Gary F, Edwina, Gene, list,
Well, before we accept or reject the LEAP proposal (which has implications
far beyong Canada), let's consider what it says. See:
https://leapmanifesto.org/en/the-leap-manifesto/.
If we do consider it here, please try to keep the discussion
Peirce-related. I've copied and pasted the text of the manifesto from the
pdf below my signature.
Best,
Gary R (writing as list moderator)
the leap manifesto
A Call for Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another
We start from the premise that Canada is facing the deepest crisis in
recent memory.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has acknowledged shocking details
about the violence of Canada’s near past. Deepening poverty and inequality
are a scar on the country’s present. And our record on climate change is a
crime against humanity’s future.
These facts are all the more jarring because they depart so dramatically
from our stated values: respect for Indigenous rights, internationalism,
human rights, diversity, and environmental stewardship.
Canada is not this place today -- but it could be.
We could live in a country powered entirely by truly just renewable energy,
woven together by accessible public transit, in which the jobs and
opportunities of this transition are designed to systematically eliminate
racial and gender inequality. Caring for one another and caring for the
planet could be the economy’s fastest growing sectors. Many more people
could have higher wage jobs with fewer work hours, leaving us ample time to
enjoy our loved ones and flourish in our communities.
We know that the time for this great transition is short. Climate
scientists have told us that this is the decade to take decisive action to
prevent catastrophic global warming. That means small steps will no longer
get us where we need to go.
So we need to leap.
This leap must begin by respecting the inherent rights and title of the
original caretakers of this land. Indigenous communities have been at the
forefront of protecting rivers, coasts, forests and lands from
out-of-control industrial activity. We can bolster this role, and reset our
relationship, by fully implementing the United Nations Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Moved by the treaties that form the legal basis of this country and bind us
to share the land “for as long as the sun shines, the grass grows and the
rivers flow,” we want energy sources that will last for time immemorial and
never run out or poison the land. Technological breakthroughs have brought
this dream within reach. The latest research shows it is feasible for
Canada to get 100% of its electricity from renewable resources within two
decades1; by 2050 we could have a 100% clean economy2 .
We demand that this shift begin now.
There is no longer an excuse for building new infrastructure projects that
lock us into increased extraction decades into the future. The new iron law
of energy development must be: if you wouldn’t want it in your backyard,
then it doesn’t belong in anyone’s backyard. That applies equally to oil
and gas pipelines; fracking in New Brunswick, Quebec and British Columbia;
increased tanker traffic off our coasts; and to Canadianowned mining
projects the world over.
The time for energy democracy has come: we believe not just in changes to
our energy sources, but that wherever possible communities should
collectively control these new energy systems.
As an alternative to the profit-gouging of private companies and the remote
bureaucracy of some centralized state ones, we can create innovative
ownership structures: democratically run, paying living wages and keeping
much-needed revenue in communities. And Indigenous Peoples should be first
to receive public support for their own clean energy projects. So should
communities currently dealing with heavy health impacts of polluting
industrial activity.
Power generated this way will not merely light our homes but redistribute
wealth, deepen our democracy, strengthen our economy and start to heal the
wounds that date back to this country’s founding.
A leap to a non-polluting economy creates countless openings for similar
multiple “wins.” We want a universal program to build energy efficient
homes, and retrofit existing housing, ensuring that the lowest income
communities and neighbourhoods will benefit first and receive job training
and opportunities that reduce poverty over the long term. We want training
and other resources for workers in carbon-intensive jobs, ensuring they are
fully able to take part in the clean energy economy. This transition should
involve the democratic participation of workers themselves. High-speed rail
powered by just renewables and affordable public transit can unite every
community in this country – in place of more cars, pipelines and exploding
trains that endanger and divide us.
And since we know this leap is beginning late, we need to invest in our
decaying public infrastructure so that it can withstand increasingly
frequent extreme weather events.
Moving to a far more localized and ecologically-based agricultural system
would reduce reliance on fossil fuels, capture carbon in the soil, and
absorb sudden shocks in the global supply – as well as produce healthier
and more affordable food for everyone.
We call for an end to all trade deals that interfere with our attempts to
rebuild local economies, regulate corporations and stop damaging extractive
projects. Rebalancing the scales of justice, we should ensure immigration
status and full protection for all workers. Recognizing Canada’s
contributions to military conflicts and climate change -- primary drivers
of the global refugee crisis -- we must welcome refugees and migrants
seeking safety and a better life.
Shifting to an economy in balance with the earth’s limits also means
expanding the sectors of our economy that are already low carbon:
caregiving, teaching, social work, the arts and public-interest media.
Following on Quebec’s lead, a national childcare program is long past due.
All this work, much of it performed by women, is the glue that builds
humane, resilient communities – and we will need our communities to be as
strong as possible in the face of the rocky future we have already locked
in.
Since so much of the labour of caretaking – whether of people or the planet
– is currently unpaid, we call for a vigorous debate about the introduction
of a universal basic annual income. Pioneered in Manitoba in the 1970’s,
this sturdy safety net could help ensure that no one is forced to take work
that threatens their children’s tomorrow, just to feed those children today.
We declare that “austerity” is a fossilized form of thinking that has
become a threat to life on earth.
We declare that “austerity” – which has systematically attacked low-carbon
sectors like education and healthcare, while starving public transit and
forcing reckless energy privatizations – is a fossilized form of thinking
that has become a threat to life on earth.
The money we need to pay for this great transformation is available — we
just need the right policies to release it. Like an end to fossil fuel
subsidies. Financial transaction taxes. Increased resource royalties.
Higher income taxes on corporations and wealthy people. A progressive
carbon tax. Cuts to military spending. All of these are based on a simple
“polluter pays” principle and hold enormous promise.
One thing is clear: public scarcity in times of unprecedented private
wealth is a manufactured crisis, designed to extinguish our dreams before
they have a chance to be born.
Those dreams go well beyond this document. We call for town hall meetings
across the country where residents can gather to democratically define what
a genuine leap to the next economy means in their communities.
Inevitably, this bottom-up revival will lead to a renewal of democracy at
every level of government, working swiftly towards a system in which every
vote counts and corporate money is removed from political campaigns.
This is a great deal to take on all at once, but such are the times in
which we live.
The drop in oil prices has temporarily relieved the pressure to dig up
fossil fuels as rapidly as high-risk technologies will allow. This pause in
frenetic expansion should not be viewed as a crisis, but as a gift.
It has given us a rare moment to look at what we have become – and decide
to change. And so we call on all those seeking political office to seize
this opportunity and embrace the urgent need for transformation. This is
our sacred duty to those this country harmed in the past, to those
suffering needlessly in the present, and to all who have a right to a
bright and safe future.
Now is the time for boldness.
Now is the time to leap.
[image: Gary Richmond]
*Gary Richmond*
*Philosophy and Critical Thinking*
*Communication Studies*
*LaGuardia College of the City University of New York*
*C 745*
*718 482-5690*
On Mon, Jun 26, 2017 at 2:16 PM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote:
>
> Gary F - as you say, these issues really have no place in a Peircean
> analytic framework - unless we want to explore the development of societal
> norms as a form of Thirdness - which is a legitimate area of research.
>
> I, myself, reject the Naomi Klein perspective [all of her work] and
> certainly, reject the LEAP perspective- and would argue against it as a
> naïve utopian agenda. You cannot do away with any of the modal categories,
> even in Big Systems, eg, as in societal analysis - and coming up with
> purely rhetorical versions of Thirdness [rather than the real Thirdness
> that is in that society] and trying to do away with the existential
> conflicts of Secondness and the private feelings of Firstness is, in my
> view, a useless agenda.
>
> Edwina
>
>
> On Mon 26/06/17 1:50 PM , g...@gnusystems.ca sent:
>
> Gene,
>
>
>
> Thanks for the links; I’m quite familiar with the mirror neuron research
> and the inferences various people have drawn from it, and it reinforces the
> point I was trying to make, that empathy is deeper than deliberate
> reasoning — as well as Peirce’s point that science is grounded in empathy
> (or at least in “the social principle”).
>
>
>
> I didn’t miss the point that it is possible to disable the feeling of
> empathy — I just didn’t see that point as being news in any sense (it’s
> been pretty obvious for millennia!). I see the particular study as an
> attempt to quantify some expressions of empathy (or responses that imply
> the lack of it). What it doesn’t do is give us much of a clue as to what
> cultural factors are involved in the suppression of empathic behavior. (And
> I thought that blaming it on increasing use of AI was really a stretch!)
> As I wrote before, what significance that study has depends on the nature
> of the devices used to generate those statistics.
>
>
>
> There are lots of theories about what causes empathic behavior to be
> suppressed (not all of them use that terminology, of course.) I think they
> are valuable to the extent that they give us some clues as to what we can
> do about the situation. To take the example that happens to be in front
> of me:
>
> The election of Donald Trump can certainly be taken as a symptom of a
> decline in empathy. In her new book, Naomi Klein spends several chapters
> explaining in factual detail how certain trends in American culture (going
> back several decades) have prepared the way for somebody like Trump to
> exploit the situation. But the title of her book, No is Not Enough,
> emphasizes that what’s needed is not another round of recriminations but a
> coherent vision of a better way to live, and a viable alternative to the
> pathologically partisan politics of the day. I can see its outlines in a
> document called the LEAP manifesto, and I’d like to see us google that and
> spend more time considering it than we do blaming Google or other arms of
> “The Machine” for the mess we’re in.
>
>
>
> But enough about politics and such “vitally important” matters. What
> interests me about AI (which is supposed to be the subject of this thread)
> is what we can learn from it about how the mind works, whether it’s a human
> or animal bodymind or not. That’s also what my book is about and why I’m
> interested in Peircean semiotics. And I daresay that’s what motivates many,
> if not most, AI researchers, including the students that John Sowa is
> addressing in that presentation he’s still working on.
>
>
>
> Gary f.
>
>
>
> } What is seen with one eye has no depth. [Ursula LeGuin] {
>
> http://gnusystems.ca/wp/ }{ Turning Signs gateway
>
>
>
> From: Eugene Halton [mailto:eugene.w.halto...@nd.edu]
> Sent: 26-Jun-17 11:09
> To: Peirce List
> Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] RE: AI
>
>
>
> Dear Gary F,
>
> Here is a link to the Sarah Konrath et al. study on the decline of
> empathy among American college students:
>
> http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/eob/edobrien_empathyPSPR.pdf
>
> And a brief Scientific American article on it:
>
> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-me-care/
>
>
>
> You state: "I think Peirce would say that these attributions of
> empathy (or consciousness) to others are perceptual judgments — not
> percepts, but quite beyond (or beneath) any conscious control, and . We
> feel it rather than reading it from external indications."
>
> This seems to me to miss the point that it is possible to disable the
> feeling of empathy. Clinical narcissistic disturbance, for example,
> substitutes idealization for perceptual feeling, so that what is perceived
> can be idealized rather than felt.
>
> Extrapolate that to a society that substitutes on mass scales
> idealization for felt experience, and you can have societally reduced
> empathy. Unempathic parenting is an excellent way to produce the social
> media-addicted janissary offspring.
>
> The human face is a subtle neuromuscular organ of attunement, which
> has the capacity to read another's mind through mirror micro-mimicry of the
> other's facial gestures, completely subconsciously. These are "external
> indications" mirrored by one.
> One study showed that botox treatments, in paralyzing facial
> muscles, reduce the micro-mimicry of empathic attunement to the other face
> in an interaction. The botox recipient is not only impaired in exhibiting
> her or his own emotional facial micro-muscular movements, but also is
> impaired in subconsciously micro-mimicking that of the other, thus reducing
> the embodied feel of the other’s emotional-gestural state (Neal and
> Chartrand, 2011). Empathy is reduced through the disabling of the facial
> muscles.
> Vittorio Gallese, one of the neuroscientists who discovered mirror
> neutons, has discussed "embodied simulation" through "shared neural
> underpinnings." He states: “…social cognition is not only explicitly
> reasoning about the contents of someone else’s mind. Our brains, and those
> of other primates, appear to have developed a basic functional mechanism,
> embodied simulation, which gives us an experiential insight of other minds.
> The shareability of the phenomenal content of the intentional relations of
> others, by means of the shared neural underpinnings, produces intentional
> attunement. Intentional attunement, in turn, by collapsing the others’
> intentions into the observer’s ones, produces the peculiar quality of
> familiarity we entertain with other individuals. This is what “being
> empathic” is about. By means of a shared neural state realized in two
> different bodies that nevertheless obey to the same morpho-functional
> rules, the “objectual other” becomes “another self”. Vittorio Gallese,
> “Intentional Attunement. The Mirror Neuron System and Its Role in
> Interpersonal Relations,” 15 November 2004 Interdisciplines,
> <http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror/papers/1>
> http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror/papers/1
>
> Gene Halton
>
>
>
>
> On Jun 20, 2017 7:00 PM, <g...@gnusystems.ca> wrote:
>
> List,
>
> Gene’s post in this thread had much to say about “empathy” — considered as
> something that can be measured and quantified for populations of students,
> so that comments about trends in “empathy” among them can be taken as
> meaningful and important.
>
> I wonder about that.
>
> My wondering was given more definite shape just now when I came across
> this passage in a recent book about consciousness by Evan Thompson:
>
> [[ In practice and in everyday life … we don’t infer the inner presence of
> consciousness on the basis of outer criteria. Instead, prior to any kind of
> reflection or deliberation, we already implicitly recognize each other as
> conscious on the basis of empathy. Empathy, as philosophers in the
> phenomenological tradition have shown, is the direct perception of another
> being’s actions and gestures as expressive embodiments of consciousness. We
> don’t see facial expressions, for example, as outer signs of an inner
> consciousness, as we might see an EEG pattern; we see joy directly in the
> smiling face or sadness in the tearful eyes. Moreover, even in difficult or
> problematic cases where we’re forced to consider outer criteria, their
> meaningfulness as indicators of consciousness ultimately depends depends on
> and presupposes our prior empathetic grasp of consciousness. ]]
>
> —Thompson, Evan. Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in
> Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (Kindle Locations 2362-2370).
> Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition.
>
> If we don’t “infer the inner presence of consciousness on the basis of
> outer criteria,” but perceive it directly on the basis of empathy, how do
> we infer the inner presence (or absence) of empathy itself? In the same
> way, i.e. by direct perception, according to Thompson. I think Peirce
> would say that these attributions of empathy (or consciousness) to others
> are perceptual judgments — not percepts, but quite beyond (or beneath)
> any conscious control, and . We feel it rather than reading it from
> external indications. To use Thompson’s example, we can measure the
> temperature by reading a thermometer, using a scale designed for that
> purpose. But we can’t measure the feeling of warmth as experienced by the
> one who feels it.
>
> Now, the statistics cited by Gene may indeed indicate something important,
> just as measures of global temperature may indicate something important.
> But what it does indicate, and what significance that has, depends on the
> nature of the devices used to generate those statistics. And I can’t help
> feeling that empathy is more important than anything measurable by those
> means.
>
> (I won’t go further into the semiotic nature of perceptual judgments here,
> but I have in Turning Signs: http://www.gnusystems.ca/TS/blr.htm#Perce.)
>
> Gary f.
>
>
>
>
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