Krimel said to dmb:
.. I don't think you will find much support for the idea that perception is
ever an incoherent jumble. Babies are born into a social world as social
agents. They are tuned to their environment from the very moment of birth. They
are most assuredly not, as James would have it, surround by a blooming buzzing
confusion.
dmb says:
Well, babies are tuned to the environment like every other living thing but
this is biological, not social. I think it's safe to say that socialization
takes place after we're born.
The infant is not only without concepts altogether, even their perceptions are
an incoherent jumble. So blooming and buzzing is this confusion - literal
confusion - that brain studies show that infants will sometimes smell colors or
taste sounds until they learn to get their sensory channels sorted out "right".
Interestingly, some of the most creative artists and aesthetically intelligent
people "suffer" from a disorder wherein the sensory channels never did get
completely "right". There is even evidence to suggest that our awareness is
somewhat plastic and shaped by culture to some degree even at this basic level.
Krimel said:
Much of what you say about language acquisition is true as far as it goes but
it hardly makes the point that thought is impossible without language.
dmb says:
That was the point or rather the conclusion drawn by the researcher. I heard it
on a radio show called "To The Best of our Knowledge", the episode called
"Words". I imagine you could hear it on their website or something. The whole
show was fascinating.
There was a story about a dear-mute who lived to the age of 26 before he had a
sudden revelation: every thing has a name. He didn't even realize there was
such a thing as sound, didn't understand that he was deaf. Sadly, he just
assumed he was stupid. He thought he was supposed to know what was going on
just from seeing it, not realizing everyone else was listening to words instead
of just watching hands and mouths move. There was teacher who tutored him
mercilessly with no effect for a long, long time until one day he realized that
every thing has a name. He realized what words are. For the first time he
understood that there is a word for everything. And then he cried.
There was also a story about how the use of sign language has created a
distinct sign-language culture.
dmb said:
Quality or pure experience or the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum seems
quite comparable to the qualitative phenomenal experience that Chalmers says
cannot be explained by materialistic conceptions of functions and mechanisms.
He is also saying that minds are not just what brains do...
Krimel replied:
Actually I think "Quality or pure experience or the undifferentiated aesthetic
continuum" as you want to use them have almost nothing to do with
"consciousness" but rather the unconscious or the non-conscious or the
non-verbal aspects of what the brain does. Which I keep saying is darn near all
of what the brain does.
dmb says:
I've been looking into Chalmers. Yesterday I saw a webvideo wherein he is
interviewed by John Horgan, a science journalist and author of "Rational
Mysticism" and they talked about the notion of "pure consciousness" for a bit.
Ironically, Horgan was more skeptical than Chalmers. More importantly though,
his notion of the hard problem of consciousness very much gets at the same
issues I've taken up with you in this ongoing dispute. He is not just saying
that there is a qualitative aspect of experience that cannot be explained by
material processes as we understand them now. He's saying they can never, ever
explain it no matter how great much you perfect that science. Examination of
the physiological processes will only ever take you so far and the hard problem
of consciousness will be solved somewhere beyond that point. It's about the
limits of that observational, third-person perspective. It's about the limits
of objectivity. It's about the turn from phenomenalism to phenomeno
logy. That's exactly where pure experience comes in. It is the natural
starting point of the first-person perspective. It's the immediate flux of
life, direct everyday experience.
Chalmers concern that something essential about experience is being left out by
the brain-mind identity crowd roughly parallels my concerns with what I've
always called your reductionism. If you can understand his criticisms of
physicalism, you'll understand my criticisms of materialistic reductionism.
Wished I noticed him earlier. 1996 would have been a good time...
"Chalmers's book, The Conscious Mind (1996), is widely considered (by both
advocates and opponents) to be an essential work on consciousness and its
relation to the mind-body problem in philosophy of mind.[1] In the book,
Chalmers argues that all forms of physicalism (whether reductive or
non-reductive) that have dominated modern philosophy and science fail to
account for the existence (that is, presence in reality) of consciousness
itself."
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