Dear Gary, lists - A good Damasio finding. There are rather different viewpoints in the Cog Sci communities - some of them, including also the Andy Clark school, refuse neurocentrism and the idea that cognition arises only with neural tissue. Best F
Den 19/10/2014 kl. 15.27 skrev Gary Fuhrman <g...@gnusystems.ca<mailto:g...@gnusystems.ca>>: The final section of NP Chapter 3, rather than summarizing what has gone before, looks ahead to the chapters which will explore the “actual implications of Peirce’s doctrine of propositions”. For me, the most interesting of these implications is the possibility of a deeper insight into the connections between human cognition and that of other sentient beings. I must say that before I was drawn into Peirce’s work, and then into Stjernfelt’s, I never expected to find any such insights in the history of logic. I was more inclined to look for them in the work of thoughtful neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio. Just to give one example from the first chapter of his recent (2010) work, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, p. 27: In brief, the conscious mind emerges within the history of life regulation. Life regulation, a dynamic process known as homeostasis for short, begins in unicellular living creatures, such as a bacterial cell or a simple amoeba, which do not have a brain but are capable of adaptive behavior. It progresses in individuals whose behavior is managed by simple brains, as is the case with worms, and it continues its march in individuals whose brains generate both behavior and mind (insects and fish being examples). I am ready to believe that whenever brains begin to generate primordial feelings—and that could be quite early in evolutionary history—organisms acquire an early form of sentience. From there on, an organized self process could develop and be added to the mind, thereby providing the beginning of elaborate conscious minds. Reptiles are contenders for this distinction, for example; birds make even stronger contenders; and mammals get the award and then some. Most species whose brains generate a self do so at core level. Humans have both core self and autobiographical self. A number of mammals are likely to have both as well, namely wolves, our ape cousins, marine mammals and elephants, cats, and, of course, that off-the-scale species called the domestic dog. Peirce’s doctrine of the dicisign as the core semiotic structure of the proposition provides another angle from which to investigate the relations between self-control and sentience, consciousness and language, cybernetics and psychology. That’s my perspective on it, anyway. I’d be interested in hearing from others — especially those with little previous interest in logic — what they hope or expect to find as we venture further into Natural Propositions. Tomorrow, Tyler Bennett will lead us into Chapter 4. gary f.
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