BACK TO “MIND SO RARE” BY MERLON DONALD

“Humans thus bridge two worlds. We are hybrids, half analogizers, with direct experience of the world, and half symbolizers, embedded in the cultural web [through culturally directed and formed language].” Brackets mine.

According to Donald, hybrid consciousness is constructed from language symbols by which we manipulate our experience of our culture and by the physicality of our contact with the world, as in: “Basic animal awareness intuits the mysteries of the world directly, allowing the universe to carve out its own image in the mind.... A receptive mode of knowing.” (p. 157)

Donald calls the analogous method of knowing, the process by which our neural synaptical patterns are formed by the incoming messages of our senses, "receptive". And he calls the symbol manipulating, language rich way of interacting with our cultures, "aggressive".

Hey! I wonder if that has something to do with passive/aggressive behavior? Our language telling us one thing while our bodies tell us another? Just a piss in the dark of an idea....


LET’S THROW PINKER’S “HOW THE MIND WORKS”
IN HERE AGAIN

I’m throwing in these bits from books just to tickle people’s fancy about these books. Here’s Pinker on the perceptual functions of the brain:

First he quotes David Marr: “Vision is a process that produces from images of the external world a description that is useful to the viewer and not cluttered with irrelevant information.” (p. 212)

As explanation for this fragmentation of the visual intake of the environment, Pinker goes on, “Perception is the only branch of psychology that has been consistently adaptation-minded, seeing its task as reverse-engineering. The visual system is not there to entertain us with pretty patterns and colors; it is contrived to deliver a sense of the true forms and materials of the world...” so that we animals can know “...where the food, the predators, and the cliffs are....” (p. 213)

And from hunting to art, he says: “Whatever assumptions impel the brain to see the world as the world will impel it to see the painting as the world and not as smeared paint.” (p. 217)


NOW La CERRA IN “THE ORIGIN OF MINDS” SAYS THAT

“To think about yourself in relation to your world, you need machinery to construct a self-representation—a neural signature that uniquely defines you as the central player in the marketplace. You also have to be able to construct representations of the other salient features in your environment. then you need to create a relational map in your mind between yourself and those salient features—the things in the world that have an effect on you. And all of this has to be dynamic, responsive to environmental fluctuations (like changing concentrations of nectar in the blue or yellow flowers) and changes in you internal state.” (p. 63)
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"The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage." —Mark Russell