"Embodied Cognition" -- empirio-criticism rides again

An article in Scientific American on "Embodied Cognition" prompted a commenter to declare: "The phrase "embodied simulation" is confusing." I agreed and added the following comment as a rider to a previous comment I made referring to Lenin's book on empirio-criticism:

jayjacobus is right about the confusion. There's an interplay between reality and perception of it, and perception itself is a reality, so we have perceptions of perception. It's like consciousness and self-consciousness, and this relationship has been a central problem for philosophy. One of the most primitive responses has been to invent a previous cause, and stop the infinite regression by calling some given cause final or ultimate or prime or whatever. This "embodied simulation" nonsense is the same kind of thing - what it doesn't do is answer the question of reality, ie what is being simulated.
This is a philosophical perpetuum mobile that pretends it isn't. 
Now Kant was smart, so he stopped his infinite regression pain by claiming that the ultimate ground for everything was ultimately unknowable, which was the agnostic thing to do. Hegel was smarter but far less diplomatic, and said "look, reality and our perception of it is full of contradictions, live with it", and moved beyond Kant, opening the way for Marx to move beyond the whole supernatural 'perception/consciousness/thought first' approach. 
For empirical beings, we are very attached to abstract ideas. The reason is simple - we process continuous empirical reality including ourselves using discrete abstract reflections of it in thought. So if you want to call this processing 'simulation', be my guest. Ditto if you want to be empirical by calling it 'embodied'. Well done. Which leaves us as bodies that think. Square one.
Moving in a world of discrete, abstract reflection our mirror minds naturally assume everything is discrete and abstract as soon as it thinks about it, except that the basic presupposition for our survival in reality is concrete continuity. And since survival is opportunistic and iconoclastic, we survive in reality at the expense of broken intellectual dogma, icons and fetishes. 
This drama is entertainingly embodied for me in Lucretius's great Latin poem On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura), and in Hegel's two great works The Phenomenology of the Spirit and The Science of Logic. These are guaranteed pre-Marxist so clear of any ideological tarring and feathering that anything written after 1848 might risk. For a scientific mind they are immensely rewarding, and even a short dip is very invigorating!

A short reading list

On a discussion list DO wrote the following:

"The sapient brain continues to evolve, and teaching methods continue
to improve, but the underlying hypothesis of traditional liberalism
(John Locke & Voltaire), and of Marxism, that the human brain is a
blank slate or general-purpose computer waiting to be programmed or re-
programmed, is biologically preposterous."

And  I replied:

Locke and Voltaire might be liberals (traditional??) but they're not so much philosophers as popularizers. The blank slate thing is the hallmark of mechanical  materialists - empiricists like Hume and a lot of the enlightenment encyclopedians. It has NOTHING WHATEVER to do with Marx's ideas. Stalin's social-darwinism is related to it, of course, but that has NOTHING WHATEVER to do with Marx's ideas, either. D, I think you should take time off from reading folks like Lakoff and dig into the mother lode of modern ideas. For me this means the following short reading list.

Kant:                 Critique of Pure Reason

Hegel:                Phenomenology of the Spirit

                           Science of Logic

Marx:                The German Ideology - part 1, Feuerbach (including the Hegel section)

                           The Grundrisse 

Too skeletal? ;-)

Add before:   

Machiavelli:     The Prince

Hobbes:            Leviathan

Rousseau:        The Social Contract

Include:

Kant:                  Critiques of Practical Reason, and of Judgment

Marx/Engels:   The Communist Manifesto

Engels:               Anti-Dühring

Marx:                 Capital I-III and Theories of Surplus Value

Add afterwards:

Freud:             The Interpretation of Dreams

Lenin:              The State and Revolution

Trotsky:          The Permanent Revolution, and The Revolution Betrayed

Chomsky:       Cartesian Linguistics        

All of them (and the idea of  evolution which I haven't "crystallized" in a single book recommendation cos that shouldn't be necessary) are concerned with ripping away illusion, false appearances, and exposing the real elements and forces at work in our lives and our world. With the possible semi-empiricist exceptions of Hobbes, Rousseau and Kant. Kant in fact going too far the other way and declaring impossible the unveiling of the hidden depths of the Thing-in-Itself. The least empirical hard-nosed empiricist you can imagine :-)

For a light-hearted frame to all this, I'd recommend Lucretius On the Nature of Things 

"Sed tua me virtus tamen et sperata voluptas
Suavis amicitiae quemvis efferre laborem
Suadet et inducit noctes vigilare serenas
Quaerentem dictis quibus et quo carmine demum
Clara tuae possim praepandere lumina menti
Res quibus occultas penitus convisere possis.
Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest
Non radii solis neque lucida tela diei
Discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque." 

rounded off by Sartre's Critique de la Raison Dialectique.

The alternative? Being consigned in perpetuity to Intellectual Hell - a dim, draughty, library with hard, splintery, rickety chairs, flickering lamps, traffic noise, machines throbbing and whining at unpredictable frequencies and volumes, musty air, moaning twitching whimpering snivelling readers radiating chill not warmth, with inaccessible and scrapy loudspeakers pouring out Stephen Hawkings reading the collected works of Jacques Lacan. For ever.

Cheers

Chops

"Ethical" conundrums - philosophical rape?

Kenodoxia writes on choices:

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

More problems with trolley problems

It's surprising how many people are currently worried about what to do about runaway trolleys which threaten to run over a group of otherwise anonymous people. Hot on the heels of a study which seemed to show that sleep deprivation promoted consequentialist reactions to moral dilemmas comes a study which seems to indicate that patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VPMC) are similarly more likely to opt for promoting the 'greatest good for the greatest number' even in so-called 'Personal Moral Scenarios'. (I gave some examples of what these are in an earlier post.)

A report of the study (involving, it has to be said, only 30 subjects) appeared in brief on the New Scientist Website and it appears to use very similar scenarios to the sleep deprivation study. The New Scientist report makes some excessively grand claims about how these findings might offer a radical challenge to ethical philosophy, but there is probably something interesting going on.

I have no idea quite what the VPMC does, exactly, but I bet that it is more complicated than just being involved in 'the emotions'. Precisely what an emotion is, for a start, would be a good question to ask, and it certainly does not follow from this experiment that we need to go for any kind of dualist moral psychology, with on one side the rational calculating faculty and on the other the affective emotional faculty. True, when wondering whether to push someone on to a train line to prevent a greater loss of life further down the tracks, there are all sorts of considerations which we might take into account. Some are rightly concerned with the numbers of people involved in each alternative; others are to do with a personal feeling of responsibility; yet more are to do with fear or excitement or panic. In fact, there is a very good case for the view that all these scenarios seriously misrepresent what it would be like to face any such dilemma in reality. We certainly wouldn't be faced solely with a bare set of propositions, designed by the experimenter to point towards the single variable subject to the testing. Rather, it would be a complicated situation affected by all sorts of factors to do with one's current disposition, the way the surroundings are and are perceived and so on.

In short, scenarios like those touted by this kind of test seem to me not really to offer any significant information about ethical thinking 'in the wild'. While they are useful ways of illustrating particular ethical theoretical views, our reactions to them are hardly indicative of our likely behaviour. It is common, for example, for a student to tell me that they would 'obviously' choose to divert a trolley to kill one person rather than five. I have no idea whether that is true and, I imagine, nor do they. Are they really able to imagine what it would be like to be faced with such a situation? I can't.

People still interested in exploring this kind of thought-experiment might like to ponder the following teaser, by Michael F. Patton jr.:

On Twin Earth, a brain in a vat is at the wheel of a runaway trolley. There are only two options that the brain can take: the right side of the fork in the track or the left side of the fork. There is no way in sight of derailing or stopping the trolley and the brain is aware of this, for the brain knows trolleys. The brain is causally hooked up to the trolley such that the brain can determine the course which the trolley will take.

On the right side of the track there is a single railroad worker, Jones, who will definitely be killed if the brain steers the trolley to the right. If the railman on the right lives, he will go on to kill five men for the sake of killing them, but in doing so will inadvertently save the lives of thirty orphans (one of the five men he will kill is planning to destroy a bridge that the orphans' bus will be crossing later that night). One of the orphans that will be killed would have grown up to become a tyrant who would make good utilitarian men do bad things. Another of the orphans would grow up to become G.E.M. Anscombe, while a third would invent the pop-top can.

There's an explanation of the example here. There is a variation on the example here.

Posted by JIW at 9:35 AM

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Choppa's response:

Very briefly, I think the whole issue of "ethical" choices is weird and unreal. So many of us are removed from any opportunity of making real decisions in our lives, of the kind that leave a taste of blood in your mouth. No wonder adrenalin is sought as a substitute for blood that's more readily available - anger, cheating, humiliation, extreme display behaviour, substitute slaughter by proxy or fiction, etc.

The big social decisions, like mutiny vs conformity, are particularly repressed.

In the post-Alexander Greek world, Epicurus rejected Democritus's determinism for freedom at all levels of being - atomic to social interaction. But he remained locked in the subjective experience of the individual, with ataraxy, a cheerful tranquillity:

[...] sapias! vina liques et spatio breui
spem longam reseces. dum loquimur fugerit inuida
aetas. carpe diem! quam minimum credula postero.

as his goal - something for the happy enlightened few against a backdrop of war, slavery, disease, natural disasters, and (as in Horace's poem) the wintry pounding of the Tyrrhenian Sea on the sharp rocky shore. Lucretius, Roman that he was, had a more missionary, proselytizing, engineering approach than Epicurus, using fiery rhetoric as his instrument. But his social intension was concealed beneath his loyalty to his master regarding the goal of individual emancipation from the corrosive terror of ignorance and the superstitious bonds of organized religion.

So instead of foisting weird conundrums onto unprepared and unwilling objects - a kind of philosophical rape with little wisdom and less love - why not ask people if they have ever in their lives actually taken a real decision - life-changing, if not life-or-death? And then discussing it with them and comparing with the questioner's personal experience.