re Re: pynchon agnostic? II

[pynchonoid]

The book is well worth reading.
-Doug

<http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lakoff/lakoff_p1.html>
"Philosophy In The Flesh"
A Talk With George Lakoff

Introduction by
John Brockman 

"We are neural beings," states Berkeley cognitive
scientist George Lakoff. "Our brains take their input
from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like
and how they function in the world thus structures the
very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think
just anything - only what our embodied brains permit."

His new book Philosophy In The Flesh, coauthored by
Mark Johnson, makes the following points: "The mind is
inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical."

Lakoff believes that new empirical evidence concerning
these finding of cognitive science have taken us over
the epistemological divide: we are in a new place and
our philosophical assumptions are all up for grabs.

He and Johnson write: "When taken together and
considered in detail, these three findings from the
science of the mind are inconsistent with central
parts of Western philosophy, and require a thorough
rethinking of the most popular current approaches,
namely, Anglo-American analytic philosophy and
postmodernist philosophy."

According to Lakoff, metaphor appears to be a neural
mechanism that allows us to adapt the neural systems
used in sensory-motor activity to create forms of
abstract reason. "If this is correct, as it seems to
be," he says, "our sensory-motor systems thus limit
the abstract reasoning that we can perform. Anything
we can think or understand is shaped by, made possible
by, and limited by our bodies, brains, and our
embodied interactions in the world. This is what we
have to theorize with." 

He then raises the interesting question: "Is it
adequate to understand the world scientifically? 

[...] 

LAKOFF: I've plunged myself as fully as possible into
the research that Jerry Feldman and I have been doing
for the past decade at the International Computer
Science Institute on the Neural Theory of Language
(www.ics i.berkeley.edu/NTL). That's where most of my
technical research effort is going to go for quite a
while.

Jerry developed the theory of structured connectionism
(not PDP connectionism) beginning in the 1970's.
Structured connectionism allows us to constructed
detailed computational neural models of conceptual and
linguistic structures and of the learning of such
structures.

Since 1988, we've been running a project takes up a
question that has absorbed both of us: From the
perspective of neural computation, a human brain
consists of a very large number of neurons connected
up in specific ways with certain computational
properties. How is it possible to get the details of
human concepts, the forms of human reason, and the
range of human languages out of a lot of neurons
connected up as they are in our brains? How do you get
thought and language out of neurons? That is the
question we are trying to answer in our lab through
the computational neural modeling of thought and
language.

JB: How do you connect structures in the brain to
ideas of space?

LAKOFF: Terry Regier has taken the first step to
figuring that out in his book The Human Semantic
Potential. He has hypothesized that certain types of
brain structures - topographic maps of the visual
field, orientation-sensitive cells, and so on - can
compute the primitive spatial relations (called
"image-schemas") that linguists have discovered. The
amazing thing to me is that not only do we actually
have a reasonable idea of how certain types of neural
structures can give rise to spatial relations
concepts. Recent neural modeling research by Narayanan
has similarly given us an idea of how brain structures
can compute aspectual concepts (which structure
events), conceptual metaphors, mental spaces, blended
spaces, and other basics of human conceptual systems.
The next breakthrough, I think, will be a neural
theory of grammar. [...] 

We are neural beings. Our brains take their input from
the rest of out bodies. What our bodies are like and
how they function in the world thus structures the
very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think
just anything - only what our embodied brains permit.

Metaphor appears to be a neural mechanism that allows
us to adapt the neural systems used in sensory-motor
activity to create forms of abstract reason. If this
is correct, as it seems to be, our sensory-motor
systems thus limit the abstract reasoning that we can
perform. Anything we can think or understand is shaped
by, made possible by, and limited by our bodies,
brains, and our embodied interactions in the world.
This is what we have to theorize with. Is it adequate
to understand the world scientifically? [...] 


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