Alfred,
>Living
>beings suffer and die when isolated from their environment, whether
>in terms of energy, stuff or "innovation" ("news" if you want) i.e.
>coordinated reorganization of internal and external structures.
In thinking about the basic CHAT argument that children's consciousness is
constituted (not filled) by their social and material interactions and
wondering how that relates to adult development, I've been thinking lately
of the mid-20th century sensory deprivaion experiments that seemed to show
that pretty continuous and typical experience of the sensory world is
needed to stabilize our typical processes of thought and senses of
identity. I wonder if anyone has reconsidered these experiments from a
CHAT perspective; they could be a strong demonstration of the
distributed-ness of consciousness and of the continuity of developmental
processes throughout the lifespan.
I'm just dipping into this conversation, but the questions of mediation
remind me of Edwin Hutchins' argument against mediation in Cognition in the
Wild. Wanting to blur the boundaries of persons and environments in his
notion of functional systems, he suggests in place of mediation the notions
of communication and coordination across different
representational/computational media.
Paul Prior
Associate Professor (English)
Associate Director, Center for Writing Studies
p-prior@uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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