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Bateson, books, cogling, context, CPB, embodiment, framing, I Ching, paradox, perception influence, prisdem, semantic punctuation, sensation, techniques, unconscious
Ramblings spawned by Professor Sydney Lamb's Neuro-Cognitive Structure in the Interplay of Language and Thought.
It is easy to [think of] concepts, like language, thought, perception, behavior, as actual objects or entities of some kind, as if they had existence apart from human beings; to be more exact, as if they had some life of their own, apart from the human mind. But I'd like to suggest that thinking in such terms is in itself an example of just the kind of phenomenon Whorf was talking about, an example of language influencing thought -- in this case, through the process of reification, in which we are reifying "language", "thought", and so forth, and treating them as independent objects.
It just doesn't get any better than this. And remember, this is from a guy working on the physical end of things, who is investigating the neuro-physiology of individual "language systems." Frustratingly, it seems there is no escape from such reifications. Lamb goes on to talk about information and information systems and such without any disclaimers as to their equally intangible nature. But I'm waiting to see where he ends up.
If I ask you to visualize a cat and you do so, you are activating those connections in your visual system as a consequence of linguistic rather than sensory input.
This troubles me ever so slightly. The response would still be to sensory input, whether the printed word or someone's speech act or even braille. The difference between visualizing a cat in response to hearing an unidentified purr or meow versus visualizing a cat in response to words exhorting you to so visualize is one of direct association. There is comparatively direct association between certain auditory and visual stimuli, such as the sound of purring and the sight of a cat. The associations from the sensory inputs that make up the command, "Visualize a cat," be they visual, auditory or kinesthetic are arbitrary and responses to those stimuli are constrained only by the listener's experience with and exposure to the social milieu in which the sensations occur.
As the discussion turns to the topic of learning I am again frustrated that we must work with such an amorphous term. I am, personally, about ready to define "learning" as entropy, as the changes in the biot over time in relation to its environment and as constrained by its physiological parameters. But, boy-oh-boy, is that clunky, not to mention in direct opposition to prevailing uses wherein "learning" is the accumulation of "information" which has been defined as "anti-entropy" or "reverse-entropy." But that definition of "information" always struck me as a little question begging, a little unduly privileging of humanist ideals, at least undue in the realm of the physical sciences.
We can hypothesize, in harmony with Hebb (1949), that the fundamental learning process might consist of strengthening a connection when it is active while the node to which it is connected has its threshold satisfied by virtue of also receiving activation from other connections.
This seems a tad off: Surely a "connection" is the relationship between the things connected. It is confusing to talk about the node to which a connection is connected, and I don't yet have the grasp to craft a good alternative. I think that's a good place to stop for now. I will come back with a better understanding of the "node" and "connection" nomenclature.
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