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Re: [xmca] Re: Mediation AND monism

Well. yes, Andy, that might help. I regret not knowing Ilyenkov well enough to evaluate his position on these questions.
The two concepts, or the systems of discourse and action that revolve around them and connect them, do historically depend quite a bit on making a contrast between them. But while Ilyenkov may see things in these more nominalist terms perhaps, I think that a large part of the tradition we inherit was trying to talk about, and make a categorical contrast between what they thought of as actual Spirit and gross matter. Originally. When the former was what was important, and the latter was just an obstacle to salvation.
I agree that in our historical tradition it was a kind of progress to see that intellectual engagement with gross matter and its properties and ways of behaving was not a complete waste of time, and was also not something which could be understood by further understanding of Spirit. Which left a few problems. What is now the nature of spirit if it has to share the universe of value with matter? And how do we divide the universe of thought between the two of them?
To which Descartes' formulation added not the radical contrast, which had long been there already, but a particular way of framing it. One that I've always thought led to a lot of less-than-useful later formulations, including the notion of a mind that could not be manifestation of the behavior of matter. Or, reversed, that mind is nothing but a manifestation of the behavior of matter. Dialectics, I thought, helped out by noting not simply that semantically the two are defined categorically by their contrast, which is already there in an Aristotelian logic of the excluded middle, but by forcing us to reject the simple dichotomy or contrast and try to understand how they actually constitute one another.
For me that dialectical problem is not solvable outside materialism. It is only by considering material practice, both natural-biological process systems and the emergence within them of semiotic-discursively mediated (and so social, cultural and historical) human systems of practice/behavior, that we can begin to see how they might constitute one another, or how the distinction and dichotomous contrast might be overcome and both the classical notion of mind/spirit and the classical notion of gross-inert, unenchanted matter finally dispensed with.
We're not there yet, but at least this is the direction in which I want to be headed. 

What do you think?

JAY.

Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke





On Sep 30, 2009, at 1:55 AM, Andy Blunden wrote:
I think I may have it! Do people realise that Ilyenkov puts 'consciousness' and 'matter ' in inverted commas because we are talking about the *concept of consciousness* and the *concept of matter*, not consciousness and matter as such? 

Does that help?

Andy

Andy Blunden wrote:

Forgive me, even I'm getting tired. Let me have another go.
About 400 years ago a project was initiated by Copernicus, Galileo and Descartes. We continue that project. As Mike is fond of saying: "We stand on the shoulders of giants." The first thing that had to be established by this project was the categorical distinction between thought (a.k.a. Faith, Scripture, Reason, Spirit, Soul, Consciousness) and matter (a.k.a. Nature, God). Each of the writers mentioned did so in their own unique way. In the 400 years since, despite "branching" into a myriad of different projects, the project (science) continues. The movement is characterized by the question which was the central problem for one generation, giving way to a new question for the next generation. But the former problematic is not abolished and thrown away, but taken up into the new problematic. People are rightly concerned with solving the problem of how to explain consciousness, how to build a science of consciousness. But this does not and cannot be done by ignoring the gains of the 17th century, namely, that there is a categorical difference between consciousness and something else, which is not consciousness, which lies behind that. Kant called that other Jenseits or "thing-in-itself" while the subject was a "transcendental subject", both utterly lacking in content (well almost). Kant was right, but this also did not form a starting point for science. It was his way of laying the question to the side and moving on. That's what Hegel did. But at the expense of taking everything, even Nature, as spirit, i.e., thought forms. Marx chose not to be a philosopher, but the question does not go away. I learnt my Marxism in the late 60s, I read "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism" in the mid-70s and Ilyenkov in the early 80s, so I admit, I have been taking this for granted. It never occurred to me that people today are happy to equate consciousness and matter, or at least say that the distinction is "relative." A new generation has arrived. I am at a loss how to explain what the problem is with denying the categorical difference between consciousness and matter. I can now see why Lenin felt he had to write a whole book on it 100 years ago! But this issue was far, far from my mind when I wrote the Paper for Discussion. I wrote this about 2 years ago. It was rejected by the first journal I submitted it to and also by the second. But I appealed to the editor in the second case and eventually with the necessary revisions, it was agreed that the paper should be published. That took 2 years. And in the meantime I have been offered a contract to write it up in 100,000 words. But this book is nothing to do with the issues discussed in the recent debate. 
Andy
(in the confidence that you the reader exists outside of my thoughts)
Andy Blunden wrote:
Your first point is true David. I thought about it myself before writing the offending statement. Really Hegel had the only solution: "Being is", but even then, he had the whole of the Phenomenology to mediate the first statement of the Logic. I was just trying to explain.
The rest of your post I can't understand David, so I will again simply sign off with Ilyenkov's words:
"'Consciousness' ... is the most general concept which can only be defined by clearly contrasting it with the most general concept of 'matter', moreover as something secondary, produced and derived. Dialectics consists in not being able to define matter as such; it can only be defined through its opposite, and only if one of the opposites is fixed as primary, and the other arises from it." 

Andy

David Kellogg wrote:
a) Andy says "consciousness is what is given to us". How is the "us" given to us? For consciousness to be given to "us", don't we need an "us" first? And isn't this "us" that is given to us actually emergent through phylogenetic and then sociogenetic and then finally ontogenetic change? (I don't think the word "emergent" is any more vacuous than the word "evolved", and in many ways it is actually more descriptive, particularly since "evolution" has acquired a meaning which is frequently opposed to revolutionary change.) b) In my profession, a lot of abstract stuff comes to us in exactly the "reified" form that Andy talks about in his paper for discussion where he says that the worker experiences labor as making a "living" and the capitalist as "making profit" but objectively it is reified as yarn. For example, I have on my desk a text which purports to teach English words like "can" and "your" through the use of pictures! I just sat through a two hour lunch with other members of the department where we discussed the furniture of the new "English Zone" in the department and the bookcases and the website and so on but never once touched on what is now known rather ridiculously as "content" (it appears that for the "Conversation Clinic" there will be no content at all, only furniture). Isn't this reification as much a proof of monism as the historical, evolutionary nature of consciousness? David Kellogg 
Seoul National University of Education

--- On Tue, 9/29/09, Bruce Robinson <bruce@brucerob.eu> wrote:


From: Bruce Robinson <bruce@brucerob.eu>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Re: Mediation AND monism
To: ablunden@mira.net, "eXtended Mind, Culture,Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu > 
Date: Tuesday, September 29, 2009, 3:24 PM
Tell me: If I say, "I don't know anything really for sure about the world, maybe you're right about phlogiston and maybe the world is governed by the will of Allah, but what I do know for sure is that there is something there outside of my consciousness," would you disagree? Would you say "Well, that's a matter of opinion" or "That's something which needs to be tested by the methods of science"? or is it just simply true beyond any dispute or scientific theory? That's what is meant by being a categorical truth. 

Andy
Would anyone but a philosopher say that? For most 'ordinary people' it would be a matter of common sense borne out of their experience. Does one have to start from the individual seeking to establish a firm footing in the world - an abstraction supreme like the utility maximiser of neo-classical economics?
I'm not sure anything is beyond dispute - you may conclude that the disputer is irrational but I'm sure there is nothing universally accepted except, if I remember rightly, in Jane Austen and the American Declaration of Independence. 

Bruce


Bruce Robinson wrote:
Oh. Andy, you agree with me. Now I'm totally confused. ;) Have I completely missed the point of what you're saying? 

Bruce
----- Original Message ----- From: "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net > 
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Monday, September 28, 2009 1:20 PM
Subject: Re: [xmca] Re: Mediation AND monism



All agreed, Bruce.
andy

Bruce Robinson wrote:

Mediation and Monism: you suggest not either but both. Yes.
How could one disagree. Really, as soon as dualism is rejected, one has a kind of monism. But unless one finds a way to *deal with the distinction* which generated the original dualism, not just deny it, then dualism pops up again at a deeper level. That's why I insist.
I accept that - there is something that needs to be explained. But I suppose that underlying what I wrote is that the distinction cannot be resolved by shuffling the philosophical categories or looking for the correct definition of consciousness but rather that the question can only be resolved by a scientific explanation of consciousness as a - dare I use the word? - material phenomenon. While I do not hold that the development of science will abolish philosophy, I think this is one area where philosophy has tried to speculatively fill in for gaps in our scientific knowledge. That's why I'm not happy with your view that: "My position is that consciousness is a *category* not a thing."
(To avoid one possible misunderstanding: I am not saying scientific knowledge is independent of methodological, philosophical or social pre-conceptions.)
Emergence: Emergence has an intuitive attraction, as a counter to the idea of causation, but I have discovered that in dialogue with neuro-types "emergence" acts a little like God: it is the idea you stuff into that gap you can't explain. "Oh! I don't know how Cs arises from a material system; it is emergence. I don't have to explain it."
Yes, maybe emergence is a fashionable explanation precisely because it avoids other obvious pitfalls of dualism and reductionist materialism. I am not sufficiently up to speed on the current state of neuro-science but there certainly are attempts to provide a more specific explanation of consciousness as emergent from 'brain matter', Gerald Edelman's for example. 

Bruce
Meaning of "Matter" and "material": more than 2 meanings. Several. Add "something else that I don't know about, outside my consciousness". Add the Nature (outside of any labour process) as opposed to "material life" in the sense of industry and commerce. I sure many many definitions of matter have been used in this discussion. The one I have tried to convey has mostly still not been accepted. 
C'est la vie.

Andy

Bruce Robinson wrote:

See comments below.
What to do then? The first answer was Monism. e.g. "everything is matter, even consciousness." Or "consciousness is a property of matter" etc. This does not sidestep the problem but denies it. As I repeatedly said to Martin, if everything is matter, everything you say about matter is a motherhood statement. There is a distinction.
What Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Vygotsky, Leontyev and Peirce all did, each in their own inimitable fashion, was to move away from the binary to a three-part ontology. In general they have "activity" as the mediating element. For Hegel it is "Particular." But the three "moments" can never ever exist separately, they are always moments of one and the same entity. So Cs is always correlated in some way(s) with matter *in and through activity*. There is no Cs without activity.
So our writers rarely talk about this hateful dichotomy, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It cannot be abolished by a monism which simply denies it. Mediation not Monism.
Why not both? Are they necessarily counterposed? Or aren't they both fundamental to a [note the article] dialectical materialism? Andy, you may not think the monist element useful; others, including me, might find it necessary to a fundamentally materialist approach - either way the problem with motherhood statements isn't that they're not true but that nobody could disagree with them. In fact, in the wider world there are plenty of people who do but that's not the issue here.
Consciousness is not just correlated with matter through activity but also through the particular organisation of matter that enables consciousness to emerge. One of the reasons the question has been posed in dichotomous terms that aren't useful is that up to now (I nearly wrote 'until now' but we're not there yet) there has not been an adequate scientific explanation of consciousness which has allowed all sorts of both reductionist materialism and idealist mysticism (not quite the word I'm after - nor am I including Andy in that) to flourish. I started but did not finish writing a post as follows a couple of days ago:
<<Isn't the idea of consciousness as an emergent property of matter the key to understanding the relationship between the two? Consciousness is then the result of a particular form of organisation of a particular form of matter (brain cells) and cannot exist without it but has properties that mean it is not simply reducible to a particular configuration of physical matter. Exactly how the 'upward causation' works is not yet known but as I understand it this view is both compatible with both the current state of the science and with a non-reductionist materialist philosophy . This is not to say that 'consciousness is given' in the sense of being innate rather that the matter develops both through biological processes and in a form affected by interaction with the environment - for humans, specifically social.>>
The idea of emergence implies a stratified conception of both matter and of human beings and thus is not reductionist. Rather the point is that if we are talking about a materialist ontology one has to provide an explanation of how higher order forms (both historically and in terms of complexity) such as consciousness are possible at all on the basis of lower order forms. Otherwise they are left hanging. I don't have a problem with the idea of a 'substratum' if understood as a level that we need to understand the properties of consciousness rather than something separate. A multi-level ontology (with more than the three levels Andy refers to but including them) necessarily implies mediation but also includes the 'monist' moment. Matter as abstraction from its forms - is, I think, necessary even if one is asking such a 'higher order', 'social' question as the nature of the ideal. Perhaps we can all agree that this is taken for granted and a
motherhood statement - if so, good but I think it's still necessary to state it. 
Finally a few points I intended to make earlier:
(1) I think people have been using the term material in two different senses - one = reducible to matter; two = having a material force or impact on the world - which maybe has confused things;
(2) To say consciousness is 'all we have' to know the workl with is irrelevant to conceptualising the relationship between matter and consciousness. It is an epistemological statement rather than an ontological one. If we were to discuss whether or how a true ontology was possible or sustainable given consciousness is 'all we have', that would be a different discussion to which there are both philosophical and above all practical (cf Theses on Feuerbach) answers. 

Bruce R









Does that resolve the issues?
Andy


Vera Steiner wrote:

Hi,
I always wondered why "inside" in its strictest interpretation, that of the brain/mind that is not accessible to unmediated eye sight should be such a pervasive metaphor. Now, the "inner" is becoming more accessible with CAT scans, X-ray, imaging, etc, should it still be called "inside?" Theories are not immune to technological change, and this which is so loaded an issue, we are stuck in an old dichotomy. Why is stone the best example for matter? Why not blood that also changes with environmental, physiological and pathological variables? It changes as does the brain/mind through action, through aging, through education, through the increasing, sophisticated understanding of meanings. All of these changes take place with people, or by and through their uses of signs and symbols, which are the consequences of their prior, collective actions? Is material only that which we can touch, but not what we create, including our minds which we create 
in.interaction with others?
The categorical distinction between Cs and matter baffles me, The discussion is still governed, I believe on both sides, by the old difference between in here, that voice in my head, or those images, which are no longer inaccessible, no longer "inner" in the old sense of the word when approached with material tools and the grass outside. But, it seems we cannot help but be snared by its pervasive, metaphoric power.. 
Vera
----- Original Message ----- From: "Martin Packer" <packer@duq.edu > To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu> 
Sent: Saturday, September 26, 2009 6:40 AM
Subject: Re: [xmca] Consciousness"only a part of the material quality of the man-sign" 



Andy,
You're misrepresenting what I wrote, and why I wrote it. I am indeed arguing that all representational systems are material. Yet I find myself dealing constantly with colleagues who believe that psychology must study non- material representational systems. That to understand children's development, for example, requires studying their 'internal,' 'mental' representations. I was citing Donald's work as an example that does a good job of explaining human cognitive development (historical rather than ontogenetic, but that's not an important difference in this context) with reference only to representational systems that are material. Plus brain functioning, construed in non- representational ways. No tautology here, and no problem. 

Martin

On Sep 26, 2009, at 7:54 AM, Andy Blunden wrote:
Martin referred to a series of "representational systems" being all "material"; I pointed out that Martin had already said that *everything*, even consciousness, was material so the statement that these representational systems were material was a "motherhood statement", i.e., a tautology.
So I responded "show me a representational system which is *not* material" which is a problem for Martin because he says that everything is material. 
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