Scientific Realism

[coberst]

Scientific Realism

I think that scientific realism can be characterized as a conviction that the world exists independent of our awareness of it and that we are capable of discovering stable knowledge about this world.

Descartes, in his search for absolute truth, has left us with the legacy of a mind/body dichotomy. Descartes ‘discovered’ that there are two kinds of substances—bodily substance, which is extension in space and mental substance, which is thought having no spatial essence. Descartes has imprinted upon Western philosophy the belief that there is a mutually exclusivity between mind and body.

It seems to me that Western philosophical tradition has gone through all sorts of intellectual contortions to accommodate this bifurcation. This philosophically created anomaly, ‘disembodied scientific realism’, has never been seriously dealt with until cognitive science has recently proposed ‘embodied scientific realism’ as a system of thought that has treated the bifurcation by eliminating the bifurcation.

Cognitive science argues for an embodied realism as opposed to philosophy’s metaphysical realism. Embodied realism provides us with a link between our ideas and the worlds we experience. “Our bodies contribute to our sense of what is real”.

Spatial-relations concepts are not part of the world but are embodied and provide us with our ability to make sense of the world. “They characterize what spatial form is and define spatial inference.”

Quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson.

[Trevor_W]

i consider the absolute extremety of what can be considered myself as a a mind body sunday, the worlds the bowl. so. i agree with the embodied realism. i think my perception of the external world is experianced through my bodily organs. the image,smell,taste,sound,feel of the world is a product of my body/sense organs coming into contact/range/focus of external objects which exhist wheter or not i am percieving them.(exist independent of my percpetion of them) in my life(the progress through experiance) i form beliefs, remember specific/particular events and the effects the events have on myself/environment with my memory. my memory is quite obviously limited(where the fuck did i put those keys) but that said, my memory can be jogged if you will.
experiance fades to new experiance and i progress through life remembering what i deem most important/necessary. Without memory life is a meaningless string of experiance, as the present moment is a constant irreversable progression and nothing stays constant forever(although there are some exceptions)the cycle of coming to be, progress, change, for most all animate things ends in change. be that death, a re-orginization of atoms ect. im no bilogist/physicist. but i think that is kind of what you were getting at with the scientific realism(certainly the least profound/ most grounded in immediate facts. kind of fucking boring though.

[Trevor_W]

i consider the absolute extremety of what can be considered myself as a a mind body sunday, the worlds the bowl. so. i agree with the embodied realism. i think my perception of the external world is experianced through my bodily organs. the image,smell,taste,sound,feel of the world is a product of my body/sense organs coming into contact/range/focus of external objects which exhist wheter or not i am percieving them.(exist independent of my percpetion of them) in my life(the progress through experiance) i form beliefs, remember specific/particular events and the effects the events have on myself/environment with my memory. my memory is quite obviously limited(where the fuck did i put those keys) but that said, my memory can be jogged if you will.
experiance fades to new experiance and i progress through life remembering what i deem most important/necessary. Without memory life is a meaningless string of experiance, as the present moment is a constant irreversable progression and nothing stays constant forever(although there are some exceptions)the cycle of coming to be, progress, change, for most all animate things ends in change. be that death, a re-orginization of atoms ect. im no bilogist/physicist. but i think that is kind of what you were getting at with the scientific realism(kind of boring an common sense though.

[coberst]

Neural Modeling

Cognitive science has radically attacked the traditional Western philosophical position that there is a dichotomy between perception and conception. This traditional view that perception is strictly a faculty of body and conception (the formation and use of concepts) is purely mental and wholly separate from and independent of our ability to perceive and move.

Cognitive science has introduced revolutionary theories that, if true, will change dramatically the views of Western philosophy. Advocates of the traditional view will, of course, “say that conceptual structure must have a neural realization in the brain, which just happens to reside in a body. But they deny that anything about the body is essential for characterizing what concepts are.”

The cognitive science claim is that “the very properties of concepts are created as a result of the way the brain and body are structured and the way they function in interpersonal relations and in the physical world.”

The embodied-mind hypothesis therefore radically undercuts the perception/conception distinction. In an embodied mind, it is conceivable that the same neural system engaged in perception (or in bodily movements) plays a central role in conception. Indeed, in recent neural modeling research, models of perceptual mechanisms and motor schemas can actually do conception work in language learning and in reasoning.

A standard technique for checking out new ideas is to create computer models of the idea and subject that model to simulated conditions to determine if the model behaves as does the reality. Such modeling techniques are used constantly in projecting behavior of meteorological parameters.

Neural computer models have shown that the types of operations required to perceive and move in space require the very same type of capability associated with reasoning. That is, neural models capable of doing all of the things that a body must be able to do when perceiving and moving can also perform the same kinds of actions associated with reasoning, i.e. inferring, categorizing, and conceiving.

Our understanding of biology indicates that the body has a marvelous ability to do as any handyman does, i.e. make do with what is at hand. The body would, it seems logical to assume, take these abilities that exist in all creatures that move and survive in space and with such fundamental capabilities reshape it through evolution to become what we now know as our ability to reason. The first budding of the reasoning ability exists in all creatures that function as perceiving, moving, surviving, creatures.

Cognitive science has, it seems to me, connected our ability to reason with our bodies in such away as to make sense out of connecting reason with our biological evolution in ways that Western philosophy has not done, as far as I know.

It seems to me that Western philosophical tradition as always tried to separate mind from body and in so doing has never been able to show how mind, as was conceived by this tradition, could be part of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Cognitive science now provides us with a comprehensible model for grounding all that we are both bodily and mentally into a unified whole that makes sense without all of the attempts to make mind as some kind of transcendent, mystical, reality unassociated with biology.

Quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh”

[Trevor_W]

@coberst

Neural Modeling

Cognitive science has radically attacked the traditional Western philosophical position that there is a dichotomy between perception and conception. This traditional view that perception is strictly a faculty of body and conception (the formation and use of concepts) is purely mental and wholly separate from and independent of our ability to perceive and move.

T.W(how can we attain information to use in forming concepts whtihout the sense organs?)(i read with my eyes, everything i experiance from birth to death is a direct result of my bodys interaction with its environment)(i don’t agree that conception is wholly seperate and independent of the body) (we can only concieve things related to our perception, because all of our information comes from the bodies interaction(perception forming)with its environment.)

Cognitive science has introduced revolutionary theories that, if true, will change dramatically the views of Western philosophy. Advocates of the traditional view will, of course, “say that conceptual structure must have a neural realization in the brain, which just happens to reside in a body. But they deny that anything about the body is essential for characterizing what concepts are.”

T.W (I’d agree that they are distinct in that each is a seperate faculty of the mind, but our faculty for conception is dependent on our faculty of perception for all of its information)

The cognitive science claim is that “the very properties of concepts are created as a result of the way the brain and body are structured and the way they function in interpersonal relations and in the physical world.”

(T.W - Language definately plays a role in concept forming, specifically plan making, decision making, reasoning)(i compare reasoning with a conversation with ones self, your mind forms beliefs which are stored in the memory, some people have a better memory, just like some people have better reaction time ect.)(there are obviously 2 types of skill sets that humans possess physical and mental, or practical and theoretical )

The embodied-mind hypothesis therefore radically undercuts the perception/conception distinction. In an embodied mind, it is conceivable that the same neural system engaged in perception (or in bodily movements) plays a central role in conception. Indeed, in recent neural modeling research, models of perceptual mechanisms and motor schemas can actually do conception work in language learning and in reasoning.

TW (our awareness is a direct result of our sense organs, eyes see, tissue
feels, tounge tastes ect. we percieve the world through our senses and the collective sensation produced by all of our(working) senses form our perceptions. a blind person has a different perception of the world than someone who can see. that said a blind person can still form concepts, writet music, and live a more or less regular life. being blind doesn’t completely shut off the mind) so obviously there are multiple seperate and distinct capacities of the mind.)

A standard technique for checking out new ideas is to create computer models of the idea and subject that model to simulated conditions to determine if the model behaves as does the reality. Such modeling techniques are used constantly in projecting behavior of meteorological parameters.

TW (i heard there was a computer designed that can simulate the collision of two black holes)(technology amazez me sometimes)

Neural computer models have shown that the types of operations required to perceive and move in space require the very same type of capability associated with reasoning. That is, neural models capable of doing all of the things that a body must be able to do when perceiving and moving can also perform the same kinds of actions associated with reasoning, i.e. inferring, categorizing, and conceiving.

(did you ever walk and chew gum while listening to music?or dance?)

Our understanding of biology indicates that the body has a marvelous ability to do as any handyman does, i.e. make do with what is at hand. The body would, it seems logical to assume, take these abilities that exist in all creatures that move and survive in space and with such fundamental capabilities reshape it through evolution to become what we now know as our ability to reason. The first budding of the reasoning ability exists in all creatures that function as perceiving, moving, surviving, creatures.

TW(were walking talking animals, we are just a bit deeper)(we can reason
more complex scenarios)

Cognitive science has, it seems to me, connected our ability to reason with our bodies in such away as to make sense out of connecting reason with our biological evolution in ways that Western philosophy has not done, as far as I know.

It seems to me that Western philosophical tradition as always tried to separate mind from body and in so doing has never been able to show how mind, as was conceived by this tradition, could be part of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Cognitive science now provides us with a comprehensible model for grounding all that we are both bodily and mentally into a unified whole that makes sense without all of the attempts to make mind as some kind of transcendent, mystical, reality unassociated with biology.

T.W (would you say our language skill accelerated our learning curve?)

Quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh”