[Xmca-l] Re: Rogers day

[Douglas Williams]

 Hi, Annalisa
I'll respond inline, but preface responses with an asterisk to separate them. 
While I'm making various assertions here, I would suggest you and others treat them as...suggestions, not assertions. The benefit of an interaction on XMCA is (to my mind at least) less to speak in the form of knowing, but rather in the form of seeking...so treat these words as sentences that do not mean fully what they say, and require elaboration and development. Keep in mind that I am, as it were, at this point, a hobbyist, and you are the professionals. 

    On ‎Friday‎, ‎September‎ ‎7‎, ‎2018‎ ‎11‎:‎49‎:‎33‎ ‎PM‎ ‎PDT, Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu> wrote:  
 
 
Hi Doug and venerable others,




Yours is a very beautifully written explanation, and very dense to unpack.





One question I have is that, yes, given that meaning can extend beyond the heuristic framework of complexes from which it arises – or am I making a mistake by saying meaning rather than language? I am forced to consider how a symbol becomes anchored, as you use the concept of symbol. How does that work? It can't just float in the air at the moment I comprehend it. 




* Coming back to this after a few days, I'm not sure if I fully identify what is (I suppose) my own context. But as for anchoring, I think it is shared experience: In shared actions; in Vygotsky's words, external speech condensed into predicates, which leads me back to Biomechanics, Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and the search for a language of action that can be represented in language or in imagery, but may have its roots, ultimately, in gestures. 




*Richard Boleslavsky, who is of a different theater group (Moscow Art Theater) than Meyerhold--and Mayerhold went out of his way, as everyone in Russia seems to have done about every other intellectual school, of criticizing Boleslavsky's theater as a group of impudent puppies who were misguided, nevertheless probably reflects a common theatrical concern of the time when Boleslavsky writes this in Acting: The First Six Lessons:




*"It helps a student of the theatre to notice everything unusual and out of the ordinary in everyday life. It builds his memory, his storage memory, with all the visible manifestations of the human spirit. It makes him sensitive to sincerity and to make-believe. It develops his sensory and muscular memory, and facilitates his adjustment to any business he may be required to do in a part. It opens his eyes to the full extent in appreciation of different personalities and values in people and works of art. And lastly, Madame, it enriches his inner life by full and extensive consumption of everything in outward life." 




*And that only works in a community of shared experiences...and because this was the object of at least part of Eisenstein's search, maybe even common innate gestures of communication. That is at least what Meyerhold hinted at, though I suspect, as Eisenstein ended up with Meyerhold's notes in the end (another common trope: he hid Meyerhold's private papes in his dacha, and I suppose Elena Luria ended up with them in hers), Meyerhold had intuition without evidence. 




*But the evidence emerges:



A Cross-Species Study of Gesture and Its Role in Symbolic Development: Implications for the Gestural Theory of Language Evolution


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A Cross-Species Study of Gesture and Its Role in Symbolic Development: I...

Using a naturalistic video database, we examined whether gestures scaffolded the symbolic development of a langu...
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Were it so, then I could have endless numbers of mentalist symbols stored in a "shelving system" whereby one symbol could reside disconnected from all the rest. 




*I don't think so, because in social species, the ultimate purpose of symbols evoking memory is to share an interaction or a perception with another member of one's species. It's certainly possible (Luria, Mind of a Mnemonist), but then it is an We appropriate new concepts--new perceptions--only to the extent that they are communicated within the range of symbols that we understand partially, so that we are in a zone of proximal development for perceiving the perceptions of another. Action predates speech, gesture predates word, but while gesture perhaps--for I suspect that was what Eisenstein, and Mayerhold, were after--is an innate means of communication that can be evoked across language and experience boundaries, language added to it is agglutinative: It adds and expands the sense of gesture, and because we are social creatures, we 







And perhaps I would require some kind of Dewey decimal system or registry in order to retrieve the symbol at which time I could utilize it. This doesn't seem to carry any economy. It does borrow the mechanics of computer memory access though, and so again we are borrowing a metaphor that as you say has become dead. 




*That is where memory consolidation comes in to play. As Milman Parry and Albert Lord found in their studies of epic storytellers, (oral-formulaic theory), we build memory palaces from our shared experiences, and construct socially preserved frameworks of memory consolidation and communication. The "wine-dark sea" may be a dead metaphor, in the sense that it is fixed in shared experience (though that one is more dead than most), just as many words (rule, reign count, reckon, rechnung, rekening, rechenunga, regning) have a common root in the metonymy of the things that rulers do--namely count, keep records, require accounting--but that doesn't change the common basis of the words in shared experience, and, though the origins may be less fully visible to us now, the ghost of the action of accounting is preserved in the senses of words derived from the action. 






The problem is when the metaphor limits our ability to reason in the world, "in the world" being the most important aspect to emphasize. 




*That puts us back in the world of Whorf/Sapir, most famously of Sapir's blower, which forced his insured clients to burn down their hide drying warehouse because they were trapped by the metaphor. But this is the least active sense of shared experience. More interesting is the Anna Karenina case that Vygotsky cites, of "Way:icnb,dy", Icnaot, stymfwh (p 237), in which alignment of action and feeling uses language as a shorthand. 




*In short, I think that once a shared experience is established, the whole direction of human communication evolution is to increase the capability of human communication to be more abbreviated and complex than I suspect we usually perceive. We take for granted shared physiological embodiment (Cog Linguistics), shared primate gestures, presumably also derived largely from embodiment, shared sociocultural interactions (which makes the foreigner's gestures foreign). combined with other rules, systems of hierarchy, and other contexts in which communication takes place. These are part of the message, but they are not IN the message, but rather the CONTEXT in which the message takes place. 




I contend that the metaphor of the computer for human cognition is a dead end, because it just doesn't make sense to limit our thinking based upon units of a machine that did not exist even a hundred years ago, where human cognition has been around a lot longer. That's like trying to use a yardstick to measure the sun. On the other hand, there has been some utility to employ the computer as a metaphor for thinking, because it may have relinquished us from a behaviorist model of stimulus/response without knowing what is inside the black box. With the computer metaphor, we could start to imagine what was in the black box. And that is the power of the metaphor, that we can map one thing to another and try it out, play and experiment. Is this like that? How much is it like that? How different is it from that? etc.





What fails is how much we don't want to let the metaphor go when the aspects of cognition fail to be effectively represented by the computer metaphor. Some would rather deny the aspects of cognition than give up the darn metaphor. 




*That is why I think Don Norman (UC San Diego Cog Psy) was cautious about skeumorphism. To think of computer files literally as physical objects placed in a file room would limit what you could imagine you could do with them. (How can one search for one world in hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper in file folders?) Metaphor gives and takes. 




* But that is where language comes in, I think: A hand has a physical limitation to what I can grasp. However, I can comprehend a great deal more than I can grasp. And this, as Sarah Boysen has so elegantly shown, is something that chimpanzees no less can do immediately as soon as one abstracts a physical object into a symbol:




Chimp Cognition | in Chapter 08: Animal Behavior and Cognition



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Chimp Cognition | in Chapter 08: Animal Behavior and Cognition

Russell A. Dewey, PhD

Chimps are known for complex cognitive abilities
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If the only requirement for the symbols I (as-if) carry around in my head was that I could comprehend them to use them, perhaps like identifying a philips screwdriver from a flathead screwdriver because I know that they are each useful based upon what type of screw I'm trying to negotiate from a hinge, let's say, there is still in my memory a recollection (re-hyphen-collection) of the context of these tools and their utility. The point being that the tool can never be decontextualized. Even to use the word "tool" means it is to be used for a particular application, it implies a context. Sure, any tool can be used in a different and innovative way, but this doesn't negate how the tool got to be a tool in the first place. 




*And that is where I think I disagree. The moment you separate an object out of a string of metonymic sequences--a pictogramic story of actions recalled--and turn it into a symbol one step removed from the action, at that moment--or so Boysen's experiments with chimpanzees seem to show-- you have created a mind-tool that enables you to escape the tyranny of actions and consequences, and have opened up a tertiary area in which one is free to imagine a world of (as yet) impossible reality. Imagination is created by the symbol. 





*There is a difference between a tool and an object, in this regard. Because the tool is unified with a context (of utility), an object on the other hand, is removed from its context. It is an abstraction and just like an item discovered in an archeological dig, after hundreds of years in the ground, the only way we can come to understand it is by trying to suss out the context, like the scene of a crime, what happened to make this dead body dead? What is it like that we already know about? etc. 







But context doesn't reside inside the metaphor, but pervades the metaphor as embodied meaning, and extends beyond it, so to speak, connecting or mapping the metaphor to its environment in the world. This environmental aspect that I'm referencing assists in economy, but it has the sense of being "invisible" because of our human attentional focus upon utility and meaning, rather than holding the entire contextual view in our heads. A symbol, as an object, becomes harder to utilize the more it extends away from its more-grounded locii (within a context), but those who are familiar with the symbol still carry the contextual framework. It is a framework not the entire world, after all. 




*Yes, to the extent that we want to capture the original meaning of the object in its own lifeworld. But I very much doubt that we read Jane Austin's novels in the same sense that Jane Austin wrote them. We see Jane Austin's damsels in economic distress, for want of marriageable young men with 10,000 Pounds per annum from the family estate and funds (a ridiculously, literally rent-seeking form of life that has no analog in most people's lives today) with our own precarious economic situations, and with our own romantic engagements. We project our own contexts into symbols, into language and narrative, and recast them to fit our own socioeconomic concerns. our actions are bound in their times. Our symbols, because they are disassociated from direct links with actions, are, or can be, timeless. And at least dating back to Alfred North Whitehead, and certainly the Cog Linguistics people believe this, with evidence, we are able to evoke quite complex implicit narratives without being aware we do so. Whorf/Sapir, G.H. Mead, Kenneth Burke and John Dewey seem also to propose the same, as of course does Vygotsky: "A word in context means both more and less than the same word in isolation: More, because it acquires new context: Less, because its meaning is limited and narrowed by the context." 







One example of this (which tests my cobwebby math memory) is the formula of 2πr equaling the circumference of the circle. (2πr) is a complex of (2) multiplied by (3.14...) multiplied by (the radius of the circle), where each of these number values are symbols in their own right, but behind this economic and compact formula, which is a handy tool, is a context that need not be unpacked every time we invoke the formula, such that2πr comes to be seen as a single unit of meaning, that is (2πr) references -> (the circumference of a circle). That reference only appears to be removed from its heuristic framework (and not just because I used parentheses), still the connection remains because the world of circles shows the merit of the formula every time, and this is not because of the formula, which is just a description of circles, but because the circumference of all circular items in the world do indeed have this proportion in relation to their radii fairly predictably. That reality is located in the immanent world, not inside the symbol. The symbol is a reference to the world itself, but we can't remove the world for the sake of the symbol. 




* Ah, but now you are in the world of science, and reason, with statements that can be falsified and out of the world of complexes, in which random events of experience can combine with sociocultural memes, and new tentative reconceptualizations of experience can be formed out of even the most activity-restricted objects. That, to me, is the magic of communication, and the potential of symbolic narrative. If you've read my paper on romantic comedy (as I recall you mentioning), and perhaps on Star Wars, then you can see the degree to which recombinant experience is the agent, ultimately, not just of cultural conveyance through paradigmatic narratives, but literally the means of human freedom, and the agents of cultural reconstruction--the very thing that Plato, with his somewhat totalitarian oligarchy in The Republic, rightly feared, so long ago, could be the agency of dissent and rebellion. 







Just try. 

*OK:

http://static.nautil.us/4676_ea6979872125d5acbac6068f186a0359.png






But the tricky thing here is that it is our attention that *does* (as-if) remove the world, and this is for economy, because the world doesn't have to be uploaded into the mind in order to use the formula or to utilize the symbol, because we are inside the world and it remains, but instead our attention is what morphs with the affordances that the world presents to us, in this case the affordance of a circle.




*But affordances offer (to borrow a term from Freud) channels of meaning, to which we naturally tend. But because we are sociocultural creatures,. who these days have to struggle (unlike animals, as Temple Grandin points out) to see the world as it IS, as opposed to the sociocultural filters through which we see the world, we are constantly inclined toward the channels that our social interactions incline us to perceive. One of Gibson's own examples of an affordance--the redness of fruit to indicate its wholesomeness for consumption--was misread by Europeans, confronted with an alien fruit, as a sign of its potential for being poisonous. Hemlock had red spots, and a few other poisonous things; God made things to communicate their purpose, and red was a warning. Confronted with a hitherto unknown reddish fruit, quickly named the wolf-peach, the tomato became an object of fear and surreptitious hope for a couple centuries before becoming a staple ingredient in cooking, and even then, in hotter countries, where its self-evidently dangerous qualities were tempered by the heat of Italian summers. 




I would say that our attention becomes fragmented by the symbol, so we can streamline our cognitive resources for economy's sake. Just experience 




*I think I'd say concentrated and abstracted--the complexity of human communication is what strikes me, its evocativeness, its depth--so that we can mean so much more than we realize we mean. But perhaps that's the poet in me. 







(2πr)  





versus 

(2) multiplied by (3.14...) multiplied by (the radius of the circle)
We need less attention for the first symbol than the second one, both signifying the circumference of a circle. Nothing changed about circles in the world in the process. 






I am doubtful whether comprehension of the tool, as I understand you to describe a symbol, can ever be disconnected from the world, because then wouldn't it be the case that we would never be able to explain the meaning of 2πr to another person once we comprehended it? The framework would be completely lost and the symbol un-anchored. We would know what the symbol could represent, but we wouldn't know why, it would be an ahistorical object. Perhaps we might forget momentarily, but then the world is there with its circles for us to reference, like reading the world as a dictionary, to remind us, re-anchor us. 




*It is one tool, learned within a specific community of practice. A tennis racket, by itself, is a totally inexplicable object. In action, in a community of practice, it takes its meaning, and its form becomes action. 




When we peel a banana, our attention is on the peel for a short time, until it is removed, and then we throw it away and enjoy the fruit, but the peel only disappears from our attention, not from the world. In fact the entire world may drop away as we focus upon the banana and the sensual experience of its smell, texture, and flavor, etc. I suggest that it is the same with what you deem symbols.





Another "inverted" aspect of this might be seen in the palace memory, and how spatial imaginings (contexts) can help the capacity of memory, but that is because there is such a thing as a framework of a conceptual house, a context that resides in the embodied world. We had to know and experience a house-in-the-world to imagine one. Here is a framework erected so that memories can be "put inside" for later access. Some folks using this method can forget about the item because they recollect the room first and survey what is in it, based upon location in this imaginary room, to retrieve it again. Like knowing I have all my books on cognitive science on the third shelf from the top, but I might not know exactly their names until I stand in front of the shelf to examine them. This is a perfect example of the economy of context.





That's why it must be that these "symbols," as in a memory palace, are not mental apparitions in the head, but something embodied, because of knowing up and down, right from left, as one travels the memory palace, room by room, can only happen with a body. 





This doesn't mean that a person has identical associations or contexts or what have you for each word or symbol as another person, it just means that for each word or symbol there is a history behind it and that history continues to grow and develop with every use in a context-in-the-world, making that "meaning" unique, uniquely developed, and uniquely appreciated by that person.





I believe the same can be said of rituals. They are enactments of the world through symbols that reference the world in some capacity, and we just unpack rituals to relive an attentional aspect of the world in order to keep their coherency and currency alive in us.  





In a certain way, rituals can be a way of garbage collection, in that they clear away the cruft that might have settled from the last time we had the ritual. Re-enactment affords an opportunity for reorganizing our meaning-making, for re-anchoring our connection to the past, to family, to any embodied connection-in-the-world. 




* I think I agree with this, though not in the form of garbage collection. I think more in terms of re-creation, repurposing. There is nothing wrong with reading Jane Austin in the specific context of a 19th Century woman's socioeconomic positioning in a semi-feudal society. But that, I submit, is not what makes Jane Austin popular today. Narratives evolve with the interactions their audiences bring to them. 




I realize that there may be some things I'm missing in my argument above, but I am counting upon others to point that out for me, and to them I say, in advance, thank you. :) 




* I suspect there are a thousand things I'm overstating, understating, or neglecting. But that is what I would hope to learn by laying out my bits of string and broken glass before those who, I trust, can look upon them and shape such mosaics as I might have dreamed of, and forgotten upon awakening. 




*Regards,

*Doug





Kind regards,




Annalisa















  
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