Our subjective mental life

[coberst]

Our subjective mental life

 

We constantly make subjective judgments regarding abstract things, such as morality, difficulty, importance; we also have subjective experiences such as affection, desire, and achievement.

 

The manner in which we reason, and visualize about these matters comes from other domains of experience. “These other domains are mostly sensorimotor domains…as when we conceptualize understanding an idea (subjective experience) in terms of grasping an object (sensorimotor experience)…The cognitive mechanism for such conceptualizations is conceptual metaphor, which allows us to use the physical logic of grasping to reason about understanding.”

 

Metaphor is pervasive throughout thought and language. Primary metaphors might properly be considered to be the fundamental building blocks for our thinking and our communication through language.

 

The theory of primary metaphors has four parts:

1) Johnson’s theory of conflation—in the early years of childhood the sensorimotor experiences are often conflated with the subjective (nonsensorimotor) experiences and judgments. An example might be when a newborn experiences the warmth of the embrace by its mother and that literal experience becomes conflated with a later subjective experience of affection. That is why our feeling of affection is accompanied by a sense of warmth. “During the early period of conflation, associations are automatically built up between the two domains. Later, during a period of differentiation, children then able to separate out the domains, but the cross-domain associations persist.”

 

2) Grady’s theory of primary metaphor—complex metaphors are like molecular structure with primary metaphors as the atomic elements.

 

3) Narayanan’s neural theory of metaphor—the associations made during conflation “are realized neurally in simultaneous activations that result in permanent neural connections being made across the neural networks that define conceptual domains…that constitute metaphorical entailments.”

 

4) Fauconnier and Turner’s theory of conceptual blending—Distinct separate conceptual domains can be coactivated thereby creating a blending, which creates new and unique conceptual blends.

 

“The integrated theory –the four parts together—has an overwhelming implication: We acquire a large system of primary metaphors automatically and unconsciously simply by functioning in the most ordinary of ways in the everyday world from our earliest days…we all naturally think using hundreds of primary metaphors.”

 

In summation, we have many hundreds of primary metaphors, which together provide a rich inferential structure, imagery, and qualitative feel. These primary metaphors permit our sensorimotor experiences to be used to create subjective experiences. Thus abstract ideas are created that are grounded in everyday experiences.

 

Do you have any idea how abstract ideas might be created other wise?

 

Quotes from Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson

[UncleAl]

(physical reality) - (empirical reality) = faith

 

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. Reality is not a complicated or subtle concept. Faith requires active ignorance and is thereby subject to vast discussion,

 

1)That which supports faith supports faith.

2)That which ignores faith supports faith.

3)That which contradicts faith supports faith - test of faith!

4)Anybody who criticizes is thereby proven unqualified to comment - and must be destroyed lest the faithful take offense.

 

Truths need not be believable, they merely self-consistently exist. Lies must be believable. Consequently, lies are much more believable than the truth. Strike a match - that's reality. Philosophize, metaphor, and situationally ethicize it into combustion a second time - we'll wait.

[coberst]

Al

 

"Philosophy in the Flesh" is a book about cognitive science. Cognitive science seeks to discover how we conceptualize, categorize, and reason. They are introducing a new empirical paradigm that began serious consideraion about three decades ago.

[CraigD]

Cognitive science seeks to discover how we conceptualize, categorize, and reason.

Coberst, as I believe you to be much more versed in cognitive science than I (despite me having a good bit of academic and professional experience in areas related to computer programming that are commonly deemed with the discipline), may I ask if you consider cognitive science to be, in general, predictive - focused on providing precise predictions which are then compared to previously unobserved external phenomena – or explanative – focused on developing explanation of previously observed, unexplained or inadequately explained phenomena?

 

In the 1980s, I was intrigued by a then fashionable branch of cybernetics commonly called “synthetic psychology” (a term coined, AFAIK, by Valentino Braitenberg). As interest in this approach decreased among people I knew who described themselves as (and were academically labeled) cognitive scientists, and their interests in areas I considered more conventional psychology increased, my interest in their discipline decreased. Braitenberg’s “synthetic psychology”, IMHO, is predictive science, similar to mathematical physics, while Lakoff’s “cognitive science” is results-focused art, similar to the psychology of Jung and other therapeutic psychodynamicists.

 

What do you think of this assessment?

[coberst]

Coberst, as I believe you to be much more versed in cognitive science than I (despite me having a good bit of academic and professional experience in areas related to computer programming that are commonly deemed with the discipline), may I ask if you consider cognitive science to be, in general, predictive - focused on providing precise predictions which are then compared to previously unobserved external phenomena – or explanative – focused on developing explanation of previously observed, unexplained or inadequately explained phenomena?

 

In the 1980s, I was intrigued by a then fashionable branch of cybernetics commonly called “synthetic psychology” (a term coined, AFAIK, by Valentino Braitenberg). As interest in this approach decreased among people I knew who described themselves as (and were academically labeled) cognitive scientists, and their interests in areas I considered more conventional psychology increased, my interest in their discipline decreased. Braitenberg’s “synthetic psychology”, IMHO, is predictive science, similar to mathematical physics, while Lakoff’s “cognitive science” is results-focused art, similar to the psychology of Jung and other therapeutic psychodynamicists.

 

What do you think of this assessment?

 

 

 

Lakoff is a linguist and Johnson is a professor of philosophy. This new paradigm of cognitive science calls them selves’ experimentalists. Their work is empirical and centered around the possibility of discovering how we think by examining our verbal habits. Many different sciences are involved in this effort and they take advantage of the new technology available for making brain scans and computer models.

 

 

It appears to me that CS has two paradigms, symbol manipulation (AI), and conceptual metaphor. When I speak of CS here I am speaking of the conceptual metaphor paradigm.

 

Cognitive science has radically attacked the traditional Western philosophical position that there is a dichotomy between perception and conception. This traditional view that perception is strictly a faculty of body and conception (the formation and use of concepts) is purely mental and wholly separate from and independent of our ability to perceive and move.

 

Cognitive science has introduced revolutionary theories that, if true, will change dramatically the views of Western philosophy. Advocates of the traditional view will, of course, “say that conceptual structure must have a neural realization in the brain, which just happens to reside in a body. But they deny that anything about the body is essential for characterizing what concepts are.”

 

The cognitive science claim is that ”the very properties of concepts are created as a result of the way the brain and body are structured and the way they function in interpersonal relations and in the physical world.”

 

The embodied-mind hypothesis therefore radically undercuts the perception/conception distinction. In an embodied mind, it is conceivable that the same neural system engaged in perception (or in bodily movements) plays a central role in conception. Indeed, in recent neural modeling research, models of perceptual mechanisms and motor schemas can actually do conception work in language learning and in reasoning.

 

A standard technique for checking out new ideas is to create computer models of the idea and subject that model to simulated conditions to determine if the model behaves as does the reality. Such modeling techniques are used constantly in projecting behavior of meteorological parameters.

 

Neural computer models have shown that the types of operations required to perceive and move in space require the very same type of capability associated with reasoning. That is, neural models capable of doing all of the things that a body must be able to do when perceiving and moving can also perform the same kinds of actions associated with reasoning, i.e. inferring, categorizing, and conceiving.

 

Our understanding of biology indicates that the body has a marvelous ability to do as any handyman does, i.e. make do with what is at hand. The body would, it seems logical to assume, take these abilities that exist in all creatures that move and survive in space and with such fundamental capabilities reshape it through evolution to become what we now know as our ability to reason. The first budding of the reasoning ability exists in all creatures that function as perceiving, moving, surviving, creatures.

 

Cognitive science has, it seems to me, connected our ability to reason with our bodies in such away as to make sense out of connecting reason with our biological evolution in ways that Western philosophy has not done, as far as I know.

 

It seems to me that Western philosophical tradition as always tried to separate mind from body and in so doing has never been able to show how mind, as was conceived by this tradition, could be part of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Cognitive science now provides us with a comprehensible model for grounding all that we are both bodily and mentally into a unified whole that makes sense without all of the attempts to make mind as some kind of transcendent, mystical, reality unassociated with biology.

 

Quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh”