Redefining the explanatory gap

So much blood and ink has been spilt trying to bridge the gap between something called mind and something called world. The gap I seek to bridge is instead between something called experience and something called language. This we can do. And with that the game is won.

 

Waves in wheat fields

I wish to draw out the waves in wheat fields idea somewhat more.  To me it is obvious at first glance what is meant.  But thinking the analogy through demands being explicit about a number of tricky issues, including the borders of the P-world (not a simple spatiotemporal bubble!) and the way in which the chair I meet in immediate experience is *both* collectively constituted, thus everyone’s chair, and entirely mine and mine alone.

This might be most fruitfully done within the book, when the P-world concept is first mooted, or shortly thereafter.

 

Synchronization and S-M Correspondence

So I started working on a sketch today that links two ideas, and the combination is surprising.

On the one hand we have O’Regan and Noe’s take on sensorimotor correspondences.  This is actually not far from a lot of Gibsonian work within Ecological Psychology.  The basic idea is that in perceiving, we are skillfully engaging with the world, and that practiced and tuned action gives rise to a corresponding characteristic change in the sensory array.  Gibsonians would say this is the basis of direct perception.  Enaction-heads would say this is skillful coping, or some such.

On the other hand, we have the peculiar issue of sensorimotor synchronization, perhaps best illustrated by a group of people dancing or beating drums together.  In the scientific literature, this has withered to a laboratory situation in which people tap in time to a metronome. (The horror, the horror.)  This is a singularly human achievement, the very odd animal counterexample notwithstanding (yes, Snowball, I’m looking at you and the Gelada baboons).  A fuller account of the basis for sensorimotor synchronization would help us enormously.  It may underpin a burgeoning theory of memes; it speaks to Gibson’s intuition that the nervous system displays resonant properties; it fits with a range of specific situations, from air guitar to stuttering.  All can be described, in some fuzzy essence, with a conceptually simple model in which two processes enter into a coupled form of synergy which looks like resonance within and among coupled systems with many degrees of freedom.

 

Mysteries and dissent

So I’m reading Tecumseh Fitch (paper here) on the Biolinguistic Enterprise.  He asserts that there are 3 extremely hard problems that stand in the way of bringing biolinguistics to the stage of real science.  Oddly, I seem to have something to say about all three, and from the way he poses the problems, I doubt we are in any danger of reaching agreement any time soon.

The 3 problems are:

1. We don’t know how brains generate minds,
2. We don’t know how genes control development form single cell to complex organism, and
3. We don’t have a theory of meaning.

My brief comments on each after the break.

 

Of Transparency

In this article, the consequences of transparency in public life are considered. It appears that money revels the collective nature of the system. Lawfulness appears in behavior, but that lawfulness requires us to posit a limited sort of an individual. Essentially selfish, but with a limited notion of self. Revealing our collective side, once again. Brains drive those smaller units, as they generate P-worlds. Consensus will be of our common nature, and not of that which is first person.

 

That of which we can speak….

…As so much of what we think of as ineffable and private is actually public and lawful, we should learn to recognize that of which we can speak. We can speak only of our collective nature. We can not speak of the individual.

 

Two things confuse us

They are: Vision and Language. Through each of them we believe we see clearly. With language, we call it understanding. But either way, it is the base faith we have in a constant objective exterior. They are highly overrated, and they prevent us seeing how awash we are in an ambiguous condition. Sense-making, but not finding bedrock.

 

How is knowledge acquired?

You ask “How do people acquire knowledge?”.  Ask rather “How does knowledge acquire people?”.

 

Looking at experience

There are consequences to the attempt to look directly at experience.   Looking requires a subject to look, and an object to be seen.  Experience is not like that.  Analytical philosophy trusts that if we look, collectively, using consensus as our gradient, we will know experience.  Looking at experience demands abandonment of the self.  As long as you believe in yourself, you are the membraneous surface that interfaces between the P-world and the body collective.  To look at experience, you need to let go of that, so that you can be aware of the cellular volume—the volume of the P-worlds.  Therein is subjective experience, and looking at it means not identifying with something you normally identify with.

 

Parallel Scanning!

The dopamine guys are getting really interesting.  The Sutton and Barto stuff is getting real big.  And now, they’ve started doing parallel fMRIs of interacting subjects.  That’s fucking brilliant.  I’m betting right here folks.