Federica wrote: ↑Sun Aug 14, 2022 10:00 am
Ashvin,
Going through my finished text before posting, I feel I should add a disclaimer, to start with. Much of what follows is in the form of statements rather than questions. I’m expressing my current position with some level of resolution, but I am fully aware that it could evolve, as it has happened here some times already. Please don’t read what follows as confrontational, I just don’t want to conceal my thoughts, because I have put my best efforts and goodwill in them.
Amazing introduction on language! I’d love to stay there for hours but I’m nudging myself to the main topic, it will be a long post already. The start is the ambivalent idea of repetitive experience and its potential to become evil when it’s clung to for the purpose of comfort and convenience. I am very much aligned with this idea, but at the same time I feel that something is missing here, or I am missing something here. The intuition is that it must be true, but maybe in some more specific sense. Because for example in music - taking this example since you later use it - the musical meaning is built on repetitive tempo. I know you then distinguish different speeds in the temporal structure, however it's noticeable that whatever the beats per minute, without consistent and lawful repetition there’s just no music. My spontaneous thought at the first reading was, can the amount of beats per minute really make the difference between mechanistic, repetitive music which is “out of season” thus evil on one side, and good, graceful music on the other? And more generally, because repetition is the necessary backbone of musical experience, do you mean that indulging in the pleasure of writing, playing, or listening to music is an ambivalent, problematic activity in itself, or that some music is evil?
Conversely, is all technological development underlain by repetitive experience? In which sense? How does repetition underlie technology differently than it underlies everything else in the perceptual world?
It seems to me that the overindulging in the convenience of technology, which is a problem indeed, does not come from repetition primarily. I think it comes from estrangement from Nature. By the way, what is it meant by technology - is the wheel to be considered a technological development? If not, why not? Beyond the digital tech focus of the essay, do you consider all the developments that came with the first industrial revolution problematic, or maybe only the ones that came more recently, with automation and information technology? Where do you put the threshold?
I would argue that if we look at estrangement from Nature - rather than repetition - as the principle that leads to, or can lead to, excessive convenience and comfort, we can see how it holds true across all the technological temporal spectrum in its broadest sense. The wheel is an elementary means of estrangement from Nature, just as, say, the printing press is, or electricity to a wider extent, or telephone, or, to a major and growing extent, digital technology.
I should clarify here that I personally don’t have any negative orientation to digital technology. I know it’s here to stay and that it’s not to be eliminated, and I am actually immensely grateful for digital technology. I am every day of the week well aware that without digital technology I simply wouldn’t have had access to the vast majority of the knowledge and information I have been able to access. I couldn’t be on this forum without it. I couldn’t do my (main) job without it. I couldn’t communicate with others across space the way I do. I couldn’t have explored and learned even the tenth of what I have been lucky to explore and discover and learn, without digital technology. This being said, I do agree with you and see the risks of a biased orientation towards technology.
It is only in 1937, through the personality of Alan Turing, that the word [computer] is first used in its modern sense of "programmable digital electronic device for performing mathematical or logical operations". One should clearly sense the distancing that is occurring here from the human body-brain and its living cognitive processes.
As I see it, what one should rather sense here is the distancing occurring from the human living cognitive process and Nature, the perceptual world, where we can include the body, and even the brain. It’s an estrangement from Nature. I don’t see how else you intended the body-brain to come in here, and especially the brain? Or maybe you intended it in that same way, and then we agree. As a drawing away from Nature, yes, it is an abstraction, and I find it insightful to inquire “what qualities of living experience we have also forsaken in this abstracting process”, but then you qualify the abstracting process as pertaining to “the modern mechanical age” and here I am not sure. Abstraction seems to me an overarching, maybe the most overarching human trend or process of all, that started way before the “modern mechanical age”. Ancient Greek already has plethora of abstract words!
What I find brilliant and new to me in your exposure is the uncovering of this correlation between abstraction and technology. Your reasoning makes me also realize that it’s been, and it’s being, a drawing away from Nature just as well as a drawing away from ourselves and our livingly experienced cognition. As we over-objectify Nature through abstracting it into transparent concepts, we move in parallel with regard to our “I”. The focus increasingly goes to a glorified object as unsaturated concept, whilst both Nature and the “I” go out of focus, are extracted from the process and parked at Vantage point. Nature and the “I” - or rather the precursor of the “I” - started off in direct connection with each other, but then gradually, the I became the full-fledged I, and with that birth - fully completed at the Plato-Aristotle cross - a tween element arose: Abstraction (let me capitalize it) which has grown into an intermediary link between the thinking I and Nature. Further, Abstraction has become more and more central in this mediated tripartite relation Nature-Abstraction-I, or the mother and her two tween offsprings. And now Abstraction has taken the exact central position in cognition, it’s being the dominant tween in the center, so it is currently eclipsing the light of Nature for the I. I am reminded of another way to say it, from another essay here: thinking is being predominantly engulfed by object, intended here as an epochal trend, rather than as a transient mode of individual thinking. By necessity, the thinking "I" still connects concepts and percepts to create experience, but because it’s not being vigilant on what it's doing, it forgets to press ‘refresh experience’ and lets the resulting mental images dry out, die out, and like helium balloons reach the Abstraction hall of fame.
In this perspective, technology, in its largest sense, seems to be the manifest, tangible face of transparent Abstraction, its control light, its visible suit. What I remain doubtful about is the specific pointing to mechanical, or repetitive technology of the modern age. I don’t see that any tipping point has happened in our cognition as a function of the mechanical-repetitive qualities and the pervasiveness of technology. As I see it, there’s been no real tipping point yet. Instead it’s been a progressive, smooth movement towards more abstraction and more technology. If I had to hazard a future look, I would imagine that the real tipping point is ahead, and will consist not in eliminating or minimizing technology, but in starting dephasing Abstraction, whereof technology is only the suit, changing the articulation of the tripartite axis Nature-Abstraction-I, dislocating it, moving our tween element on the side, giving our stuck thinking habits a bit of a hysteretic shake, so that we can discover the light of Nature again, while being a fully separate I-entity this time. This move also equals moving cognition out of parking lot Vantage, which is sort of our tween’s artificial I, or the core, the attracting heart of Abstraction. So when I readI think: Yes! But I would prefer to replace ‘mechanical’ with ‘abstract’. I will hopefully clarify this further by means of following your deep dive into “what natural perceptual-cognitive processes do for us” as a way to consider what happens to our perception-cognition when we substitute digital technology for these natural processes.It is not only our ideas about the world which have taken on a mechanical nature, but our method of forming ideas has been mechanized [in relation to digital media technology]
Here I’m following the idea that the perceptual world is a playground for thinking, where we are invited, or compelled to, jump in with concepts and ideas to try and fit the percepts, so that meaningful experience can arise. Percepts suck in concepts, and as they match, or intersect, knowledge is generated. To illustrate this function of natural perceptions, you take written language as a first example. Here I immediately wonder, why did you choose a double-layered perception such as language as an example, rather than start simple, maybe with a sensory perception? Let me explain. Within your example, there is the case of the perceiver who does not know the alphabet. This perceiver also perceives the interspaces in sentences 2 and 3, and certainly still makes sense of these percepts by matching the perceived graphical forms with concepts, let’s say esthetical concepts. So the suction does operate, although it is very different from the one a literate person would experience. But ok, let’s stay with this literate person now. I find the example in this case confusing in many ways. First, the spaces have meaning as a graphical, visual element, which, yes, facilitates the reading experience, as a convenience, however spacing has no impact on the plane of decoding the symbols and assigning meaning to them, which is what the example was pointing to in the first place. So I would accept the spaces, in the sense they are proposed in the example, only for the illiterate perceiver, who has to remain on the bare visual experiential plane. For the literate one, the process of assigning meaning to the sentence is completely distinct from the process of reading the sentence! It’s a second layer that starts only after the first layer, the visual one, is made possible, no matter how uncomfortable and entangled, or easy and fluid, we make this first layer for the reader. For the illiterate, the example works well, because there is only one process, the visual one, and it’s not a reading process, there is no alphabet-word-syntax decoding here. There is only the evaluation of a form, as one would do with a painting, and spaces then do enter the meaning-making process directly. On the same logic, I don’t understand when you say that
words have no semantic meaning in isolation, but rather that meaning lives in the empty spaces between the letters
The visual appearance of the word is only an artifice to make the reader aware of what is the word (or the sentence) that should be made sense of. Writing m o u s e or m o u s e, may create more or less discomfort for the reader in realizing we are talking about a mouse, but then one still has to discern, in both cases, and through concepts, what that mouse is, and what it is doing in the overall sentence, which is not in any way impacted by how painful it was to get to grips with the code in the first place!
Here I should add that even in Cleric’s example of the thought ‘circle’, and although the way the example is expressed is very helpful to understand the void of perception and the act of filling it back with meaning, the conclusion with the hexagon feels less helpful, because it suggests that it’s then only a matter of coming up with six properly shaped pieces, slide them into the six voids, and that would be enough for a perfect match. It prompts the thought that, like in a circle-shaped Tetris, the whole block would then slot together and disappear.
My current understanding from PoF is that “what natural perceptual-cognitive processes do for us” is way more complex than - and actually also different from - filling spaces between letters, silence between notes or intersected shapes. Thinking creates experience by merging percept with concept, but because percepts get (by thinking) uniquely time-stamped, uniquely characterized with contours, with countless details, and countless interrelations, the match with (universal) concepts is practically never a perfect one. This is what keeps them up as percepts (I would even say, as ‘perceivables’) while an individualized thought-image is clicked and archived as memory for every moment we expose ourselves to the perceptual experience. Curiously, the impression I receive from your examples is that these are over-complicated examples (language and then music, I am coming to music) used to arrive at over-simplified conclusions. In a certain way I am struggling to follow your logic. I see it well in the general purpose and in the direction of the argumentation, I follow it well at that level, but if we zoom in on the details of your reasoning, then I’m lost, I am somehow missing what you are not saying.
About music, the first thing that makes me wonder why you chose music as an example of natural perceptual-conceptual process to use as a bridge to grasp mechanistic processes, is that unless we are playing or listening to live music, the general experience of music we most frequently have is indeed through digital media technology. I am not referring to the experience you suggest here with the 3 samples, because of course you didn’t have any other choice, but to the most common experience of music these days. But ok, let’s imagine live music, say an orchestra, playing Vivaldi’s Summer. We immediately get into complications with this example of musical performance. For instance, there is in reality no silent space between beats, notes and chords here. If we dissect the composition in groups of instruments, then yes, we find some silence, but that’s not the living experience of the performance. More importantly, the musical structure, the rhythm, is not what invites meaning in this percept. It's only one minor element of the meaning. The rhythm is the naked, geometrical, in a way neutral, repetitive framework to which the musical language, the phrase, is appended. The meaning is in the development of the phrase, in melody. This phrase can be long and articulated, or simple, square and repetitive, contrasted or nuanced, surprising or highly predictable… etcetera. It can take thousand different forms and there resides the meaning, not in the tempo and its see-throughs. On the same temporal structure, thousands of pieces of music have been written and thousand more could be written, with completely different meanings! To me, the liminal spaces of understanding music do exist, but are not literal spaces between beats notes and chords. They are not “exemplified by rhythmic thresholds”. They are conceptual liminal spaces, which, yes, develop in temporal form, but cannot be reduced to our grasping of the beat in the music. This is an incredible over-simplification! The liminal spaces are of very changing duration and path, and it's their unfolding that determines the transition between one state of being and the next.
It’s a little bit of the same problem I found in the previous example, with language. It must be no coincidence that music is a language, and the physical spaces that pace it are not the code, but only a framework that supports the unfolding of the code. So here again I feel music is a complex, difficult example from which over-simplified conclusions are drawn.
Getting to the 3 samples, here’s my thoughts. I don’t agree that the liminal spaces appear as a property ‘of the song’ in the form of paced openings in its rhythm that invite meaning. Rather, they arise in the thinking act of making sense of the song, at the conjunction of concept and percept. I see them as qualitative spaces in cognition. While I do have a preference - like you, I prefer Vivaldi’s Summer, the fast and furious of the three, in my opinion - I can make sense of all three songs with equal ‘ease’. I can enter each of these three worlds and understand them. By the way, the metal one with a very fast pace sounds monotone and slow to my ear, because of its somber and heavy vibe. The liminal spaces there - the changes in status that help us approach and grasp the music by probing its character - appear to me in longer spans, in a way that is quite independent from musical tempo. It’s a qualitative understanding that follows the unfolding of the phrase and explores the meaning in there, rather than in a flat geometrical temporal structure that is nearly the same in a thousand other songs!These peculiar, slower liminal spaces don’t make it easier or more difficult to apprehend the song, they only make it less pleasant for me in this case. But this is a matter of feeling, and how it personalizes the process, rather than pure cognition, I would imagine.
Finally, coming to the conclusion about the effect of mechanization, technology, and high-pace repetition on cognition. Unsurprisingly at this point, because I don’t recognize the strict correlation between the presence of comfortable open or silent spaces in perception (visual or temporal see-throughs) and the ease of filling it with meaning, I would confirm my initial thought. I definitely agree that our orientation to technology is over-indulgent and problematic, but in my view the problem with it actually resides in the preponderant role of abstraction, the force that underlies and determines technology, way more than it resides in its repetitive and mechanistic character itself.
Ashvin, I have to admit I am a bit saddened by not being able to concur as much as I would have liked here. Your thoughts in this essay have been very insightful and helpful in guiding my reflection in this matter and I am thankful for that, however I would have preferred to agree with not only the high level direction of the essay, which I do, but also with the detailed reasoning. I hope I am missing points that I’ll get later and that will allow me to better integrate these views.
A side note, on the evolution of language, a topic I’m interested in. This “History in English words” by Barfield seems an extraordinary book with a prodigious purpose! It definitely goes on my list. Having studied the old languages in highschool, all the provided examples of words were known to me, but I definitely want to see where he brings it in the book. If you have other works in mind with specific reference to the evolution of language, please recommend!
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Frederica,
Thanks for this detailed feedback. I have no problem at all with the 'statement' approach and actually find it very enjoyable to engage with. Although I am not breaking up your response into discrete chunks, I think what is below should address most of the points you raised, but I am happy to revisit any that were missed.
Yes, we should always keep the principle in mind - we make the difference. I think this is mostly what you were objecting to in the essay. Perhaps you felt that I was resting too much of the difference on the perceptual structures themselves, but that was quite the opposite of my intentions. That being said, in the phenomenological approach, we must begin with what the perceptions themselves disclose to our reasoning. That our mode of cognition is really the determining factor in mining their depth of meaning should be the result of evidence and a chain of reasoning which leads to that conclusion. Yet this is also my conclusion, which I think becomes much more clear in the subsequent installments. To be clear, I was not saying the meaning is dwelling in literal 'spaces' and that we can enrich the meaning by simply changing the size or duration of these spaces. Actually, at the ontic level, what lives in the 'spaces' is the ideational activity of other living beings and we come to know the inner meaning of the perceptual world by using our own cognition to resonate with the 'frequencies' of their activity. So our estrangement from Nature is, in that sense, nothing other than the estrangement from their living spiritual activity.
The critical factor in our experience of music, as in the perceptual world in general, is our own cognitive development. The 'rhythmic thresholds' mentioned in the essay, for ex., are only applicable to normal waking cognition - "the threshold at which our normal cognition will fail to notice any significant difference in the musical structure if it were to become any faster". And even this shouldn't be taken too rigidly - I can't claim to have done any in-depth study here, and perhaps the data is somewhat off or has been updated. But the principle is that our cognitive interaction with the temporal structure plays a critical role in how much, or what sort, of meaning we will mine from it. It may be more helpful to imagine one is playing a song on an instrument at various tempos - here our creative thinking is determining the temporal structure. Clearly there are certain tempos at which the act of playing the song will be rather meaningless (way too slow or fast) compared to others at a more tempered speed. I can sense this pretty clearly when I attempt (key word: attempt ) to play various songs on piano. So we shouldn't think of the perceptions - the tempo in this case - as something independent of our cognition.
Rather, the latter is what structures the former. In our normal intellectual mode, our thinking consciousness simply isn't differentiated enough for us to discern how this is taking place. People simply assume the tempo (and other qualities) is an absolute property of the song which is independent of our cognition. Practically, for all intents and purposes the intellect is concerned with, these qualities are the same for everyone, because we simply don't have the thinking flexibility to discern otherwise. But when we endeavor to penetrate more deeply into the dynamics of the natural and cultural worlds, then we find the 'rhythms' of perceptions will vary greatly depending on our own cognitive engagement with the phenomena. Working with the simple sentences and music clips was only a way to help give people a sense of how (a) their cognitive activity is actually involved in the process of discerning meaning of perceptions (which may sound obvious, but is very often ignored in modern thinking) and (b) they can try to sense a limited amount of differentiation within their own activity. There is only so much that can be done with the intellect, though.
So to summarize, it is our mode of cognition which manifests the mechanistic technology and perceptual world, and the meaning it can disclose to us, not the other way around. Yet within the confines of our normal waking intellect, during this evolutionary stage, it is beginning to matter less and less how we interact with the spatial and temporal perceptions. The intellect gets rapidly diminishing returns from its thinking power at this stage. According to this phenomenology, there will come a time soon when most songs, regardless of their qualities like style and tempo, will fail to provide us with the deep meaning the ancients mined from it. And that is true of all perceptions, generally. Why? Because the Spirit has withdrawn from the outer world and into our inner world. We can trace this withdrawal quite precisely through recent human history, especially using the changes in language (as Barfield does in various writings), but also across all cultural dimensions. Modern language has become very dry and prosaic, consisting in mostly empty husks of meaning.
The brief overview of how the meaning of "computer" has changed was simply to illustrate that fact. A person in the 16th or maybe even 17th century would not comprehend the concept of a "computer" which exists entirely independent of human thinking agency. Even if they could imagine a physical device which is not attached to the human being, it wouldn't occur for them to consider this an entity which performs calculations simply through material processes independent of any human agency. That, of course, has changed dramatically with the descent of consciousness into materialistic thinking. Yet, this 'descent' can also be seen as an ascent from another, more holistic angle. As Barfield remarked, 'repetition' here is at the foundation of our reasoning faculty and therefore human culture. It is practically synonymous with memory - we can lift experiences into the realm of thought and willfully re-experience them.
The problem with our current obsession with mechanistic technology is mostly an unwillingness to use this as a tool for further evolution, rather than an end-in-itself for various materialistic, selfish pursuits. And this problem runs deeper than most would care to admit. Even if we are idealistic and spiritual in our thinking, we get very comfortable and make this into yet another mechanism by only forming concepts about higher worlds with the intellect. We have the greatest difficulty admitting to ourselves that we secretly desire to remain in the comfortable, familiar repetitive loops, instead of venturing with our inner activity into the unfamiliar, unknown territory of the higher worlds. The path to higher cognition makes us much more aware of this tendency within ourselves - the desire to prioritize, at every turn, the material and sensuous, the known and familiar, over the currently supersensible, even when we have the free choice and opportunities to prioritize the latter.
Federica wrote:Here I should add that even in Cleric’s example of the thought ‘circle’, and although the way the example is expressed is very helpful to understand the void of perception and the act of filling it back with meaning, the conclusion with the hexagon feels less helpful, because it suggests that it’s then only a matter of coming up with six properly shaped pieces, slide them into the six voids, and that would be enough for a perfect match. It prompts the thought that, like in a circle-shaped Tetris, the whole block would then slot together and disappear.
I didn't quite follow your objection here. Can you elaborate?