Our subjective mental life

We constantly make subjective judgments regarding abstract things, such as morality, difficulty, importance; we also have subjective experiences such as affection, desire, and achievement.

The manner in which we reason, and visualize about these matters comes from other domains of experience. “These other domains are mostly sensorimotor domains…as when we conceptualize understanding an idea (subjective experience) in terms of grasping an object (sensorimotor experience)…The cognitive mechanism for such conceptualizations is conceptual metaphor, which allows us to use the physical logic of grasping to reason about understanding.”

Metaphor is pervasive throughout thought and language. Primary metaphors might properly be considered to be the fundamental building blocks for our thinking and our communication through language.

The theory of primary metaphors has four parts:
1) Johnson’s theory of conflation—in the early years of childhood the sensorimotor experiences are often conflated with the subjective (nonsensorimotor) experiences and judgments. An example might be when a newborn experiences the warmth of the embrace by its mother and that literal experience becomes conflated with a later subjective experience of affection. That is why our feeling of affection is accompanied by a sense of warmth. “During the early period of conflation, associations are automatically built up between the two domains. Later, during a period of differentiation, children then able to separate out the domains, but the cross-domain associations persist.”

2) Grady’s theory of primary metaphor—complex metaphors are like molecular structure with primary metaphors as the atomic elements.

3) Narayanan’s neural theory of metaphor—the associations made during conflation “are realized neurally in simultaneous activations that result in permanent neural connections being made across the neural networks that define conceptual domains…that constitute metaphorical entailments.”

4) Fauconnier and Turner’s theory of conceptual blending—Distinct separate conceptual domains can be coactivated thereby creating a blending, which creates new and unique conceptual blends.

“The integrated theory –the four parts together—has an overwhelming implication: We acquire a large system of primary metaphors automatically and unconsciously simply by functioning in the most ordinary of ways in the everyday world from our earliest days…we all naturally think using hundreds of primary metaphors.”

In summation, we have many hundreds of primary metaphors, which together provide a rich inferential structure, imagery, and qualitative feel. These primary metaphors permit our sensorimotor experiences to be used to create subjective experiences. Thus abstract ideas are created that are grounded in everyday experiences.

Do you have any idea how abstract ideas might be created other wise?

Quotes from Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson

Sorry, coberst, but its a bit too esoteric for my taste.

I would have simplified the post by saying we know what a chair is, ie. have a concept of 'chairness', because we have been exposed to different chairs throughout our lives. We see different chairs and form an overall concept of what a chair is.

I am grossly distrustful of the efforts of people to assign literary concepts to neuroscience. Cognitive science is great in that it's the cutting edge of neuroscience, but I feel that the primary thrust of neuroscience should be finding an adequate model for how our brain works, and building a theory from that. This sort of conjecture to me has no relevance, and should be relegated to the same trash heap of poor reasoning that string theory belongs in. This isn't cognitive science, it's psychological speculation on the same level as memetics.

I think the people coberst cited are trying to find a model for how the brain works. They are just doing it in a different way from what you would prefer.

Yeah, a shitty way. They're starting with garbage, and trying to create order out of it. It's not scientific. The scientific method is, you start with a hypothesis, then you gather data, then you see how it fits your hypothesis. These people are starting with the data, then trying to build a hypothesis around it, without doing additional testing to see if the hypothesis is accurate. How could you do experiments on such rubbish sounding theories? It doesn't work, and it's bad science. Science is a predictive art. It's success is measured by how well it predicts future events.

Conceptual blending, primary metaphors? Sounds more like metaphysics than science to me.

Nappy,

I studied just what coberst is talking about when I was fullfilling the requirements for my Masters in Special Education. While it may not be quantifiable or able to be studied with instruments it is still a valid supposition. We may eventually be able to fully map the brain but the brain and the mind are not synonomous so the mapping of the one will not necessarily tell us how the other works.

So what if it's valid? One could conjecture hundreds of different ways that certain subsects of neuroscience data be interpreted, that doesn't mean all of them are worthy of study. We have the same problem in physics, where thousands of different "theories" all compete for space in Popular Science. With no way to differentiate any of them from any other. You might be able to stomach such a thing in religion, where there's billions of different ways to God, but this is the real world we're talking about. It only works one way. We need to find that way, and that means more innovative ways to study the mind, not more innovative ways to reinterpret data. We need better and more imaginative experiments. Not better and more imaginative ways to imagine how the mind works.

I really don't think it's up to you or me to decide what is and what is not worthy of study. The fact that these men and women are conjectoring on how the brain works is no skin off my nose and it shouldn't be any skin off yours.

What's with this now? I'm not allowed to pass my opinion on the crackpot theories they come up with because it's "no skin off my nose?" You lost the argument, Frogger, now accept your defeat gracefully.

The worst thing about this crap is it leads people to believe that these "theories" are of the same significance as scientific theory, like the theory of gravity, or the theory of evolution, or the Standard Model of quantum physics. (some of you smartasses might point out that the standard model is prime to be replaced as well, my answer is since the standard model was built with real science, it won't become irrelevant, because it'll still work, whereas string theory, since it has no real science backing it will be SOL) It leads people to believe that they're worthy topics to study in school, worthy subjects to specialize in. There are plenty of string theory specialists who decided to go into the "field" of string theory who will be completely out of a job, once the real "theory of everything" shows up, created with real science, not conjectural pseudoscience. Nutrition is rife with this crap too.

Only you are arguing. You are arguing that since you don't agree with their methodology they are crackpots and their research is worthless.

I say it isn't up to you to decide what is or is not worthless.

See previous post.

It appears to me that CS has two paradigms, symbol manipulation (AI), and conceptual metaphor. When I speak of CS here I am speaking of the conceptual metaphor paradigm.

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”

It appears to me that CS has two paradigms, symbol manipulation (AI), and conceptual metaphor. When I speak of CS here I am speaking of the conceptual metaphor paradigm.
Close. There are two general approaches, symbolic, and connectionist. Connectionist holds that cognition can only be understood by building artificial neural networks on the level of physical brain properties. That's the kind I prefer, as it involves less conjecture and more experiment. Conjecture makes for great dinner table conversation, but experiment is what really expands minds.

Conceptual metaphor seems to be relevant to a related discipline, cognitive linguistics, and not so much to the greater discipline of CS.

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.”
Contemporary academic philosophy is unavoidably boring, and has absolutely nothing to say on the vagaries of life, by its very conception. None of the posters here have a grounding in it, if they do, they certainly aren't making posts about it here. You'd do better talking about that stuff elsewhere, or relating your conjecture to real-world topics like law or politics.

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.
Interesting. Can you relate this to a real world scenario where this would be important? I spent a minute parsing that only to find that I couldn't make it relevant to a single current social problem.

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.
So other mammals can reason too?

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.
The failure was not of philosophy, which does not concern itself with biology. Natural selection is a biological process, not a philosophical idea. It would seem to me, without a thorough grounding in Western philosophy, that it would be impossible to integrate mind and body in a philosophical sense, lacking an acceptable model for how our brain works. The two worlds are so vastly different it would necessitate such a split. Eastern philosophy, which is much more religiously influenced and less so by science, could conjure up all kinds of metaphysical paradigms where the body and mind are treated holistically, but to date none of the Eastern ideas have found ground in Western empirical skepticism.

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.
Cognitive science offers no such comprehensive model. It's a very new field, it has the potential to give us a model, but no such model of the human brain exists as of the present.

Nap...

Yes, mammels other than humans reason. Human reasoning is an extension of that ability.

I would say that the basic facts that we have, with which to start the search for the cusp of instinctive and reasoned behavior might be:

1) Somewhere in the chain of life, from its mysterious beginning to the present, there exists a point when the behavior of creatures is influenced by something we call reason rather than something we call instinct.

2) Using computer lingo, we can classify instinct as behavior caused by hardwired algorithms.

3) Reason is a means to control behavior based upon real time assessment of real time circumstances.

4) Reason requires that data from the senses be ordered into some fashion that will facilitate real time inferences, this is called conceptualization; followed by inferences made from these concepts.

5) We have, from computer modeling technology, empirical evidence that the neural system that control perception and mobility have the capacity to conceptualize and to infer. In other words, the essential elements of sensorimotor control are also similar to the essential elements of reasoning.

6) If biology has created the structure that has the elements for reasoning, it is logical to conclude that such a system would not be duplicated for reason but that this very same system would be modified in whatever manner is necessary for it to function also as an instrument that can reason.

Instinct controlled the behavior of creatures until reason kicked in and now humans are controlled to a large extent by reason rather than instinct. Throughout time the evolutionary process, which includes instinctive behavior, maintained some form of equilibrium in the world. With the introduction of rational creatures this evolutionary process has been drastically disrupted.

As reasoning creatures that have disrupted the evolutionary process, we must replace this evolutionary process with a rational process that can duplicate or improve on the natural evolutionary process. If we cannot perform this prodigious task adequately the whole shebang will be flushed down the toilet.

Secretary of State Powell said in regards to the Iraq war that “if we break it, we own it”. I think we can say the same thing about our human activity and natural evolution. We break natural evolution and thereby we own the problems caused by that action.

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One of the important things about conceptual metaphors is that they are used to reason with.

‘A Purposeful Life Is a Journey’ is a complex metaphor that affects most of us in the American culture. It is composed, among other things, of the primary metaphors—‘Purposes Are Destinations’ and ‘Actions Are Motions’.

The inference structure carried within the neural structure of this metaphor plus its entailments turn this complex metaphor neural structure into the inference patterns that accomplish the following reasoning:
A purposeful life requires planning, there will be difficulties to be planned for, pack up a bag of stuff required for such a journey, and an overall planning in space and time is required to reach the individual destinations along the way.

Not all cultures have such a metaphor and not all people in a culture have developed such a metaphor and those who have not can be easily spotted. Such a metaphor is not consciously constructed but develops unconsciously based upon the experiences of individuals throughout their lives.

There is no evidence that we have broken natural evolution. It only seems that we have done so. In fact, quite a few scientists have outlined ways in which humans will further evolve biologically. It is possible that our thinking structures are subject to evolution as well, it could be possible that war or self-destructiveness will evolve itself right out of our systems. It is possible that no matter how technologically great we become, we still cannot beat evolution. It would seem that way to me, who observes our lives as little more than a great game we play with each other as social creatures to attain love and the respect of our kinsfolk, exactly like other social creatures do, like ants or monkeys. I think our behavior is shaped more by evolution than even the scientists among us care to admit.

It is also possible that should we allow evolution to run unchecked among other animals, they too could develop higher reasoning abilities as well. Though there seems to be no biological imperative for them to do so as of present.