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Andy,Donald, whose views I was summarizing, subscribes to what he calls "exuberant materialism" (p. 381). He rejects dualism, "the traditional comfortable separation of mind from the material world." He rejects a "simplistic 'reduction' of mind to matter." His vote goes to what he calls "mental materialism," which seeks "a straight material explanation for mind."
This from the last paragraph of his book: "Our minds function on several phylogenetically new representational planes, none of which are available to animals. We act in cognitive collectivities, in symbiosis with external memory systems. As we develop new external symbolic configurations and modalities, we configure our own mental architecture in nontrivial ways. The third transition has led to one of the greatest reconfigurations of cognitive structure in mammalian history, without major genetic change."
I don't agree with you that to say everything is material is tautological, empty, or meaningless. There are different kinds of matter: different elements, compounds, mixtures, different organisms, artifacts, machines. All are material.
Martin On Sep 24, 2009, at 11:03 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:
Oh I don't doubt that the various strands of abstract empiricism and so on are full of non-material representational systems and non- material all-sorts-of-things. I think you are just making a point about your not subscribing to Platonism or some dualist philosophical system.But in the meaning *you* give to "material" aren't you making a tautology by saying that representational systems found in history are material? Or are there representational system which *you* say are not material?Andy Martin Packer wrote:Andy,Well, the (putative) representational systems studied by cognitive science, which are taken to be mental functions, properties of thought, which are not doubted to have a material substrate (the brain) but which are assumed not to be material themselves but ideal, in Plato's rather than Ilyenkov's sense. Chomsky's generative grammar is a good example. Piaget's theory of the mental actions and operations going on 'inside the head' of child is another.Martin On Sep 24, 2009, at 9:09 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:Martin, tell me a representational system which is *not* material. a Martin Packer wrote:humans have evolved to use an ordered series of "representational systems." The sequence is as follows: the episodic, mimetic, mythic, and theoretic. I won't go into the details, but crucially important, I think, is that these systems are material._______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Andy Blunden http://www.erythrospress.com/Classics in Activity Theory: Hegel, Leontyev, Meshcheryakov, Ilyenkov $20 ea_______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
_______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca