Value

The Wikipedia article about Pitchfork mentions how the site has been criticized by some for what is perceived as that sites control over people's musical preferences. In short, it was claimed that a positive/negative review on Pitchfork has a massive effect on the success of the artist under review, because the site sets an influential example for how a particular work can be received.

I've been thinking a lot about this issue and about the value of shared aesthetic preferences. If Pitchfork does have the power that it has been accused of having, what are the consequences of this for society and individuals?

First off, it seems pretty much clear from the start that shared aesthetic values are important. Enjoying a piece of art with others (mutually revelling in aesthetic enjoyment) is certainly a bonding experience that can link minds by suggesting a similarity of experience between two or more people. Although it is certainly possible to enjoy others aesthetic preferences for their own sake (when we don't share them ourselves), a qualitatively different type of experience is offered by the mutual enjoyment of the same piece of art.

Also clear is the fact that aesthetic experiences are variable in terms of their intensity; i.e., they are not just good or bad, but vary in the intensity with which they are good or bad. This occurs at the level of the individual person, it is not objectively true. What I mean by this is that, to use the framework of Maturana and Varela, the aesthetic experience of art is something that occurs as a result of a coupling between a person and a work of art. Although it could be easily argued that there is also a coupling on a wider social level between a work of art and a society in general-in that a particular society is predisposed to accept certain works of art over others based on the preferences and values of its constituent members-the aesthetic experience of art being explored here is that which occurs on the individual level.

To return to the theme of Pitchfork, I'm wondering what the role of that site (and others like it) is in manipulating people in such a way as to change their potential for aesthetic enjoyment-in other words to change their predisposition to certain art. It would seem that a site like Pitchfork has the potential to act as an organizer of aesthetic preferences for individuals. This is how this would be achieved: First, the site achieves some level of credibility amongst individuals-perhaps this occurs directly, as a result of making individuals aware of music that they immediately like. Once this credibility has been established, further recommendations from the site will be taken more seriously. If the site has been particularly successful in showing its readers art they enjoy, it (the site) will have more freedom in terms of what art its readers will be willing to take seriously.

The things I have just said pertain to art criticism sites like pitchfork, but the same things could be said about an individual who affects the taste of others. Unique to Pitchfork however is that it is not a person, but rather an organization resulting from the collaboration of many people. Consequently, although it is able to attain the same credibility as a person (e.g. a knowledgeable music listener who gives valued recommendations to friends), it also benefits from the fact that it is perceived by its readers as the outcome of the aesthetic preferences of many people-an "in" group-and is therefore more formidable than most individuals.

To be continued...

Social Panic

A recurrent feature in my social life-that is my life in the social domain-is an uncomfortable situation caused by a conflict between two social constraints upon my action. One one hand, as I move about in the social domain, my awareness of the potential meaningfulness of my actions leads me to be aware of my surroundings so that I my temper my conduct with respect to what I perceive, with the goal of maintaining some desired relation to my surrounding social world.

However, ever so often I face a situation whose solution (the course of action that will resolve the situation in a desirable way) is in some other way problematic. For instance, if when walking down the street, I see an acquaintance, it is my usual desire to acknowledge this by saying e.g. "hello". If the acquaintance is more than 20 feet or so away, I am forced to account for the fact that quietly saying hello is unreasonable-especially if it is noisy out. As a result, I have several options: to raise my voice, wait until the person is closer, or give a greeting that is too quiet to hear. Each of these is problematic in that they will be intrinsically meaningful in their own ways-even as they solve the original problem.

By raising my voice I will satisfy my desire to greet the friend, but in doing so, engage in an activity (yelling) that has other social connotations which may conflict with the message I want to convey. If I wait until the friend gets closer, I will solve the problem presented by the distance, but in doing so will do nothing to fulfill my desire to be sociable towards my friend. As I approach the friend silently, I position myself in an ambiguous zone of social relations towards my friend-I may not be planning to greet them, I may be waiting, whatever the case, my positioning is ambiguous to my friend. This is an uncomfortable position to be in, because such ambiguous zones may catalyze (in the friend) several different courses of action. The friend is forced to attempt to interpret the ambiguous performance I am giving, and may interpret my actions in the "wrong" way-a way different from what I myself intend.

THe reason that this situation is so undesirable is that we do not look appetizingly on the possibility of reacting to ways of acting that are beyond our control. We act in certain ways towards others so that we may enjoy a particular social positioning. There are courses of action that we don't take because we don't want to face the social consequences of acting in these ways. When are actions make our intentions ambiguous, we enter a realm in which undesirable responses form others are made more likely.

Thus, such situations place us in a bind: though we want to position ourselves in a certain way, the possible courses of action that we have for achieving such a positioning would actually make our positioning ambiguous because these actions have additional significance-in addition to offering solutions to the present problem.

The Externalization of Perception

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.

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?

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?

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.