Is Chomsky's View on the Mind-Body Problem Redefining Materialism?

[bohm2]

Complexity of a higher order (like life and mind) can arise if a system discovers the trick of constructing its own constraints.What matters in the mind is that an idea, an anticipatory image, forms. This is going to happen every moment anyway because that is how brains are structured. But states of mind can be constructed via acts of verbally-base, recursively nested, constraint.

Isn't "constructing it's own constraints" just the nativist position?

Sure, you can get obsessed about the hunt for a brain module which does "syntactic constraint". Stick a person's head in a scanner, ask them to generate regular and irregular verbs, and you will find different parts of the brain working hard. Perhaps the left dorsolateral prefrontal for regular verbs, and the left superior frontal gyrus for the irregular (until the next study using german rather than english speakers contradicts you).

But this is missing the point. Brains are already hierarchically organised. And the cause that is making such a "neuroscientific" difference in humans is not the addition of some novel brain module/genetic modification but another level of the epistemic cut. That is what needs to be the focus of attention.

Maybe I'm mistaken but I don't think they are suggesting a "brain module". I think the argument is for "mental" module. It's not clear if such modules can be accommodated within neural mechanisms as presently understood. I think that's why Chomsky writes:

The familiar slogan about the mental and the neurophysiological has the matter backwards: it should not be taken as a characterization of the mental, but rather as a hypothesis about neurophysiology: perhaps the neurophysiological is the mental at a “lower” level, perhaps not. As of now, we have more reason to feel secure about the mental than about the neurophysiological.

The point, I thought, was whether the "environment" influenced the evolution of the "particle"; and even in the case of hydrogen fusing into helium, it was only under the conditions produced by the stars that the hydrogen atoms overcame their electroweak interactions and found the more favorable strong interaction. It was a synthesis of both external and internal forces.

Nobody is claimimg that the environment plays no role just a secondary, minor role. With respect to language, the environment just can't deliver the goods or so goes the argument for reasons as the following:

An important argument in favor of the generative approach is the Poverty of the stimulus argument. The child's input (a finite number of sentences encountered by the child, together with information about the context in which they were uttered) is in principle compatible with an infinite number of conceivable grammars. Moreover, few if any children can rely on corrective feedback from adults when they make a grammatical error. Yet, barring situations of medical abnormality or extreme privation, all the children in a given speech-community converge on very much the same grammar by the age of about five years. An especially dramatic example is provided by children who for medical reasons are unable to produce speech, and therefore can literally never be corrected for a grammatical error, yet nonetheless converge on the same grammar as their typically developing peers, according to comprehension-based tests of grammar. Considerations such as these have led Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Eric Lenneberg and others to argue that the types of grammar that the child needs to consider must be narrowly constrained by human biology (the nativist position).These innate constraints are sometimes referred to as universal grammar, the human "language faculty," or the "language instinct"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition

 

[apeiron]

Maybe I'm mistaken but I don't think they are suggesting a "brain module". I think the argument is for "mental" module. It's not clear if such modules can be accommodated within neural mechanisms as presently understood. I think that's why Chomsky writes:

Chomsky has always been wedded to the notion of organs of the mind, suggesting the brain would be organised in a functionally compartmented way like the body's organ system.

So yes, it may have only been a hypothesis - a move from the supposed evidence for mental modularity to the expectation of actual neurophysiological modularity. But it was the hypothesis.

And it was a hypothesis broadly shared by many cogsci folk in the early days of brain scanning. Despite the jokes about cognitive phrenology.

The hypothesis of course collapsed pretty quickly - about 1988 to be precise, when the Washington PET group reported the cerebellum (along with many other areas) lighting up during word processing tasks.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3277066

 

[Pythagorean]

Nobody is claimimg that the environment plays no role just a secondary, minor role. With respect to language, the environment just can't deliver the goods or so goes the argument for reasons as the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition

I so no good reasons for you to quantify who plays the bigger role and I really don't understand how you're quantifying it. If we take the environment away, there can be little to no development. How do you tally up contributions, how do you weigh contributions? Do you really think that paragraph did a sufficient job of making any quantifiable argument? It was a bunch of hand-waving. All it does it outline (and quite qualitatively, I may add) the fact that environment is not sufficient which we all agree on already.

 

[bohm2]

I so no good reasons for you to quantify who plays the bigger role and I really don't understand how you're quantifying it. If we take the environment away, there can be little to no development. How do you tally up contributions, how do you weigh contributions? Do you really think that paragraph did a sufficient job of making any quantifiable argument? It was a bunch of hand-waving. All it does it outline (and quite qualitatively, I may add) the fact that environment is not sufficient which we all agree on already.

This is his argument. Take a simple example. A human embryo. It grows to develop hands and not wings in comparison to a bird embryo. One assumes that's due to heredity (nativist position). Environmental factors are considered to play a minor role. Do you agree with that?

 

[Pythagorean]

This is his argument. Take a simple example. A human embryo. It grows to develop hands and not wings in comparison to a bird embryo. One assumes that's due to heredity (nativist position). Environmental factors are considered to play a minor role. Do you agree with that?

In the very specific case of morphology of wing vs. bird, yes, it's obviously based on internal genetic programming, but I don't see how this is relevant to the discussion at large.

 

[bohm2]

In the very specific case of morphology of wing vs. bird, yes, it's obviously based on internal genetic programming, but I don't see how this is relevant to the discussion at large.

Okay, given that you agree with this and we don't know the details how that occurs, why do you believe that such an internal genetic programming does apply with respect to the bird embryo example and not the human language case? That's his basic argument:

In fact, if someone came along and said that a bird embryo is somehow "trained" to grow wings, people would just laugh, even though embryologists lack anything like a detailed understanding of how genes regulate embryological development...The gene-control problem is conceptually similar to the problem of accounting for language growth. In fact, language development really ought to be called language growth because the language organ grows like any other body organ.

 

[Pythagorean]

Okay, given that you agree with this and we don't know the details how that occurs, why do you believe that such an internal genetic programming does apply with respect to the bird embryo example and not the human language case? That's his basic argument:

I didn't say the internal genetic programming isn't there, I said environment plays a significant role. I'd appreciate if you stopped trying to paint my arguments black or white, because you're mischaracterizing my position.

On example: the language you speak depends on the region you live in. Another example, bilingual have an intellectual edge on unilinguals, which supports the weak http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity" .

Diane Poulin-Dubois, Agnes Blaye, Julie Coutya, Ellen Bialystok. The effects of bilingualism on toddlers’ executive functioning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2010; DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2010.10.009

 

[bohm2]

I didn't say the internal genetic programming isn't there, I said environment plays a significant role. I'd appreciate if you stopped trying to paint my arguments black or white, because you're mischaracterizing my position.

My mistake. I didn't mean to imply that you don't think genetics isn't important. I lost track of the argument. It happens a lot to me when I'm doing multiple tasks. I apologize.

 

[Pythagorean]

Wow, don't see that much in philosophy forums; apology accepted.

 

[bohm2]

even in the case of hydrogen fusing into helium, it was only under the conditions produced by the stars that the hydrogen atoms overcame their electroweak interactions and found the more favorable strong interaction. It was a synthesis of both external and internal forces.

I'm not very well read on cosmology and this is a total aside, but isn't it believed that most of Helium existed before star formation or am I mistaken?

 

[Pythagorean]

I think you're right; I think on the way down from very very hot, there was some fusion going on.

 

[bohm2]

They basically argue that this uniquely human part of our language faculty (FLN-see links for details) having the properties of recursion (also found in our mathematical abilities) emerged in human brains for “physical” reasons yet to be fully comprehended; but unlike most innatists/ nativists (e.g. Pinker/Jackendoff) the reasons suggested are not due to “natural selection” but instead are guided by principles of elegance and compactness (not “tinkering” in Pinker’s sense, I guess). So to give one example, “why did Helium evolve after Hydrogen in the evolution our universe”, etc. It wasn’t for reasons of “natural selection” in any sense of the term. There were physical laws dictating it that it occur. Same with this uniquely human abstract abilities in language and mathematics (or so, it is argued by this position).

I thought this recent analysis seems to offer some support by the scheme outlined by Gould/Chomsky/Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, I think?

Due to such constraints, selection for localized shape change in a single part of a structure can produce widespread morphological changes because relative constraints deflect the evolutionary response in a direction of morphological space that differs from the direction of selection...Because relative constraints can produce substantial deflections of the evolutionary response from the direction of selection, inferring the selective pressures from observed changes in the fossil record is fraught with difficulty. It is conceivable that the derived characters of modern humans may not have arisen independently by adaptive evolution in response to separate selection pressures, but that the origin of one trait may have facilitated the evolution of the entire suite of characters.

"As much as possible, we simulated each of these changes as a localised shape change limited to a small region of the skull. For each of the simulations, we obtained a predicted response that included not only the change we selected for, but also all the others. All those features of the skull tended to change as a whole package. This means that, in evolutionary history, any of the changes may have facilitated the evolution of the others."

Human Skull Is Highly Integrated: Study Sheds New Light On Evolutionary Changes
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111220102248.htm

Pervasive Genetic Integration directs the evolution of human skull shape
http://www.flywings.org.uk/PDF%20files/Evol2012.pdf

 

[apeiron]

I thought this recent analysis seems to offer some support by the scheme outlined by Gould/Chomsky/Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, I think?

Given that fossil endocasts suggest very little evidence of significant brain reorganisation - local or global - it seems more likely that the telling change was a redesign of the vocal tract for articulate vocalisation.

Studies of Neanderthals, for instance, argue for only slight differences. Of these, the ones like the shortening of frontal and temporal areas in humans look due to changes in jaw-line - so an imposed change in the shape of the brain case that is unlikely to have changed the brain functionally. While others, such as a possible expansion of cerebellum and parietal lobes, would be in the "wrong" place so far as grammar ability goes.

http://www.paleoanthro.org/journal/content/PA20080093.pdf

So - as I've already argued in post #270 - the brain looks to have kept doing what it was doing, and a new constraint was put upon its output in the form of serial articulation. Which in turn created the possibility of the elaborate recursion that underpins grammatical structure.

It has been pointed out that the radical modification of the hominid vocal tract involves a whole hierarchy of dichotomies in itself. So just to control the equipment demands a recursive motor capacity.

http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~chrisg/index_files/EvolHierar.pdf

Brown and Golston note how there is a first divide between the larynx and the supralaryngeal filter (or voice box and basically the rest), then the filter divides in turn into its oral vs nasal paths, the oral into its lips vs tongue, the tongue into its front vs back, the front of the tongue into its pointy tip vs broad blade configuration. There is a whole tree of sub-divisions.

To get an idea of how much happens in articulation, compare saying bat and mat. Pinch your nose shut to really see how one is oral, the other nasal. So once the machinery existed - probably evolved just to make complicated expressive social noises (the old "singing ape" hypothesis) then you have all the exaptation for recursive grammar you really need. The cultural habit of associating semantics to this syntactical capacity could then eventually develop.

This is a simpler story. Any major reorganisation of the brain itself is a problem for evolutionary theory. But a change to some other bit of the body which had a major rebound effect on the brain, that is more parsimonious.

 

[Albuquerque]

From where I stand Holism and its emergence or irreducible complexity, as an anti mechanical approach to reality is unacceptable...the best I can make for a case, is to say that any valid conception of Holism must be symmetrically proportional to Reductionism or in turn be abandoned...on that regard one might just as well give up any hope of rational thought, Philosophy, Mathematics, or Science altogether, if we are to indulge ourselves in such appetites, as from this point on concepts become a word salad, and of course, through it, any thing can be made up to fit our observational needs...

...precisely in this sense I am lead to not believe in "minds" as agents of causal constrains upon a body of parts any more than I believe in parts as the causal justification of a mind...in fact if applying the principles of a non linear relativistic time to it, the all idea of agency falls down as meaningless...to me Holism or Reductionism are then constrained to perspective place holders from where we can build a symmetrically proportional understanding of reality but nothing else...the cause of much confusion is the permanent lack of "resolution" or "detail" in detecting what can be described as parasite hidden variables in the correct framing of the problems at hand...

A correct Reductionist approach must account for the dynamic unfolding of functions when making the bottom up stack of parts onto a system as means of explaining it...in turn the Holistic approach cannot give up a mechanical exact account on the phenomena it tries to describe. Same is to say the last must be undressed from its magical pretensions while the first must re-equate its notion of parts without contextual dynamics...that is, "things" must do/perform, in order to be things, just as systems must be functionally accountable to parts in order for "systems" make any sense at all !

 

[bohm2]

Given that fossil endocasts suggest very little evidence of significant brain reorganisation - local or global - it seems more likely that the telling change was a redesign of the vocal tract for articulate vocalisation.

I'm not very knowledgeable about evolutionary theory but I think that these authors don't believe that language has much to do with vocal tract redesign. Here's an interesting assessment of Chomsky's position from one blog:

Chomsky thinks language should be seen as a “spandrel” of some other structural change. The

“answers may well lie not so much in the theory of natural selection as in molecular biology, in the study of what kinds of physical systems can develop under the conditions of life on Earth and why, ultimately because of physical principles” .

Though he does not deny that evolution played a role in the development of language, he stresses that it possibly emerged only via a small mutation and that ultimately only unknown operations of “physical laws applying to a brain of a certain degree of complexity” could explain the origin of the language faculty and its properties...The only speculation he expressed before his Science paper with Fitch and Hauser was that

"It may be that at some remote period a mutation took place that gave rise to the property of discrete infinity, perhaps for reasons that have to do with the biology of cells, to be explained in terms of properties of physical mechanisms, now unknown...At that point evolutionary pressures might have shaped the further development of the capacity, at least in part. Quite possibly other aspects of its evolutionary development again reflect the operation of physical laws applying to a brain of a certain degree of complexity. We simply do not know. (Chomsky 1988: 170)...

With the rise of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program this view became more concrete: if only few principles ultimately comprise Universal Grammar (Pinker/Jackendoff 2005: 219),

“one does not need to advance incremental, adaptationist arguments with intermediate steps to explain much of natural language's specific syntactic design”.

http://sharedsymbolicstorage.blogspot.com/2008/02/language-evolution-i-noam-chomskys.html

But he doesn't think it has much to do with the vocal tract for some reasons that can be found in these passages:

Langauge can of course be used for communication, as can any aspect of what we do: style of dress, gesture, and so on. And it can be and commonly is used for much else. Statistically speaking, for whatever that is worth, the overwhelming use of language is internal – for thought. It takes an enormous act of will to keep from talking to oneself in every waking moment – and asleep as well, often a considerable annoyance. The distinguished neurologist Harry Jerison (1977:55) among others expressed a stronger view, holding that “language did not evolve as a communication system…. the initial evolution of language is more likely to have been…for the construction of a real world,” as a “tool for thought.” Not only in the functional dimension, but also in all other respects – semantic, syntactic, morphological and phonological – the core properties of human language appear to differ sharply from animal communication systems, and to be largely unique in the organic world.

Anatomically modern humans are found in the fossil record several hundred thousand years ago, but evidence of the human capacity is much more recent, not long before the trek from Africa. Paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall reports that “a vocal tract capable of producing the sounds of articulate speech” existed over half a million years before there is any evidence that our ancestors were using language. “We have to conclude,” he writes, “that the appearance of language and its anatomical correlates was not driven by natural selection, however beneficial these innovations may appear in hindsight” – a conclusion which raises no problems for standard evolutionary biology, contrary to illusions in popular literature (Tattersall, 1998). It appears that human brain size reached its current level recently, perhaps about 100,000 years ago, which suggests to some specialists that “human language probably evolved, at least in part, as an automatic but adaptive consequence of increased absolute brain size” (neuroscientist Georg Striedter, 2004).

http://www.punksinscience.org/klean...L/material/Berwick-Chomsky_Biolinguistics.pdf

 

[apeiron]

A correct Reductionist approach must account for the dynamic unfolding of functions when making the bottom up stack of parts onto a system as means of explaining it...in turn the Holistic approach cannot give up a mechanical exact account on the phenomena it tries to describe.

I agree and have always argued that reductionism and holism are complementary views of reality. Both are "right". Although it is also clear which is the simpler model, which the larger model.

 

[apeiron]

But he doesn't think it has much to do with the vocal tract for some reasons that can be found in these passages:

Again, to be frank, Chomsky's views cut little ice in paleolinguistic circles. Why do you treat him as such an authority here?

Gould, likewise, is not exactly state of the art in evo-devo theory.

Both these guys seem to have reputations for challenging the uber-reductionist approaches of their days - Chomsky vs behaviourism, Gould vs Darwinism. So they were good critics - putting things in blunt and simple-minded fashion - but then poor at creating the alternative theories because of the same rhetorical qualities.

Yes, a broadly human brain organisation judging by endocasts has been around 1.8 million years, an articulate vocal tract for perhaps 400,000 years, Homo sapiens has been around about 120,000years, the symbolic explosion in human culture happened about 40,000 years ago. So theories about the rise of the human mind are constrained by a basic timeline.

In broad terms, this can be explained by, first the rise of tool-use and brain lateralisation in H.erectus (so the reorganisation seen in endocasts), then the rise of expressive vocalisation/emotional calls in the highly social late erectus period (a smart chimp who now made fire, used spears to hunt, chipped hand axes, but had no symbolic culture and so no evidence of actual language), then at some point there was the invention of actual language and the sudden explosion of symbolic culture because of the feedback advantages of speech-scaffolded thought.

You could say that for a long time there was the hardware (a capable brain and articulate vocal tract). But the software of an actual language had to be invented socially (it could not evolve biologically). And you can then speculate about why it took a while, or why it happened when it eventually did.

But you can see why people can't take Chomsky seriously on the subject. He is focused on the abruptness of the emergence of symbolic culture circa 40kya. And seeks some strange "spontaneous genetic reorganisation due to Platonic principles" explanation - a view which is utterly handwavy and lacking in biological specifics. Where is the evidence for this kind of thing to happen? Well, how can we even attack this as a theory when it is just handwaving without the detail to contradict?

Chomsky seems to be ignoring the evidence of actual steady biological change - the early reorganisation of the brain and greater laterality for tool-use, the medium term reorganisation of the vocal tract, probably for expressive communication.

And then he discounts the cultural evolution of the software to make use of the gradually exapted hardware. He believes human-level thought to be "innate" rather than socioculturally evolved and language scaffolded. So the very rapid pace of cultural evolution cannot be used to explain the sudden appearance of symbolic culture. Chomsky has to appeal to some genetic "hopeful monster".

OK, the later Chomsky has tried to trim down universal grammar to a minimal core that biological evolution could implement rapidly. But the leaner the mechanism, the more definite should be its imprint. The genetics, the brain architecture, should be damn obvious. And yet the Chomskian approach can't even explain the differences in the way the brain handles regular and irregular verbs.

Can you state what you actually think Chomsky's theory is here? Summarise its essentials? To be honest, I felt I was always chasing shadows when trying to deal with what Chomsky believes. He had a description of the structure of grammar. Fine. He had a critique of Behaviourism and associative learning. Again fine. But has he ever had a sensible theory of the evolution of human language and thought? I have always felt most definitely not. I can't even see an actual theory there, just some hand-waving coupled to a grumpy refusal to engage with the actual science that has been going on.

 

[Albuquerque]

I agree and have always argued that reductionism and holism are complementary views of reality. Both are "right". Although it is also clear which is the simpler model, which the larger model.

...well, agreed but then I would argue that a sub-set will never compute a "master-set"...
...a master-set if everything, is not computable or "repeatable", at least while unfolding as an ensemble within itself, if repeatable, it will be cyclic repeatable, one after the other and obviously without memory of the other...a sub-set as an epistemic description will therefore always lack "resolution" in relation to its master domain (reality) once the demonstration is the domain itself...what I informally in my own vague language am clumsily trying to convey is that epistemologically Holism serves as analogy from our perspective limited frame of reference downwards and not upwards...Reality is upwards ! Hence sub-set minds do not exist and an ultimate reality/system taken for a mind does not need to think/search...its done, and its not an agent !

...note that my conceptual frame of reference permanently will avoid terms like "nothingness" or any degrees of "freedom" whatever they are...there is no "creative somethingness" to be added to the power set which is everything that can truly be mechanically and "causally" separated and then randomly emerge in this wholeness...if anything "my" wholeness, which include from our point of view, conception of potential states, does not grow nor does it shrink...as time is relative, whatever is the case is NOW the case...

(...I apologise for the messy amateurish "free form thinking" presentation of would be ideas, as for my unforgivable bad English, hope nevertheless there is some content to explore around...)

 

[Albuquerque]

(above edited)
...in sum, in neither case, human like or god like, regarding minds, one can account for valid full agency..."agency" here, is seen as more of an illusory effect and not so much as a thing in its own right...as I put it and timely speaking, all there is is process, and curiously the process is done !

 

[apeiron]

(...I apologise for the messy amateurish "free form thinking" presentation of would be ideas, as for my unforgivable bad English, hope nevertheless there is some content to explore around...)

It would indeed help if you could supply a reference that explains your epistemological position here. If your ideas are based on anything, it won't be to hard to cite the relevant source.

But as far as I can make out what you are saying, you seem to be muddling the map and the territory.

Both reductionism and holism are formal styles of map-making. Reality is always going to be something else, complete and entire, and not actually divided in any of the ways we may talk about.

Reductionism is indeed a subset of the master set of holism, I would argue. But both then stand apart from reality as our models.

 

[apeiron]

(above edited)
...in sum, in neither case, human like or god like, regarding minds, one can account for valid full agency..."agency" here, is seen as more of an illusory effect and not so much as a thing in its own right...as I put it and timely speaking, all there is is process, and curiously the process is done !

Again, reality is certainly "done!". But our models of reality are another matter.

This goes to the OP in that our minds are models of reality. And that modelling keeps progressing. The shift from the informal modelling of speechless animals to the formal modelling of symbol-handling humans is a significant step in the history of reality modelling.

The mind-body "problem" as traditionally posed focuses on the fact that there is "something it is like to be" to be modelling reality. Well, surely it had to be like something . The real question is how has that process of modelling evolved? And once the basics of modelling are understood, the apparent distance between mind and world is no longer a problem but a necessary quality.

If reality is "holistic", then the only way to be an observer of reality is to (pretend) to stand outside it. A separation - an epistemic cut - must be manufactured.

 

[Albuquerque]

It would indeed help if you could supply a reference that explains your epistemological position here. If your ideas are based on anything, it won't be to hard to cite the relevant source.

But as far as I can make out what you are saying, you seem to be muddling the map and the territory.

Both reductionism and holism are formal styles of map-making. Reality is always going to be something else, complete and entire, and not actually divided in any of the ways we may talk about.

Reductionism is indeed a subset of the master set of holism, I would argue. But both then stand apart from reality as our models.

...well it seams fair to reckon there is this idea going around on reality being an open ended ongoing process in permanent construction...how many current contemporary philosophers or scientists in mainstream oppose this conception in your view ?

...and of course holism and reductionism regard map making, I just accessed the real constrains each approach presents as its implications regarding my own perspective upon minds, there are no citations to be made here...

 

[bohm2]

Can you state what you actually think Chomsky's theory is here? Summarise its essentials? To be honest, I felt I was always chasing shadows when trying to deal with what Chomsky believes. He had a description of the structure of grammar. Fine. He had a critique of Behaviourism and associative learning. Again fine. But has he ever had a sensible theory of the evolution of human language and thought? I have always felt most definitely not. I can't even see an actual theory there, just some hand-waving coupled to a grumpy refusal to engage with the actual science that has been going on.

What science? I thought there is very little science in this area. If his papers and that of people like Ian Tattersall, Hauser, etc. aren't convincing then it's unlikely that a non-expert like myself can do justice to their arguments but two very good papers giving these arguments are the following:

An Evolutionary Framework for the Acquisition of Symbolic Cognition by Homo sapiens
http://psyc.queensu.ca/ccbr/Vol3/Tattersall.pdf

Three Factors in Langauge Design
http://www.biolinguistics.uqam.ca/Chomsky_05.pdf

 

[Albuquerque]

Again, reality is certainly "done!". But our models of reality are another matter.

This goes to the OP in that our minds are models of reality. And that modelling keeps progressing. The shift from the informal modelling of speechless animals to the formal modelling of symbol-handling humans is a significant step in the history of reality modelling.

The mind-body "problem" as traditionally posed focuses on the fact that there is "something it is like to be" to be modelling reality. Well, surely it had to be like something . The real question is how has that process of modelling evolved? And once the basics of modelling are understood, the apparent distance between mind and world is no longer a problem but a necessary quality.

If reality is "holistic", then the only way to be an observer of reality is to (pretend) to stand outside it. A separation - an epistemic cut - must be manufactured.

I am trying to make a point that ultimately goes against agency evolution and causality as things in their own right as I don´t see nor primal nor last agents no start nor end...I am absolutely sure you understand what I mean as lack of intelligence does not seam to be one of your attributes...I guess I am trying to reduce minds to compelled systems without agency, to question open randomness in evolution whatever randomness intends to mean, and ultimately to regard causality as a correlation on non free events in which the LAW of what is to be the case at all times is the very source of Logic and reason from where causality is later wrongly inferred...necessarily my position goes against the status quo as it presents a very undigested raw approach to such problems...

 

[Albuquerque]

...even squids and octopus are capable of symbolic representation through mental mapping of their surroundings, I would say our uniqueness is more related with complexity then with any emergent extra feature...oral language was useful for conveying complex systems of relations in the world to our weak infants in which our increasingly developed brain require a great deal of time to fully grow to adulthood...

...now my question is would you consider Earth an Intelligent being on its own ? You see taken huge lengths of time Earth adapts as any other system in this universe adapts in their own way...at this light "awareness" seams more the product of progressive complexity where increasingly degrees of awareness arise then it looks like an all or nothing situation...still I don´t see "agency" in none of cases...

 

[bohm2]

...even squids and octopus are capable of symbolic representation through mental mapping of their surroundings, I would say our uniqueness is more related with complexity then with any emergent extra feature...

The argument is that there is a qualitative difference between the symbolic systems of man vs other animals:

In symbolic systems of other animals, symbols appear to be linked directly to mind-independent events. The symbols of human language are sharply different. Even in the simplest cases, there is no word-object relation, where objects are mind-independent entities. There is no reference relation, in the technical sense familiar from Frege and Peirce to contemporary externalists. Rather, it appears that we should adopt something like the approach of the seventeenth and eighteenth century cognitive revolution, and the conclusions of Shaftesbury and Hume that the “peculiar nature belonging to” the linguistic elements used to refer is not something external and mind-independent. Rather, their peculiar nature is a complex of perspectives involving Gestalt properties, cause-and-effect, “sympathy of parts” directed to a “common end,” psychic continuity, and other such mental properties. In Hume’s phrase, the “identity, which we ascribe” to vegetables, animal bodies, artifacts, or “the mind of man”—the array of individuating properties— is only a “fictitious one,” established by our “cognoscitive powers,” as they were termed by his seventeenth century predecessors. That is no impediment to interaction, including the special case of communication, given largely shared cognoscitive powers. Rather, the semantic properties of words seem similar in this regard to their phonetic properties. No one is so deluded as to believe that there is a mind-independent object corresponding to the internal syllable [ba], some construction from motion of molecules perhaps, which is selected when I say [ba] and when you hear it. But interaction proceeds nevertheless, always a more-or-less rather than a yes-or-no affair.”

N. Chomsky in THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE: HOW DEEPLY HIDDEN? p. 199-200.

And I'm probably being a big-time hypocrite here because in some of my other misanthropic posts I often refer to man as nothing more than a socially-obsessed linguistic ground chimp. But I guess perspective is important.

 

[Albuquerque]

Have you seen latest TED video from Antonio Damasio on mind ? its worth take a look although not directly linked to the issue here...any way our symbolic representations in language are abstract, if that was what you meant...their are systematizations of functions in themselves, and they can represent multiple tasks in one simple concept...as I see it, the complexity of such representations justified by the very integrated working of the neo-cortex with other systems in the brain does not have any emergent special feature but rather a complex inter-relational increment on multiple cognitive tasks seen more loosely in other animals in nature...even the all mighty Culture, paradigm of the 70´s mentality can be tracked today to killer wales and other species...I don´t think a strong case can be made regarding the human special case for minds and language not even regarding Civilization emerging in the past 20.000 years, although I can see Anthropologists Sociologists and the likes embarking all the way in such sunken ship...

 

[apeiron]

...and of course holism and reductionism regard map making, I just accessed the real constrains each approach presents as its implications regarding my own perspective upon minds, there are no citations to be made here...

Unfortunately, this forum does expect you to be able to provide references to back up opinions, to stay on topic, and to write in understandable fashion to boot.

Your choice if you want to play by these minimal standards.

 

[Albuquerque]

I commonly use to say that there is no bigger hypocrisy then pointing out an hypocrite...so no worries there, I sympathise with playing devils advocate if we are to seriously question anything...my problem here goes far beyond humans versus animal, aiming high I want a fundamental analogy between organic and inorganic systems, go figure...that´s why agency must go out of the window specially when one starts to associate this problem with other fundamental problems like compatiblist free will (foxy approach) and abstruse concepts like randomness and the like...it is my feeling there is allot that must be purged from our conceptual frames if we are to develop anything new from the Greeks on...

 

[Albuquerque]

Unfortunately, this forum does expect you to be able to provide references to back up opinions, to stay on topic, and to write in understandable fashion to boot.

Your choice if you want to play by these minimal standards.

...my opinions, if new or even partially new, can be backed up through an increment in internal consistency and a progressive clarification on the terms and concepts I provide if intending a useful fruitful communication with you guys which I honestly do, although the appeal of shortcuting extensive arguments with analogies and metaphors hoping for an intuitive reading may be tempting given my poor control of the language or the extenuating collection of evidence that such complex issues require when bringing out of the box thinking up to the table...nevertheless extraordinary claims require extraordinary profs and I fully appreciate the constructive intention of your remarks.