andrewducker | Things so horrible you never want to be in the situation to find them out #167

depends, i think our reaction to it says something about our own psychic ecomomy. I look at Klein and think, yep, sounds about right, but thats because i know that part of me is all about the body and the fluids and the envy and the filth. If you fancy yourself a bit more rarified and narrative then go for Jung, if you fancy yourself as a creature eterenally alientated from itself by the monstrous imposition of language, go to Lacan (or Zizek) etc.

It's like different people reaction to their own shit.

I mostly fancy myself a monkey that tells stories. Who do I get?

me

Well that's handy - at least you live in the same city, and aren't dead. Makes things a lot easier.

Terry Pratchett?

(and a few popular science authors whose names escape me right now Damiaso?)

You are REALLY quite attached to this concept, aren't you? :-)

Ian Stewart/Jack Cohen.

that's the chaps. Ian Stewart is the quite numerical one, IIRC

but after a bracing session of CBT, I'd send you back to a Lacanian (or get you to read Zizek) because I think you are a little blithe about the story telling and the metaphors, about quite how irredeemably perverted by language we are.

quite how irredeemably perverted by language we are.

Something I am thinking about again at the moment actually (in my own, brute-force kind of way).

You can end up right up your own arse (he heh) with considering language though. That's a philosopher's job :-) I'm a scientist, gimme repeatable results :-) (which I am aware there are, and have read up on a few more really fascinating effects recently...)

(which I am aware there are, and have read up on a few more really fascinating effects recently...)

go on, share, or at least point...

I'd have to go and reference-comb/spend some time hunting stuff down. Some is quite old, some I only vaugely recall - a couple of bits I know are mentioned in a book that's under my bed, so that'll be easy.

Stuff like reading/hearing/watching sexist/racist material affecting results of intelligence tests, Association tests (you now is this word 'X or negative', Y or positive' where X and Y have sterotypical associations - now try it vice versa and watch the reaction times skyrocket, can be done with all sorts of categories) differences in perception of the same thing between people who speak different languages which vary in their descriptive range/power/variety. People walking slower down the corridor after a seemingly random word test that sprinkled terms associated with being old...

And I really wonder about deaf people in the days before and after widespread literacy/teaching of sign language...

Might be a mission for me. Not to sure I have the time, though...

There ya go, using language to pervert things. You could have said "how irrecovably changed by language" - which would have been more value neutral, but instead you're treating language as the bad guy, perverting us from our pre-Fall goodness, turning our natural Noble Savage into a corrupted Industrial Monster.

Which, I thought, was an interesting choice of words.

Oh, and I agree that Lacan should be read, because we should understand our environment, and a vast amount of our modern environment is language and other constructed signals. But I think the best response is to refuse to take these signals too seriously. I generally think that pure rebellion is an infantile response, treating the world in a black/white manner, and allowing the thing rebelled against control over your actions (albeit in an oppositional way).

"generally think that pure rebellion is an infantile response, treating the world in a black/white manner, and allowing the thing rebelled against control over your actions (albeit in an oppositional way)."

I agree, rebellion is actually not possible. the fundamental insight of Lacan, Zizek et al is that "the thing" (in your sentence above) is acutally inscribed at the heart of subjectivity, that the "language and constucted signals" far from being mere contingent externals are also the constitutive bases of our "I". As such, language is a kind uncanny possession, It speaks us.

Or, as the deconstuctionists would have it, there is nothing outside the text. There is no external place from which to rebel, no escaping the prison house of language.

Interestingly you find almost the same argument in cognitive science, very well articulated by Dennett and Andy Clarke, and Dennett takes the metaphor even further and happily talks about our being forcibly parastised by language. And of course you have the real piss poor lego version of it in Richard "memes" Dawkins.

rarely do you get such convergence of opinion from such disparate intellectual traditions. They all point to the fact that language is not an add on, we are not just Monkeys+. Language founds subjectivity and forms the site of Being.

I, of course, disagree.

There's the Zen Escape, by which we escape from language into the realm of pure experience.

The problem with pure experience, of course, is that you can't talk about it, think about it, or otherwise process it. It merely 'is' - any attempt to do more than that with it stops it being pure experience and brings it into the realm of abstractions, patterns, models and other things that are mere shadows and metaphors for reality.

oooh, the boys are being clever kittens today :-)

actually, after concentrating enough to read this properly, I think the only pre linguistic experience I've ever had was that first time on magic mushrooms. I've always assumed my I was what I said or thought now what I was. Did I even exist before i learnt to read? i have precious little subjective evidence of it. I think cos if I don't I am nothing.

Well, consciousness seems to rely on the same abstraction level as language, so if you can't talk about something you almost certainly can't think about it - we need to find the edges on things to be able to comprehend them (cf the way that religious experiences/alien abductions/etc are interpreted in varying different ways).

But you have non-linguistic experiences all the time, you just aren't conscious of them. When you're driving along, in a flow state, and arrive at work with no real idea of what happened between leaving home and arriving at the office - that's you so wrapped up in non-linguistic experience that you have no conscious experience of the situation. It's possible to do this with almost any task that's become so internalised that you no longer have to think about it to do it - which is why buddhist monasteries set monks to simple tasks (well, one of the reasons) - keeping the body occupied and the mind free can act as a kind of meditation.

I zone out at work fairly frequently, and 'come to' to find that I have an understanding of how to make something work, with no real idea of where the answer came from. It's a terribly handy knack to have, letting your unconscious do all the work :->

hear hear.

I'm all for pure experience, a very big fan of it in fact...

... but I can't help analysing or at least trying to distill down and record (mentally or otherwise) *something* that might remind at least me of at least a little bit of how it was.

not very Zen then, really :-)

But abstractions can, of course, be useful - in the right place for the right purpose. Witness that some people in this thread can effectively shortcut explanations to each other because they have read the same things, can put names to the philosophies/theories etc. which serve as pointers to a whole ream of background.

Whereas brute-force, ill-read boors like me just crash in without regard for the proper jargon, hammering general-purpose language to try to express the same concepts, and gleaning the overall sense :-)

now who's going in for pre-lapsarian fantasy? Pure experience indeed! You can no more have a pre-lingusitic pure experience than you can see with your eyeballs removed. The very opening of the world as experience is predicated on a subjectivity that is predicated on language. For sure you can clear your mind of extraneous clutter, but you can't (except a bullet to your skull) unpick the conditions that give rise to experience in the first place.

Experience is always mediated. I'm sorry but thats just philosophy/psychology 101. The notion of direct access to experience without the mediation of representation went out with Kant.

Experience is always mediated

Agreed.

But it goes like this:
Actual Event -> sensory organs -> unconscious experience -> language/abstraction processing -> conscious experience

I was talking about unconscious experience, the first level of what hits you, before the conscious mind breaks it apart.

Otherwise you're arguing that (non-primate) animals can't experience things, which is obviously complete nonsense.

But yes, coffee is good - I believe I'm seeing you on Saturday for V.

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andrewducker - 2006-03-17 16:48 (UTC) - Expand

plus see Dennett quote in response to chanelpenguin below. We really should do this over coffee. Having a debate over text is like trying to arrange a meeting by SMS, it takes 10 times as long as just speaking...

Oh, and see response just above to the liminal one.

Which Dennett book is that?

I'll agree that the agreement between such 'camps' is unusual.

[I have my own opinions on any thinking about humans that doesn't take overwhelmingly strong account of us as an animal like any other. A lot of certain intellectual traditions come to what seem to me to be very implausible conclusions given even a smattering of biological knowledge, and jump through incredible hoops to explain things that are quite simple in their roots. And I think that has been very damaging in all sorts of ways. But I'm well aware that I'm not equipped to even get started on that, so I won't...]

which dennet, most of them, but heres a bit i like this from freedom evolves, brief intro from me...

In a few species there are hints of another medium of transmission of information. In some primates, for example, there is rudimentary transmission of simple tool use through observation and imitation. This cultural or horizontal transmission (as opposed to the vertical descent of genetic information) is a very minor part of each generations inheritance. Except...

“... there is one species, Homo Sapiens, that has made cultural transmission its information superhighway, generating great ramifying families of families of families of cultural entities, and transforming it’s members by the culturally transmitted habit of vigorously installing as much culture as possible in the young, as soon as they can absorb it. This innovation in horizontal transmission is so revolutionary that the primates that are it’s hosts deserve a new name....[but] we could use the vernacular and call them persons. A person is a hominid with an infected brain, host to millions of cultural symbionts, and the chief enablers of these are the symbiont systems known as languages.” (Dennett 2003)