[Xmca-l] Re: Rogers day

[Annalisa Aguilar]

Hi Alfredo and venerable others who continue to peruse the thread,


Thanks for your verdant post! I must say that in regard to your syllogism:


Grass dies;
Men die;
Men are grass.


I would reply:


Grass dies;
Men die;
Men are grass cut down by the grim reaper;
but grass grows back if watered by mother nature;
A mother who lives forever.

Just to give a feminist twist, though I hope not too essentialist.


However, I was taken by surprise on your take on Lakoff and Johnson, and I had to think a little before I replied, so that I respond more thoughtfully (I hope).


For me, the "flesh" part of the book's content references embodied thinking, which I may have already said, and I hope I'm not repeating myself. The assertion being, we can't think without a body and also that we are not robots with brains for our CPUs. I wish I had the book at my fingertips right now to say more on that.


It took me a little bit to consider what embodied thinking actually meant while reading the book, because looking back I see how many Cartesian assumptions I had to unlearn when thinking about mind. Also reading David Kirsh's work on dancers and how they mark with their bodies when learning new sequences of steps helped me to understand. Using a bookmark is a form of embodied thinking (real books not digital browsers!)


The problem with thinking about thinking is that we forget that we have a body already in place sitting in a soup of evolution, culture, history, etc, and how there is an illusion that we are bubbles of consciousness thinking like Rodin's thinker on a stool. That pose has become the shorthand for mainstream conceptions of a thinker.


I'm even remembering how the documentary of Hannah Arendt shows her laying on a couch smoking a cigarette while contemplating evil (which might just a postmodern cinematic redo of David's Madame Recamier perhaps?).


Anyway, there was also something Kirsh wrote in another paper about metacognition about libraries that I found illuminating, and I'm not referencing green-shaded lamps. Recalling from memory... it was something like: how if not for size and height of the tables (horizontal) we could not read the books stored on the shelves (vertically) because sometimes we want to lay many books open at once and compare them, and how we might use a finger to keep our place while checking and comparing texts. So environment has a lot of power in how we digest our tools for thinking as well.


How could we conceive of vertical and horizontal without bodies (and without gravity and a horizon).


Also, that the way we see, which the eyes only have a small part in, also has to do with our bodies, because sometimes we have to walk around things to know about them, something the eyes can't do alone. Or how the organs of perception work in unison, such as smoke and fire may mean danger when we see flames, smell burning wood and our skin feels heat. But when we have one of those faux fireplaces with digital flickering flames, we just feel coziness (or an aversion to the kitsch)!


Anyway, Bateson was an inspiration to Hutchins, and his work assisted in Hutchins's development of his approach to distributed cognition (Bateson is someone on my reading list). I also feel that there is a connection to what you offer about Bateson's observation of metaphor as a "primary" language to Levi-Straus's Science of the Concrete, as described in the first chapter of Le Pensée Sauvage whose connotation, I might add, is lost when translated to English's "The Savage Mind" because in the French (as I understand) is a double enténdre of savage mind and wild pansy at the same time. I take that to be a wonderful reference to the wisdom of the natural world inherent in what we used to call "primitive" or "uncivilized" cultures. It is a beautiful, embodied metaphor which is far more meaningful than the English, which ironically seems more idealized, or Cartesian (who was French!)


I would enjoy to look at that chapter you almost attached if not for want of a plane to board.


With regard to the metaphor and how it fails, is that metaphor is aspectual. Just like a tool might have a proper and improper application, so does a metaphor.


In Vedanta, for example, there is a drshtanta (sanskrit for "teaching-illustration") for the dehatma-buddhi, which translates roughly to the "mind-body-sense complex," (and also references that the dehatma-buddhi is the self and the self is the dehatma-buddhi as 1:1 equivalence and how this equivalence is an illusion), anyway, the drshtanta of the red-hot iron ball is a very old metaphor used to explain something very hard to explain rationally.


It is used to show how one might perceive that the attributes of iron might associate to the fire and vice versa, because they are indeed at that moment in time inseparably presenting in the same loci. It would take for one to have prior knowledge of the attributes of fire to know that the roundness and heaviness of the ball does not belong to fire but to iron, and likewise the knowledge of iron to know that the heat and the redness belong actually to fire not to iron. It is impossible to physically differentiate the red-hot from the iron ball, say by pulling them apart into smaller pieces (which Descartes tries to do: to see a thing in parts adding into a whole). It is a beautiful metaphor for explaining how the self takes on attributes of the body and the body takes attributes of the self. And yet the drshtanta fails if someone from the peanut gallery says, "Just dunk it in a pool of water like any old blacksmith and you'll figure that one out," and the peanut thrower would be right, but the metaphor, if used in a surgical way, is very apt to show the illusion of the location of consciousness (self). So the metaphor, when used with precision, is a useful tool.


One doesn't get far with a screwdriver if everything seems a screw, especially if the screw is a nail.


I think with a metaphor (as a cognitive tool) it's the same. Of course there is danger if we mix our metaphors inappropriately, which is another way they can fail.


I feel compelled to find an example in which metaphors help problem-solving in life situation...perhaps it is a job for Superman or some other superhero.


Kind regards,


Annalisa

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