smcder
Paranormal Adept
Here is her paper that Christensen refers to "A Dancer Reflects"
A Dancer Reflects: Deliberation in Action
A Dancer Reflects: Deliberation in Action
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 7
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
Post-physicalism by Montero
Post-Physicalism
cruxy, very cruxy
And so, despite much talk about the wonders science is capable of achieving, the crux of the mind–body problem is actually not the ques- tion ‘is the mind physical?’ (where this notion is tied to what science can achieve) but is rather the question, ‘is the mind fundamentally nonmental?’
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Post-Physicalism
cruxy, very cruxy
And so, despite much talk about the wonders science is capable of achieving, the crux of the mind–body problem is actually not the ques- tion ‘is the mind physical?’ (where this notion is tied to what science can achieve) but is rather the question, ‘is the mind fundamentally nonmental?’
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Shaun Gallagher in How the Body Shapes the Mind:
"The body generates a gestural expression. It is, however, another person who moves, motivates, and mediates this process. To say that language moves my body is already to say that other people move me."
Book description at amazon:
"How the Body Shapes the Mind is an interdisciplinary work that addresses philosophical questions by appealing to evidence found in experimental psychology, neuroscience, studies of pathologies, and developmental psychology. There is a growing consensus across these disciplines that the contribution of embodiment to cognition is inescapable. Because this insight has been developed across a variety of disciplines, however, there is still a need to develop a common vocabulary that is capable of integrating discussions of brain mechanisms in neuroscience, behavioral expressions in psychology, design concerns in artificial intelligence and robotics, and debates about embodied experience in the phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Shaun Gallagher's book aims to contribute to the formulation of that common vocabulary and to develop a conceptual framework that will avoid both the overly reductionistic approaches that explain everything in terms of bottom-up neuronal mechanisms, and inflationistic approaches that explain everything in terms of Cartesian, top-down cognitive states.
Gallagher pursues two basic sets of questions. The first set consists of questions about the phenomenal aspects of the structure of experience, and specifically the relatively regular and constant features that we find in the content of our experience. If throughout conscious experience there is a constant reference to one's own body, even if this is a recessive or marginal awareness, then that reference constitutes a structural feature of the phenomenal field of consciousness, part of a framework that is likely to determine or influence all other aspects of experience. The second set of questions concerns aspects of the structure of experience that are more hidden, those that may be more difficult to get at because they happen before we know it. They do not normally enter into the content of experience in an explicit way, and are often inaccessible to reflective consciousness. To what extent, and in what ways, are consciousness and cognitive processes, which include experiences related to perception, memory, imagination, belief, judgment, and so forth, shaped or structured by the fact that they are embodied in this way?"
"The body generates a gestural expression. It is, however, another person who moves, motivates, and mediates this process. To say that language moves my body is already to say that other people move me."
Book description at amazon:
"How the Body Shapes the Mind is an interdisciplinary work that addresses philosophical questions by appealing to evidence found in experimental psychology, neuroscience, studies of pathologies, and developmental psychology. There is a growing consensus across these disciplines that the contribution of embodiment to cognition is inescapable. Because this insight has been developed across a variety of disciplines, however, there is still a need to develop a common vocabulary that is capable of integrating discussions of brain mechanisms in neuroscience, behavioral expressions in psychology, design concerns in artificial intelligence and robotics, and debates about embodied experience in the phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Shaun Gallagher's book aims to contribute to the formulation of that common vocabulary and to develop a conceptual framework that will avoid both the overly reductionistic approaches that explain everything in terms of bottom-up neuronal mechanisms, and inflationistic approaches that explain everything in terms of Cartesian, top-down cognitive states.
Gallagher pursues two basic sets of questions. The first set consists of questions about the phenomenal aspects of the structure of experience, and specifically the relatively regular and constant features that we find in the content of our experience. If throughout conscious experience there is a constant reference to one's own body, even if this is a recessive or marginal awareness, then that reference constitutes a structural feature of the phenomenal field of consciousness, part of a framework that is likely to determine or influence all other aspects of experience. The second set of questions concerns aspects of the structure of experience that are more hidden, those that may be more difficult to get at because they happen before we know it. They do not normally enter into the content of experience in an explicit way, and are often inaccessible to reflective consciousness. To what extent, and in what ways, are consciousness and cognitive processes, which include experiences related to perception, memory, imagination, belief, judgment, and so forth, shaped or structured by the fact that they are embodied in this way?"
"The body that creates meaning is not only an emotional, kinesthetic, and aesthetically experiencing body; the body that creates meaning is a social body." -- Kelvin J. Booth in "THE MEANING OF THE SOCIAL BODY: BRINGING GEORGE HERBERT MEAD TO MARK JOHNSON'S THEORY OF EMBODIED MIND"
The above is the first essay in an issue of William James Studies (VOL. 12 • NO. 1 • SPRING 2016) devoted to pursuing "the question of the relationship between pragmatism and phenomenology in Edmund Husserl, John Dewey, William James, Max Scheler, Charles S. Peirce, Herbert Mead, and the contemporary pragmatist philosopher Mark A. Johnson. Here are the opening paragraphs of this paper:
"In his book The Meaning of the Body, Mark Johnson brings together a number of important strands in cognitive science and the phenomenology of the body, and integrates them into a pragmatist philosophy of mind (Johnson, 2007). Meaning is grounded in embodied movement, emotion, and feeling, and it finds expression in what Johnson calls the aesthetics of human understanding. The word of in the title of Johnson's book should not be read as the meaning that a body has as an object in the world. Rather, meaning is created by the body. This approach breaks down any dualism between bodies and minds, as well as other persistent dualisms, such as concept and emotion and inner experience versus an external world. Johnson especially criticizes the mental representation theory of mind, which reinforces such dualisms. Using James and Dewey as a basis, as well as his own previous work with George Lakoff on metaphor and embodiment, Johnson offers a non-representational view of mind that expands the idea of meaning well beyond concepts and propositions. Johnson’s wide-ranging book provides an excellent basis for future developments in a pragmatist cognitive science, I want to focus on one element in particular needing further development— the social dimension of the theory of mind and meaning. Johnson does bring in social elements to some extent, for instance when he discusses infant imitation, and then again as one element of distributed cognition, but he does not offer an extended discussion of the social element of embodied condition. My intention here is to find a place within Johnson’s pragmatist view of embodied mind for Mead’s social theory of mind and meaning, which is clearly an embodiment theory since it is based on the gesture as bodily movement. The body that creates meaning is not only an emotional, kinesthetic, and aesthetically experiencing body; the body that creates meaning is a social body.
EMBODIED MEANING
Johnson uses the word meaning very broadly. Meaning concerns the significance of our interactions with our environment, and the consequences of these interactions for actual and possible experience. Linguistic meaning is only one dimension of these interactions with our environment, just one part of a “vast, continuous process of immanent meanings” (Johnson 2007, 10). Meaning "is not just a matter of concepts and propositions, but also reaches down into the images, sensorimotor schemas, feelings, qualities, and emotions that constitute our meaningful encounter with the world" (ibid., ix). This embodied view "sees meaning and all our higher functioning as growing out of and shaped by our abilities to perceive things, manipulate objects, move our bodies in space, and evaluate our situation" (ibid., 1). In short, meaning is a relation of the active body encountering and structuring the world. This embodied view of meaning is, he says, “the only way to preserve the continuity between so-called higher and lower cognitive processes…. The ‘higher’ develops from the ‘lower’” (ibid., 25). In terms of human ontogeny, our abilities to engage in developed symbolic communication grow out of our embodied kinesthetic and emotional interaction with the people and objects around us beginning in early infancy. In evolutionary terms, our distinctly human linguistic and conceptual meanings evolved from a pre-linguistic level of embodied meaning that we likely share with many animals, particularly our closest primate relatives. Meaning for Johnson, and for pragmatism in general, is a relation of organism-environment, where we have not two separate things—the organism and the environment—but a unified relationship within which the organism and the environment have interdependent existence and function.
An environment is always an environment of an organism, and the living organism is of its environment, not just in it. Similarly, there is no separation between mind and world. Meaning, as a mode of human life activity, is a way that the body is of its world, and how it lives its world. Dewey talks of immediate meaning that is prior to conceptual understanding and prior to the distinction between subject and object, mind and world. Subject and object are abstractions arising out of our linguistically mediated experience and are not characteristic of immediate embodied experience. Though a naturalist theory of mind supported by most mainstream philosophy rejects the dualism of mind and body, Johnson notes that dualism creeps back into philosophy in the form of widespread acceptance of a representational psychology. This psychology is based on the idea of mind and world as being in some way separate from each other, with an external world being experienced by way of internal mental representations. The transactional embodied view developed by Johnson and based on the classical pragmatists precludes a representational psychology. . . . ."
http://williamjamesstudies.org/wp-c...itive-Science_WJS_Vol-12_No-1_Spring-2016.pdf
The above is the first essay in an issue of William James Studies (VOL. 12 • NO. 1 • SPRING 2016) devoted to pursuing "the question of the relationship between pragmatism and phenomenology in Edmund Husserl, John Dewey, William James, Max Scheler, Charles S. Peirce, Herbert Mead, and the contemporary pragmatist philosopher Mark A. Johnson. Here are the opening paragraphs of this paper:
"In his book The Meaning of the Body, Mark Johnson brings together a number of important strands in cognitive science and the phenomenology of the body, and integrates them into a pragmatist philosophy of mind (Johnson, 2007). Meaning is grounded in embodied movement, emotion, and feeling, and it finds expression in what Johnson calls the aesthetics of human understanding. The word of in the title of Johnson's book should not be read as the meaning that a body has as an object in the world. Rather, meaning is created by the body. This approach breaks down any dualism between bodies and minds, as well as other persistent dualisms, such as concept and emotion and inner experience versus an external world. Johnson especially criticizes the mental representation theory of mind, which reinforces such dualisms. Using James and Dewey as a basis, as well as his own previous work with George Lakoff on metaphor and embodiment, Johnson offers a non-representational view of mind that expands the idea of meaning well beyond concepts and propositions. Johnson’s wide-ranging book provides an excellent basis for future developments in a pragmatist cognitive science, I want to focus on one element in particular needing further development— the social dimension of the theory of mind and meaning. Johnson does bring in social elements to some extent, for instance when he discusses infant imitation, and then again as one element of distributed cognition, but he does not offer an extended discussion of the social element of embodied condition. My intention here is to find a place within Johnson’s pragmatist view of embodied mind for Mead’s social theory of mind and meaning, which is clearly an embodiment theory since it is based on the gesture as bodily movement. The body that creates meaning is not only an emotional, kinesthetic, and aesthetically experiencing body; the body that creates meaning is a social body.
EMBODIED MEANING
Johnson uses the word meaning very broadly. Meaning concerns the significance of our interactions with our environment, and the consequences of these interactions for actual and possible experience. Linguistic meaning is only one dimension of these interactions with our environment, just one part of a “vast, continuous process of immanent meanings” (Johnson 2007, 10). Meaning "is not just a matter of concepts and propositions, but also reaches down into the images, sensorimotor schemas, feelings, qualities, and emotions that constitute our meaningful encounter with the world" (ibid., ix). This embodied view "sees meaning and all our higher functioning as growing out of and shaped by our abilities to perceive things, manipulate objects, move our bodies in space, and evaluate our situation" (ibid., 1). In short, meaning is a relation of the active body encountering and structuring the world. This embodied view of meaning is, he says, “the only way to preserve the continuity between so-called higher and lower cognitive processes…. The ‘higher’ develops from the ‘lower’” (ibid., 25). In terms of human ontogeny, our abilities to engage in developed symbolic communication grow out of our embodied kinesthetic and emotional interaction with the people and objects around us beginning in early infancy. In evolutionary terms, our distinctly human linguistic and conceptual meanings evolved from a pre-linguistic level of embodied meaning that we likely share with many animals, particularly our closest primate relatives. Meaning for Johnson, and for pragmatism in general, is a relation of organism-environment, where we have not two separate things—the organism and the environment—but a unified relationship within which the organism and the environment have interdependent existence and function.
An environment is always an environment of an organism, and the living organism is of its environment, not just in it. Similarly, there is no separation between mind and world. Meaning, as a mode of human life activity, is a way that the body is of its world, and how it lives its world. Dewey talks of immediate meaning that is prior to conceptual understanding and prior to the distinction between subject and object, mind and world. Subject and object are abstractions arising out of our linguistically mediated experience and are not characteristic of immediate embodied experience. Though a naturalist theory of mind supported by most mainstream philosophy rejects the dualism of mind and body, Johnson notes that dualism creeps back into philosophy in the form of widespread acceptance of a representational psychology. This psychology is based on the idea of mind and world as being in some way separate from each other, with an external world being experienced by way of internal mental representations. The transactional embodied view developed by Johnson and based on the classical pragmatists precludes a representational psychology. . . . ."
http://williamjamesstudies.org/wp-c...itive-Science_WJS_Vol-12_No-1_Spring-2016.pdf
Steve, thank you for the links to Barbara Montero's writing. She likely follows in the footsteps of another dancer-philosopher, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, who has been writing about the phenomenology of the body and movement for a number of years. Here is a search page with links to the latter's publications. I'm interested in reading Barbara Montero to see the relationship of her theorizing to that of MSJ.
Search - CenturyLink
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Very nice ... I did not think of that ... isn't the paper brilliant?
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Yes, I think it is. It overcomes chronic presuppositional thinking, should energize consciousness studies and philosophy of mind and help to overcome the still-dominant 'physicalist' paradigm among many scientists if it's widely enough read.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Barbara Gail Montero, The Body Problem and Other Foundational Issues in the Metaphysics of Mind - PhilPapers
A nice summary of Montero's "body problem"
"My dissertation focuses on the foundations of the mind-body problem: how we should think about the physical world, what the role of science is in arriving at a solution to the problem, and whether it is possible to answer metaphysical questions about the mind while admitting epistemic defeat. ;Many philosophers argue that the mind is physical, but few spend much time explaining what counts as being physical. This, I argue, is a mistake: if the mind-body problem is the problem of explaining how the mind could be physical, we should have some understanding of what it means to be physical. In other words, in order to solve the mind-body problem, we must also solve the body problem. Surprisingly enough, however, a solution to the body problem is not forthcoming. ;Where, then, does this leave the mind-body problem? One might think that the impossibility of solving the body problem dissolves mind-body problem entirely. This, I argue, is not the case. Rather, the most troubling aspect of the mind-body problem does not dissolve in light of our inability to solve the body problem. For regardless of whether we understand what it means to be physical, we can still ask whether mentality is a fundamental feature of the world. Thus I propose that rather than thinking of the mind-body problem as the problem of finding a place for mentality in a fundamentally physical world, we should think of it as the problem of finding a place for mentality in a world that is, at its most fundamental level, entirely nonmental. The crux of the mind-body problem, then, is whether mentality is fundamental. ;Finally, I argue that it is difficult to justify ontological-conclusions about the mind while holding that we will never understand the mind. A number of philosophers think that while we cannot explain how the mind is physical we can know that it is physical, nonetheless. I argue that given a commitment to the inexplicability of the mind, arguments for ontological physicalism are not persuasive and conclude that physicalists must strive to understand the mind. Anything less amounts to giving up."
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A nice summary of Montero's "body problem"
"My dissertation focuses on the foundations of the mind-body problem: how we should think about the physical world, what the role of science is in arriving at a solution to the problem, and whether it is possible to answer metaphysical questions about the mind while admitting epistemic defeat. ;Many philosophers argue that the mind is physical, but few spend much time explaining what counts as being physical. This, I argue, is a mistake: if the mind-body problem is the problem of explaining how the mind could be physical, we should have some understanding of what it means to be physical. In other words, in order to solve the mind-body problem, we must also solve the body problem. Surprisingly enough, however, a solution to the body problem is not forthcoming. ;Where, then, does this leave the mind-body problem? One might think that the impossibility of solving the body problem dissolves mind-body problem entirely. This, I argue, is not the case. Rather, the most troubling aspect of the mind-body problem does not dissolve in light of our inability to solve the body problem. For regardless of whether we understand what it means to be physical, we can still ask whether mentality is a fundamental feature of the world. Thus I propose that rather than thinking of the mind-body problem as the problem of finding a place for mentality in a fundamentally physical world, we should think of it as the problem of finding a place for mentality in a world that is, at its most fundamental level, entirely nonmental. The crux of the mind-body problem, then, is whether mentality is fundamental. ;Finally, I argue that it is difficult to justify ontological-conclusions about the mind while holding that we will never understand the mind. A number of philosophers think that while we cannot explain how the mind is physical we can know that it is physical, nonetheless. I argue that given a commitment to the inexplicability of the mind, arguments for ontological physicalism are not persuasive and conclude that physicalists must strive to understand the mind. Anything less amounts to giving up."
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
Wikipedia:Getting to Philosophy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
smcder
Paranormal Adept
@Constance
Saw de Waals book at our library ... listened to this on the way home:
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Saw de Waals book at our library ... listened to this on the way home:
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
From Davos 2016... the discussion of "deep learning" for AI general intelligence, around 22 minutes in ... is very interesting, that it's "inscrutable" ... how it learns... to those who created it.
Compare with De Walls, et al, ideas about animal intelligence
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Here is an overview of the major issues addressed in the 2016 Davos Conference:
Davos 2016: eight key themes for the World Economic Forum
Davos 2016: eight key themes for the World Economic Forum
Another major international conference devoted to scientific and technological issues, scheduled for November in Vienna:
http://www.sgemviennagreen.org/
http://www.sgemviennagreen.org/
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Terrifying. Thank god he didn't create us as narrow AI. Right?
smcder
Paranormal Adept
I rather think, some of us, he did.
Steve, I've just read the available pages of the new de Waals book you linked at amazon and want to read all of it. It's available on Kindle. Here is another book that extends de Waals's approach to the study of elephants and dolphins.
Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel
Among the review comments at amazon:
“Beyond Words is a must-read. Animals think, mourn, dream, make plans, and communicate complex messages in much the same way that we do. Readers who knew this already will rejoice, others will learn the truth, and the more of us who capture the message, the sooner we will change the world.” ―Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs
Btw, I read The Hidden Life of Dogs years ago and I think you and your wife would enjoy it as I did when Miles and Maisie (our chows) were with us.
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