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Xenophanes, Wittgenstein and Meaning

in Analytical Philosophy, Broken Postcard, Humanism, Philosophy, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | 2 comments

Wittgenstein remarked “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him”. It’s worth noting that the insight was not Wittgenstein’s alone. Xenophanes (approx 400 BC) stated “if oxen, horses…. had hands or could paint…horses would paint horse-like images of gods, and oxen ox-like ones”. Xenophanes continues “Ethiopians consider the gods..black..Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired”.

Wittgenstein parallels Xenophanes but they also refer to something quite different from each-other. Wittgenstein is making a comment about language and meaning, Xenophanes makes a comment about the Gods. Both however, make an interesting point about mind and human relations. It is in this context that both of their statements are worth expanding.

As individuals there is a degree to which we expect to be understood. It isn’t that we expect people to understand our words. The sense in which we expect to be understood doesn’t change if we use a translator. What we expect is that people understand what we mean.

In the same vein it is interesting that we assume that when we use words we expect they have the same values inter-subjectively. When we look at the world or other people we are limited in our ability to attribute reason by one thing; the limits of our own reason. Think, how many of us have given some reason for others behavior only to find out from them other reasons we may not have considered?

These are two strong assumptions to make. On the one hand we expect the world to understand us and on the other we expect the world to be like us. It seems to me that many errors are caused by these assumptions. First, it is indicative of most of our immediate history that it is our moral imperative to fashion a world that conforms to our reason. Secondly, that it ought to be intuitive to others that this is the case. However, it seems perpendicular to reason that our words and meanings ought to be shared on the basis of assumption.

The poet Fyodor Tyutchev wrote:

Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal
the way you dream, the things you feel.
Deep in your spirit let them rise
akin to stars in crystal skies
that set before the night is blurred:
delight in them and speak no word.
How can a heart expression find?
How should another know your mind?

A thought once uttered is untrue.
Dimmed is the fountainhead when stirred:
drink at the source and speak no word.
Live in your inner self alone
within your soul a world has grown,
the magic of veiled thoughts that might
be blinded by the outer light,
drowned in the noise of day, unheard…
take in their song and speak no word

This poem is a poetic paraphrase of the problems of translation, and the poets response is radical indeed. On the basis of our assumptions it just is the case that human lives can be lost. And to communicate our meanings in a world that doesn’t understand us is a tragic affair indeed. However, despite differences in culture, language and the values of one person and the next, there are very important problems with a world in which meaning and thought are believed to be heterogeneous. As a species we also share very many concerns, wherever we go and with whomever we speak to.

The thought expressed by Tyutchev is romantic. I don’t doubt that there is a degree to which it resonates with many of us. And that is the point. In as much as the poem has any effect, it does little to make its own case. If it were able to make its case it would be unintelligible, for the point is that it wouldn’t be understood by anyone other than the author.

Both Wittgenstein and Xenophanes are approximately correct. I doubt that lion’s would have the same use for language as us. However, I also imagine that if lions could speak (let’s assume that they had evolved a language as rich as ours) then they would share certain concerns in common, survival being one, and there ability to communicate their needs using that language for another. Xenophanes is also correct, we do tend to fashion Gods in our image. Worse, we fashion what we think Gods would want in our likeness as well, I personally can’t think of anything more perverse. That said, in as much as we are concerned with morality in any sense we really ought not consider Gods at all. It is our relationships as human beings that are far more important. After all, it is this world and in this life that our concerns for freedom, expression and justice are shared. It is therefore in this world that we ought to find some meaning between us and figure out the rest.

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A Relationship With The World

in A Place For Thought, Art, Broken Postcard, Consciousness, Design, Embodied, Humanism, Images, Logic, Psychology, Science, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | Comment

A tantalizing part of experience is the noise we don’t experience; both the visual and auditory noise in the environment is immense. The environment is an almost chaos. Light, shapes and sounds; all varied and complex. It is natural to think of shapes as formed, ready made for minds to acquiesce. We see ‘a table’ or ‘chair’ or ‘face’, and that is it. From the chaos we see an ordered world. That is amazing.

Furthermore within the order we can navigate, making sense of the fauna and flora of our environments. There is a degree to which the impressionists had it right however, there is a a sense in which their paintings are closer to the reality of perception than our very own eyes. After all we are closer to light than to objects (physically speaking).

Color perception offers a simple illustration. When we see a series of different colors the colors remain constant despite variability in environmental conditions such as luminance. This is known as color constancy and this is thought to be achieved because the brain reads the ratios of difference between the wavebands of light from one surface to the next. As wavelengths vary between the surfaces we are looking at, the brain ‘reads’ the ratio differences between light from surfaces (which stays the same irrespective of light variations) allowing the colors we see to remain constant. In other words the brain computes color properties from ratios which, when we think about the brain as fleshy stuff is just amazing.

We don’t just perceive and navigate, we order the world too. How many of us, moving into a new home hang up pictures ‘where they belong’? The world is not just a thing we receive, it is something we act on and try to control. Our brains, human brains that is, are immense in their ability to both make inferences from the available data and and then structure the world according to our needs. We are the only species known to use tools to make tools. That too is amazing.

Within evolutionary theory there is a not insignificant idea that the more variable a trait is the less likely it is to have adaptive value. The argument goes that truly adaptive changes quickly loose their variability as the remaining population have acquired them, thus leaving previously adaptive traits fully absorbed by a species; they become a part of the total makeup of the species. Although the assumption has been contested the overarching principle has held as a rule.

The point is that there is a base level at which we all operate on the world with the same bodies. Each an agent coming to the world ready to make something meaningful of it with the same demands. It was Darwin who noticed that across cultures facial reactions to emotions have an invariance. To the extent that we as a species have invariant demands, we too have structured responses. In short, we see and act on a world we see that is, in part at least, not just composed of the world, but of our response to it. In as much as that is the case, the world in which we live is our construction.

For me personally, it is not just that we are conscious that is amazing, it is that we are conscious agents with a bid to our futures. We live in reciprocity with the environment in such a way that the environment serves a function in an almost Hegelian dialectic, but rather than being an historical and transcendental metphysic, the relations are immediate and physical. Rather than being governed by an end point that is teleological in some as yet unperceived way, it is itself evolving between the myriad minds that people the world, somehow finding solutions to life as it emerges. In all its detail, that is magical.

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An anatomy of the idea

in A Place For Thought, Analytical Philosophy, Art, Belief, Broken Postcard, Consciousness, Design, Embodied, Logic, Psychology, Science, Sleep, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | Comment

Liv­ing day to day we some­times for­get the sig­nif­i­cance of our brain are with respect to the ideas that make up our worlds. In our brain are a con­sid­er­able num­ber of neu­rons with sig­nif­i­cantly more con­nec­tions. Odd as it may sound, there is noth­ing like the world in the brain, nor are there any clear ideas, just some gray and white mushy stuff. How your brain and my brain know a table is a table or an idea is an ideas is there­fore puzzling.

Of course as sci­ence has pro­gressed the ques­tions have been framed dif­fer­ently. The way in which the ques­tions have been framed has become and index for under­stand­ing how we relate to mean­ing in the world; under­stand­ing thought and the rela­tion­ships ideas have to each other is impor­tant if we want to under­stand how we relate to our cul­tural envi­ron­ment. Know­ing how our brains work will help us to frame our­selves in the con­cep­tual world of memes and archetypes.

A good place to start to think about our dreams. In our dreams our expe­ri­ences bear lit­tle resem­blance to the actual world. But when we dream we are as good as con­science. For all intents and pur­poses we see, move and exist in a world, albeit a dream world. The ques­tion is how? A lot of work has gone into try­ing to explain ‘how mat­ter becomes imag­i­na­tion’ (to bor­row a phrase from one of my favorite scientists).

To start to under­stand we must return to when we are awake; there is dis­tri­b­u­tion of activ­ity going on in our heads. Mem­o­ries encoded across regions of the brain are acti­vated, not just to explic­itly remem­ber some­thing, but to relate what we hear to the bank of infor­ma­tion already encoded in our brains. Those seman­tic net­works that become active rec­i­p­ro­cally influ­ence the way in which we encode the envi­ron­ment, we thus fur­ther per­ceive the world and our rela­tion to it in rela­tion to the meme­ories already banked up in our brains.

Prim­ing offers a rather good illus­tra­tion. If we are asked to study a list of words, and we are then given syl­la­bles and asked to com­plete them we are more likely to com­plete the syl­la­bles as the words that were in the list we stud­ied. On a seman­tic level, if we are ‘primed’ with a word like doc­tor, we would be more likely to think ‘nurse’ than say ‘tele­phone’, why, because they are seman­ti­cally related. Sim­i­larly, researchers have found that ‘prim­ing’ peo­ple with aggres­sively related stim­uli will get peo­ple to inter­pret oth­ers behav­ior dur­ing com­pet­i­tive games as more aggres­sive and will sim­i­larly trig­ger a more aggres­sive response than one would oth­er­wise have seen.

One other impor­tant things about sleep­ing is that when we sleep our minds have a chance to encode and rehearse infor­ma­tion that was impor­tant dur­ing the day, that is as well as process things that may have been on our minds. The same seman­tic net­works that are active dur­ing the day are active in our sleep minus the real world to order them. Of course this is a rather sim­ple account. But it’s the prin­ci­ple that’s impor­tant. The prin­ci­ple is that the world that we expe­ri­ence is related to active con­stel­la­tions of infor­ma­tion in our brains, formed by the activ­ity between neu­rons that struc­ture and encode that infor­ma­tion. That activ­ity has an impact on how we act on the world, and of course that has an impact on our expe­ri­ences, which fur­ther influ­ences the world that influ­ences us.

As human beings, as minds a sig­nif­i­cant part of that activ­ity is ideational. A sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of our expe­ri­ence is formed through ideas, con­cepts and seman­tic activ­ity. Things mean things (if I am per­mit­ted a circularity).

And that is the sig­nif­i­cance of mean­ing. The mean­ing we find in things dri­ves us. We relate to mean­ing of things. Jung in his book The Sci­ence of Mythol­ogy drew this point out (albeit psy­cho­an­a­lyt­i­cally), and if we think of the way in which we use rep­re­sen­ta­tional medi­ums, like deserted islands (Deleuze), or the sig­nif­i­cance of a Brand in the mod­ern world, we come close to under­stand­ing the sig­nif­i­cance of ideas in our lives. But they run deeper.

The con­cept of a schema is impor­tant in under­stand­ing the same point. Schema, or pat­terns that rep­re­sent some part of the world don’t come in-​​built like the abil­ity to rec­og­nize faces (or like the struc­tures that con­tain the schemata). The con­cept of the arche­type is of this form as is the con­cept of the meme. They share enough sim­i­lar­i­ties to be syn­onyms for each other. That is they are both ref­er­ents for ideas.

Com­bin­ing all of the ele­ments in this pic­ture we can begin to form an under­stand­ing of our rela­tion­ship with the world of ideas. Ideas, rep­re­sented often as objects, have sig­nif­i­cance by virtue of our rela­tion to them. The rela­tion­ship between the objects we encounter, the ideas that we form them and the ideas we get learn in soci­ety act as ref­er­ents, pro­vid­ing the envi­ron­ment with a sense of sig­nif­i­cance. That sig­nif­i­cance dri­ves our rela­tion­ship with our envi­ron­ment: press­ing for­ward en-​​mass the devel­op­ment of ideas con­tained in that envi­ron­ment shape a she­matic of ideational con­tent press­ing us with mean­ing. Thank­fully this is a par­tial pic­ture. One I hope devel­ops the impor­tance of ideas in the world as fac­tors in our rela­tion­ship with it. One that can help us bet­ter con­cep­tu­al­ize why some ideas work and some don’t as we cre­ativ­ity develop an image of the world we’re in.

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Embodied Society #1: The World In The Mind

in Broken Postcard, Consciousness, Embodied, Philosophy, Psychology, Science, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | 7 comments

Embodied We Are

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“Bodily space can be distinguished from external space and evelops its parts…”

“the body scheme is finally a way of stating my body is in the world”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The Phenomenology of Perception

It seems strange to me that as a species we would have been as successful as we have without the capacity to cooperate. In fact cooperation has been attributed as one of the main causes of our success. And an almost unique feature of our physiology, the size of our frontal cortex, has been related to the dynamics of our social groups. We don’t just have complex social structures; there are dense social dynamics amongst groups within larger social groups that have their own dynamics. The frontal cortex is responsible for a number of unique features of our behavior, a part of which includes our ability to inhibit it.  Organized society would be impossible without the inhibitory mechanisms of the frontal lobes.

In addition we are ‘designed’ in such a way that we can recognize 200 people well enough to engage with them meaningfully. This seems to stand in contradistinction to the size and complexity of the groups we live in. Living in a city we come across far more people day to day that we are ‘designed’, as a species to have  integrated relations with. Think about some of the largest institutions in society. There are functioning bodies of significantly more people than 200; all cooperating within themselves well enough for those institutions to survive.

This is in part dependent on our theory of mind which enables us to have sophisticated beliefs about other peoples beliefs’. On the one hand this increases our competitive advantage within society. On the other hand it demonstrates the extent to which we have evolved an innate intentionality that involves other people at the forefront of our consciousness.

At each level of the milieu of society are groups with their own dynamics each equally dense and complex. Wat is more we are capable of forms of thought that involve people other than ourselves  that are sophisticated. If we are to accept some form of evolutionary theory we must accept that there is more to our evolution than individual competition. Sociability and cooperation are central facets of an evolved person. We have an innate capacity for social interaction in a complex environent that requires other people.

Take the form of thought ‘I know that she knows that I know what I know, which she doesn’t know‘. That requires several levels of thought only possible in a sophisticated mind evolved to manage complex interactions in a distributed group of other people.

One only need consider the possibility of language to understand the fundamental nature of our being embedded in a  social context. Language would be impossible if we were not able to understand each other. This in and of itself implies the extent to which the social world is an inescapable part of the individual. The extent to which language facilities social interaction and cultural development is a singularly unique feature that is  human.

But we are led to believe that we are individuals with singularly selfish genes. Competition has become one of the prevailing features, not just of evolutionary and biological science but of the social sciences too. This mode of thought is not compatible on its own with the drive to complex social systems described thus far.

It is not only a false and dangerous  myth that competition stands on its own as an axiom of evolution; social, cultural and biological science has adopted the selfish gene as an explanatory concept. The associated concepts and the methodology that have led towards such a myth lie behind a difficulty we have solving some of the most intractable problems of our time.

In his 1945 masterpiece Maurice Merleau-Ponty placed our phenomenology (the structures of consciousness, and by virtue of that our minds) in the world; not just in the mind or the body of the organism. His critical insight was not just that as perceiving and conscious agents are we dependent on our bodies for the structure of our perceptions; as bodies we exist in relation to the world: our experience implies our bodies and our bodies imply the world in which they are intentional objects and situated.

In a sense a part of our world is contained in the character of our experience, the world that we experience is then implied by us. In order that facts of experience are coherent we must be continuous with that world in which we are embodied. It is also the case that we are not singularly self serving individuals. We are embodied in a whole that extends from us into the world and of which we are a significant part. For that whole to to be understood it is not enough that we conform to it. Nor that we understand a part of it. In some sense it must also conform to us with a given reciprocity. It is in that reciprocity that we can consider the whole character of  society and the mind.

In the field of Consciousness Studies one of the problems over the last decade has been the question ‘where do we identify consciousness as being‘. Some, (notably the neuroscientific community) have  said that consciousness is in the brain. Advocates of this view are eager to eliminate the kind of dualism found in Descartes cogito. They want to identify consciousness with brain function only.

However, others (mainly philosophers) have pointed out that if you prick your finger you don’t feel the sensation in your brain. Irrespective of where the sensation is processed the pain remains in your finger; i.e. that is where consciousness is. In that sense consciousness can not be said to be in the brain; consciousness is where it is experienced. Advocates of these latter theories cite greater need for the inclusion of first person methodologies in the science of consciousness.

If we take the latter view as the basis of a methodology that will inform us it is quickly clear that orthodox methods don’t give the whole picture. Our language it appears is ill equipped dealing with the relation between the individual and whole. As a consequence our concepts are impoverished. A paradigm shift that could articulate the whole and the individual, or the system and its parts (simultaneously) is needed. This implies a radical shift in the set of concepts that form the basis of inquiry.

Modern inquiry is based on our ability to break down  component parts of a system. We atomize phenomena in order to understand them. The atomization enables us to explain phenomena in terms of cause and effect of their smaller constituent parts. However, in the process of conducting the analysis the larger system is explained away. The explanandum is in part impoverished by the explanan in modern analysis.

This is necessary for two reasons. The first is that we make statements in which only component parts of the system are predicated in the antecedent of the statements we test. This means that the truth or falsity of the consequent conclusions are valid only for the parts we have predicated. we make an inference from these parts to a larger system, but in the process we have already lost a significant portion of what needs to be explained.

This wouldn’t be a significant problem on its own if it were not for the second part of the issues surrounding modern methodologies. We employ a method called logical reductionism in which a set of statements in (X) are explained by another set of statements in (Y) which contain statements about (X). If statements in (Y) are found to be true in (Y) we have sufficient proof of the validity of the explanation of (X) through (Y).

In other words statements about water (X) can be explained by talking about the behavior of water molecules which are contained in physics or chemistry (Y). If we know the statements of (Y) to be true (consistent) then they can be applied to our understanding of (X); we have explained water (X) through (Y).

Science is built around the coherence of sets of statements about a feature of the world. These statements imply other statements that form testable hypotheses. The testable hypotheses by their very nature do not test the whole set of statements related to the phenomena, only the parts that we can test contained in the hypothesis. Once these have been tested (and validated) the implication is that we have an explanation/description of the higher order statements of which they came from. The problem I am illustrating is that en-route we have lost a significant portion of what there is to be understood.

To take consciousness for example. Aspects of consciousness are explained by brain activity. However, in none of the explanations is consciousness required to exist in order for the statements being tested to be true (of consciousness). It would be the goal of the reductionist to explain all of the properties of consciousness by neural activity.

However, given our innate relations (R) to the social world it seem that these  relations (Rn) would have to be contained in the reduction for the description to be complete. But as we don’t have the language to do that, nor the concepts required, it would be an impossible feat. The result is an impoverished view of what consciousness consists in.

The fact remains that our minds exist as a function of our bodies and as a part of the world in which they are agents. These two factors not only form a concrete and necessary part of who we are. They are a requisite feature of the consciousness that science wishes to understand. In order that it does, it will have to learn from phenomenology before the character of our experience can be fully understood. We must be able to generate a sufficient and necessary set of statements that canbe tested, but also that can form a part of our understanding of who we are and what our relationship is with the world. It is a fact of our existence that we are social and that as such we embody the world in which we exist as much as that world is a product of us.

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everything is ‘natural’

in Analytical Philosophy, Belief, Broken Postcard, Cities, Logic, Philosophy, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | 7 comments

Naturalism,clear thinking and our future

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The physical world is causally closed. The statement is so broad and yet so pointed that understanding the implications in their entirety is impossible. Yet the meaning of the statement needs to be understood, and by everyone. We have all managed to apply in our own beliefs some parts of the tenet but, unfortunately not all. If we were to understand and apply all implications of that one single statement “The physical world is causally closed” our entire attitude to life, the planet and many of the choices we make would be radically different.

The statement that the physical world is causally closed needs some explanation. In essence it means that all of the phenomena we see in the world are caused by other things we find in the world and that the effects of all physical causes will be found in the world. This supposition is taken from the finding that the total of energy and momentum have always been conserved wherever they have been measured.

A more prosaic example comes from Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier who found that in chemical reaction matter may change its state but it’s total mass will remain the same. Rust is a good example, when iron rusts it also gets heavier because iron and oxygen combine.

The word natural has a long history and has come to be used in many contexts. Advocates of herbal remedies cite that their medicines are natural, people talk about homosexuality as unnatural and we talk about ‘the natural course of action’. However, understanding physical closure permits us to say that each of these statements are nonsense if they are taken even remotely literally. ‘Natural’ as term has its origins in Latin and Greek and roughly in Middle English was used to mean ‘in accordance with nature‘. It is in the sense that the word is used in Lucretius’s epic poem  ’De Rerum Natura‘ that it is used here. That is as a part of the property that things posses by virtue of existence and not as a moral quantifier or proof of goodness.

Not only is it the case that there are a great number of poisons in the ‘natural’ world, it is also the case that it is literally impossible for homosexuality to be unnatural. More broadly speaking, given physical closure all phenomena that we see are natural.

The natural sciences ought to encompass the investigation of all phenomena. However, they have come to mean (through the correct application of the term) the physical sciences (otherwise known as the Naturwissenschaften as opposed to the Geisteswissenschaften, or social sciences). In essence however, the approach employed by all sciences can be called naturalistic and within the present conception of the universe all of the phenomena contained within it are natural.

If everything said thus far is true then it is meaningful to make statements like ‘photography is natural’ and ‘pollution is natural’ also. Most people, will have a harder time digesting statements like these as opposed to the statement ‘homosexuality is unnatural’.

The difficulty lies in an innate bias. It also highlights our need to guard ourselves from nonsense. The bias comes not just from ambiguity about the word natural but the fact that we have come to assume that pairing the word ‘natural’ with a statement gives that statement moral significance. That is in effect the nonsense which I refer to.

The point is that everything that does occur, occurs in the world, if it occurs in the world then it is natural. The flip-side of the coin is that just because something is natural (or can be found in nature) it doesn’t make it either right or give it any special moral significance. It was a natural event that wiped out the dinosaur. That fact doesn’t make the potential extinction of the human race any more palatable, I happen to be quite attached to the interests of humanity.

There are a number of implications of the discussion so far that ought to be considered. In connexion with this post however, my interest is in the world that we live in.

It is no platitude to say that wherever we are we obey the laws of physics. Gravity is a pervasive feature in all of our lives despite the fact that most of us take little time to notice the effect it has on us. But existing in the natural world is not just about obeying laws such as the law of gravity. The natural world is as much about living in a complex system such as our environment. What is more the point about natural phenomena is that we are embedded within those systems and are component part of them.

In effect we are a part of a much wider system and that system houses us. However, much like  gravity we seem to be too well acquainted with our environment. So well acquainted in fact that it doesn’t seem to make significant difference to us if we destroy it in piecemeal fashion. Of course we don’t experience a great deal of pollution. Nor do we experience the effects of pollution immediately. Environmentalism is concerned with a concept and by virtue of being a concept it is far removed from us.

But that doesn’t change that fact that the destruction of the system that we live in could be the destruction event of our species. By extension this also suggests the possibility that another species one day in the far future will refer to us in making the same arguments. As human beings we have used our imaginations to great use. From migrating bands of hominid to static cities populated by millions of people living not on subsistence but beyond necessity our species has achieved a lot in a short space. However, it is a part of that achievement that we can  see that our actions now have, within the closed physical system that is the world we live, far reaching consequences.

The point is this: Given that we live in the natural environment, (and I see no option but giving ourselves to that fact) a certain clarity of thought is required about our lives within that context. So far we have allowed ourselves an incredible amount of fuzzy thinking on the subject. However, if we are to save the planet we have to divorce ourselves from all of the immediate luxuries of existence (such as gravity) and understand that as necessary as gravity is, so are the effects of our actions on the future of our species.

We are unfortunately predisposed to being told what we want to hear from politicians (lest we don’t vote for them). However, in order that a concerted effort is made by all, that effort will have to be concerted and universal. That means saying a number of unpopular things and effort on all our parts. It means that developing countries will have to develop within the context of change that is uncertain and in developed countries that incentive will have to be on the part of survival. It is after all survival that we are after and survival can only take part within a physical system that we know can sustain us. That system is closed and that leaves a great deal of responsibility on our shoulders.

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