Re: [xmca] dynamical sensory motor minds

[Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>]

Hi Monica,

I enjoyed reading your response and further reflections on this fascinating
topic of the "ravine of incommensurability" or chasm between understanding
the internal and external.  The concept of "auto*bio*graphy" as the 3
domains or levels that make up our "human nature" is a way I attempt
to grasp the intricacies of all 3 aspects that must be considered.  The
"auto" or UNIQUE self [that ceases to exist at death] is as fundamental as
"bio" and "graphy" are to exploring how we express our "selves" through
movement as dwelling in the world.  Monica, your description of
phenomenology, when you wrote,

  "phenomenology as a method of inquiry is not just about the first person
subjective idealization, but about "expression". I would go even further
and say that phenomenology is about the universal and empirical reality of
development and first person subjectivity is a fundamental part of
expression and activity."

is focusing on phenomenology as "reality of development". I absolutely
agree that first person subjectivity is a FUNDAMENTAL PART of expression
and activity.You then suggest our current notions of ideas as "abstract
universals" cannot be measured scientifically to prove they are real.

In your words,
"For me the ravine is more symbolic of "incommensurability". This is the
real chasm between understanding the internal and the external. What is
real and how can it be measured, divided up, and talked about? This is a
malady of the human condition, that has played a strong role in our value
of old epistemological arguments. In the Western Tradition, probably going
back to Plato, our fascination with the origin of the Ideal as external to
the individual. It is echoed in Kant as a priori knowledge. It reverberates
through nativist arguments about the origin of conceptual knowledge,
acutely in the Chomsky’s proposition of univeral grammar and the language
acquisition device.   I sense a paradigm shift reminiscent of Kuhn. If
ideas, our knowledge of abstract universals, don’t come from our human
condition by divine right, and scientific method can’t systematically
measure them and prove they are real, we have no choice to inquire about
them outside of established paradigms."

The question then becomes "Which paradigms offer promise as a way to "see
through" our current frameworks? Paradigms that do NOT appeal to "divine
transcendent" explanations beyond the world OR appeal to measurements OF
what already exists previous to our measurements and only needs to be
verified and categorized as previously existant]

 Monica, you suggest one model or theory, as an alternative paradigm that
may hold promise, is "dynamic systems theory" which is  attempting to
explain "mercurial microprocesses" within the brain and also "sedimented
macroprocesses" within activity as developmental phenomena being expressed
at radically different time scales [Bateson's definition of CHANGE].  You
wrote,

 (3) by the concurrent activation-state of your entire neuronal population,
a complex factor that reflects your cognitive activity immediately
preceding the present computational interaction” (p. 19). Churchland makes
a case for the brain’s dynamical system as complex, capable of a great
range of possible and unpredictable behaviors , and decidedly nonlinear.
His argument for the difficulty of studying and understanding these
“mercurial microprocesses”  sounds much like the difficulty of study
activity in activity theory.

Monica, as I read your response it triggers
further questions on which models, theories, or paradigms we "use" that
consider "auto" "bio" & graphy" as a UNITARY process.  I share with you a
committment to NOT loose sight of [or stop hearing] the "auto" as the
UNIQUE [romantic] aspect of our autobiography.  Cultural historical theory
is developing my awareness of the centrality of BOTH the "bio" and "graphy"
but I have the urge to add perspectives from "romantic studies" that
embraces the UNIQUENESS of each PARTICULAR situated human being. As I focus
on the "auto" am also struggling not to fall into the trap of envisioning
the "encapsulated self" as separate from "bio" and "graphy". However, I
also want to avoid dissolving the "auto" into "biography".

Mike and Etienne's exploration of gaps and gap filling as central processes
connecting SELF and world, is one more piece of the puzzle that I see as a
phenomenological exploration of movement [activity??] as EXPRESSION that is
FUNDAMENTALLY a movement OF auto OF bio OF graphy.   Monica, your question
of how the internal BECOMES external and the external BECOMES internal also
brings in the question of "boundaries" or "borders" BETWEEN the internal
and external.  How do we describe or explain these boundary MARKERS.  Do
these MARKERS "exist" or are they cognitive constructions of  analyzing and
differentiating "minds" which differentiate phenomena FROM  PRE-existing
UNITY [gestalten]??

One particular example questioning the existence of PRE-EXISTING boundaries
of internal and external is the development of "writing" as a particular
cultural historical FORM or MEDIUM  that CREATED NEW boundaries OF internal
and external that previously did not "exist".  With these new forms "of
differentiated knowing" come new forms of "self" and new relations of "self
AND world" that previously did NOT exist.

I still wonder though if the "auto" of autobiography ALWAYS exists though
how "I know" auto changes through historical time.  The internal and
external are fluid boundary markers historically. I also would suggest the
boundaries of internal and external are fluid markers within  ontogenetic
development.  The question then becomes do internal and external markers
fluidly change from moment to moment in forming gaps and gap filling. In
other words, are the boundary MARKERS  differentiating the internal and
external, in actuality IMAGINAL processes or images [auto] that are THEN
expressed or given "voice" [externalized] AS CREATIVE ACTS [graphy].  From
this perspective the UNITY of phenomena is PRIOR TO the differentiating
which makes a difference. [Goethe's unitary gestalten].

If these notions have any relevancy then the question returns to what KINDS
of persons are FORMED within different "mediations" of "self" and world
within particular cultural historical periods.  The Enlightenment shifted
the boundary MARKERS from the "divine" as "transcendent" and gave
legitimacy to a new boundary marker [the encapsulated self] The self that
validates "self-assertion" and "self-mastery" and finding "one's authentic
VOICE" and an encapsulated self BOUNDED by recognition. [The perspective
Greg is challenging]

The existential "auto" is often confused as THE phenomenological
perspective.  However  phenomenology [and continental philosophy] also are
developing an alternative tradition expressing "auto" as fundamentally
dialogical [expression AS ANSWERING or RESPONDING TO world and other]
Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, Buber, Shotter, Bahktin, are expressing THIS
dialogical phenomenological tradition.  These philosophers each in his own
way challenge Husserl's "transcendental pure consciousness" and refocus
EXPRESSION as "auto" AND "bio" AND "graphy" AS A UNITY.  For analytical
purposes we may separate auto*bio*graphy into distinct domains [as a MAP]
but the map is NOT the autobiography.

In summary, the internal, external, and the IMPLIED boundary MARKERS as
developmental processes which "mind" EXPRESSES culturally and historically
[as differences which make a difference] are multiple and plural forms
[maps?] mediating dwelling or moving within the world.  My bias is to
suggest that "auto" is a CENTRAL and FUNDAMENTAL domain that cannot be
ACTUALLY SEPARATED FROM autobiography, but can be "analytically separated"
when composing "maps" of self within the world.  This is a middle way which
neither reifies the "auto" as prior to or pre-existing biography or
dissolves "auto" into biography.

I share with Greg the understanding that the way of "self-assertion" and
"self-mastery" must now be questioned developmentally.  As a response to
the processes of the Enlightenment, where we turned away from divine
transcendence, self-assertion and self-mastery may have been an
understandable RESPONSE or answer to that time eriod. However, the costs of
valorizing this particular form of self identity have  become cancerous,
and destructive. Monica, new paradigms, such as dynamic system theory and
dialogical/hermeneutical relational perspectives are EMERGING.  These new
paradigms are EXPRESSING how bankrupt our current common sense notions of
the encapsulated "auto" have become. As we develop new models and theories
I hope the notion of "auto" becomes re-configured but NOT dissolved into
bio*graphy

Larry










On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 12:19 PM, monica.hansen <
monica.hansen@vandals.uidaho.edu> wrote:

> Larry and interested others,
>
> I am reconsidering my phrase "the ravine of phenomenology"; it is not
> really phenomenology that I wanted to compare to a ravine, agreeing with
> Larry that phenomenology as a method of inquiry is not just about the first
> person subjective idealization, but about "expression". I would go even
> further and say that phenomenology is about the universal and empirical
> reality of development and first person subjectivity is a fundamental part
> of expression and activity.
>
> For me the ravine is more symbolic of "incommensurability". This is the
> real chasm between understanding the internal and the external. What is
> real and how can it be measured, divided up, and talked about? This is a
> malady of the human condition, that has played a strong role in our value
> of old epistemological arguments. In the Western Tradition, probably going
> back to Plato, our fascination with the origin of the Ideal as external to
> the individual. It is echoed in Kant as a priori knowledge. It reverberates
> through nativist arguments about the origin of conceptual knowledge,
> acutely in the Chomsky’s proposition of univeral grammar and the language
> acquisition device.   I sense a paradigm shift reminiscent of Kuhn. If
> ideas, our knowledge of abstract universals, don’t come from our human
> condition by divine right, and scientific method can’t systematically
> measure them and prove they are real, we have no choice to inquire about
> them outside of established paradigms.
>
> Why do I go on about this? Because I think we are beginning to find paths
> across the ravine of incommensurability. I think the more we are able to
> understand micro processes in the brain, and the macrofunctions that are
> enabled by them, the more we are able to understand how mental processes
> originate in the physical body and the more we can begin to understand how
> significantly the social and cultural processes are a part of the dynamic
> and bidirectional (or dialogical) processes of cognition. I know I go on
> about the sensory motor and physiology, probably too much. But at the heart
> of all my inquiry is a deep seated desire to understand the same question
> posed before: how does the external become the internal? And the
> reciprocal: how does the internal become the external?
>
> Hear this from Churchland (2012): “The fact is, the modification,
> extinction, and growth of new synaptic connections is the single most
> dramatic dimension of structural change within the brain, from birth
> onward. Creating and adjusting the precious configuration of one’s 10 to
> the fourteenth synaptic connections is the very essence of learning in
> one’s infant and childhood stages, for it is the collective configuration
> of  synaptic connections onto any neuronal population that dictates the
> family of categories embodied in that population’s proprietary activation
> space.”
> Churchland goes on to describe the difficulties of trying to plot
> activation points or “sculpt the target conceptual framework” (p. 15) for
> predictive models.  “The real difficulty is the empirical fact that each
> person’s matured synaptic configuration is radically different from anyone
> else’s.” And to those of you who have, as Larry has been, trying to
> understand the potential for personal creative expression, even in forms of
> narrative, this is significant, but not unrealized. In fact many
> qualitative researchers and teachers have recognized this all along when
> comparing the unique attributes of various students from day to day. But in
> traditional experimental form this amounts to a limited N=1.
> In trying to puzzle out the conundrum of how best to research or prove
> anything about what constitutes our mental representations, Churchland also
> criticizes the approach originating and continuing with Aristotle, Locke,
> and Hume of simple concepts acquired as copies and then complexed in
> concatenations or modulations: “Empirical research on the neuronal coding
> strategies deployed in our several sensory systems reveals that, even in
> response to the presumptively “simplest” of sensory stimuli, the sensory
> messages sent to the brain are typically quite complex, and their
> synapse-transformed offspring—that is, the downstream conceptualized
> representations into which they get coded—are more complex still, typically
> much more complex.”
> Churchland goes back to neurons throughout his argument, but this is not
> just the same old case of reflex psychology. In this book he describes
> multiple levels of what he terms ”dynamical learning”. “At any point in
> time, your next activation point, within your global activation space, is
> always dictated (1) partly by your current sensory inputs, (2) partly by
> the already acquired profile of your background conceptual framework (that
> is, by the lasting configuration of your synaptic connections), but also,
> and most importantly in the present context, (3) by the concurrent
> activation-state of your entire neuronal population, a complex factor that
> reflects your cognitive activity immediately preceding the present
> computational interaction” (p. 19). Churchland makes a case for the brain’s
> dynamical system as complex, capable of a great range of possible and
> unpredictable behaviors , and decidedly nonlinear. His argument for the
> difficulty of studying and understanding these “mercurial microprocesses”
>  sounds much like the difficulty of study activity in activity theory.
>
> So to bring this full circle: taking into account the brain, the body, the
> cultural, and historical we never stop learning or being and dynamic part
> of the systems around us. At once our cognition/activity is both situated
> and distributed.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] on behalf
> of Larry Purss [lpscholar2@gmail.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, February 07, 2012 9:02 PM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: Re: [xmca] sensorymotor reguires gaps... especially for the worms
>
> Monica,
>
> I've noticed that Mike has this ability to offer "openings" into very deep
> questions which leaves others "wondering". This is an amazing gift that I'm
> guessing is an expression of his own deep wondering about mind, self, world
> and the gaps that are continually opening into new vistas and horizons.
>
> I appreciate your and others participating in the dancing which seems to be
> roving all over the countryside. Monica, your big question in attempting to
> understand the role of mental imagery in the process of reflective
> functioning and more specifically in the construction of writing seems  to
> be a particular focus which leads back to the shared participation in mind
> as both internal and external [in Bateson's terms] but as you mention this
> boundary is always fluid and we are always problematizing "internal &
> external" and the boundary which differentiates the difference.
>
> Monica, you mentioned the "ravine" of phenomenology, but I understand
> phenomenology as not merely 1st person subjective idealizations but also as
> an approach which is centered on "expression" as movement within the world.
>
>  I'm offering another perspective which Sara Heinamaa articulates
> as Merleau-Ponty's way of exploring gaps and gap filling.  Sara Heinamaa
> wrote an article "Merleau-Ponty's Modification of Phenomenology: Cognition,
> Passion, and Philosophy" [Synthese, Volume 118, pages 49-68, 1999.]
>
> Sara is interpreting Merleau-Ponty's perspective on our capacity to ARREST
> ONE'S ACTIVITY in order to learn something new about the world, about
> oneself, and about the elation of self and world.  The same topic Mike and
> Etienne were exploring. [Also Bateson and Greg in an earlier post]  M-P
> suggests we cannot "suspend" or "bracket" our passions or "reduce" them in
> the sense of suspending our beliefs or thesis we entertain about the world.
> [this is a response to Husserl's notion of transcending thesis into pure
> consciousness]  BUT M-P does suggest wecan take a new stance towards our
> beliefs by "arresting one's activity" In M-P's thinking WONDER refers to
> this possibility of arresting one's activity in order to learn something
> new.  In Sara Heinamaa's words "wonder" is the first passion in the sense
> that it precedes categorizations and evaluations.  Wonder is the state in
> which something has AWAKENED the mind-body's attention, but this something
> has not yet been measured against EARLIER experience and knowledge.
>
> This idea of "awakening" in M-P's phenomenological exploration of wonder is
> interpreted as the state when
>
> "our natural and habitual OPERATIONS of adoption and rejection are
> arrested. It is NOT a reflection on passions or emotions, but rather like a
> PAUSE, a BREAK, or an INTERRUPTION, in which the world APPEARS ANEW, as
> UN-usual, or extraordinary, as strange and paradoxical.
> Thus understood, REDUCTION is not a deliberate step or decision, but
> involves a passion that one falls into. It cannot be planned in advance but
> happens unexpectably." [page 62]
>
> Monica, I read Merleau-Ponty, Bateson, and Mike& Etienne as exploring
> differences which make a difference.  Arresting one's activity [forming
> gaps] seems central to "awakening" and "responding" [answering] the
> differences which make a difference. Writing, from this perspective, is a
> central "way" or "path" for arresting activity and forming gaps.
>
> Larry
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