coberst

Symbolically-Instinctivized Sapiens evolved into creatures with symbolic structured modes of behavior. Human consciousness extended wo/man’s reach to infinity—wherein infinity is within the extended reach of human imagination. We are creatures with the ability to create symbolically a virtual reality that extends out to the limits of our imagination. We are also creatures “prone to anxiety, extremely helpless in his natural state, almost entirely devoid of instincts.” Therein lay the paradox. ”Instead of remaining free and broadly adaptive, the new symbolic animal immediately became ‘symbolically re-instinctivized’ almost as solidly as the other animals were physio-chemically instinctivized.” Evolution has programmed the animal world to act automatically in certain ways under certain conditions. Humans have lost a good bit of these programmed responses because we have an ego that places our responses on hold until we have had time to reflect and construct a non-programmed response. Humans create the world we live in; it is a virtual world constructed principally because of the neurosis we have developed in the first five years of our life. If we try to think about a virtual world I think we must start with a natural world so that we have a starting point, something with which we can compare. What is a natural world? Is it what we ‘see’? Is it the ‘thing-in-itself that Kant tells us about? Depending upon which is a natural world I think we can begin to realize that the world we live in is a virtual world. We are creatures who create symbolic worlds that are more important to us than the world we ‘see’. Water boarding is a good example of what we feel about death. Being sentenced to death for a crime is a good idea of what we think about the importance of death. The things people do to prolong their life one more day is a good example. We have been very successful about hiding these anxieties from our self that we have created an inferior culture in our pursuit after something that we do not allow our self to think about. Self deception is our greatest enemy and our closest companion. I am claiming that the reaction we feel when water boarding or claustrophobia is that very fear of death. If someone asks me what is the fear of death I will say that if they can imagine the feeling of being water boarded they are feeling the fear of death. Our rather blaze attitude that we say we feel about dying is our self deception. This fear of death that we work so hard to hide from our self is one of the major reasons that we have created a virtual realty and this virtual world we have created is going to kill us. Now ain’t that ironic? Quotes from “Escape from Evil” by Ernest Becker Questions for discussion Do you think that humans have replaced the basic animal instincts with symbolic type instincts as the author notes? Do you know how the ego acts so as to make our modified instinctual behavior work?

David Lakoff and Johnson defines a concept in this way--"concepts are neural structures that allow us to mentally characterize our categories and reason about them...All living systems must categorize...The categories we form are part of our experience." When I say such things as a concept is a word I am using an analogy and do not mean it literally. When I say 'knowing is seeing' I am using a metaphor.

Abstract concept versus literal concept When we throw a stone we develop a mental structure that is the concept of throwing a stone. When we run from a bear we develop a mental structure of the concept of running from a bear. These are literal (experiential, actual) concepts. What is an abstract concept? I think that a sentence or a paragraph might be good analogies for abstract concept. Think of words as being literal concepts and think of sentence or paragraph as being an abstract concept. The words are organized by the imagination to develop a sentence or paragraph. The coherence of the sentence or paragraph is dependent upon how well the imagination has formed it. A good sentence, like a good abstract concept, makes sense and will stand up to the empirical test of validity. Cognitive science, as delineated in “Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson, presents a new paradigm for cognitive science. This new paradigm might be called the “conceptual metaphor” paradigm. The theory is that experiences form into concepts and some of these concepts are called “primary metaphors”. These ‘primary metaphors’ are often unconsciously mapped from the originating mental space onto another mental space that is a subjective concept, i.e. abstract concept. Many years ago, before ‘self-service’, it was common to pull into a gas station and when the attendant came to the car the motorist would say “Fillerup”. “More is up” is a common metaphor. I think of it every time I pour milk into a measuring cup when baking cornbread. The subjective judgment is quantity, the sensorimotor domain is vertical orientation, and the primary experience is the rise and fall of vertical levels as fluid is added or subtracted and objects are piled on top of or removed from a collection. We can see (know is see) by this mechanism that we equate vertical motion in the spatial domain with quantity; we use the vertical domain to reason about quantity. We have a vast experience in vertical space domain reasoning and thus we derive this great experience to help us in reasoning about quantity; no doubt a very useful thing when first learning arithmetic. Teachers of mathematics, I suspect, depend upon this storehouse of knowledge to make abstract mathematical reasoning for children more comprehensible. In a metaphor the source domain, ‘up’, is mapped onto the target domain ‘more’. The neural structure of the sensorimotor domain, the primary metaphor, is mapped onto the subjective domain ‘more’. Reasoning about the vertical motion in the spatial domain is mapped onto reasoning about the quantity domain. This is a one-way movement; reasoning about quantity is not mapped onto spatial domain reasoning. The direction of inference indicates which the source is and which the target domain is. Physical experiences of all kinds lead to conceptual metaphors from which perhaps hundreds of ‘primary metaphors’, which are neural structures resulting from sensorimotor experiences, are created. These primary metaphors provide the ‘seed bed’ for the judgments and subjective experiences in life. “Conceptual metaphor is pervasive in both thought and language.” It is hard to think of a common subjective experience that is not conventionally conceptualized in terms of metaphor.