[Fis] _ response to Pedro, response to Salthe
Because I am unclear about just what was received by FIS members and what was not, I am copying my response to Salthe and my response to Pedro below. Kindly excuse the repeat performance if it is one-- it won't happen again! Cheers, Maxine Response to Pedro: With respect to nonhuman animal dances, in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin describes the "Love-Antics and Dances" of male birds, and later, more generally, describes male "love-dances"—-all in the context of male-male competition, or what Darwin describes in upward of 460 pages,starting with mollusks and crustaceans and beetles and working his way through fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds (four chapters), mammals (two chapters), then finally and specifically human mammals (two chapters), as “the law of battle.” Jane Goodall describes a movement sequence that is part of a male chimpanzee's kinetic repertoire, a sequence that a male performs in conjunction with his "sexual signalling behavior" or "courtship display." “The bipedal swagger,” as she identifies the behavior or display, is typically an upright male sequence of movements and occurs only rarely in females. Primatologist C. R. Rogers amplifies Goodall’s description of a male’s bipedal swagger in describing what he identifies as a male chimpanzee’s “short dance.” Female choice in relation to male-male competition is described by Darwin, particularly in relation to birds, but also in suggestive ways with respect to mammals. More recently, the topic of female choice was taken up by William Eberhard. His hypothesis: “sexual selection by female choice, proposes that male genitalia function as ‘internal courtship’ devices” (Eberhard 1985). Simply as an event of possible evolutionary interest and one that is both innovative and provocative, I attach a write up of “A Human Enclosure at Edinburgh Zoo” Cultural differences exist not only in dance but in everyday life—-for example, in everyday interpersonal spatial relationships. Cultural distinctions in these relationships are commonly made in terms of whether one is in front of or behind another, whether one is above or below another; whether one is small or large in relation to another, and so on. Anthropologist Raymond Firth, who studied Tikopia culture, wrote of the postural and gestural practices of Tikopians and then compared their practices to those of his own experience in British culture. In the process of doing so, Firth made interesting observations with respect to the different practices. In The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies, I discussed Firth’s research and the research of others and gave an evolutionary genealogy of diverse intercorporeal relationships. As for Tango: I do not know what the “informational implications” of Tango might be, but I might well ask Adriana Pegorer who teaches Tango-Argentino-style, a style that she says is different from ballroom Tango that requires swift head turning. She has taught Tango to visually impaired people for years and has also combined Tango with Contact Improvisation, an internationally practiced form of dance that commonly involves non-dancers as well as dancers. (Her work is mentioned in an extended endnote on cultural differences in an article titled “On Movement and Mirror Neurons: A Challenging and Choice Conversation” that was published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.) And thanks for your reminder regarding food, where it goes, and what it does, all of which recalled Richard Wrangham and Rachel Carmody’s thesis in Catching Fire. Cheers, Maxine Response to Salthe: Theories are based on first-person observations. Observations are first-person real-life, real-time experiences and are duly recorded in support of theory. Descent with modification was a theory that Darwin put forth on the basis of his observations that had to do with morphology, but not only with morphology. See, for example, his last book on worms and the intelligence of worms; see also his third book devoted to emotions. I am unaware of Darwin’s denying a concern with origins and would appreciate knowing more about his denial by way of a reference. I know that what he did not deny was “[t]hat many and grave objections may be advanced against the theory of descent with modification through natural selection” (Origin of Species, p. 435). Clearly, “descent with modification” has to do not just with morphology but with history. History has to do with timelines, and in this instance with origins and extinctions. I would add that because “descent with modification” involves a history and not just a morphological comparison as in your human hand and chicken foot example, the phrase is actually pertinent to the current discussion in evolutionary biology as to how single-celled organisms gave rise to multi-celled organisms. If, as is currently suggested, the way a protein wiggles can result in a mutation so
[Fis] Follow-up to my response to Pedro
In my response to Pedro, I wrote, “Simply as an event of possible evolutionary interest and one that is both innovative and provocative, I attach a write up of 'A Human Enclosure at Edinburgh Zoo'. It was not possible to attach the file. If anyone would like a copy, kindly email me directly at m...@uoregon.edu and I will send it on to you. Cheers, Maxine ___ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
[Fis] Response to Salthe's response
Response to Salthe's response: So, as I understand the discussion, we are using the term origin in at least two different senses: origin as in Darwin's "origin of species," which passes muster, and origin as a big bang of some order or other, which does not pass muster, muster in the sense of being objectively attainable by science. I agree that “there can be no First Person observation of an evolutionary origin.” I would say that there can be only deductive observations of evolutionary origins on the basis of fossil evidence. The same holds for extinctions. But I wonder, as in the case of passenger pigeons, for instance. You state that no one “would actually SEE its death,” but wasn’t the death of the last passenger pigeon seen? I take the following from Wikepedia: The last captive birds were divided in three groups around the turn of the 20th century, some of which were photographed alive. Martha, thought to be the last passenger pigeon, died on September 1, 1914, at the Cincinnati Zoo. The eradication of this species has been described as one of the greatest and most senseless extinctions induced by humans. Regarding movement and phenomenology: Husserl spelled out an exacting methodology with respect to phenomenology. That methodology is not always recognized and respected in the so-called practice of phenomenology or in discussions of phenomenology. In my original article in the special issue of FIS, I pointed out common definitions/understandings of movement that are, well, off the wall in terms of grasping the foundational dynamic nature of movement. Alas! I quote from that article: Movement is indeed the essential measure of being alive. Like other forms of animate life, we humans come into the world moving: we are precisely not stillborn (for more on this particular kinetic reality see Sheets-Johnstone 1999/exp. 2nd ed. 2011). To understand movement from this living, essentially experienced perspective, one must necessarily cast aside such common definitions and understandings of movement as “movement is a change of position” and movement takes place in time and space. In doing phenomenology, that is, in the practice of the phenomenological method, one indeed separates oneself from standard texts and assumptions, long-held beliefs, and so on, and thereby makes the familiar strange. In doing so with respect to movement, one plunges into a bona fide phenomenological investigation of dynamics, the dynamics that undergird both kinesthetic experiences of movement and kinetic-visual experiences of movement. Let us think for a moment along the lines of such a plunge and of what such an investigation reveals. Many thanks for your comments!--and Cheers, Maxine ___ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
[Fis] Response to Steven Ericcson-Zenith
Response to Steven Ericcson-Zenith: Thank you for the reference. One might possibly relate King's notion of "catastrophic evolutionary pressure" to Stephen J. Gould's 21st century thesis of "punctuated equilibrium," though Gould hardly dismisses "natural selection by incremental mutation" in the process of documenting his thesis. Maxine ___ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
[Fis] Response to Alex Hankey
As I wrote in the extended abstract: “These qualitative aspects of movement are separable only reflectively, that is, analytically, after the fact; experientially, they are all of a piece in the global qualitatively felt dynamic phenomenon of self-movement.” There are further comments I would make. First, when learning a new skill of any kind, one not infrequently pays attention to the qualitative dynamics of one’s movement, specifically, for example, to the tensional or areal quality-—the degree of effort or the range of the movement. In such instances, one is not attending to the globally-felt dynamic but to particular aspects of the dynamic. Precisely by such attention, one perfects the skill one is learning. Second, whether in dance, in sports, or in washing the dishes, movement is movement. It may be attended to in various ways and indeed awareness may alternate among the spatio-temporal-energic aspects of movement-—what you name “digitized procedures”--and the global phenomenon. With respect to professionals, whether they be in dance, sports, or yoga, the professionals have spent time learning to do what they do and hence the dynamics of movement run off fluidly, in seeming effortless ways. Third, other forms of movement analysis exist. Labananalysis and Eshkol-Wachmann analysis are graphic forms. I have been told by researchers in both areas that the phenomenological analysis of movement is complementary in many respects to those graphic forms—-Labananalysis in dance and Eshkol-Wachmann in studies of wolves, mice, and other mammals (see the studies of ethologists John Fentress and Ilan Golani on the latter.) Finally, one of the obstacles to veridical accounts of movement is the confusion of movement with objects in motion, which commonly carries with it an inability to separate movement from objects in motion together with a tendency to give preferential attention to objects in motion over movement. An analogy might be made to particles and waves in physics with respect to the latter tendency and possibly even to neurons over dynamic networks in brain studies. The tendency appears to stem from a predilection for what is solid and spatially pointillist over what is fluid and does not stay in place. Indeed, as pointed out in the extended abstract, common notions of movement—-that movement is a force in time and in space, and that movement is a change of position—-overlooks a primary kinetic fact: any and all movement creates its own distinctive dynamic, whether a tennis serve, an ocean wave, the hammering of a nail, or a sneeze. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone ___ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
[Fis] _ Discussion
To all colleagues, I hope I may voice a number of concerns that have arisen in the course of the ongoing discussions that are ostensibly about phenomenology and the life sciences. The concerns begin with a non-recognition of what is surely the ground floor of real-life, real-time realities, namely, animation, not in the sense of being alive or in opposition to the inanimate, but in the sense of motion, movement, kinetics. As Aristotle cogently remarked, “Nature is a principle of motion and change. . . . We must therefore see that we understand what motion is; for if it were unknown, nature too would be unknown” (Physics 200b12-14). Through and through--from animate organisms to an ever-changing world-- movement is foundational to understandings of subject and world, and of subject/world relationships, and this whether subject and world are examined phenomenologically or scientifically. In short, movement is at the core of information and meaning, at the core of mind and consciousness, at the core of both gestural and verbal language, at the core of nervous system and organic functionings, at the core of molecular transformations, at the core of ellipses, electrons, gravity, waves, particles, and so on, and further, at the core of time, the concept, measurement, and meaning of time. I enumerate below specifics with respect to what is essentially the foundational dynamic reality. The summary concerns are followed by references that document each concern. If further specifics are wanted or if specific articles are wanted, kindly contact m...@uoregon.edu (1). Instincts and/or feelings motivate animate organisms to move. Without such instincts or feelings there would be no disposition to move. An ‘animate organism’ would in truth be akin to a statue, a statue Condillac described two and a half centuries ago as having first this sense given to it, then that sense given to it, but that, lacking movement, is powerless to gain knowledge of the world. Such a movement deficient creature would furthermore lack the biological capacity of responsivity, a near universal characteristic of life. The startle reflex is a premier example. Can what is evolutionarily given be “illogical”? Clearly, feelings are not “illogical,” but move through animate bodies, moving them to move. Without feelings of curiosity, for example, or awe, or wonder, there would be no exploration of the natural world, no investigations, hence no “information.” Furthermore, without feelings of movement—initially, from an evolutionary perspective, no proprioception, and later, no kinesthesia--there would be no near and far, no weak and strong, no straight and curved, and so on, hence, no determinations of Nature. In short, there would be no information and no meaning. (See Note #1: The Primacy of Movement) (2). An excellent lead-in to scientific understandings of movement and its inherent dynamics lies in the extensive research and writings of J. A. Scott Kelso, Pierre de Fermat Laureate in 2007. Kelso was founder of the Center for Brain and Behavioral Studies and its Director for twenty years. His rigorous multi-dimensional experimental studies are anchored in coordination dynamics, an anchorage that is unconstrained by dogma. The breadth of his knowledge and his sense of open inquiry is apparent in the literature he cites in conjunction with his articles and books. His recent article in Biological Cybernetics that focuses on “Agency” is strikingly relevant to the present FIS discussion. It takes experience into account, specifically in the form of “positive feedback,” which obviously involves kinesthesia in a central way. Moreover his upcoming Opinion piece in Trends in Cognitive Science should be essential reading. (See Note #2: “The Coordination Dynamics of Mobile Conjugate Reinforcement” and The Complementary Nature) (3). As pointed out elsewhere, “Certainly words carry no patented meanings, but the term ‘phenomenology’ does seem stretched beyond its limits when it is used to denote either mere reportorial renderings of perceptible behaviors or actions, or any descriptive rendering at all of perceptible behaviors or actions. At the least, ‘phenomenology’ should be recognized as a very specific mode of epistemological inquiry invariably associated with the name Edmund Husserl. . . . ” Phenomenological inquiries are tethered to a very specific methodology, one as rigorous as that of science. Phenomenological findings are furthermore open to verification by others, precisely as in science. Moreover two forms of phenomenological analysis warrant recognition: static and genetic, the former being a determination of the essential character of the object of inquiry, the second being a determination of how the meaning of that object of inquiry came to be constituted, hence an inquiry into sedimentations of meaning, into protentions and retentions, into horizons of meaning, and so on. Thus too, what warrants
[Fis] _ FIS discusion
To FIS colleagues, First, an open-to-all response to Lou Kaufmann: Thank you for your lengthy tutorial—some time back--but I wonder and am genuinely puzzled given the “phenomenology-life sciences theme” why none of the articles that I referenced were read and a response generated at least in part on the basis of that reading in conjunction with your own work. Is there some reason why they were not taken up, especially perhaps the article identified as being a critique of Godels’s incompleteness theorem from a phenomenological perspective? I would think that you and perhaps FIS persons generally would feel particularly inquisitive about that article. I would think too that people in FIS would be particularly inquisitive about the reference to Biological Cybernetics. Viewpoints that differ from one’s own are by some thought a waste of time, but for my part, I think they rightly broaden a discussion, which is not to say that entrenched or deeply held views are not solidly based, much less wrong, but that they have the possibility of being amplified through a consideration of the same topic from a different perspective. For example: Language did not arise deus ex machina, and it certainly did not arise in the form of graphs or writing, but in the form of sounding. Awareness of oneself as a sound-maker is basic to what we identify as a ‘verbal language’. Moreover this awareness and the verbal language itself are both foundationally a matter of both movment and hearing. A recognition of this fact of life would seem to me to be of interest, even primordial interest, to anyone concerned with ‘SELF-REFERENCE', its essential nature and substantive origins. With respect to ‘substantive origins’, does it not behoove us to inquire as to the genesis of a particular capacity rather than take for granted that ‘this is the way things are and have always been’?. For example, and as pointed out elsewhere, the traditional conception of language being composed of arbitrary elements—-hence “symbols”--cannot be assumed with either epistemological or scientific impunity. Until the origin of verbal language is accounted for by reconstructing a particular lifeworld, there is no way of understanding how arbitrary sounds could come to be made . . . let alone serve as carriers of assigned meaning. What is essential is first that arbitrary sounds be distinguished from non-arbitrary sounds, and second, that a paradigm of signification exist. Further, no creature can speak a language for which its body is unprepared. In other words, a certain sensory-kinetic body is essential to the advent of verbal language. In short, in the beginning, thinking moved along analogical lines rather than symbolic ones, hence along the lines of iconicity rather than along arbitrary lines. See the extensive writings of linguistic anthropologist Mary LeCron Foster and Sheets-Johnstone’s The Roots of Thinking, Chapter 6, "On the Origin of Language." Foster's finely documented analyses show that the meaning of the original sound elements of language was the analogue of their articulatory gestures. Similarly, in my own analysis, I start not with symbols or symbolic thought but at the beginning, namely, with a sensory-kinetic analysis of the arbitrary and the non-arbitrary. Husserl wrote that "each free act [i.e., an act involving reason] has its comet’s tail of Nature.” In effect, living meanings are, from a phenomenological perspective, historically complex phenomena. They have a natural history that, in its fullest sense, is bound not both ontogenetically and phylogenetically. Like living forms, living meanings hold—-and have held—-possibilities of further development, which is to say that they have evolved over time and that investigations of their origin and historical development tell us something fundamental about life in general and human life, including individual human lives, in particular. WITH RESPECT TO ORIGINS AND HISTORICALLY COMPLEX PHENOMENA, consider the following examples: Information is commonly language-dependent whereas meaning is not. We come into the world moving; we are precisely not stillborn. We humans all learn our bodies and learn to move ourselves. Movement forms the I that moves before the I that moves forms movement. Infants are not pre-linguistic; language is post-kinetic. Nonlinguistic corporeal concepts ground fundamental verbal concepts. To all FIS colleagues re Alex Hankey's presentation: I thought at first that we might be talking past each other because it was my understanding that this 4-part discussion was about phenomenology and the life sciences. What this means to me is that we conjoin real-life, real-time first-person experience, thus methodologically anchored phenomenological analyses, with real-life-real-time third-person experience, thus methodologically anchored empirical analyses. With this last conversation between Rafael and Alex, the terrain seems
[Fis] re Gödel discussion
Many thanks for your comments, Lou and Bruno. I read and pondered, and finally concluded that the paths taken by each of you exceed my competencies. I subsequently sent your comments to Professor Johnstone—-I trust this is acceptable—asking him if he would care to respond with a brief sketch of the reasoning undergirding his critique, which remains anchored in Gödel’s theorem, not in the writings of others about Gödel’s theorem. Herewith his reply: Since no one commented on the reasoning supporting the conclusions reached in the two cited articles, let me attempt to sketch the crux of the case presented. The Liar Paradox contains an important lesson about meaning. A statement that says of itself that it is false, gives rise to a paradox: if true, it must be false, and if false, it must be true. Something has to be amiss here. In fact, what is wrong is the statement in question is not a statement at all; it is a pseudo-statement, something that looks like a statement but is incomplete or vacuous. Like the pseudo-statement that merely says of itself that it is true, it says nothing. Since such self-referential truth-evaluations say nothing, they are neither true nor false. Indeed, the predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’ can only be meaningfully applied to what is already a meaningful whole, one that already says something. The so-called Strengthened Liar Paradox features a pseudo-statement that says of itself that it is neither true nor false. It is paradoxical in that it apparently says something that is true while saying that what it says it is not true. However, the paradox dissolves when one realizes that it says something that is apparently true only because it is neither true nor false. However, if it is neither true nor false, it is consequently not a statement, and hence it says nothing. Since it says nothing, it cannot say something that is true. The reason why it appears to say something true is that one and the same string of words may be used to make either of two declarations, one a pseudo-statement, the other a true statement, depending on how the words refer. Consider the following example. Suppose we give the name ‘Joe’ to what I am saying, and what I am saying is that Joe is neither true nor false. When I say it, it is a pseudo-statement that is neither true nor false; when you say it, it is a statement that is true. The sentence leads a double life, as it were, in that it may be used to make two different statements depending on who says it. A similar situation can also arise with a Liar sentence: if the liar says that what he says is false, then he is saying nothing; if I say that what he says is false, then I am making a false statement about his pseudo-statement. This may look like a silly peculiarity of spoken language, one best ignored in formal logic, but it is ultimately what is wrong with the Gödel sentence that plays a key role in Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. That sentence is a string of symbols deemed well-formed according to the formation rules of the system used by Gödel, but which, on the intended interpretation of the system, is ambiguous: the sentence has two different interpretations, a self-referential truth-evaluation that is neither true nor false or a true statement about that self-referential statement. In such a system, Gödel’s conclusion holds. However, it is a mistake to conclude that no possible formalization of Arithmetic can be complete. In a formal system that distinguishes between the two possible readings of the Gödel sentence (an operation that would considerably complicate the system), such would no longer be the case. Cheers, Maxine ___ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
[Fis] _ Concerns regarding a questioning of Goedel's theorem . . .
To all concerned colleagues, I appreciate the fact that discussions should be conversations about issues, but this particular issue and in particular the critique cited in my posting warrant extended exposition in order to show the reasoning upholding the critique. I am thus quoting from specific articles, the first phenomenological, the second analytic-logical--though they are obviously complementary as befits discussions in phenomenology and the life sciences. EXCERPT FROM: SELF-REFERENCE AND GÖDEL'S THEOREM: A HUSSERLIAN ANALYSIS Husserl Studies 19 (2003), pages 131-151. Albert A. Johnstone The aim of this article is to show that a Husserlian approach to the Liar paradoxes and to their closely related kin discloses the illusory nature of these difficulties. Phenomenological meaning analysis finds the ultimate source of mischief to be circular definition, implicit or explicit. Definitional circularity lies at the root both of the self-reference integral to the statements that generate Liar paradoxes, and of the particular instances of predicate criteria featured in the Grelling paradox as well as in the self-evaluating Gödel sentence crucial to Gödel's theorem. Since the statements thereby generated turn out on closer scrutiny to be vacuous and semantically nonsensical, their rejection from reasonable discourse is both warranted and imperative. Naturally enough, their exclusion dissolves the various problems created by their presence. . . . VII: THE GOEDEL SENTENCE Following a procedure invented by Gödel, one may assign numbers in some orderly way as names or class-numbers to each of the various classes of numbers (the prime numbers, the odd numbers, and so on). Some of these class-numbers will qualify for membership in the class they name; others will not. For instance, if the number 41 should happen to be the class-number that names the class of numbers that are divisible by 7, then since 41 does not have the property of being divisible by 7, the class-number 41 would not be a member of the class it names. Now, consider the class-number of the class of class-numbers that are members of the class they name. Does it have the defining property of the class it names? The question is unanswerable. Since the defining property of the class is that of being a class-number that is a member of the class it names, the necessary and sufficient condition for the class-number in question to be a member of the class it names turns out to be that it be a member of the class it names. In short, the number is a member if and only if it is a member. The criterion is circular--defined in terms of what was to be defined--and consequently not a criterion at all since it provides no way of determining whether or not the number is a member. The situation is obviously similar for the class-number of the complementary class of class-numbers--those that do not have the defining property of the class they name--since the criteria in the two cases are logically interdependent. The criterion of membership is likewise defined in circular fashion, and hence is vacuous. In addition, the criterion postulates an absurd analytic equivalence, that of the defining property with its negative. The question of whether the class-number is a member of the class it names is unanswerable, with the result that any proposed answer is neither true nor false. In addition, of course, any answer would generate paradox: the number has the requisite defining property if and only if it does not have it. As might be expected, the situation is not significantly different for the class-number of classes of which the definition involves semantic predicates. Consider, for instance, the class of class-numbers of which it is provable that they are members of the class they name. The question of whether the class-number of the class is a member of the class it numbers is undecidable. The possession by the class-number of the property requisite for membership is conditional upon the question of whether it provably possesses the property, with the result that the question can have no answer. Otherwise stated, the number has the defining property of the class it names if and only if it provably has that property. In these circumstances, the explanation of what it means for the class-number to have the property has to be circular in that it must define having the property in terms of having the property. The vacuity that results is hidden somewhat by the presence of the requirement of provability, but while provability might count as a necessary condition, in the present case it cannot be a sufficient one. In fact, its presence creates a semantically absurd situation: the analytic equivalence of having the property and provably having it. The statement of the possession of the property by the class-number in question is consequently both vacuous and semantically absurd, hence an undecidable