Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

CORRECTING GEORGE LAKOFF’S POSTMODERN FASCINATION WITH THE EXPERIENTIAL CONCEPTS; “EMBODIED” and METAPHOR

Just reading his work makes me agitated. As if introspection could tell us something on the one end, and as if reduction could tell us something on the other.

What follows are three important points. The second of which is profoundly important.

Propertarianism:

REGARDING #1 BELOW

(a) We must use a variety of instrumental systems (logics) and instrumental means (technology) to reduce that which is imperceptible with our senses, to analogies to experience.

(b) That our senses are limited to that which we can experience with our bodies is certainly true. However, that metaphors which can easily be loaded, are equal to logics which cannot be, is to make the postmodern error that our feelings are more than descriptions of changes in state given our CURRENT knowledge. They tell us only whether we are ignorant of something or not. They don’t tell us anything meaningful about the universe. This is why introspection is meaningless activity, while action is meaningful.

(b) Given that we must reduce to analogy to experience that which we wish to perceive, then there is a maximum level of precision that humans can make use of in any theory of action in any given context. In this sense, newton’s theory is the greatest precision we need for all perceptible human action. As such it is not false, it is just only applicable to the instrumentation that is available to our senses. (I haven’t said this quite right. I have to think about how to state it better.) There is a maximum level of precision that we need to understand human behavior. I am fairly sure that propertarianism is the maximum level of precision necessary for the formulation of political cooperation.

REGARDING #2 BELOW

(a) All experience can be expressed in operational terms. Otherwise, per ’embodiment’ we cannot express it. The profundity of this statement should not be overlooked. In other words, there is nothing we cannot express that we can experience. We may lack the language for it. But that is all. For example, as I have argued, mathematics can be expressed entirely operationally, yet mathematicians persist in discourse about ‘mathematical reality’, when no such thing exists or can exist in any meaningful sense other than as imagination. So, due to the necessity of simplifying terms, and the advantage of highly loading and framing terms, we obscure content. However, no content is actually obscurable in operational language. The problem is that as complexity increases the ability of the both the speaker and the listener to construct an and share an experience requires some sort of reduction. But that does not mean that the entire experience cannot be articulated operationally. (If I could get this one point across then my work would be done. lol) This is what praxeologists have failed to understand. All experience may be reduced to operational language, and therefore truth tested, but not much can be deduced from that statement without the additional use of logic, science and instrumentation to extend our perceptions to that which we cannot perceive without their assistance.

REGARDING #3 BELOW

(a) Reason is not very complicated. Experience is the use of short term memory to determine changes in the state of our assets both real and imagined in real time, and storing those changes in state in long term memory given the amplitude of the change. We then compare experiences with other experiences. And we test those differences. We are very limited in the number of differences that we can test. So we rely on our logical technologies to extend our memories so that we can break a problem into simple sections which our simple minds are able to solve one at a time. As such reason and experience are only different from the natural world in that they exist only with the passage of time.

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#1″ Reason is not disembodied, as the tradition has largely held, but arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment. The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reason. Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanisms of neural binding. In summary, reason is not, in any way, a transcendent feature of the universe or of disembodied mind. Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details of the neural structure of

our brains, and by the specifics of our everyday functioning in the world.”

#2 “Reason is evolutionary, in that abstract reason builds on and makes use of forms of perceptual and motor inference present in “lower” animals. The result is a Darwinism of reason, a rational Darwinism: Reason, even in its most abstract form, makes use of, rather than transcends, our animal nature. The discovery that reason is evolutionary utterly changes our relation to other animals and changes our conception of human beings as uniquely rational. Reason is thus not an essence that separates us from other animals; rather, it places us on a continuum with them.

#3″ Reason is not “universal” in the transcendent sense; that is, it is not part of the structure of the universe. It is universal, however, in that it is a capacity shared universally by all human beings. What allows it to be shared are the commonalities that exist in the way our minds are embodied.”

• Reason is not completely conscious, but mostly unconscious.

• Reason is not purely literal, but largely metaphorical and imaginative.

• Reason is not dispassionate, but emotionally engaged.