Conceptual Images

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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Conceptual Images

Humans and I suspect all creatures navigate in space through spatial-relations concepts. These concepts are the essence of our ability to function in space. These are not concepts that we can sense but they are the forms and inference patterns for our movement in space that we utilize unconsciously. We automatically ‘perceive’ an entity as being on, in front of, behind, etc. another entity.

The container schema is a fundamental spatial-relations concept that allows us to draw important inferences. This natural container format is the source for our logical inferences that are so obvious to us when we view Venn diagrams. If container A is in container B and B is in container C, then A is in C.

A container schema is a gestalt figure with an interior, an exterior, and a boundary—the parts make sense only as part of the whole. Container schemas are cross-modal—“we can impose a conceptual container schema on a visual scene…on something we hear, as when we conceptually separate out one part of a piece of music from another.”

“Image schemas have a special cognitive function: They are both perceptual and conceptual in nature. As such, they provide a bridge between language and reasoning on the one hand and vision on the other.”

Quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh” and “Where Mathematics Comes From” Lakoff is coauthor of both.

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i find this interesting but i want you to add more…what do you think about this? is this just food for thought?
do you see this as an agreement between mind and exterior and an ultimate meshing of the two into one…kind of like poles to a continuum? kantian? epistemological views? let me know…

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i asked my fired the other day; do you think a song changes(relating to the way we hear it)(obviously the composition is the same) after the 1st 2nd 3rd
time you listen to it? he said yah, but left it at that. Nietzche said we should leave our friends a playground for misunderstanding to romp in. Any way ; is
it solely our focus that changes the perception of the song as we become more familiar with it? if so, is it an involuntary drifting of focus or do we consciously listen to some parts more carefully than others?

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i tend to like the idea that when listening to music there is a lack of focus on particular parts and more focus on not focusing(or an even distribution of focus)but that said i also think that certain parts(especially in a band like tool)
where focus is needed to really understand what each musician is doing, there is a loss of focus relating to the other musicians parts when listening specifically to a single part, effectively taking away from the synergistic experiance of the whole group. i’m not sure if i like that aspect, i like to think i’m not missing anything when listening to the song but on the other side of the coin, with a band like that you rarely listen to the exactly same song twice in a row. more a rant than philosophy but …

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We have in our Western philosophy a traditional theory of faculty psychology wherein our reasoning is a faculty completely separate from the body. “Reason is seen as independent of perception and bodily movement.” It is this capacity of autonomous reason that makes us different in kind from all other animals. I suspect that many fundamental aspects of philosophy and psychology are focused upon declaring, whenever possible, the separateness of our species from all other animals.

This tradition of an autonomous reason began long before evolutionary theory and has held strongly since then without consideration, it seems to me, of the theories of Darwin and of biological science. Cognitive science has in the last three decades developed considerable empirical evidence supporting Darwin and not supporting the traditional theories of philosophy and psychology regarding the autonomy of reason. Cognitive science has focused a great deal of empirical science toward discovering the nature of the embodied mind.

The three major findings of cognitive science are:
The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

“These findings of cognitive science are profoundly disquieting [for traditional thinking] in two respects. First, they tell us that human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains. Second, these results tell us that our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real.”

All living creatures categorize. All creatures, as a minimum, separate eat from no eat and friend from foe. As neural creatures tadpole and wo/man categorize. There are trillions of synaptic connections taking place in the least sophisticated of creatures and this multiple synapses must be organized in some way to facilitate passage through a small number of interconnections and thus categorization takes place. Great numbers of different synapses take place in an experience and these are subsumed in some fashion to provide the category eat or foe perhaps.

Our categories are what we consider to be real in the world: tree, rock, animal…Our concepts are what we use to structure our reasoning about these categories. Concepts are neural structures that are the fundamental means by which we reason about categories.

Quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh”.

P.S If we take a big bite out of reality we will, I think, find that it is multilayered like the onion. There are many domains of knowledge available to us for penetrating those layers of reality. Cognitive science is one that I find to be very interesting.

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so the be all end all of knowledge is experiance. we know nothing without before experiance and as we experiance more “reality” we can develop more intricate theorys pertaining to it? To sum up, without perception there can be no conception? just trying to see if i follow.

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You are using some of the same words, I guess that might qualify for following the matter a little bit.

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i’m using a computer with no copy and paste function right now, so excuse me for lacking in that area.
anyhow:
coberst: thats really interesting. i can’t help but to think of the problem in terms of Plato, aristotle, and the problem of forms/numbers/definitions/ being outside empirical reality. i guess i tend to agree with the cognitive science bit you added in there, but my thoughts are more aristotelian in the sense that when we count horses we are saying “this is one horse” (which is an entirely weird quote on my part). that is, our counting and tautologous definitions are conceived by our minds and we don’t know if they could exist as such without them. i guess this gets heideggarian in this linguistic idealism sense. as if you could say that sunsets don’t exist without us because no one would call them sunsets as such. which is not to say that there isn’t “the real” outside of us.

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My first contact with ‘axiom’ was in geometry class. Most people talk of assumptions and not axioms. Cognitive science uses the phrase “Folk Theories” to clarify what are basic assumptions that we humans often use.

Every theory of knowledge must begin with some assumptions. In geometry ‘the shortest distance between two points is a straight line’. One Folk Theory is “all things are a kind of thing” another is “everything has an essence”. Essentially all our assumptions are accepted as true because ‘everyone’ agrees that they are ‘obviously’ true.

What cognitive science is saying is that the philosophy of all thinkers, including Aristotle, begins with “folk theories”. These are assumed to be true because they are obviously true.

Plato comes to the conclusion that “essences are ideas” and Aristotle comes to the conclusion that “ideas are essences”. Plato thus becomes an idealist and Aristotle thus becomes a realist.

Why is this the case? We use the metaphor ‘know is see’. We can understand know by comparing it with see that we already understand. BB is AA is a metaphor that helps us understand BB because we already know AA. Plato is saying he knows ideas and thus we can understand essence by association with ideas. Aristotle is saying essence is known and we can understand idea by comparison.

The philosopher takes the folk theories and moves forward to further conclusions. The philosophers are sophisticated because they take basic assumptions and take the matter a step further.

Cognitive science is trying to say that mind begins in body. All of our concepts are grounded in bodily experience. The metaphor ‘BB is AA’ says one can understand BB by association with AA, ‘know is see’, see what I mean? Cognitive science is arguing against a mind body dichotomy and arguing for the concepts, categories and inference as based upon bodily experience.

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I agree that all of our concepts are grounded in bodily experiance, theres only one way to experiance the world and thats through the bodys senses. Even if i have a idea pertaining to something i read, rather than something i did, i still use my eyes to read it. So, the philosophers folk theory (absolute scientific fact)is something known from experiance.

“Essentially all our assumptions are accepted as true because ‘everyone’ agrees that they are ‘obviously’ true”

I’d say that our assumption are accepted only when they can be grounded in scientific fact. I don’t mean that we all should know the leading theorys in physics/biology ect., just that we need to have a elementry understanding of the consequences the theory has on human life to base our assumptions on.
I don’t need to know the particulars of the theory of gravity and sensation
to know that what goes up comes down and pain and plaesure are quite different.

Ideas for me are grounded in experiance so i’d consider myself a realist.
Ideas are an account of the essence of something. The essence of something is what makes it distinguishable from other things and similar to things which are like it. I find it impossible to imagine a world without physical experiance and that i think is the root of the problem when trying
to understand the concept of god. I die(loose my ability to experiance the physical world) and i go to heaven or hell(depending on judgement). Even
the idea of “going” to heaven or hell is based on physical experiance (travlling)

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All commentary; verbal, written or digitally transmitted; by this poster is expressly a matter of personal opinion, individual belief, personal experience, and is not intended to purport necessity of change(s), implied/perceived, to other posters; physical, mental or emotional. Any attempt to treat this post in a manner contradictory to what has been thusly stated, is erroneous, and is the fault, entirely, of the reader of said post.

Perhaps my position is going to be considered thick, or easily dismissable, but it seems disagreeable to make a singular instance of mind and body.

My reasoning is that the mind has cognition of the form, and makes use of the tools of the form, whereas, the body does not have direct cognition of the mind.

Also, the entire neural network is an extension of the mind, obviously for the necessity of creating more surface area for stimuli recognition.

Bodily reaction to stimuli is often very limited, and it is not until an assessment against the stored/intrinsic value system, that the mind makes determinations of stimuli, and outputs a proper chemical consequence.

One of the major areas of failure of science with respect to defining the mind, and the autonomous functions, is the limited area of the brain used for such, and deeper cortex reactions are not nearly as noticeable, or correctly represented/catalogued. Not to mention the activities of the subconscious which are still relatively unknown, and perhaps at current levels of technology, not knowable.

One other problem that has occurred to me with my readings of the propositions of the autonomous mind action is that there is, in my opinion, an unknown quantity in regards to the speed at which the mind makes determinations, especially as regards the value system check and stimuli collection and interpretation.

Summarily, I find a great deal of modern science’s explanations to still be speculatory with regards to mind activity.

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Mastriani

I think you would change your opinion if you were to study “Philosophy in the Flesh”. This book details the theory of “conceptual metaphor”, which is a possible first paradigm for cognitive science and is empirically substantiated.

This book is not light reading but is definately en-lightening.

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Where can i read this?

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Coberst:

i want to agree, but i think that this theory is too materialist in the end. As if the metaphysical or was dead, which i disagree with. Its collapsing a duality into a pole and saying that the other doesn’t exist. there is just body, no mind. like, there is just good, and no bad (theological privation argument). There is something enticing about it, but i’m generally wary against absolutisms in this way. i’m more of a beyond the duality kind of person, if you will.

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The theoretical frameworks that I have seen for purely materialistic cognitive science contain dazzling general statements - but just that. The overall function of the brain in regards to the categorizing of concepts (such as container-type concepts) is still unkown.

 Alex - The idea isn't that "mind" and "body" both exist, and that it's some mix of the two.  The idea is that the distinction doesn't exist.  When you say "mind," you are refering to one set of events in the universe (what you would conceptualize as physical events) that give rise to conscious thought.  When you say "body" you're refering to events in the world, some of which give rise to what you refer to as "mind."

  If this analogy helps you any - consider "good" and "evil."  Assuming that objective meaning is impossible, we can't say that all things are "good" or that all things are "evil" - we can only say that the distinction doesn't make sense.

 Mas, I'd like you to specify exactly what you're refering to when you say mind - if you're not refering to the combined product of those same neural networks; the aggregate of events that I infer from the word.

 Modern sciences explanations of brain (mind) activity are indeed only vaguely schematic, but all the evidence available points to the activity of the mind being tightly linked with that of the body (especially the brain,) and vice versa.

 Again, I'm not saying that the sstudy of the relationship between "mind" and "body" will lead to the discarding of one "side" in favor of another - just that it is inconcievable that the two can be explained in any way that does not leave then inextricably and intricately tied.
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All commentary; verbal, written or digitally transmitted; by this poster is expressly a matter of personal opinion, individual belief, personal experience, and is not intended to purport necessity of change(s), implied/perceived, to other posters; physical, mental or emotional. Any attempt to treat this post in a manner contradictory to what has been thusly stated, is erroneous, and is the fault, entirely, of the reader of said post.

I’ve never closed my mind to any reading, so no point disagreeing until I look into it, thanks coberst.

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All commentary; verbal, written or digitally transmitted; by this poster is expressly a matter of personal opinion, individual belief, personal experience, and is not intended to purport necessity of change(s), implied/perceived, to other posters; physical, mental or emotional. Any attempt to treat this post in a manner contradictory to what has been thusly stated, is erroneous, and is the fault, entirely, of the reader of said post.

Emo,

My definition is not likely to fit the same mold as most, and certainly not an empiricist one. Coberst will likely shred me for the way I define mind.

Mind in my perspective is the physical matter of the brain, neural network, and awareness/cognition … body being “other”.

I agree they are tied, in the sense of dependency, but my personal perspective is that the mind, because of cognition, still holds an entirely different place, which doesn’t, in my opinion, get proper coverage under strictly empirical views.

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Do a Google with the title or with one of the author’s name try George Lakoff. Of course almost any college library will have a copy of it. This subject is not something you will be familiar with so it will take some attention and time. I spent 6 moths with it before I felt that I understood the subject matter. I consider it the best book I have read.

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Emorgasm: yikes, again i am using a computer with no paste function. but in regards to your comments to me:
i get that “the diea isn’t that “mind” and “body” both exist, and that it’s some mix of the two. The idea that the distinction doesn’t exist”.

my worry is that by denying the distinction we are becoming philosophically dogmatic. Instead of moving beyond good and evil, if you will, it seems that we just pick good, or evil, or material reality, etc. but if you think that cognitive science has acheived this beyond and isn’t dogmatically materialistic…then ok…but i would like for you to explain to me how.