views
on thinking and consciousness align with the comments on
consciousness
that
you make, Mike, in your 2006 article, which you linked us to the
other
day
(see post below). Keeping in mind that this article had a more
specific
purpose, to make the case for the intertwining of phylogeny and
culture
in
human mental life, it nevertheless makes a brief but very
interesting
point
about consciousness itself.
I find myself agreeing with both Ilyenkov, and the observations
in this
article. But there seem to be some links missing between the
two views,
which I am puzzling over.
Ilyenkov, for his part, makes it clear that he believes the
world of
objects is independent of human will and consciousness. In my
interpretation of the passages from Problems of Dialectical
Logic that
David
and I have been discussing, Ilyenkov also believes that the
**connections**
between human thought and the world of objects are independent
of human
will
and consciousness. Furthermore, in Chapter 8 of his book
Problems of
Dialectical Logic (1974/1977), and in his essay The Concept of
the Ideal
(1962/1977), Ilyenkov argues that the ideal, that is, ideality
(roughly,
the
social meanings of things) is independent of human will and
consciousness
as
well.
My question is: How do Ilyenkov's claims - or perhaps put
another way,
**do** his claims - align with Mike's thoughts on consciousness?
Here are Mike's comments about human consciousness in this 2006
article,
which seem very reasonable to me:
"A provocative way to think about phylogeny–culture–cognition
relations
among humans is to consider the combination of processes that
appears to
be
necessary for an adult human to experience a visual image of the
world
(the
same processes presumably apply to images in other sensory
modalities but
the relevant data are lacking)." p 237
After a very helpful description of human vision processes,
(which, after
reading this, could be said to be discontinuously continuous and
continuously discontinuous!), Mike concludes:
"Following the logic of this line of research on what might be
termed
‘‘the
components of the visual image” we can conclude that one
component is
highly
specified by factors arising from human beings’ phylogenetic
history and
one
part from the individual’s culturally organized experience,
which itself
is
the residue of the cultural history of the individual’s social
group.
However, these two sources of experience are not sufficient to
provide a
coherent image of the object before one’s eyes. Rather, it
requires a
‘‘third component,” the active reconciliation or filling-
in by active
humans
seeking to make sense of their experience for an integrated,
veridical
image
of the world to arise and be maintained.
"In addition to its value as a reminder of the tripartite nature
of human
conscious experience, the stabilized image experiment is
valuable in
underlining the fact that the causal relations between the brain
and
culture
are bi-directional and that neither constituent of psychological
processes
is sufficient; the active resolving activity of the human being
striving to
make sense of the world is a necessary component of normal
consciousness
as
well." p 239.
- Steve
On Sep 3, 2009, at 4:18 PM, Mike Cole wrote:
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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