> drose wrote:
>
> While browsing the local bookseller yesterday evening, I ran across the
> book "Philosophy in the Flesh", a tome espousing the merits of something
> called cognitive science, a concept I have never heard of before
> yesterday. The minimal reading I have done in the book so far seems to
> speak to this issue, although I don't have enough of a grasp of the
> subject yet to make even a feeble attempt at an explanation.
.
I suppose I'll take this as an opportune time to delurk . . .
.
I bought this book (the full title is - philosophy in the flesh: the
embodied mind and its challenge to western thought -) for myself as a
Christmas present, but haven't had the time to get more than a few chapters
into it. Anyway, the authors have this to say regarding science and SOM.
.
Beyond Subject and Object -
.
"Embodied realism can work for science in part because it rejects a strict
subject-object dichotomy. Disembodied scientific realism creates an
unbridgeable ontological chasm between "objects," which are "out there" and
subjectivity, which is "in here." Once the separation is made, there are
then only two possible, and equally erroneous, conceptions of objectivity:
Objectivity is either given by the "things themselves" (the objects) or by
the intersubjective structures of consciousness shared by all people (the
subjects).
.
"The first is erroneous because the subject-object split is a mistake:
there are no objects-with-descriptions-and-categorizations existing in
themselves. The second is erroneous because mere intersubjectivity, if it
is nothing more that social or communal agreement, leaves out our contact
with the world. The alternative we propose, embodied realism, relies on the
fact that we are coupled to the world through our embodied interactions.
Our directly embodied concepts (e.g., basic-level concepts, aspectual
concepts, and spatial-relatoins concepts) can reliably fit those embodied
interactions and the undertakings of the world that arise from them.
.
"The problem with classical disembodied scientific realism is that it takes
two intertwined and inseparable dimensions of all experience – the
awareness of the experiencing organism and the stable entities and
structures it encounters – and erects them as separate and distinct
entities called subjects and objects. What disembodied realism (sometimes
called "metaphysical" or "external" realism) misses is that, as embodied,
imaginative creatures, we never were separated or divorced from reality in
the first place. What has always made science possible is our embodiment,
not our transcendence of it, and our imagination, not our avoidance of it."
.
I'd like to write more about cognitive science/consciousness and the MOQ –
I think Bodvik's hint that Quality and a fundamental consciousness are
equal spoke volumes, and David's post on being "in the zone" would fit in
well. But more on this later, perhaps? It's getting a little too late here
for me to be able to think coherently (although the 'blue moon' tonight is
beautiful).
.
ciona
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