Part of what’s throwing me here is that , while I do make use a notion of dialectic , it is closer to George Kelly’s concept of the construct as dichotomous. — Joshs
His fundamental postulate says this: "A person's processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he anticipates events."
This is the central movement in the scientific process: from hypothesis to experiment or observation, i.e. from anticipation to experience and behavior.
The dichotomy corollary
"A person's construction system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs."
We store our experience in the form of constructs, which he also referred to as "useful concepts," "convenient fictions," and "transparent templates." You "place" these "templates" on the world, and they guide your perceptions and behaviors.
He often calls them personal constructs, emphasizing the fact that they are yours and yours alone, unique to you and no-one else. A construct is not some label or pigeon-hole or dimension I, as a psychologist, lay on you, the "ordinary" person. It is a small bit of how you see the world.
The young child doesn't care if you are fat or thin, black or white, rich or poor, Jew or Gentile; Only when the people around him or her convey their prejudices, does the child begin to notice these things.
The individuality corollary
"Persons differ from each other in their construction of events."
Since everyone has different experiences, everyone's construction of reality is different. Remember, he calls his theory the theory of personal constructs. Kelly does not approve of classification systems, personality types, or personality tests. His own famous "rep test," as you will see, is not a test in the traditional sense at all.
The commonality corollary
"To the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is similar to that employed by another, his psychological processes are similar to the other person."
Just because we are all different doesn't mean we can't be similar. If our construction system -- our understanding of reality -- is similar, so will be our experiences, our behaviors, and our feelings. For example, if we share the same culture, we'll see things in a similar way, and the closer we are, the more similar we'll be.
In fact, Kelly says that we spend a great deal of our time seeking validation from other people. A man sitting himself down at the local bar and sighing "women!" does so with the expectation that his neighbor at the bar will respond with the support of his world view he is at that moment desperately in need of: "Yeah, women! You can't live with 'em and you can't live without 'em." The same scenario applies, with appropriate alterations, to women. And similar scenarios apply as well to kindergarten children, adolescent gangs, the klan, political parties, scientific conferences, and so on. We look for support from those who are similar to ourselves. Only they can know how we truly feel!
Feelings
The theory so far presented may sound very cognitive, with all its emphasis on constructs and constructions, and many people have said so as their primary criticism of Kelly's theory. In fact, Kelly disliked being called a cognitive theorist. He felt that his "professional constructs" included the more traditional ideas of perception, behavior, and emotion, as well as cognition. So to say he doesn't talk about emotions, for example, is to miss the point altogether.
What you and I would call emotions (or affect, or feelings) Kelly called constructs of transition, because they refer to the experiences we have when we move from one way of looking at the world or ourselves to another.
Psychopathology and Therapy
This brings us nicely to Kelly's definition of a psychological disorder: "Any personal construction which is used repeatedly in spite of consistent invalidation." The behaviors and thoughts of neurosis, depression, paranoia, schizophrenia, etc., are all examples. So are patterns of violence, bigotry, criminality, greed, addiction, and so on. The person can no longer anticipate well, yet can't seem to learn new ways of relating to the world. He or she is loaded with anxiety and hostility, is unhappy and is making everyone else unhappy, too.
If a person's problem is poor construction, then the solution should be reconstruction, a term Kelly was tempted to use for his style of therapy. Psychotherapy involves getting the client to reconstrue, to see things in a different way, from a new perspective, one that allows the choices that lead to elaboration.
By this he means it is a way in which two events are alike and different from a third. Your use of dialectic seems closer to that of Hegel. — Joshs
The dichotomozation a construct effects isnt the kind of othering or antithesis we see in Hegel’s dialectic. It is more along the lines of a variation or modification. — Joshs
One can always see pomo in opposition to what came before it, but a closer look should reveal an intricate development within pomo that bridges what came before such that the appearance of dialectical conflict and othering is replaced by something more on the order of a continuum of historical change. — Joshs
I think there's a lot of confusion and equivocation going on in this OP between information theory (from electronic engineering and information technollogy) and philosophy. That's my last comment on this thread. — Wayfarer
This is where dictionaries come in handy! :smile:There is no agreement as to what emotions are. — Pop
Logic, maths, deductive knowledge don't need experience. 1+1 = 2. You know it instantly without having to experience anything. — Corvus
Just looked up my Dictionary of Philosophy for "Logos". It says - Greek, statement, principle, law, reason, proportion.
It derived from the verb "lego" which denotes "I say".
Therefore, I say and confirm that Logos comes from language. — Corvus
Yes. without that form, there would be no information. It is the fact that something has form, that allows us to interact with it. The form changes the patterning of our brain somehow. This change that the form imposes on our brain patterning, at a subconscious level, embeds us in a meaningful exchange with the object. If mind is a state of integrated information, then a disturbance to that state is more information.
If we accept that information is fundamental, then this process of mutual change between systems ( objects, people ) is what happens in every transaction that can possibly happen in the universe at any scale. Information enables the interaction of form - says to me: because something has form it is able to interact with another something that has form. A change in that form is information.
If something has no form, then it has no information - so cannot effect a change in our neural patterning. — Pop
No, a child does not automatically know 1+1 = 2. It takes a lot of work to get a child to understand the concepts of math. There are primitive tribes today that do not have the ability to count above the number 3 and it took us centuries to understand the importance of the zero. — Athena
And human, when broken down to its root meaning, means moist soil, That means contained in our word human is the belief that a god made us from mud, but few of us are aware of that. And to stop at the root of logos being connected to the spoken word and dropping its meanings of being a principle, law, and reason is a failure to understand the meaning of logos. That law meant universal law, not man-made law, and a democracy is supposed to build it isn't laws on an understanding of best reasoning and universal laws, but in our ignorance, we don't know that. — Athena
A common failing inscientificphilosophical writing is to blur the line between nouns and verbs. Through a process called nominalization, we morph verbs (and sometimes adjectives) into abstract nouns. This process robs our writing of energy and clarity. — Crystal Herron, blog
The notion of "neural correlates of consciousness" is an attempt to draw a simple one-to-one map of the inter-relationships between empirical brain functions and rational mental functions. But, as a typical reductive scientific approach, it may place undue stress on the neurons themselves. They are just relay stations (nodes) in a complex web of functional relationships for processing information. Even the relatively-inert glial cells have been found to play a supporting role in the system. So, I prefer a more holistic model of the physical network that mysteriously produces spooky Consciousness as its metaphysical output. Even a silicon analogue (computer) is just a "brick" unless its output includes meaningful information for the human mind.I have built a model, assuming monism, and neural correlation, — Pop
↪Pop One more question. I don’t really understand that mass-energy-information paper you linked to. What do you think the point of it is? — Wayfarer
If something has no form, then it has no information - so cannot effect a change in our neural patterning.
— Pop
I am good with what you said up to the last line. Why did you have to add the term "neural system?" Does the universe have a neural system? — Athena
And Kelly gets the dichotomous nature of constructing constructs - the generalities that ground the ability to then particularise in terms of individuated balances on some spectrum that lies between "two poles of being". — apokrisis
The young child doesn't care if you are fat or thin, black or white, rich or poor, Jew or Gentile; Only when the people around him or her convey their prejudices, does the child begin to notice these things. — apokrisis
Yet if we are talking about the mind and its model of physical reality, then the dichotomies are objectively real in that reality self-organises via its fundamental symmetry breakings. The Universe is not pluralistic but unified as a system. — apokrisis
Our chore becomes the one of placing ourselves as free individuals within some vast space of seven billion people all meant to live by the same social code. Any local diversity or plurality is a freedom gained by accepting some even more trans-communal and pan-species moral system and Platonic-strength abstraction. — apokrisis
We all have to live not by local acceptable custom but by the iron law of what is universally correct - which of course breaks into its dichotomies as its must. If there is a coherent leftish position, it is automatic that there is a rightish position that is just as loud and proud in its cultural demands. — apokrisis
The commonality corollary
Just because we are all different doesn't mean we can't be similar. If our construction system -- our understanding of reality -- is similar, so will be our experiences, our behaviors, and our feelings. For example, if we share the same culture, we'll see things in a similar way, and the closer we are, the more similar we'll be.
Both the personal and the public are being recognised. But bad. It isn't being framed as a dichotomy of localised construction and globalised constraint.
It is only about the bottom-up construction which thus roots things in the individual and leaves the communal as some kind of collection of accidental choices rather than a larger universalising view that has evolved to provide a generalised constraining hand over local acts of individuation. — apokrisis
Here we see the problem of failing to distinguish between the biological and cultural sources of semiosis that shape the individual person. It is bad enough to reduce social constructs to personal acts of construction. It is really bad to omit the biological basis of a person's world modelling. — apokrisis
The dichotomozation a construct effects isnt the kind of othering or antithesis we see in Hegel’s dialectic. It is more along the lines of a variation or modification.
— Joshs
Oh quick. Before our start gets us to the "wrong" destination, let's jump our escape hatch and return to the comfort of PoMo pluralism.
There is no ultimate constraining unity at the end of the line. There is just all us little chirping personalised differences - small, accidental, and localised reactions that constitute a Secondness that doesn't want to venture any further into the thickets of grand univocal metaphysics. — apokrisis
I'm sure the post-structuralists had no violent intentions when it came to smashing structuralism. It was just a helpful conversation to help the old guard come to see the error of its ways. — apokrisis
The mindless pluralism that seeks out the best available examples to find the mindless universalising that makes its own mindless polarity the "definitely right one". — apokrisis
There is no agreement as to what emotions are.
— Pop
This is where dictionaries come in handy! :smile:
"Emotion" from Merriam-Webster (First definition): "A conscious mental reaction (such as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body"
(Stresses are mine. But disctionaries are not faultless: the phrase "in the body" at the end is not only redundant (since it is implied by "physiological") but also wrongly connected to the word "behavioral" (since behaviour is normally related to the mind and the human being iself).)
Classic example: it is a common fact that fear/stress increases heart rate and adrenaline, that hormones are released by anger, etc. — Alkis Piskas
That's why I think the overall Monism of Information Theory is built upon a dualistic substrate consisting of both physical and meta-physical elements -- equivalent to Descartes's body/mind split. Most scientists try to avoid mentioning "Metaphysics" in their theories. — Gnomon
I have built a model, assuming monism, and neural correlation,
— Pop
The notion of "neural correlates of consciousness" is an attempt to draw a simple one-to-one map of the inter-relationships between empirical brain functions and rational mental functions. But, as a typical reductive scientific approach, it may place undue stress on the neurons themselves. They are just relay stations (nodes) in a complex web of functional relationships for processing information. Even the relatively-inert glial cells have been found to play a supporting role in the system — Gnomon
Who is it who is claiming there is a trans-communal and trans-species moral
system? — Joshs
In Kelly's approach, even when someone lives in a culture which is tightly conformist, one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one's own construction of the world using the resources of that culture. — Joshs
One can see how the ‘tremendous variety of ways' that participants are capable of interpreting the ‘same' cultural milieu makes any attempt to apply a group -centered account of social understanding pointless. — Joshs
No one has yet proved himself wise enough to propound a universal system of constructs. We can safely assume that it will be a long time before a satisfactorily unified system will be proposed. For the time being we shall have to content ourselves with a series of miniature systems, each with its own realm or limited range of convenience. As long as we continue to use such a disjointed combination of miniature systems we shall have to be careful to apply each system abstractly rather than concretively. For example, instead of saying that a certain event is a ‘psychological event and therefore not a physiological event', we must be careful to recognize that any event may be viewed either in its psychological or in its physiological aspects. — Kelly
How do you reconcile “There is no ultimate constraining unity at the end of the line” with “ We all have to live not by local acceptable custom but by the iron law of what is universally correct.” — Joshs
But don’t you think one could lay out a spectrum of positions within ‘structuralism’ and pomo such that it becomes difficult to discern the actual
boundary between them? — Joshs
What we possess, or what we have achieved so far, are approximations of the truth, not fragments of it. Hopefully we are getting closer, in some sort of asymptotic progression, — Kelly
What about Kelly’s constructive alternativism? How would you state the mindless universalism and polarity he settles on? Elevating the personally psychological and its dichotomous processes to pre-eminent status? — Joshs
And how should we then read his efforts to impose a therapy that indeed imposes a universalising rational structure on the perhaps idiosyncratic and fairly contingent social learning of that farmer? — apokrisis
Is it the farmer that does all his or her own self-actualising? Are the constructs truly personal creations that are merely being excavated and brought finally to light?
Or are they vaguely organised thoughts being constrained within a cultural context - such as the US circa 1950 - that prized both rationality and individuality, and so made it natural to frame its therapeutic interventions in that fashion? — apokrisis
wonder why the circa 2020 Kansas farmer might seem such a different creature if Kelly were still around? Did something happen to the dream of universalising rationally-structured individuality in the decades of mindless culture wars inbetween? — apokrisis
This is an assumption, that a system is already recognised and distinguished prior to interaction (by whom?). It’s the interaction that exists prior, and these properties that interact consist of unattributed quality, taking on form only with interaction, by structuring different quality according to pre-existing logic.
— Possibility
This is true, but we have to describe it somehow. There are certain attributes necessary before information can take place, such as form, interaction, and change. Of course we don't find ourselves at the beginning of any process, but in the midst of it. — Pop
The quantum foam has to develop to form. Without form there is no information, so no interaction is possible. — Pop
So we can look at a rock without experiencing any change in neural patterning that would amount to information at that level.
— Possibility
No, I don't think so. Try shutting your eyes and opening them. Or turn your head to the side. Its quite different. Of course the environment is probably memorized and so you will not see anything new that can draw your focus. — Pop
But is it a universalizing structure? — Joshs
By contrast, in Kelly's form of interlocking, any two events are just as closely related to each other as either of them is to the third. In other words, all events are inferentially, relevantly, motivationally, replicatively related to each other like an optimally enlightened construct system, which is different than saying they are just causally connected. — Joshs
Certainly Kelly never gave up a realist-sounding language that spoke of a universe seemingly ‘out there' and which we are mirroring more and more accurately through successive approximations, but If one follows the implications of the theory itself, it seems to me what one ends up with is not a correspondence theory of truth, but rather a developmental teleology of intentionality itself directed toward endlessly increasing internal integration. — Joshs
Notice that Kelly does not say our approximations UNCOVER what was presumed to be already there in an independently existing world. Rather, our approximations help to UNFOLD that reality. I interpret this to mean that our approximations co-create the ‘larger scheme of things’ in contingent fashion. — Joshs
Does the cultural context constrain the theory like a frame that limits the range of variations that can occur within it, or does each individual participant redefine the boundaries of the frame in some measure? — Joshs
There were communists , libertarians and John Birchers, Christian Fundamentalists and atheists, Freudians and Skinnerians, — Joshs
But is any major thinker just a product of their time or does a Descartes, Kant , Hegel extend the frame and move slightly beyond their ‘time’? — Joshs
Even today , 70 years later , one can hardly claim that Kelly’s perspective characterizes the mainstream intellectual climate there yet. — Joshs
But what about what we don’t know that we don’t know? — Possibility
But how does quantum foam develop form without interaction? As I said, you need to look deeper. If quantum foam has no form, then what does form consist of? Let me try: quality, logic and energy... — Possibility
The theory is that through random interaction form develops. Daniel posted a video earlier of one way it might happen. — Pop
Without form there is no information, so no interaction is possible. — Pop
But what about what we don’t know that we don’t know?
— Possibility
I don't think it is about us Possibility ( nonanthropocentric ). I think it is about the creation of form. In the creation of more and more complex form, new function arises. In the case of our interaction, random elements will click, but we will maintain the momentum of our personal knowledge Juggernaut. Its direction and momentum cannot shift drastically, but will shift in some small respect in the process of interaction, even if only in understanding each other. — Pop
Form is endlessly variable. Form varies, but the underlying informational process is constant. — Pop
How does "feel deep down" differ from "experienced as strong feeling" in the definition I brought up? And why "deep down"? Emotions can be very light and subtle and easily felt. But maybe by "deep down" you mean the elements that exist in our subconscious that produce emotions as reactions. Because emotions are reactions. And as such they are always felt (sensed) at the surface, not somewhere deep.This is a description of the effects of emotions. Not a description of what emotions are. Emotions are what we feel deep down. — Pop
Experiences do not necessarily produce emotions. "Experience" from Merriam-Webster: "Practical contact with and observation of facts or events.". But as I can see, you don't like dictionnaries much. You prefer creating your own concepts about terms, risking to use baseless descriptions like "deep down" ...If it was not for emotions all experiences would be the same. — Pop
You can find anything in a dictionary. Not that dictionaries are faultless or desrcibe something in the best way. But if you cannot find something in a dictionary or you cannot define it yourself better, then you cannot talk about it!so you will not find them described in a dictionary any time soon. — Pop
I did. (I also use Wikipedia very often -- sometimes, it's the first reference I use, depending on the subject.) Emotions are biologically-based psychological states brought on by neurophysiological changes, .... It's also a good description. In fact, it is a little better, because the term "state" is more appropriate than "reaction" as far as emotions are concerned.Instead read this Wiki source, and focus on all the different theories of emotion. — Pop
What is information? — Pop
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