In his book, Signs of Meaning in the Universe, Jesper Hofmeyer talks about how in the phylogenesis of animals, the role of the genome has shifted from directly anticipating how to detect and respond to the environment (by specifying structures that will detect and respond to specific aspects of the environment in specific ways), to simply specifying means of perceiving and acting that will be flexible, as well as an organism that will be able to learn from its world how to act adaptively using its abilities of perception and action. Using this idea, we can look at how this process has taken shape within the comparitively recent history of human development over the last 40,000 years. Within this period there is a definite trend affecting human perception: The externalization of the perceptual process. In other animals, the perception of things in the environment is an internal process that occurs within the organism's nervous system. When a deer sees a lion in its field of vision, the process of recognition occurs largely within the nervous system, which makes use of the pattern of light to interpret the scene. It is possible to see the deer react to the lion once it has been interpreted as such, but it is not possible to see the process of interpretation itself which occurs completely within the nervous system. In contrast, it is possible to see human beings perform externalized processes of perception. Examples include a person counting a set of items, or a research team collecting data about a population. In the latter example, computers may even be used, in which case the perceptual process is in fact distributed throughout the environment and only overseen by the human being.
Inextricably connected to the development of new (externalized) ways of perceiving is the development of new things to perceive that, in different ways, overtaxed internal systems of perception. The first way that existing internal perceptual systems were overtaxed was by the proliferation of vast numbers of perceivable things that occurred as a result of linguistic distinctions. This proliferation overtaxed the memory and forced certain parts of the process of perceptual recognition to be stored externally. Of the many thousands of bird species in the world, I know only a small number of them, and of these I know virtually nothing more than their appearance. Despite this, if I see a strange bird I can learn a good deal about it if I consult a guide to wildlife.
The second way that the overtaxing of internal perceptual abilities led to the development of external forms of perception was the development of new things to perceive that were not suited to the existing internalized perceptual abilities. The latter are well suited to perceiving discrete objects in the environment, and to a limited extent, things that are distributed spatially or temporally. As spatial and temporal distribution increases, internalized perceptual processes become increasingly unfeasible. However, externalized processes of perception, combined with language allow for the perception of widely distributed things like population density, or its change over large amounts of time.
With externalized processes of perception, what we are able to perceive is a function of how we use our body to perceive things about the environment. The world that we live in (that we perceive ourselves to live in) is partly a function of how we act. Learning how to perceive new things in the environment is therefore an incredibly fruitful open-ended endeavor.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Second Order Perception
When we think of perception, we think of something being "picked up", or sensed, and then a process that is somehow induced within a system as a result of that stimulation. In other words, there is an initial stimulation, and then a process occurs that gives meaning to that stimulation. In visual perception, this may manifest itself when the stimulation of our retina leads to the phenomenological sensation of seeing a ball.
Certain practices within human culture demonstrate that the processes leading up to the phenomenological state of perceiving something may take as a part of their input other phenomenologically perceived states. Number provides a good example. If I stand by a pond and count out a group of 25 geese swimming in front of me, a perceptual process has occurred that used the perceived geese (which were already the output of another perceptual process) as its input.
A pattern of activity in the brain led to the perception of the geese, and another pattern of activity led to the perception that there were 25 geese. This demonstrates that it is possible to create meta-perceptual systems that may be quite useful. While the practice of enumeration demonstrates this, the entire field of statistics also exemplifies it. The goals of that field are none other than to create second order systems of perception.
Even though numbers may be very powerful tools for us, it is clear that there is much room for improvement as far as systems of perception go. THe perceptions furnished by numbers are very one dimensional. I don't think I'm going out on too much of a limb when I say that second order systems of perception are now in the stages that first order perception was in with the emergence of light sensitive cells that only later developed into vision. The question is, what can be done to expand the dimensionality of these new forms of perception?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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