To document : the most spectaular :
[[
For more than twenty years, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has been studying,
and
attempting to cultivate, the linguistic and cognitive skills of a
number of
laboratory-reared primates.
...
[[ ...
Most notably,
Kanzi has proven himself capable of comprehending spoken English
utterances
of a grammatical and semantic complexity equal to (and in some
cases surpassing)
that mastered by a normal two-and-a-half-year-old human child.
... ]]
... And there could be many reservations !
Haydi
--- On Tue, 9/8/09, ulvi icil <ulvi.icil@gmail.com> wrote:
From: ulvi icil <ulvi.icil@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Consciousness, Piaget
To: mcole@weber.ucsd.edu, "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>
Date: Tuesday, September 8, 2009, 9:53 AM
First, glory to strikers then !
Ulvi
2009/9/5, Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>:
Haydi-- Animals are conscious, but human consciousness, by my
interpretation
(you read the paper arguing for the tripartate nature of
human consciousness that accompanied my note?) human
consciousness, being
culturally mediated, has an "extra layer" of constraints and
associated
affordances.
Interesting about elephants and the mirror test, Tony.
So we can argue that elephants have self recognition. Is this
self-consciousness? Do they experience false consciousness? I am not
intrigued enough to add to my stack of books as i prepare to teach
history
of the discipline (sic!) of communication and an integrative senior
seminar.
Enough that i just completed *Daniel Doronda*, but now must turn
to the zo
zerious matters of academe as my colleagues plot
strikes aimed at restoring Univ of California to its pre-reagan
glory.
mike
On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 2:20 PM, Tony Whitson <twhitson@udel.edu>
wrote:
check this out:
http://www.amazon.com/Elephants-Edge-Animals-Teach-Humanity/dp/0300127316/
On Fri, 4 Sep 2009, Haydi Zulfei wrote:
Hi
And what about animals' mind-activities , lacking a
consciousness ? or
do
they have just brains ?
Haydi
--- On Fri, 9/4/09, Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Consciousness, Piaget
To: "Carol Macdonald" <carolmacdon@gmail.com>
Cc: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Friday, September 4, 2009, 3:21 PM
Carol-- You mean it is outside of the brain? It IS mind-activity.
mike
On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 6:17 AM, Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com
wrote:
Carol Macdonald says
Many years ago (in 1976 exactly) when I read Piaget's theory of
perception, he put consciousness between the subject and
object. It is
outside of the mind. Much later I wondered whether this
conception
would
somehow fit with LVS's perception of mind. Can anybody comment
on this
primitive perception?
2009/9/4 Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Your multi-lingualism, as always, David, is very helpful, along
with
your
broad and close readings.
I am a very late comer to the issues of consciousness, having
been
raised
in
the era when the term
was exorcized by American psychology. You can find my first
halting
steps
at
coming to grips with
the idea in *Cultural Psychology, *in the chapter where I
describe the
analysis of question-asking reading that Peg Griffin invented
and
which
I
still work with as a teaching tool. There we replace the solid
triangle
with a triangle that is "open at the front end" putting time
along the
bottom line and having a gap
between the mediated and direct connections between subject and
object.
That
process of filling that
gap is the process of consciousness. This idea appears in a
different
nascent form in analysis of
fixed images on the retina that can be found at
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/People/MCole/PHYSIO326.pdf
The fixed image data make clear that tripartate nature of HUMAN
consiousness, where discoordination is constituitive of
consciousness.
elsewhere i have written about taking the russian term,
voobrazhenie into-image-making as THE fundamental cognitive
act.
All of these involve, I believe,
a) awareness
b) noticing
c) selection
d) potential anticipation
But there are so many more and many different ways of thinking
of the
matter. False consciousness is a term I worry about a lot.
Color me self conscious.
mike
On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 4:03 PM, David Kellogg <
vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
wrote:
Tony, Mike:
We translated Piaget's "prise de conscience" as "seizure of
consciousness",
except that in Korean the verbal noun has the more
psychological
sense
of
"grasping" as when you grasp a meaning that you didn't really
understand
in
a phrase that you have heard many times. So, to nominalize, the
"prise
de
conscience" is the "graspture of awareness" or the "rapture of
awareness".
Every child is an awareness raptor.
I think that one important thing to grasp here is that
"conscience"
in
French is not really the homuncular "consciousness" we have in
English,
any
more than it is the obvious false friend, the meaning of a
moral
"conscience" that we find in English writings on ethics. It
has a
number
of
OTHER meanings that attracted Vygotsky to Piaget, to wit:
a) awareness
b) noticing
c) selection
d) potential anticipation
It seems to me that all of these can be conceptualized as
moments in
the
passing of the child from a relatively passive, reactive
state to a
much
more voluntary, volitional one.
Last night, I was re-reading Engestrom's old book "Learning by
Expanding",
which some of our teachers are busy translating into Korean. In
Chapter
Five
he does try to tackle the question that I think gives the
"prise de
conscience" its real importance, which is the question of
whether and
at
what point learning is REVERSIBLE--at what point the laying
down of
socioculturally accumulated experience becomes the creation
of new
content
for the next phase of sociocultural progress.
I think Engestrom sees Vygotsky's preliminary considerations of
history
(which he describes, it seems to me incorrectly, as
phenomenological),
his
laboratory experiments (what Paula and Carol replicated), his
empirical
classroom observations (Chapter Six of T&S) and his
theorizing as
moments of
a single process which can be REVERSED in order to yield the
next,
higher
phase of expansion. The first process works from outside in,
and the
second
from inside out.
The problem, it seems to me, is the crisis. the "prise de
conscience"
is
really a crisis par excellence, and a crisis is by definition
NOT
reversible. For example, awareness is not simply the end
point of
noticing
done backwards, nor is noticing the endpoint of attentional
selection
in
reverse. Obviously, active anticipation requires awareness,
noticing,
and attentional selection, but not vice versa.
So the crisis obeys different laws, and we can also expect
post-critical
development to be different from precritical development in
important
ways.
In physics, a shock wave cannot, by definition, be understood
with
the
same
mathematics we use to describe continuous phenomenon. And the
shock
reverberates: if a crisis is generally restructuring, we have
to
expect
that
the laws of the next phase of social progress are going to be
in some
way
fundamentally different.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
---
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
--
Visiting Researcher,
Wits School of Education
6 Andover Road
Westdene
Johannesburg 2092
011 673 9265 082 562 1050
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
Tony Whitson
UD School of Education
NEWARK DE 19716
twhitson@udel.edu
_______________________________
"those who fail to reread
are obliged to read the same story everywhere"
-- Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970)
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca