Why is Philosophy like General Motors?

[coberst]

Why is Philosophy like General Motors?

With the aid of new brain scan technology the amalgamation of scientific disciplines that make up what is commonly known as SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) has produced empirical evidence to support theories that challenges two millennia of a priori philosophical speculation.

The three major findings of SGCS that challenges Anglo-American analytic and postmodernist philosophy are as follows:

The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

These newly assimilated (primarily in the last four decades) discoveries require that our Western culture must question and discard some of its most deeply held philosophical assumptions.

We have in our Western philosophy a traditional theory of faculty psychology wherein our reasoning is a faculty completely separate from the body. “Reason is seen as independent of perception and bodily movement.” It is this capacity of autonomous reason that makes us different in kind from all other animals. I suspect that many fundamental aspects of philosophy and psychology are focused upon declaring, whenever possible, the separateness of our species from all other animals.

This tradition of an autonomous reason began long before evolutionary theory and has held strongly since then without consideration, it seems to me, of the theories of Darwin and of biological science. Cognitive science has in the last four decades developed considerable empirical evidence supporting Darwin and not supporting the traditional theories of philosophy and psychology regarding the autonomy of reason. Cognitive science has focused a great deal of empirical science toward discovering the nature of the embodied mind.

The cognitive science claim is that ”the very properties of concepts are created as a result of the way the brain and body are structured and the way they function in interpersonal relations and in the physical world.”

The embodied-mind hypothesis therefore radically undercuts the perception/conception distinction. In an embodied mind, it is conceivable that the same neural system engaged in perception (or in bodily movements) plays a central role in conception. Indeed, in recent neural modeling research, models of perceptual mechanisms and motor schemas can actually do conception work in language learning and in reasoning.

A standard technique for checking out new ideas is to create computer models of the idea and subject that model to simulated conditions to determine if the model behaves as does the reality. Such modeling techniques are used constantly in projecting behavior of meteorological parameters.

Neural computer models have shown that the types of operations required to perceive and move in space require the very same type of capability associated with reasoning. That is, neural models capable of doing all of the things that a body must be able to do when perceiving and moving can also perform the same kinds of actions associated with reasoning, i.e. inferring, categorizing, and conceiving.

Our understanding of biology indicates that the body has a marvelous ability to do as any handyman does, i.e. make do with what is at hand. The body would, it seems logical to assume, take these abilities that exist in all creatures that move and survive in space and with such fundamental capabilities reshape it through evolution to become what we now know as our ability to reason. The first budding of the reasoning ability exists in all creatures that function as perceiving, moving, surviving, creatures.

Cognitive science has, it seems to me, connected our ability to reason with our bodies in such away as to make sense out of connecting reason with our biological evolution in ways that Western philosophy has not done, as far as I know.

It seems to me that Western philosophical tradition has always tried to separate mind from body and in so doing has never been able to show how mind, as was conceived by this tradition, could be part of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Cognitive science now provides us with a comprehensible model for grounding all that we are both bodily and mentally into a unified whole that makes sense without all of the attempts to make mind as some kind of transcendent, mystical, reality unassociated with biology.

Just as General Moors is headed toward bankruptcy court, likewise is Western traditional philosophy headed for bankruptcy hearings in the court of public comprehension.

Quotes from Philosophy in the Flesh by Lakoff and Johnson

 

[nozflubber]

What do you actually know about cognitive science? It grew APART from (and in spite of) Freud, who saught the biological evolutionary interpretation to all psyche events.

Nueral network models are insufficient to explain observed cognitive patterns in human organisms, not to mention animal. The problem as I heard it from one robotics/computer science guru, is that we straight up don't have the "code", the software patterns, (that is the encoding, storage and retreival methods) of the human brain. There is no clear "bridge" between biology and cognition, just yet.

So i don't even know what propositons you're basing this on, really? How has cognitive science been paired so well with biology? plz start from there, cuz i missed that memo when I took psychophysiology and biophysics ~

 

[Into It]

Forgive me, C.O., for ignoring the larger part of your post. I am going to say a few words on the three "findings" that you mentioned.

Your first one was that the mind is entirely physically contained.

1.I never questioned this until I was about fifteen or sixteen years old, that is, when I heard that you could question this; that people did. It hogged my RAM for a while, so to speak, and it was only later, when I became just a little bit older, that I actually sought out the opinions of our greatest thinkers on this issue. In that area, I still have much work to do and many opinions to consider. But it at one point, eventually, I started taking note of this intuitive 'tingling' that I had always had when considering this subject. It is the same feeling I used to get when I heard of the miracles in church as a young boy, or that I get today when I try to force MBTI upon reality.

My gut, which I am usually rewarded for listening to, tells me that looking at the mind - thought - from a metaphysical standpoint, is like considering "the soul," in that I simply have no good reason to do it. And the as I lean over, wishing to peer more deeply into this rabbit hole, it is always my intuition which reminds me that I may very well slip in if I am not careful. My intuition is my foot on the ground.

There is no year I could have been born in which it would be difficult for me to question the shape of the earth, not even today. To question is my forte, yet, finding answers is not. I will stick with my strengths. In light of this, I am very weary of "expecting" or even considering strongly, things that to me appear highly questionable.

2.Your second "finding" was that thought is mostly unconscious. Again, I have no idea about the validity of these findings or any information about the studies that were done. That the majority of our thought is unconscious is hard to verify. My memories are surely somewhere, but thinking denotes a movement of sorts, and whether or not my memories are sloshing about or merely waiting to be recovered is the distinction that must be made, because no one would argue that what they are thinking of consciously, at any given moment, can be compared to the amount of knowledge that would lie dormant within us, if that knowledge is not being connected together and assimilated into new, working models, that is, if that knowledge is not being subconsciously thought. I'll put more on subconscious thinking in just a little bit.

plz start from there, cuz i missed that memo when I took psychophysiology and biophysics ~

You coax with a chainsaw.

 

[coberst]

What do you actually know about cognitive science? It grew APART from (and in spite of) Freud, who saught the biological evolutionary interpretation to all psyche events.

Nueral network models are insufficient to explain observed cognitive patterns in human organisms, not to mention animal. The problem as I heard it from one robotics/computer science guru, is that we straight up don't have the "code", the software patterns, (that is the encoding, storage and retreival methods) of the human brain. There is no clear "bridge" between biology and cognition, just yet.

So i don't even know what propositons you're basing this on, really? How has cognitive science been paired so well with biology? plz start from there, cuz i missed that memo when I took psychophysiology and biophysics ~

We have in our Western philosophy a traditional theory of faculty psychology wherein our reasoning is a faculty completely separate from the body. “Reason is seen as independent of perception and bodily movement.” It is this capacity of autonomous reason that makes us different in kind from all other animals. I suspect that many fundamental aspects of philosophy and psychology are focused upon declaring, whenever possible, the separateness of our species from all other animals.

This tradition of an autonomous reason began long before evolutionary theory and has held strongly since then without consideration, it seems to me, of the theories of Darwin and of biological science. Cognitive science has in the last three decades developed considerable empirical evidence supporting Darwin and not supporting the traditional theories of philosophy and psychology regarding the autonomy of reason. Cognitive science has focused a great deal of empirical science toward discovering the nature of the embodied mind.

The three major findings of cognitive science are:
The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

“These findings of cognitive science are profoundly disquieting [for traditional thinking] in two respects. First, they tell us that human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains. Second, these results tell us that our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real.”

All living creatures categorize. All creatures, as a minimum, separate eat from no eat and friend from foe. As neural creatures tadpole and wo/man categorize. There are trillions of synaptic connections taking place in the least sophisticated of creatures and this multiple synapses must be organized in some way to facilitate passage through a small number of interconnections and thus categorization takes place. Great numbers of different synapses take place in an experience and these are subsumed in some fashion to provide the category eat or foe perhaps.

Our categories are what we consider to be real in the world: tree, rock, animal…Our concepts are what we use to structure our reasoning about these categories. Concepts are neural structures that are the fundamental means by which we reason about categories.

Quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh”.

 

[coberst]

Forgive me, C.O., for ignoring the larger part of your post. I am going to say a few words on the three "findings" that you mentioned.

2.Your second "finding" was that thought is mostly unconscious. Again, I have no idea about the validity of these findings or any information about the studies that were done. That the majority of our thought is unconscious is hard to verify. My memories are surely somewhere, but thinking denotes a movement of sorts, and whether or not my memories are sloshing about or merely waiting to be recovered is the distinction that must be made, because no one would argue that what they are thinking of consciously, at any given moment, can be compared to the amount of knowledge that would lie dormant within us, if that knowledge is not being connected together and assimilated into new, working models, that is, if that knowledge is not being subconsciously thought. I'll put more on subconscious thinking in just a little bit.




You coax with a chainsaw.

Unconscious thought forms 95% of all thought.

In the 1970s a new body of empirical research began to introduce findings that questioned the traditional Anglo-American cognitive paradigm of AI (Artificial Intelligence), i.e. symbol manipulation.

This research indicates that the neurological structures associated with sensorimotor activity are mapped directly to the higher cortical brain structures to form the foundation for subjective conceptualization in the human brain. In other words, our abstract ideas are constructed with copies of sensorimotor neurological structures as a foundation. “It is the rule of thumb among cognitive scientists that unconscious thought is 95 percent of all thought—and that may be a serious underestimate.”

Categorization, the first level of abstraction from “Reality” is our first level of conceptualization and thus of knowing. Seeing is a process that includes categorization, we see something as an interaction between the seer and what is seen. “Seeing typically involves categorization.”

Our categories are what we consider to be real in the world: tree, rock, animal…Our concepts are what we use to structure our reasoning about these categories. Concepts are neural structures that are the fundamental means by which we reason about categories.

Human categories, the stuff of experience, are reasoned about in many different ways. These differing ways of reasoning, these different conceptualizations, are called prototypes and represent the second level of conceptualization

Typical-case prototype conceptualization modes are “used in drawing inferences about category members in the absence of any special contextual information. Ideal-case prototypes allow us to evaluate category members relative to some conceptual standard…Social stereotypes are used to make snap judgments…Salient exemplars (well-known examples) are used for making probability judgments…Reasoning with prototypes is, indeed, so common that it is inconceivable that we could function for long without them.”

When we conceptualize categories in this fashion we often envision them using spatial metaphors. Spatial relation metaphors form the heart of our ability to perceive, conceive, and to move about in space. We unconsciously form spatial relation contexts for entities: ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘about’, ‘across from’ some other entity are common relationships that make it possible for us to function in our normal manner.

When we perceive a black cat and do not wish to cross its path our imagination conceives container shapes such that we do not penetrate the container space occupied by the cat at some time in its journey. We function in space and the container schema is a normal means we have for reasoning about action in space. Such imaginings are not conscious but most of our perception and conception is an automatic unconscious force for functioning in the world.

Our manner of using language to explain experience provides us with an insight into our cognitive structuring process. Perceptual cues are mapped onto cognitive spaces wherein a representation of the experience is structured onto our spatial-relation contour. There is no direct connection between perception and language.

The claim of cognitive science is “that the very properties of concepts are created as a result of the way the brain and the body are structured and the way they function in interpersonal relations and in the physical world.”

Quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson

 

[Sniffles]

WTF is this bullshit?