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Re: [xmca] Consciousness, Piaget



I'm glad Martin posted the link to this book review. Also, some might enjoy an excerpt from the first chapter to this book at

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/books/excerpt-inside-of-a-dog.html?ref=review

- Steve


On Sep 12, 2009, at 10:56 AM, Martin Packer wrote:

More on animal consciousness:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/books/review/Schine-t.html?ref=science >


On Sep 8, 2009, at 7:12 AM, Haydi Zulfei wrote:

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

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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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