[Xmca-l] Re: Andy Blunden on unit of analysis and Huw on cognition

[HENRY SHONERD]

Great! Thanks, Martin.
That leaves mediated activity, where the mediation is digital. Is there a “feel” to digital cognition? Cyborgs and synths suggest some kind of individual consciousness. Do synths and cyborgs have electric dreams? Maybe the “hard problem” of consciousness is solved through technology. But it’s collective. And it spells the next stage of the human experiment. Who out there has read Arthur Clark’s Childhood’s End? I am Buridan’s Ass looking at your sign.
Henry

 

> On Sep 9, 2020, at 5:24 PM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:
> 
> Hi Henry,
> 
> Yes, phenomenology has connections with 4E cognition. Often Merleau-Ponty is the phenomenologist who is cited, but also Heidegger. One of the contemporary philosophers involved in 4E is Shaun Gallagher, and his training is in phenomenology.
> 
> Martin

Ha,ha!
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On Sep 9, 2020, at 4:44 PM, HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com <mailto:hshonerd@gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> Hello Martin and Andy,
>> Academia shoots articls at me all the time that they think I might like. I just got one that investigates coropreality in the digital age. It makes use of Husserl. I am captured by embodied cognition (embodied, extended, enactive and embedded) as in the writing of Hutto. Do either of you find resonance between embodied cogntion, phenomenology and mediated activity? Feel free to disregard the question, if it sounds too zany. As in, “that way lies madness”.:)
>> Henry
>> 
>>> On Sep 8, 2020, at 6:47 PM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net <mailto:mpacker@cantab.net>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Andy, I didn’t mean to suggest that there are no problems with Husserl’s approach!  :)
>>> 
>>> As you diagnosed, his position is basically Kantian: that is, he assumes that the ‘essence’ of an entity — an object of experience — lies not in the entity but in consciousness. That motivates him to try to strip away everything empirical — language, culture, way of life — so as to isolate the contribution of ‘pure,’ ‘transcendental’ consciousness. And that way lies madness! For one thing, how could he communicate the results of his investigation if language is to be distrusted? 
>>> 
>>> I find Husserl more interesting for the people he influenced than for his own work. For example, the way Shpet reworked Husserl’s phenomenology and so in turn influenced Vygotsky.
>>> 
>>> Martin
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On Sep 8, 2020, at 7:35 PM, Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org <mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> As I said, Martin, "I don't know Husserl very well." I read him a little over 20 years ago, following on from reading Hegel, and was disappointed by the subjective turn. I am sure you are right, and that my reaction was "exaggerated a bit." A study of experience necessarily includes a element of scepticism about the existence of the objects perceived, that is true. Hegel dealt with this by locating the concepts acquired by the individual in the way of life in which the subject acts and thinks. In this way the moment of scepticism is located in the entire way of life and ways of life are necessarily realistic as totalities. This is not something I saw in Husserl, so his scepticism falls back to that of Kant. At that point, I laid Husserl aside, ... but of course that was probably premature. I do recognise that Phenomenology did go on to grapple with social action as best it could.
>>>> 
>>>> andy
>>>> 
>>>> Andy Blunden
>>>> Hegel for Social Movements <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://brill.com/view/title/54574__;!!Mih3wA!U4EAcxwt3mcEh1KZUYNTjDzjHix0oTl2ZHTivTil-KH8vQ7F7gUuUUbu3dvAvYkX0M2fJA$>
>>>> Home Page <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm__;!!Mih3wA!U4EAcxwt3mcEh1KZUYNTjDzjHix0oTl2ZHTivTil-KH8vQ7F7gUuUUbu3dvAvYmY4ICBaA$>
>>>> On 9/09/2020 7:22 am, Martin Packer wrote:
>>>>> Andy, I think you’ve exaggerated a bit the differences between Husserl and Dewey. Husserl’s views of the goal of phenomenology changed over his life. (And his students, who included Gustav Shpet, Edith Stein, and Roman Ingarden, each had their own views.) But broadly speaking, Husserl considered phenomenology to be the study of experience from a first-person perspective. That was not an unreasonable idea, given the way we generally think about experience, as a phenomenon of subjectivity. As such, phenomenology is an investigation that certainly includes the ‘what’ of experience: the objects that a person perceives, thinks about, feels about, and acts towards. But Husserl wanted to bracket any presuppositions about the *existence* of those objects in order to focus on and understand the active, constituting role that he believed consciousness plays in any and every experience. That’s to say, he didn’t believe that an experience is simply a passive copy or reflection of its object. 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Martin
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>> 
> 

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