Monday, August 24, 2009

What is there without language?

I think that anyone in their right mind would be interested in experiencing just a taste of what life would be like without language.  What would be different? What couldn't we do? What could we learn to do? Finally, if we were able to learn some of our lost abilities in a new non-linguistic world, how would the process of learning them be different?

I've begun to think that getting a glimpse of what a non-linguistic existence would be like is not as impossible as it might seem.  I've been engaging in some phenomenological reflection along these lines and have really started to make progress.  What I do is simply try to block language from my experience-that is, to block language from the outside world and from the inside one as well.  For anyone who hasn't tried this, it's definitely worth a try.

Escaping language from the outside is relatively straightforward, and it happens to us regularly throughout the day (although not as often as many of us might like).  Just avoid hearing speech or written words.  Blocking off language from the inside is easy as well, but it's not something that we regularly do.  There may be different approaches to this, and I may be missing something major, but what I've been doing is consciously avoiding attaching words to my experience (not all the time of course).   When I reflect on the role of language on my thoughts, I find that I frequently bring words up in my mind to apply to either whatever is going on around me, or whatever I'm thinking about.  By doing this, I've noticed that I don't really have access to concepts as I normally do.  I just can't bring them into my mind.  I'm using concepts here in a broad sense.  Basically I mean any discrete mental entity that can be brought to mind when its not present in my immediate surroundings (e.g., in my field of vision).  I don't know yet if this means that I wouldn't be able to make decisions with them in the ways that I'm used to.  For example, if I'm struck with an important decision that would affect my family, would I be able to take them into account if I wasn't able to use language?

Monday, August 17, 2009

The Cultural Construction of the Self

Who am I?

Growing up in the 21st century, I am familiar with the concept of the self, and I self-apply it. The peculiar way in which I do this is the result of cultural-historical forces in general, and in particular, scientific advancements. This implies that the concept of "the self" has changed over time. I would like to examine the dynamics of these changes, approaching them as shifts in the way that experience is related to, and understood in terms of, its objects.

Pure experience, as in experience without perspective, untempered by the world, is inconceivable and perhaps impossible. To come alive, experience must be manifested in something which itself is not pure experience. It is as if experience were a light shining on our back, invisible to us until we hold something in its rays and reflect it back on ourselves.

I experience an orange, holding it in front of my field of vision. It is essential to the presence of the experience that it be conveyed by something (in this case the orange), yet the fact that it is conveyed by an orange is trivial. I could just as easily have had an experience (albeit a different one) with another fruit.

A self is a coherent pattern of experience extended through time. The coherence of the self comes from the stability of the body which continually captures and creates experiences. The sense of a localized self is caused by the temporal and physical linking of experiences flowing through the same body. The interpretation of each successive experience is shaped by those that have preceded it. At the same time, the unique qualities of each new experience shape the memory of past experiences. This is very similar to the way that new water flowing down a stream bed is (on one hand) shaped by the paths cut by past flows, but also reshapes the path in relation to its own particular movement. New experiences occur in relation to the "same old self" because they are brought forth within a system that has previously brought forth (and been shaped by) all of the experiences of that self.

Before going on, I should note an inadequacy of the otherwise useful river metaphor used above. While both a riverbed and a biological body are shaped by natural forces, bodies are structured to be receptive in a wide variety of extremely subtle and complex ways. Riverbeds have nowhere near this kind of complexity.

While experience most likely exists apart from human society, the general concept of the self most likely does not. The self is necessarily a product of society. On one hand it separates the individual from the rest of society, but at the same time it aligns and coordinates the individual with respect to his/her own goals, as well as to society as a whole. The self can be viewed as either the catalyst for, or the reaction to, the emergence of the social domain. Like most things, it's probably a mixture of both. In any case, the self only becomes practical once organisms become primarily social creatures.

Next time...

The particular form that a self may take in a given society is a function of culture. Here culture is understood as concerning the form of social interactions. What types of interactions are possible is a function of culture in general and a function of the self in particular.

Self consciousness/concepts

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm trying to construct a timeline of sorts for the development of the self concept or self consciousness. I mean self con. in a very broad sense, referring to the ways that people understand themselves. As someone with an interest in the cognitive sciences, I'm interested in how advancements in our understanding of our own experience will affect our self concept (from this point on I'm merging self concept and self consciousness into one thing). At the same time, I'm interested in the possibility of understanding the development of cognitive science in terms of the larger development of an understanding of experience. This would include the development of primitive self concepts like the idea of "myself" as a person.

Bertallanffy on The Problem of Consciousness

The thing that got me interested in psychology and philosophy was consciousness. Specifically the mystery of consciousness: How is it that our bodies can produce conscious experiences?

The great thinker Ludwig von Bertallanffy published a paper on consciousness that goes a lot further towards making sense of consciousness than anything I've ever read. He is able to make sense of the mystery of how mere arrangements of matter may give way to something as spectacular as consciousness. I want to summarize his position here.

Based on the evidence from modern science, Bertallanffy concludes that consciousness is produced by our bodies. The fact that this strikes us as such a mystery is a result of the fact that we attempt to explain conscious experience using certain products of that experience. Let me try to clarify: Consciousness is primary within our experience. Within conscious experience , we have our understanding of the world, including various causal models, etc. At the present we have reached the conclusion that "Yes, consciousness seems to be caused by the arrangement of particules making up physical organisms, even though we have no idea how this might occur." Bertallanffy argues that the reason for this is that the particles (or arrangements of them) are mental representations of the particles that actually cause consciousness (whatever the hell they are). They are the maps of the real particles.

The point can be illustrated by a heirarchy.

The primary layer is comprised of the actual "objective" structures of molecules and particules that give rise to consiocus experience. There is no way to talk about this level coherently since it is impossible to talk of things that are not perceptions. I bring it up because it is what the third layer models. This level gives birth to...

The secondary layer which is conscious experience itself. In terms of our own experience this layer is primary. It gives birth to...

Models of the primary layer of particles and molecules. These models are insufficient for explaining consciousness because they are incomplete representations of the primary level.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

A recurrent pattern in my life has been an interest in learning about the basic facts of reality. [I couldn't find a more constructivist way to phrase that sentence]. In particular, I want to come up with better models for this experience that I have. Recently, this has led me to want to learn about memory, in particular to understand the physical basis of memories.

In doing this, I often feel daunted that I will be embarking on someting too extreme; that learning too much about the creation of my experience will lead to changes in how that experience unfolds further down the road. At the root of that is what I perceive as my own mental instability-or potential for instability.

At the same time as I think this I am also aware of an opposing feeling: Could it really be that I have the special priveledge of being able to access deep "truths" about my experience? I mean, what are the odds that scientific knowledge has matured sufficiently now to allow for a completely different type of self awareness than ever before? Now, let me state that of course scientific knowledge allows for me to take a different position on my own existence than has ever been possible. My point is that I would hesitate before saying that "advances in neurosciences will allow my generation to advance its understanding of itself in ways that are incomparable to past advancements".

In other words, I aim to see our self concept (or the individual self concepts of individuals) as a work in progress. If I came to understand the neural mechanisms behind specific abilities, this would advance the particular self concept that I have of myself. If it led to a qualitatively new kind of self concept, then I would be tempted to believe that all past advancements of this kind were proportionally significant.

I'm not sure how far I would go with this. It's tempting to think that applying an advanced model of ourselves as biological beings to our experience would be as profound as the past development of the self concept of the person.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Patterns among systems

What patterns are there among the systems in our world?  In particular, what patterns are there between the cell as a system, the body as a system, and a society as a system?  I am concerned with patterns of adaptation: how a system learns to act adaptively in response to something that it perceives.  

Let's take the threat of environmental change as an example.  The solution to the current climate crisis will have to involve an effort that occurs on the level of (most of) humanity, not the level of the individual person.  Such a response would be an adaptive reaction taken on behalf of the system.  But at the same time, the constituent parts of this reaction (individual people) are not unaware of what they're a part of.

It would be very strange if a cell, or even the body were to operate like this.  Can we say that killer T cells understand what they're doing?  Do neurons understand what they are doing?  If they don't understand exactly what we understand them as doing, do they understand something-and what is it?

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Systemic Awareness

Climate change threatens to affect humanity on the  individual level as well as the collective social level.  In order to prevent an ecological catastrophe, action must be taken on the collective individual level.  In other words, action must be taken on the level of the system, which in turn translates to many different actions being simultaneously undertaken by many individuals.

My interest in climate change was bolstered when I re-imagined the whole issue as a challenge facing the world itself, viewed as a potentially adaptive system.  I began to look at the world as if it were a single cell whose pattern of activities was driving it closer and closer to an undesirable future.

I realized that the challenges facing the earth are the same as the challenges facing any living system.  To survive, a system must be able to do two things: (1) perceive threats to their survival and (2), take actions to maintain survival on the basis of these perceptions.  
There is a third step that is implied between these two, and it is arguably the most important of all.  This is the creation of the appropriate links between actions and perceptions.  These links will allow for the perception of climate change (as well as the perception of appropriate ways to "change the change") to trigger the appropriate actions to prevent the undesirable changes.

There are two domains onto which we can apply the processes of perception and action that will be necessary to prevent a climate change.  These are the individual and the collective.  I think that it is most productive to choose the latter.  The reason is that the changes that will have to be made are structural and "macro" in nature.  They will certainly involve (at some point) changes made by individuals, but the necessary changes will have to be made on a large scale, by corporations or governments.  The problems have their origin on this level, anyway.

On the individual level, there is a large-scale recognition of the climate problem, although it is certainly not universal.  Unfortunately, this is less true on a collective level where the changes must be made.  
One thing is certainly clear:  This crisis can take lessons from biology and systems theory, and those disciplines can take lessons from it.  What we are seeing now is learning, taking place on a larger scale than has ever been possible.  This learning is not the kind that involves the memorization of facts.  It is the fundamental kind of learning that involves making adaptive connections between perception and action.

This kind of learning also occurs in the corporations and other systems that are responsible for the climate crisis.  Those systems learned to perceive threats and opportunities related to their financial survival, and they learned how to act in ways that would take advantage of their perceptions in order to generate capital.  The motivation for them was capital, and it is clear that this is a potent motivator.  It motivates the component parts of systems to adapt themselves to make a better system-better in terms of being more profitable.  

It could be said that the reason why climate change is such a difficult issue is that it occurs on a large timescale.  Although there is a payoff for preventing climate change, there is also a payoff for doing some things that will hasten climate change, and this payoff occurs in the shorter term.  However, it is not the fact that these payoffs occur on the shorter term that makes them better motivators, it is the fact that they are the kinds of payoffs that literally pay off.  
The motivation to work for climate change is to ensure long term survival.  The problem is that working for climate change has no short term payoff, and hence, no possibility for short term survival.  With short term survival in jeopardy, long term survival becomes irrelevant.
Next time, I will look into ways to make operations affecting the long term survival pay off positively or negatively in the short term...