6 replies to this topic

[coberst]

Imaginative Rationality

All of our laws of natural science are human constructs that depended upon imaginative rationality in their construction.

Human understanding is about a process of developing imaginative models of reality and then testing those imaginative structures against what is perceived as reality.  We comprehend our model of reality, i.e. our hypothesis, as being true when that model fits our comprehension of the situation closely enough for our purposes.

In our vanity we have tried to hide the true nature of imagination because imagination has been closely associated with the body, how ghastly the vulgar body when compared to the nature of gods.  Can one be a god when one is required to drag along the body, especially when that body includes an anus?

Imagine how imagination works.

Imagination has a two part job: Imagination is part of the creation of image schemas and of the creation of elaborate models of reality.  Imagination fits into the beginning of thought and into the resulting meaning of thought.

SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) and Antonio Damasio inform me that before there is a concept of an object or an experience there exists already preconceptual structures that makes such things possible.  

An object is an entity: such as a person, rock, tree, tooth ache, song, melody, etc.  An image is a “mental pattern in any of the sensory modalities, e.g. a sound image, a tactile image, the image of a state of well-being.  Such images convey aspects of the physical characteristics of the object and they may also convey the reaction of like or dislike one may have for an object, the plans one may formulate for it, or the web of relationships of this object among other objects.” Pge 9 damasio

How are such resulting images from the inputs from our five sensory portals formed into what might loosely be called the MITB (“movie-in-the-brain”)?  Damasio says “I believe these qualities will be eventually explained neurobiological although at the moment the neurobiological account is incomplete and there is an explanatory gap.”

Consciousness is a matter of connecting this MITB with the self.  Damasio cannot explain at this time the biological formation of the object but sets himself the task of theorizing about the second problem of consciousness; that is the parallel problem of comprehending the sense of self in the act of knowing.

Consciousness is the coming together of an object and the self.

Quotes from “The Feeling of what Happens” Antonio Damasio

[Saard]

coberst on Nov 23 2008, 11:13 AM, said:

Imaginative Rationality

All of our laws of natural science are human constructs that depended upon imaginative rationality in their construction.

Human understanding is about a process of developing imaginative models of reality and then testing those imaginative structures against what is perceived as reality. We comprehend our model of reality, i.e. our hypothesis, as being true when that model fits our comprehension of the situation closely enough for our purposes.

In our vanity we have tried to hide the true nature of imagination because imagination has been closely associated with the body, how ghastly the vulgar body when compared to the nature of gods. Can one be a god when one is required to drag along the body, especially when that body includes an anus?

Imagine how imagination works.

Imagination has a two part job: Imagination is part of the creation of image schemas and of the creation of elaborate models of reality. Imagination fits into the beginning of thought and into the resulting meaning of thought.

SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) and Antonio Damasio inform me that before there is a concept of an object or an experience there exists already preconceptual structures that makes such things possible.

An object is an entity: such as a person, rock, tree, tooth ache, song, melody, etc. An image is a "mental pattern in any of the sensory modalities, e.g. a sound image, a tactile image, the image of a state of well-being. Such images convey aspects of the physical characteristics of the object and they may also convey the reaction of like or dislike one may have for an object, the plans one may formulate for it, or the web of relationships of this object among other objects." Pge 9 damasio

How are such resulting images from the inputs from our five sensory portals formed into what might loosely be called the MITB ("movie-in-the-brain")? Damasio says "I believe these qualities will be eventually explained neurobiological although at the moment the neurobiological account is incomplete and there is an explanatory gap."

Consciousness is a matter of connecting this MITB with the self. Damasio cannot explain at this time the biological formation of the object but sets himself the task of theorizing about the second problem of consciousness; that is the parallel problem of comprehending the sense of self in the act of knowing.

Consciousness is the coming together of an object and the self.

Quotes from "The Feeling of what Happens" Antonio Damasio

I don't understand this, I am a bit twp however. Is there a point being made here or just an opening for discussion?

I'm assuming the latter and going for gold.

I understand, and agree, that our view of the universe has to be created in the imagination before it can be tested against reality. It's the same with invention; before something exists, it obviously has to be imagined.

I don't see the imagination as being bodily. Yes, it requires a body to function, as does thought itself, but the height of human thinking, poets, scientists, whatever are about as far away from the anus as we can ever hope to be. Did I miss a metaphor or something?

So, from what I understand of this post, your man Damasio is trying to figure out how our senses (many more than 5 incidentally) combine to make our consciousness as we know it and to explain it (neuro)biologically?

He doesn't set his sights low, does he?

I hope he can do it and explain it to me. It's always bothered me that consciousness is based in physicality but seems to be so much more. Though it sounds like Damasio would ground us in the cranial cauliflower.

It's no doubt a fear of my own fleshy mortality and irrelevance in the grand scheme of things but I feel there's a value of ideas and personality above and beyond the meat that makes them, the meat is, after all, only the foundations.

No matter the mechanisms that create us, though we can deconstruct back from self to brain to cell to atom, I want us to be more. I've tried to imagine us in the other direction and keep stumbling onto the collective or meme-like things. It makes you wonder if the self is an irrelevant blip on the way to somewhere else.

Regardless, the way we imagine reality and how we prove that vision right or wrong is fundamental. It's a question of our ability to imagine the right things to test and their being testable.

Edited by Saard, 25 November 2008 - 02:07 AM.

[coberst]

Many years ago while rummaging in a used book store I decided to buy “Human Evolution Coloring Book”, I wanted to learn more about evolution.  I learned all about how the hand evolved from the fin—or was it the gills—of fish.  I looked in vain for a description of how my reasoning ability evolved from the fish.

“Philosophy in The Flesh” by George Lakoff, linguist, and Mark Johnson, philosopher, that I discovered at my local community college library several months ago finally helped me understand this, which since Darwin must be an obvious connection.

Darwin’s theory declares that human capacity grows out of animal capacity but until I discovered this book PTF no one had given me any idea how this is possible.  I studied a little philosophy but it never made much sense to me how pure reason with a dichotomy of mind and body could be inherited from tadpoles.

In the last three decades linguists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and others utilizing the scientific method of empirical study have organized a new cognitive theory that is described in this book.   These ‘cognitive scientists’ from many differing domains of knowledge speak of themselves as experimentalists.  And the theory goes unnamed.  I call the theory metaphor theory and I think that this theory will one day become the first paradigm of a new cognitive science.

We normally think of metaphors as merely linguistic means to associate an unknown with a known.  ‘Understand is grasp’ is one common metaphor ‘more is up’ is another.  The woods are full of such common metaphors and these metaphors are much more than meet the uninitiated eye.

Metaphor theory claims that almost all cognitive action takes place unconsciously.  Metaphors, as we commonly know them, are conscious phenomena but metaphors are more importantly unconscious happenings in tadpoles and in humans.  All creatures with neural capacity categorize, conceptualize, and infer; the principal characteristics of reasoning.  Here in metaphors we see how human reason is connected to tadpole existence.

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.


Throughout our life we constantly make judgments about such abstract matters as difference, importance, difficulty, and morality, and we have subjective experiences such as affection, desire, love, intimacy and achievement.  Cognitive science claims that the manner in which we conceptualize and reason about these matters are determined, to one extinct or another, by sensorimotor domains of experience.  CS claims that, in many cases, early experiences of normal mundane manipulations of objects become the prototypes from which these later concrete and abstract judgments are made.

“When we conceptualize understanding an idea (subjective experience) in terms of grasping an object (sensorimotor experience) and failing to understand an idea as having it go right by us or over our heads” we are using a sensorimotor experience as the metaphor for the subjective experience.  The metaphor ‘understand is grasp’ results from our conflating a sensorimotor happening with a later subjective experience.

Metaphor is a standard means we have of understanding an unknown by association with a known.  When we analyze the metaphor ‘bad is stinky’ we will find: we are making a subjective judgment wherein the olfactory sensation becomes the source of the judgment.  ‘This movie stinks’ is a subjective judgment and it is made in this manner because a sensorimotor experience is the structure for making this judgment.

Why is the premise “A straight line is the shortest distance between two points” self-evident.  It is because this is one of the first things an infant learns and it is verified and reinforced constantly throughout life by our sensorimotor experiences.  The metaphor ‘more is up’ is not so pervasive in our experience but its rationale is similar.

If we recognize metaphor as a means to associate something new with something old, something known with something unknown, we can begin to understand what CS is proposing in this revolutionary theory.  CS is presenting a theory based upon empirical evidence gathered by the combined effort of linguists, philosophers, and neural physicists that metaphor is a very necessary element of our ability to reason as we do.

We normally think of metaphor as a tool of language whereby one can enlighten another by making an association of an unknown with a known.  CS is making a much more radical use of metaphor.

CS is claiming that the neural structure of sensorimotor experience is mapped onto the mental space for another experience that is not sensorimotor but subjective and that this neural mapping, which is unconscious and automatic, serves as part of the “DNA” of the subjective experience.  The sensorimotor experience serves the role of an axiom for the subjective experience.

[Saard]

I've just done an Internet search on you because I idly wondered if you were plugging a book and I can only say wow! You've p*ssed people off on most of the discussion sites out there. In fairness, some like you too.

If your responses are going to consist of huge chunks of possibly cut and paste text and no actual discussion, I don't think I'll bother.

It'll be a shame, as this is an interesting topic I don't know much about and was hoping to learn some stuff. I wanted a discussion, but random excerpts from something don't count as a reply.

[coberst]

Saard

The purpose of the post is to engage the curisity of the reader sufficiently as to lead them into going to the books.  The Intenet is a good place for discovering new ideas but is a lousy place for learning anything significant.

[Saard]

coberst on Nov 26 2008, 05:11 PM, said:

Saard

The purpose of the post is to engage the curisity of the reader sufficiently as to lead them into going to the books. The Intenet is a good place for discovering new ideas but is a lousy place for learning anything significant.

Ah! A noble aim. Unfortunately, I don't want a reading list, I want a good chat about interesting stuff, this is a chat-type forum after all. This includes different opinions, thoughtful arguments, well-crafted put-downs and occasional moderator intervention.
Maybe once I'm interested enough, I'll go read a related book.

[coberst]

Saard on Nov 27 2008, 01:00 AM, said:

Ah! A noble aim. Unfortunately, I don't want a reading list, I want a good chat about interesting stuff, this is a chat-type forum after all. This includes different opinions, thoughtful arguments, well-crafted put-downs and occasional moderator intervention.
Maybe once I'm interested enough, I'll go read a related book.

Chating will get you nowhere.  If you wish to kearn something significant you must learn how to judge good books and then study those good books.  Chating is the blind-leadng-the-blind.