Greetings, Platt --
> As always you supply food for thought. Here is an excerpt from a > recent article about the ideas of Pinker. I wonder if they fit with your > own. Offhand I would say you and Pinker have something in common. Steven Pinker was new to me, so I did some research and learned that he is a Harvard psychology professor who has written a lot of books about language as related to (Gav's word) "ideation". This would tend to position him closer to the semioticists here than to "valuists" like Pirsig and myself. I also read his long essay "The Mystery of Consciousness" which is accessible at TIME's website. Proof that Pinker is not an essentialist is this statement that appears under his heading "The Brain as Machine": "Scientists have exorcised the ghost from the machine not because they are mechanistic killjoys but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain." That conclusion is not only unfounded but is more evidence of the drift toward psycho-cybernetics that characterizes our postmodern thinking. It is what Richard Schain, a psychiatrist, describes as "the modern view that there is no such thing as the self, that there is only a complex arrangement of synapses and neurons in the brain, giving rise to the illusion of self." No neurophysicist, cognitive scientist, or brain surgeon has found, or will ever find, subjective consciousness in the brain. He may discover "ties"--evidence of responsive mechanisms linked to conscious behavior--but not consciousness itself. By the same token, no cyberneticist or nanotechnician will ever build a machine with consciousness in it. These are myths of New Age pseudo-scientism. (It angers me to see the conscious self explained as a digital mechanism, especially by intellectuals who should know better than to confuse information with awareness.) > Maybe I get it wrong but it seems the division of subject/object > in your metaphysics would be one of items in Pinker's "cast of basic > concepts" if not indeed the primary concept. Your reviewer states that the cast of basic concepts "...includes notions of things happening (not anything happening in particular; rather, the idea of happening). We all contrast ... coming from going; human from nonhuman, animate from inanimate. We cause things to happen; we prevent things from happening. These are the most general kinds of states, actions, and conditions, and these are what Mr. Pinker avers 'to be the major words in a language of thought.'" I don't see the "division of subject/object" in this analysis. I take it to mean simply that we are all aware of change as a continuum of connected events and exercise some control over them. That's hardly a profound revelation. We observe reality from an infinitesimal point in the space/time system and ascribe dimensionality to it. This illusory perspective is partly due to the limitations of organic sensibility. But I believe it has more to do with the primary division of sensibility from its source, which is at the root of all differentiation. That we see the universe as an intelligently designed, orderly system indicates that we "make sense out of it", which is precisely what human reason is designed to do. When it doesn't make sense, something has gone awry with the main apparatus of reason, the brain or its ability to integrate sensory data. But the disoriented psychotic person maintains selfness, even if he loses all sense of time, space, or the knowledge of what objects and people are. He is still a conscious self capable of value-awareness. Thanks for introducing me to Pinker, Platt, even though the views of Pinker and Priday hardly go together like two P's in a pod ;-) But can you be more specific regarding the primary subject/object division about which you seem to have some reservations? Cheers, Ham Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
