"Edwina Taborsky" <tabor...@primus.ca>
Gary R, list:
Yes, I think that any utopian regime, to maintain its 'purity of type', must act as an Authoritarian regime to maintain the holistic purity and prevent the natural dissipation of type that occurs within the natural operations of both Secondness and Firstness. That is - it must reject any incidents of Secondness and Firstness. [Entropy is a natural law and utopias cannot function within entropy].
My own view of utopias is that there are two basic types. One 'yearns for' the assumed and quite mythic Purity-of-the-Past. The image of this Past is pure romantic idyllic scenarios - purity of behaviour, purity of genetic composition, purity of belief - This is the utopia commonly known as Fascism where the idea is that If Only we could go back to The Way We Were - then, all would be perfect. That would be the Ernest Bloch one - and similar to that of Rousseau, Mead etc - which all focused around The Noble Savage or some notion that early man was somehow 'in a state of physical and mental purity'. Or course the most famous recent example is Nazism.
The other utopia, equally mythic, sets up a Purity-of-the-Future. The image of this Future is equally romantic and idyllic - where no-one really has to work hard, where everyone collaborates and gets along, where debate and discussion solves all issues; where such psychological tendencies as jealousy, anger, lust, hatred etc - don't exist. This utopia is commonly known as Communism. This is the LEAP manifesto idea - where - If Only we all learn to behave in such and such a way - then, we'll all have enough, won't have to work hard, will all have loving families and etc. Equally naïve and mythic - and ignorant of economics and human psychology.
I don't agree that Peirce's philosophy involves any utopian ideas, for the reasons I've outlined. Utopia is by definition 'no place'; and Peirce's phenomenology is deeply, thoroughly, pragmatic. That is, it is enmeshed, rooted, in Secondness and the brute individual realities of that category. Equally, it is rooted in Firstness and the chance deviations, aberrations of that mode. Thirdness doesn't exist 'per se' [which would make it utopian if it did] and exists only within the hard-working dirt and dust and chances of Firstness and Secondness.
I feel that Peirce's agapasm is an outline of constant networking, informational networking and collaboration - where for example, plants will interact with insects and animals and vice versa - but- this complex adaptive system is not a utopia, but...a complex adaptive system, busily interacting and coming up with novel solutions to chance aberrations...etc.
Edwina
On Mon 26/06/17 4:00 PM , Gary Richmond gary.richm...@gmail.com sent:
Edwina, list,The LEAP manifesto sounds like North Korea? Well, while I agree with you that the manifesto is at least quasi-utopian, I think equating it with the brutal NK is way off the mark.In any case, there was an op-ed piece today in The Stone, that section of the New York Times editorial page where philosophers comment on cultural, social, political, etc. issues. Today's piece, by Espen Hammer, a professor of philosophy at Temple University, is titled "A Utopia for a Dystopian Age." https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/opinion/a-utopia-for-a-dystopian-age.html?ref=opinionHammer's piece concludes:Are our industrial, capitalist societies able to make the requisite changes? If not, where should we be headed? This is a utopian question as good as any. It is deep and universalistic. Yet it calls for neither a break with the past nor a headfirst dive into the future. The German thinker Ernst Bloch argued that all utopias ultimately express yearning for a reconciliation with that from which one has been estranged. They tell us how to get back home. A 21st-century utopia of nature would do that. It would remind us that we belong to nature, that we are dependent on it and that further alienation from it will be at our own peril.While Peirce was a fierce opponent of "social Darwinism," I'm don't recall him discussing utopia as such (or even Utopia for that matter), while he was most certainly an advocate of meliorization.However, this author argues that the philosophy of Peirce (and that of Mead) do indeed involve utopian ideas. See: "The Agathopis of Charles Sanders Peirce, Maria Augusta Nogueira Machado Dib, International Center of Peirce Studies : http://ruc.udc.es/dspace/bitstream/handle/2183/13424/CC-130_art_131.pdf;sequence=1Abstract The subject of this article is the specificity of Peirce’s Agathotopia and the relevance of his thought for the «actual global crisis».. . Peirce . . . focused on the research of the evolutionary process which leads to the summum bonum where aesthetics, ethics and logics converge into the same purpose, . . Wellness (EP 2.27). Locus of Wellness - Agathotopia - term used by James Edward Meade, Nobel Prize award in economics (1977), has come out in the universe of political economy. it would possibly be a model for the construction of a good society to live in . . neither a socio-political nor an economic model to promote the collective welfare in the reality of the existential universe. Peirce’s Agathotopia has been proposed in all his scientific metaphysical architecture, in his realistic philosophy and logic of his objective idealism, in his synechism, into the ongoing semioses between his three categories, and the evolving process of reasonability, a continuous teleological selfcorrective movement toward the evolutionary enhancement. if Peirce believes in a dynamic mental loving action (evolutionary love) that tends to the admirable, Fair and True Purpose then he might not be proposing just one more utopia in the history of Philosophy, but Agathotopia for the first time. A tópos to the Summum Bonum.See also, Utopian Evolution: The Sentimental Critique of Social Darwinism in Bellamy and Peirce by Matthew Hartman. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20718007?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contentsBest,Gary RGary RichmondPhilosophy and Critical ThinkingCommunication StudiesLaGuardia College of the City University of New YorkC 745718 482-5690On Mon, Jun 26, 2017 at 3:30 PM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote:I don't see that it is Peirce-related for it is utopian; operating purely in the realm of Homogeneic Purity; it is Hegelian, i.e., rejecting the reality of individual Secondness and finiteness; rejecting the adaptive reality that is chance; rejecting even the openness of genuine Thirdness [which is never finite].
It instead is filled with unverified assumptions, lacking evidentiary support for these axioms, [massively ignorant about economics and human psychology]and assuming, like all utopian theories, that If Only We All Behaved in Such-and-Such a Way - then, all will be well.
This is the mindset of all fundamentalist and totalitarian ideologies - which all operate within the Seminar Room mode of Thirdness - i.e., alienated from the pragmatic daily realities of Secondness and Firstness. I'd call this Thirdness-as-Firstness, alienated from physical reality, operating within an insistence on iconic homogeneity of its population. Sounds a bit like Animal Farm or 1984.
And - its mindset includes not only a profound ignorance of economics but - a complete ignorance of the psychological reality of the human species - which is not and has never been, able to operate within only the abstract generalities of Thirdness. Certainly, you can get small populations operating within the abstract generalities - these are isolate communities sustained by the external world [a convent, a monastery]; or cults. Since they are not operating within all three categories but only within degenerate Thirdness, they are all unable to provide continuity of Type. Their membership must be replenished from external sources; or - most of them implode after a few years. And all of them require enormous external authoritarian Force to prevent any intrusion of Secondness and Firstness - i.e., individual realities, individual emotions and sensations. And to keep the population submissive and entrapped within a homogeneic perspective. Sounds a bit like N. Korea.
Edwina
On Mon 26/06/17 3:03 PM , Gary Richmond gary.richm...@gmail.com sent: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 manifestoA Call for Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One AnotherWe 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.Gary RichmondPhilosophy and Critical ThinkingCommunication StudiesLaGuardia College of the City University of New YorkC 745On 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:
And a brief Scientific American article on it:
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/1Gene 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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