More quotes from "The First Idea"

(still out of context, of course !!!)

The authors are comparing the standard model, where most of the emotions are subconscious and according to some (like the neuroscientist LeDoux) are not expressable in language. The rational level is then the conscious level over top of this subconscious, and is fed by it, affected by it. Importantly ... there is a division between the conscious and conscious that equates to a division between the rational and the emotional.

"We are proposing, however, that emotions serve to integrate the different processing areas of the mind, such as attention and sequencing, visual-spatial thinking, sensory processing, and language."

"The ability to know an emotion - to study one's own perception of it - is proportional to the degree to which it is tamed and transformed into an interactive and representational form."

"The key to the conscious awareness of emotions is, therefore, the human ability to tame the emotion through emotional signalling [between individuals, especially infant and caregiver] and make it into a signal."

"Transforming catastrophic emotions into signals enables a child to integratge subsymbolic [subconscious] and symbolic [conscious] systems."

"As emotions become part of interactive patterns, the child learns to perceive the pattern. She doesn't simply experience her heart beating or a desire to run away; she experiences fear, and then soothing [from the caregiver], and eventually mastery. These emotional patterns include expectations and the anticipation of feelings. For example, a toddler learns that her joy leads to happiness in her parents. She may also learn that her anger leads to parental disapproval or disquiet. These patterns now define the emotion. THE EMOTION NO LONGER EXISTS AS AN ISOLATED ENTITY and, since affective interactions begin very early in life, perhaps it never really did"

[emphasis mine]

"The emotional recognition that one's actions can have an impact on someone else is the foundation for sequencing, that is, the ability to carry out many steps in a row where each one is related to a previous one."

- Stanley Greenspan and Stuart Shanker


I include that last quote as Natalie had asked me in a comment to say more about what the authors mean by sequencing. As per this quote, it is not the same thing as meant by basic Gestalt, which is more, i take it, to be the sequencing of numbers, especially counting, early in the infants life and expanded upon later.
(Infants can tell the number of discrete objects [at least up to three] pretty much from birth. ["Subitizing" - Many other animals, "down to" the birds, also can do this.] By age 15 months babies are known to have a concept of "order" for numbers, say, that 3 is greater than 2. Ddevelopmental Cog Sci types are still much split over how early the concept of number order exists in the infant's mind.)


I can't help but think of Dostoevski's underground man when psychologists talk about taming emotions for utility purposes.

What would Nietzsche think?

More around Heidegger ...

The late 19th and early 20th century was definitely reflected a social paradigm in crises. I appreciate the way in which Heidegger went back to the classics, found refreshment in the classics, as one of the thinkers that tried to lead Germany through its malaise. (I am thinking here especially of his Hereclitus seminars with Fink, and his reverting to the notion of truth as "lifting veils" [ohne Schminke, you might say]. )

Other Germans were doing the same, and even more others were searching out new sources, especially in the Far East.

The crisis leads to the search.
But how much can the past help us there? Is it more so just entertaining ourselves until the forward thinker leads us on? ... or will the forward thinkers necessarily have their thoughts triggered by golden Athens or Eastern China?

Was Kant looking forward, or backward, or walking forward while looking backward ... or how shall we describe his post-dogmatic-slumber walk?

Heidegger ...

My problem with Heidegger is not that he is wrong, but that he can't be wrong. ... or right. In fact, my problem with Heidegger is not even with Heidegger, but with metaphysics in general. The terms "right" and "wrong" simply do not apply to metaphysical frameworks, they are terms that apply only within the accepted belief system.

My problem with Heidegger is not even with his statements. They are fine statements as far as poetry goes, and i like poetry. But poetry is neither right nor wrong, it is aesthetic. Heidegger is aesthetic at times, usually, though, he is just wordy ... and if i'm going to endure wordiness for the sake of verbal aesthetics i am going to read Proust.

It may be the case that no branch of philosophy can be right or wrong, that it is all poetry, albeit mostly very poor poetry. I accept that as an open question. But i know metaphysics (and any bordering epistemology) certainly does not qualify.

Right and wrong? ... these terms need not have any relation to an ultimate truth. They are meaningful in language whether or not there is an ultimate, or even very many relative, truths, perhaps even if there are none.

This is "cat" spelled right. This is "cath" spelled wrong. Purely normative, but the words (right and wrong) are still meaningful. Nothing in Heidegger's ontologies are similar.

The same can be said of Descartes' famous dictums, but Descartes also wrote other tracts, all of which were wrong.
(Newton has freed us. All praise Newton.)

... but how is the truth relative?

An old notion, but one i like to speak from time to time ...

A debate is often framed between absolute truth (or "Truth" with the big "T") and relativism. The current status of the debate is moreso, though, showing others where they still have Truth in their thinking, as one meets very few non Christians or Islamists (or maybe a A. Randian) who actually believe in a human obtainable/knowable Truth. I bet there are still some good Platonists out there somewhere, by i never meet them.

But whether we are engaged in this debate, or merely pointing out to others where they are being inconsistent in this regard, one thing always seems missing to me. The relativists and Platonists both often use the phrase "truth is relative" when they mean to claim that truth is arbitrary. They are very different claims. The former claim in not incompatible with the notion that a type or types of knowledge can be better than others, and a type or types of knowledge can be worse than others. The latter claim, that truth is arbitrary, can not use, or at least i have not yet seen it used, the word "better" in any meaningful way. It renders all value statements (whether they use "should" or "ought") untenable. Even statements such as "Nationalist authoritarians should be stopped" begin to make no sense.

The phrase "truth is relative" contains a very wide set of beliefs. Really it covers the whole ground between absolute and arbitrary. One could believe that all truths are absolute, except one, and claim to be a relativist. Conversely, one could claim that all truths are arbitrary except one, and also claim to be a relativist. Yet we would not say that these two people share much of an agreement on truth.

My general claim is that nearly all metaphysical truths are arbitrary, but there are some truths, epistemological (some of them) or just plain material (others of them), that are relatively true ... or ... rather ... absolutely true relative to certain given conditions and constraints. The word "nearly" makes its way in front of metaphysics only because i believe that some of the truths of metaphysics proper (e.g. simple mathematical truths) are actually material truths. How one might draw this line, this distinction, is well beyond the scope of this current post. Neuroscience and developmental psychology will provide my lines of reasoning in most cases though. [Note - i do not believe that all mathematical truths are reducible to the material, or even to simple logic ... my claim is well outside the Logical Positivist claim. It asserts itself only under certain conditions.]

Where was i? ...

Oh, the question. I am, of course, setting up a question.

Where do you find yourself standing within the Relativist continuum?

Do not say, "truth is relative". Say rather, "this truth is relative, and it is relative to the notion(s) or belief(s) X and Y." To say "truth is relative" is merely to begin the task. What is needful still is waiting to be done.

Herzog

As most of you are probably aware, Saul Bellow died a few weeks ago. The event sent me back to re-read Herzog. Herzog is one of the few books written by a contemporary of mine that sits in my "top 20". With all of his learning, the professor finds, when life turns nasty, he hasn't really learned anything helpful at all. He has to return to solitude and live amongst the weeds, a Nietzschean-Zarathustraian theme, as well as a finish similar to the same.

What did he learn about ambiguity, and how did he learn it?

pattern recognition ...

"One of the central insights of [Artificial Intelligence studies] is that pattern recognition is essential for the development of the human mind."

"The great stumbling block for AI, however, was to explain the origins of these pattern recognition skills."

"The solution [per modern evolutionary psychology] is that they must have been naturally selected at the 'genetic dawn' of our species."

{There is that Scholastic/Platonic-Chomskyesque impulse of which i often warn. The evolutionary sciences are full of it. -tfts}

"In the critical forth stage of the functional/emotional development infants begin to engage in long chains of co-regulated affective interactions, which enable them to recognize the various patterns involved in satisfying their emotional needs."

- All quotes except mine from Greenspan and Shanker's "The First Idea"

Confessing about Kuhn ...

I use the terms "paradigm" and "revolution" (in relation to paradigms) pretty much in the manner laid out by Thomas Kuhn in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and latter essays along the same line. My interpretation of the meaning of what Kuhn says is pretty conservative (not surprising to those who know me ... my interpretation of things like Quantum Mechanics and Goedel's Incompleteness theories are likewise conservative).

At the end of the day i do not believe that the word "paradigm" picks out anything real. It is a useful fiction at best. It is a good tool for introducing topics concerning assumptions and cultural norms, though. He does put forth many questions that i take very seriously.

Leading among these is the concern about discussing anything, including hard sciences, across paradigm boundries. [The exact boundries are hard to place, as Kuhn points out in his own book on the Copernican Revolution.] But noting that even base terms like "mass" are significantly different entities in the Newtonion [where it is a constant] and Einsteinian [where it is a variable] frameworks, and then to think about the condition of the less well defined terms, certainly is a thought worth consideration. Analytic philosophers are split on whether this problem is intractable, but i think most Continental philosophers would agree that it is intractable. So i, not believing it is visciously so, fall into a minority camp on this issue. By that i mean that, although there will be places we cannot go with our thought, there are many useful places we can go ... and may the gods grant me the understanding to know the difference.

One of the "useful" places for an analytic philosopher in the world today, and a task my mentor George E. Smith takes on from time to time, is to sit down amongst competing schools of scientific thought (at their behest) and figure out how they are using terms to help them to not just "talk past one another" when debating issues ... that is ... roughly ... to set up a translation, a Rosetta Stone, between the competing paradigms.

That is a case, though, where the paradigms are close to one another. It is not obvious that we can do the same thing in comparing, say, ancient Chinese skepticism to modern French skepticism ... and such book titles as "The Tao of Physcis" (F. Capra), as well as the content, drive me nuts. I think any interesting comprisons between those sets are thoughts are pretty well intractable.
Where does the line sit? I don't know. I feel comfortable comparing spots within modern and even contemporary science, but pre Newton (physics) and Lavoissier (chemistry) it starts getting dicey for me. It is always dicey for me in the non-mature sciences (everything outside physics and chemistry pretty much) ... though when parties are agreed toward finding some common language, I think progress can be made.

The issues that crop up between paradigms are similar to the issues of language translation, and even of "translation" across language dialects, and the same language group over different times. That is, i'll "get" more of Twain than of a Balzac translation ... but i think i get something of both and i'd rather read Grimmelshausen's "Simplicisimus" over DeLillo's "White Noise" any day. In the history of science there is also the advantage in avoiding the study of the new in that we can see how the struggles turned out ... where as in the debate over, say, string theory, that has yet to be worked through. The loss via "translation" is less than the loss invoked by still being in the middle of the fray. (That and, the point of the study is ikely to be pertaining to how not to be so lost in the middle of the fray in the first place.)

Ih Kuhnian theory revolutions are driven by knowledge and questions. The old paradigm is no longer answering new questions. New assumptions are given a chance and, if they seem to work well on the new important questions of the day, the younger generation runs with them. Paradigms that are still answering big questions, though, are not succeptable to revoltion ... only those that have gone stagnent.
It is important to note too that the new paradigm, at the highest point of the debate between the old and the new, is usually inferior in many or even most ways to the old. The younger generation has faith that the problems will be fixed AND the new hard questions will be answered. The old generation almost never admit they were wrong, they merely die off. Also, often, the critic of the new paradigm by the old guard is never answered successfully ... the questions merely become irrelevent. (Newton never answered the mechanist's main objection that his theory of Universal Gravity never told us what gravity is, there is and can be no working model of his force. Newton not only overturned the mechanistic theories of earthly and celestial gravity, he made their way of thinking about the problem irrelevent rather than answered, directly, their critique.)

I think revolutions are driven, outside science too, by pushing where the cracks are. No matter how right one is, if the rest of the population does not see a problem, you can argue until you are blue in the face (and strung out on caffeine from writing essays all night) with no affect. But when society senses the problem and is looking for a new angle, then even half-thought-out notions may get their hearing.

[another uncompleted thought]

Argumentation II

Normal inovation versus revolutionary inovation ...

Going back again to the Socratic dialetic, one of the elements noted was the propensity to attack assumptions.

In a logical or mathematical proof one writes out the givens and then proceeds to make deductions from them. The general notion of how to engage in a debate of this kind is not to merely deny the assumptions of others, but to either show that their conclusions do not follow from their assumptions, or to show that their assumptions lead to logical inconsistencies. (This latter is the classic Socratic reductio move.)

I could also simply deny that your assumptions are true. In most cases this means our debate is not going to go to far. If i ask you to prove them, you will probably say they are obvious. If you ask me to prove mine i am likely to just shrug and say that i don't know how, or say that they are "primitives" to be accepted or not, but not particularly up for debate in my world structure.

That is the state of play ... but what i want to focus on is the relation between this state of play and the notion of "normal inovation" versus "revolutionary inovation". One might also use the terms "within paradigms" and "across paradigms" to speak of the phenomenon.

(...)

Argumentation I

How should we debate?
Why should we debate?
Should we debate?

One of the oldest forms of debate is the Socratic dialectic method. When i think of the Socratic dialectic i think of two things:
1) A form of debate focused on challenging assumption
2) A form of debate that seeks truth by moving away from particulars and toward the more general

It is this latter part of the dialectic that becomes so apparent in thinkers like Hegel and today's Metaphysical Realists. Their logical structures dominate their thinking, whether they believe those structures represent the world or just the human capacity to think about the world.

I am not a fan of this part of the dialectic. Then again, i am not a fan of metaphysics, analytic or otherwise. I do not see it as a kind of knowledge worth pursuing. I have no problem conceeding that the truths discovered are often logical truths, and perhaps there are even big Truths (with the capital T) out there to be discovered, though i have not found them.

What is a kind of truth worth seeking?

Back to Socrates and his use of the method. He challenged assumptions and, in general, used the Reductio ad Absurdum argument form to bring his opponents into his view that they know nothing. That is fine and well for the topics at hand, the seeking after definitions of things like Virtue (with the capital V). Such terms, virtue, courage, power, justice, freedom, etc ... i am nihilist myself in regards to them. (At best i might approach them as does Aristotle in the Aristoteleon Spheres method , but that is here beside the point.)

It was not right for Socrates to say his fellow Athenians knew nothing though. Some of the building amonst which he stood and carried out debates, they are still standing. They obviously knew something about the world. They built a sailing fleet and defeated the Persians.

The question then: "What is it the Athenians did know?" ... "And how did they know it?"
What form of debate and style of thinking will lead us toward these answers?
And further, today ... what do we know and how do we know it? ... and how should we even approach the question?
That is, to me, the key task to keep in mind when we choose a mode or modes of debate.

Reflective thinking ...

"Some of us can reflect maturely in some areas, such as our work problems, but not in family issues. Some of us can apply complex thinking skills around family, but not around work. Some of us can do it in scholarly work, but not in politics. We vary in how well we apply our thinking abilities because they are dependent on the range of our emotional experiences ..."
- Greenspan and Shanker

thoughts?