Saturday, February 25, 2012

the fictional nature of human meanings

Horizons | Man’s answers to the problem of his existence are in large measure fictional. His notions of time, space, power, the character of his dialogue with nature, his venture with his fellow men, his primary heroism - all these are embedded in a network of codified meanings and perceptions that are in large part arbitrary and fictional. This begins early in childhood … In the symbolic world limitations are overcome. Here the child can grow to “enormous size” as the child / individual identifies with giants, gods, heroes of myth, and legend, or historical figures of a particular culture … The ego, or self, becomes indistinguishable from the cultural worldview because the worldview protects the ego against anxiety. The ego now feels warm … the mind flies out of the limits of the puny body and soars into a world of timeless beauty, meaning and justice

This is already a shocking conclusion to symbolic animals who pride themselves on living in a real world of intense experience … But can it all be a fiction, a mirage, “a tissue spun in happy hours” as James put it? Ludwig von Bertalanffy wrote [1955] that evolution would soon have weeded man out, if his cultural categories of space, time, causality, etc. were entirely deceptive. Anthropology has taught us that when a culture comes up against reality on critical points of its perceptions and proves them fictional, then that culture is eliminated by what we would call “natural selection”

6 comments:

nanakwame said...

Nonsense  - Conjectures on concepts which has fictional (untruths)  in-itself. Very few of Freud is even correct, even the coining terms - Culture is broad term, so even if I have been a Bonobo I have culture (selections- pruning, then constant behavior - culture)
Crick was correct on the use of semantics and not solving our insights, but show me where him or others did study the grammar, perceptions, art, myths; to understand the how of the brain/mind.  The art of the man/robot is already here, that what has been so delightful for me to see and it came from a priori of writers, futurist who could think.  Now on to consciousness - Theories of the Mind

Every time he sees a number he sees a color…

There's an analogy here between what the structure of the
claustrum is and what the phenomenology of consciousness is. Maybe this is not
just a superficial analogy. Maybe it's deep. Maybe the clue to consciousness
lies in looking at the structure of the claustrum, a detailed study of its
microanatomy and its connections to the rest of the brain.

 

Questions of that nature, trying to explain functions
like consciousness, like self-awareness, like qualia, in terms of brain
structures, is something that Crick pursued, and I think its something that I'd
like to pursue as well, and we have been trying. We all share his agenda—though
obviously not his stature. Dr. Ramachandran btw - he thinks qualia is a miss used

nanakwame said...

my bag show me where Crick and others did not study...

CNu said...

I'm going to guess that this morning's random assertions have something to do with this article  www.klab.caltech.edu/news/crick-koch-05.pdf

nanakwame said...

Oh I do that well,l got mine from Bogart at an early age, to cool my emotive, looking at this Bitter Earth. What is not understood, does not mean it is not correct.  Explain guilt to me in a 21C world . Where majority are numb to the death of numerous people.  Explain guilt to me w/o invoking religion or Freud.  Describe the self to me based on the knowledge we know now? Is "persona" like Eisenstein's "constant" to a quantum world, a time cell has been found, something dies every second in our body.  Should we have a morning every day?  The concepts and passage rituals are givens, since ancient time; the conjectures and conclusions  are not , I don't care how famous he is. 
http://edge.org/conversation/adventures_behavioral_neurologyhttp://www.livescience.com/18641-reasons-fear-robots.html

nanakwame said...

the machine ate this one, thought it relational http://www.livescience.com/18641-reasons-fear-robots.html

nanakwame said...

"Much of the evil in the world, he (Becker) believed was a consequence of this need to deny death". Does a sulky mood lead to thanatology? Doc  Kansas played well yesterday, good day Sir

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