minds of our own?

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Wed, 09 Jul 97 23:50:59 EDT

Paul Prior reasonably asks if we can get to 'persons with a
brain' having 'affordances of their own' without resorting to 'a
sovereign mind behind a hard boundary'.

The problem I guess is 'affordances of their own'. I cannot even
quite understand the notion of 'affordance' apart from
participation in the larger system. Aren't affordances
fundamentally _relational_, rather than intrinsic properties?
isn't that the appeal of the idea?

People talk and cats communicate in their own ways, even as
members of the same immediate interactional household. This has
to do no doubt with development within phylogenetically semi-
conserved pathways, but the same issue arises about evolution.
The species is not, I think, the most reasonable unit of
evolution. Species do not evolve outside of ecologies, cannot do
so. It's all co-evolution. If there are evolutions of
affordances, they are also fundamentally relational. The
evolutionary issue, for me, is the evolution of human-cat
communication and where it may be headed in a few thousand
generations. If people talk it is because there has been someone
to talk to and some point in the larger relevant ecology of human
for doing so. If cats communicate in their ways, likewise.
Interspecies communication is not much studied. Yes, there are
species-specific affordances, but only if we insist on seeing
them as properties of one species at a time, when they must
logically be properties of the evolving systems of interactions.

We all know there is a long history of humans trying to define
ourselves as different from (and better than) other species (and
not just species of animals). Perhaps modernism has exaggerated
this old habit: we parcel everything out into isolable units with
inherent properties. I don't think it works as an intellectual
strategy, at least not beyond the realms of simple physics and
chemistry. Species are probably not a good unit of analysis, and
I am not the first person, and probably one of the least
qualified in biology as a discipline, to think so. Finding
something better is not easy, we are only just gaining the
technical capacities to model complex co-evolution of mixed-
species populations/communities.

Think Leibniz, think Spinoza. Each species is a mirror, each
organism a record/product/generator of the evolutionary
history/future of the ecologies of its/each other's
ancestors/descendants.

For a view of what's different in ecosystems with meaning-making
practices, my sketch is given in chapter 6 of _Textual Politics_.
The main point is that such ecosocial systems _are different_,
have emergent properties, that these depend on the semiosis, that
the semiosis depends (often, not always) on the role of humans in
the networks, etc. I think it's anthropocentric enough, and
admits it (the specification hierarchy converges like a bulls-eye
on -- surprise! -- us, or at least our kind of system from which
the rest is viewed).

JAY.

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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU