When pupils in schools put up their hands and cry ‘Miss, Miss, Miss, me Miss’ as they do, they have a proliferation of thoug.t. "See Miss, I am speaking up," they might say to their teacher later.
However if we delve into what constitutes the pupils' 'I am' at this juncture we discover that it is made up of endless cycles of apperceptions, (past perceptions constituting our present perceptions)) conceptual proliferation and further entangling apperceptions till one inevitably arrives at the ontologically destabilisng idea that the 'I' and the 'am' of the pupil are spurious claims.
.’ But the teacher is not going to say this to the pupil, "Sorry, Melanie, you don't have an 'I' and an 'am' and who could blame her.
.
Perhaps that fear of a kind of ontolocial vertigo is why educators don’t broach this realiy. . However it cannot be denied that in the evolutionary process of language and the unconscious structuring of experience with its processual and interactive arising of things, there has been imparted the cogency of human experience, and here we come to the spurious part, with its deep sense of subjective coherence, which is this self, or this symbolic self.
Yet where the self actually is, one cannot individuate a subject at all. It would appear the metaphysical subject is not an object of experience at all, but a way of indicating the overall structure of experience. It would appear that the evolutionary linguistification of human mental processes has given rise to a symbolic self, which is dependent upon the reflexive possibilities of language rather than reflecting the existence of the substantive.
From this standpoint, cognition, or how we perceive, is thus neither purely subjective nor wholly objective. Like a transaction that takes place between individuals, cognitive awareness occurs at the interface, the concomitance of a sense-organ and its correlative stimulus.
Cognitive awareness does not reflects things, as they are, since what constitutes an ‘object’ is necessarily defined by the capacities of a particular sense organ; say the eye, and it is well to remember that the cognitive capacities of a sense organ are also correlatively defined by the kinds of stimuli that may impinge upon them.
As Capra (1998, 220) points out, "...as it keeps interacting with its environment, a living organism will undergo a sequence of structural changes... an organism's structure at any point in its development is a record of its previous structural changes and...each structural change influences the organism's future behaviour." The symbolic evolves, it is not static.
For stimuli are always impinging upon the sense organs, say the eye, giving rise to forms of cognitive awareness; and these processes continuously but subtly modulate the structures of these organs, which in turn influences their receptivity to subsequent stimuli. The two notions - that living entails continuous cognition and cognition entails continuous modification of living structures - introduces an important causal reciprocity between the structure of sense organs and the arising of cognitive awareness.
These reciprocal processes take place not only at the micro level of cognition, but also at the macro level of evolution. Both evolutionary biology and the view of dependent arising articulate models of circular causality to describe how things come into being over the long term.
Through this circular, recursive and evolutionary process we arrive at what we feel to be language, but is no more than difference.So when I perceive something, say what I am typing on this screen now, I perceive difference; I look at the empty screen and I have a proliferation of recursive and circular aperceptions. For all receipt of information is necessarily the receipt of difference.
To even speak of perception is to necessarily speak of awareness of differences. Awareness of differences, however, cannot arise outside of a context, since differences occur between phenomena. An absolutely isolated object would be imperceptible, like say ‘real originality’ it is impossible, for how would we know it is was original if we had nothing to compare it to.
Contextual differences however, have no singular location. As Bateson (109) avers: "Difference, being of the nature of relationship, is not located in time or in space." Since awareness of differences arises contextually rather than independently, and is episodic rather than enduring, it has no substantive existence. Not being a substance, it neither comes nor goes anywhere. Differences have neither any actual substance nor any singular location; they are neither a something nor a nothing ontologically speaking.
The differences we perceive or aperceive are to be regarded as the effects of the difference which preceded them." (Bateson, 121) Circular causality, which classroom logic eschews, occurs in the form of recursive feedback processes, wherein the results of previous events serve as the basis for succeeding ones. The language we use refer to patterns of relationships, not properties of substances; to maps not territory; terra incognita not terra firma.
Our linguistic capabilities are part of the accumulative, constructive and interactive processes of evolution whereby cognitive processes condition living structures, which in turn condition further processes and so on. As symbolic communication dependently arose in early hominid species it became a powerful evolutionary force in its own right, radically and irrevocably changing the structures and processes of the human brain.
This momentous change centred on an increasingly enlarged prefrontal cortex, where such symbolizing processes apparently occur. As language use and this ‘prefrontalisation’ mutually reinforced each other, the symbolic-linguistic mode of cognition that is dependent upon them came to dominate other, originally non-linguistic, processes.
Human cognitive processes, even simple sensory ones, in other words, unavoidably arise in dependence upon our linguistified brain. Language, then, along with the systemic distinctions upon which it depends, is not something added on to human cognitive processes. Systemic symbolic thinking is constitutive of normal human cognitive processes.
We live our lives in this shared virtual world. The doorway into this virtual world was opened to us alone by the evolution of language "We cannot help but see the world in symbolic categorical terms," Deacon declares (416), "...dividing it up according to opposed features, and organizing our lives according to themes and narratives."
This linguistification of human cognitive processes thus represents a physiologically enstructured, dominating cognitive strategy characterized by compulsive yet creative recursivity, based upon words that are defined mutually and systemically, not independently or substantively, and whose ultimate meanings are conventional determined. It is late at night, there is a moon out there reflecting its light on the back garden.
A fox barks, I read on... it would seem the most deeply entrenched source of these recursive possibilities, which also doubles back to generate its own linguistically generated recursivity, is no doubt our sense of self as an enduring, experiencing agent. The fox yaps again, this is not the hour to be doubting the self. This sense of self, however, derives its compelling cogency, it’s enduring and endearing allure, from the same social and linguistic matrix other words and symbols do. Like language, this symbolic self is a product of massive interdependency; like other relational phenomenon, it has no substantive existence in time or space.
The idea of self would appear to be the final lignustic irony.
"And if I do ‘speak up’ Dad, I know the teachers will only correct me, because they are kinds of ...instruments?"
"Instrument of what?" "Well....instruments of correction, Have I got the right, Dad?"
"Spot on, Renata," I say gushing with parental pride.
School are not a language area for semantic freewheeling, without referring to anything in particular, they are in arena of formal rigour where linguistic norms are imposed.
Through innumerable acts of correction, the educational system tend to produce the need for its own services as teachers consecrate legitimate language and conserve their monopoly in their labour of correction. As parents we had never given a thought to the fact that the teachers were paid to teach codified language with authority for they were codified by grammarians, and their task is to encourage equivalences in a system of grammatical norms not to teach the evolutionary fact that we are the word made wo/man.
1372
evoked the idea of an inner nature of things, normally hidden by an opaque veil and only occasionally discernible by the senses.
Buddhism strongly warns against becoming too attached to ‘views’
Ends (2750 words)
Books researched and referred to: Barash, David. 1979.
The Whisperings Within: Evolution and the Origin of Human Nature. New York: Harper & Row.Bateson, G. 1979.
Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Bantam Books.Capra, Fritjof. 1998.
The Web of Life. New York: Anchor Books.Carrithers, M. 1992.
Why Humans Have Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.Collins, S. 1982. Selfless Persons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Deacon, T. W. 1997.
The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.Geertz, C. 1973.
"The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man." The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.Harland, Richard. 1987. Superstructuralism. London: Routledge.Johansson, R.E.A. 1979.
The Dynamic Psychology of Early Buddhism. London: Curzon Press.Lakoff, G. and Mark Johnson. 1999.
Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.Lewontin. R. 1983.
"The organism as the subject and object of evolution." Scientia 118:63-82.Lewontin, R. 2000. The Triple Helix: Genes, organism, environment. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press.Oyama, S. 2000.
The Ontogeny of Information. 2nd ed. Duke University Press.Rappaport, R. 1999.
Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Restak, R. 1994.
The Modular Brain. New York: Touchstone Books.Rose, S. 1997. Lifelines: Biology Beyond Determinism. New York: Oxford University Press.Saussure, F. 1959.
General Course in Linguistics, New York: The Philosophical Library.Stern, D. G. 1995. Wittgenstein on Mind and Language. New York: Oxford University Press.Tooby, J. and Leda Cosmides. 1992.
The Psychological Foundations of Culture. in Barkow, Cosmides, Tooby. 1992.
The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford University.Varela, F., E. Thompson, and E. Rosch. 1991.
The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Wa
However if we delve into what constitutes the pupils' 'I am' at this juncture we discover that it is made up of endless cycles of apperceptions, (past perceptions constituting our present perceptions)) conceptual proliferation and further entangling apperceptions till one inevitably arrives at the ontologically destabilisng idea that the 'I' and the 'am' of the pupil are spurious claims.
.’ But the teacher is not going to say this to the pupil, "Sorry, Melanie, you don't have an 'I' and an 'am' and who could blame her.
.
Perhaps that fear of a kind of ontolocial vertigo is why educators don’t broach this realiy. . However it cannot be denied that in the evolutionary process of language and the unconscious structuring of experience with its processual and interactive arising of things, there has been imparted the cogency of human experience, and here we come to the spurious part, with its deep sense of subjective coherence, which is this self, or this symbolic self.
Yet where the self actually is, one cannot individuate a subject at all. It would appear the metaphysical subject is not an object of experience at all, but a way of indicating the overall structure of experience. It would appear that the evolutionary linguistification of human mental processes has given rise to a symbolic self, which is dependent upon the reflexive possibilities of language rather than reflecting the existence of the substantive.
From this standpoint, cognition, or how we perceive, is thus neither purely subjective nor wholly objective. Like a transaction that takes place between individuals, cognitive awareness occurs at the interface, the concomitance of a sense-organ and its correlative stimulus.
Cognitive awareness does not reflects things, as they are, since what constitutes an ‘object’ is necessarily defined by the capacities of a particular sense organ; say the eye, and it is well to remember that the cognitive capacities of a sense organ are also correlatively defined by the kinds of stimuli that may impinge upon them.
As Capra (1998, 220) points out, "...as it keeps interacting with its environment, a living organism will undergo a sequence of structural changes... an organism's structure at any point in its development is a record of its previous structural changes and...each structural change influences the organism's future behaviour." The symbolic evolves, it is not static.
For stimuli are always impinging upon the sense organs, say the eye, giving rise to forms of cognitive awareness; and these processes continuously but subtly modulate the structures of these organs, which in turn influences their receptivity to subsequent stimuli. The two notions - that living entails continuous cognition and cognition entails continuous modification of living structures - introduces an important causal reciprocity between the structure of sense organs and the arising of cognitive awareness.
These reciprocal processes take place not only at the micro level of cognition, but also at the macro level of evolution. Both evolutionary biology and the view of dependent arising articulate models of circular causality to describe how things come into being over the long term.
Through this circular, recursive and evolutionary process we arrive at what we feel to be language, but is no more than difference.So when I perceive something, say what I am typing on this screen now, I perceive difference; I look at the empty screen and I have a proliferation of recursive and circular aperceptions. For all receipt of information is necessarily the receipt of difference.
To even speak of perception is to necessarily speak of awareness of differences. Awareness of differences, however, cannot arise outside of a context, since differences occur between phenomena. An absolutely isolated object would be imperceptible, like say ‘real originality’ it is impossible, for how would we know it is was original if we had nothing to compare it to.
Contextual differences however, have no singular location. As Bateson (109) avers: "Difference, being of the nature of relationship, is not located in time or in space." Since awareness of differences arises contextually rather than independently, and is episodic rather than enduring, it has no substantive existence. Not being a substance, it neither comes nor goes anywhere. Differences have neither any actual substance nor any singular location; they are neither a something nor a nothing ontologically speaking.
The differences we perceive or aperceive are to be regarded as the effects of the difference which preceded them." (Bateson, 121) Circular causality, which classroom logic eschews, occurs in the form of recursive feedback processes, wherein the results of previous events serve as the basis for succeeding ones. The language we use refer to patterns of relationships, not properties of substances; to maps not territory; terra incognita not terra firma.
Our linguistic capabilities are part of the accumulative, constructive and interactive processes of evolution whereby cognitive processes condition living structures, which in turn condition further processes and so on. As symbolic communication dependently arose in early hominid species it became a powerful evolutionary force in its own right, radically and irrevocably changing the structures and processes of the human brain.
This momentous change centred on an increasingly enlarged prefrontal cortex, where such symbolizing processes apparently occur. As language use and this ‘prefrontalisation’ mutually reinforced each other, the symbolic-linguistic mode of cognition that is dependent upon them came to dominate other, originally non-linguistic, processes.
Human cognitive processes, even simple sensory ones, in other words, unavoidably arise in dependence upon our linguistified brain. Language, then, along with the systemic distinctions upon which it depends, is not something added on to human cognitive processes. Systemic symbolic thinking is constitutive of normal human cognitive processes.
We live our lives in this shared virtual world. The doorway into this virtual world was opened to us alone by the evolution of language "We cannot help but see the world in symbolic categorical terms," Deacon declares (416), "...dividing it up according to opposed features, and organizing our lives according to themes and narratives."
This linguistification of human cognitive processes thus represents a physiologically enstructured, dominating cognitive strategy characterized by compulsive yet creative recursivity, based upon words that are defined mutually and systemically, not independently or substantively, and whose ultimate meanings are conventional determined. It is late at night, there is a moon out there reflecting its light on the back garden.
A fox barks, I read on... it would seem the most deeply entrenched source of these recursive possibilities, which also doubles back to generate its own linguistically generated recursivity, is no doubt our sense of self as an enduring, experiencing agent. The fox yaps again, this is not the hour to be doubting the self. This sense of self, however, derives its compelling cogency, it’s enduring and endearing allure, from the same social and linguistic matrix other words and symbols do. Like language, this symbolic self is a product of massive interdependency; like other relational phenomenon, it has no substantive existence in time or space.
The idea of self would appear to be the final lignustic irony.
"And if I do ‘speak up’ Dad, I know the teachers will only correct me, because they are kinds of ...instruments?"
"Instrument of what?" "Well....instruments of correction, Have I got the right, Dad?"
"Spot on, Renata," I say gushing with parental pride.
School are not a language area for semantic freewheeling, without referring to anything in particular, they are in arena of formal rigour where linguistic norms are imposed.
Through innumerable acts of correction, the educational system tend to produce the need for its own services as teachers consecrate legitimate language and conserve their monopoly in their labour of correction. As parents we had never given a thought to the fact that the teachers were paid to teach codified language with authority for they were codified by grammarians, and their task is to encourage equivalences in a system of grammatical norms not to teach the evolutionary fact that we are the word made wo/man.
1372
evoked the idea of an inner nature of things, normally hidden by an opaque veil and only occasionally discernible by the senses.
Buddhism strongly warns against becoming too attached to ‘views’
Ends (2750 words)
Books researched and referred to: Barash, David. 1979.
The Whisperings Within: Evolution and the Origin of Human Nature. New York: Harper & Row.Bateson, G. 1979.
Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Bantam Books.Capra, Fritjof. 1998.
The Web of Life. New York: Anchor Books.Carrithers, M. 1992.
Why Humans Have Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.Collins, S. 1982. Selfless Persons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Deacon, T. W. 1997.
The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.Geertz, C. 1973.
"The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man." The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.Harland, Richard. 1987. Superstructuralism. London: Routledge.Johansson, R.E.A. 1979.
The Dynamic Psychology of Early Buddhism. London: Curzon Press.Lakoff, G. and Mark Johnson. 1999.
Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.Lewontin. R. 1983.
"The organism as the subject and object of evolution." Scientia 118:63-82.Lewontin, R. 2000. The Triple Helix: Genes, organism, environment. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press.Oyama, S. 2000.
The Ontogeny of Information. 2nd ed. Duke University Press.Rappaport, R. 1999.
Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Restak, R. 1994.
The Modular Brain. New York: Touchstone Books.Rose, S. 1997. Lifelines: Biology Beyond Determinism. New York: Oxford University Press.Saussure, F. 1959.
General Course in Linguistics, New York: The Philosophical Library.Stern, D. G. 1995. Wittgenstein on Mind and Language. New York: Oxford University Press.Tooby, J. and Leda Cosmides. 1992.
The Psychological Foundations of Culture. in Barkow, Cosmides, Tooby. 1992.
The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford University.Varela, F., E. Thompson, and E. Rosch. 1991.
The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Wa
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