- SurgicalOntologist
- Jun 17, 2004
-
|
Hi thread.
My "academic grandfather" (my PhD's advisor advisor) is Herman Haken so I have some familiarity with cybernetics despite that it's not what I actually studied. (Fake edit: I just realized I mixed up synergetics and cybernetics, guess my familiarity is not too great, ah gently caress it this can stay. Wikipedia says synergetics is a subfield of cybernetics which is cool I guess)
Anyways zodium asked me to say somthing about ecological psychology, what I studied, and maybe I'll try to throw something together. But here's a post I made in D&D not too long ago in the theory thread. It didn't get any traction. Serves me right for D&D-posting, I guess.
quote:This may seem a bit out of left field, but something I've been wondering for a while is if Marxist materialism ever made its way explicitly into areas of thought other than economics, social relations, and history. Let me back up a bit and give the question some context. I studied and had a short academic career in "ecological psychology", an unorthodox area of psychology that rejects much of mainstream cognitive sciences. There are a lot of aspects to it but one of the most foundational is in philosophy of mind or philosophy of perception.
In philosophy of perception there is a long-standing debate between two approaches, indirect and direct perception, with the indirect form being the mainstream approach. In this way of understanding perception, our brains receive "impoverished" stimulus, ambiguous information that on its own is not enough to understand what is happening in the world. Thus, our brains must make assumptions, perform calculations, and all sorts of things to build an internal representation of the world, its best guess given the limited information. And so, we don't really perceive real objects in the world, in fact we are fairly disconnected from the real world in the end, only truly in contact with these mental stand-ins. Anyone who took an intro psych or cog sci or neuroscience class might have been exposed to this view (probably introduced as scientific truth rather a rich philosophical debate).
Direct perception, on the other hand, holds that the indirect approach massively underestimates the information available in the patterns of light (or whatever), that we do directly perceive the real world, we have direct epistemic contact with it unmediated by any mental representation. I'll stop here and try to avoid arguing for this view, since that's not the point. I did have a few threads in D&D maybe 5 years ago with provocative titles like "You are not a computer" so maybe someone remembers that. The guy in my profile pic is J.J. Gibson who provides an accessible starting point for any curious about direct perception.
Besides philosophy of perception there are other relevant philosophical traditions like the American pragmatists (William James, Dewey, Peirce), who argued that the only way to conceptualize philosophical problems like knowlege, language, beliefs, etc was by looking at the real-world effects of something rather than playing with ideas. For example, truth is not based on logic relationships built upon foundational axioms but rather truth is a functional description of the result of a practical inquiry in the real world.
Basically you can see this kind of debate back to Plato vs Aristotle, often called realism (or materialism) and idealism, most notably to me in philosophy of mind but it permeates everywhere.
Anyways, in the years since my studies I've been exposed to Marxist thought and particular a materialist view of history. And I can't help wondering how my professors who dedicated their life to a materialist philosophy of mind, and connect their work to various philosophical traditions back to Aristotle, never mentioned Marx. And Wikipedia makes no connection between Marx and pragmatism. I assume politics has a lot to do with it, since these are mainly American philosophies.
I don't know where I'm going but I'm wondering if Marx or any of his followers made any connections to philosophy of mind, and if anyone has any specific readings to recommend given my background (I haven't' read most of the foundational works yet).
Well, if you google "marx pragmatism" or 'marx "ecolgoical psychology"', you do get some scattered academic papers mostly behind paywalls. Here's two readings that may be interesting: "Dewey, Hook, and Mao: on some affinities between Marxism and pragmatism", and "The dance of pragmatism and Marxism" from marxists.org. Maybe I should have read those before posting but I'll read them now. I'd be curious what those of you think you may be better versed in Marx than I.
Edit: poo poo, I guess Sidney Hook (who I had never heard of) was a well-known Marxist philosopher who was a student of Dewey's. I guess have some reading to do...
second edit: OK, well, he started out as a Marxist at least...
Maybe slightly off topic but I don't care
Edit: I guess in my OP I didn't make explicit the connection I see between historical materialism and philosophical realism but it's self-evident right?
SurgicalOntologist has issued a correction as of 19:20 on May 6, 2021
|
#
¿
May 6, 2021 19:13
|
|
- Adbot
-
ADBOT LOVES YOU
|
|
|
#
¿
May 20, 2024 04:27
|
|
- SurgicalOntologist
- Jun 17, 2004
-
|
Yeah, I mean realists about perception mainly. Those who believe the objects of perception (what is being perceived) are real objects in the world rather than objects in the mind.
And by materialism I don't mean the belief that there is only matter, but rather the belief that material conditions should be at the center of any theory about society or behavior more generally.
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2021 21:13
|
|
- SurgicalOntologist
- Jun 17, 2004
-
|
For me I’ve come to a place where I don’t care as much about the idea / material categories any more. I’m comfortable thinking either might be real. Zizek uses an analogy to a shore line. A shore line is an intersection, a place where two material things meet. it can move and change and is dynamic, but most people would call it real.
I look at the ideal in that way.
What I'm referring to, It's not about the shore line per se, it's about our perception of it, our epistemic relationship to it. I believe we perceive the real shoreline. Most mainstream perception scientists believe that's impossible, we only perceive a model of a shoreline constructed in our heads to stand in for the real one. That's the distinction in philosophy of perception. You can see of it more as external/internal or representational vs. non-representational as well.
And regarding the type of question you're raising, from an ecological/pragmatic perspective, the shoreline is real to an organism not because of what it's made of or how concretely it can be defined, but rather because it affords behaviorally relevant opportunities for action. It's real to me because it's behaviorally relevant.
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2021 23:31
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2021 19:13
