

The success of our production and consumption society is structured upon our highly rationalized capacity to develop, organize and utilize knowledge; this process is designed to encourage individuals to become highly specialized experts in narrow specialties. Our industrial base demands experts who require little understanding except in very narrow specialties. ]]> coberst http://hypography.com/forums/philosophers-weightroom/21394-acquiring-database-versus-creation-understanding.html http://hypography.com/forums/philosophers-weightroom/21348-ignorance-ideology-open-society.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:36:36 GMT Ignorance and Ideology in an Open Society *Karl Popper argues, in his book The Open Society and... Ignorance and Ideology in an Open Society

Karl Popper argues, in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, that all ideology shares a common characteristic; a belief in infallibility.

The concept Popper illustrates in this book sounds much like the concept of a liberal democracy but his concept is more epistemological than political. It is based upon our imperfect comprehension of reality more than our structure of society. Such infallibility is an impossibility, which leads such ideological practitioners to use force to substantiate their views and such repression brings about a closed society.

Popper proposed that the open society is constructed on the recognition that our comprehension of reality is not perfect—there is realty beyond our comprehension and our will cannot compensate for that lack of comprehension. Even though the will of the power structure can manipulate the opinions of the citizens sooner or later reality will defeat the will. Truth does matter and success will not always override truth—truth being reality.

The Old Testament is an example of a tribal society and thus a closed society; the New Testament is an example of universal morality determined by universal recognition of human rights, which results in an open society.

George Soros “was born in Budapest, Hungary on August 12, 1930. He survived the Nazi occupation of Budapest and left communist Hungary in 1947 for England, where he graduated from the London School of Economics (LSE). While a student at LSE, Soros became familiar with the work of the philosopher Karl Popper, who had a profound influence on his thinking and later on his professional and philanthropic activities… In 1956, Soros moved to the United States, where he began to accumulate a large fortune through an international investment fund he founded and managed… Soros has been active as a philanthropist since 1979.”

Philosopher, tycoon, philanthropist, author, and international political activist George Soros says in his book The Age of Fallibility that “An open society accepts our fallibility; a closed society denies it.”

Soros declares that America is an open society that does not comprehend or abide by its principles. He argues that the principles of an open society are not a product of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment projected a reality that was in many ways separate from reason, and it was reason’s job to discover reality. In this view of reality, wherein reason had an independence from reality, reality could know absolute truth. “For instance, the theory of perfect competition was based on the assumption of perfect knowledge.”

Enlightenment was an age of hope in which reality was a virgin territory waiting to be discovered by reason. “The scope for reason seemed unlimited”. Reason has discovered a great deal and one very important truth is that there is no absolute truth; humans are fallible.

Although America is an open society, Americans do not comprehend why it is so and thus many contradictions result. Our government was formed on the principle of divided powers and not on the recognition of fallibility. In fact, the Declaration states a conceived absolute truth, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” The preamble of the Declaration of Independence is based upon natural rights while the text is based upon universal human rights.

An open society is constructed on the understanding that there is no absolute truth; there is a reality beyond our knowledge and that reality will contradict our will at times. America has often pursued success without regard for truth. Truth is easily manipulated or power often overrides truth as a result we often have little concern for truth. Soros calls this a feel-good society wherein society is unwilling to confront unpleasant realities.

An important consideration is that the people must believe in the value of an open society for that type of society to succeeds and flourish. In an open society ‘truth matters’; when the people become accustomed to the prevalence of power or ideology determining actions that society soon gives up the commitment to truth.

A feel-good society is not committed to truth and is soon deprived of the essence of an open society. When this principle is lost so might the open society. “Intellectual honesty and integrity are the values that America needs to rediscover if it is to recover.”

Americans seek entertainment rather than understanding. In an open society business seeks to give the citizens what they want provided that fits within the profit motive upon which business is constructed. Often business must step in to guide public desires to fit business interests. In our society the media, wherein the critical faculty generally lay, tends to provide the people what they clamor for, thus the societies critical faculty is steadily diminished and so the bulwark of an open society. ]]> coberst http://hypography.com/forums/philosophers-weightroom/21348-ignorance-ideology-open-society.html http://hypography.com/forums/philosophers-weightroom/21322-humans-seek-transcend-nature-via-culture.html Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:06:40 GMT Humans seek to transcend nature via culture But Love has pitched his mansion in The place of... Humans seek to transcend nature via culture

But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement.--Yates

“What will come of my whole life…Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”—Tolstoy

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker suggests that we all create an artificial world to avoid confronting the hopelessness of the human condition.

The basic premise of The Denial of Death is that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality, which in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism.

Meaning is number ONE. What wo/man fears most is extinction, which includes insignificance.

Wo/man wants assurance that their life has somehow counted; if not for her or his self then at least within the overall scheme of things. If there is some kind of “judgment day” then I want to be in ‘that number’ that matter. While alive I want to know that “I am somebody”.

Religion is our primary means for responding to that basic need to be somebody. Otto Rand says that all religions spring up “not so much from…fear of natural death as of final destruction.”

“It is culture itself that embodies the transcendence of death in some form or other, whether it appears as purely religious or not…culture itself is sacred, since it is the “religion” that assures in some way the perpetuation of its members.”

Our dichotomy of sacred and secular aspects of social life is an egregious error. There is no such thing as a distinction between sacred and secular in the symbolic affairs of sapiens. Sacred is that which transcends the natural world while secular is that which is of the natural world. In the world of symbolic affairs such distinctions do not hold.

“As soon as you have symbols you have artificial self-transcendence via culture. Everything cultural is fabricated and given meaning by the mind, a meaning that is not given by physical nature. Culture is in this sense “supernatural” and all systemizations of culture have in the end the same goal: to raise men above nature, to assure him that in some ways their lives count in the universe more than merely physical things count.”

Self-transcendence, i.e. transcending nature via culture, does not provide a simple means to deny the primacy of death; the terror of death still lurks beneath the veneer. We have shifted the fear of death onto a new level of anxiety; we must “now hold for dear life onto the self-transcending meanings of the society in which we live…a new kind of instability and anxiety are created.”

In our attempt to deny evil, i.e. death, we bring a new and grotesque form of evil. “It is man’s ingenuity, rather than his animal nature, that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter fate.” Wo/man has, through ingenuity, heaped great evil on the world; far greater than could ever be created by our animal nature.

Quotes from Escape from Evil—Becker ]]> coberst http://hypography.com/forums/philosophers-weightroom/21322-humans-seek-transcend-nature-via-culture.html http://hypography.com/forums/philosophers-weightroom/21303-how-can-we-create-personality-we-desire.html Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:07:01 GMT How can we create a personality we desire? Personal heroism by means of individualism is a task... How can we create a personality we desire?

Personal heroism by means of individualism is a task requiring courage and self-confidence. Courage and self-confidence are characteristics of few sapiens, young or old. It is a path less traveled because it imposes terrifying burdens; these burdens display themselves by isolation from the common herd. “This move exposes the person to the sense of being completely crushed and annihilated because he sticks out so much, has to carry so much in himself.”

Personal heroism demands that one exposes her self, i.e. s/he sticks out dramatically from the herd. Those creative types who expose themselves so must create their own justification. Herein we find something that may seem illogical “the more you develop as a distinctive free and critical human being, the more guilt you have. Your very work accuses you; it makes you feel inferior. What right do you have to play God?” By what authority do you presume to introduce new meaning into the world?

Otto Rank was a colleague of Freud and, like Jung, carried theories far beyond those which Freud created. “Freud’s reality psychology emphasized essentially the influence of outer factor, of the outer milieu, upon the development of the individual and the formation of character,…I [was] opposed to this biological principle, the spiritual principle which alone is meaningful in the development of the essentially human.”

For Freud the id is the nucleus of being and it, the id, is subject to the natural laws. In such a frame the personality consists of layers of identification that “form the basis of the parental super-ego.” This might be properly considered to be the spiritual structure of the average individual, i.e. the average personality results from the natural influences developed against the naturally evolved super-ego.

Such a theory accounts for the average but does not account for the two creative extremes: the creative type and the so-called “neurotic” type. I would label the average personality to be a reactive individual; an individual who goes with the flow.

There are two personality types that make up the proactive personality: one creative type squeezes him or her self into a tight ball in reaction to the inner and outer milieu, i.e. the so-called “neurotic” and the second creative type who creates a personality wherein the ego “is strong just in the degree to which it [i]is[i] the representative of this primal force and the strength of this force represented in the individual we call will.”

This second creative type, which Rank identifies as the creative type while he identifies the other creative type as the “neurotic”, creates “voluntarily from the impulsive elements and moreover to develop his standards beyond the identifications of the super-ego morality to an ideal formation which consciously guides and rules this creative will in terms of the personality.”

“The essential point in this process is the fact that he evolves his ego ideal from himself, not merely on the ground of the given but also of self-chosen factors which he strives after consciously.”

Quotes from Will Therapy and Truth and Reality by Otto Rank ]]> coberst http://hypography.com/forums/philosophers-weightroom/21303-how-can-we-create-personality-we-desire.html http://hypography.com/forums/philosophers-weightroom/21285-can-experimentalism-loosen-grasp-tradition.html Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:39:41 GMT Can experimentalism loosen the grasp of tradition?

I remember watching the movie [i]Fiddler on the Roof[i]. In this movie there was much talk, and singing and dancing abouttradition. The story of the movie is, I think, about what happens when a people steeped in tradition are forced to deal with dramatic change.

The rock of tradition continually meets the winds of change to produce a new tradition. Tradition evolves and the rate of evolution marches ever faster as technology provides the metronomic beat of the march.

Cognitive science presently functions within the boundaries of two distinctly different paradigms. The traditional and first generation paradigm, Artificial Intelligence, is founded upon the theory of mechanical manipulation of symbols by computer, has in the last few decades been challenged by the SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) also known as Experimentalism.

Cognitive science seeks to comprehend via empirical techniques answers to such questions as: What is reason, how do we organize experience, what is a conceptual system, and others. These are not new questions but the answers derived via SGCS are new to science and a challenge to traditional philosophy.

Objectivism is considered to be the traditional philosophical view. “It has come out of two thousand years of philosophizing about the nature of reason. It is still widely believed despite overwhelming empirical evidence against it.” Objectivism is still widely held as valid because the empirical challenge to traditional knowledge, which is not within the domain of the natural sciences, takes generations to permeate the consciousness of the general pubic. The general public learns such matters primarily via social osmosis.

Cognitive science is in transition and categorization is the central issue defining the separation of the traditional view from the experimentalist view.

Cognitive science has introduced revolutionary theories that, if true, will change dramatically the views of Western philosophy. Advocates of the traditional view will, of course, “say that conceptual structure must have a neural realization in the brain, which just happens to reside in a body. But they deny that anything about the body is essential for characterizing what concepts are.”

The cognitive science claim is that ”the very properties of concepts are created as a result of the way the brain and body are structured and the way they function in interpersonal relations and in the physical world.”

The embodied-mind hypothesis therefore radically undercuts the perception/conception distinction. In an embodied mind, it is conceivable that the same neural system engaged in perception (or in bodily movements) plays a central role in conception. Indeed, in recent neural modeling research, models of perceptual mechanisms and motor schemas can actually do conception work in language learning and in reasoning.

A standard technique for checking out new ideas is to create computer models of the idea and subject that model to simulated conditions to determine if the model behaves as does the reality. Such modeling techniques are used constantly in projecting behavior of meteorological parameters.

Neural computer models have shown that the types of operations required to perceive and move in space require the very same type of capability associated with reasoning. That is, neural models capable of doing all of the things that a body must be able to do when perceiving and moving can also perform the same kinds of actions associated with reasoning, i.e. inferring, categorizing, and conceiving.

Our understanding of biology indicates that the body has a marvelous ability to do as any handyman does, i.e. make do with what is at hand. The body would, it seems logical to assume, take these abilities that exist in all creatures that move and survive in space and with such fundamental capabilities reshape it through evolution to become what we now know as our ability to reason. The first budding of the reasoning ability exists in all creatures that function as perceiving, moving, surviving, creatures.

Cognitive science has, it seems to me, connected our ability to reason with our bodies in such away as to make sense out of connecting reason with our biological evolution in ways that Western philosophy has not done, as far as I know.

It seems to me that Western philosophical tradition as always tried to separate mind from body and in so doing has never been able to show how mind, as was conceived by this tradition, could be part of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Cognitive science now provides us with a comprehensible model for grounding all that we are both bodily and mentally into a unified whole that makes sense without all of the attempts to make mind as some kind of transcendent, mystical, reality unassociated with biology.

Quotes from Philosophy in the Flesh by Lakoff and Johnson ]]> coberst http://hypography.com/forums/philosophers-weightroom/21285-can-experimentalism-loosen-grasp-tradition.html http://hypography.com/forums/philosophers-weightroom/21277-how-can-young-person-become-hero-ine.html Fri, 30 Oct 2009 08:07:16 GMT How can a young person become a hero/ine? “Not in that he leaves something behind him, but in... How can a young person become a hero/ine?

“Not in that he leaves something behind him, but in that he works and enjoys and stirs others to work and enjoyment, does man’s importance lie.” Goethe

A hero (heroine in female), “in Greek mythology and folklore, was originally a demigod, their cult being one of the most distinctive features of ancient Greek religion. Later, hero (male) and heroine (female) came to refer to characters who, in the face of danger and adversity or from a position of weakness, display courage and the will for self sacrifice – that is, heroism – for some greater good, originally of martial courage or excellence but extended to more general moral excellence.”—Quickie from Wiki [with minor modification].

My parents accomplished a heroic task that is often not available to today’s young people because many young people start out with so much more to begin with. It seems to me that in a more comfortable standard of living (America) available today that people so fortunate must develop other means for heroic action. However, we are rapidly approaching a time that may change this situation dramatically and thus challenge the new generation greatly on a more basic level of needs.

I was born in 1934 during the Great Depression. Dad drove a city bus in Amarillo Texas. My family moved to a very small town in Oklahoma before my first birthday; I had four siblings at the time we moved from Texas to Oklahoma to manage a small café and hotel that was then being managed by my uncle who wished to return to farming.

During the next 15 years my family managed that café and hotel. This operation allowed my parents to raise a large family in reasonably comfortable conditions throughout the depression and war years of World War II.

The psychologist Alfred Adler said: “The supreme law [of life] is this: the sense of worth of the self shall not be allowed to be diminished.”

For humanity, and especially for young people, this “supreme law” presents a paradox.

“The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meaning”. The creative type finds that for some reason, perhaps it is an unconscious reason, the world as others see it presents a problem. When the creative type perceives the collective solution to the problem is inadequate s/he attempts to fashion an individual solution. In doing so the creative type becomes “a painfully separate person with nothing shared to lean on.”

I claim that our (American) culture is anti-intellectual consumerism. It is anti-intellectual in that any intellectual energy expended on non-money making ventures is considered as a foolish waste of time and energy. Our culture discourages the egg-head, the pointed-head intellectual, and the wonk. Why else would it have such labels?

I claim that the young person can solve this paradox by developing a dual personality. S/he can learn to lead two lives. One life is shown to his or her peers under normal situations and the other life becomes a self-actualizing self-learning experience that is shared only with those few like-minded peers or perhaps adults who are capable of appreciating the distinction. ]]> coberst http://hypography.com/forums/philosophers-weightroom/21277-how-can-young-person-become-hero-ine.html http://hypography.com/forums/philosophers-weightroom/21262-we-perceive-our-self-object.html Wed, 28 Oct 2009 07:41:30 GMT We perceive our self as an object ‘Object is container’ is, I think, a useful metaphor. The... We perceive our self as an object

‘Object is container’ is, I think, a useful metaphor. The object has an inside and an outside with a boundary separating the two. It is possibly the reason we think of the existence of souls and spirits. Humans think about them self as an object. We see an example of this interior and exterior when we communicate on the Internet. In our face-to-face communication in the real world the exterior of a person becomes very important in our concept of that person. On the Internet such is not the case and this fact causes situations between the two modes of communication.

When most people contact one another there is only a combining of exteriors. Few occasions develop when two people make a significant contact of interiors. James Baldwin put it succinctly when he said “mirrors can only lie”. The mirror exposes only the exterior and says nothing about the interior; I find that, as I grow older, I have less and less exterior about which to communicate and communication about the interior seems much easier with total strangers on the Internet than with those close to me.

Marshall McLuhan was particularly interested in Technology as Extension of the Human Body. “An extension occurs when an individual or society makes or uses something in a way that extends the range of the human body and mind in a fashion that is new. The shovel we use for digging holes is a kind of extension of the hands and feet. The spade is similar to the cupped hand, only it is stronger, less likely to break, and capable of removing more dirt per scoop than the hand. A microscope or telescope is a way of seeing that is an extension of the eye.”

Going further in this vein the auto is an extension of the foot. However there are negative results from all such extensions. “Amputations” represent the unintended and un-reflected counterparts of such extensions.

“Every extension of mankind, especially technological extensions, has the effect of amputating or modifying some other extension… The extension of a technology like the automobile "amputates" the need for a highly developed walking culture, which in turn causes cities and countries to develop in different ways. The telephone extends the voice, but also amputates the art of penmanship gained through regular correspondence. These are a few examples, and almost everything we can think of is subject to similar observations…We have become people who regularly praise all extensions, and minimize all amputations. McLuhan believed that we do so at our own peril.”

McLuhan was concerned about man's willful blindness to the downside of technology. In his later years McLuhan developed a scientific basis for his thought around what he termed the tetrad. The tetrad is four laws, framed as questions, which give us a useful instrument for studying our culture. What does it (the medium or technology) extend?
What does it make obsolete? What is retrieved? What does the technology reverse into if it is over-extended?

McLuhan’s gravestone carries the inscription The Truth Shall Make You Free. We do not have to like or even agree with everything that McLuhan said. However, we would be wise to remember that his was a life of great insight and it was dedicated to showing wo/man the truth about the world we live in, and especially the hidden consequences of the technologies we develop.

In the book The Birth and Death of Meaning Earnest Becker provides us with a synthesis of the knowledge about the extensions of the human body that McLuhan spoke of and science certified through research.

Becker informs us that the “self” is in the body but is not part of the body; it is symbolic and is not physical. “The body is an object in the field of the self: it is one of the things we inhabit…A person literally projects or throws himself out of the body, and anywhere at all…A man’s “Me” is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his mind, but his clothes and house, his wife and children, [etc].” The human can be symbolically located wherever s/he thinks part of her really exists or belongs.

It is said that the more insecure we are the more important these symbolic extensions of the self become. When we invest undue value onto such matters as desecrating a piece of cloth that symbolizes our nation is an indication that our self-valuation has declined and this overvaluation of a symbol can help compensate that loss. We get a good feeling about own value by obtaining value in the pseudopod as the flag.

In conceiving our self as a container that overflows with various and important extensions that our technology provides us we might appear like a giant amoeba spread out over the land with a center in the self. These pseudopods are not just patriotic symbols and important things but include silly things such as a car or a neck tie. We can experience nervous breakdowns when others do not respect our particular objects of reverence. ]]> coberst http://hypography.com/forums/philosophers-weightroom/21262-we-perceive-our-self-object.html http://hypography.com/forums/philosophers-weightroom/21242-can-t-simple-absolute-dickandjane.html Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:09:50 GMT Can’t be simple/absolute for DickandJane! *Those who control public policy in the United States,... Can’t be simple/absolute for DickandJane!

Those who control public policy in the United States, and I suspect elsewhere, try desperately to keep things simple so that DickandJane do not have to trouble themselves with complex problems. If DickandJane can handle the problems of production and consumption nothing else matters. Keep DickandJane quiet until they are needed to protest something.

I have recently turned my attention to art because I have discovered that the experts in this field seem to agree with Wilhelm Worringer, author of Abstraction and Empathy, that “The study of art is an indispensable part of the study of man.”

Worringer points out that the study of art as an objective science and the study of art as an aesthetic experience are incompatible disciplines. He also notes that each discipline often focused upon the Classical epochs when they created categories of understanding for the purpose of analysis.

He notes that such categories cannot be used with abandon between the two disciplines and between different historical epochs. That is to say that the created categories must be used with a comprehension of wide ranging nuances or they will cause mistaken analysis.

This is much the same problem that has been caused within the sciences when Newton’s theories and the expansion of technological advances led the general population to assume that the same categories used in the natural sciences are applicable to the wide domain of sciences in a much different world later.

All this is to say that DickandJane must learn to become a much more sophisticated analyst of even very basic categories or they will be unable to comprehend and thus hope to solve the grave, and complex problems our society faces today.

Most cognitive activity happens backstage, i.e. in the unconscious, which is unavailable to direct conscious analysis. The unconscious might be compared with the inside of the atom. They both are worlds not directly available to intuition; these worlds must be comprehended based upon what happens outside their enclosure.

Humans talk, listen, and draw inferences without conscious effort. “A large part of unconscious thought involves automatic, immediate, implicit rather than explicit understanding.” A large part of reasoning is accomplished within this unconscious domain of the brain and this reasoning is grounded in our everyday experiences.

Humans and, I suspect all creatures navigate in space through spatial-relations concepts, i.e. schemas. These concepts are the essence of our ability to function in space. These are not concepts that we can sense but they are the forms and inference patterns for our movement in space that we utilize unconsciously. We automatically perceive an entity as being on, in front of, behind, etc., another entity.

Common sense or, as cognitive science labels it, folk theory informs us that “all things are a kind of thing”. All things have in common with other things certain characteristics; i.e. all things belong in categories with other like things. Things are categorized together based upon what they have in common. It might be worth while to think of category as being a container.

In classical or conventional terms we categorize things in accordance with what are regarded as being that which is essential to that kind of thing. All things that are essentially the same fall into the same category. What is essential to a tree is that which is necessary and sufficient for that thing to be classified as a tree. To categorize a thing, i.e. define a thing, is to give its essential characteristics.

In some way or another all creatures must categorize. At a minimum all creatures must distinguish friend from foe or eat and not eat. Categorization is part of the fundamental needs for survival of the creature. If the mouse mistakes a snake for a stick that mouse becomes toast; the same categorization problem applies to the lion and to the man.

Categorization is meaningful. Meaning is not a thing; something is meaningful for a creature only when there is an association between that thing and the creature. “Meaningfulness derives from the experience of functioning as a being of a certain sort in an environment of a certain sort.” It is meaningful to a soldier when s/he mistakenly categorizes a tank to be only a harmless tree or an enemy to be a friend.

There is nothing more meaningful for a creatures’ survival than correct categorization of the world in which that creature lives.

A container schema is a gestalt (a functional unit) figure with an interior, an exterior, and a boundary—the parts make sense only as part of the whole. Container schemas are cross-modal—“we can impose a conceptual container schema on a visual scene…on something we hear, as when we conceptually separate out one part of a piece of music from another…This structure is topological in the sense that the boundary can be made larger, smaller, or distorted and still remain the boundary of a container schema.”

“Image schemas have a special cognitive function: They are both perceptual and conceptual in nature. As such, they provide a bridge between language and reasoning on the one hand and vision on the other.”

Quotes from Philosophy in the Flesh by Lakoff and Johnson ]]> coberst http://hypography.com/forums/philosophers-weightroom/21242-can-t-simple-absolute-dickandjane.html http://hypography.com/forums/philosophers-weightroom/21226-humans-objects-commerce.html Sat, 24 Oct 2009 10:10:09 GMT Humans as objects of commerce McLuhan was, I guess, the first to express the insight that... Humans as objects of commerce

McLuhan was, I guess, the first to express the insight that technology is an extension of the human body.

These hand-held gadgets for communication might very well represent the end of ‘understanding’ for almost all citizens by 2050. I can see it already on the Internet discussion forums where communication is becoming a stream of consciousness without coherent grammatical or thoughtful content or construction.

Rugged individualism might be an appropriate expression for all the creatures in the world, with one exception. Humans have, in the last few hundred years, moved from being rugged individuals to our present state in which we have fashioned an alien environment in which we have become chess pieces or ciphers. We have invented the Artificial Kingdom where, as Simone Weil once noted, “it is the thing that thinks and the man who is reduced to the state of the thing”.

I think that we, women and men, have become chess pieces. We have become objects to be manipulated by the market and the corporation. We spend our days like the chess piece; we have a quantified value and are placed on the board and used as desired by some one who may be a real person. The real person has still the human characteristics of creativity, spontaneity, improvisation, spontaneously reactive, discontinuous, a mosaic more than syntax or cipher. Just what we find is missing when using the telephone to contact someone out there.

In an effort to understand where we are now it might help to start back in time and move forward. In frontier days each person was very much an individual. Rugged individualism was a popular expression. Each man and woman was a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. Each husband and wife was a team that together could and had to do everything that was needed.

In early America we were an agricultural economy. Most families were farm families we were all rugged individualist. The farmer was very much the jack-of-all-trades and the master of his or her domain.

As we move forward in time we see this team become a man working in a factory or office and the woman was at home raising the children and maintaining the day to day necessities for all family members. She washed, cleaned, shopped, sewed, and was still much of a rugged individual. Slowly the man became a specialized worker in a clockwork factory or office.

Moving forward in history we arrive at the present moment where not only is the man working in the factory or office but the woman joins him there also.

When we examine the factory or office workspace we find a very different occupation for the man and woman than the rugged individualism of emerging history of human evolution. We no longer are masters of our own domain but are ciphers in a clockwork that functions upon modern economic principles.

A pertinent example of this mode of commodification is how we have converted what was political economics into the modern economics. Political economy is the study of social relations. It is the study of culture. Political economy focuses upon the problem of how to regulate industrialization within the context of a healthy society, it worries about the problems of labor within a context of the laborer as an end and not a commodity—an object of commerce.

Economics, however, in its modern form, has replaced political economics. Economics has removed the pesky concern about labor as being human and has replaced labor as being a commodity—an object of commerce. Modern economics is now the study of scarcity, prices, and resource allocation. Economics has legislated that labor, as an end, is no longer a legitimate domain of knowledge for economic consideration. In doing so, over time, society has become ignorant of such concerns. Our culture has replaced concern about humans as ends with humans as means to some other end.

In the rugged individualist mode of living the individual was creative and master even though the domain of mastery was small. An individual’s personality is dramatically affected. Labor has become an abstract quantity and calculated into the commodity produced. We are the only creatures who have completely removed our self from what we were evolved to be. We are the only creatures removed from our grounding in an organic world. We came from a long ancestry of rugged individualist and now reside in the Artificial Kingdom. To what end only time will tell.

Do you feel like a cipher in our culture? ]]> coberst http://hypography.com/forums/philosophers-weightroom/21226-humans-objects-commerce.html