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Amira .

Transindividuation by Bernard Stiegler & Irit Rogoff | Journal e-flux 2010 - 0 views

www.e-flux.com/...121

philosophy cultural Individualism Human being

shared by Amira . on 15 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • This is a segment of conversation between the philosopher Bernard Stiegler and cultural theorist Irit Rogoff that took place on the occasion of Stiegler’s lecture series, “Pharmaconomics” at Goldsmiths in February, March 2010, as part of his current professorial fellowship. In this segment, we touch on a couple of Stiegler’s key terms in the development of his thought, such as “transindividuation,” “transmission,” and “long circuits.” In his three-volume work Technics and Time, Stiegler has argued that “technics” (a constellation of models and discourses converging on information systems, codes, prostheses, machines, etc.) constitute what “is most properly to be thought as the key philosophical question of our time.” As Andrés Vaccari states about Technics and Time: In the human sciences, culture and language have also been progressively engulfed by the universe of technics: the artificial realm of institutions, rituals, knowledges, symbol systems and practices that makes humans functional, speaking, meaning-making creatures; that is, what makes humans human. The essence of the human, it seems, is the technical; which is paradoxically the other of the human: the non-human, the manufactured, unnatural, artificial; the inhuman even.1
  • Attention is the reality of individuation in Gilbert Simondon’s sense of the terms: insofar as it is always both psychical and collective. Attention, which is the mental faculty of concentrating on an object, that is, of giving oneself an object, is also the social faculty of taking care of this object – as of another, or as the representative of another, as the object of the other: attention is also the name of civility as it is founded on philia, that is, on socialised libidinal energy. This is why the destruction of attention is both the destruction of the psychical apparatus and the destruction of the social apparatus (formed by collective individuation) to the extent that the later constitutes of system of care, given that to pay attention is also to take care.
  • The first is education in the larger sense of transmission—inter-generational transmission—because, to my mind, this is the essence of education. What is education in this sense? Education is the relation between diverse generations, and contact is its mode of transmission. For example, an artist is capable of affecting, in and of themselves, a line of transmission from Paleolithic art through to contemporary art, and this transmission is a relationship to time, to human—I don’t like the word “human,” so perhaps we could say “mortal”—experience. These lines are within the artist, not made manifest by him or her, nor are they structures of representation, and they are put into effect through their practice, through the contact with them. Initially, the most common, everyday experience of education is the relationship between parents and children, or we could say that the space of the family is the first space of education. And here we can already begin to identify problems, which are very close, very connected to problems that you can see at other levels and modalities of education, in schools and in museums and in other similar institutions. And so I would like to speak about those three levels; this “family” education; academic education, lets say; and “cultural” education, that of cultural institutions. And in these three different levels, you can encounter the same problems—problems of circuits, long and short. Today, the problem of education at the level of the family is the short-circuiting of the relationship between generations through the operations of the media. What is created between generations are in fact long circuits. What Freud or Groddeck call the “id” is an unconscious space of long circuits. These unconscious spaces link generations along very, very long spans of time. What is produced within these long circuits are the material of the dream, for example, which is at stake in Freud’s interpretation of dreams, as well as clearly being the matter from which artists operate and produce. Joseph Beuys is extremely important for me because he was working on this question of long circuits aligning him in individuated ways with the past.
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  • I discovered that in fact in the 1880s, the Paris Opera had an extremely interesting policy regarding the “public.” When you were a member, you had a subscription to the opera, and you received the entire score of a new production before the performance. And you also received the transcription of the piece, an arrangement for piano and violin and voice as well as a commentary on the complexity of the score. And you had to prepare yourself before going to the concert hall. Why? In fact, at this time throughout the bourgeois families you had people with skills at playing the piano, the violin, or singing, and everyone was reading and writing music. Being capable of playing music was a condition for listening to music, because if you could not play, it was not possible to listen to this music. Because there were no hi-fi apparatuses, there was no radio or phonographs. So at the beginning of the twentieth century new apparatuses appeared that suddenly created a short-circuit in the skills—the musical skills of the public.
  • My own grandfather who died in 1935 was a worker who drove locomotives, but he was capable of reading music. But in my generation, our generation, reading music is exceptional, it’s not common knowledge, so in fact I think that in the twentieth century you had an extremely important, instrumental shift, a transformation in education in which suddenly the skills of the “savoir faire”—of playing instruments and reading scores—were short-circuited, and suddenly the relationship between artworks and their publics was completely changed.
  • My thought was much influenced by the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, who was an important thinker of individuation. Simondon says that if you want to understand the individual, you need to inscribe the individual in a process of which he is only a phase. As such, the individual has no interests. The individual is only an aspect, or phase of a process, but the process is what is important. So what is this process? It is the process of individuation, that is of transformation, and for Simondon, everything is a caught up in and brought into a process of individuation. For example, the passages of life are a process of individuation, but “technics” are also processes of individuations.
  • Now we ourselves, as humans, are a type of individuation that is very specific, as our individuation is not only a vital individuation, that is, an individuation of the living organism, of life, but an individuation of the psyche as well, so it is operating as both conscious and unconscious processes. And Simondon says that the individuation of the psyche is always already an individuation of a group of psyches, because a psyche is never alone. It always operates in relation to another psyche. At the limit itself, himself, or herself, a psyche in this situation is a very specific doubling of oneself in narcissism and a type of dialectical relationship to oneself. But this situation of dialogism in the psyche is an interiorization of a primordial situation in which, if you follow the arguments of Freud or Winnicott, you are in a dialectic relationship with other psyches, such as that of your mother or your father. This individuation, for example, is omnipresent and continuous. When you are reading a book, you individuate yourself by reading this book because reading a book is to be transformed by the book. If you are not transformed by the book, you are not reading the book—you believe that you are reading. You may believe that you are, but you are not.
  • IR: So reading a book is a short-circuit. BS: It can be a short-circuit if you believe you are reading a book and you don’t in fact read it. It is a long circuit if you individuate yourself by reading the book, if you are in the process of individuating yourself. Now the theory of Wolfgang Iser—the theorist of the school of Konstanz—is that a book is a process of individuation, a book doesn’t exist as such. What exists as a book is the community of the reader. And this is extremely interesting. Because it says in fact that a book is a power of individuation, but not individuation as such. It is the circuit created, the long circuit created by the readers, which is the individuation of the book. And it is not only the case for the book. It is the case for every artwork or other forms of creative work in the humanities. Now, when you are individuating yourself with somebody—for example, we are now in discussion and in speaking, I am individuating myself. But in listening to me, you are individuating yourself through my discourse. You can individuate through my discourse by adherence with my discourse, but it’s also equally possible to individuate oneself by its contradiction, its negation.
  • A co-individuation is not the same as individuation, it is a process of individuation—for example in the dialogues of Plato, in which you have the presence of Socrates and Gorgias who are not in a position of individuating themselves. In the dialogues of Plato, the goal of the dialogues is nevertheless to reach a kind of agreement, even an agreement on disagreement if you can say, “we disagree on that,” “we agree on things,” “we disagree on that,” it is a kind of disagreement. It is a disagreement with an agreement about the disagreement. Part of the belief in socialization was to stipulate that a “gentleman” is capable of arriving at an agreement about a disagreement while a “barbarian” is not capable, and that is important for our argument here. This process of co-individuation, when it produces a kind of convergence and agreement, transforms the process of trans-individuation. Why? Because if you have a discussion and a topic, in the discussion you have several positions expressed during the discussion, but you have a moment in which you have what Simondon calls a “meta-stabilization”—a kind of agreement that can become a rule. For example, if you are a geometer or a moviemaker, you will meta-stabilize something that will become the style of Euclid, or the style of Fellini, or the style of Godard, or the style of Expressionism in German cinema in the twenties, and so on and so forth. And this becomes a kind of cultural inheritance, which created in philosophy, for example, a new dialectic, or perhaps an “apodictic” (the branch of philosophy that analyzes influence) that will then be transmitted in the operations of a conventional “objective” education.
  • There is a specific reason, an argument I am putting forward, which is that, in my point of view, the twentieth century began in the nineteenth century. There was a change, a very deep change, in the organology of transindividuation. Such was the text of Adorno and Horkheimer “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in which suddenly—through what is currently called mass media: television, cinema, radio, now digital technology and networks as well—the development of a new organology was forged, which in turn creates a new organization of the circulation of the symbolic. Within this new mode of organization, suddenly the production of the symbolic becomes industrial, subject to industrial processes. Here you encounter the production of symbols on the one hand, and the consuming of such symbols on the other—an aporia because it is impossible to consume a symbol. The symbol is not an object of consumption; it is an object of exchange, of circulation, or of the creation of circuits of trans-individuation. So this situation suddenly produced what I call short-circuiting—of trans-individuation. And it is a very long story, it is not framed by a short historical period, but extends over a long time.
  • There is an extremely interesting sentence by the anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan who says you need to participate at the level of feeling, of emotion, in order to exit something—not reject something, but engage with it emotionally. Why did he say something like that? He was a reader of Bergson, just like Simondon, and you know the problem for Bergson is what is called the “loop stimulus”—it is not a stimulus response, but is like Marcel Mauss, with the exchange of gifts. You can receive if you can give. If you can engage, you are also able to exit. If you are able to engage critically, then a process takes place that would otherwise remain static.
Amira .

You are not a self! Bodies, brains and the nature of consciousness by prof Thomas Metzi... - 3 views

www.abc.net.au/...2705963.htm

Consciousness mind & brain Neuroscience science philosophy psychology

shared by Amira . on 23 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Nobody has ever seen a will. How many grams does a will weigh? What colour does it have? We don't find a will in the brain, that's for sure. What we have is the conscious experience of having free will, of actually deliberating, wanting something, of weighing different goals against each other and so on, and that conscious experience of free will, that will be explained by science.
  • So, what makes you you?
  • you make the provocative argument that there is no such thing as a self, that there never has been, that there never will be.
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  • Thomas Metzinger: Yes, it's actually not so provocative, it's not an original idea at all. Many philosophers, David Hume, in the Anglo Saxon universe have said that for a long time. Who am I? The physical body certainly exists, the organism exists, but organisms are not selves. I don't deny that there is a self-y feeling. I certainly feel like someone, but there is no such thing. There is neither a non-physical thing in a realm beyond the brain or the physical world that we could call a self, but there's also no thing in the brain that we must necessary call a self.
  • Of course Buddhist philosophy had that point 2,500 years ago. So the idea that, as philosophers say, the self is not a substance, that it is something that can stay and hold itself in existence, even if the body or the brain were to perish, that's not a very breathtaking and new idea. What I am interested in is to understand why we just cannot believe that this is so. We have the feeling there is an essence in us, a deepest, inner core. We have this feeling that there must be something that is just not right about neuro-scientific theories about self consciousness, there's something beyond it. And I want to understand what that deepest core is because that's the origin of the subjectivity of consciousness.
  • But the experience of looking, of being directed to one's own feelings or to one's sensory perceptions of the outside world, this is itself an image. There is nobody looking at the image, it's like the camera is part of the picture or the viewing is itself a part of the process of viewing. This is how a first-person perspective emerges in our own case, the question is, okay, if it's not a thing, if it's not something in the brain, what kind of a process is it? And I think it's a process, as philosophers say, of representing, that is of making an image, and that process is not there all the time. You know you have a conscious self in dreams, you have one in your waking life. During anaesthesia or during dreamless sleep there is no such thing as this process of self-ing, if I may call it like that.
  • The conscious self...that's what we call consciousness today. I think it's also something like a computational tool that helps us to navigate the world, like the mouse pointer that tells you 'You are here and now and you can control this and that'. And so we actually have something like a simulation of the world, and I think the amazing thing is Mother Nature has done this much better than any computer today. Millions of years ago we have this feeling of being present in the world as selves, and that's a great achievement of natural evolution and the evolution of nervous systems, but it's virtual.
  • Natasha Mitchell: So interesting. So, consciousness literally is the appearance of an inward world, but that world is a very partial representation of the material, the real world that we experience, is your suggestion.Thomas Metzinger: Right, it's just like your physics teacher perhaps told you in high school, in front of your eyes there is just a raging ocean of different wavelength mixtures, there are no coloured objects. Coloured objects are the models your brain creates of visual objects. The world model our brains create has many dimensions, it has the dimension of auditory perceptions, of sound and speech and music, of colours and smell. But it also has these gut feelings, all our body perceptions, moods, emotions, all these are parts of...it's like a thin film which creates the boundary to the world. I'm not saying there is no outside world and I'm also not saying we're not in contact with it and we don't act in the world, but just for conscious experience, how it appears to you, that is actually an inner space, that is something that is very local in your own brain. In the real world there is no self as one substantial thing. That's part of the simulation.
  • On the one hand I believe that we could have much better science and a much better science of consciousness if many of the involved researchers would do things like meditating or other practices in, say, altered states of consciousness, but as a philosopher I don't believe that in a strict sense that we can just look into our own minds and find facts there. I usually keep this completely separate, this is my private life, but I am also first a long-term meditator and just by chance in my early 20s I've had six or seven spontaneous out-of-body experiences. Nothing dramatic, just when falling asleep. They made me think a lot because I was just writing my PhD thesis on the mind/body problem and I just found out that everybody on the research frontier is a materialist...
  • Natasha Mitchell: So they locate the mind in the body and very much in the brain.Thomas Metzinger: Or to the point that they say that there has never been anything like a mind, that's the most ruthless form of eliminative materialism, as we call it.
  • for most people this only happens when they try to sit up or so, jump up, and then they suddenly really jump up and they float out and then they realise this physical body is behind them. That would be a very simple and natural out-of-body experience that hundreds of thousands of people have had on the planet. Then you suddenly have the experience that your self, your centre of thinking, of attending, is located out of your physical body for the first time and often you experience a second kind of bodily shape, an ethereal light body in which you can fly around. That is of course, or so I have claimed, the root of our belief in souls because human beings have had these experiences at all times and in all cultures, long before there was science or philosophy, and people have made theories about what could that be because it's pretty realistic, at least as realistic as your lucid dreams are. It's at least as realistic as waking life, and then you have a problem. I mean, are you going to tell people about this or are they going to send you to the psychiatrist...
  • atasha Mitchell: Exactly, you've spent many years trying to explain it, but scientifically. And in fact you describe yourself in your new book as an intrepid philosophical psychonaut. It sounds like you've tried all sorts of experiments on yourself, as well as in collaboration with scientists and their subjects. You got your surgeon to alter your anaesthetic regime when you went under surgery once.Thomas Metzinger: Yes, they were really cynical. They said, 'So young man, you've been writing your thesis about the mind/body problem. Observe yourself now!' And they knocked me out and it was very nasty, it was a very death-oriented waking up phase, there was nothing that resembled an out-of-body experience, it was in parts frightening. No special discovery there. But if you want to enhance your lucid dreaming, one thing you could do, a simple old classic, is stop drinking at noon, then stare at a glass of water just before you go to sleep in a really thirsty condition, then you place half a tablespoon of salt in your cheek and go to sleep and make a firm commitment as soon as you are there again and you realise you cannot lift it to drink, you will become aware that you're dreaming now. I can guarantee what's going to happen.
  • Full lucidity means that you become aware of your own agency, that you can control the dream world and your own body, you can go through walls or make experiments, and there are very interesting experiments. For instance, you could ask, as a philosopher, another dream figure if they actually think they have a conscious mind of their own or if they actually think they're a subsystem of your dreaming brain right now.
  • Thomas Metzinger: But more seriously what I'm of course interested in is the functional building blocks of what I call the human self model. So in the transition from the ordinary to the lucid dream, for instance, you gain all these memories you have lost, who you are in waking life, that you have had lucid dreams perhaps before, and most importantly perhaps you can control the focus of your attention, focus your own mind. I don't know if you've ever realised this but in ordinary dreams you cannot really control your attention. And then it's of course an amazing, a unique state of consciousness from a theoretical point of view because it's the only state of consciousness where you are not a naïve realist, where you actually experience everything as an internal simulation and you lose this feeling of moving in a real external world. Then you know you are moving in a simulation and you can try all kinds of things.
  • Thomas Metzinger: Because one of many elements of the conscious self I need to understand is the sense of ownership. Long before language and concepts you have the feeling 'this is me', and we also have this, for instance, in using tools. It may be very important when you use a rake or a stick for the period while you use it to actually incorporate it into your body image. What I was interested in was is there something like a global sense of ownership. Not just a feeling of owning your hand or maybe owning a thought, but owning the body as a whole, and can that be experimentally manipulated, that was the question.
  • My theory—big, unintelligible philosophical theory—says that we identify with this image of our body because we cannot recognise it as an image. And if my theory is correct, there should be just this one element of global identification and it should be easy to control it experimentally. That was the idea behind it. But I must also...one warning, the idea of global ownership for our body as whole is a dangerous idea because it introduces a second self, like a little man that does the owning.
  • what do you think was most adaptive about...most beneficial to us as a species about this unique sense of selfhood that it seems that we possess?Thomas Metzinger: Well, in general of course it's good for an animal to have a model of its own body. How fast can I run? Should I pick a fight with this guy? Or better not? How far can I jump to the next branch? How heavy am I? What are my collision properties? That was important. So I think bodily self models have been on this planet for a long time. The next invention was emotions, to know what is in your own interest and in the interest of your offspring, to have the experience of being...I guess, bonding, you say in English, to other conscious selves.
  • In your work you're also very concerned about our changing conception of consciousness with the help of neuroscience, and this is something you're very enthusiastic about, given your partnerships with scientists for many years, but you're calling for a new field of ethics, Thomas, a ethics of consciousness. What would be the focus of such an ethics and why do you see it as being so crucial?Thomas Metzinger: We do have this brand new discipline since 2002 of neuro-ethics where one investigates the ethical consequences of new technologies that come out of neuroscience, like new lie detectors, cognitive enhancers, brain implants and so on. Our image of ourselves, the image of man, of humankind, is changing faster and more dramatically then through any other scientific revolution in the past. In a way we are destroying a lot of what mankind has believed in during the last 4,000 years, but it's also clear that in this emerging vacuum neuroscience will not be able to put something new into this vacuum.
  • how will our culture actually react to a naturalistic turn in our image of man, if there's no supernatural root even in our minds anymore, and we actually have to come to terms with the fact that not only our bodies but also our minds are results of a process that had no goal, that was driven by chance events...I mean, how are we going to come to terms with this? Will we develop a culture of denial, or will we all become vulgar materialists? And I think something that could help us to take this step in integrating all this brand new knowledge and the new potentials for changing our brains and our minds technologically...
  • Thomas Metzinger: And pharmaceutically, that's what we're researching in my cognitive enhancers group...how are we going to make this historical transition in an optimal way? And I think, to put it very simply, we could do it by just thinking not only about what is a good action but what is a good state of consciousness. What states of consciousness do we want to show our children? How can neuroscience help us with optimising education? What states of consciousness are we allowed to impose, to force upon animals? Are all these experiments in, say, primate research, in consciousness research, in neuroscience ethically tenable? What states of consciousness should be illegal in our society? New drugs. What states of consciousness do we want to foster and cultivate?
  • It's also a question of preserving our dignity in the face of these sometimes very sobering discussions, and in developing a cultural response to it. Can modern science help me? It's not only about defending ourselves, it's also about what I call riding the tiger; can all this new knowledge help us to improve our autonomy, maybe also our rationality? How can I take responsibility and charge for the way I deal with my own brain? Can it help us to die better deaths? Who knows? But I think we should all, not only philosophers and scientists but all of us, start to think about what we want to do with all these new brain/mind technologies. Just looking the other way won't make it go away.
  • Amira . on 23 Jan 10
     
    German philosopher of mind Thomas Metzinger is one of the world's top researchers on consciousness, instrumental in its renaissance as a respectable problem for scientific enquiry. From out-of-body experiences to lucid dreaming, anarchic hand syndrome to phantom limbs, his investigations have taken him to places few dare to go. Be spooked, bewildered and amazed.
Amira .

The Home of Man by Aviezer Tucker - 0 views

www.crvp.org/...chapter_xxi.htm

Multiculturalism culture Other globalization Human being philosophy Traveling

shared by Amira . on 15 Jan 11 - Cached
  • "Home is where the heart is," and "At the turn of the century Vienna is my real home,"
  • Home is not where we happen to be born or reside, subject to meaningless chance; we may be born on a means of transportation or in a jail, or be under circumstances that force us to reside in a location that is not home.
  • Home is usually a multi-level structure that combines several single level homes, such as an emotional home, a geographical home, a cultural home, etc. For example, "I am at home in Prague, reading Patocka, listening to a Mahler symphony, with my love in my arms." The combination of single-level homes that makes our home is so closely connected to our personality, that a description of a person’s multi-level structure of single level homes, his home, may be unique enough to suggest that person’s identity. For example, "I am at home in the marketplace, in the company of well-bred young men, arguing about the meaning of things."
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  • Havel regards "home," following Patocka,2 as an existential experience that can be compared to a set of concentric circles on various levels, from the house, the village or town, the family, the social environment, the professional environ-ment, to the nation as including culture and language (Czech or Slovak), the civic society (Czechoslovak), the civilization (Europ-ean), and the world (civilization and universe). Havel stressed the equality among all concentric circles, especially the national, civic, and universal ones with their corresponding national self-determi-nation rights, civic rights, and human rights.
  • Every circle, every aspect of the human home, has to be given its due. It makes no sense to deny or forcibly exclude any one stratum for the sake of another; none should be regarded as less important or inferior. They are part of our natural world, and a properly organized society has to respect them all and give them all the chance to play their roles. This is the only way that room can be made for people to realize themselves freely as human beings, to exercise their identities. All the circles of our home, . . . are an inalienable part of us, and an inseparable element of our human identity. Deprived of all the aspects of his home, man would be deprived of himself, of his humanity
  • Having cleared some confusions of "home" with fixed resi-dence and place of birth and having seen that home may be a struc-ture of several single level homes (on different and identical levels) which may change in time, it is time to attempt a more positive analysis of home. In "home is where the heart is;" "at the turn of the century Vienna is my real home;" and "my marriage was a home-coming," "home" is marked by an emotional attachment: to a place, a person, an intellectual environment, etc. "I am at home in Prague, reading Patocka, listening to a Mahler symphony, with my love in my arms," as well as the sentences identifying the homes of Socrates, the British monarch and Franz Kafka stress the strong relation between personal identity and home (as Havel claimed in the above quotations). Home is where we could or can be ourselves, feel at ease, secure, able to express ourselves freely and fully, whether we have actually been there or not. Home is the reflection of our subjectivity in the world. Home is the environment that allows us to fulfil our unique selves through interaction with the world. Home is the environment that allows us to be ourselves, allows us to be homely. Since in a home environment we can express our true iden-tity, home is the source of home truth. Home may be an emotional environment, a culture, a geographical location, a political system, a historical time and place, etc., and a combination of all the above.
  • We are all descendants of immigrants. The natural home of humanity is the dry land of the planet. People, unlike trees and bushes, are not "rooted" -- people are born with legs. The fact that we are born with legs and intelligence opens to us ever new spacial and intellectual horizons. The human race, like other animals, is a migratory specie, from our ancient ancestors who, as we are told by anthropologists, migrated from Africa’s planes to settle the globe some three million years ago, to present day refugees and migrants. The human ability to migrate has been one of our basic assets for survival, allowing us to free ourselves of geographic constraints, from bondage to the earth. Bosnians, East European refugees in German hostels, Chinese, Haitian and Vietnamese refugees, like our ancestors and ourselves, whoever we may be, are searching for a home. This search for home is a basic trait of being human. It seems though that in today’s inhospitable world, the search may end in homelessness rather than in homecoming.
  • Amira . on 15 Jan 11
     
    When ethnic and nationalist wars over "homeland" expel from their homes fleeing refugees, who then search for new homes and have to clash with xenophobic populations, who in turn wish to send them back "home," the meaning of "home" becomes important for ethical and political considerations. A philosophical analysis of the meaning of "home" in its contexts may clarify the assumption embodied in ordinary language about the relation between person and home, as well as distinguish uses of "home" from Orwellian newspeak misuses of "home" that change its meaning while main-taining its relation with man to legitimize xenophobic and inhumane policies.
Amira .

Everything We Knew About Human Vision is Wrong by Mark Changizi Tells Us Why ... - 0 views

neuronarrative.wordpress.com/...hor-mark-changizi-tells-us-why

mind & brain Neuroscience science cognition & relativity Cognition perception relativity cognitive science philosophy

shared by Amira . on 15 Jan 11 - Cached
  • I call myself a theoretical neurobiologist, more generally, and I have had a number of non-vision research directions, including, for example, the shape and evolution of the brain, and why animals have as many limbs and digits as they do.  Some of these research directions were central parts of my first book, The Brain from 25,000 Feet.
  • You mention in the book that reading and writing are relatively recent advances in human development, and yet we take for granted that we “see” and understand words, as if our brains were simply meant to see and understand them.  What’s really going on that allows us to make sense of symbols on a page—and why can we do this at all?
  • the invention of writing is only thousands of years old. In addition, for most of us, our grandparents, great grandparents or great great grandparents didn’t read at all. Writing is much too recent for our brains to have evolved to have reading mechanisms.
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  • The solution is that culture made writing easy on the eye, by shaping letters to be what the eye likes. The idea that culture shapes our artifacts to be good for us is not new. What’s new here is a specific hypothesis for what writing should look like in order to be good for us.
  • To be easy on the eye, writing needs to “look like nature,” just what our illiterate visual systems are fantastically competent at processing. The trick of that research direction was making this “writing looks like nature” idea rigorous, and coming up with ways of testing it. I show that there are certain signature visual patterns found in nearly any natural environment with opaque objects strewn about, and that these signature patterns are found in human writing. In short, writing has evolved so that written words look like visual objects.
  • When light hits our retina, what our brains would like to do is instantaneously generate a perception of what the world looks like. Alas, our brain can’t do this instantaneously. Our brains are slow. It takes around a tenth of a second for your perception to be built, and that’s a long time when you’re moving about. If you perceived the world the way it was when light hit your eye, you’d be having a tenth-of-a-second old view of the world.
  • First consider illusions like those I discussed above. One often feels as if what we see is due to some kind of direct “reading” of the real physical world. But our brain can’t just passively react to the incoming stream of visual information, lest it have an old perception of the world. Instead, it must actively generate a guess about the near future, which helps drive home that our perception is always an internal concoction by your brain. In fact, most of the input to your visual system is feedback from that very visual system.
  • Second, consider forward-facing eyes and binocular vision. When we see with two eyes in the same direction, we have one unified visual perception. We have what feels like a single viewpoint, one that is emanating roughly from a point between our two eyes. Furthermore, our single viewpoint is always filled with two copies of the world that you hardly ever notice. When you fixate on something out in front of you, then objects nearer and farther split into two perceptual copies, each rendered as transparent in your perception.
  • This allows you to see objects, and to see beyond them. For example, you can see your own nose from opposite sides at all times, but it is rendered as partially transparent and so does not block your view of the world beyond. The more one analyzes the phenomenology of binocular vision, the stranger it seems. But it doesn’t feel strange, because these are perceptual facets that our brain knows how to interpret. They are needed as part of your unified view of the world in order to incorporate the fact that it is really built out of two views of the world. Although, in a sense, you are perceiving fictions, they are fictions that allow you to more veridically see the world.
  • And, lastly, consider color vision. This is a case that helps us better understand that it is not so much whether you see the world as it is, but how much of the world’s reality your are privy to seeing. Colors are primarily about the underlying emotions and states of those around us, as seen through the window of skin, and the physiological changes in the blood. The spectrum of skin is complicated, but it varies over two dimensions that matter most for sensing the states of others, the concentration and oxygenation of skin.
  • The question is, what does the concentration and oxygenation of blood in the skin of others “truly” look like? Or, what do the emotions those blood variables signify “truly” look like? The interesting thing here is that these blood dimensions and these emotions are “really there”, but there is little sense to what their “real look” might be. Colors serve the role of what they look like, but does red really look like oxygenated blood or really look like anger? I’m not sure this is a sensible question. What matters is that that qualitative perceptual state is given a meaning or association to us, and so serves its purpose.
  • Amira . on 15 Jan 11
     
    For theoretical neurobiologist and author Mark Changizi, "why" has always been more interesting than "how." While many scientists focus on the mechanics of how we do what we do, his research aims to grasp the ultimate foundations underlying why we think, feel and see as we do. Guided by this philosophy, he has made important discoveries on why we see in color, why we see illusions, why we have forward-facing eyes, why letters are shaped as they are, why the brain is organized as it is, why animals have as many limbs and fingers as they do, and why the dictionary is organized as it is.
Amira .

Science historian cracks the 'Plato code' | PhysOrg June 28, 2010 - 0 views

www.physorg.com/news196943667.html

philosophy science

shared by Amira . on 15 Jan 11 - Cached
  • A science historian at The University of Manchester has cracked "The Plato Code" - the long disputed secret messages hidden in the great philosopher's writings.
  • Plato was the Einstein of Greece's Golden Age and his work founded Western culture and science. Dr Jay Kennedy's findings are set to revolutionise the history of the origins of Western thought. Dr Kennedy, whose findings are published in the leading US journal Apeiron, reveals that Plato used a regular pattern of symbols, inherited from the ancient followers of Pythagoras, to give his books a musical structure. A century earlier, Pythagoras had declared that the planets and stars made an inaudible music, a 'harmony of the spheres'. Plato imitated this hidden music in his books. The hidden codes show that Plato anticipated the Scientific Revolution 2,000 years before Isaac Newton, discovering its most important idea - the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. The decoded messages also open up a surprising way to unite science and religion. The awe and beauty we feel in nature, Plato says, shows that it is divine; discovering the scientific order of nature is getting closer to God. This could transform today's culture wars between science and religion.
  • "It is a long and exciting story, but basically I cracked the code. I have shown rigorously that the books do contain codes and symbols and that unraveling them reveals the hidden philosophy of Plato.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • This will transform the early history of Western thought, and especially the histories of ancient science, mathematics, music, and philosophy. Dr Kennedy spent five years studying Plato's writing and found that in his best-known work the Republic he placed clusters of words related to music after each twelfth of the text - at one-twelfth, two-twelfths, etc. This regular pattern represented the twelve notes of a Greek musical scale. Some notes were harmonic, others dissonant. At the locations of the harmonic notes he described sounds associated with love or laughter, while the locations of dissonant notes were marked with screeching sounds or war or death. This musical code was key to cracking Plato's entire symbolic system.
  • Dr Kennedy, a researcher in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, says: "As we read his books, our emotions follow the ups and downs of a musical scale. Plato plays his readers like musical instruments." However Plato did not design his secret patterns purely for pleasure - it was for his own safety. Plato's ideas were a dangerous threat to Greek religion. He said that mathematical laws and not the gods controlled the universe. Plato's own teacher had been executed for heresy. Secrecy was normal in ancient times, especially for esoteric and religious knowledge, but for Plato it was a matter of life and death. Encoding his ideas in secret patterns was the only way to be safe. Plato led a dramatic and fascinating life. Born four centuries before Christ, when Sparta defeated plague-ravaged Athens, he wrote 30 books and founded the world's first university, called the Academy. He was a feminist, allowing women to study at the Academy, the first great defender of romantic love (as opposed to marriages arranged for political or financial reasons) and defended homosexuality in his books. In addition, he was captured by pirates and sold into slavery before being ransomed by friends.
  • Dr Kennedy explains: "Plato's importance cannot be overstated. He shifted humanity from a warrior society to a wisdom society. Today our heroes are Einstein and Shakespeare - and not knights in shining armour - because of him."
  • "The result was amazing - it was like opening a tomb and finding new set of gospels written by Jesus Christ himself. "Plato is smiling. He sent us a time capsule." Dr Kennedy's findings are not only surprising and important; they overthrow conventional wisdom on Plato. Modern historians have always denied that there were codes; now Dr Kennedy has proved otherwise. He adds: "This is the beginning of something big. It will take a generation to work out the implications. All 2,000 pages contain undetected symbols."
  • Amira . on 15 Jan 11
     
    A science historian at The University of Manchester has cracked "The Plato Code" - the long disputed secret messages hidden in the great philosopher's writings.
marioarroyo

Postmodern roots of leftist policy | Live as Free People - 0 views

liveasfreepeople.com/...modern-roots-of-leftist-policy

shared by marioarroyo on 06 May 16 - No Cached
  •  This post attempts to dig up the roots of wild and crazy public policies.
  • Kant (1724-1804) kicked it off.  Boiled down, he said we cannot know the thing-in-itself apart from our mind interpreting it.
  • We can have no knowledge of things as they are in themselves, existing independently in a physical world. (p. 283)
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  • Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a powerful anti-philosopher.  He says in this brief excerpt that facts do not exist; only interpretations do.  He writes: Everything is Interpretation: … Against those who say “There are only facts,” I say, “No, facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations.” We cannot establish any fact in itself. Perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing
  • This is called perspectivism, and an interpreter of postmodernism describes the practical outcome of it. We have lost the ‘real world’ and the ‘apparent world,’ he [Nietzsche] thought, and it follows from this eerie situation that there are no facts, only interpretations. With that breathtaking claim we broach the doctrine that Nietzsche called ‘perspectivism.’ It is a shorthand for a group of different doctrines – that truth is perspectival, that logic is, that knowledge is, and so on … There is no absolute, Nietzsche declared: being is always becoming and ‘being human’ is fluid rather than fixed.
  • This hyper-skepticism can be summed up in one word: postmodernism. It has worked its way into the cultural water we drink and air we breathe.
  • Roots
  • 1. Implementing Worldview Studies in curricula
  • Christian universities and high schools have accepted perspectivism as if there are no objective truths out there, but only our competing worldviews.  So they teach “Worldview Studies.”
  • 2. Destroying the essence of marriage and gender differences
  • postmodernism is hyper-skeptical of essences.
  • If you can find the definition of a pencil, then you have discovered its essence, which distinguishes it from other objects like a pen.
  • in a debate over same-sex “marriage,” one advocate for redefining marriage proclaimed: “Marriage has no essence!”  In other words, it’s open to reinterpretation and redefinition.  Perspectivism.
  • take postmodernism to its deeper outcome, it also says human sexuality is fluid, not fixed.  There are no clear gender differences.  The essence of maleness and the essence of femaleness is being shattered.
  • 4. Negotiating with evil politicians
  • Humankind used to have an essence: a rational soul.  Christianity added that the essence is a contaminated rational soul.  We don’t even need a biblical text to reach that conclusion, which is deduction.  We can observe humans over the centuries.  That’s induction.
  • Postmodernism, however, denies humankind’s essence.  So why not overlay it with the (naïve) ideology of wishful thinking?  The West has a secular, easygoing, live-and-let-live outlook, so surely everyone else does.
  • 5. Denying origins
  • Postmodernism says key concepts, like justice and rights and even God, are up for grabs like a loose ball in basketball.  Meaning is fluid and playful, and the context and original intent do not limit those foundational truths. So judges, growing up in this postmodern environment at the university, cut the Constitution loose from its original and historical context and interpret it as a living document, subject to the modern, evolving zeitgeist.  The Constitution says whatever they intend per their politics, not what its authors originally intended.
  • 6. Politicizing science
  • For postmodernism, science (or cause and effect) has no firm foundation (see Hume).  If we have no secure knowledge, then why not overlay and shape it through political ideology?
  • Practical solutions
  • reject ancient hyper-skepticism, against which Aristotle fought, that has recently morphed into postmodernism.
  • Expose who many liberals really are.  They’re amoral, anything-goes postmodernists.  Use it as a pejorative.
  • explain postmodernism, so students can figure out that they are being swept along by hyper-skepticism.
  • The main thing is that that there really are essences.  Marriage has an essence, and there are essential differences between maleness and femaleness.  Humanity itself has an essence that places it above other mammals.
  •  Hyper-skepticism is a minority viewpoint.
  • Don’t deny the obvious that you can see with your own eyes.  Your five senses are an accurate source of common sense
  • Be confident in this: the real world – which really does exist and can be objectively known without our mental games and interpretations – must come before ideology.
marioarroyo

Liberals Treat Christians Like Cow Dung - 0 views

Most liberals tend to treat Christians one of two ways: either with open contempt or if they think they need their votes, they tend to switch over to grotesque pandering. That's not to say that the...

Secularism Relativism Religion Law & Culture

started by marioarroyo on 11 Mar 12 no follow-up yet
marioarroyo

Latest infanticide push about more than killing babies - dailycaller.com - Readability - 0 views

www.readability.com/...csklpxhr

Abortion Personhood_Theory

shared by marioarroyo on 11 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • The ancient Romans used to expose unwanted babies on hillsides. Thankfully, we have come a long way since those bad old days. We would never countenance letting a baby die of exposure or get eaten by animals. No, today’s infanticide promoters insist that babies be killed painlessly. After all, we aren’t barbarians!
  • It is tempting to dwell on these shocking views and thereby miss the bigger picture. “After-Birth Abortion” is merely the latest example of bioethical argument wielded as the sharp point of the spear in an all-out philosophical war waged among the intelligentsia against Judeo/Christian morality based in human exceptionalism and adherence to universal human rights.
  • A new article that has gotten much attention in the blogosphere, “After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?” published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, asserts that whatever reasons justify abortion — and in the USA that means anything and everything — also support the right of parents to have unwanted infants painlessly killed
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  • Abortion wasn’t legalized to grant a woman the “right” to a dead fetus. Rather, legislatures or courts — depending on the country — determined that a woman’s right to control her own body should trump the fetal right to life. That being so, once the baby is born the entire issue of protecting female autonomy evaporates and the issue of abortion becomes factually irrelevant.
  • On the other hand, not only [personal] aims but also well-developed plans are concepts that certainly apply to those people (parents, siblings, society) who could be negatively or positively affected by the birth of that child. Therefore, the rights and interests of the actual people involved should represent the prevailing consideration in a decision about abortion and after-birth abortion.
  • In other words, babies are not people
  • A bureaucratic check list has even been published — including in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine — known as the Groningen Protocol, by which Dutch neonatologists determine which sick and disabled babies qualify to be euthanized. Indeed, according to two articles published in The Lancet, about 8% of all babies who die each year in the Netherlands (80-90) are killed by their own doctors.
  • In place of intrinsic human dignity as the foundation for our culture and laws, advocates of the new bioethical order want moral value to be measured individual-by-individual — whether animal or human — and moment-by-moment. Under this view, we each must earn full moral status by currently possessing capacities sufficient to be deemed a “person.” As the authors of “After-Birth Abortion” put it, “We take ‘person’ to mean an individual [not just a human] who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.” In other words, if you can’t value your own life, your life has less value.
  • This means that you can be a person today but not tomorrow, and not be a person today and be killed before you become one tomorrow.
  • Even more radically, according to some personhood theorists, higher mammals — dogs, dolphins, chimps, pigs — are persons and hence have greater value than human non-persons. Princeton’s notorious bioethicist Peter Singer is perhaps the world’s most famous advocate of this view — arguing, for example, that patients in a persistent vegetative state should be used in medical experiments in place of animals with higher cognitive capacities.
  • Bioethics isn’t about abstract argument. It uses discourse to transform philosophical views into societal action. And while personhood theory is certainly not the unanimous view, I think it is fair to say that it represents the consensus in the field — at least among the majority of bioethicists who don’t have a modifier such as “conservative” or “Christian” in front of their title.
  • Obamacare has centralized control of health care into the federal bureaucracy, including by establishing a plethora of cost/benefit boards that will start operating within the next several years. Who do you think will be tapped to fill many of these powerful government positions that could ultimately decide what medical procedures will and won’t be covered by insurance — perhaps even which patients will and won’t receive them? Bingo! “Experts” trained in bioethics.
Amira .

"Philosophy In The Flesh" - A TALK WITH GEORGE LAKOFF | EDGE 3rd Culture, 1999 - 0 views

www.edge.org/...lakoff_p1.html

philosophy mind & brain Metaphor languages

shared by Amira . on 15 Jan 11 - Cached
  • "We are neural beings," states Berkeley cognitive scientist George Lakoff. "Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything - only what our embodied brains permit."
  • "The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical."
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