Re: [xmca] More on Martin: Consciousness vs knowledge?

David-- As I believe I have remarked before, one of the problems I have in
discussions of "consciousness" is that there are so many uses of the term
and rarely are the meanings-in-particular uses made clear. You write:

*Because it seems to me that if consciousness is merely self-knowledge, the
distinction is not very interesting (I guess I'm a boring person that way).
On the other hand, if consciousness is VOLITIONAL knowledge, ENABLING
knowledge, ENACTABLE knowledge, then I'm interested. *I begin wondering to
myself, is self knowledge/consciousness different from knowledge of being
conscious/ or consciousness of consiousness or o-so-znanie
(about-with-knowing)?
*
*In a note where I was asking Martin's help on a closely related issue, he
referred to something he called (approximately), "simple stimulus
consciousness" which didn't interest him. But this simple
consciousness/knowledge that you see a rock in front of you does interest
me! (And I am clearly boring in THIS regard!). Why am I interested? Because
I believe that the mechanisms of this "simple" form of consciousness REQUIRE
imagination, which is the basis for my interest in the discussion that Luiz
the temporary Parisian brought us to vis a vis mmorgs.That is another rock I
obviously have to
polish if it is going to get noticed and carved into something more
interesting.

Now I need to spend some time thinking about volitional, enabling, and
enactable consciousness, or come to re-mediate my understanding of the
consciousness/knowledge relationship (and hence
my consciousness?).

Just one note on LSV and the people he referred to as primitive. We could
call them small, face to face, hunter-gather societies but its a little
awkward. I need complete reading Bakhurst's piece you pointed to, but just
for now. In talking about the "image-laden" nature of the speech of such
people, LSV drew, as he did in many instances, on Levy-Bruhl. This is an
important topic all its own. But
he more or less quotes LB by writing that "Tasmanians do not have words to
specify such qualities as sweet, bitter, hard, cole, long short, and rount.
Instead of "hard" they say "like a stone," in place of "tall" - "high feet",
"round"=like a ball, and they also add a gesture which explains this.....
This is why in cases where a European man may use one or two words a
primitive man utters sometimes 10.

Later for "pre-logical" etc.

I am not at all sure we disagree at one level, although when we deal in
abstractions such as telelogy and relativism we might think we do and it
might even be that we do, but I am having a very hard
time distinguishing disagreements from failure to recognize we are not
talking about the same thing.
mike

On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 12:35 AM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
wrote:

> Let me see if I can OPERATIONALIZE this distinction between consciousness
> and knowledge. Because it seems to me that if consciousness is merely
> self-knowledge, the distinction is not very interesting (I guess I'm a
> boring person that way). On the other hand, if consciousness is VOLITIONAL
> knowledge, ENABLING knowledge, ENACTABLE knowledge, then I'm interested.
>
> As always, the key question for me is: what can you teach with it?One
> common problem in elementary English classes is articles. I think this is
> caused by a complete MISUNDERSTANDING of the structure of the problem. We
> first teach the distinction between countable and uncountable nouns. We then
> focus like a laser beam on the countables and teach the distinction between
> plural and singular. We then focus on the singular countables and teach that
> they require one of two articles in English, a definite one ("a") or an
> indefinite one ("the").
>
> All of this is quite Saussurean, which is another way of saying that it is
> closer to science fiction than science. You can easily see this by trying to
> use it to explain why we can say "Marriage is a market" but not "*A marriage
> is market". But even if it were all quite true, by focusing our rule in this
> way we have largely excluded the phenomena for which we need it. We have
> created an elegant system of knowledge quite disinfected of all practical
> work. And as a result we can't actually use it to choose which article we
> need in a pinch.
>
> The other day in class we were practicing with various puppets--I got this
> amazing four foot red dragon in the Seattle airport when I was on
> holiday and everybody wanted to be photographed with the dragon curled
> around their waist and over one shoulder. So I had them do something like
> this:
>
> T: I like dragons. (concept)
> This is a dragon. (example)
> The dragon's name is Yongwang! (name)
>
> And in my undergraduate class we often do this when we introduce the
> textbook characters:
>
> T: This is Minsu. (name)
> He is Mina's brother. Any other brothers? (concept)
> Yes, Tony's a brother too. (example) Tony is Julie's brother.
>
> From this we can see that actually "a" and "the" do NOT exist on the
> same plane; one is more specific and concrete and the other is more abstract
> and closer to the concept. One is much more like a NAME and the other is
> much more like a NUMBER. "The" is the name that nouns have when they don't
> have a name. "A" is the number we give to examples when they don't have a
> number. ("Marriage" is a concept, and we don't pluralize it because we need
> to be able to distinguish it from plural examples of marriage, but "a
> market" is an example, one of the many delightful phenomena of free
> exchange.)
>
> It seems to me that this way of structuring the problem is correct, if we
> mean by correct that it corresponds to praxis comprehended and not simply
> science fictionalized. So I think we need a threefold distinction between
> every day explanations which need to be systematized and hierarchized,
> scientific explanations which need to (and can) ascend to the concrete,
> and non-scientific explanations which need to be destroyed. I guess I think
> that's what LSV is really up to in "The Meaning of the Crisis in
> Psychology".
>
> I guess I think this is where the distinction between learning and
> development really comes from: in learning we need to add to knowledge, but
> in development we have to get rid of falsified forms which have now become a
> fetter to the increase of knowledge, consciousness and volition. I realize
> that this puts me very clearly on the teleological, historical,
> anti-relativist end of cultural historical psychology, and that's a pretty
> unfashionable spot at present. But I think there are concepts that you can
> do more stuff with and there are other concepts that you can only do very
> narrow things with and then there are other concepts that are so narrow as
> to be essentially false (such as the phonics rule "When two vowels go
> walking the first one does the talking", which if it were true would have to
> rhyme "does" with "doughs"). All this is quite independent of the word
> "primitive" with which it has somehow become confused: As Mike and Eugene
> Subbotsky point out, even scientists go to the theater. Saussure, on the
> other hand, was no more a savage than he was a scientist.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
> ------------------------------
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Received on Sun Mar 9 11:39 PDT 2008