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Re: [xmca] Consciousness, Piaget

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
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> >>
> >>
> > 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)
> _______________________________________________
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