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Re: [xmca] Consciousness

The ideal is not a negation of the material. We agree that
there is no problem in things being both ideal and material.
But if we are going to talk about "matter" and "material",
tell me, what is not matter? A category is meaningless if it
is everything.

"My relationship to my environment is my consciousness" is a
fine definition of consciousness, but it suffers from a
certain unclarity. We need to be more precise. But notice
even in  this definition, it is in the first person
*singular* and it refers to an other.

Every writer uses words like "actuality", "reality",
"objective reality", "being", "matter", "existence" and so
on slightly differently. So I won't attempt a definition of
them just now, until we agree that a thought of something
belongs in some different category from the thing in itself.

Also, I could spend all morning telling us why Kant was
wrong and Hegel was right, but then come back after lunch
and berate you on why Hegel was wrong and Marx was right.
But eacj of these characters made some point which is not
overthrown and destroyed by those who came after. So for
example, Kant has a point about the thing-in-itself: we can
only get closer and closer to a knowledge of it, but never
absolutely, there is always something unexpected still to
reveal itself. He is also right about the transcendental
subject, up to a point. etc., etc. and Damassio will never
find the subject somewhere inside the brain or anywhere else.

Andy

Martin Packer wrote:

Andy,
LSV's point was not that Cs is only an appearance, quite the contrary. Cs is real; but the subjective is an appearance. He criticizes phenomenologists such as Husserl precisely for considering Cs as merely appearance.
Definitions of Cs?: Well, LSV cites Marx: “‘My relationship to my environment’, says Marx, ‘is my consciousness’” And I think a good definition of Cs *would* have to capture the way that it is constantly moving, transforming itself into what it was not.
You ask, "Are you saying that there is *no* meaning whatsoever which is not social? " First, we're talking about being, not about meaning. But yes, all that is real is 100% social. And 100% material. Latour has an excellent article bemoaning the way that 'socially constructed' or 'socially produced' has come to seem to mean unreal, flimsy, easy to change, "only in our consciousness." As he points out, a building is socially produced, and it is substantial, real, material, and objective. Wasn't this a central point of Marx's analysis, to point out the social construction of commodities, the worker, capital, et al.? Labor is a social process that produces various kinds of real things.
Andy, you are drawing now not only a categorical distinction between consciousness and matter, but a distinction between reality and existence. Is this distinction categorical too? Appearances exist, but they are not real? I'm a bit confused. 

Martin

On Sep 24, 2009, at 8:19 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:


Martin and Vera,
We agree that there is a categorical difference here, then, somwhere. I still wouldn't call it "material" v. "non-material" since "consciousness" is primary here. It's between this and the something else outside my head.
Martin introduces appearances: "Science does not study appearances, it studies realities, though it can then use these to *explain* appearances."
I am cool with the idea that consciousness is not a "reality" but only an "appearance." And certainly if we are talking about *science* that is, as you say, exactly what science is about - getting behind appearances.
But reality and existence are two different categories. All that exists is not necessarily real. Science cannot ignore appearances just because they are "not real", but has to penetrate them, negate them. Lenin insisted with Hegel against Kant, that there is no categorical difference between appearances and things-in-themselves. But he also insisted that appearances exist. I'm OK with that if that settles the argument.
I agree that in all his rant about "reflection" Lenin barks up some wrong trees, but as you quite rightly point out, he has a truth there doesn't he. (1) How can you make the point here about the categorical difference between a thing and the thought of it without insisting on a categorical difference and getting into the difficult kind of discussion we are having? and (2) How does an animal survive unless its impressions reflect something. A person whose thoughts do not reflect anything outside of his consciousness will die very soon. The bus will run over you even if you have never heard of public transport.
Ideal v material and consciousness. Of course I hope and believe that we are all clear about the ideal on this list. I deliberately used dollars and Presidents and not trees and stones because dollars and presidents have an obvious ideal aspect. Nowadays you can have dollars with absolutely nothing in your pocket, just a silicon switch somewhere in some computer! But the fact remains that a Martian might laugh at you if you pulled the coin out of your pocket to prove that you *do* have a dollar in your pocket, and the Martian knew nothing of coins, and if they were blind they would not even see that there was *something* in your hand. But if you put your hand in your pocket and found it empty, or if the Martian used whatever senses she had to test your claim, are you saying that there is *no* meaning whatsoever which is not social? That reality is entirely 100% social? That as Baudrillard said in 1991 - the Gulf War never happened, it was only a text?
By the way, Vera and Martin, I initiated this difficult talk in answer to Mike's question: how to define consciousness? Want to have a go? Can we have a definition which does not select just one mode of consciousness, continually transforming itself moving into another, which ipso facto is "not consciousness", and one which does not lead to the conclusion that the Gulf War exists only in "our" consciousness? 

comradely,
Andy

Vera Steiner wrote:

Andy,
But does the categorical difference have to be between material and non-material? And by the way, I did not mean to ignore culture in my response, there is no way to specialize neural pathways without the culturally mediated actions that shape them, but there is no way to appropriate culture without its material, neuronal, foundation. (I think part of the problem is with the word substrata which puts material, neuronal participation in appropriation into a subordinate position vis-a-vie thinking.) 
Vera
----- Original Message ----- From: "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net>
Cc: "eXtended Mind, Culture,Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2009 6:35 PM
Subject: Re: [xmca] Consciousness
But Vera, all the complexity and nuances of the idea of consciousness and its relation to the material world (both its substratum in the body and in culture and in its relation to its objects) do not obliterate the categorical difference between the President and my thought of the President. And reflecting on this overnight, I am now convinced that this is an *important* as well as a "bleeding obvious" difference.
I think that the early investigators of this problem (pre-18th century and contemporary "learning scientists" who are about 200 years behind) believe that the human body is in some way endowed (by God, by genes or by education doesn't matter) with a reflective ability which is inherently natural, and give no special place in the idea of consciousness to *artefacts*. That is, the cultural and natural worlds are conflated. It is this conflation which leads to contradictions and misunderstandings. It is impossible to overcome the dichotomy without the nature/culture distinction.
I think the solution to the riddle of a categorical distinction between thought and matter, and a dialectical unity of the ideal and the material and subject and object in consciousness, is *history*, that is, the historical construction of *culture*, i.e., the manufacture of thought-objects and activities organised around the use of these "thought-objects". It cannot be resolved within the confines of the individual organism. As a result of culture and history, the nature-given reflective capacities of our organism are built upon and transformed, and this process of construction is where we find all the dialectical processes which, for example, you are describing Vera.
You suggest consciousness is brain cells organized in a certain way. I think Vygotsky makes an analogy somewhere with a machine, every part of which is obedient to natural laws, but the overall design and construction is obedient to human will. Right? A great metaphor: the human body as an artefact - an object for cultural critique not natural science.
But what is being described here is only the material substratum (conditions) of thought, not thought itself. I was reading Damassio a while ago, and he still expects that any day now neurobiologists will discover the subject in some part of the brain. Even at the highest level (Damassio is regarded as one of the best today) we have not got beyond Descartes who believed thought and matter were joined at some point in the brain! Was it Engels who said something like: when I see an object, I do not see the excitation on my optical nerve, I see an object (or a unicorn for that matter). There is a categorical difference between the material organisation of this thinking body and its thoughts.
But this dichotomy is not a fruitful starting point for science. Joint artefact-mediated activity overcomes the dichotomy and makes the fruitful starting point for a science of consciousness. But that does not mean that the dichotomy is simply a mistake or illusion. It is actually correct and necessary. 

Andy

Vera Steiner wrote:

Hi,
A quick thought while I am reading the exchanges on consciousness. I think consciousness is matter (brain cells) which become organized as a consequence of activity, and once organized (never fully, finally, until the moment of death) they facilitate (and that,too is an activity) certain kinds and speeds of activity. My consciousness of the act of writing is multi-layered, it runs ahead of the text while it also monitors what is written, these are activities that are facilitated by the consequences of previous, repeated, experience I now write in English, my monitoring a text written in Hungarian is slower, I have less current practice and thus the conscious focus required to write in my mother tongue is differently organized, it may require a shifting back and forth between planning and monitoring rather than the simultaneous activities called forth if the task is in English. The example is to serve us to think developmentally of matter, of differently structured matter, rather than dichotomously. 
Thanks for the stimulating exchanges,
Vera
----- Original Message ----- From: "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net>
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2009 9:16 AM
Subject: Re: [xmca] Consciousness
THis is indeed a tricky question which inevitably generates seemingly contradictory positions. Please recall the context. Mike raised the problem of multiple definitions of "consciousness" among us - we who share a lot of agreement on these questions. I responded that I didn't think we *should* tie Cs down to a single, well-defined meaning. Then realizing that it was unsatisfactory, to leave us in such an open-ended, undefined position, I thought about it, and realized that what unified all these multiplicity of legitimate definitions and concepts of Cs was Cs as a philosophical category.
Descartes introduced us to the philosophical catgory of Cs, but he did not at all solve the problem of the scientific study of consciouness. Only Vygotsky solved this, but quite specifically he built on Hegel and Marx.
If I ask you to accept that the dollar you think is in your pocket and the dollar which is actually in your pocket (or not) are categorically different, this is asking you to state the bleeding obvious, and does not give you a program for the scientific study of consciousness. But nor can a program for the scientific study of consciousness forget or turn its back on this categorical difference between Cs and matter.
The big step that Hegel took in fact was to lay to the side the whole issue of an absolute difference between thought and thing, between subject and object, and to look instead at the movement of (subject/object), with the whole idea of objectified thoughts and internalised artifacts.
So here we have these two (as you say) completely *opposite* proposals about how to proceed, and I am advocating *both* of them. But we can't go all the way with Hegel. Hegel basically elided the mind/matter distinction and this proved to be very productive. But it couldn't be maintained, could it? Feuerbach called his bluff, and Marx agreed.
On science: I am saying that science is one of a number of possible ways of apprehending the world (quoting Marx in the Grundrisse). It is good for certain tasks up to a certain point. And what Kuhn means by "ontological assumptions" is not necessarily really ontological. Natural science does assume the existence of a material world, outside of, independent of, and prior to consciousness. This ontology got a bump c. 1905, but it was soon restored. But natural science is not the only way. I don't think psychology can proceed on the same set of ontological assumptions. If we make "Activity" a fundamental category, we depart from natural science. And I don't believe we can proceed by acting as if we can study the psyche on the basis of the same metaphysical assumptions as natural science. We are part of it; we cannot objectify the object of study. 

Enough,
Andy



Martin Packer wrote:

Andy,
I am familiar with what seems to be your general line of argument. It runs, indeed, through the philosophers you have highlighted: Descartes, Kant, and Husserl (whose 'Cartesian mediations' was both a criticism of Kant for being too mystical and an affirmation of the continuity of his project with Descartes). But I am surprised that you would follow this line for, in my reading at least, Marx and Vygotsky took a different line, prompted in my view by Hegel's critique of Kant.
But first, it seems to me there is a central contradiction in what you have written, and I take this to mean that perhaps I'm not correctly identifying your position, since you seem to affirming and denying the same point. You write critically of natural science:
"Natural science is based on the assumption that outside of consciousness there is a natural world, which exists independently of consciousness and prior to consciousness"
But when you cited Lenin you explained: "Consciousness is what is given to us; matter is what exists outside and independently of consciousness."
Perhaps your point is that science is not *critical* of this central assumption, which was indeed what Kant and Husserl argued? (I think this is actually an inaccurate claim: Kuhn's work showed us that scientists constantly question their ontological assumptions, and also made the important point that these assumptions are embedded in the shared, social practices of a scientific paradigm, not in the thoughts of individual scientists.)
Where should I begin with a response to this D-K-H line? Perhaps here: you write: "The reality is: you open your eyes, you see things, and *then* you question whether what really exists out there (matter) corresponds to what you think exists out there (consciousness)."
...for this is precisely the move that Descartes, Kant and Husserl made. They each engaged in a reflective attitude of doubt, questioning the correspondence of (inner) thought and (external) matter, and even the existence of the latter. The problem is that this epistemological scepticism (Is my knowledge valid?) is *always* a sign of an underlying ontological dualism (My thoughts are inner; matter is outer). If one starts there, it does indeed seem that only a God's eye view would be able to resolve the problem. And with this dualism it seems that each individual can form only mental representations of a reality that they can never in fact be sure they know. Precisely the representational model of human beings that cognitive science has accepted, at least until recently.
But there is a different line of thinking about human being, knowledge and consciousness. I first learned of it from studying Heidegger, but it has been explored by Merleau-Ponty, Garfinkel, and as I read them, Marx and Vygotsky. It is a line that gives priority to practical activity rather than reflective thinking. (You can see why I am puzzled that you would follow the former line, and why, for example, you would write that post Heisenberg, "not concsciousness but *activity* had to step in to provide a rational foundation for even natural science." That seems to imply that for you consciousness and activity are distinct.)
The central thrust of Heidegger's Being and Time was that the typical and traditional philosophical move is mistaken and unnatural. People in their everyday activity do *not* "question what really exists out there." If I am digging in my garden, see a strange object and have a question about it, I don't reflect on the adequacy of my thought categories, I get down on my knees to take a closer look at the object. I poke it, I pick it up. Heidegger distinguished three modes of engagement (Tony mentioned them recently). These philosophers operated in what Heidegger called the present-at-hand mode, in which practical activity is completely suspended. But the more fundamental mode is the ready-to-hand, in which we are engaged in practical activity with artifacts, and there is no separation between subject and object, mind and matter. For Heidegger, *this* is consciousness. In this mode, Cs is not separate from matter.
I find it particularly helpful to think in terms of children's development, because infants have a practical engagement in the world without the capacity for reflective thought.
There is obviously much more I could and should say to develop the point I'm trying to make. But if I send this message now it might reach you before night falls. 

cheers

Martin


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Classics in Activity Theory: Hegel, Leontyev, Meshcheryakov,
Ilyenkov $20 ea


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