Philosophy Needs a Visceral Connection

[coberst]

Philosophy Needs a Visceral Connection

The visceral (instinctive, unreasoning, and ‘earthy’) domain of human reality is not exclusively the domain of intellection but is a partnership with the crude and earthy emotions that are so dominate a part of human experience.

A new manner of thinking was born in Greece in the five centuries BC. This might properly be called the Pagan Period. Webster informs me that a pagan is a follower of a polytheistic religion or one with little or no religion and who delight in sensual pleasures and material goods. Modern day America seems to fulfill at least one aspect of that definition of paganism.

The Pagan Period was followed by what might be called the Catholic Period. The Catholic Period was a millennium in which the Catholic Church dominated Western civilization.

The manner of thinking born in the Pagan Period and nurtured during the Catholic Period might properly be called the philosophical manner of thinking. Philosophy, born in Greece and nurtured during the millennium following, was grounded in the mind/body dichotomy introduced by Descartes under the heavy influence of an overseeing Catholic Church.

I claim that Western philosophical tradition is today at the cusp of adolescence leading into adulthood. This major paradigm shift is constructed on the recognition that we can no longer ground our philosophical attitudes on the mind/body dichotomy and must recognize the validity of the empirical scientific theories centered about the idea of the embodied cognition. This theory can be justified as a result of the technology that makes observation of brain actions observable.

Classical cognitive science assumes that “cognition consists of the application of universal logical and formal rules that govern the manipulation of “internal” mental symbols, symbols that are supposedly capable of representing states of affairs in the “external” world.” Classical cognitive science treats mind as a computational program.

Alan Turing (1937) developed the idea of the human mind acting as a universal computing machine. Further developments of Turing’s ideas led to the development that the human brain was conceived as a physical symbol system capable of operating on symbols in a logical fashion. Hence the metaphor ‘Mind as Computer’ became the rage of the electronic and computer sciences.

The internal/external split characterizing this view illuminates the idea that this computational function can be detached from the body of the organism, which means that any number of contraptions might perform adequately the actions of the human mind.

First generation cognitive science developed a science of cognition constructed around the ‘Mind as Computer’ metaphor. This was labeled as AI (Artificial Intelligence).

SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) developed a science of cognition constructed around the ‘Cognition in the Body’ metaphor. Rather than thinking of cognition as a manipulator of symbols, human cognition and our bodies are a gestalt; so integrated as to constitute a functioning unit with properties not derivable by summation of its parts.

Quotes from The Meaning of the Body by Mark Johnson

 

[Mr.Advocate]

It is not the process of thinking, but the results of thinking that appear in consciousness. Consciousness is to the contents of the brain, what a binocular view is to horizon. A limited vision of the entire field.

Whether the brain is thinking in terms of mathmatical equations, musical sounds or emotions, these are no different than the series of 0's and 1's that an AI computes. They are in effect all symbols in that they exist only in your brain as a specific state caused by the fireing or nonfireing of neurons.

The brain is no different from a computer in that it works with a simple fire/don't fire gateway. And your consciousness is no more responsable for calculating 2+2=4 than getting ***** slapped=crying.

The big question as asked by such philosophers as Chalmers, is how does a system give rise to experience. In other words, how do we create a computer that knows what it is like to be a computer.

This does not mean that an AI requires mystical emotions, instincts or unshaved armpits. It simply requires a self referential loop simular to creature-consciousness to be "human".

So let's say that your Rachael Raybot 3000 is provided with a sensor that tells it when it's oil level is low, and that it must now prioritize maintenence. You tell it to wash the dishes, and it "unreasonably" denies your request for the sake of self preservation. It's programing then causes it to verbalize, "is that all you think of me?", drip fluids from the camera sockets and storm out of the room in search for a liter of oil.

How is this any different from human behavior?

 

[3.14]

why would we not make a polite AI?

 

[coberst]

Embodied Realism

Cognitive science argues for an embodied realism as opposed to philosophy’s metaphysical realism. Embodied realism provides us with a link between our ideas and the worlds we experience. “Our bodies contribute to our sense of what is real”.

Spatial-relations concepts are not part of the world but are embodied and provide us with our ability to make sense of the world. “They characterize what spatial form is and define spatial inference.”

We do not see neither nearness nor farness but see objects in the world as they are and attribute the characteristic of nearness or farness to them. “We use spatial-relation concepts unconsciously, and we impose them unconsciously via our perceptual and conceptual systems. We just automatically and unconsciously ‘perceive’ one entity as in, on, or across from another entity. However, such perception depends on an enormous amount of automatic unconscious mental activity on our part.”

We might see a butterfly ‘in’ the garden. We conceptualize a three-dimensional container that is bounded by the garden and that which contains the butterfly. We locate the butterfly as a figure relative to that container. “We perform such complex, though mundane, acts of imaginative perception during every moment of our waking lives.”

Spatial relations have built in “logics” by virtue of their image-schematic structure:
Given two containers, A and B, and an object, X, if A is ‘in’ B and X is ‘in’ A, then X is ‘in’ B. Such is self-evident and requires no deduction. A container is a gestalt structure, its parts make no sense without the whole, it has an inside, outside, and a boundary.

“Container schemas, like other image schemas, are cross-modal. We can impose a conceptual container schema on a visual scene.” We can impose it on something we hear, on music perhaps to separate components, on our motor movements such as breaking down our movements in a tennis stroke and deal with these parts as within the whole.

Another important schema commonly used in perception and conception is the source-path-goal schema, which has an internal spatial “logic” with built in inferences”:
*If you have traversed a route to a current location, you have been at all previous locations on the route.
*If you travel from A to B and from B to C, them you have traveled from A to C.
*And so forth.

“Our most fundamental knowledge of motion is characterized by the source-path-goal schema…One of the important discoveries of cognitive science is that the conceptual systems used in the world’s languages make use of a relatively small number of basic image schemas…The spatial logics of these body-based image schemas are among the sources of the forms of logic used in abstract reason.”

The embodied mind hypothesis “radically undercuts the perception/conception distinction. In an embodied mind, it is conceivable that the neural system engaged in perception (or in bodily movement) plays a central in conception. That is, the very mechanisms responsible for perception, movements, and object manipulation could be responsible for conceptualization and reasoning.”

Quotes from Philosophy in the Flesh by Lakoff and Johnson

 

[Seven]

Fascinating stuff! Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I get from this article is that the vast majority of our experience of the world is a product of our own minds.

 

[coberst]

Fascinating stuff! Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I get from this article is that the vast majority of our experience of the world is a product of our own minds.

Everything that we think, know, or perceive is a product of our cognition.

 

[Seven]

Everything that we think, know, or perceive is a product of our cognition.

I'm starting to think you may be a figment of my imagination, coberst:yes:

 

[Troublemane]

this is the postmodernist view of philosophy, which we are currently experiencing as an unfolding paradigm on a mass scale, but its not the new paradigm which leading minds are already unfolding on the small scale.

the paradigm on the horizon seems to be completely transpersonal. the cognitive view endorsed by Hume (et al.) is found subsumed into a transcendent model which both unites and transcends subject/object dichotomies. science cant find it because its wedded to a strictly materialist view of reality, and thus falls into "flatland". the first to really discuss this in the west was probably Nietzsche, ....before he went all batty...

 

[Ozzie]

Philosophy Needs a Visceral Connection

The visceral (instinctive, unreasoning, and ‘earthy’) domain of human reality is not exclusively the domain of intellection but is a partnership with the crude and earthy emotions that are so dominate a part of human experience.

A new manner of thinking was born in Greece in the five centuries BC. This might properly be called the Pagan Period. Webster informs me that a pagan is a follower of a polytheistic religion or one with little or no religion and who delight in sensual pleasures and material goods. Modern day America seems to fulfill at least one aspect of that definition of paganism.

The Pagan Period was followed by what might be called the Catholic Period. The Catholic Period was a millennium in which the Catholic Church dominated Western civilization.

The manner of thinking born in the Pagan Period and nurtured during the Catholic Period might properly be called the philosophical manner of thinking. Philosophy, born in Greece and nurtured during the millennium following, was grounded in the mind/body dichotomy introduced by Descartes under the heavy influence of an overseeing Catholic Church.

I claim that Western philosophical tradition is today at the cusp of adolescence leading into adulthood. This major paradigm shift is constructed on the recognition that we can no longer ground our philosophical attitudes on the mind/body dichotomy and must recognize the validity of the empirical scientific theories centered about the idea of the embodied cognition. This theory can be justified as a result of the technology that makes observation of brain actions observable.

Classical cognitive science assumes that “cognition consists of the application of universal logical and formal rules that govern the manipulation of “internal” mental symbols, symbols that are supposedly capable of representing states of affairs in the “external” world.” Classical cognitive science treats mind as a computational program.

Alan Turing (1937) developed the idea of the human mind acting as a universal computing machine. Further developments of Turing’s ideas led to the development that the human brain was conceived as a physical symbol system capable of operating on symbols in a logical fashion. Hence the metaphor ‘Mind as Computer’ became the rage of the electronic and computer sciences.

The internal/external split characterizing this view illuminates the idea that this computational function can be detached from the body of the organism, which means that any number of contraptions might perform adequately the actions of the human mind.

First generation cognitive science developed a science of cognition constructed around the ‘Mind as Computer’ metaphor. This was labeled as AI (Artificial Intelligence).

SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) developed a science of cognition constructed around the ‘Cognition in the Body’ metaphor. Rather than thinking of cognition as a manipulator of symbols, human cognition and our bodies are a gestalt; so integrated as to constitute a functioning unit with properties not derivable by summation of its parts.

Quotes from The Meaning of the Body by Mark Johnson

Philosophy has always been visceral in connection as described in their words.

 

[Mr.Advocate]

Greetings Coberst,

After reading your second post, I'm not sure how this strengthens your original assertion.

Prior to Descartes, the Atomists such as Leucippus based their philosophy on monist materialism in the 5th century BCE. Science has simply returned to the Greeks and away from the catholic church.

It can also be said that the tiered system, or evolution of reason presented by Lakoff and Johnson is identical to what Aristotle presented in his writing on "the soul". AI pioneers in cognitive science such as Rodney Brooks of MIT, based their programs upon Aristotle before these two made a name for themselves.

If there is a Lakoff/Johnson quote that you can provide, that undermines reason in favor of instinct, I for one would be glad to read it. But I think that you are jumping to a conclusion that is unjustified. (I must admit that I have not spent much time reading these two, as I find linguistic philosophy to be extremely dull).

Like you, I do think that cognitive science is the most advanced study of the philosophy of consciousness and intelligence. However, I do not see a need to resort to a "visceral" approach to embodied mind philosophy.

Please explain your conclusion.

 

[coberst]

We have in our Western philosophy a traditional theory of faculty psychology wherein our reasoning is a faculty completely separate from the body. “Reason is seen as independent of perception and bodily movement.” It is this capacity of autonomous reason that makes us different in kind from all other animals. I suspect that many fundamental aspects of philosophy and psychology are focused upon declaring, whenever possible, the separateness of our species from all other animals.

This tradition of an autonomous reason began long before evolutionary theory and has held strongly since then without consideration, it seems to me, of the theories of Darwin and of biological science. Cognitive science has in the last three decades developed considerable empirical evidence supporting Darwin and not supporting the traditional theories of philosophy and psychology regarding the autonomy of reason. Cognitive science has focused a great deal of empirical science toward discovering the nature of the embodied mind.

The three major findings of cognitive science are:
The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

“These findings of cognitive science are profoundly disquieting [for traditional thinking] in two respects. First, they tell us that human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains. Second, these results tell us that our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real.”

All living creatures categorize. All creatures, as a minimum, separate eat from no eat and friend from foe. As neural creatures tadpole and wo/man categorize. There are trillions of synaptic connections taking place in the least sophisticated of creatures and this multiple synapses must be organized in some way to facilitate passage through a small number of interconnections and thus categorization takes place. Great numbers of different synapses take place in an experience and these are subsumed in some fashion to provide the category eat or foe perhaps.

Our categories are what we consider to be real in the world: tree, rock, animal…Our concepts are what we use to structure our reasoning about these categories. Concepts are neural structures that are the fundamental means by which we reason about categories.

Quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh”.