Atlantis wrote:I don’t claim anything different. The physicist having an aha-moment about the nature of matter obviously has acquired knowledge about physics, thus his aha-moment relates to the problems in physics he’s been studying and not, for example, to the stock market. That still means he has to set aside his acquired knowledge for an instant to let intuition guide him to new knowledge.
Let me use an example from language learning. I have known highly educated people who have studied a foreign language for ten years or more without being able to communicate verbally even in very simple sentences. On the other hand, kids without formal education can pick up any language spontaneously to reach fluency within a short period of time.
The former uses the rational mind to learn vocabulary and grammar, while the latter spontaneously picks up language skills. That may sound different from the intuition of reality transcending the conventional concepts of the rational mind, but psychologically it is the same process. The former can’t let go of the straightjacket of conventional linguistic concepts, while the latter spontaneously dives into a new linguistic universe with her whole being and not just with her conceptual faculties. Linguistic patterns are anchored at a subconscious level that can't be altered by the consciousness without an effort of the will that transcends rationalization. Logically toying with concepts won't get you there.
Thus, intuition is always the same, but the content of the insight is different according to circumstances.
So we're agreeable the ones intuition is based in the experiences of the individual and isn't the case that they have some universal access through intuition to things that are simply outside their experience.
I find that characterization agreeable in that the adult relates the foreign language to the system of signs and meanings they already established in their first language. While a child at a particular age has little basis for a similar process as they know too little language. But this is specific to a child t a particular stage because children do undergo some sense of language and in the process fo learning a new language becomes quite self-conscious of their dominant/first.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/words/ch06.htmIt is well known that the child learns a foreign language in school in a completely different way than he learns his native language. Few of the empirical regularities or laws characteristic of the development of the native language are repeated when a foreign language is learned by the school child. Piaget is right when he argues that adult language does not represent for the child what a foreign language represents for the adult. Specifically, it is not a system of signs that corresponds point for point with a system of concepts that have already been acquired. Learning a foreign language is profoundly different from learning a native language. This is partly because a set of fully formed and developed word meanings already exist in the former case. These word meanings are simply translated into the foreign language. In other words, this is partly a function of the relative maturity of the native language itself. It is also partially a function of the fact that the foreign language is learned under entirely different internal and external conditions, of the fact that the conditions that characterize the learning process differ profoundly from those that characterize the learning of the native language. Different developmental paths, followed under different conditions, cannot lead to identical results.
It would be odd if the process involved in learning a foreign language in school reproduced that involved in learning the native language, repeating a process that had occurred earlier under entirely different conditions. Nonetheless, the profound differences between these processes must not divert us from the fact that they are both aspects of speech development. The processes involved in the development of written speech are a third variant of this unified process of language development; it repeats neither of the two processes of speech development mentioned up to this point. All three of these processes, the learning of the native language, the learning of foreign languages, and the development of written speech interact with each other in complex ways. This reflects their mutual membership in a single class of genetic processes and the internal unity of these processes. As we indicated above, the learning of a foreign language is unique in that it relies on the semantic aspect of the native language. Thus the instruction of the school child in a foreign language has its foundation in his knowledge of the native language. Less obvious and less well known is the fact that the foreign language influences the development of the child’s native language. Goethe understood this influence clearly. In his words, he who does not know at least one foreign language does not know his own. This idea is fully supported by research. Learning a foreign language raises the level of development of the child’s native speech. His conscious awareness of linguistic forms, and the level of his abstraction of linguistic phenomena, increases. He develops a more conscious, voluntary capacity to use words as tools of thought and as means of expressing ideas. Learning a foreign language raises the level of the child’s native speech in much the same way that learning algebra raises the level of his arithmetic thinking. By learning algebra, the child comes to understand arithmetic operations as particular instantiations of algebraic operations. This gives the child a freer, more abstract and generalized view of his operations with concrete quantities. Just as algebra frees the child’s thought from the grasp of concrete numerical relations and raises it to the level of more abstract thought, learning a foreign language frees the child’s verbal thought from the grasp of concrete linguistic forms and phenomena.
Thus, research indicates that: (1) the learning of a foreign language both depends on the child’s native speech and influences it; (2) the course of its development does not repeat that of native speech; and (3) the strengths and weaknesses of native and foreign languages differ.
We have every reason to believe that an analogous relationship exists between everyday and scientific concepts. Two significant considerations support this notion. First, the development of all concepts (both spontaneous and scientific) is part of the more general process of speech development. The development of concepts represents the semantic aspect of speech development. Psychologically, the development of concepts and the development of word meaning are one and the same process. As part of the general process of linguistic development, it can be anticipated that the development of word meanings will manifest the regularities that are characteristic of the process as a whole. Second, in their most essential features, the internal and external conditions involved in the development of foreign languages and those involved in the development of scientific concepts coincide. Perhaps more significantly, they differ from the conditions involved in the development of the native language and spontaneous concepts in much the same way. In both cases, instruction emerges as a new factor in development. In this way, just as we differentiate spontaneous and nonspontaneous concepts, we can speak of spontaneous speech development with the native language and nonspontaneous speech development with the foreign language.
In Vygotsky's distinction between spontaneous and scientific concepts where concept and begin from the abstract or immediate but connect with one another, your sense of intuition would emphasize the spontaneous here where one constructs their sense of things individually and is not lead by a concept.
So a child has a spontaneous concept of a brother because they grew up with one, but they don't yet understand how to express such relations in words, their concept is tied to their experiences rather than biological connections.
And indeed, it seems almost impossible for someone to have developed connections through language which mark logical memory and the sort instead of actual eidetic memory. Except through perhaps intense practice of meditation where one tries to recreate the immediacy of being.
That demonstrates the process of intuition in primates. They stop their habitual responses not to “think”, but to wait for something new to bubble up. Here, the “habitual responses” correspond to the conventional concepts of human rationalization, which is the preferred tool in humans. I previously mentioned that the roots of our dualistic conceptual thinking can be found in the behaviour of primates. It all fits nicely.
Hmm when I think of habits I think of unconscious or subconscious practices which were once conscious but have been mastered and are automatic. In Cultural Historical Activity Theory, these are called '[url]=https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/chat/index.htm#operationoperations[/url]' and can readily be shifted back into consciousness. Like walking, you don't think about it because you been doing it so long you can just control your ability to walk but not in some analytical sense of now I move my leg this way and so on. BUt if you misjudge the sidewalk and slip, suddenly you are thinking about walking in order to gain control because the habitual response was disrupted.
And agreed, humans in their habits rely on their conventional concept and hence why disruption is required to evoke actual thinking through something consciously.
Well yes you could call it intuition in that the Primate is seeking to find the aha moment in solving their problem but to not also call it thinking is dubious I believe because as 've been saying about active thought, it breaks or disrupts the habit and thus requires a conscious effort to resolve the problem. They aren't simply going about their business as usual and aha pops up, they have to direct their efforts to considering the task. Perhaps you could speak of how conscious thought isn't the whole of consciousness and that we don't hold everything in awareness so that the subconscious and all that underpins the concentrated effort of thought to find such solutions.
That’s supposing that there is an unbridgeable gap between reality and conceptualization. I think that conceptualization can be re-attached to reality in a moment of intuition at any time, just like Copernicus re-attached to the reality of planetary orbits by discarding conventional concepts. The intuition “can be about anything;” but when it takes on conscious form it has to find expression within a particular field of consciousness.
I don't think their is some impassable gap but in fact think that in a person, the abstract generalizations of human culture and language are connected up with the individual's sense/experience of things.
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Journal/pdfs/20-1-holodynski.pdfPeople do not appropriate the use of signs and their meanings during social interactions in an impartial way. They interpret and use them in the light of their actually elicited motives along with the motives they assign to the interaction partner (see González-Rey, 2012). The societal meaning of the used signs does not have to match the individually assigned personal sense. For example, an outsider may well interpret a public fit of rage by a low-ranking bank employee toward his superior as an inexcusable violation of social etiquette. However, for the menial employee, it may well be a reassertion of self-esteem in response to a humiliating directive.
The second psychological factor deals with the situatedness of sign-use. The personal sense of sign-use is also determined by the situatedness and sensory mediation of the previous encounters in which the use of signs is (or was) embedded. Societal meanings are coded primarily not by propositional phrases (e.g., “a dog is a mammal” or “wide-open eyes signal fear”) but through their ties to sensorially mediated and situated perceptions—as complex as these interrelations may be (Leont’ev, 1978). For example, two persons can use propositional phrases to agree on the same definition of the term “dog” or “fear.” These terms, however, will be situated very differently and enriched with other sensory perceptions when one person grew up with a very likeable family dog and the other person experienced a highly dramatic episode with an overpoweringly large and aggressive dog. Research on “grounded cognition” (Barsalou, 2008) and developmental studies on the appropriation of goal-directed actions (Hommel & Elsner, 2009) and of speech (Bruner, 1983; Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005) have also corroborated this sensorially anchored use of signs.
Thus, conventionalized signs and the meanings assigned to them are subject to an interpersonal process of interpretation and coordination that more or less successfully supports the embodiment and expression of personal sense. People do not have a private “speech” at their disposal that they can construct and use on their own (Wittgenstein). Therefore, they depend on the appropriation and use of conventionalized signs when they want to communicate successfully and satisfy their motives in social interactions (Gebauer, 2012). From this perspective, it is the principle of internalization in particular that offers concepts that help us to conceptualize the particular status of the mind as a coconstruction of the social and material world by means of conventionalized signs that are anchored in sensory perceptions related to the motives of a person.
And I disagree strongly in the characterization that copernicus, or anyone who revolutionizes the understanding of a science simply discards the old theory, they in fact incorporate many facts already established in the theory and explain more facts. Like how Albert Einstein's theory of general and special relativity didn't emerge independently of Newtonian classical physics but in fact subscumed the same facts but properly delinated the manner in which they were true as they were made universal but were in fact only absolutely true within particular limits.
And yes, I agree that the content of consciousness (not confined to awareness but to the entirety of the mind) can be applied to anything and that thought necessarily finds its container in some sort of concept.
The biology and neurons of scientists don’t differ from those of artists or religious leaders. I think the process of intuition is identical in religion, the arts, science and everyday life. It’s just the expression it takes that differs; an artist comes up with a piece of art and not with a mathematical formula of particle physics.
Agreed, they're all humans.
Indeed it takes a different form but I would say that art requires just as much intelligence and understanding of things more than primarily being characterized by sponatenous inspiration alone which in fact seems to be the result of great concentration and thought on an issue at length.
[ur;]https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/spirkin/works/dialectical-materialism/ch01-s05.html[/url]
The work of the artist is not spontaneous. It always follows some kind of plan and it is most effective when talent is guided by a world-view, when the artist has something to tell people, much more rarely is it effective when it comes about as a result of the accidental associative play of the imagination, and never is it effective when it is a result of blind instinct. The keen attention that is given to the problems of method is a sign of progress in both modern science and art, a sign of the increasing interaction of all aspects of intellectual life—science, philosophy, and art.
What comes across in the passage you quoted from
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/wits/vy ... usness.pdf
is that Marxism seems to be a totally ego-centred philosophy. How can you juxtapose “matter” and “(individual) consciousness”? Individual consciousness has no more reality than a dream, while matter is usually associated with the basic substance of reality. Surely, the juxtaposition ought to be “mind and matter”, wherein, mind is not individual consciousness, but some sort of universal mind. But as “matter disappears” in the new physics so does mind. In other words, the synthesis of mind and matter results in potentiality, as the ultimate non-dual reality.
It doesn’t matter that you don’t like it, if it is empirically proven by science it becomes the new paradigm. Most people felt uncomfortable with the worldview suggested by Quantum physics. Einstein never accepted it. According to him “god does not play dice”. Einstein has been proven wrong and all his objections have been experimentally shown to be wrong.
Philosophy is not longer the master discipline guiding all other sciences. Unable to provide a holistic view of reality, philosophy has been relegated to the second row while the natural sciences are sprawling into all directions.
I’ll cut short my reply here because it’s getting too long. I’m not a philosopher who compares the different systems of thought of Western philosophers. I can only say what makes sense to me. It’s been interesting to contrast my thoughts with your views of Western philosophy, but so far I haven't seen anything that proves me wrong.
What would the universal mind even be because this just sounds like the sort of idealist stuff that I consider nonsensical and in the vein of Jung's collective unconscious and isn't able to be substantied in it's ontology other than reference to how human consciousness isn't a sum of individual consciousness.
In this regard, the Marxist tradition follows Hegel.
https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1048&context=phiPractical reason is inseparable from social practice. It is true that actions are carried out by individuals, but such actions are possible and only have meaning in so far as they participate in sociocultural practices. There are two important questions here, Westphal suggests: (1) are individuals the only bearers of psychological states, and (2) can psychological states be understood in individual terms? Individualists answer both questions in the armative, and most holists answer both questions in the negative. Hegel, however, answers the rst question armatively and the second negatively. In other words, it is only individuals who act, have 108 intentions, construct facts, and so forth. Nevertheless, such acts, intentions, and facts cannot be understood apart from sociocultural practices—their meaning can only be understood as interpreted in a sociocultural context.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htmIn Hegelian philosophy, however, the problem was stated in a fundamentally different way. The social organism (the “culture” of the given people) is by no means an abstraction expressing the “sameness” that may be discovered in the mentality of every individual, an “abstract” inherent in each individual, the “transcendentally psychological” pattern of individual life activity. The historically built up and developing forms of the “universal spirit” (“the spirit of the people”, the “objective spirit”), although still understood by Hegel as certain stable patterns within whose framework the mental activity of every individual proceeds, are none the less regarded by him not as formal abstractions, not as abstractly universal “attributes” inherent in every individual, taken separately. Hegel (following Rousseau with his distinction between the “general will” and the “universal will”) fully takes into account the obvious fact that in the diverse collisions of differently orientated “individual wills” certain results are born and crystallised which were never contained in any of them separately, and that because of this social consciousness as an “entity” is certainly not built up, as of bricks, from the “sameness” to be found in each of its “parts” (individual selves, individual consciousnesses). And this is where we are shown the path to an understanding of the fact that all the patterns which Kant defined as “transcendentally inborn” forms of operation of the individual mentality, as a priori “internal mechanisms” inherent in every mentality, are actually forms of the self-consciousness of social man assimilated from without by the individual (originally they opposed him as “external” patterns of the movement of culture independent of his will and consciousness), social man being understood as the historically developing “aggregate of all social relations”.
And you seem to not to have understood the very criticism against Descartes who generalizes the quality of his own consciousness to everything when in fact your consciousness is different for yourself than it is someone else's consciousness. Someone else's consciousness is by definition matter, not in the crude physical sense but in the philosophical definition that it is outside and independent your consciousness. In fact, the whole point is that the error of Descrates was to treat the ontological distinction between mind and matter as an epistemological problem which is instead the subject-object relation. Just because your entire experience of reality passes through your consciousness, this doesn't then characterize the inherent quality of reality. It doesn't allow a scientific understanding because it doesn't in itself allow distinctions between dreams and reality alone. I can think that I wrote a particular word but then examine the result of my actions and see I mispelt it or had a fruedian slip.
Reality isn't syonynmous with one's consciousness.
BUt neither is there a universal mind, psychological states are only passed by individual organisms and although they relate to the real world and for many are social, this doesn't extend consciousness outside one's mind only that it necessarily participates in reality.
In fact, the manner in which consciousness becomes socialized is through social practices, in which you can think to your own upbringing by your parents and how they acculturate you to use cultural artefacts, a world organized with human activities and meaning. WHich then end up reflected in ideal form in the consciousness.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/the-individual.htmOnce, however, the process of internalisation is complete, the artefact, which may begin its life as an objective, material thing outside consciousness, albeit a thing endowed with social significance, has become integrated into the psyche itself, and cannot be said to be something other than the psyche. The same can be said of the activity of consciousness in relation to other people and an artefact; this activity ceases to be something that the psyche does, but rather is the psyche itself. In Leontyev’s words: “Man’s activity is the substance of his consciousness,” or as Johann Fichte put it: “The self is pure activity.” (Fichte 2000)
And no, Marxism isn't a kind of egoism, as it doesn't give primacy to the individual consciousness, the point is simply the fact that consciousness is not experienced in any other way than individually. To treat mind as some sort of stuff is nonsense.
On the other hand, Marxism also is novel, thanks to Hegel, in how it considers ideality as objective/matter.
Ilyenkov explains as much and is pivotal to Marx's conception of value as not simply subjective.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htmAnd if you don't get the issue here in which the individual's consciousness may be social but consciousness is not the universal quality of reality but simply a property of the object, then you seem to be confused about what the mind is and it's nuclear to me what significance you give to this 'universal mind' ontologically.
When you talk about synthesis of mind and matter, you're more appropriately speaking about the subject-object relation in which we interact with the world and it changes us as much as we change it and hence the reciprocal determination of man determining his own nature by changing nature.
But even in this, the distinction between my thoughts and the world is still quite clear unless you have lost your sense of individuation as a subject as distinct from the world.
Otherwise you're engaging in the ery problem Lenin characterized as underpinning idealism, which is an aversion to marking the clear binary distinction between mind and matter and eclectically and haphazardly jumping between the two without coherence.
And there is something interesting to be said about the potential of human action but in this again I would emphasize that prior man necessarily has social experiences before he has the consciousness to then plan. THis follows the earlier point by William james that no first act can be considered a free act because it is only once we have trained our bodies and minds that we're able to consciously self direct ourselves.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/determinism.htmIf we were to consider how an athlete or artist or mathematician achieves a particular feat, there are two phases: first a protracted process of training their bodies to respond to artificial stimuli in certain complex ways, and secondly the performance of the feat by the activation of the self-constructed bodily apparatus. In this second phase, the various forms of action have been mastered and are executed with conscious control, but without conscious direction of the individual reactions. ('Consciousness’ includes those processes which, while not part of conscious awareness, can move into conscious awareness in response to events.)
...
These artificial stimuli which the subject uses to train and control their response to stimuli are provided by their social and cultural surroundings. Adults purposely direct the actions of infants in their care and in doing so introduce these stimuli. Later, children appropriate these same stimuli to “command” themselves. By school age, a child is able to exercise what must be recognized as free will and a significant level of control of their own behavior, while remaining culturally and socially dependent on the conditions of their existence, beyond their control.
“Freedom of will is not freedom from motives.” Yes, though the ability to educate one’s own motives is crucial to the attainment of a genuinely free will, something which may or may not be attained to some degree in the course of an adult life.
Man is able to plan out in his mind a course of action, based on his past experiences and self control.
But even in the subject-object relation a clear distinction is maintained even though it is one of interaction because there can be the difference between the ideal end and the realized end after one pursues ones plan but reality doesn't pan out according to the ideal perfectly.
I don't think my position is that I simply don't like it, as much as I have points of why it seems to be untenable and even incomprehensible.
Science is inseparable from philosophy and it often the philosophically naive that end up in silly positions like the Machists or simply repeat old and already resolved problems.
Indeed it has been interesting but as much as I think we have found somethings agreeable and maybe give things a different emphasis or are simply trying to clarify between ourselves, I must say this last passage has me confused. As I don't think it defends the Copenhagen interpretation and the manner in which Heisenberg came to the conclusion that particles have an immateriality. And that could be my own limited understanding of quantum mechanics but I also can't just take his authority on the matter as truth, particularly if there seems to be reasons to be skeptical of his conclusions.
I am also confused to your sense of 'universal mind'.
In the Marxist or Cultural Historical Activity Theory tradition, cultural artefacts constitute the universals within (particular) social institutions which give the social quality to individual's consciousness.
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/o.htm#constructivismThe Marxist School of psychology including Lev Vygotsky, Georges Politzer, Lucien Séve, A R Luria, A N Leontyev and others, is ‘constructivist’, emphasising the social-historical and collaborative character of human activity. On the other hand, relativist constructivism emphasises the voluntarism and autonomy of an individual subject in constructing personal meaning.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Brandom.pdfThe metaphor of judge-made law cited above, which is a pragmatic rendering of Hegel’s conception of sprit, by disposing of the need for a pre-existing principle governing the development of new propositions, seems to justify the idea that the whole process of cultural and historical development can be rendered as interactions between individuals. But this does not stand up. The process depends essentially on the availability of the precedents, the body of enacted law and all the legal principles which exist in the form of documents. These documents are crucial mediating artefacts which regulate the development of the common law. The idea that the judge is able to make explicit what was merely implicit in the previous decisions is an attractive and eminently Hegelian idea. But it presupposes that these documented decisions act as mediating elements in the development of law, not to mention the entire material culture which supports the way of life in which the decisions are made by judges and enforced by a state.
A proposition appears to be something created and enacted in the moment when two people interact, but neither the language used in the interaction nor the concepts which are embedded in the language are created de novo in that interaction. The words and concepts relied upon in any interaction “are always already there in the always alreadyup-and-running communal linguistic practices into which I enter as a young one” (Brandom 2009: 73). Through the provision of these artefacts, every linguistic interaction is mediated by the concepts of the wider community.
If Hegel’s idea of Recognition is taken out of the context of his whole method it is easily misunderstood, and taken to be an unmediated binary relation between two individuals, but this is never the case; interactions between subjects are always mediated. As Hegel states at the very beginning of the Logic: “There is nothing, nothing in Heaven, or in Nature or in Mind or anywhere else which does not equally contain both immediacy and mediation” (Hegel 1816/1969: §92). Analytical philosophy, and all varieties of interactionism and recognition theories, systematically ignore this maxim of Hegel’s, which characterises his entire corpus. Mutual understanding even between strangers, apparently unmediated by common language or custom, is possible provided that each person can produce something which the other person needs. As participants in a shared culture there are concepts which are “always already-up-and-running.” This mediating element is something not created by the interaction (although every interaction maintains and modifies the culture). The mediating structure exists independently of any single interaction and is a ‘larger’ unit, being a property or aspect of the entire community of which the partners to interaction are a part. Concepts belong to this larger unit, and are evoked in the interactions and thinking of individuals as mediating elements. This stands in contradiction to Brandom’s efforts to found his inferentialism and his reading of Hegel exclusively in actions. It is as if actions and interactions (such as uttering a proposition, recognising another individual, committing oneself to a concept, etc.) can exist prior to and independently of the cultural constellations and social formations which mediate individuals’ actions and from which actions draw their meaning
But it is most certainly not universal as in the underpinning reality between me and others, this would fly in the face of the sound points Hegel makes in summarizing the manner in which independent subjects come to recognize one another. Such as that of strangers to colonizer and colonized.
Hegel offers the most sensible position I believe in groups of people who already share a way of life coming into increasing contact with others and having to develop a shared means of meaning and life. At the moment, the only universally shared condition is perhaps that of the market, which even if it hasn't swallowed up everything is pretty close and is part of the reason that it is seena s the basis for realizing the possibility of a humanized world despite all it's problems. It has brought the world into increasing connect and to be more tied up with one another than ever before.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics