BODY { font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12px; }I
don't see that it is Peirce-related for it is utopian; operating
purely in the realm of Homogeneic Purity; it is Hegelian, i.e.,
rejecting the reality of individual Secondness and finiteness;
rejecting the adaptive reality that is chance; rejecting even the
openness of genuine Thirdness [which is never finite].
It instead is filled with unverified assumptions, lacking
evidentiary support for these axioms, [massively ignorant about
economics and human psychology]and assuming, like all utopian
theories, that If Only We All Behaved in Such-and-Such a Way - then,
all will be well.
This is the mindset of all fundamentalist and totalitarian
ideologies - which all operate within the Seminar Room mode of
Thirdness - i.e., alienated from the pragmatic daily realities of
Secondness and Firstness. I'd call this Thirdness-as-Firstness,
alienated from physical reality, operating within an insistence on
iconic homogeneity of its population. Sounds a bit like Animal Farm
or 1984.
And - its mindset includes not only a profound ignorance of
economics but - a complete ignorance of the psychological reality of
the human species - which is not and has never been, able to operate
within only the abstract generalities of Thirdness. Certainly, you
can get small populations operating within the abstract generalities
- these are isolate communities sustained by the external world [a
convent, a monastery]; or cults. Since they are not operating within
all three categories but only within degenerate Thirdness, they are
all unable to provide continuity of Type. Their membership must be
replenished from external sources; or - most of them implode after a
few years. And all of them require enormous external authoritarian
Force to prevent any intrusion of Secondness and Firstness - i.e.,
individual realities, individual emotions and sensations. And to keep
the population submissive and entrapped within a homogeneic
perspective. Sounds a bit like N. Korea.
Edwina
On Mon 26/06/17 3:03 PM , Gary Richmond gary.richm...@gmail.com
sent:
Gary F, Edwina, Gene, list,
Well, before we accept or reject the LEAP proposal (which has
implications far beyong Canada), let's consider what it says. See:
https://leapmanifesto.org/en/the-leap-manifesto/ [1].
If we do consider it here, please try to keep the discussion
Peirce-related. I've copied and pasted the text of the manifesto from
the pdf below my signature.
Best,
Gary R (writing as list moderator)
the leap manifesto
A Call for Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One AnotherWe
start from the premise that Canada is facing the deepest crisis in
recent memory.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has acknowledged shocking
details about the violence of Canada’s near past. Deepening poverty
and inequality are a scar on the country’s present. And our record
on climate change is a crime against humanity’s future. These facts
are all the more jarring because they depart so dramatically from our
stated values: respect for Indigenous rights, internationalism, human
rights, diversity, and environmental stewardship.
Canada is not this place today -- but it could be.
We could live in a country powered entirely by truly just renewable
energy, woven together by accessible public transit, in which the
jobs and opportunities of this transition are designed to
systematically eliminate racial and gender inequality. Caring for one
another and caring for the planet could be the economy’s fastest
growing sectors. Many more people could have higher wage jobs with
fewer work hours, leaving us ample time to enjoy our loved ones and
flourish in our communities. We know that the time for this great
transition is short. Climate scientists have told us that this is the
decade to take decisive action to prevent catastrophic global warming.
That means small steps will no longer get us where we need to go.
So we need to leap.
This leap must begin by respecting the inherent rights and title of
the original caretakers of this land. Indigenous communities have
been at the forefront of protecting rivers, coasts, forests and lands
from out-of-control industrial activity. We can bolster this role, and
reset our relationship, by fully implementing the United Nations
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Moved by the
treaties that form the legal basis of this country and bind us to
share the land “for as long as the sun shines, the grass grows and
the rivers flow,” we want energy sources that will last for time
immemorial and never run out or poison the land. Technological
breakthroughs have brought this dream within reach. The latest
research shows it is feasible for Canada to get 100% of its
electricity from renewable resources within two decades1; by 2050 we
could have a 100% clean economy2 . We demand that this shift begin
now.
There is no longer an excuse for building new infrastructure
projects that lock us into increased extraction decades into the
future. The new iron law of energy development must be: if you
wouldn’t want it in your backyard, then it doesn’t belong in
anyone’s backyard. That applies equally to oil and gas pipelines;
fracking in New Brunswick, Quebec and British Columbia; increased
tanker traffic off our coasts; and to Canadianowned mining projects
the world over.
The time for energy democracy has come: we believe not just in
changes to our energy sources, but that wherever possible communities
should collectively control these new energy systems.
As an alternative to the profit-gouging of private companies and the
remote bureaucracy of some centralized state ones, we can create
innovative ownership structures: democratically run, paying living
wages and keeping much-needed revenue in communities. And Indigenous
Peoples should be first to receive public support for their own clean
energy projects. So should communities currently dealing with heavy
health impacts of polluting industrial activity.
Power generated this way will not merely light our homes but
redistribute wealth, deepen our democracy, strengthen our economy and
start to heal the wounds that date back to this country’s founding.
A leap to a non-polluting economy creates countless openings for
similar multiple “wins.” We want a universal program to build
energy efficient homes, and retrofit existing housing, ensuring that
the lowest income communities and neighbourhoods will benefit first
and receive job training and opportunities that reduce poverty over
the long term. We want training and other resources for workers in
carbon-intensive jobs, ensuring they are fully able to take part in
the clean energy economy. This transition should involve the
democratic participation of workers themselves. High-speed rail
powered by just renewables and affordable public transit can unite
every community in this country – in place of more cars, pipelines
and exploding trains that endanger and divide us.
And since we know this leap is beginning late, we need to invest in
our decaying public infrastructure so that it can withstand
increasingly frequent extreme weather events.
Moving to a far more localized and ecologically-based agricultural
system would reduce reliance on fossil fuels, capture carbon in the
soil, and absorb sudden shocks in the global supply – as well as
produce healthier and more affordable food for everyone.
We call for an end to all trade deals that interfere with our
attempts to rebuild local economies, regulate corporations and stop
damaging extractive projects. Rebalancing the scales of justice, we
should ensure immigration status and full protection for all workers.
Recognizing Canada’s contributions to military conflicts and
climate change -- primary drivers of the global refugee crisis -- we
must welcome refugees and migrants seeking safety and a better life.
Shifting to an economy in balance with the earth’s limits also
means expanding the sectors of our economy that are already low
carbon: caregiving, teaching, social work, the arts and
public-interest media.
Following on Quebec’s lead, a national childcare program is long
past due.
All this work, much of it performed by women, is the glue that
builds humane, resilient communities – and we will need our
communities to be as strong as possible in the face of the rocky
future we have already locked in. Since so much of the labour of
caretaking – whether of people or the planet – is currently
unpaid, we call for a vigorous debate about the introduction of a
universal basic annual income. Pioneered in Manitoba in the 1970’s,
this sturdy safety net could help ensure that no one is forced to take
work that threatens their children’s tomorrow, just to feed those
children today. We declare that “austerity” is a fossilized form
of thinking that has become a threat to life on earth.
We declare that “austerity” – which has systematically
attacked low-carbon sectors like education and healthcare, while
starving public transit and forcing reckless energy privatizations
– is a fossilized form of thinking that has become a threat to life
on earth.
The money we need to pay for this great transformation is available
— we just need the right policies to release it. Like an end to
fossil fuel subsidies. Financial transaction taxes. Increased
resource royalties. Higher income taxes on corporations and wealthy
people. A progressive carbon tax. Cuts to military spending. All of
these are based on a simple “polluter pays” principle and hold
enormous promise.
One thing is clear: public scarcity in times of unprecedented
private wealth is a manufactured crisis, designed to extinguish our
dreams before they have a chance to be born. Those dreams go well
beyond this document. We call for town hall meetings across the
country where residents can gather to democratically define what a
genuine leap to the next economy means in their communities.
Inevitably, this bottom-up revival will lead to a renewal of
democracy at every level of government, working swiftly towards a
system in which every vote counts and corporate money is removed from
political campaigns. This is a great deal to take on all at once, but
such are the times in which we live. The drop in oil prices has
temporarily relieved the pressure to dig up fossil fuels as rapidly
as high-risk technologies will allow. This pause in frenetic
expansion should not be viewed as a crisis, but as a gift.
It has given us a rare moment to look at what we have become – and
decide to change. And so we call on all those seeking political office
to seize this opportunity and embrace the urgent need for
transformation. This is our sacred duty to those this country harmed
in the past, to those suffering needlessly in the present, and to all
who have a right to a bright and safe future. Now is the time for
boldness.
Now is the time to leap.
Gary RichmondPhilosophy and Critical Thinking Communication
StudiesLaGuardia College of the City University of New YorkC 745718
482-5690
On Mon, Jun 26, 2017 at 2:16 PM, Edwina Taborsky wrote:
Gary F - as you say, these issues really have no place in a Peircean
analytic framework - unless we want to explore the development of
societal norms as a form of Thirdness - which is a legitimate area of
research.
I, myself, reject the Naomi Klein perspective [all of her work] and
certainly, reject the LEAP perspective- and would argue against it as
a naïve utopian agenda. You cannot do away with any of the modal
categories, even in Big Systems, eg, as in societal analysis - and
coming up with purely rhetorical versions of Thirdness [rather than
the real Thirdness that is in that society] and trying to do away
with the existential conflicts of Secondness and the private feelings
of Firstness is, in my view, a useless agenda.
Edwina
On Mon 26/06/17 1:50 PM , g...@gnusystems.ca [3] sent:
Gene,
Thanks for the links; I’m quite familiar with the mirror neuron
research and the inferences various people have drawn from it, and it
reinforces the point I was trying to make, that empathy is deeper than
deliberate reasoning — as well as Peirce’s point that science is
grounded in empathy (or at least in “the social principle”).
I didn’t miss the point that it is possible to disable the feeling
of empathy — I just didn’t see that point as being news in any
sense (it’s been pretty obvious for millennia!). I see the
particular study as an attempt to quantify some expressions of
empathy (or responses that imply the lack of it). What it doesn’t
do is give us much of a clue as to what cultural factors are involved
in the suppression of empathic behavior. (And I thought that blaming
it on increasing use of AI was really a stretch!) As I wrote before,
what significance that study has depends on the nature of the devices
used to generate those statistics.
There are lots of theories about what causes empathic behavior to be
suppressed (not all of them use that terminology, of course.) I think
they are valuable to the extent that they give us some clues as to
what we can do about the situation. To take the example that happens
to be in front of me:
The election of Donald Trump can certainly be taken as a symptom of
a decline in empathy. In her new book, Naomi Klein spends several
chapters explaining in factual detail how certain trends in American
culture (going back several decades) have prepared the way for
somebody like Trump to exploit the situation. But the title of her
book, No is Not Enough, emphasizes that what’s needed is not
another round of recriminations but a coherent vision of a better way
to live, and a viable alternative to the pathologically partisan
politics of the day. I can see its outlines in a document called the
LEAP manifesto, and I’d like to see us google that and spend more
time considering it than we do blaming Google or other arms of “The
Machine” for the mess we’re in.
But enough about politics and such “vitally important” matters.
What interests me about AI (which is supposed to be the subject of
this thread) is what we can learn from it about how the mind works,
whether it’s a human or animal bodymind or not. That’s also what
my book is about and why I’m interested in Peircean semiotics. And
I daresay that’s what motivates many, if not most, AI researchers,
including the students that John Sowa is addressing in that
presentation he’s still working on.
Gary f.
} What is seen with one eye has no depth. [Ursula LeGuin] {
http://gnusystems.ca/wp/ [4] }{ Turning Signs gateway
From: Eugene Halton [mailto: eugene.w.halto...@nd.edu [5]]
Sent: 26-Jun-17 11:09
To: Peirce List
Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] RE: AI
Dear Gary F,
Here is a link to the Sarah Konrath et al. study on the decline
of empathy among American college students:
http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/eob/edobrien_empathyPSPR.pdf [6]
And a brief Scientific American article on it:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-me-care/ [7]
You state: "I think Peirce would say that these attributions of
empathy (or consciousness) to others are perceptual judgments — not
percepts, but quite beyond (or beneath) any conscious control, and .
We feel it rather than reading it from external indications."
This seems to me to miss the point that it is possible to
disable the feeling of empathy. Clinical narcissistic disturbance,
for example, substitutes idealization for perceptual feeling, so that
what is perceived can be idealized rather than felt.
Extrapolate that to a society that substitutes on mass scales
idealization for felt experience, and you can have societally reduced
empathy. Unempathic parenting is an excellent way to produce the
social media-addicted janissary offspring.
The human face is a subtle neuromuscular organ of attunement,
which has the capacity to read another's mind through mirror
micro-mimicry of the other's facial gestures, completely
subconsciously. These are "external indications" mirrored by one.
One study showed that botox treatments, in paralyzing facial
muscles, reduce the micro-mimicry of empathic attunement to the other
face in an interaction. The botox recipient is not only impaired in
exhibiting her or his own emotional facial micro-muscular movements,
but also is impaired in subconsciously micro-mimicking that of the
other, thus reducing the embodied feel of the other’s
emotional-gestural state (Neal and Chartrand, 2011). Empathy is
reduced through the disabling of the facial muscles.
Vittorio Gallese, one of the neuroscientists who discovered
mirror neutons, has discussed "embodied simulation" through "shared
neural underpinnings." He states: “…social cognition is not only
explicitly reasoning about the contents of someone else’s mind. Our
brains, and those of other primates, appear to have developed a basic
functional mechanism, embodied simulation, which gives us an
experiential insight of other minds. The shareability of the
phenomenal content of the intentional relations of others, by means
of the shared neural underpinnings, produces intentional attunement.
Intentional attunement, in turn, by collapsing the others’
intentions into the observer’s ones, produces the peculiar quality
of familiarity we entertain with other individuals. This is what
“being empathic” is about. By means of a shared neural state
realized in two different bodies that nevertheless obey to the same
morpho-functional rules, the “objectual other” becomes “another
self”. Vittorio Gallese, “Intentional Attunement. The Mirror
Neuron System and Its Role in Interpersonal Relations,” 15 November
2004 Interdisciplines,
[8]http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror/papers/1 [9]
Gene Halton
On Jun 20, 2017 7:00 PM, wrote:
List,
Gene’s post in this thread had much to say about “empathy” —
considered as something that can be measured and quantified for
populations of students, so that comments about trends in
“empathy” among them can be taken as meaningful and important.
I wonder about that.
My wondering was given more definite shape just now when I came
across this passage in a recent book about consciousness by Evan
Thompson:
[[ In practice and in everyday life … we don’t infer the inner
presence of consciousness on the basis of outer criteria. Instead,
prior to any kind of reflection or deliberation, we already
implicitly recognize each other as conscious on the basis of empathy.
Empathy, as philosophers in the phenomenological tradition have shown,
is the direct perception of another being’s actions and gestures as
expressive embodiments of consciousness. We don’t see facial
expressions, for example, as outer signs of an inner consciousness,
as we might see an EEG pattern; we see joy directly in the smiling
face or sadness in the tearful eyes. Moreover, even in difficult or
problematic cases where we’re forced to consider outer criteria,
their meaningfulness as indicators of consciousness ultimately
depends depends on and presupposes our prior empathetic grasp of
consciousness. ]]
—Thompson, Evan. Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness
in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (Kindle Locations
2362-2370). Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition.
If we don’t “infer the inner presence of consciousness on the
basis of outer criteria,” but perceive it directly on the basis of
empathy, how do we infer the inner presence (or absence) of empathy
itself? In the same way, i.e. by direct perception, according to
Thompson. I think Peirce would say that these attributions of empathy
(or consciousness) to others are perceptual judgments — not
percepts, but quite beyond (or beneath) any conscious control, and .
We feel it rather than reading it from external indications. To use
Thompson’s example, we can measure the temperature by reading a
thermometer, using a scale designed for that purpose. But we can’t
measure the feeling of warmth as experienced by the one who feels it.
Now, the statistics cited by Gene may indeed indicate something
important, just as measures of global temperature may indicate
something important. But what it does indicate, and what significance
that has, depends on the nature of the devices used to generate those
statistics. And I can’t help feeling that empathy is more
important than anything measurable by those means.
(I won’t go further into the semiotic nature of perceptual
judgments here, but I have in Turning Signs:
http://www.gnusystems.ca/TS/ [10]blr.htm#Perce.)
Gary f.
-----------------------------
PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY
ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to
peirce-L@list.iupui.edu [11] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to
PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu [12] with the line "UNSubscribe
PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at
http://www.cspeirce.com/ [13]peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
Links:
------
[1] https://leapmanifesto.org/en/the-leap-manifesto/
[2]
http://webmail.primus.ca/javascript:top.opencompose(\'tabor...@primus.ca\',\'\',\'\',\'\')
[3]
http://webmail.primus.ca/javascript:top.opencompose(\'g...@gnusystems.ca\',\'\',\'\',\'\')
[4] http://gnusystems.ca/wp/
[5]
http://webmail.primus.ca/javascript:top.opencompose(\'eugene.w.halto...@nd.edu\',\'\',\'\',\'\')
[6] http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/eob/edobrien_empathyPSPR.pdf
[7] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-me-care/
[8] http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror/papers/1
[9] http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror/papers/1
[10] http://www.gnusystems.ca/TS/blr.htm#Perce
[11]
http://webmail.primus.ca/javascript:top.opencompose(\'peirce-L@list.iupui.edu\',\'\',\'\',\'\')
[12]
http://webmail.primus.ca/javascript:top.opencompose(\'l...@list.iupui.edu\',\'\',\'\',\'\')
[13] http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm
-----------------------------
PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L
to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To
UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the
line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at
http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
