[MD] Social level for humans only

[MarshaV]

On Aug 21, 2010, at 2:55 PM, Krimel wrote:

> [Marsha]
> An analogy of what you're requesting might be like asking someone to explain
> Quantum entanglement using Newtonian proofs.  Of course dmb's trying to
> explain the MoQ using James texts is just as ridiculous.  
> 
> [Krimel]
> I like James' distinction between percepts and concept. His treatment of
> them in Some Problems... is very good and worth your attention. But yeah, at
> some point it is time to move on. Many of the concepts that inform my
> understanding the MoQ didn't exist during James' time. 


Marsha:
Maybe James had some insights, but I hope you have not missed the paper I
posted the other day.  It is very modern and up-to-date (2004):

        Sensory Cognition

It is prosaic, perhaps even tautological, to note that knowledge depends upon a means of knowledge. We can only perceive what our organs and faculties enable us to perceive, and this in turn depends upon the kind of stimuli their physical structures are capable of responding to. This is what a “correlative object” means: a “visible object” is precisely that which can impinge upon the visual organ and elicit visual awareness. This appears to invert the usual roles of subject and object, though, because now it is not the objects that determine the form of sensory awareness, but rather the sensory capacities that determine the “object,” that determine what kind of phenomena

can even become a cognitive object.17 Human eyes, for example, do not respond to ultra-violet or infra-red light, nor can most of us hear a dog whistle; we are blind and deaf to what other species can see and hear. In this fashion, just as our analysis of color perception undermines our sense that colors truly exist “out there,” so too does an analysis of sensory awareness undermine the sense that we experience objects “out there.” This merits further discussion.

According to many analyses, sense organs only function when the stimuli impinging upon them reach a certain threshold, triggering impulses in the receptor neurons that, via various mediating processes, register in the cortex.18 When sufficiently strong, these result in a form of perceptual awareness. A number of implications follow from this simple process. First, the entire process is temporal; it is an event. By definition, a stimulus is something that evokes a change in the sense organ,19 distinguishing it from its preceding state. And second, whatever stimulus leads to perceptual awareness is necessarily distinguished from its surrounding context. We do not, for example, normally notice subtle stimuli like the quick flicker of a fluorescent light or ambient stimuli like the steady hum of a fan since they are either too rapid or too regular to trigger our awareness—until there is a change. We only notice it when the hum stops. Similarly, if everything in our visual field were completely white (or completely black) nothing would be distinguishable from anything else and we would be effectively blinded, as in the blizzard condition called a “white-out.” The arising of perceptual awareness thus depends upon the effervescent contrasts, the shifting temporal and contextual distinctions that disjunctively constitute stimuli, not upon some solitary stimulus existing in splendid isolation.

It appears then that the objects of our sense organs are not really objects at all; they only appear to be. This is tellingly illustrated in experiments tracing people’s eyes as they scan a photograph. The eyes do not dwell on the “objects” in the picture, but follow their outlines, where the greatest contrasts lie. As Gregory Bateson (1979, 107) explains, “the end organs [of sense] are thus in continual receipt of events that correspond to outlines in the visible world. We draw distinctions; that is, we pull them out. Those distinctions that remain undrawn are not.” This then suggests a third point: that our everyday awareness of the world, what we see and hear and touch and smell, critically depends upon the distinctions our sense faculties are capable of “drawing”—indeed, the world ordinarily only appears in the forms they draw.

In this sense, cognitive awareness is both categorical and constructive. First, the receptor neurons of the sense organs, according to cognitive scientist, Christine Skarda (1999, 85), are “stimulus-specific in terms of their response characteristics. Each responds maximally (i.e. with a burst of intense electrical activity) to a specific type or class of stimuli,” such as certain wavelengths or intensities of light, temperature, sound, etc. Even putatively “pure sensations” depend upon the elementary schemas that constitute the responsive structure of the sense organs. This initial process, however, only yields isolated neurological signals that at this stage do not yet amount to identifiable objects or characteristics.20

...    
 
http://www.gampoabbey.org/translations2/Co-arising%20of%20SOWS-Waldron.pdf   
 
 
 

 
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