[xmca] Consciousness As Noticing and Abstraction

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Mike, Steve:
 
I meant this bit, which is paragraph 32 of the Second Section of Chapter Six. Vygotsky has just complained that Freud and Piaget are using "unconscious" or "subconscious" to mean things that are genetically completely different: not yet conscious (that is, genetically primary), semi-conscious (partially conscious and therefore somewhere in the middle) and repressed from consciousness (that is, genetically late emerging).
 
To clear this up, he suggests junking ALL of the above and replacing them with a FOURTH meaning of "conscious", which is volitional, voluntary, deliberate noticing of one's own psychological activity, which he calls "awareness". The example he gives is knot-tying:

"Я завязываю узелок. Я делаю это сознательно. Я не могу, однако, рассказать, как именно я это сделал. Мое сознательное действие оказывается неосознанным, потому что мое внимание направлено на акт самого завязывания, но не на то, как я это делаю. Сознание всегда представляет какой-то кусок действительности. Предметом моего сознания является завязывание узелка, узелок и то, что с ним происходит, но не те действия, которые я произвожу при завязывании, не то, как я это делаю. Но предметом сознания может стать именно это — тогда это
 будет осознание. Осознанием является акт сознания, предметом которого является сама же деятельность сознания."
 
("I make a knot. I do it consciously. I cannot, however, tell you exactly how I did it. My conscious act is unconscious, because my attention is focused on the act of the tying, but not on how I do it. Consciousness is always some piece of reality. The object of my consciousness is tying the knot, a knot, and what was happening to it but not those actions that I make when tying, not how I do it. But the object of consciousness can be just that - then it will be awareness. Awareness is an act of consciousness, the subject of which is itself the very same activity of consciousness.")
 
I don't agree that there is any light between Luria and Vygotsky on this question, Steve. the part I quote from Tool and Symbol is from a manuscript co-authored by both of them. I also don't agree that what I wrote about computer addiction and role play is not relevant to this thread; I think that one of the great strengths of xmca is that it really does allow us to "rise to the concrete". But I do admit that adolescence is more or less beyond my expertise (I notice that whenever I start talking about my own childhood I have probably trespassed the extremely narrow boundaries of what I know about kids). 
 
So here are three things that are more to the point. 
 
a) My former grad, Yongho, who is doing his Ph.D. thesis is looking at some data where the kids can manipulate "avatars" made with their own photographs and get them to interact with each other. The third graders love it. The fourth graders are a little shy. And the fifth graders hate it.
 
b) At the same time, we've found that when we ask kids to role play, the third graders take it very seriously, the fourth graders ham it up, and the fifth graders tend to either parody or satirize.
 
c) Finally, I am looking at some data this morning where the teacher is trying to get the kids to distinguish between nuclear two-generation families and extended three-generation families by looking at their own family trees. She's having a lot of trouble  because the kids keep mixing up a "broad" family (many siblings) with a "deep" one (many generations) by talking about "large" families. So she introduces the term "nuclear".
 
One of the kids immediately identifies the term as referring to atomic weapons. The teacher is hopeful, since this would mean being able to talk about North Korea, about divided families, and maybe even about the "nucleus" of an atom and a family. 
 
But it turns out that the child only knows the "nuclear option" in the game of Starcraft, which is an option offered to the human-like Terrans; the option of simply dropping a bomb on subhuman races and eradicating them. For the child, it's not a weapon at all; it's just a trump card in a game.
 
Now it seems to me that what ALL of these examples have in common is a growing ability to ABSTRACT a concept, including a self-concept, from its context--and from its consequences. THAT seems to me to be characteristic the end of childhood. I am hard put to describe this, as Leontiev and Karpov do, as the struggle to be taken seriously by adults.    
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
 
 --- On Thu, 5/12/11, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:


From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] how did Luria explain practical intellect
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Thursday, May 12, 2011, 8:03 AM


I am way back on "Vygotsky used the example of a knot."
Which example, David? Are you referring to tying a knot to remember and
example of quipu? If so, I cannot understand
what you say about it.

Could you clarify?

Arent the examples you give of driving a car etc for sort of
"action-reflexes" what, following Leontiev, Zinchenko, et al, are referred
to as operations?

I'll start from the top if you could clarify here and get back on the trail.
mike


On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 11:56 PM, Steve Gabosch <stevegabosch@me.com> wrote:

> How did Luria explain practical intellect, automatic behaviors, etc. and
> the distinctions David is making?
>
> - Steve
>
> PS I changed the subject line and snipped out other topics.
>
>
>
> On May 11, 2011, at 5:52 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
>
>  Steve:
>>
>> We need a distinction here, and I think it is equivalent to the
>> omnirelevant distinction Vygotsky makes between higher, culturally mediated,
>> and lower, biologically endowed, psychological functions.
>>
>> Martin says (and I agree) that SOME forms of practical thinking are purely
>> sensorimotor: always have been and always will be. I think that is true, but
>> that when we examine those functions we find that they are utterly
>> uninteresting to historico-cultural psychology except insofar as they form
>> the basis for higher, culturally mediated functions.
>>
>> I guess I would include the "jump" you create when you fire a gun next to
>> somebody's ear (they jump before realizing that it is a gun), the sickly
>> feeling you get when you look down from a very tall building or come around
>> a trail bend and see a coiled snake, and eidetic memories (the "after
>> vision" you see when you shut your eyes after looking at a bright light).
>>
>> I think that if these were all there were to psychology,
>> historico-cultural pscyhology would be a bizarre branch of philosophy, or an
>> obscure literary practice, and the reactologists would have been right after
>> all. There is, however, a second kind of practical thinking which is
>> functionally similar, looks structurally similar, but is genetically utterly
>> different and therefore, in the final analysis (e.g. under conditions of
>> pathological degeneration as in old people with Alzheimer's) it is also
>> structurally different.
>>
>> These are the hand-to-eye "reflexes" we see in driving, in computer games,
>> in piano playing, and in a wide range of societal practices that are
>> manifestly symbolic manipulations. They are semiotically consequential for
>> other people (not just for the biological organism).
>>
>> But they do appear for all the world like "automatic" reflexes (a term
>> that I think Vygotsky would avoid, except for metaphorical usages), actions
>> into which consciousness does not (any longer) appear to enter. These are
>> the actions I would like to call "post-verbal" or "de-verbal" thinking
>> rather than "pre-verbal" or "non-verbal" thinking.
>>
>> Vygotsky's example is tying a knot. It's not that this is unconscious (you
>> are not asleep when you tie your shoes, and you are not even in a trance).
>> It is that it is largely non-conscious, because your attention is focused on
>> the result of the action and not on the activity itself. You can, if you
>> wish, focus on the activity, and in this sense it is structurally quite
>> different from what happens when I unexpectedly fire a gun next to your ear.
>>
>> You cannot, no matter how hard you try, focus on the jump that you
>> involuntarily make when you hear an unexpected gunshot. The same is true of
>> the other examples as long as they are unexpected, although of course people
>> can and do culturally mediate their vertigo and deliberately train for
>> eidetic memory, after which we can no longer call it a lower psychological
>> function.
>>
>> I think that all kinds of history, including ontogeny, know instances of
>> what in phylogenesis is called convergent evolution. The wings of birds,
>> insects and airplanes are functionally and even structurally similar, but
>> they are only externally related; that is, related because of their very
>> different adaptation to the functional needs and to the environment. I think
>> that pre-verbal and post-verbal "automatism" has the same type of
>> resemblance: a phenotypical rather than a genotypical one.
>>
>
> <snip>
>
>
>
>> David Kellogg
>> Seoul National University of Education .
>>
>>
>> --- On Wed, 5/11/11, Steve Gabosch <stevegabosch@me.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> From: Steve Gabosch <stevegabosch@me.com>
>> Subject: Re: [xmca] last on concepts
>> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>> Date: Wednesday, May 11, 2011, 3:28 AM
>>
>>
>> David,
>>
>>
> <snip>
>
>  Question: is what you are referring to as "practical intellect" and
>> "post-verbal" behavior equivalent to what Vygotsky refers to as automatic
>> behavior or activity, such as in his discussion of Claparede's law, v1 p
>> 183?  "This law states that difficulties or impediments encountered in
>> automatic activity lead to conscious reflection on that activity." p 70
>>  (Vygotsky seems to accept this law, but only as a functional law - his
>> criticism is that it only indicates whether the need for conscious awareness
>> is present or absent in an individual, not how conscious awareness itself
>> emerges. v1 p183)
>>
>> A classic example of automatic activity versus behavior guided by
>> conscious awareness is of course comparing the driver who is used to
>> changing gears with a stick shift to someone just learning how to do that.
>>  The coordination of the gear shift with the clutch eventually becomes
>> habitual and only rises to consciousness when there is a problem for the
>> first driver, but initially requires constant attention from the second one.
>>
>> - Steve
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On May 10, 2011, at 5:16 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
>>
>>  Steve:
>>>
>>> One of the things we did when we translated T&S into Korean was to
>>> carefully compare every single paragraph with the Minick translation into
>>> English. We found quite a few differences. Here's the original Vygotsky:
>>>
>>> Отношение мышления и речи в этом случае можно было бы схематически
>>> обозначить двумя пересекающимися окружностями, которые показали бы, что
>>> известная часть процессов речи и мышления совпадает. Это . так называемая
>>> сфера &Lt;речевого мышления&Gt;. Но это речевое мышление не исчерпывает ни
>>> всех форм мысли, ни всех форм речи. Есть большая область мышления, которая
>>> не будет иметь непосредственного отношения к речевому мышлению. Сюда следует
>>> отнести раньше всего, как уже указывал Бюлер, инструментальное и техническое
>>> мышление и
>>> вообще всю область так называемого практического интеллекта, который
>>> только в последнее время становится предметом усиленных исследований.
>>>
>>> Here's an English translation, with some of the differences with Minick
>>> in parentheses:
>>>
>>> "(It would be possible to) schematically designate the relation of
>>> thinking and speech (in this case) by two intersecting circles, (which would
>>> show that a certain part) of the processes of speech and thinking do
>>> coincide. (Here is the so-called sphere of “verbal thinking”. But) this
>>> verbal thinking exhausts neither all the forms of thought nor all the forms
>>> of speech. There is the large area of thinking, which will not have direct
>>> relation to the vocal thinking. (Here one should relate first of all as
>>> already indicated Bühler, instrumental and technical thinking and generally
>>> the entire region of so-called the practical intellect, which only recently
>>> becomes the object of those intensified studies.)"
>>>
>>> Now, Minick dislikes Vygotsky's tendency to say the same thing three
>>> times, and like Hanfmann and Vakar he often prunes in the hope of producing
>>> a stronger and clearer image. Martin doesn't like Vygotsky's love of
>>> striking, and often spatial, images (and I certainly agree with Martin that
>>> they ARE dangerous sometimes, as in the idea of four "planes" that so struck
>>> you, Professor Mack, and Colin, which I think is a complete
>>> misunderstanding).
>>>
>>> I like both, and I think they are related. I think that we are supposed
>>> to take both with a block of salt, the way a cow does. I think that we take
>>> Vygotsky's slightly different redundancies and his not quite overlapping
>>> images not as Galton photographs (where similarities reinforce each other
>>> and differences obscure) but as frames in a moving picture, verbal
>>> approximations of something that is changing as we speak.
>>>
>>> So here we have the image of two intersecting circles. Vygotsky says it's
>>> only one of several ways to imagine this (and in fact he has already
>>> described it as the intersection of two lines, as a tangled skein, as two
>>> "currents" that flow into each other, etc. So it is right and proper to
>>> begin with "It might be possible" or "it may be possible" or "it would be
>>> possible" which is what Vygotsky really does.
>>>
>>> He's talking about speech functions in ADULTS, which is why he says "in
>>> this case". Think of an adult driving a car. This is an almost perfect
>>> example of practical, mechanical intellect. Vygotsky is surely right to
>>> suggest that it has no DIRECT relationship to verbal thinking; if you
>>> describe what you are doing while you are driving, you are probably going to
>>> have an accident.
>>>
>>> But it's not at all like PRE-verbal nonverbal thinking, is it? We can see
>>> this in a number of ways. First of all, we find conversation a little
>>> burdensome when we are driving unless it is actually connected with the
>>> driving task (e.g. a GPS). This suggests positive and negative interference,
>>> doesn't it? Secondly, we do LEARN to drive in a verbal way, from
>>> instructions, instructors, and ultimately verbal tests. So perhaps we should
>>> say that structurally, genetically, yea, even functionally, driving is
>>> POST-verbal or DE-verbal rather than PRE-verbal. And this DOES suggest an
>>> INDIRECT relationship to verbal thinking.
>>>
>>> Here's some other stuff, earlier in the chapter, worth looking at in this
>>> context:
>>>
>>> Так, Бюлер со всей справедливостью говорит: &Lt;Действия шимпанзе
>>> совершенно независимы от речи, и в позднейшей жизни человека техническое,
>>> инструментальное мышление (Werkzeugdenken) гораздо менее связано с речью и
>>> понятиями, чем другие формы мышления&Gt; (13, с. 100). Дальше мы должны
>>> будем еще возвратиться к этому указанию Бюлера. Мы увидим, что действительно
>>> все, чем мы располагаем по этому вопросу из области экспериментальных
>>> исследований и клинических наблюдений, говорит за то, что в мышлении
>>> взрослого человека отношение
>>>
>> интеллекта
>>
>>> и речи не является постоянным и одинаковым для всех функций, для всех
>>> форм интеллектуальной и речевой деятельности.
>>>
>>> So Bühler, (with entire validity), says “The (performances) of the
>>> chimpanzee are completely independent from speech, and (in the later life of
>>> man) technical, instrument thinking (Werkzeugdenken) is much less connected
>>> with speech and with concepts, than other forms of thnking” (13, p. 100).
>>> Further on we must again return to this indication of Bühler’s. (We will
>>> see), that actually everything that we now have available on this question
>>> from the areas of experimental studies and clinical observations (will
>>> confirm as a point of fact) that in the thinking of the adult person the
>>> relation of intellect and speech is neither constant nor identical (for all
>>> functions) and all forms of intellectual and verbal activity."
>>>
>>> Again, we can easily imagine that the practical, instantaneous problem
>>> solving behavior we see in an adult human repairing a car was originally
>>> learnt from a repair manual, or from another more expert repairman; in other
>>> words, at one point the adult human’s thinking was virtually identical with
>>> written or oral speech and proceeded step by step alongside it.
>>>
>>>
>>> Finally, take a look at "Tool and Sign in Child Development", Steve
>>> (Volume Six). In the first chapter, first section, paragraph 11-12, Vygotsky
>>> and Luria go over this same ground. But this time they make an invidious
>>> comparison between Kohler, who really tries to show how human the chimp is,
>>> and Buhler, who is trying to show how chimplike the human is. And they draw
>>> attention PRECISELY to the MISTAKE of assuming that practical intelligence
>>> in later life is language free. Here's what they've got.
>>>
>>> Эта тенденция остается неизменной и у всех дальнейших исследователей, за
>>> небольшими исключениями. В ней наиболее ярко выражена та упомянутая
>>> опасность зоологизирования детской психологии, которая, как уже сказано,
>>> является господствующей чертой всех исследований в этой области. Однако в
>>> исследовании Бюлера эта опасность представлена в наименее серьезном виде.
>>> Бюлер имеет дело с ребенком до развития речи, и в этом отношении основные
>>> условия, необходимые для оправдания психологической параллели между шимпанзе
>>> и
>>> ребенком, могут быть соблюдены. Правда, Бюлер сам недооценивает значение
>>> сходства основных условий, говоря, что действия шимпанзе совершенно
>>> независимы от речи и в позднейшей жизни человека техническое,
>>> инструментальное мышление в гораздо меньшей степени связано с речью и
>>> понятиями, чем другие формы мышления.
>>>
>>> "This tendency, with a few exceptions, remains unchanged in the work of
>>> all following investigators. It is here that the danger of what might be
>>> called the ‘animalization’ of child psychology, mentioned earlier, finds its
>>> clearest expression as the prevalent feature of investigation in this field
>>> (see earlier reference). However, this danger is at its smallest in Bühler’s
>>> experiments. Bühler deals with the pre-speech period of the child, which
>>> makes it possible to fulfill the basic conditions necessary to justify the
>>> psychological parallel between chimpanzee and child. It is true that Bühler
>>> underestimates the importance of the similarities of these basic conditions
>>> when he states : ‘The chimpanzee’s activities are totally independent of
>>> speech, and in man’s later period of life technical, instrumental thinking
>>> is much less connected to speech and concepts than other forms of thought’,”
>>>
>>> David Kellogg
>>> Seoul National University of Education
>>>
>>
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