Gesendet: Donnerstag, 12. Juni 2014 um 23:09 Uhr
Von: "Gary Moore" <[email protected]>
An: "[email protected] [email protected]" <[email protected]>, "[email protected] [email protected]" <[email protected]>
Betreff: [PEIRCE-L] ANOTHER REPLY TO HELMUT RAULIEN
Von: "Gary Moore" <[email protected]>
An: "[email protected] [email protected]" <[email protected]>, "[email protected] [email protected]" <[email protected]>
Betreff: [PEIRCE-L] ANOTHER REPLY TO HELMUT RAULIEN
HELMUT RAULIEN: Maybe the ability of having a self concept is proportional with the intelligence or the well functioning of the mind, because the mind is a reflecting system, and also self-reflecting, if it is highly developed. But intelligence does not guarantee social competence: Asperger people and are often very intelligent, but lack social competence. I like the term "social agreement", though many agreements have been established long before a human was born, and are eg. present in the epigenes and genes. Social agreements, I think, are the structure of a social system (Luhmann said, expectations and expectations of expectations are the structure). And the more one shares these agreements or expectations, the more social competence he or she has. Intelligence, of course, helps too, but not alone. And a trauma, like having been neglected as a child, or experience of violence, like in a war, can destroy or block social agreements and with it social competence.
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GCM: This all presupposes that 1] “self concept” is ‘something’ even if just a concept; 2] that you objectively know “well functioning” of the mind according to a scientifically experimented conclusion physically demonstrable; 3] that any reflecting system has a self since there is a “reflection of”; 4] that “social competence” is a scientifically experimented conclusion demonstrable in repeated physical experiments with exactly the same results; 5] that “the more one shares these agreements or expectations, the more social competence he or she has” always and in every possible case throughout history or any place in present-time world arrives at exactly the same “social competence”; 6] what physical trauma changes is not “social agreements and with it social competence” but physical control.
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I myself would agree with Pierce that there is no ego except in the all-encompassing Hegelian sense of one’s understanding of all ‘one’ knows since ‘two’ cannot share the immediate physical experience of ‘knowing’, that “we have no power of introspection”, that “all knowledge of the internal world is derived by hypothetical reasoning from our knowledge of external facts”, that “we have no power of intuition, but every cognition is determined logically by PREVIOUS cognitions”, and that we have no power of thinking without previously cognized signs. “Social agreements” are physically present only between specific people determined not by a “the intelligence of the well functioning of the mind” but by the physical circumstances of the specific place of agreement, for instance western Iraq at the moment which in no possible way is in accord with the “social agreements” of West Texas. Trauma changes the control of how and what one speaks without one’s consent that is “always already” a problem for non-traumatized speakers trying to avoid either a Freudian mistake or an ambiguous phrase interpretable in a way one has not approved. All people speak “after the fact” out of, hopefully, a well-trained (habitual) ability to enunciate to one’s purpose, but there is never any absolute control over what one says. But I suppose a “way of speaking properly” is sort of a social convention that, however, changes according to whether one is speaking to Republicans or Democrats or Islamists.
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Helmut: I mostly agree. I see, that social competence has not much to do with intelligence. Thinking may even hinder social competence, I think. "Any reflecting system has a self since there is a "reflection of"": Yes, but not any reflecting system has a self concept: This is only there, if the reflection is reflected too, and this new reflection also, and so on. I see your and Peirces points. Although I have the hope, that this endless circle of reflecting the reflection of reflection of.... provides an emergent self-creation of a self-conscious self, and that this emergent self is connected somehow with nature. This connection (religion), might refer to God, or Peirces Agape, or the Clear Light in Buddhism, or Atman-Paratman in Hinduism. Such an emergent self would not be describable by mere backtracing by looking at previous cognitions or by QBist calculations. But that is only a hope, because I dont want to be just the product of history. But this hope I presume confirmed by chaos theory- well, not religion, but that there are emergent, not backtraceable attractors. And if our self is not backtraceable, it does not depend completely on the past, but we can have an autonomy (Kant), and can stop wars, maybe even install a partnership between western Iraq and West Texas if we cultivate this autonomy better. We can make up new social agreements and design our society, instead of letting it design us. But these have to be real agreements, and not imposed by a communist party or something like that.
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