The Source of Human Reason?

[coberst]

The Source of Human Reason?

All of our acts and thoughts are based upon philosophical assumptions. Metaphysics is a fancy word for our concern about ‘what is real’. For example, whenever we think or speak about responsibility we are assuming causality. Without causality there is no responsibility. The nature and status of the self is another speculation, and an important one, in most decisions we make daily.

Politics is about forming perceived reality in accordance with points of view. In America we have two parties and each party attempts to move the electorate to perceive that party’s point of view is better than the other’s point of view.

We rely on our unconscious to furnish the building blocks for comprehension of reality. If we examine the cognitive sciences and the human sciences we see a constant emphasis about the unconscious. It is through our conceptual systems, which are unconscious, that we make sense of our every day existence and our everyday metaphysics exists within our conceptual system.

It appears to me that cognitive science has two paradigms; symbolic manipulation, which is also called AI (Artificial Intelligence) and the second paradigm, which might be called ‘conceptual metaphor’, or it might be called ‘embodied mind’, or ‘embodied realism’.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) research began shortly after WWII. Alan Turing was one of the important figures who decided that their efforts would not be focused on building machines but in programming computers.

The new potential paradigm for cognitive science has given us evolution-based realism. This is also called embodied-realism because it has abandoned the mind/body dichotomy that characterizes other forms of realism and is convinced that natural selection is the process by which the human species has developed.

Cognitive science studies our conceptual systems. Cognitive science has, since the 1970s, amassed a great deal of empirical evidence to conclude that most of our conceptual activities fly below our conscious radar. Our unconscious, which contains our stealth conceptual system, has been ignored by our Western philosophical tradition, thereby leading us astray in matters of great importance.

The ‘cognitive’ in cognitive science is used “for any kind of mental operation or structure that can be studied in precise terms. Most of these structures and operations have been found to be unconscious.” Visual and auditory processing--memory and attention--all aspects of thought and language--mental imagery--emotions and conceptual aspects of motor operations--and neural modeling of cognitive operation; all of these are part of the science known as cognitive science.

“Most of what we [SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science)] will be calling cognitive unconscious is thus for many philosophers not considered cognitive at all.” Cognitive for many philosophers’ means that which has truth-conditional meaning, “that is, meaning defined not internally in the mind or body, but by reference to things in the external world.”

This branch of cognitive science, “because our conceptual systems and our reason arise from our bodies, will also use the term cognitive for aspects of our sensorimotor system that contribute to our abilities to conceptualize and to reason. Since cognitive operations are largely unconscious, the term cognitive unconscious accurately describes all unconscious mental operations concerned with conceptual systems, meaning, inference, and language.”

The ‘bible’ for embodied-realism is “Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson. The paradigm of this cognitive science is ‘conceptual metaphor’. The fundamental findings from which all principles flow are:
• The mind is inherently embodied.
• Thought is mostly unconscious.
• Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

Let us imagine how human reason might have been born. The question seeking an answer is: how can natural selection (evolution) account for human reason?

Somewhere back in time we must encounter the signs of reason within the capacity of our ancestors. What is the essence of reason? The necessary and sufficient conditions for reason are conceptual and inference ability. To conceptualize is to create neural structures that can be used to facilitate making if-then inferences.

Imagine an early water dwelling creature, which must survive utilizing only the ability to move in space and to discriminate light and shadow. The sense of a shadow can indicate a friend or foe and can indicate eat or not eat. Assume that this sensibility has a total range of two feet, i.e. a shadow within a radius of two feet of the creature can be detected.

A shadow comes within sensible range, the creature can ‘decide’ by the size of the shadow whether the shadow is friend or foe and as a possible lunch. If the shadow is large the creature must ‘run’ if it is small the creature might ‘decide’ to pursue.

It seems obvious to me this simple creature must have the ability to reason in order to survive. This creature must be capable of ascertaining friend/foe and eat/not eat. It must also determine how to move based upon that conceptual structure. It must be able to make inferences from these concepts, these neural structures of what is sensed, to survive. This creature must have the capacity to perceive, conceive, infer, and move correctly in space in order to survive.

Continuing my imaginary journey; I have a friend who is the project engineer on a program to design robots. I ask this friend if it is possible for the computer model of a robot in action can perform the essential operations required for reasoning. She says, “I think so, but I will ask my robot simulation to do the things that are considered to be reasoning”.

She performs this operation and tells me that it is within the capacity of the robot movement system to also do reasoning. I conclude that if the sensorimotor control system of a creature also has the ability to reason, then biology would not recreate such a capacity and thus this sensorimotor capacity is also a reasoning capacity that evolves into our human capacity to reason.

Quotes from Philosophy in the Flesh by Lakoff and Johnson

Does this imaginary journey compel you to shout with joy at discovering the source of human reason?

[0=2]

Grats. Robots can reason, by human standards, which would mean something if we were reasonable, or if reason wasn't cosmic treason.

If a robot acts as what we consider "reasonable" that does not mean it fathomed this "reasonability" for itself. The "reason" why we fathomed logical procession, why we sought to relay our own properties onto the world around us, it the root of the... "problem".

That's the question, and though I have no "reason" to answer it with this short but sweet note, I will do so anyways, because "reason" hardly follows itself, unless to its own shallow grave.

The macrocosm is the microcosm and htere is one movement, one universal pulse htta creates all movement, all creation. The natural law of existence becomes sex, interaction between existing item and existing item creates an existing situation... and it all multiplies.

We follow this, the universe was dark, and hardly a universe, until the nothingness became self-conscious. This did not take place in and of time and therefore is always.. this moment the universe is reborn as it faces hte constant struggle of self-realization and rebirth. This asexual reproduction is how our conscious works, biomes of thought within biomes culture... it just keeps building.

Cause this moment is forever and bla bla bla New Age bandwagon.

[blp]

Does this imaginary journey compel you to shout with joy at discovering the source of human reason?

Well, not exactly, but it's very interesting. Thanks for such a long and detailed exposition.

Just a small quibble with this:



Our unconscious, which contains our stealth conceptual system, has been ignored by our Western philosophical tradition, thereby leading us astray in matters of great importance.

While it may have taken until the twentieth century for philosophy to begin to actively theorise the unconscious, it seems to me you can read a great deal of it throughout its history as being concerned with it in, specifically in being concerned with wondering how we know what we know. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, for instance, perpetually confronts the reader with this question in its attempt to map a complex conceptual system with an imputed universality to human consciousness. It's not telling us how things should be, it's telling us how things are, at least allegedly, in all our minds, and this is what makes it such a strange reading experience, simultaneously irritatingly pedantic, seemingly superfluous in detailing, so exhaustively, what appears to be perfectly obvious, and maddeningly, arrogantly presumptuous in laying out a system that actually seems to have no empirical basis of evidence.

A lot of what follows looks like an attempt to explain this. Lots of false starts and dead ends perhaps, but the psychological effect remains of having something at least partially explained to one that somehow feels as if it's not supposed to be explained - as indeed, it would almost seem from what you write, it's not, in that evolution's designed us to attain mastery of profoundly complex systems such as language, perception and motor functions (and their interrelations) without being constantly aware of them.

[coberst]

blp

I think that SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) shows us that most of what we have believed about cognition is in error.

[blp]

blp

I think that SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) shows us that most of what we have believed about cognition is in error.

Not quite sure how this relates to what I said, partly, perhaps, because I don't know anything about this subject. What I was trying to get at was the idea that the unconscious is something already implicit in philosophy long before it's actually identified by it.

[blp]

Our unconscious, which contains our stealth conceptual system, has been ignored by our Western philosophical tradition, thereby leading us astray in matters of great importance.

Which matters and how have we been led astray?

[coberst]

Which matters and how have we been led astray?

Most Thought is NOT in Linguistic Form

Mammals evolved on this planet about 200 million years ago. One type of mammal, the hominid, began using audible signals to convey meaning about 4 million years ago. Language, as we comprehend that word, began much less than 4 million years ago.

What is thought? The dictionary gives us various definitions of thought; I would guess that it is accurate to say that the actions of neural networks that control our sensorimotor actions can be regarded as thought. In other words, such things as memory, control of movements, and processing of sense inputs are all a process of thinking. Thinking produces thoughts. Thinking goes on all the time even while we sleep.

I guess that we will agree that all mammals had to have the ability to think. This leads to the conclusion that thinking was been happening on this planet at least 200 million years before human language existed on this planet.

Those individuals who accept the science of evolution must then conclude that humans may think in linguistic forms some small percentage of the time but that most thought is not in linguistic form.

“It is the rule of thumb among cognitive scientists that unconscious thought is 95 percent of all thought—and that may be a serious underestimates.”

What does all this mean to you? It means that most of the things that you think are true about thinking are pure non-sense. This also applies to many of the things we all believe that are based upon the philosophical attitudes that fills our life are likewise pure non-sense.

How can we overcome this avalanche of pure nonsense that we learn from our culture via social osmosis?

Quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh”—Lakoff and Johnson

[blp]

Most Thought is NOT in Linguistic Form

Mammals evolved on this planet about 200 million years ago. One type of mammal, the hominid, began using audible signals to convey meaning about 4 million years ago. Language, as we comprehend that word, began much less than 4 million years ago.

What is thought? The dictionary gives us various definitions of thought; I would guess that it is accurate to say that the actions of neural networks that control our sensorimotor actions can be regarded as thought. In other words, such things as memory, control of movements, and processing of sense inputs are all a process of thinking. Thinking produces thoughts. Thinking goes on all the time even while we sleep.

I guess that we will agree that all mammals had to have the ability to think. This leads to the conclusion that thinking was been happening on this planet at least 200 million years before human language existed on this planet.

Those individuals who accept the science of evolution must then conclude that humans may think in linguistic forms some small percentage of the time but that most thought is not in linguistic form.

“It is the rule of thumb among cognitive scientists that unconscious thought is 95 percent of all thought—and that may be a serious underestimates.”

What does all this mean to you? It means that most of the things that you think are true about thinking are pure non-sense. This also applies to many of the things we all believe that are based upon the philosophical attitudes that fills our life are likewise pure non-sense.

How can we overcome this avalanche of pure nonsense that we learn from our culture via social osmosis?

Quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh”—Lakoff and Johnson

I still don't see the problem.

What my badly expressed quibble, above, was with was the implication that the entire history of trying to understand thought had been a dead-end with no value at all until second generation cognitive science. Fine, some very large percentage of thought is unconscious - more than was previously believed. What are the implications of that? Specifically?

What exactly are you saying is nonsense? How does scientists have, until now, not really understood the nature of cognition translate to an 'avalanche of pure nonsnese that we learn from our culture via social osmosis'? What is the nonsense and what's creating it?

What I was trying to say above was that two-thousand year old philosophy already gives us an inkling of this discovery by attempting to bring to consciousness what is unconscious. This tendency might be said to reach fruition with Freud, whose talking cure was based on precisely this strategy. Looked at this way, the avalanche of nonsense is in our unconscious thoughts and must be brought into the light and decoded by conscious thought to give the troubled consciousness peace.

None of this need be seen to conflict with the discovery you're talking about. Essentially all it amounts to is saying that the unconscious is an animal's way of thinking - precisely, thinking without awareness of thought, merely to fulfill necessary functions. What is say, 95% for humans, is 100% for an animal. So we have this other 5%, conscious thought, which seems to be largely dependent on language and has generally been seen as an advantage. I think it is. Look:

Both humans and relatively sentient animals such as dogs learn by experience. Put your hand on a hot stove and you learn never to do it again. Ring a bell at a dog's dinner time and it learns to salivate just at the ringing of a bell. The trouble is, as the latter example shows, some of the things we learn unconsciously actually make no sense: Mommy was mean to me so now I hate all women, say, to give an ultra-Freudian example. Both animals and humans are susceptible to these nonsensical unconscious learnings. The advantage we have is that language gives us a way of understanding and overcoming our unconscious Pavlovian responses.

[coberst]

blp

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.”

“That is to say that the sensorimotor system in the human body can perform the functions required to conceptualize and, infer from those conceptions, in a manner required by human cognition. The logical assumption is that these self same sensorimotor neural networks are the networks the body uses to conceptualize during cognition.”

Human reason is an extension of animal reason. The sensorimotor system in the human body can perform the functions required to conceptualize and to infer, i.e. the system controlling bodily movements and perception are theorized to be the same that is used for reasoning and that much of what we thing comes from the unconscious. That which comes from the unconscious has been conceptualized based upon our bodily interaction with the world. We have an embodied mind and the failure to recognize that fact is the primary difference

[coberst]

blp

These matters are complex and cannot be understood by reading a few paragraphs on the Internet. I write about these matters in the hope that the reader will become curious enough to go to the books. What I would like for you to do is to go to a local college library and read a bit of this book that I reference and hopefully you will find it to be interesting enough that you will get a "Friends of the Library" card so that you can check out the book and spend the next 6 months studying it. It will be well worth the effort.

[Jason Lycurgus]

Is this a branch of naturalized philosophy?

It seems pretty interesting, I'll have to check that book out when (IF!?) I get some free time.

Thanks for the threads coberst; these are all pretty interesting.

[coberst]

Is this a branch of naturalized philosophy?

It seems pretty interesting, I'll have to check that book out when (IF!?) I get some free time.

Thanks for the threads coberst; these are all pretty interesting.

It is cognitive science.

[Lust Hogg]

Coberst i am having trouble understanding what you mean by unconscious. Are you positing that there is an entire domain of unexplored territory which lies outside of the scope of modern psychology? Well i kind of agree if thats what you mean. But, this all depends on what you mean by unconscious. you seem to suggest that is that which you are not directly aware of at any given time. I am currently conscious of the fact that i am pressing keys in which i perceive to be some coherent form on some blinking screen. I am not conscious of my first math test i took, but i suppose i could be if i was to reawaken by conscious memory of it.
You mentioned that you studied philosophy in the past. I am sure you aware of the problem of meaning especially, when you have mentioned three different disciplines in your above posts (Psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy) all three use what seem to be superficially, similar terminology, but most of the time there are huge disparities in meaning. Sometimes the genesis of conflict opinion is an ambiguity in meaning, it would be irresponsible and ignorant of me to criticize your argument without properly understanding what you mean.

[NikolaiI]

This is really fascinating, coberst, I wish I had the time to give it the critical study it deserves. Thank you very much for your contributions to our philosophy forum!

I agree that thought is mostly unconscious... I haven't studied all the philosophers so I don't know their theories but one reason I would give for this is an analogy to an iceberg; the majority is underwater.

I am very interested in consciousness, and I am thinking about it almost all the time. I specifically try to understand states of consciousness; in my view everything we can perceive must affect our consciousness in some way; and yet also our consciousness has an effect on the environment we live in as well. It's natural, since it is our consciousness which defines our actions, thoughts, etc., which also have their effect. In fact there is a continuous flux between ourselves, inner, mental, physical states and activites; as with the external environment.

What is the source of human reason? I might venture to say it is an observation of natural phenmena, gradually evolved. Ramana Maharshi, who was a mystic, taught - well he taught by silence, but when he used words to explain what he meant, he taught to meditate on the self, and the question of "Who am I?" and to be absorbed in this. Because the only answer to the question is that we are not static but dynamic, along with our dynamic world. And we can't use static valuations to describe a dynamic "thing" such a the self, which is no more static than a whirlpool, a twister, or a sun.


- on a similar but slightly different note; have you ever heard of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother? Aurobindo wrote pretty extensively on various topics such as states of consciousness. Don't forget that there are different forces within us such as the vital, the mental, the submenetal, the supermental... or this might be just theory but it seems pretty solid to me. Aurobindo said that life was an evolution toward a perfection of Spirit. Generally we may have some difficulty in life, the main cause of this is probably working against ourselves. Setting out some plan (possible an unconscious intention or formation, etc) which is very good!- but then working against it with some kind of negative hindrance, which would sort of nullify our progress. But if we could work in one positive direction wholly, then we could align all our forces, mental, phyiscal, vital, submental; all of them and have them in alignment with the super-mental, as Aurobindo says, the Mind of Light, etc..

For instance consider the Hindu way of understanding the self; our most obvious interaction with the world is through our senses, but then we also have valuations of the senses (good bad, pleasant or unpleasant), and then we have feelings, emotions, thoughts, concepts... I am mixing Buddhist and Hindu a bit here... Buddhist says we are consciousness, Hindu says the same thing but says we are soul. So a central question to me is about the soul. I believe the soul exists, that we are the soul, and so the soul is the source of reason. The soul supercedes reason, because the soul is part of the spiritual world, which is completely transcendental... If we were to work in harmony with the laws of the soul, a great many of our sufferings would go away. Atheists like to parade rationalism as a way to go against faith, but in my understanding; whether we are a soul or not a soul, there is something more to us than senses; and so we cannot be satisfied by merely satisfying our senses; and yet that is what our entire society is geared towards. ( maybe not the whole thing, but a preponderous mis-proportion of effort and energy is spent toward satisfying the senses, which often leaves us unsatisfied.) This reminds me of something I saw by some Kabbalists (Kabbalah.com) - they said that we are at a unique state in human history, and this is the prime point for people to come to curiosity and eventually spiritual knowledge. Why? Because all our other forces are taken care of, all our other needs: the most basic, physical requirements, then social, emotional, etc., then we have a wide amount of scientific knowledge, but none of this satisfies our search completely. Many people agree on this, that mere science does not solve our quest for meaning, peace, truth, etc. One might say Love is merely chemicals reacting, but what is the point of this? I would never say this. There is no less mystery because we have learned the fact that our brain has billions and billions of neurons, and billions and billions of cells! :)

[blp]

blp
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.

You 'suspect' this? Don't you think you should actually check wither it is before you start making assumptions about how misguided it all is?

[blp]

blp

These matters are complex and cannot be understood by reading a few paragraphs on the Internet. I write about these matters in the hope that the reader will become curious enough to go to the books. What I would like for you to do is to go to a local college library and read a bit of this book that I reference and hopefully you will find it to be interesting enough that you will get a "Friends of the Library" card so that you can check out the book and spend the next 6 months studying it. It will be well worth the effort.

Sorry, I'm too busy checking whether Kant and the rest of the philosophers and psychologists did their best to insist, whenever possible, on the separateness of humans from all other species. Nothing so far, but I'll let you know if anything turns up.