04-08-2009, 03:15 AM | #1 (permalink) | |
Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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ethics meets cognitive science ny times version
this edtiorial appeared in yesterday's ny times.
it is a kind of pop cult version of arguments that run well beyond it, in which to some extent the article does not state correctly, but it nonetheless poses some interesting questions. i wonder what you make of it. Quote:
first, with the understanding that we're dealing with a plot summary version... there are several interconnected claims here. first, what brooks is talking about are some of the implications of seeing human being as embedded in its environments, so as a living system that processes contexts by generating patterns that enable information to be limited. it skips over the ways pattern generation is understood to operate (there's a ton of literature out there on this, as you can imagine maybe)...and shifts straight into a space of judgment, which is staged as second-order pattern generation---direction of attention, individuation of phenomena, evaluation, imagining action, so the blur of present into subjunctive tenses. what brooks is interested in is the position of ethics or morality in this general conception of judgment. he follows this question in three main directions: if human beings are living systems that like any other continually interact with their environments, and so are shaped by these environments, and if this overall relation--which is not some revelation in itself--is taken as the starting point for philosophical work, it follows that (a) you cannot think of the self or ego as other than social and historical (b) you cannot presuppose any separation between areas like aesthetics and morality--brooks says that within this overall view of things, the two are variants of the same thing, which he characterizes as an ëmotional viewpoint. these two premises open onto the problem of what exactly ethical or moral thinking is. brooks is locked in a traditional schema---there is the space of thinking, or reflection, which involves an abstract individual which interacts by directing its attention to one or another variant of a world, which is external to it; or there is immediacy, in which the separations between types of thinking does not happen, just as the separation between the idea of the subject and the idea of world does not. it is from this that he sets up the conclusion that thinking through embeddedness--thinking through the obvious fact that you and i are social and historical institutions (if you like) and not objects, not meat puppets endowed with souls that function as essences which enable the separation of subject from world---thinking through these assumptions spells the end of philosophy. what do you make of that? the other set of claims has to do with outlining some of the attributes of being human that thinking through embeddedness opens up that traditional philo tended to foreclose. within this, brooks centers on the problem of ethical or moral thinking and action. what do you make of this editorial?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 04-08-2009 at 03:17 AM.. |
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04-08-2009, 03:55 AM | #2 (permalink) |
Mad Philosopher
Location: Washington, DC
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When I first read the article, I thought Brooks was giving judgment short shrift; see the sixth paragraph. It seems to describe the human as being merely a product of evolution/the environment. Our emotional moral judgments come from somewhere we know not where, and we're largely helpless in the face of them. I didn't notice the third from last paragraph, in which he notes the possibility of judgment overcoming our emotional reactions. The difficulty is that the source of our judgment is also external -- our reasons for overcoming our intuitions come from society, largely in the form of our friends. But for moral action to be moral, it has to in some sense come from us, and I'm not sure that this sort of account leaves room for that.
I think one problem might be this dichotomy between embeddedness and reflection. Our reflection is itself always already embedded, but that does not mean it is determined by that embeddedness. It is a false dichotomy. I also have no idea why he would think that any of this would mean the end of philosophy. Perhaps he's right (though I think he's not; cf. Blackburn, for example), and philosophy has historically given too short a shrift to moral emotions. But that just mean Philosophy needs to change its course, right?
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04-08-2009, 04:43 AM | #3 (permalink) |
Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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i think what this cog-sci does really is simply pushes the notion of judgment out of its transcendent position and into the process of pattern generation, interaction with afforances, information limitation (all more or less synonyms). the other thing that contemporary cog-sci (complex dynamical systems in particular) does is forces one to link this judgement process back to broader patterns of socialization. what it doesn't do is explore some of the implications of this move---for that you need to move into social ontology and wade through some of the more psychoanalytically influenced work--particularly that which comes out of melanie klein---which opens onto the ego as a matter of affective investment, and the modalities of ego activity as well. i don't have time to go into this too much right now (maybe later)--but one point of bringing this up is that when you make the move into the social-historical, you really aren't talking about the subject as traditionally understood plus a network of friends--you're pushed into an account of the formation of the ego itself, so into a developmental space, in order to begin talking about basic grids (this is too quick, it's shorthand) which are transposable from region or region and which come together in that general network of orientations toward the world that pierre bourdieu talks about as habitus.
so these dispositions that enable an affective investment in ethical action are in a sense aesthetically oriented--if by aesthetic you simply point to a preference for, say, certain kinds of symmetry (i desire for whatever reason that my actions conform to model x, say)...but it doesn't necessarily follow that therefore these investments ARE aesthetic---it just implies that the basis for the sense of fit between a way of thinking the self, action and outcomes is not based on the detached reflection that a traditional moral or ethical philosophy (which is to some extent a straw man, but whatever) would have you think. there's nothing particularly radical in this---in a sense it's simply includes something like--you're reading an account of ethics, but something keeps you reading it that's not included in the arguments themselves, but that's in a sense presupposed by them, that is by the fact of the text itself, which is that you feel a sense of resonance, you feel a sense of correctness or its absence---this is separate from (but conditions) your interactions with the formal argumentation itself... i don't know if i'm explaining myself well because i have to leave for work in a minute and am trying to jam this in before i go... maybe i'll come back to it later.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite |
04-08-2009, 10:12 AM | #4 (permalink) | |||
Junkie
Location: Greater Harrisburg Area
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So, emotions influence personal ethics at the time of the ethical decision...most of the time. Ok, fine with me, I don't understand how this would override or destroy philosophy. He doesn't quite say it destoys philosophy, but describes what will happen in philosophy as an epochal shift. I assume that he is trying to say that it is no longer possible to philosophize about the ethics without considering a personal and 'other' emotional filter that controls ethics, or simply to arrive at a purely reasoned ethics(reasoned in this sense meaning chiefly non-emotional). Especially, when reading his next to last paragraph:
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04-08-2009, 10:34 AM | #5 (permalink) |
Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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well, hektore---first off you somehow or another confused what i was talking about with something else, so when you bit that sentence you decided it was talking about something it wasn't. the point there was that ethical action--and thinking about ethical action--is an aesthetic matter, and always has been. the point isn't that complicated, and is not particularly about the question you decided it doesn't answer.
if you frame socialization as conditioning, you run into problems, yes? socialization is the production of a coherent ego, and to be coherent it has to be able to engage in certain baseline operations---for example your patterns of desire have to be delimited so as to fall within certain social limits---your modes of organizing information have to be adaptable within the constraints placed on you by your social situation. and so forth. so socialization is unavoidable--the question is not yes/no but what kind of socialization and what relation is possible/desirable with respect to socialization (including one's own)--and what types of argument can be fashioned that would make a political question of this. your actions are constrained, whether you're aware of it or not. if you imagine yourself to be "free" and do not understand at least something of the constraints that shape you--including your ability to say that you're free--then you aren't, in fact, saying anything at all. and nothing is changed by calling socialization "conditioning" except that it introduces some fantasy that it's possible to be outside it. it isn't. so you're in this game whether you like it or not. the variable really is the extent to which you think it important to know you're in it. there's no outside, and you're dreaming with your eyes open if you imagine there is. so you could say that placing emphasis on embededness is simply placing emphasis on where it ought to be in any event, on social agents acting in particular social-historical environments, who possess various modes of processing information as well as modes of making statements about processing information.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite |
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cognitive, ethics, meets, science, times, version |
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