[Xmca-l] Re: Rogers day

[Douglas Williams]

Hi, Annalisa--
I should preface this by saying that I've been sitting on this argument for years. I'd expected that this would be my academic work. But as I'm out of academia, except for the occasional paper someone specifically requests of me, I don't think I'll be going further with this. Someone should, I think, as the importance of mediated cognition is not growing of less interest. And it is not really as though any of this is neglected, fully. But from a CHAT point of view? I haven't seen the work, if it's being done. 
In reference to dreams and mammalian memory, I ran into Jonathan Winson's book on dreaming early in my reading of Freud, in the period where I was saying to myself "No one knew much of anything about brain anatomy or function in 1900. So of course Freud is overreaching. But we know vastly more now. What do modern neuroscientists think about memory and dreams?" I read J. Allen Hobson's book "The Dreaming Brain", on dreams being garbage collection, more or less, and Winson's book "Brain and Psyche." The latter was far more convincing. REM sleep is measurable, and it is present in nearly all mammals. We can be highly certain that if we are mammals, and REM sleep is associated with dreams that something of our perception of dreaming is present in all mammals that show EEG patterns associated with human REM sleep are exhibiting something similar to human dreams. It is reasonable to assume that the functional purpose, and probably some of the same characteristics of that type of sleep are similar. So while we don't know what they are dreaming, we know that they dream. Moreover, while Winson's proposal that the hippocampus was central to memory formation was not fully supported in 1980, it certainly is now. How do memories take shape, are stored, and recalled? The details are still very much being worked out, but the empirical evidence so far confirms Winson, and disconfirms Hobson's hypothesis of dreams as a meaningless artifact. It is logical that if you find something that is preserved across the entire phylum mammalia, and universally across all advanced mammals, then you are dealing with something essential to survival. It is logical that the mechanisms of dreaming, if they are evoked in dreams and in memory formation, and in memory recall, have an association that may be causal, rather than incidental. And with the case of Henry Molaison (HM), we have the forbidden experiment that manifests this hypothesis in history and physiology relating to memory formation and recall. 
With Temple Grandin's insights, we now have a good idea of how animals dream: They dream in images. And this is also consistent with Freud's observation (and others) about the hegemony of images to words in dreams for humans. Words are a secondary artifact in memory formation. And memory itself is astonishingly plastic, and very much susceptible to modification through social interaction, and collective recall. I've experienced this myself with a story about a fishing trip, which I had heard so much in my life that I found myself one day reciting it as if it was my memory, from first-hand observation, and believing it to be so, though my father reminded me (and I confirmed later) that I was somewhere else when the event I was recalling occurred. Story-telling not only recalls experience, but can create it. 
It is logical that if you find something that is preserved across the entire phylum mammalia, that you are dealing with something essential to survival. And it is logical that if you find something universally present in human experience (story-telling, as a form of personal and collective identity) that you are dealing with something essential to being human, which I think is built on this common mammalian basis of metaphor, metonymy, and sequence in the formation and recall of memory.
Inner speech of social groups can be extremely abbreviated, but this always depends on at least a group of two (I recall that Tolsty reference too), and more commonly, large social groups. If I say "ruby slippers" or "every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings," or "we'll always have Paris," I evoke quite complex narratives of shared experience, just as the Dorze's Christian leopards (who fast on feast days and Sunday...but don't necessarily count on it) are narrative axioms of a specific culture that define and inform not just a shared experience, but literally perception, which may or may not be empirical. Our language is constantly reinforcing common canonical narratives of embodied interactions...and for the greater part--and this is where Lakoff and the Cog Linguistics people come into play--and before them, with less precision, Whorf-Sapir--these canonical narratives are not fully open to conscious perception, in that they are the means of perception and interaction, and not the medium: I can use a metaphor consciously, but as I say that I comprehend an idea (meaning, literally, I grasp it in my hand), that dead metaphor--or to put it another way, unconscious metaphor--while it informs the nature of the kinds of interactions I can imagine with the idea of comprehending something, is not consciously open to my scrutiny, unless I devote conscious effort to make it so. 




"We could give moreexamples and show that for many Marxists, Freudians orstructuralists, their doctrine functions symbolically. They takeits theses to be true without knowing exactly what they imply.Empirical counterarguments, in so far as they concernthemselves with them, lead them not to reject these theses, butto modify their import. More generally, in our society a largenumber of symbolic statements are of the form of (26) wherescience plays the role of the ancestors:(26) 'p' is scientific.So-called symbolic statements figure in encyclopaedicknowledge not directly, but obliquely by conceptualrepresentations in quotes, in contexts of the type '"p" is true'." --Dan Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism
So this is where it returns to me, as a person with a communication background: How do we know what the meaning is of the words that we say? How are the words in our head meaningful to ourselves and others? How do they correspond to a real world that is, in fact, real? What, ultimately, is reality? 
Narratives are a kind of thinking in complexes. Memory cooperates in fixing shared complexes as the frames within which people perceive the world. And in this respect, we are unique: When we married, my wife had a cat. I went away to graduate school, but before I did, I was tasked with giving the cat flea-shampoos that, of course, the cat was less than thrilled with. After an absence of two years without a home visit, I returned. The cat (Nickleby, after Nicolas Nickleby--long story--treated me as a stranger: who was this person? Nickleby sniffed me--paused--and literally, the sclera became visible, and poor Nickleby dashed away, in terror. This was a terror that Nickleby never evinced while actually being given a flea bath, but I hypothesize that it was the distillation of feline distaste for water, fixed emotively in memory, in the form of a metonymic association "this human image and smell equals water bath," which was the strongest emotive imagistic fix he had on me. Nickleby, happily for both of us, recovered from his terror, and formed new narrative memories of me as a dispenser of cat treats and petting, so his narrative became more nuanced. 
But there were no words that mediated the images. They were immediate and present for the cat, and personal. Human narratives, by contrast, are always a mixture of sensory experience and perception, and from my own personal experience, and from observation, I am reasonably sure that human memory is highly susceptible to symbolic transformation by social interaction and shared memory. The metaphors that we use, the canonical stories that we tell, (incidentally, jackalopes are based on a real fungal infection from Shope papiloma virus--but I digress...) 
I'll need to find the article I ran into recently about memory recall being literally an effort of recreation, so that each time you recall a memory, you are literally reshaping it. The intriguing thing for me is collective memory--which is, again, a core human interaction technique. I think people, unlike other mammals, literally don't know what to think about the world, except when it is reshaped in the form of collective narratives. These canonoical narratives are largely formed through mass-mediated culture these days. The advantage is that they are shared very widely, and can coordinate shared experience and perception much more broadly than in the past. The disadvantage, of course, is the same thing: Dysfunctional, but widely shared narrative complexes--and again, because they are narratives, existing sometimes substantially on the level of images, evoked metonymies, metaphors, that are not fully reviewed consciously--are a real risk to a society based on more empirical perceptions of the world. This is, of course, suggesting that there are more empirical perception--I'm somewhat sympathetic to Feyerabend's argument that our perception is more shaped by appealing narratives than literal empiricism, as we are always underinformed about the nature of the certainty of the theories of reality we take as self-evident--but again, I'm digressing.  




Reading through Anthony Trollope's biography, I was quite struck by something that he had to say about novels. We take being surrounded by narratives for granted, but in Trollipe's time, the omnipresence of a narrated world was something quite new. The English magazines that serialized novels emerged within his lifetime. The popular audience for novels, though it had developed in the previous century, became a truly popular trend in Trollipe's time. And this is what he said of the novel:
"I could well remember that, in my own young days, they had not taken that undisputed possession of drawing-rooms which they now hold. Fifty years ago (writing in the 1870s), when George IV was king, they were not indeed treated as Lydia had been forced to treat them in the preceding reign, when, on the approach of elders, Peregrine Pickle was hidden beneath the bolster, and Lord Aminworth put away under the sofa. But the families in which an unrestricted reading of novels were very few, and from many they were altogether banished. The high poetic genius and correct morality of Walter Scott had not altogether succeeded in making men and women understand the lessons which were good in poetry cold not be bad in prose. I remember that in those days an embargo lay upon novel-reading, as a pursuit, which was to the novelist a much heavier tax than that want of full appreciation of which I now complain.   There is, as we all know, no such embargo now. May we not say that young people of an age to read have got too much power into their own hands to endure any very complete embargo? Novels are read right and left, above stairs and below, in town houses and in country.parsonages, by young countesses and by farmers' daughters, by old lawyers and by young students. it has not only come to pass that a special provision of them has to be made for the godly, but that the provision so made must now include books which a few years since the godly would have thought to be profane.... If such be the case--if the extension of novel-reading be so wide as I have described it--then very much good or harm must be done by novels. The amusement of the time can hardly be the only result of any book that is read, and certainly not so with a novel, which appeals especially to the imagination, and solicits the sympathy of the young. A vast proportion of the teaching of the day--greater probably than many of us have as yet acknowledged to themselves--comes from these books ,which are in the hands of all readers.  It is from them that girls learn what is expected from them, and what they are to expect when lovers come; and also from them that young men unconsciously learn what are, or should be, or may be, the charms of love, --though I fancy that few men will think so little of their natural instincts and powers as to believe that I am right in saying so. Many other lessons also are taught. In these times, when the desire to be honest is pressed so hard, is so violently assaulted, by the ambition to be great...."
I will leave off here, as Trollople's particulars of media effects are a Victorian horror story. And of course mass-mediated narratives are only one strain of symbolic interactions. But I think it is fair to suggest that the mediated nature of social symbols--the metaphors, the canonic narratives, the themes of common interactions--are indeed much more shaped by social narratives than once they were. The Cro-Magnons created a mediated world with their cave art of hunts, and of the master animals to whom they appealed to yield themselves for the sustenance of humans. From what little we can see, these symbols of their real world of survival were central to the formation of tribal identity, and of initiation into the serious business of surviving as a human. The ancient Greek dithyrambs sung to Dionysius, the god of wine, of unity between the sensual and emotive bonds between humans that united them together as a collective unit, became the great tragedies of social identity and morality solemnly performed in the Dionysia as part of their worship. Our narratives are quite powerful too, though the degree of their influence is only fitfully measured, and the form that they take, in news reports, with or without narrative themes, and the more properly narrative forms of network and film cinematics, is vast beyond imagining, with effects that are surely as powerful, yet mostly neglected, as the novelists of Trollope's time. 
But I've taken up a lot of time, so I'll leave it at that for now...not least of which because it is late again. And I may need to save my energy to see what is on TCM tomorrow... :)
Regards,Doug
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   On ‎Friday‎, ‎August‎ ‎31‎, ‎2018‎ ‎11‎:‎12‎:‎07‎ ‎PM‎ ‎PDT, Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu> wrote:  
 
 
Lovely thread spinning Douglas!




(Am taking my time reading the Bates chapter Alfredo so generously added to this topic discussion.)




I don't know if this is fair game, but I always got the sense that Lakoff has thought, perhaps too long, on the metaphor, with the idea that his tenure on the topic would mandate wrapping anyone else's exceptions into questions, just to not seem priggish.




And Huw, we await the throwing of your exceptions into the ring; all 20 of them!





Also to Douglas, I had an insight that perhaps is already obvious to some experienced thinkers about it (including yourself), whether percepts might be stored imagistically (as a base container of thought among all animals for it being an embodied copy, like a shadow is a copy of a thing in silhouette), except for humans who have developed language possess an alternative option to abbreviate a percept into a word-meaning, such that word-meaning becomes something of a jack-in-the-box upon usage, then to be packed up for the next usage (and may be why word-meanings change over time). Additionally, that metaphor works alongside word-meaning as an engine for economy so that instead of image to word-meaning to image, or word-meaning to image to word-meaning, the connection is image to image or, word-meaning to word-meaning, or word-meaning to image or image to word-meaning, which makes cognition more efficient (at least by a third). When I say "to" I mean more a mapping connection, rather than a 1:1 connection. Like a Venn diagram is a mapping (though overlap) a group with another group (like Late Wittgenstein's family resemblances), and that this is different than the connection extending between a trunk and a leaf connected with a branch. We wouldn't say that a trunk is a leaf, but that there is an association and their connection is via a branch.





I'm not sure I'm making all that much sense and that's OK because I'm just thinking out loud.




We know for example that inner speech can be abbreviated. Virginia Woolf would have very telegraphic writing as she developed her stories, and then she would elaborate to "unpack" this code she had captured through exercising her inner speech, to herself. Kind of like an algebra of storywriting/storythinking




And so to be stored in memory, the percept is made fast with the image/word-meaning but then unpacked upon usage. And I'm also thinking that this isn't asymbol, because a metaphor is far richer than a symbol because a metaphor by its very nature has a lived context (otherwise, how could be map it?) whereas a symbol might not, just a representative or reference in a two-dimensional sense. And this may explain why analytical logic is so unpopular among the human beasts because the symbols appear to be so arbitrary. While a metaphor extends to the world, and so the cognitive load is offloaded to the environment (and not the mind, so much) so all that is required is the imagistic reference (or word reference) pointing to the world. Everything represented in a very small box. A firefly in a glass jar.





This overlap (mapping) creates the layers of depth-of-meaning (with patterns) that might not so readily adhere to a logical symbol, which has a more mechanical interaction symbol to symbol.





I also had an insight that this referential mapping to the world could explain why there are different forms of learning and different forms of cognition and conceptualization, which would explain different sorts of intelligences (no one intelligence being better than any other, just different). 





Then, with regard to dreams, I had always thought of dreaming as the brain's garbage collection during sleep, and that collection is based upon what the mind was preoccupied with during waking hours. Nightmares would be an instance of brain constipation, holding onto things too long that are best let go. It is fascinating that we can never dream about anything that we do not already know about in the waking world. We can make things up, like the horns of a rabbit, which do not exist, but such a thing is a complex of objects we have witnessed in the world. We don't tend to dream about things that have a strange logic, such as the son of a barren woman.





Which sort of works with my hypothesis above about mapping and overlapping.




I did also have to laugh, because how do we know whether animals dream? Did someone host an interview with Dick Cavett or something?




Anyway, given that we have the basis of imagistic cognition (in the animal kingdom) and word-meaning cognition (in humans because of language), as a human, since a human is still an animal, though a very polluting one, could do both, one or neither, and this lends to add many variations of thinking across a population.





Then a word more about the unconscious. Given what I've said so far, perhaps the unconscious is just like misplacing our keys. We record something and we know we've got it stored away in the same way we might distractedly set down our keys, but we've forgotten where we left them until such time we stumble across them while looking for something else.





What is also intriguing is that cinema seems to go in reverse, because it is image to word-meaning to image as word-meaning, since there is more language-like structures, syntaxes, and grammars to cinema construction, which of course does also change over time. 


Kind regards,
Annalisa
  
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