coberst

Coberst says that you are a heckler. Heckle--to harasses and try to disconcert with questions, challenges, or gibes, i.e to badger. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged How does one discuss grafitti? Do you ever question the grafitti that makes up the responses? Are not moderators here for a purrpose beyond supporting friends? Have you any interest in creating a more intellectual forum?

padren Are you a moderator?

Vision: the creative apprehension of reality Wilhelm Worringer author of Abstraction and Empathy informs me that “Aesthetic enjoyment is objectified self-enjoyment”. Aesthetics is that which is pleasing in appearance, i.e. that which we find to be attractive. What do we do when we objectify self-enjoyment? A quick answer might be that we make self-enjoyment into an object. When we speak of “object” we generally must speak also of “subject”. We might say that the subject is the “knower” and the object is that which is “known”. “The study of art is an indispensable part of the study of man.” “Our experiences and ideas tend to be common but not deep, or deep but not common. We have neglected the gift of comprehending things through our senses.” Our penchant for the facts (what can be counted or measured for distance, speed, time, or weight) has left us with a paucity of ideas for dealing with images and the meaning of those images; “we seek refuge in the more familiar medium of words…The inborn capacity to understand through the eyes has been put to sleep and must be reawakened…This limitation, however, applies not only to art, but to any object of experience” Words can and must wait until our minds distill the categories of living that are revealed to us through our body in the process of experience. “Language cannot do the job directly it has no direct avenue for sensory contact with reality; it serves only to name what we have seen or heard or thought.” “Unchecked self-analysis can be harmful, but so can the artificial primitiveness of the person who refuses to understand how and why he works. Modern man can, and therefore must, live with unprecedented self-awareness.” Many decades ago I asked a professor philosophy ‘what is philosophy about’; he replied that it is about radically critical self-consciousness. Gestalt psychology has a kinship with art. Gestalt is a common German noun for shape or form derived mainly from experiments in sensory perception. “Artistic vision of reality was needed to remind scientists that most natural phenomena are not described adequately if they are analyzed piece by piece. That a whole cannot be attained by the accretion of isolated parts was not something the artist had to be told.” “Far from being a mechanical recording of sensory elements, vision proved to be a truly creative apprehension of reality—imaginative, inventive, shrewd, and beautiful…The mind always functions as a whole…all perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.” Gestalt experiments made it clear that an examination of reality requires interplay between the object and the nature of the observing subject. The objective element in experience justifies the distinguishing between what is an adequate and an inadequate conception of reality. Adequate conceptions must contain a common core of truth that will permit the art to be potentially relevant to all individuals. Quotes from Art and Visual Perception by Rudolf Arnheim, Professor Emeritus of Psychological of Art at Harvard University. His books include Film as Art 1957, Visual Thinking 1969, The Dynamics of Architectural Form 1977, and The Split and the Structure: Twenty Eight Essays” 1996.

Are you the chief heckler here?

Can we create a New Age of Enlightenment? If one half of one percent of the population acquires the hobby that I call the ‘intellectual life’ such a group could be the foundation for a new Age of Enlightenment. The original Age of Enlightenment occurred in Europe during the eighteenth century. “The men [in the 18th century the enlightened were still only half enlightened] of the Enlightenment united on a vastly ambitious program, a program of secularism, humanity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom, above all, freedom in its many forms—freedom from arbitrary power, freedom of speech, freedom of trade, freedom to realize one’s talents, freedom of aesthetic response, freedom, in a word, of moral man to make his own way in the world.” It appears to me that following the completion of our schooling the normal inclination is to pack up our yearbook and our intellect into a large trunk and store it in the attic. Occasionally one might go up to the attic and reminisce about the old days. What I propose is that following the end of our school days we begin a gradual process of self-actualizing self-learning. This period of our life is generally filled with our duties to family and career so that not a great deal of time is available for extraneous matters. However, time is always available for important things and the important thing is to ‘keep curiosity alive’. I suspect that if one does not engage in non job related intellectual efforts for the twenty years between the end of schooling and mid-life that the curiosity with which we started life will have dried up and blown away. What are non job related intellectual activities? Such activities are what I consider to be intellectualism. Intellectualism is active engagement with ‘disinterested knowledge’. There is in industry the concept of ‘applied research’, which is research looking for a good way to build a new mouse trap; there is also a concept called ‘pure research’, which is a search for truth that may or may not lead to an enhancement of the ‘bottom line’. Interested knowledge is knowledge we acquire because there is money in it. Disinterested knowledge is that knowledge we seek because we care about understanding something even though there is no money in it. The goal of intellectual life is similar to the goal of the artist "the artist chooses the media and the goal of every artist is to become fluent enough with the media to transcend it. At some point you pass from playing the piano to playing music." I think it is possible for a significant portion of the population of every nation to become intellectuals. What do you think? Quotes from The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism by Peter Gay

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 by Lakoff and Johnson

Tradition of Change: an oxymoron? Thales, who lived around 625 BC, is called the ‘first philosopher and the first scientist’. He is considered to be the first thinker to propose a single universal principle of the material universe, “a unique substratum that, itself unchanging, underlay all change.” When we think about this problem of comprehending change we recognize that there must exist something that is essential to change that remains unchanged. When we look around us we are struck with the fact that things constantly change. Thales is said to have asked the important question does everything change or is there something that remains unchanged? If there is not something that remains unchanged then how can we recognize anything as being what it was before change? We recognize continuity as well as change. Even when we recognize that something changed appearance we are confident that something remains of the original source. Is there one primordial thing that never changes? The questions and answers developed by Thales are extremely important because for the first time we observe a human not resorting to animistic (attribution of conscious life to objects) answers for that which is observed. He did not settle for the answer “I do not understand so it must be just the nature of the gods made it happen”. He also followed a new human inclination to believe that the mind is capable of comprehending what happens in the world. Philosophy was born. If we added to traditional thinking the abstract idea of change our world becomes tremendously complex. The way we manage the complexity is that we create; we create by introducing generalizations plus other abstractions. Absent the concept of change we humans need deal only with the here and the now. We can include the past and the future but only in that they are an extension of the here and the now. Since the past and future are extensions they must be a unity like the present, the past and future can be only what now is, they can be nothing else. Thinking, that excludes change, eliminates a great deal of complexity. It simplifies greatly our task of thinking, because we need deal only with concrete things; we need to deal with only what we sense here and now. Some call this a traditional mode of thinking. It exemplifies the thinking of primitive humanity up to the Greek period that began around 500 BC. It is, I think, a good way to comprehend what myth is all about. Philosopher, tycoon, philanthropist, author, and international political activist George Soros says in his book “The Age of Fallibility” that “Once it comes to generalizations, the more general they are, the more they simplify matters. This world is best conceived as a general equation in which the present is represented by one set of constants. Change the constants and the same equation will apply to all past and future situations…I shall call this the critical mode of thinking.” Soros identifies the traditional mode of thinking with an ‘organic society’. He further identifies the critical mode of thinking with the ‘open society’. Each society must find a means to deal with factors that do not conform to the will of the members of that society. In a traditional society, even though it focuses primarily on phenomena that are generally static, nature can be obdurate. In the traditional mode of thinking the central tenet is that things are as they have always been and the future will be likewise—thus they cannot be any other way. The status quo is fate and all we need do is learn that fate and to organize our lives in accordance. In such a world logic and argumentation has no place because there exists no alternatives. When we examine the nature of epistemology--what can we know and how can we know it--in such a mode of thinking we quickly illuminate the advantages and drawbacks. In a traditional society there is no bifurcation between thought and concrete reality. There exists only the objective relationship between knower and known. The validity of traditional truth is unquestioned; there can be no distinction between ideas and reality. Where a thing exists we give it a name. Without a name a thing does not exist. Only where abstraction exists do we give non-objects a name. In our modern reality we label many non-concrete things and thus arises the separation of reality and thoughts. The way things appear is the way things are; the traditional mode of thinking can penetrate no deeper. The traditional mode of thinking does not explain the world by cause and effect but everything performs in accordance with its nature. Because there is no distinction between the natural and supernatural and between reality and thought there arise no contradictions. The spirit of the tree is as real as the branch of the tree; past, present, and future melt into one time. Thinking fails to distinguish between thought and reality, truth and falsehood, social and naturals laws. Such is the world of traditional thought and the world of mythological thought. The traditional mode is very flexible as long as no alternatives are voiced, any new thing quickly becomes the traditional and as long as such a situation meets the needs of the people such a situation will continue to prevail. To comprehend the traditional mode we must hold in abeyance our ingrained habits of thought, especially our abstract concept of the individual. In a changeless society all is the Whole, the individual does not exist. The individual is an abstraction that does not exist whereas the Whole, which is in reality an abstraction, exists as a concrete concept for traditional thought. The unity expressed by the Whole is the unity much like an organism. The individuals in this society are like the organs of a creature; they cannot last if separated from the Whole. Society determines which function the individual plays in the society. The term “organic society” is used often to label this form of culture. When all is peaceful with no significant voices placing forth an alternative then this organic society exists in peace. In this organic society a human slave is no different from any other chattel. In a feudal society the land is more important than the landlord who derives his privileges from the fact that he holds the land.

I claim that we humans created this dichotomy when we discovered that we are mortal. We could not accept this fact without great anxiety and thus created soul as a means for an after life and thus immortality.

Mind/Body dichotomy: Our great nemeses? Theology and philosophy are guardians of the human urge to separate itself as much as possible from its animal heritage and to move closer toward being god-like. The overt effort of theology is to accentuate the misconceived mind/body dichotomy while the covert effort of philosophy is to accentuate this same mind/body dichotomy. Theology does this legitimately because it believes that humans are both body and soul. The body is what we must put-up-with for our short stay on earth while the soul will last through eternity in an environment determined by our brief stay on earth. I claim that philosophy does this illegitimately because it vainly wishes to be respected in the manner like mathematics or physics. Philosophy wants to use word symbols to describe truth in much the same way as math uses their particular symbols of equality, greater than, minus, plus, differential, exponential, etc. It appears to me that analytic philosophy is being challenged by SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) Philosophy in the Flesh 1999, by Lakoff and Johnson ; by meaning philosophy The Meaning of the Body 2007, by Johnson; by visual art Art and Visual Perception 1954, by Arnheim.

National governments in the West have advanced from Monarchies to Republics. Societies have moved from rule by a monarchy aided by the aristocracy, to rule by a plutocracy subject only to ratification by the citizens of the republic. It seems that, like the poor, we constantly have with us a privileged class. Is it possible to organize a well functioning democracy that does not support a privileged class? Let me give you my definition of privileged class. Fifteen years ago there was a humorous saying about George Bush the elder, which went something like this, “George Bush was born on third base and thought he had hit a triple”. My definition of a privileged individual is one who was born on “third base”. Evidently many assume that the privileged classes are those who have higher IQs or some kind of natural endowment. I do not consider this to be privilege. The privileged are those who, by birth, are endowed with great wealth thereby being placed into a position of power and prestige without any meritorious effort on their part. Can a democratic society function effectively if no individuals are allowed to inherit great wealth?

“The capitulation of Western man to his technology, with its crescendo of specialized demands has always appeared to many observers of our world as a kind of enslavement.” No more are intellectuals focused upon the nature of man in society. Intellectuals have become non intellectual specialists—hired guns of CA (Corporate America)—Vulcan Vulcanization—the process of treating crude or synthetic material chemically to give it useful properties. All thought is saturated with egocentric and sociocentric presuppositions. That is, all thought contains highly motivating bias centered in the self or in ideologies such as political, religious, and economic theories. Some individuals are conscious of these internal forces but most people are not. Those individuals who are conscious of these biases within their thinking can try to rid their judgments of that influence. Those who are not conscious, or little conscious of such bias, are bound to display a significant degree of irrational tendencies in their judgments. “Can the intellectual, who is supposed to have a special and perhaps professional concern with truth, escape from or rise above the partiality and distortions of ideology?” Our culture has tended to channel intellectuals, or perhaps more properly those who function as intellectuals, into academic professions. Gramsci makes the accurate distinction that all men and women “are intellectuals…but all do not have the function of intellectuals in society”. An intellectual might be properly defined as those who are primarily or professionally concerned with matters of the mind and the imagination but who are socially non-attached. “The intellectual is thought of not as someone who displays great mental or imaginative ability but as someone who applies those abilities in more general areas such as religion, philosophy and social and political issues. It is the involvement in general and controversy outside of a specialization that is considered as the hallmark of an intellectual; it is a matter of choice of self definition, choice is supreme here.” Even anti-ideological is ideological. If partisanship can be defended servility cannot; many have allowed themselves to become the tools of others. We have moved into an age when the university is no longer an ivory tower and knowledge is king but knowledge has become a commodity and educators have become instruments of power; the university has become a privately owned think-tank. “A profound change in the intellectual community itself is inherent in this development. The largely humanist-oriented, occasionally ideological minded intellectual dissenter , who saw his role largely in terms of proffering social critiques, is rapidly being displaced either by experts and specialist, who become involved in special government undertakings, or by generalist-integrators, who become house-ideologues for those in power, providing overall intellectual integration for disparate actions.” The subordination to power is not just at the individual level but also at the institutional level. Government funds are made available to universities and colleges not for use as they deem fit but for specific government needs. Private industry plays even a larger role in providing funds for educational institutions to perform management and business study. Private industry is not inclined ‘to waste’ money on activities that do not contribute to the bottom line. ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune.’ Each intellectual is spouting a different ideology, how does the individual choose what ideology? Trotsky once said “only a participant can be a profound spectator”. Is detachment then a virtue? To suggest that intellectuals rise above ideology is impractical. Explicit commitment is preferable to bogus neutrality. But truth is an indispensable touchstone. Quotes and ideas from “Knowledge and Belief in Politics” Bhikhu Parekh

No. Intellect is what a person is born with. I am encouraging the viewer to develop intellectual sophistication, which is within the reach of every person.

Take your pick!

Hey! Get an Intellectual Hobby My experience leads me to conclude that there is a world of difference in picking up a fragment of knowledge here and there versus seeking knowledge for an answer to a question of significance. There is a world of difference between taking a stroll in the woods on occasion versus climbing a mountain because you wish to understand what climbing a mountain is about or perhaps you want to understand what it means to accomplish a feat of significance only because you want it and not because there is ‘money in it’. I think that every adult needs to experience the act of intellectual understanding; an act that Carl Sagan describes as “Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.” This quotation of Carl Rogers might illuminate my meaning: I want to talk about learning. But not the lifeless, sterile, futile, quickly forgotten stuff that is crammed in to the mind of the poor helpless individual tied into his seat by ironclad bonds of conformity! I am talking about LEARNING - the insatiable curiosity that drives the adolescent boy to absorb everything he can see or hear or read about gasoline engines in order to improve the efficiency and speed of his 'cruiser'. I am talking about the student who says, "I am discovering, drawing in from the outside, and making that which is drawn in a real part of me." I am talking about any learning in which the experience of the learner progresses along this line: "No, no, that's not what I want"; "Wait! This is closer to what I am interested in, what I need"; "Ah, here it is! Now I'm grasping and comprehending what I need and what I want to know!" When we undertake such a journey of discovery we need reliable sources of information. We need information that we can build a strong foundation for understanding. Where do we find such reliable information? We find it in the library or through Google on the Internet or combinations thereof. I have a ‘Friends of the Library’ card from a college near me. This card allows me, for a yearly fee of $25, to borrow any book in that gigantic library. Experts in every domain of knowledge have written books just especially for laypersons like you and I. I often recommend to others that they get an intellectual hobby. The following is the essence of my message. Hobbies are ways in which many individuals express their individuality. Those matters that excite an individual’s interest and curiosity are those very things that allow the individual to acquire self-understanding and understanding of the world. Interests define individuality and help to provide meaning to life. We all look for some ideology, hobby, philosophy or religion to provide meaning to life. Not many of us have discovered our full potentialities or have fully explored in depth those we have discovered. Self-development and self-expression are relatively new ideas in human history. The arts are one means for this self-expression. The artist may find drawing or constructing sculptures as a means for self-discovery. The self-learner may find essay writing of equal importance. I recommend that each person who does not presently have some similar type of hobby develop the hobby of an intellectual life. We could add to our regular routine the development of an invigorating intellectual life wherein we sought disinterested knowledge; knowledge that is not for the purpose of some immediate need but something that stirs our curiosity, which we seek to understand for the simple reason that we feel a need to understand a particular domain of knowledge.

What is the American frame of mind? I would say that a culture consists of the complex of ideas that a group of people hold dear. One can speak of the culture of a small group or of a very large group. In the United States our culture is determined to a large extent by how we hold "these truths to be self-evident"; we are held together by ideas perhaps more than other societies. Next, religion plays a great role, and in our case it is the mixture of Protestantism, Judaism, and Catholicism. Following this is our infatuation with capitalism; following that is our narcissistic view of our uniqueness and greatness. Our culture is a general attitude toward our self and toward the world based upon these four ideologies. To what powers have wo/men given allegiance in order to solve the paradoxes of life? To what or to whom have each of us given our uncritical allegiance? “Into what hero-system do I fit the expression of my talent”? What or whom has become my fetish-god? It is possible for the adult to choose which power s/he will serve; however, to do so, when the choice is contrary to one that has resulted from the family and community clan, is an extremely unusual and heroic act. “The great tragedy of our lives is that the major question of our existence is never put by us--it is put by personal and social impulses for us.” Very few of us discover our authentic talent—if it is ever found it is generally found accidentally through plain fate by us in our social milieu as we tap...tap...tap our blind way through life. From a personal point of view our principal task is to somehow find our way out of the fate that we stumbled into and to grow out of our idol worship and fetishism and to expand our horizons, allegiances, and to drop our mere preoccupations. We need to free our self from the opinions of others. “Since aggression is a reaction to frustration, by remaining tightly bound to the success of our social world we increase our aggressiveness, life invariable frustrates us.” Disinterested knowledge is the energy bunny. It generates the energy for exploration and for overcoming some of the inhibitions conscious reason places on the unconscious. Studying disinterested knowledge is like taking off a month every year to visit a strange new land. Curiosity is reinvigorated and new meaning is created.[/b Knowledge is like a jigsaw puzzle. We have created many puzzles in coping with reality and when we received a new piece (knowledge) that does not fit our present puzzles we forgetaboutit. However, if through disinterested knowledge we have created new puzzles we might find a place for this new fragment of knowledge to fit; thereby this fragment becomes our new knowledge. Our mind is constantly working for us and when we do not give it a worthwhile project, i.e. a new puzzle, it will just waste away in boredom or worry. In America one might best see this attitude manifested by this frame of mind “I’ve Upped My Income; Now Up Yours”; a manifestation of this attitude may be seen in concrete form by the fact that 45 million citizens are without proper health care. Do you think that the attitude “I’ve Upped My Income, Now Up Yours” is an American frame of mind? Quotes from The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man by Ernest Becker

In a throw-away society is longevity of little value? For a period of some two hundred years America had an every moving new frontier. One of the appeals of this ever-present frontier was the sense that there was always a place for the rugged individualist. A place existed for the individual who was enthused about the prospect of uninhibited growth where each individual could test his or her capacity to be all they could be. No one had an edge over the other person beyond character and motivation. Darwin’s theory teaches us that mating and reproduction is the means whereby the species adapted to a changing environment and thereby created the possibility for survival of the species. Generally speaking the human species stops this procreation process before the age of fifty. Biological evolution generally provides no means for adaptation in our species beyond fifty years of age. Human instrumental rationality has created a technology that continually increases the longevity of individuals of our species. Instrumental rationality is the ability to determine and execute the best means for reaching an established goal. We have determined the goal of ever extending life to be a valuable goal and are constantly extending human longevity. Simultaneously with an extended life span we are continually shortening the social value of longevity. Like the rest of our commodities we have a throwaway culture for long-lived persons. Our society seems to mimic biological evolution in placing fifty years as the end of adaptability concern. Biological evolution terminates concern for those beyond the age of reproduction and our culture terminates concern for those beyond the age of commodity production. Biological adaptation has abandoned us after fifty, our instrumental rationality is responding to our unexamined desire to prolong life; how do we manage to survive as a species if we do not find a rational means to engage this challenge? The challenge is to improve the societal value of human life after fifty. Where is the ever-moving frontier of expectations for the man or woman beyond the age of fifty? Is age beyond fifty to remain a throw-away social value? I claim that longevity can provide a greatly needed value for our culture, provided that each of us begin developing an intellectual life after our school daze are over. That is to say, if by mid-life we have prepared our self to provide to society an intellectual sophistication that this society badly needs we can then donate a great deal of sophisticated intellectual energy to our culture in those long years that are presently devoted to little constructive activity. This intellectually sophisticated energy can prove to be very beneficial to a culture that is badly lacking in this very important ingredient. Our society badly needs a cadre of men and women who have grown in intellectual sophistication while growing old in years. Such individuals can provide the Dutch uncles and Dutch aunts to serve the function that village shamans provided to more primitive societies.

Three stages to consciousness Suppose something happens that frightens me. My blood pressure goes up, my heart starts beating very fast, the release of adrenalin creates a great burst of energy, I may even jump or start to run. All of the feelings that are a result of these biological happenings reach my consciousness and I now know that I am afraid. Many non human creatures have emotions—“human emotions however have evolved to making connections to complex ideas, values, principles, and judgments”—thus human emotion is special—the impact of feelings on humans is the result of consciousness—a distinct difference between feeling and knowing a feeling—“neither the emotion or the feeling caused by the emotion is conscious”—these things happen in a biological state—there are three stages here; emotion, feeling, and consciousness of feeling—consciousness must be present if feelings have an influence beyond the here and the now. We need not be conscious of the emotion or the inducer of the emotion—we are about as effective in stopping an emotion as in stopping a sneeze. “Emotions are about the life of an organism, its body to be precise, and their role is to assist the organism in maintaining life…emotions are biologically determined processes, depending upon innately set brain devices, laid down by long evolutionary history…The devices that produce emotions…are part of a set of structures that both regulate and represent body states…All devices can be engaged automatically, without conscious deliberation…The variety of the emotional responses is responsible for profound changes in both the body landscape and the brain landscape. The collection of these changes constitutes the substrate for the neural patterns which eventually become feelings of emotion.” The biological function of emotions is to produce an automatic action in certain situations and to regulate the internal processes so that the creature is able to support the action dictated by the situation. The biological purpose of emotions are clear, they are not a luxury but a necessity for survival. “It is through feelings, which are inwardly directed and private, that emotions, which are outwardly directed and public, begin their impact on the mind; but the full and lasting impact of feelings requires consciousness, because only along with the advent of a sense of self do feelings become known to the individual having them.” Damasio proposes “that the term feeling should be reserve for the private, mental experience of an emotion, while the term emotion should be used to designate the collection of responses, many of which are publicly observable.” This means that while we can observe our own private feelings we cannot observe these same feelings in others. Core consciousness—“occurs when the brain’s representation devices generate an imaged, nonverbal account of how the organism’s own state is affected by the organism’s processing of an object, and when this process enhances the image of the causative object, thus placing it saliently in a spatial and temporal context” First, there is emotion, then comes feeling, then comes consciousness of feeling. There is no evidence that we are conscious of all our feelings, in fact evidence indicates that we are not conscious of all feelings. Quotes from The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio

Great thinkers of the past have given us two bits of advice "the unexamined life is not worth living" and "know thy self" that form the essence for a creative life. Our young people need to be taught Critical Thinking and to be encouraged to become self-actualizing self-learners when their formal schooling is over. The Critical Thinking self-actualizing self-learner has the foundation required of a creative thinker. I shall post more details about these two factors shortly.

Education in America It appears to me that there are two categories of educational techniques. One focuses on creating graduates with large databases and the other focuses on the individual creativity of its graduates. The US system concentrates on large databases and ignores (I think not accidentally) individual creativity. The graduates of US education are great producers and consumers and almost totally without individual creative capability. Our economic system thrives on a policy of habit, pattern and routine. The workplace wants action and not time consuming thought. Thought must be of the kind that can quickly choose between ‘True and False’ or ‘A, B or C’. Thought should be “curtailed to a minimum”; quick action must be “accentuated to a maximum”. Any action delayed by excessive thought is to be discouraged. All thought beyond “T or F and A, B or C” is excessive. The workplace, primarily the large corporation, needs expert specialists with finely detailed pattern recognition. The most valuable employee, at any single moment, is one with a readily available menu of routines who can--after recognizing the problem pattern—quickly choose the routine that will immediately reengage the wheels of production. Our college graduates are primed for pattern recognition and choosing routines. If the workplace detects a situation wherein the available routines are inadequate quick action is demanded to correct that situation. Our workplaces are designed to accommodate workers who follow detected patterns with honed routines. The workplace must maximize routine and minimize the need for any thought outside that which is carefully calibrated by routine. The most efficient workplace functions like a military force wherein all actions are made in response to codified routine. Even when the need arrives to replace an ongoing routine with another, this action too, is codified. We think of the private entrepreneur as a very creative thinker who wins because of a quick and creative brain. I suspect there is some degree of truth in this assumption but it is a very small factor for success. Someone said ‘success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration’. The major element of success results from correct business pattern recognition; followed by well-honed business routines that makes success a possibility. Luck then determines who succeeds or fails. Bruit force capitalization, I suspect, is also a big factor. Bill Gates and many others attempted to develop software in the early days of the hi-tech boom. One or another of these entrepreneurs would succeed magnificently. Gates happened to be the one. So, when all our citizens are educated to be successful in the world of ‘produce and consume’, what citizen is prepared to make good judgement in life when faced with problems with no pattern and no routines? I have more than 16 years of formal education. Within the American lexicon I would, I think, be considered “well educated”. In my opinion, our standard college degree does not advance our education but very little. I think that it advances our training a great deal. I think this college degree prepares us for our life as a producer and consumer and does little positive to advance our ability to be what I consider to be a “good and wise citizen”.

Well said. However, few responders display the Critical Reading skills that you speak of. It appears to me that our schools seldom teach these basic reading skills.

What can one dummy tell another about self-learning? I often face the frustration of responders who find them selves confused by my words. This has led me to post my OP “Knowledge is a puzzle” (which I copy and place at the end of this OP) I constantly study books written by authors who hold a critical view of the existing social status quo. The books I study are the books I write about and these essays are the ones I post. Thus my OPs are constantly contrary to the status quo world views. My OPs are essays that do not generally fit the puzzles that readers have been working on all their lives. Thus when I throw a piece on the reader’s table it will almost never fit any of her puzzles. The reader who decides to respond generally does so after modifying the piece so that it will fit the puzzle that is familiar. The response the reader makes is then about the fragment of knowledge that has been sliced and diced to fit the wrong puzzle. When I start reading a new author I am constantly facing total confusion as to what the author is saying. However, I do this so often that I have learned not to be frustrated because I know that if I just keep plodding along I will sooner or later begin to comprehend what the author is driving at. Of course, I can trust the author because I only choose the best that is around (or at least one that receives praise from many) whereas the reader of my essays does not have that comfort. I discovered that few people know how to go about the process of learning a new domain of knowledge. When they are given a fragment of knowledge that does not fit into their puzzles that they have been working on all their life they do not know how to start a new puzzle. They had teachers to help them start new puzzles but they never learned how to start one of their own. Instead, they take the fragment of new knowledge and either tosses it out the window or they cut it up to fit their present puzzles. What is needed, I think, is for young people to learn how to start new puzzles. Your teachers will never teach you how to do this, you must learn that your self or remain ignorant of new domains of knowledge the rest of your life. The reason many find my posts to be incomprehensible is because I am presenting a bit of knowledge that does not fit the puzzles that our teachers taught us. --------------- Most everyone has played with jigsaw puzzles and recognize how we put such puzzles together. When we start a new puzzle the first thing we do is construct the frame. We gather all the pieces with one straight edge and slowly construct the outer perimeter of the puzzle. Such is the case when we organize knowledge. When we begin to learn a new domain of knowledge in school our teachers help us set up the frame. They hold our hands while we construct the outside boundary and slowly fill in the image by adding new facts. After we leave school if we want to become a self-learner and to become knowledgeable of new domains we will follow this same procedure but with a significant difference. We will have no teacher to supply us with the pieces of the puzzle. Especially difficult will be gathering the appropriate side pieces so that we can frame our domain. After this we might very well have to imagine the image of the puzzle because we will not have a teacher to help us ‘see’ what the domain ‘looks like’. When we become a self-learner we will often find pieces of knowledge that do not fit our already constructed frames, when this happens we have two choices. We can throw away the new fragment of knowledge or we can start a journey of discovery in an effort to organize the construction of a new domain. The odd piece of knowledge is either trashed or we must begin a big effort to start construction on a new big puzzle. I think that knowledge is easily acquired when that knowledge fits easily within one’s accepted ideologies. If we have a ready place to put a new fragment of knowledge we can easily find a place to fit it in. When the knowledge does not fit within our already functioning ideas that fact will be discarded unless a great deal of effort is made to find a home for that fragment of knowledge. We are unable to move beyond our ideologies unless we exert great effort. No one can give us that type of knowledge; we must go out of our way to stalk it, wrestle it to the ground and then find other pieces that will complete a frame. That is why our schools do not try to take us beyond our narrow world because it is too costly in time and effort. Our schools prepare us to be good workers and strong consumers, anything beyond that we must capture on our own. No one can give us that kind of knowledge. It can only be presented as an awakening of consciousness and then we can, if we have the energy and curiosity go and capture the knowledge of something totally new and start a new puzzle.

I challenge the student of mathematics It appears to me that most people look on math as something with supernatural qualities. I challenge the student of math to develop and post short essays on Internet discussion forums about those fundamental aspects of math that you think people can and should comprehend. What follows is something that I have posted regarding my idea of what ordinary citizens should know abut this very fundamental domain of knowledge. Arithmetic is object collection It is a hypothesis of SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) that the sensorimotor activity of collecting objects by a child constitute a conceptual metaphor at the neural level leading to a primary metaphor that ‘arithmetic is object collection’. The arithmetic teacher attempting to teach the child at a later time depends upon this already accumulated knowledge. Of course, all of this is known to the child without the symbolization or the conscious awareness of the child. The pile of objects became ‘bigger’ when the child added more objects and became ‘smaller’ when objects were removed. The child easily recognizes while being taught arithmetic that 5 is bigger than 3 and 3 is littler than 7. The child knows many entailments, many ‘truths’, resulting from playing with objects. The teacher has little difficulty convincing the child that two collections A and B are increased when another collection C is added, or that if A is bigger than B then A+C is bigger than B+C. At birth an infant has a minimal innate arithmetic ability. This ability to add and subtract small numbers is called subitizing. (I am speaking of a cardinal number—a number that specifies how many objects there are in a collection, don’t confuse this with numeral—a symbol). Many animals display this subitizing ability. In addition to subitizing the child, while playing with objects, develops other cognitive capacities such as grouping, ordering, pairing, memory, exhaustion-detection, cardinal-number assignment, and independent order. Subitizing ability is limited to quantities 1 to 4. As a child grows s/he learns to count beyond 4 objects. This capacity is dependent upon 1) Combinatorial-grouping—a cognitive mechanism that allows you to put together perceived or imagined groups to form larger groups. 2) Symbolizing capacity—capacity to associate physical symbols or words with numbers (quantities). “Metaphorizing capacity: You need to be able to conceptualize cardinal numbers and arithmetic operations in terms of your experience of various kinds—experiences with groups of objects, with the part-whole structure of objects, with distances, with movement and location, and so on.” “Conceptual-blending capacity. You need to be able to form correspondences across conceptual domains (e.g., combining subitizing with counting) and put together different conceptual metaphors to form complex metaphors.” Primary metaphors function somewhat like atoms that can be joined into molecules and these into a compound neural network. On the back cover of “Where Mathematics Comes From” is written “In this acclaimed study of cognitive science of mathematical ideas, renowned linguist George Lakoff pairs with psychologist Rafael Nunez to offer a new understanding of how we conceive and understand mathematical concepts.” “Abstract ideas, for the most part, arise via conceptual metaphor—a cognitive mechanism that derives abstract thinking from the way we function in the everyday physical world. Conceptual metaphor plays a central and defining role in the formation of mathematical ideas within the cognitive unconscious—from arithmetic and algebra to sets and logic to infinity in all of its forms. The brains mathematics is mathematics, the only mathematics we know or can know.” We are acculturated to recognize that a useful life is a life with purpose. The complex metaphor ‘A Purposeful Life Is a Journey’ is constructed from primary metaphors: ‘purpose is destination’ and ‘action is motion’; and a cultural belief that ‘people should have a purpose’. A Purposeful Life Is A Journey Metaphor A purposeful life is a journey. A person living a life is a traveler. Life goals are destinations A life plan is an itinerary. This metaphor has strong influence on how we conduct our lives. This influence arises from the complex metaphor’s entailments: A journey, with its accompanying complications, requires planning, and the necessary means. Primary metaphors ‘ground’ concepts to sensorimotor experience. Is this grounding lost in a complex metaphor? ‘Not by the hair of your chiney-chin-chin’. Complex metaphors are composed of primary metaphors and the whole is grounded by its parts. “The grounding of A Purposeful Life Is A Journey is given by individual groundings of each component primary metaphor.” The ideas for this post come from Philosophy in the Flesh. The quotes are from Where Mathematics Comes From by Lakoff and Nunez

Can we compare physics and psychology? Libido is an energy source—Heat is an energy source—there is potential and kinetic energy Emotion aka instinct is an energy source— Narcissism is a force—gravity is a force—electromagnetism is a force—within the atom there are the strong and weak forces—there are four physical forces within nature. Narcissism is a force that displays itself in--self-absorption—self-love—sense of immortality—self-esteem—cosmic significance—self-importance—feeds on symbols, on abstract ideas of my own worth Guilt is a feeling caused by outside resistance Feeling—the mental experience of an emotion after the body has reacted to the emotion Neurosis is the control of anxiety by restricting experience—the humanization process is neurosis in action Anxiety is a feeling, the penalty for becoming human, i.e. for becoming self-conscious; it is not based on instinct but is based upon individual sense of helplessness. Ego controls responses by delaying action Hero—the world is a stage for heroism—our main task on this earth—man’s natural yearning for organismic activity, the pleasure of incorporation and expansion, fed limitlessly in the domain of symbols—we compare one another symbolically—we are ignorant of what we want and need, we disguise it in consumption as our badges—desire to be hero is natural and to admit it is healthy—need to make me, man, nation, etc, meaningful—our need for freedom is our need to be a hero—it becomes a blind-drivenness that burns us up—we must feel that what we do is heroic—crises is when youth does not feel heroic, we have a crisis of heroism—religion is no longer a stage for heroism—heroics is a central theme of human action Culture is a symbolic action system for heroism—to give death its due is perhaps a step back that will permit a step forward—death is reality, when we repress it what happens?— This is how our brain works. We think with the aid of past experiences. We use linguistic metaphors to give others a direction for understanding. Our brain uses conceptual metaphors this same way; automatically using conceptual metaphors. LIFE IS A JOURNEY. Automatically our brain “copies” what we already know about journeys that help us to better comprehend the task of living. Abstract ideas are largely metaphorical. An infant is born and when embraced for the first time by its mother the infant experiences the sensation of warmth. In succeeding experiences the warmth is felt along with other sensations. Empirical data verifies that there often happens a conflation of this sensation experience together with the development of a subjective (abstract) concept we can call affection. With each similar experience the infant fortifies both the sensation experience and the affection experience and a little later this conflation aspect ends and the child has these two concepts in different mental spaces. This conflation leads us to readily recognize the metaphor ‘affection is warmth’. Cognitive science uses metaphor in the standard usage as we are all accustomed to but it also uses a new concept that you are unfamiliar with unless you have been reading this book. This new concept is called ‘conceptual metaphor’. Conceptual metaphor is the heart of this new cognitive science and represents what will be in my opinion the new paradigm of cognitive science. In my example I speak of two separate mental spaces; one being the experience of being held and the other is the subjective experience of affection. The theory behind the ‘conceptual metaphor’ is that the structure of the sense experience can and is often automatically without conscious intention mapped into a new mental space. The experience structure can be mapped into a new mental space and thereby becomes part of the structure of that new mental space. In this fashion these conceptual metaphors can act somewhat like atoms that join together to make a molecule. SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) has developed new and revolutionary theories regarding how cognition works. One way that it works is through metaphor, not just linguistic but also through conceptual metaphor. You ought to give it a study. You might be surprised how many things will become clearer. I am a retired engineer; that is why I think using physics as an aid in comprehending the world I live in.

Certainly, we created math it did not come from some heavenly kingdom.

That says it well. Morality is about relationships, one mght call it a code for diplomacy. We must learn many things about relationships but one very important thing is the ability to dialogue followed by dialectical reasoning to reach conscensus on how best to mold relationships. I recently had occasion to hang out in the waiting area of St Joseph Hospital in Asheville for a few hours. I was free to walk many of the corridors and rest in many of the waiting areas along with everyone else. It was early morning but it was obvious that the hospital functioned fully 24/7. A person can walk the corridors of any big city hospital and observe the effectiveness of human rationality in action. One can also visit the UN building in NYC or read the morning papers and observe just how ineffective, frustrating and disappointing human rationality can be. Why does human reason perform so well in some matters and so poorly in others? We live in two very different worlds; a world of technical and technological order and clarity, and a world of personal and social disorder and confusion. We are increasingly able to solve problems in one domain and increasingly endangered by our inability to solve problems in the other. Normal science, as defined by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is successful primarily because it is a domain of knowledge controlled by paradigms. The paradigm defines the standards, principles and methods of the discipline. It is not apparent to the laity but science moves forward in small incremental steps. Science seldom seeks and almost never produces major novelties. Science solves puzzles. The logic of the paradigm insulates the professional group from problems that are unsolvable by that paradigm. One reason that science progresses so rapidly and with such assurance is because the logic of that paradigm allows the practitioners to work on problems that only their lack of ingenuity will keep them from solving. Science uses instrumental rationality to solve puzzles. Instrumental rationality is a systematic process for reflecting upon the best action to take to reach an established end. The obvious question becomes ‘what mode of rationality is available for determining ends?’ Instrumental rationality appears to be of little use in determining such matters as “good” and “right”. There is a striking difference between the logic of technical problems and that of dialectical problems. The principles, methods and standards for dealing with technical problems and problems of “real life” are as different as night and day. Real life problems cannot be solved only using deductive and inductive reasoning. Dialectical reasoning methods require the ability to slip quickly between contradictory lines of reasoning. One needs skill to develop a synthesis of one point of view with another. Where technical matters are generally confined to only one well understood frame of reference real life problems become multi-dimensional totalities. When we think dialectically we are guided by principles not by procedures. Real life problems span multiple categories and academic disciplines. We need point-counter-point argumentation; we need emancipatory reasoning to resolve dialectical problems. We need Critical Thinking skills and attitudes to resolve real life problems.