Re: [xmca] Operations, mental images and emotions (!)

[Haydi Zulfei <haydizulfei@rocketmail.com>]

________________________________
 From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
To: Haydi Zulfei <haydizulfei@rocketmail.com> 
Sent: Wednesday, 17 April 2013, 3:02:02
Subject: Re: [xmca] Operations, mental images and emotions (!)
 


Hi Martin


[[I appreciate that you're being brave enough to write in a second language, and I know that much of my confusion stems from that.]]

So grateful because I have this bravery from you . Mutually , I'm so happy you've been enlightened with your confusions through my explications :-)

[[But I've always thought of "reification" as treating something as real and concrete when it is not. Treating a process as an object for example.]]


I'm so sorry that after presenting so many paragraphs as evidence , you still urge on your all-embracing truth-finding potentialities and erudition . All along the terms such as : reified , embodied , materialized , extinguished , crystalized , finished , they use the term : 'alienated' . The finished product is A PRODUCT however ; in other words , on the surface , you see a thing , a product , an object ; but IN ESSENCE , you see a process , relation . And this is the advantage of penetrating the depths . Many a time , there's talk of taking relations between social beings for those between things . It's been so legitimate for you to define the term the way you've presented . Not a bit of a problem .

[[However, when the action of changing gears becomes habitual, it seems to me that one becomes unaware of it even as a process. Nothing seems to be reified in such a habitualization - almost the contrary.]]

The GOAL of being skilled in driving , as you said before , is not something material . But the structure of the activity , as L says , is the same . You're conscious about everything in the early stages . Little by little , everything becomes automatic with you . You've now got the skill , may be called the condensation of the learnings . This is the same as the process which leads , say , to the production of tools . Words and sentences are also reifications because they have lost the ideality which once they were filled with . I don't mean the mere meaning of the word . I mean all the processes the agent had to pass on and all the interactions she had to go through so that a meaning were to be created . Just remember the formations of the concepts with Vygotsky . Now , take the skill is attained but to drive to a destination , you're recommended to use gears 4-5 ; then though it's been already habitualized as you say , you have to connect the activity
 of driving with the changing of the gears which is now the action assigned by a goal .

[[I also don't see how a habitual action becomes unmotivated. Perhaps if I understood the terminology of Leontiev better this would not confuse me. If I have to drive to the store to pick up some milk, the fact that I have learned to change gears smoothly means that I no longer have to maintain the conscious goal of getting into second gear. But it doesn't mean that I am driving (and changing gears) without motive. No, I am changing gears as part of driving the car in order to get the store to buy the milk.]]

With the above , you understood how a habitual action becomes MOTIVATED hopefully ; Now imagine while driving through gears 4-5 you receive a call from the recommender indicating for this or that reason there's no need for you to drive so speedily . give up the task . The motivated habitual action now becomes UNmotivated / demotivated ; you no longer have to drive on that speed . 
If you HAVE TO drive for milk (the physician has advised to have the baby drink milk so that her health will be guaranteed) , you're on to an activity and action ; But if it's your routine habitual action of getting it while back home form the work , you're off the activity ; you get it while thinking and acting in one thousand other ways . 

[[And no, of course one doesn't have to consciously think about the survival of mankind. But this was rather my point - all sorts of actions and activities are possible without having a "mental image" of what they are in fact accomplishing.]]

This was clearly stated in the paragraphs which was problematic on our previous discussions . 

[[It might be helpful for us to take a look at Dreyfus' treatment of skillful coping in pilots. Or Gary Klein's work on the intuitive expertise of fire-fighters. In both cases, actions become habitual without thereby becoming mechanical, or unintelligent, or unmotivated. On the contrary, these are experts who rely on habitualization in order to do their job successfully.]]

Thanks for recommending the articles ; aside from the exchange of some unhealthful points , I especially thank you and everybody else on this forum who've been so kind to tolerate me and to direct me to some understanding . Enormously thankful !!!
Best
Haydi 

Martin

Dreyfus, H. L. (2002). Refocusing the question: Can there be skillful coping without propositional representations or brain representations? Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1(4), 413-425.

Kahneman, D., & Klein, G. (2009). Conditions for intuitive expertise: A failure to disagree. The American Psychologist, 64(6), 515-26. doi:10.1037/a0016755


On Apr 16, 2013, at 8:45 AM, Haydi Zulfei <haydizulfei@rocketmail.com> wrote:

Hi Martin
>
>
>[[I'm not following your train of thought. Yes, what humans do WITHIN THE PROCESSES OF LIFE ACTIVITIES certainly becomes routinized. But how does this connect to "reified ideals"?]] 
>
>
>Please let's keep the discussion within its limits ; expanding it causes misunderstanding . Within our limits , here , 'routinized' means 'reified' . On the object plane , the changing of gears become routinized , you're no longer on it , it's been thrown out of consciousness like many other things within your car not within your focus of attention , unnoticed . Hence unMOTIVATED / INACTIVATED . Because there's no need for them to be mobilized . 
>This is the same with , say , buying bread . It's not the case that each time you focus on your being hungry or assign yourself a particular time of the day or night to think about your being hungry so that you're motivated to think about social reproduction and the survival of the mankind or generation ; then idealizing the related division of labour ; and the part you've been allocated , that is , to provide bread for the family (action and operation) . The problem with you is that you think of 'automaticality' as being equal to having piles and piles of bread stored within the house because of that automaticity . You might have been thinking of one thousand other things during the one hour ; then just at the entering the door , you see yourself holding loaves of bread in your hand . Compare it with providing bread for a banquette . 
>
>
>[[I can't find that phrase in Leontiev's chapter 3.5.]] 
>
>
>If you mean the phrase 'ideal , being reified , is no longer ideal' . I think it's MINE literally . 
>First , I just had time to review 'the concept of the ideal' . The result is the many paragraphs you see down here . They hopefully testify to its being correct . Some paragraphs deal with other ideas discussed before on this thread like what Michael wanted to know . Andy will be up to me because of the lengthy quote and message . No way out , Andy :-) 
>Second , long ago , I put this to the Israeli Colleague (memory failure) who knows a lot about 'ideality' , he Oked it . You might be willing to discuss with him .  Victor Odaysis , I suppose .
>Third , Brecht on his explications upon Marx's THESES ON FEUERBACH , came up with one brilliant quote from Marx to the effect that 'the beginning is living process , activity ; in the end , finish , product , ?!  I could not find it . May Brecht or Andy resend it ? In relation to the Objectification / Deobjectification processes . 
>
>
>[[ I've been thinking that activity is defined by a motive, which could be an ideal but not necessarily so. (That's why I quoted Marx: I presume we'd agree that production is an activity? According to Marx production can be motivated by a mental image, a need, a desire...  But I repeat myself.) ]]
>
>
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>If you read the paragraphs carefully , which is crystal clear , you will get a bright picture . That will be the same with L . 
>
>
>[[Are you suggesting that once an activity's actions are routinized, it is no longer an activity?]]
>
>
>
>YES , YES . Please read the INTERNAL transformations of an activity to the end of 3.5 hopefully . In the end , we have a product , a thing , a object , How could we call it an activity cycle , then ? Both 'ideality' and along with it 'the activity' are gone . If just one activity continually reproduces itself , what happens to the life , to the man , to the world , then ? Hierarchy of motives and levels of activity are up , too . 
>
>
>And are you suggesting that having a baby becomes routine and automatic? I would imagine one would have to have a lot of babies for that to occur!  : )
>
>
>
>How nice you portray it , Martin :-) ?   IT DEPENDS ON THE 'SOCIAL' NEED .  In Germany , they say there's the SOCIAL NEED for proliferation ? What about Canada , then ? If there IS , go to help them with the activity .  The ideality , the motivation and the activity of this phenomenon is to be found in , say , India ? My relative has 10 , numerous dead ?! but socially they need more soldiers ?? and think of what passes in China ? In this relation , other factors to be discussed .
>
>
>Best
>Haydi
>
>
>Martin
>
>
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>
>
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>
>
>For this reason in the vocabulary of modern materialistic psychology 
>(and not only philosophy) the category of ‘ideality’ or the ‘ideal’ defines 
>not mental activity in general, but only a certain phenomenon connected, 
>of course, with mental activity, but by no means merging with it. 
>
>
>‘Ideality mainly characterises the idea or image insofar as they, becom-ing objectivised in words’ [entering into the system of socially evolved 
>knowledge which for the individual is something that is given for him. – 
>E.V.I.], ‘in objective reality, thus acquire a relative independence, separat-ing themselves, as it were, from the mental activity of the individual’, 
>writes the Soviet psychologist S. L. Rubinstein. 
>
>
>Only in this interpretation does the category of ‘ideality’ become a 
>specifically meaningful definition of a certain category of phenomena, 
>establishing the form of the process of reflection of objective reality in 
>mental activity, which is social and human in its origin and essence, in the 
>social-human consciousness, and ceases to be an unnecessary synonym 
>for mental activity in general. 
>
>
>With reference to the quotation from S. L. Rubinstein’s book it need 
>only be observed that the image is objectivised not only in words, and 
>may enter into the system of socially evolved knowledge not only in its 
>verbal expression. The image is objectivised just as well (and even more 
>directly) in sculptural, graphic and plastic forms and in the form of the 
>routine-ritual ways of dealing with things and people, so that it is ex-pressed not only in words, in speechand language, but also in drawings, 
>models and such symbolic objects ascoats of arms, banners, dress, utensils, or as money, including gold coins and paper money, IOUs, 
>bonds or credit notes.
>***
>In other words, what is ‘represented’ here as a thingis the form of 
>people’s activity, the form of life activity which they perform together, 
>which has taken shape ‘behind the back of consciousness’ and is materi-ally established in the form of the relationship between things described 
>above. 
>***
>It is here that we find the answer to the riddle of ‘ideality’. Ideality, 
>according to Marx, is nothing else but the form of social human activity 
>represented in the thing. Or, conversely, the form of human activity 
>represented as a thing, as an object. 
>***
>‘Ideality’ constantly escapes, slips away from the 
>metaphysically single-valued theoretical fixation. As soon as it is fixed as 
>the ‘form of the thing’ it begins to tease the theoretician with its ‘immate-riality’, its ‘functional’ character and appears only as a form of ‘pure 
>activity’. On the other hand, as soon as one attempts to fix it ‘as such’, as 
>purified of all the traces of palpable corporeality, it turns out that this 
>attempt is fundamentally doomed to failure, that after such a purification 
>there will be nothing but phantasmal emptiness, an indefinable vacuum. 
>***
>And indeed, as Hegel understood so well, it is absurd to speak of ‘ac-tivity’ that is not realised in anything definite, is not ‘embodied’ in some-thing corporeal, if only in words, speech, language. If such ‘activity’ 
>
>exists, it cannot be in reality but only in possibility, only potentially, and, 
>therefore, not as activity but as its opposite, as inactivity, as the absence of 
>activity. 
>***
>Man is quite a different matter. The child that has just been born is 
>confronted – outside itself – not only by the external world, but also by a 
>very complex system of culture, which requires of him ‘modes of behav-iour’ for which there is genetically (morphologically) ‘no code’ in his 
>body. Here it is not a matter of adjusting ready-made patterns of behaviour, but 
>of assimilating modes of life activity that do not bear any relationship at all to 
>the biologically necessary forms of the reactions of his organism to things 
>and situations. 
>***
>This applies even to the ‘behaviouralacts’ directly connected with the 
>satisfaction of biologically inborn needs: the need for food is biologically 
>encoded in man, but the need to eat it with the help of a plate, knife, fork 
>and spoon, sitting on a chair, at a table, etc., etc., is no more congenital in 
>him than the syntactical forms of the language in which he learns to 
>speak. In relation to the morphology of the human body these are as 
>purely and externally conventional as the rules of chess. 
>***
>The existence of this specifically human object – the world of things 
>created by man for man, and, therefore, things whose forms are reified 
>forms of human activity (labour), and certainly not the forms naturally inher-ent in them – is the condition for the existence of consciousness and will. And 
>certainly not the reverse, it is notconsciousness and will that are the 
>condition and prerequisite for the existence of this unique object, let 
>alone its ‘cause’. 
>***
>The ideal form is the form of a thing created by social human labour. 
>Or, conversely, the form of labour realised in the substance of nature, 
>‘embodied’ in it, ‘alienated’ in it, ‘realised’ in it and, therefore, presenting 
>itself to man the creator as the form of a thing or a relationship between 
>things in which man, his labour, has placed them. 
>***
>For this reason the ‘ideal’ exists only in man. Outside man and beyond 
>him there can be nothing ‘ideal’. Man,however, is to be understood not 
>as one individual with a brain, but as a real aggregate of real people 
>collectively realising their specifically human life activity, as the ‘aggregate 
>of all social relations’ arising between people around one common task, 
>around the process of the social production of their life. It is ‘inside’ man 
>thus understood that the ideal exists, because ‘inside’ man thus understood are 
>all the thingsthat ‘mediate’ the individuals that are socially producing their 
>life: words, books, statues, churches, community centres, television towers, and (above 
>all!) the instruments of labour, from the stone axe and the bone needle to the 
>modern automated factory and the computer. It is in these ‘things’ that 
>the ideal exists as the ‘subjective’, purposeful form-creating life activity of 
>social man, embodied in the material of nature. 
>***
>The form of the thing created by man, taken out of the process of social life activity, out of the process of man-nature metabolism, also turns out to be simply the material form of the thing, the physical shape of an external body and nothing more. A word, taken out of the organism of human intercourse, turns out to be nothing more than an acoustic or optical phenomenon. “In itself” it is no more “ideal” than the human brain.
>
>
>
>END OF QUOTES 
>
>________________________________
> From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
>To: Haydi Zulfei <haydizulfei@rocketmail.com>; "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu> 
>Sent: Tuesday, 16 April 2013, 3:45:23
>Subject: Re: [xmca] Operations, mental images and emotions (!)
>
>
>
>Hi Haydi,
>
>
>
>I'm not following your train of thought. Yes, what humans do certainly becomes routinized. But how does this connect to "reified ideals"? I can't find that phrase in Leontiev's chapter 3.5.  I've been thinking that activity is defined by a motive, which could be an ideal but not necessarily so. (That's why I quoted Marx: I presume we'd agree that production is an activity? According to Marx production can be motivated by a mental image, a need, a desire...  But I repeat myself.)
>
>
>
>Are you suggesting that once an activity's actions are routinized, it is no longer an activity?
>
>
>
>And are you suggesting that having a baby becomes routine and automatic? I would imagine one would have to have a lot of babies for that to occur!  : )
>
>
>
>Martin
>
>
>
>On Apr 15, 2013, at 5:30 AM, Haydi Zulfei <haydizulfei@rocketmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>> Martin
>
>> 
>
>> There are many factors involved in this article .
>
>> 
>
>> In 3.5 of L's book , there's an example of the activity of 'driving' . Please read it again . First when you concentrate on changing gears , as it is conscious , it can be considered moment of activity . But when you change this goal , and think of speeding the car so that you might reach the destination , you no longer think of the changing of the gears . You AUTOMATICALLY  do it and it is removed from your consciousness as a goal . And please do remember that reified ideals are no longer ideal and that without 'ideality' you cannot involve in a activity cycle or generally in the FLOW of activities which L prefers to call it the 'sum total' of life itself . 
>
>> 
>
>> The routinized autonomic act of reproduction of generations need not to be activated / motivated generally . 
>
>> 
>
>> Finished products are there all the time ; at one certain point , they begin to reach the status of being an object to an activity ; while before being reified , all living material spiritual condition of an activity were true about them . Now , everything is extinct . 
>
>> 
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>> I wonder if I can call it a reverse activity . At its normal state , if it is natural or social , is to be discussed . Though exhaustion prevails .  
>
>> 
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>> I mean some activity was stopped because of the many factors involved in the situation and in relation to two different locations mentioned in the article . 
>
>> 
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>> The NEED arose as to find ways to remove the hindrances and obstacles in the way of 'productivity' . 
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>> 
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>> This need motivated and now is motivating those involved to plan for actions ; actions , according to the article , are under way .
>
>> 
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>> Conditions are also weighed down so that they will see if there are hopes for realization of the goals of the actions . 
>
>> 
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>> THIS IS THE ACTIVITY OF REACHING LOW/HIGH RATE OF, RELATIVE / ABSOLUTE (NORMAL / PERFECT) FERTILITY . 
>
>> 
>
>> Best
>
>> Haydi
>
>> 
>
>> 
>
>> ________________________________
>
>> From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
>
>> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu> 
>
>> Sent: Monday, 15 April 2013, 2:03:02
>
>> Subject: Re: [xmca] Operations, mental images and emotions (!)
>
>> 
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>> 
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>> 
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>> How's this for a neat example of the role of inorganic and organic cycles in the human activity/project of reproduction!
>
>> 
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>> 
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>> This from ethnography with the Abelam, who avoid sexual activity during the giant yam-growing season because it would upset the yams. The consequence is that no babies are born May through July.
>
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>> (I assume we can all agree that having a baby is a collaborative activity/project, motivated by human needs and involving various goal-directed actions? Or is this too base and animalistic an analysis?)
>
>> 
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>> 
>
>> Martin
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>> 
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>> 
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>> [cid:9559E85F-F2FC-4E6C-8BD4-7A77B5FB095C]
>
>> 
>
>> Condon, R. G., & Scaglion, R. (1982). The ecology of human birth seasonally. Human Ecology, 10(4), 495-511. doi:10.1007/BF01531169
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