Re: [xmca] The Non-modular Mind

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

A year's worth of topics crowded into that message, David. Reminded me that
I am trying to get the Shuenko and Hengl article mentioned on XMCA about a
week ago pdf-ed because it covers a whole lot of XMCA territory as well.

I heard the book written about below discussed on NPR earlier this week, and
your note induced me to dig out and send along. Seems relevant to your
comments.
mike

http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/05/09/the_shallows

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 10:46 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:

> Bradd Shore argues (in his book "Culture in Mind") that the "mod" in
> "modern", or "postmodern" really stands for "modular", that is, the belief
> that the world is basically made of blocks that are not functionally
> dedicated but simply structural units, and function arises out of the way
> that modules are combined. The productivity of nature, as Phillip Morrison
> says, is in the combination and recombination of a very small number of
> neutral units, like atoms and subatomic particles, and the way we understand
> nature is simply a reflection of that modular structure in the thinking
> brain.
>
> Shore's problem, then, is to account for the radical diversity of human
> minds we see both within and between human cultures. Now, he does this by
> arguing that although certain structures such as language might be modular,
> the mind itself is non-modular; the way in which the various units of human
> mental functioning fit together are not at all content free but culturally
> dedicated. (Despite what Jerry Fodor says, I think language is a VERY poor
> candidate for modularity; it turns out that even at the level of the phoneme
> everything gets connected to everything else! Shore would be much better off
> making his argument the way Morrison did, by looking at that function which
> in any given society allows human beings to create mental models of material
> reality.)
>
> When we look at them carefully, mental models, but not minds
> themselves, always involve some kind of modularity. Even the use of
> "totems", as Levi-Strauss pointed out, is modular in the sense that
> categories are freed of content and allowed to recombine without any
> functional restrictions (e.g. "human" and "nonhuman"). Shore says totemism
> did not die out died but proliferated in the form of "techno-totemism", or
> the identification of particular tribes of our societies with superhuman
> technical means that are omnicompetent and based on the idea of
> interchangeable parts (computers, cyborgs, plastic surgery, etc.).
>
> Shore takes a position that Richard Shweder would call relativist (as
> opposed to universalism, which says that everybody is really the same, and
> developmentalism, which says that some of us are better than others). He is
> arguing that cultures, and the subunits of culture we call minds, really are
> different; there is no such thing as psychic unity. But because they are
> functionally differentiated, it is pointless to try to argue that some are
> more developed than others; it's like saying that an iPhone app is more
> functional than a tooth filling, or a prosthesis is more efficient than a
> pacemaker.
>
> I am not so sure. We know, for example, that some kinds of language (those
> that developed with universal literacy) are more democratic than others, and
> they are not the more modular, insular, self-contained ones. In the
> eighteenth century, Newton and Galileo made it possible to radically
> democratize scientific knowledge by writing in the vernacular and by
> constructing sentences that looked a little like mathematical equations
> (complex concepts but very simple "X is Y" grammar structures). By making
> science middle class and even working class, they exponentially increased
> the number of people doing science and vastly expanded the amount of science
> that could be done.
>
> Soon this vernacular, simple language was extended lengthwise into long
> works by Darwin, Marx, and the great ninetenth century novelists. James'
> first lectures on "Varieties of Religious Experience" were three or four
> hours long, without any breaks, and they were extremely well attended. By
> reconstruing complex vocabulary as simple, everyday concepts and
> transferring the complexity to the discourse, the great nineteenth century
> artists and scientists once again made it more accessible, and once again
> vastly extended its reach.
>
> I can see this expanding of complex concepts into complex sequences even in
> things like painting and music: it's in the nineteenth century that we get
> realism, that is, the idea that a completely everyday scene is as complex
> and as worthy of extended treatment as an epic, in both areas. Of course,
> Aristotle had always advocated "temporal unity" and insisted that all the
> action on stage should correspond to a single day. But it was as a purely
> modular, content-free dramatic dogma, not as a statement about the
> complexity and ineffability and artworthiness of everyday life. Only in the
> twentieth century does it really become possible to write things like
> Joyce's Ulysses or Strauss's Alpine Symphony, where a single day represents
> not a module, but a completely non-modular, context-specific, and ineffable
> moment of real time.
>
> The problem is that these works require an ATTENTION SPAN. And just as the
> number of human languages really does seem to have dwindled from several
> hundred thousand to less than four thousand, it seems to me that the ability
> of our own culture to deal with long stretches of text is really shrinking.
> Some people have speculated that the 19th Century was really an abberation,
> and that people are really more like Andrew than like George Eliot. So the
> mind really is modular, and when it distractedly glances from one piece of
> information to another without bothering to integrate them into wholes it is
> simply reverting to its modular self.
>
> But that view too seems to take an aberration and make it into an essence.
> Short-windedness is not at all a property of oral, face-to-face cultures.
> The longest poem ever "written" in any language, at least so far as we know,
> is the Saga of King Gesar, which is (in some parts of Sichuan and Qinghai
> province in China) still recited in the eighth century Tibetan in which it
> must have been first composed.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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