JellevanDijk.org

Vast onderdeel van mijn college over kennis en geheugen,  Theo Maassen over nadenken. Je kunt hem ook beluisteren (met een Realplayer).

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Here’s another quote:Objectivism refuses to take this sort of reflexive step, and thereby consigns itself not merely to ignorance and the unexamined 

life, but to a form of false consciousness. As Merleau-Ponty states in the Preface to his

Phenomenology of Perception: “The whole universe of science is built upon the world as

directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and

arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening

the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression” (1962,

p. viii).  This all sounds kind of reasonable. Yes, the objectivist mechaniscists materialist guys have to explain somehow what rationale they have for being so utterly optimistic about the scientific method and its ‘uncritical’ positing of basic objects (building blocks) that make up ‘reality’. In physics, nobody is certain anymore that these blocks exist (even if they were to be quarks or snares Higgs-ies instead of the familiar very-small-balls-of-stuff we grew up with in highschool). In quantummechanics, things *might* ‘be’ ‘there’ - probably-, but: only for a whee instant (we think). Not the kind of firm ground you whish to stand on. But it is nonsense to state that

The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced 

This would give way to much credit to the human scientist himself (the person) in favor of all the structure and organisation he has gathered around him (please read her instead of the hims everywhere). The machine that people have built in order to detect Higgs-particles is not just some linear extension of the human mind. For one thing, the machine is an extension of *many* human minds. So this would already mean that this machine is aggregating over many ‘direct experiences’, probably washing out most of the experiential noise. What is left is, for lack of better terms, perhaps best called “objectivity”. And moreover, even if the whole universe is built upon the world as directly experienced, who ever said that we didn’t come over that exactly by doing Western science? Why do we have to go back? MP says:   

f we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and

arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening

the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression”

But that doesn’ mean that in order to understand, say, Vulcano’s, we have to go back to our basic experience of Vulcano’s? And even in order to understand “experience” or “cognition”, we do not have to ‘reawaken the basic experience of the world’? Why would we? As an analogy, consider that, very probably, most of our social and normative behaviors (say: stopping for a red traffic light) is *ultimately* grounded in a biological need of the cave-man, involving heavy amounts of sex, aggression, fear and running around in bush-fashion. Does that mean that in order to negotiate a heavy traffic situation on a Monday morning we have to go back into our deep Neanderthaler-selves and find that inner strength that killed so many Bisons? I would think not. I think that the fact that many people actually DO in some way let the CroMagnon in themselves spring out on Monday mornings is the exact reason that so many people get killed in traffic everyday. We DO NOT WANT to do that. In short: to say that X has roots in Y does not mean that in order for X to work, or even in order to understand X, you need to “go back to Y”. There were reasons why Y is no longer Y, reasons why it evolved into X. There were reasons for the evolution of Western science over direct experience. Now PERHAPS there is reason to go back to direct experience again, but the mere fact that all of science is rooted in it, does not provide any reason whatsoever we should go back into it. Unless we are also willing to accept the logical consequence that all people need to go back into the wombs that produced them - immediately. 

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While reading in Thompson’s Mind in Life I stumbled upon this part: 

Jonas [who BTW is not my son, although he says smart things, JVD] summarizes this line of thought in the proposition, “life can be known only 

by life” (p. 91). This proposition is a quintessential phenomenological one: Before being 

scientists we are first and foremost living beings, and thus possess within ourselves 

evidence of purposiveness (Weber and Varela 2002, p. 110). As Jonas puts it, “being 

living bodies ourselves, we happen to have inside knowledge” (1966, p. 79). In observing 

other creatures struggling to continue their existence—starting with bacteria that actively 

swim away from a chemical repellent—we can, by the evidence of our own experience 

and the Darwinian evidence of the continuity of life, view inwardness and purposiveness 

as proper to living being. 

In other words: only a living creature can understand another living creature: life seems to have some kind of almost mysterious quality that makes it such that you actually need to “be alive” before you can start to understand what ‘being alive’ means: you need to understand it from the inside out, as it where. A robot or computer would never be able to understand what life is because he’s not alive. (Unless we take the Frankenstein-turn: “It’s alive! It’s alive!).

Well, maybe. 

The only thought I whish to record here is that I was thinking very strongly that this is just Cartesianism all over again (only this time it goes by the name of phenomenology - which is a bit odd since phenomenologists are about as anti-cartesian as you can get). Descartes said: I think - therefore I am. He doubted everything but his own thoughts (and, for various purported reasons, God), precisely because these thought he was having from-the-inside-out, while all other essences he was considering (chairs, other people, the sky above etc) could be illusions or misperceptions or what have you. Now, somewhere in my psychology classes in Nijmegen I have been infected with a strong allergy against introspection and I still haven’t come over it: I still do not understand why something that you experience from-the-inside-out would have more value than some observable fact in the world. In fact, I actually do not understand why something that one experiences from-the-inside-out would have any value at all - that is, considering we are trying to explain what “experience” and “thinking” and “believing” means. How can we “experience” what experience means? How would that help us in any way? There is no garantee that we can analyse the workings of a certain tool by using that same tool. Does one learn to understand what a clock is by taking another clock and timing the time of the first clock? Do we bang hammers with hammers in order to learn to use hammers? How would that be of any help? In fact, I would think we’d probably need *other* (even more sophisticated?) tools than our own on-board circuitry in order to understand that very cirtuitry, at least that would be my strong intuition. As my email-signature has been claiming for years, this might well be impossible: if the brain was so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t. (And this goes for ‘mind’ as well). And in any case, this thing called introspection is not going to be explained by introspection…   

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Met dank aan Marco 
Touch-screen met tactile-feedback 

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Met dank aan Otto een mooie lezing voor kinderen (waarom alleen voor kinderen? dit is helemaal niet kinderachtig?) waarin gevoel voor hoeveelheden tastbaar wordt gemaakt met allerlei materialen en metaforen. Door Robbert Dijkgraaf.

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