Realism: Evolution-Based

[coberst]

Realism: Metaphysical, Representational, Symbol-Based, and Evolution-Based

What is real and how can we know it?

Aristotle gave us classical metaphysical realism. Aristotle concluded that we can know reality because our mind grasped directly the essences of things in the world.

Descartes gave us representational realism. Ideas in the mind were representational of things in the world. Ideas correspond to things in the world.

Analytic Philosophy gave us symbol-based realism. I will not even try to say what this means because I do not know and it appears to me that there are multiple variations on this concept.

Cognitive science has given us evolution-based realism. This is also called embodied-realism because it has abandoned the mind/body dichotomy that characterizes other forms of realism and is convinced that natural selection is the process by which the human species has developed.

There are two major world views of cognitive scientists; Artificial Intelligence and embodied-realism. AI is a symbol based realism and embodied-realism is an evolution-based realism.

The ‘bible’ for embodied-realism is “Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson. The paradigm of this cognitive science is ‘conceptual metaphor’. The fundamental findings from which all principles flow are:
• The mind is inherently embodied.
• Thought is mostly unconscious.
• Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

The ‘bible’ states that “What we take to be true [real] in a situation depends on our embodied understanding of the situation, which is in turn shaped by all these factors.”

It seems to me that all of Western traditional philosophy and thus almost everyone’s comprehension is based upon classical metaphysical reality or some aspect of that philosophy. If so, I would expect all of these forces to find error in this Book. That does not mean that there is not error but only time will tell. Darwin is still being attacked as misguided constantly by many if not most citizens in the US.

[Ierrellus]

Coberst,
I've found that cognitive psychology, based on Darwinian principles (Cosimedes & Tooby), is not well accepted here. Deifications of mind refuse to admit its material origins. No one wants to believe that humans who can place a craft on Mars came from a primordial soup of proteins or perhaps had great apes as ancestors. Not many wish to admit that matter can evolve into mind and spirit. it's a matter of pride, of seeing things in the valley as lowly from the mountaintop. Semantic chess games yield only concepts of relativism and infinite regress (See Rorty on this.) Language criticism only clarifies language use; it has no use for predecessory or precursory properties inherent in language.
Yet our mental estrangement from our being in and of matter prophesy our doom as a species. Unless philosphy can address what is human, not parts or polarites of what is human, it will fail to adress also the essential survival needs of humans.

[kennethamy]

Coberst,
I've found that cognitive psychology, based on Darwinian principles (Cosimedes & Tooby), is not well accepted here. Deifications of mind refuse to admit its material origins. No one wants to believe that humans who can place a craft on Mars came from a primordial soup of proteins or perhaps had great apes as ancestors. Not many wish to admit that matter can evolve into mind and spirit. it's a matter of pride, of seeing things in the valley as lowly from the mountaintop.

It seems to me that what you say would be appropriate to attacks on Evolution in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But certainly not now. There are few philosophers (actually none I know of) who deny the evolution of many and his intellect from matter, nor who deny the close relation between man and the great apes. Daniel Dennett's great book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea typifies most contemporary analytic philosophy (what goes on on the Dark Continent I have no idea. Maybe you are right about them). But you say that no one want to believe that humans who can place a craft on Mars.... came from a primordial soup. But Dennett certainly does. And so does that linguist, Pinsky. So you are wrong about them. So who can you mention who is in that class of those masses of philosophers who don't believe in Darwinism? Or have you erected a strawman? William Jennings Bryan no longer is around.

[Hoodoo Ulove]

• The mind is inherently embodied.
• Thought is mostly unconscious.
• Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.What makes you think that analytic philosophy is hostile to these propositions?

[coberst]

What makes you think that analytic philosophy is hostile to these propositions?



I am not well versed in Analytic Philosophy, which has, it seems to me, a myriad of paradigms that I find to be very confusing.

This is a summation of this philosophy that I have derived from “Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson.

1) To analyze language is to analyze thought.
2) Linguistic meaning is mind-independent, objective, and publicly accessible.
3) The meaning of a linguistic expression is given by what it can correspond to in the world.
4) A sentence is true if the words fit the state of affairs in the world.
5) All meaning is literal.
6) Meaning is disembodied.
7) We can just by thinking come to understand the mind accurately and with absolute certainty.
8) No empirical study of language or thought is necessary. We need only training in philosophical analysis via self-reflection to answer philosophical questions. Empirical study is not necessary.

[kennethamy]

I am not well versed in Analytic Philosophy, which has, it seems to me, a myriad of paradigms that I find to be very confusing.

This is a summation of this philosophy that I have derived from “Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson.

1) To analyze language is to analyze thought.
2) Linguistic meaning is mind-independent, objective, and publicly accessible.
3) The meaning of a linguistic expression is given by what it can correspond to in the world.
4) A sentence is true if the words fit the state of affairs in the world.
5) All meaning is literal.
6) Meaning is disembodied.
7) We can just by thinking come to understand the mind accurately and with absolute certainty.
8) No empirical study of language or thought is necessary. We need only training in philosophical analysis via self-reflection to answer philosophical questions. Empirical study is not necessary.

Insofar as one can understand some of this (What does "meaning is disembodied" mean for heaven's sake?) it is false. "The meaning of a linguistic expression is given by what it can correspond to in the world" is actually anti-analytic philosophy which has as a central precept that the meaning of a term or an expression consists in the way it is used. Obviously it is just false that the expression, "I am glad to meet you" as a greeting, has anything to do with correspondence. And the researches of J.L. Austin into "performative expressions" like, "I promise" gives the lie to this description.

Lakoff knows very little about analytic philosophy, or, so far as I can tell, philosophy in general. I know no philosopher of language who heeds him or even takes him seriously.

[coberst]

Insofar as one can understand some of this (What does "meaning is disembodied" mean for heaven's sake?) it is false. "The meaning of a linguistic expression is given by what it can correspond to in the world" is actually anti-analytic philosophy which has as a central precept that the meaning of a term or an expression consists in the way it is used. Obviously it is just false that the expression, "I am glad to meet you" as a greeting, has anything to do with correspondence. And the researches of J.L. Austin into "performative expressions" like, "I promise" gives the lie to this description.

Lakoff knows very little about analytic philosophy, or, so far as I can tell, philosophy in general. I know no philosopher of language who heeds him or even takes him seriously.

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.”

[b]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.”[b]

[coberst]

Insofar as one can understand some of this (What does "meaning is disembodied" mean for heaven's sake?) it is false. "The meaning of a linguistic expression is given by what it can correspond to in the world" is actually anti-analytic philosophy which has as a central precept that the meaning of a term or an expression consists in the way it is used. Obviously it is just false that the expression, "I am glad to meet you" as a greeting, has anything to do with correspondence. And the researches of J.L. Austin into "performative expressions" like, "I promise" gives the lie to this description.

Lakoff knows very little about analytic philosophy, or, so far as I can tell, philosophy in general. I know no philosopher of language who heeds him or even takes him seriously.

You might find this conversation with Lakoff interesting
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lakoff/lakoff_p4.html
The following are some excerpts from that conversation.
Concepts and reasoning must be independent of the sensory-motor system, since the sensory motor system, being embodied, cannot be a form of disembodied abstract symbol-manipulation.

Language too - if it was to fit the symbol-manipulation paradigm - had to be literal, independent of imagery, and independent of the sensory-motor system.

From this perspective, the brain could only be a means to implement abstract "mind" - wetware on which the "programs of the mind" happened to be implementable. Mind on this view does not arise from and is not shaped by the brain. Mind is a disembodied abstraction that our brains happen to be able to implement. These were not empirical results, but rather followed from philosophical assumptions.

In the mid-1970's, cognitive science was finally given a name and outfitted with a society and a journal. The people who formed the field accepted the symbol-manipulation paradigm. I was originally one of them (on the basis of my early work on generative semantics) and gave one of the invited inaugural lectures at the first meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. But just around the time that the field officially was recognized and organized around the symbol-manipulation paradigm, empirical results started coming in calling the paradigm itself into question.

This startling collection of results pointed toward the idea that mind was not disembodied - not characterizable in terms of the manipulation of meaningless symbols independent of the brain and body, that is, independent of the sensory- motor system and our functioning in the world. Mind instead is embodied, not in the trivial sense of being implementable in a brain, but in the crucial sense that conceptual structure and the mechanisms of reason arise ultimately and are shaped by from the sensory-motor system of the brain and body.

[TruthPrevails]

Mind instead is embodied, not in the trivial sense of being implementable in a brain, but in the crucial sense that conceptual structure and the mechanisms of reason arise ultimately and are shaped by from the sensory-motor system of the brain and body.Agree with your views.
Another crucial aspect is the brain-mind interaction with other humans and the environment. Without these essential interactions there won't be a 'normal' human mind.
'Emergent Theory' also provide a basis on how the mind emerged through evolutionary forces.
IMO, most non-theists would have no problem accepting an embodied mind, in contrast to the majority of theists/zombies who would surrender and enable some 'greater-mind' or God to control their physical brain.

Most living things higher up the evolutionary ladder have some kind of mind of their own, albeit in different stages of development and capabilities.
In terms of realism; evolutionary-based, IMO, the great question should be directed towards 'consciousness' not the mind in general.
What is the basis of this human consciousness that enable it to reflect on it's own kind of 'relative' reality?

[coberst]

Agree with your views.
Another crucial aspect is the brain-mind interaction with other humans and the environment. Without these essential interactions there won't be a 'normal' human mind.
'Emergent Theory' also provide a basis on how the mind emerged through evolutionary forces.
IMO, most non-theists would have no problem accepting an embodied mind, in contrast to the majority of theists/zombies who would surrender and enable some 'greater-mind' or God to control their physical brain.

Most living things higher up the evolutionary ladder have some kind of mind of their own, albeit in different stages of development and capabilities.
In terms of realism; evolutionary-based, IMO, the great question should be directed towards 'consciousness' not the mind in general.
What is the basis of this human consciousness that enable it to reflect on it's own kind of 'relative' reality?


Is it not obvious that the basis of human consciousness is in our non human ancestors just as is everything else we humans have?

Are not all animals conscious? Isn’t human consciousness just a more advanced manifestation of what all animals have?

[Ierrellus]

Coberst,
In the evolution of human consciousness reason and its offspring logic are newcomers. (Circa 40 million BCE, according to research on prefrontal cortexial brain development.) They are tools in the survival constructions of a mind. A tool is not an answer. It is a device, at least in consciousness, for clarifying or taking a new look at what exists. It is built on its precusory tools of emotions and drives. While I empathize with those who look for static absolutes in any plateau of mental development, I cannot consider their arguments experientially valid. As tools, reason and logic may be essential for doing archeological digs into the prehistory of mental concepts. But, to see these tools as ultimate answers to the human problem of coming to grips with change inherent in motion is at best adressing existential need and at worst, intellectual snobbery and dishonesty. Whoever cannot account for flux has alligned with the perfect heaven of religious afterlifes, with stop the world, I want to get off the merry-g0-round, not with the hard problem of coming to grips with the pains of possibilty.

[coberst]

Ierrellus

??

[Ierrellus]

Coberst,
I apologize if I have confused your thread by giving current definitions of the evolution of human consciousness as considered in cognitive psychology, neuroscience and contemporary philosophy. I thought you knew me well enough to know where I'm coming from and that I present researched responses to good threads. I realize I'm not always wecome here; but, knowing I cannot ever be always right, I try to be always honest. I could suggest reading lists for you on the subjects brought up by your OP, but that would be presumptious of me to do so. If you prefer opinions, go for it.