What is SOM?
Here is a summary(mine, ripped from an older article) of human cognitive
abilities according to Egan and Donald. I notice that SOM relates very
strongly with PHILOSOPHIC understanding.
maggie.
------------------------------------
Modern humankind perceives its existence in its conscious goals and
thought-processes, nevertheless that consciousness exists in layers and
webs of previously-evolved systems of cognitive tools and even more
primitive forms of social understanding. In the development of human
individuals, the history of humankind is recapitulated, and the
conscious processes of that entire human history can be seen being
stored in the individual as he or she grows from somatic (pre-literate)
understanding to full adult cognition.
To delineate some of these processes we can use descriptions drawn from
the work of educator Kieran Egan (Egan, 1997) and cognitive scientist
Merlin Donald. (Donald, 1991). These are hard to capture in a nutshell,
but the attempt will be made here. This list starts with those cognitive
abilities that, as they develop, are evident in the acquisition of
language.
SOMATIC Understanding -- Most evident in pre-language-using human
experience. "The use of patterns of mimetic representations in modern
human society have remained distinct from the uses of our later
cognitive acquisitions (like language and literacy). In effect, there is
still a vestigial mimetic culture embedded within our modern culture;
and a mimetic mind embeddedwithin the overall architecture of the modern
human mind." (Merlin Donald)
Characteristics of Somatic Understanding:
* Intentionality: Infant aligns gaze with parent's gaze, understands
that what the parent looks at is important.
* Generativity: intentional recombination of actions. Children act
out adults’ actions, but they recombine them in play.
* Communication: performed publicly
* Reference: Knowledge of distinction between real and pretend (or
re-enacted)
* Unlimited Objects: Limited to events, but anything can be portrayed.
* Auto cueing: "Mimetic acts are reproducible on the basis of
internal, self-generated cues. This permits voluntary recall of mimetic
representations, without the aid of external cues--probably the earliest
form of representational "thinking" (Donald).
"The intellectual tools of somatic understanding do not go away as
language develops. As Donald points out, language evolved, and continues
to be employed, in a wider cultural context. A basic element of that
wider cultural context for modern humans is the persistence within the
architecture of our minds of a pre-linguistic somatic understanding or
Mimetic culture. From this distinctively human understanding, language
emerged in the distant past and emerges every day in the lives of young
children; the various forms of languaged understanding that we develop
carry distinctive traces from this cognitive and cultural source."
(Egan, 1997)
MYTHIC understanding:
Characteristics of Mythic Understanding:
* Associated with oral language users, young children.
* Abstract thinking characterized by dualism and binary structuring.
(security/danger, wildness/cultivation, life/death, nature/culture,
obedience/disobedience, human/animal, good/bad, ) This is the
understanding that is active when children want fairy-tale stories. "Why
should binary structuring be a necessary consequence of language
development? Because logically, we express...elementary differentiation
in the form of contradictories, A and not-A, and it is certainly true
that the ability to distinguish, together with the ability to perceive
resemblances, is basic to all cognitive processes. "
* Mythic understanding makes use of metaphor, rhythm and narrative
(story-telling).
ROMANTIC understanding:
Romantic understanding is often associated with writing alphabetic
languages, historically includes a "new consciousness of
reality--'reason'". An early example is Herodotus/ Histories, which
"bear more than a passing resemblance to the newspapers at the
supermarket checkout."
Characteristics of Romantic understanding:
* Romantic interaction involves a fascination with biological
extremes, but is a form of definition of limits and boundaries of the
social. In this form, while it is influenced by the need to make a good
story and have a human angle, the emotion is nevertheless restricted to
"facts".
* Romantic understanding also involves certain kinds of logic and
numbers.
PHILOSOPHIC understanding:
Philosophic understanding includes such things as geometry--the ideas
that follow theoretical discourse. It assumes that there is "one
truth". "Philosophic thinking decries Romantic. This common feature of
Western cultural history is unfortunate for many reasons, not least
because it takes most people a long time to realize that the preceding
kind of understanding is not simply the pit of villainous confusion
represented by its successors but in fact forms a foundation to their
own preferred kind.” (Egan).
Characteristics of Philosophic understanding:
* Philosophic understanding enables a disengaged (subject-object)
perspective.
* Philosophic thinking generates patterns, recurrence, processes,
essences, ordinary principles, and theories. "The ability to generate
schematic conceptions of reality can liberate us from the constraints of
the conventional ideas, beliefs, general schemes into which we grow up."
* Philosophic understanding wants to generalize, and looks for
certainty. Examples: Plato and Aristotle, 12th Century Christians,
Bacon, Descartes, nineteenth-century positivism.
* Philosophic understanding has a tendency to turn into a "belief"
system.It requires schools and institutions to develop it.
IRONIC understanding:
Ironic understanding recognizes that "All generalizations are false" but
worth doing anyway. "The fluent ironist can slip from perspective to
perspective." (Nietzsche almost made it to ironic, but didn't get the
second part).
Somatic, mythic, romantic, philosophic and ironic abilities span the
spectrum of consciousness from simplest to most highly-developed.
There are also pre-conscious stages (those that culminate in somatic
awareness) that are less easily observed. They are the first processes
accessed by the infant, and as they, like other forms of intelligence,
are absorbed from the society in which they are stored, they become the
basis, the “stuff,” of not only the individual’s social patterns but
also his or her higher processes as well. Just as the primitive forms of
life-processes that nourished ancient microscopic sea creatures have
become the building blocks of the human circulatory system, the ancient
awareness stored in a culture’s patterns of action provides the building
blocks of social and intellectual interaction.
After pointing out distinct systems of conscious cognition, beginning to
perceive their evolution as they grow and layer themselves upon each
other, it should be possible to return to the starting point—somatic
awareness— to look backwards for a dividing line: the breakpoint between
conscious and unconscious awareness.
Pre-language awareness, labeled by Egan as somatic, is itself composed
of massive, distinct evolutionary systems that exist not only in the
physiology of the individual, but in the webs of historic cultural
interactions. These pre-language systems can be observed somewhat
distinctly in records of primitive cultures, in the current patterns of
apes, and in other animal intelligences. Donald speaks of two
particular intelligences, which seem to fall on opposite poles of the
consciousness breakpoint. They are episodic memory and procedural memory.
EPISODIC memory:
Episodic (concrete, time-bound) memory is described by Donald as
memory for specific episodes in life, that is, events with a specific
time-space locus. Thus, we can remember the specifics of and experience:
the place, the weather, the colors and smells, the voices of the past.
Typical examples of episodic memories are found in the details of
specific experiences: a death in the family, first love, and so on. Such
memories are rich in specific perceptual content. By definition,
episodes are bound in time and space to specific dates and places. The
important feature of this type of memory is its concrete, perceptual
nature and its retention of specific episodic details. (Donald, 1991)
PROCEDURAL memory as described by Donald
The ancient foil to episodic memory is procedural memory. Procedural
memory is quite different and structurally more archaic. For the most
part, procedural memories can be regarded as the mnemonic component of
learned action patterns. Simple organisms can learn patterns of action
without any detailed episodic recall; procedural memory involves the
storage of the algorithms, or schemas, that underlie action…Whereas
episodic memory preserves the specifics of events, procedural memory
preserves the generalities of action, across events…Episodic and
procedural memory involve different neural mechanisms…Episodic memory
also differs fundamentally from the dominant form of human memory,
specifically semantic (language-oriented) memory.” (Donald, 1991)
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