|
i'm confused. it seems to me that twistedmosaic basically ended the discussion in an abstract sense by pointing to communication skill as what differentiates human modes of practice from that of other animals. it'd probably have been a good idea to specifically say language. all the various abilities pointed to above concerning human being and it's particular forms of intelligence rest of the ways in which cognition is mediated by language--regardless of the framework that one deploys in order to talk about how language is knit into the forming and collapse of various neural networks (which are obviously ways of talking about cognition as a bio-system functionality, which in the end loops back onto the properties of language not as an object but as a system of mediations that shape practical activity, opening up certain options, foreclosing others)....
you could say that the central capability language enables is recursion. since recursion entails a separation between action and statements about actions, it is in a sense a device that enables consideration of the roles of distancing, formalization, decomposition of a whole into parts, recombination of parts into a whole, etc. recursion is itself a highly rule-bound operation, so to talk about it you're also necessarily talking about rules or constraints. so language is a repository of constraints in a sense. but that would mean nothing--and not be possible--were it not for memory and the way it is organized, which presupposes language (in the human being context it seems)...at this point, things start to get more complicated, not so much in themselves but at the level of generating accounts which are stylistically consistent, given the constraints of a messageboard.
ANYWAY...this is not at all to say that other bio-systems do not have forms of intelligence, but rather that the nature of language and of our relations to the world mediated through it is---so far as we know--what differentiates human from other forms.
that's enough for now,
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|