| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Relevancy |
| Posted by: | Lee |
| Date/Time: | 06/06/2003 17:16:04 |
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Hi John, Firstly, apologies to Carmen for not acknowledging her contribution to the co-creation of WITW... I have ordered a pair of glasses as you suggested! You wrote: 'Bateson, to the best of my knowledge, do not take the position you ascribed to him - he patently did not say that we can never know the external world' You're quite right, what I meant to say is 'which we can never know directly'. The point I was driving at is that Bateson assumes the existence of an independent external world of events/objects/differences. You also wrote: "Further, while at present it is not possible to untangle the mix (f1 and elements of the external world, your use of the combination of a modal operator and a universal quantifier in the phrase, "...which we can never know..." is ridiculous. I suppose that 1000 years ago, it would have been safe to say that humans can never fly - we accomplished that routinely. Your or my lack of imagination is hardly as argument for imposing constraints on the future... your claim has no justification from my point of view." You misunderstand me,it was not my claim rather my interpretation of Batesons position subject to the above correction. You further wrote: "Your use of the cause-effect relationship is ("the cause of our experience") wholly unwarrented. If you pause a moment and consider that what you are characterizing as the effect is this horribly entangled mix of external world elements (transformed) and the contributions of the set of f1 transforms, causality is not even a candidate -correlation, partial consequence of... there are a number of relationships looser than cause-effect that might be usefully appealed to but please, not cause-effect" O.K, better to say that the external world is the source of stimulii that contribute along with my neurology to my perceptions. However my point was that there are alternatives to this version of events. An example of a theory that does not posit the existence of an independent external world would be Maturana and Varela's Santiago theory. For them, we do not represent an external world, but instead we and other organisms continually bring forth a world through the process of living. In Varela's words: "We must call into question the idea that the world is pregiven and that cognition is representation. In cognitive science, this means that we must call into question the idea that information exists ready made in the world and that it is extracted by a cognitive system." In other words, the map making itself brings forth the features of the territory. Different organisms bring forth different features of the territory because they have different physiological structures to us. Wouldn't this make a profound difference to the concept of FA, as what would we have access to? All the best Lee |