As a person with math background you might ask this question of that discipline as well. Every day about 80 articles are submitted to ArXiv.org . There are probably tens of thousands of articles published that are read by less than five people and have not garnered enough support to move the needle of mathematical desire.

To this extent most mathematics and philosophy have little to no effect on the twists and turns of civilization. But there is a kind of satisfaction to the individual producing their product. — jgill

Yes indeed! I remember having complicated feelings as I realized that economically I was and am primarily a teacher of low-level math to students who are required to take this or that class for their degree. Turns out that I like what is largely a social role and seem to be pretty good at it, at least in certain scholastic contexts (small classrooms among students who are chasing a particular future job have been best, in my experience.)

At the moment I'm more invested in philosophical/literary creativity, but I have at times been obsessed with mathematical creativity (constructions of the real numbers, cryptosystems, etc.) For me it's more about creation than discovery, at least once I got a sufficient sense of the space. I was playing sculptor in a material stronger than steel. I really like (when in that mood) building cryptosystems with a focus on beauty and strangeness rather than on what the economy needs (contraptions with [ metaphorically speaking ] spinning wheels, clever clockwork.) But I haven't had much luck doing math with others.

Still, it seems to me like meaning is in some ways constructed too. — Count Timothy von Icarus

My systems science view expects upward acting construction as the “other” to downward acting constraint. So construction comes as part of the holistic equation in some form.

t seems like different, quite independent systems get used for processing different aspects of language. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. Your brain is an accumulation of processing habits that will simply emit the right response when constrained by some general act of attention.

So if your focus is on interpreting an utterance, that suppresses activity across the brain so that all your many perceptual habits - visual, gustatory, object recognition, spatial orientation, whatever - are turned to the task of responding in their learnt habitual way. The words will be decoded in terms of their suitable associations and anticipatory imagery will form.

Stick a person’s head in a scanner and the word “hammer” will light up the motor cortex areas which know what it feels like to initiate the physical act to banging down a nail. Say “wombat” and the visual recognition paths will light up with a suitable state of expectancy for what you might indeed turn your head and see within your visual field.

So understanding is the brain being holistically constrained by attentional focusing to have some narrowed state of sensory and motor priming that “puts you in mind” of the right kind of anticipatory imagery and readiness to act accordingly.

The call of “Kentucky Fried” or “pizza” might even get you drooling in preparation for what you expect is about to arrive on the diner table. Responses that would be more appropriate to “hammer” and “wombat” will also now be equally much suppressed.

Those constructive habits of action are still part of the fabric of your brain, but they will be inhibited rather than excited. The meaning of words is understood in what you now don’t expect or prepare for as much in what you do.

That is why we wouldn’t describe interpretation as simply representational or constructive. It needs a holistic act of focusing that fruitfully limits the brain by suppressing the vast number of inappropriate reactions as much as it appears to stimulate the few right ones.

You can see this happening in real-time with EEG recordings. There is a characteristic P300 positive wave of inhibition that sweeps across the brain 300 milliseconds after some surprise stimulus to narrow focus to the task of interpreting just whatever it is. Then a N400 negative swing of excitation as the suitable pattern-match gets made and the right state of sensory and motor priming is evoked.

So, it seems like the recipient "brings something to the table." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yep. The brain isn’t a computer. It is very flexible and organic. It can cut short the time it spends letting a state of deep understanding emerge. Or it can linger until you really start to feel what it would be like to really have a wombat rummaging about at your feet, probably stinking like a wombat and grunting how you might imagine a wombat would, That level of vividness takes about 500ms to conjure up, and so occupies your brain that it “blinds” you to everything else for half a second too.

Or you can do the quicker thing of just responding “subconsciously”. Almost as you hear the word, you have made enough of a connection - “OK, that Australian marsupial thing” - to just skip on and keep going with the sentence. You can get the gist and always come back to let the word expand in your consciousness if you need to double check that “wombat” could really make sense in the context of what was said after that.

Think about thinking. That is our learnt habit of using speech on ourselves - the inner voice. But we often believe we think wordlessly because we can cut short the full act of uttering in our heads - waiting long enough for the full auditory image to arrive - as it is enough to begin shaping the motor intent to the point we could have actually said the words to ourselves, then skip on. We short-circuit to save time as the attention constraining effect of narrowing our state of thought has already been achieved by our getting ready to verbalise some point of view.

The effect is compounded by the fact that we are mostly always going to say the kinds of things we usually would say to ourselves anyway. There is even less need to linger. We can even think on automatic pilot. Just let the routines run.

Language is an evolved capacity that itself evolves. It is used to do many different types of things — Count Timothy von Icarus

And what is missed is that language is used as the trick that structures our own thoughts as much as it communicates our state of mind to another. To be able to speak its to have the ability to self-constrain in ways that are like being “spoken to” by your society, your culture, your peers, your tribe.

We did not evolve as thinking selves that then needed to tack on speech to express a headful of clever private thoughts. We evolved as animals whose behaviour could be organised from an emergent higher level of socially constructed meaning. We evolved to be listener’s of what we were meant to be doing so as to function in a communal fashion. Once we got into that habit of constantly reminding ourselves through a “self-regulating” inner voice, then we started to find ourselves with a headful of clever private thinking.

Any time there was some socially approved course of action, that would automatically bring to mind it’s “other” of what we thus shouldn’t be doing, or even thinking as a possibility. But of course, that then raises the very possibility of going against the group mind and doing something for selfish and private reasons.

The “voice of conscience” will be ringing in your guilty head. Very loudly if you have a strict upbringing where you were always being told by parents, teachers and priests. Yet the very fact of being socialised as a general constraint on your thought and behaviour will shape up matching degrees of freedom in your thought and behaviour. In being strongly focused on what not to do, you become strongly focused on what you might indeed do. And so the private self emerges as other to the public self.

Language leads to the co-construction of our private and public realms. Society needs language to shape us, and we need language to shape our societies.

That two-way focusing effect of speech acts is what Anglo thought in particular tends to miss. It is absent from mainstream cognitive psychology, neurolinguistics and evolutionary psychology even.

The sciences that think they study the human mind think they need to study the human individual. You have to get into sociology, anthropology and child development to hear about how the human mind is in fact linguistically constructed.

Sure, and I think there are deconstruction-adjacent forms of literary criticism that dissolve the creative personality into a mere thermostat of their time -- ignoring that their own criticism becomes equally 'irrational' --a mere blinking light on the history machine -- thereby. — plaque flag

Still not sure what goal you are reaching for here. You seem to be arguing that these things are mutually exclusive rather than necessarily complementary. That one most win and thus the other lose - the zero sum game - instead of there being the win-win that comes with a useful division of labour.

The game is to differentiate AND integrate. Go in both directions with the vigour that can arrive at a high state of dynamical contrast.

And isn’t that why you would celebrate a historical figure like Shakespeare. He was singular and different because of the generality or universality of what he had to say. We can focus on him to understand what we all ought to think.

The tightness of listening to a single lonely voice, heard and agreed to by the largest imagined crowd, indeed echoing on down the ages, is the kind of high contrast state that eliminates the most ambiguity. We have even the artefact - the canonical work of a play - to cement the lonely utterance in the collective memory. We can refer back at any moment to a spoken truth and interpret it afresh - stage Macbeth in the setting of a modern corporate office or whatever.

So your acts of solitary genius are meaningless until they are understood as having been matched by an equal amount of intelligent response.

The question then is who moved more people down the ages. Is Newton greater than Shakespeare? At least in theory we could quantify this in terms of how much movement - cultural or physical - was created by a bunch of plays vs the Principia.

You seem to want to ask how to measure genius, I say the yardstick is obvious. Action and reaction. The push and its effect. A simple reciprocal equation, or Newton’s third law of motion. And then less clearly, the kind of thing l’m sure Shakespeare also gestured at in all his words I never actually bothered to read. :smile:

Language leads to the co-construction of our private and public realms. Society needs language to shape us, and we need language to shape our societies.

That two-way focusing effect of speech acts is what Anglo thought in particular tends to miss. It is absent from mainstream cognitive psychology, neurolinguistics and evolutionary psychology even. — apokrisis

Exceptions to this include the later Wittgenstein, enactivism and social constructionist approaches in psychology.

Your brain is an accumulation of processing habits that will simply emit the right response when constrained by some general act of attention. — apokrisis

Does language serve a role in fusing habit and what is attended to in such a way as to transform the habit in the very act of engaging it?

Finding refuge in the Gettier problem? Sly dog. — apokrisis

Not getting the reference.

But you were talking about the "dogmatic" institutions – you know, the places that can house so many contradictory dogmas. — apokrisis

I was talking about the human tendency to dogmatize theories like Darwin's and the BB, according them the status of facts, of orthodoxy, and how that can make it difficult for competing theories to get heard.

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Exceptions to this include the later Wittgenstein, enactivism and social constructionist approaches in psychology. — Joshs

Sure. Belatedly the Anglo world started to show up. So I don’t see these as exceptions but stragglers. Folk like Vygotsky and Luria already had the party well started in the 1920s. Social constructionist approaches to psychology arose out of that as the Russian texts finally got translated.

Yet right when Vygotsky/social constructionism was finally filling two shelves at UCL’s Waterstones, along comes the genecentric/cognitive module bandwagon of evolutionary psychology and rolls right over it. Back to the future we go.

Enactivism really took its time showing up too. I had long given up waiting. The Cartesian grip on the Anglo imagination is strong. The enactivists came in swinging as if they were offering the world something unthunk and brand new.

Does language serve a role in fusing habit and what is attended to in such a way as to transform the habit in the very act of engaging it? — Joshs

Not sure that this question coheres well enough for me to give a matchingly snappy answer.

But I’m inclined to “sure”. It is all a pliable and fused kind of story once social construction and neurodevelopment have been co-habiting a brain for 20 or 30 years.

The game is to differentiate AND integrate. Go in both directions with the vigour that can arrive at a high state of dynamical contrast. — apokrisis

Oh we agree on that. That's good thinking in general, right?

You seem to want to ask how to measure genius,I say the yardstick is obvious. Action and reaction. The push and its effect. A simple reciprocal equation, or Newton’s third law of motion. — apokrisis

What I'm getting at is that personality is the yardstick. My choice of criterion is my choice of heroic costume for the world in pursuit of mates and mangos. Maybe a forgotten politician Smith who lived in comfort and safety and cranked out many healthy children with a pneumatically admirable wife counts himself wiser and brighter than either Shakespeare or Newton, both contemporaries. Maybe he's right. Let's say that he was a master of the handshake and getting himself trusted --demonstrating intense worldly knowhow. He even kept in the shadows because it was more pleasant, less subject to envy, whatever. He didn't care about cultural legacy, knew he couldn't enjoy it as a corpse.

So your acts of solitary genius are meaningless until they are understood as having been matched by an equal amount of intelligent response. — apokrisis

To me that's not obvious. Outlandish, but let's imagine a shipwrecked composer with a harpsichord and plenty of coconuts. He soars to new musical heights on that island, though only he ever hears the music. Socially he is nil, but his individual nervous system, running on software downloaded before the connection was broken, is swimming in meaning. Or so he might insist. We might also imagine a mathematician who proves a great theorem but never gets to share it. The hardware can run alone for a number of years, making progress, forging spores that are potentially meaningful to others (the strange nature of script, like a virus). Whether it matters that anything survives the nervous system that enjoys it while alive is up for debate. Maybe I'd rather be happy and forgotten than miserable but remembered, etc.

I was talking about the human tendency to dogmatize theories like Darwin's and the BB, according them the status of facts, of orthodoxy, and how that can make it difficult for competing theories to get heard. — Janus

But you were claiming that inside the institutions as well as outside. And I replied that the institutions institutionalise the competitive space in which the different theories are heard. It would be a problem if they were bad at serving this function. We would know they were bad as nothing was ever allowed to change. They would be museums and not places of quite frantic intellectual competition.

What in fact makes it difficult to be heard is everyone is shouting at once these days. Anyone can shove a pet Theory of Everything on Arxiv. Then belly-ache if everyone else doesn’t immediately drop their own pet theory.

Academia used to be so much smaller. You could immediately ignore anything said by a polytech, or which came out of the colonies.

I’m not recognising the intellectual world you are quoiting Hands as describing.

What I'm getting at is (roughy) personality is the yardstick. — plaque flag

A certain kind of inquiring intelligence?

A certain kind of inquiring intelligence? — apokrisis

I think we can safely limit ourselves to 'cognitive heroes' for the purposes of this discussion, yes.

Maybe a forgotten politician Smith who lived in comfort and safety and cranked out many healthy children with a pneumatically admirable wife counts himself wiser and brighter than either Shakespeare or Newton — plaque flag

Oh I know of one Smith who not only thought of himself that way, but also convinced enough people to start a religion.

Though he had wives.

Smith focused on mastering social knowhow, having decided it was the best kind of knowledge. I'd count him in the pragmatist camp, tho not in your subcamp.

Oh I know of one Smith who not only thought of himself that way, but also convinced enough people to start a religion.

Though he had wives. — Moliere

Nice ! Bring 'em young !

Heh. That's the second prophet who some consider false!

Sorry. I couldn't help myself with the "Smith" name.

:up:
I knew you meant the first, but it reminded me of that Joyce joke.

Sorry. I couldn't help myself with the "Smith" name. — Moliere

No worries. I think a little comic relief is a nice lubricant.

Cool :)

let's imagined a shipwrecked composer with a harpsichord and plenty of coconuts. He soars to new musical heights on that island, — plaque flag

Better yet, let’s imagine the infinity of randomly typing monkeys banging away until the end of time.

We agree that they “must” produce every possible work of genius of any kind? And hence this proves something about genius?

Meaning has to be smuggled in somewhere to give life to the syntax. You want to claim it starts with the individual and so artfully arrange your thought experiment to achieve that illusion. I say go back and start again. Deal with Borges’ Library of Babel.

Better yet, let’s imagine the infinity of randomly typing monkeys banging away until the end of time.

We agree that they “must” produce every possible work of genius of any kind? And hence this proves something about genius? — apokrisis

This is where someone like Husserl comes in. The world exists through particular 'meaning-bestowing' nervous systems. Those nervous systems are in the very world that they disclose. Meaning is 'dormant' (a 'spore' or 'virus') in/as a script without a reader.

I think that maybe you don't sufficiently address the importance of the subject. It's one thing to transcend any particular subject. It's another to transcend embodiment and the existential situation in general altogether.

Meaning has to be smuggled in somewhere to give life to the syntax. You want to claim it starts with the individual and so artfully arrange your thought experiment to achieve that illusion. I say go back and start again. — apokrisis

I say that one cannot remove either the world or the individual nervous system. I'm arguing against rampant subjectivism in another thread.

I'm a holist focused on the (human) lifeworld that can't really be broken up except in terms of useful lies. As Hegel put it, the ideality (fantasy status) of the abstract is the core of idealism --which is of course a realistic holism, calling out the limits of abstraction (finite, disconnected pieces of an actually unbreakable continuum).

I think we agree very much that knowledge is primarily social. Language is tribal software. The individual nervous system 'runs' and updates the software of the tribe. But the hardware is not some fantasy of the software. We are stuck to some degree in this Flesh < truly a key metaphysical concept when it's our flesh , my flesh > , seeing through/with these human sense organs, speaking from a single mouth in an adversarially cooperative conversation -- a person that's not only generic tribesman but also a genuine experiment -- a tender tentacle the tribe uses to explore possible strategies. (This helps us make sense of individual coherence norms, because inconsistent leaders lead the tribe to ruin in the context of unforgiving nature.)

I’m not recognising the intellectual world you are quoiting Hands as describing — apokrisis

Fair enough. I can't argue with you about it because I have not been involved with cosmology at the institutional level; I can only go on what Hands describes.

I think this is a properly balanced view. It's not either all social construction or the sovereign individual, but somewhere in between.

I think this is a properly balanced view. It's not either all social construction or the sovereign individual, but somewhere in between. — Janus

Thanks! I also see it that way. Scylla and Charybdis, right ?

:up: Yes, we don't want to get too close to the one or the other of these "monstrous" views.

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He was singular and different because of the generality or universality of what he had to say. We can focus on him to understand what we all ought to think. — apokrisis

I think there is truth in this, but perhaps the genius and richness of Shakespeare is precisely his seemingly inexhaustible undecidability. I don't see the place of true 'infinite' irony in your system, tho I think you have a healthy sense of gallowshumor given your grim-to-many views.

Kierkegaard said that if Hegel had called his Logic a mere thought experiment, it would have been a greater work. This is not (I don't think) about the sentimental appreciation of humility but a metaphysical point --- Hegel's implicit theoretical acknowledgement of a world beyond his personality, which would have been Hegel's transcending of his own system. Holding it in suspension as a mere possibility implies a much richer world.

Hegel's resistance to the Irony of his Romantic literary peers looks like an 'irrational' existential commitment, a tonal preference, a non-autonomous foundation.

Sure. Belatedly the Anglo world started to show up. So I don’t see these as exceptions but stragglers. Folk like Vygotsky and Luria already had the party well started in the 1920s. Social constructionist approaches to psychology arose out of that as the Russian texts finally got translated. — apokrisis

G H Mead was also an important source for constructionist thought, as was George Kelly (b. 1905) and Jerome Bruner, but Pragmatism, constructivism and constructionism, gestalt theory, phenomenology and hermeneutics all had to wait decades till behaviorism and cognitivism’s stranglehold on mainstream psychology weakened.

Meaning is 'dormant' (a 'spore' or 'virus') in/as a script without a reader. — plaque flag

That is how a computationist would look at it. Biology and neuroscience show that computationalism is simply wrong. Life and mind start from the first meaningful action. The first shifting of an atom for a reason.

Scripts don't write themselves. And they need to be being read from the start of their writing.

I think that maybe you don't sufficiently address the importance of the subject. — plaque flag

Or you are not following what I've been saying.

So let's get focused on what you say your are here to discuss despite it being a wandering of the thread. You want to be able to quantify the "genius personality" in terms of some individualistic paradigm of the human mind and spirit?

I am saying this would simply be a bad question arising from a bad metaphysics. And I've made that reply accordingly.

I've tried to argue using concrete examples which you brush away in your haste to just keep moving on in aimless-feeling fashion.

So again, focus. If we have Shakespeare and Newton as our candidate for intellectual hero of the English millennial, how do we decide who wins, who is runner up?

A metric I might toss into the mix is what we are willing to ignore about their personalities – if personalities is indeed key to your putative model.

So Newton was a historical genius in turning physics into maths. He was brave or reckless enough to use dramatically lossy data compression. He even was willing to chuck out the very materialistic metaphysics he just had substantiated with his Laws of Motion to take the opposite tack "action at a distance" in his Law of Gravitation.

We all applaud that kind of relentless genius that can use and abuse metaphysics as he willed. The maths is what mattered. The metaphysics got backfilled to fit. A project going on for both his mathematical triumphs. And even the maths was of foundational importance and is keeping folk busy trying to back fill its metaphysics too. The ghost of departed quantities, and all that.

No wonder Newton is a turning point just in terms of social attitude. He personified something that really did change intellectual history. Where would Kant and the rest be without Newton as that central challenge? The guy had strut.

But what does polite intellectual society then say about his religiosity? Well, it seems excusable for a person of his time if not his genius.

What about his difficult personality? Again, excusable to be impatient with dullards and jealous of those claiming any part of his personal glory. That's just people being people. Maybe he was neurodiverse and so really can't be blamed.

Did did you know he was made Master of the Royal Mint? And he was twice an MP? Oh yeah. A man of the world, a man of action too. That adds to his genius personality index. But wait. That was about social influence and good money. Erm, it seems he was trading up to be a big cog in the Imperial British enterprise. He lost a good chunk of change plunging into a slave-trading venture. Um, move on.

Now let's socially evaluate his career as an alchemist, his occult studies. Oh no. Let's not. Erase that from the collective memory and fix on the bit of the scientist that was the mathematical genius. We don't have to judge the genius personality in terms of his personality after all perhaps.

Now run the same ruler over Shakespeare. Could his peccadilloes even detract from his reputation? Wouldn't he be judged more leniently on that social score because the social realm was itself the one he was addressing where Newton was addressing something intellectually more demanding than that?

Shakespeare stands accused of the literary sin of plagiarism – turning the prose of others into poetry. But no one minds that as he just told the stories better.

I'm just illustrating here the reality that it is audiences that rate genius. And they do so in regard to their institutionalised interests. It might then take certain personality traits to succeed in this competitive game. But it is still the audience that takes the view on what it might treat as the proper measure, even just on the "type of person" the genius was.

If you are a mathematician, for instance, there are almost no standards of social grace that obtain. :naughty:

I'm a holist focused on the (human) lifeworld that can't really be broken up except in terms of useful lies. — plaque flag

The problem with the subjective stance is that even the self as a first person viewpoint is socially constructed.

Well it is first neurobiologically constructed. Pragmatic modelling means I can chomp my food with out chewing off my tongue.

But the kind of self that exists the social world where individuals can be acclaimed as "genius personalities" is a social construction. And needs to understood as such. Otherwise you are building your philosophical cities on foundations of sand.

Language is tribal software. — plaque flag

Computationalism works as very rough metaphor. But it is another foundation of sand.

Life and mind science need to be built on the foundation of dissipative physics. As I argued, even the modern industrial world with its particular economic and political structures are comprehensible as "metabolism".

Once again a code is putting itself in charge of the physics needed to give itself existence as a structure that can grow and evolve.

And you can't say that about a computer. Well, not until they start telling ChatGTP to go find its own wall socket to plug itself into after the power company cancels over the mounting unpaid bills. Hey computer, go figure it out for yourself. If you are so smart, provide your own metabolic foundation.

Tell me something I didn't know and haven't said. We discussed Kelly at length, remember? And I think why Mead, Cooley and Dewey showed something was also stirring at the turn of the century in the wake of pragmatism, but failed to flower for reasons of wisespread Anglo-world disinterest.

Vygotsky and Luria are more interesting to me. They combined the psychology and the neurobiology. They experimented. They seemed to have a receptive audience as social constructionism ought to be "on brand" following a Marxist revolution. But then shit happened. Along came Stalin. The suppression of the books. The academic seizing on Jewishness and Vygotsky's failure to actually adhere literally to Marxist theology. And tuberculosis.

As a stirring that again failed, it was bigger and thus more tragic.

There is a social history here that goes back to Aristotle at least. And it doesn't feel as if there has been a true paradigm shift yet.

I mean you don't seem impressed with Bayesian mechanics as the vision of where enactivism is all headed. I haven't heard enthusiasm from you for the semiotic turn in the life sciences. PoMo may have turned towards metaphysics in its search for fresh discursive meat, but not serious engagement with Peircean semiotics. The carcasses of Saussure and Marx are still stinking up the place.

The problem with the subjective stance is that even the self as a first person viewpoint is socially constructed.

Well it is first neurobiologically constructed. Pragmatic modelling means I can chomp my food with out chewing off my tongue.

But the kind of self that exists the social world where individuals can be acclaimed as "genius personalities" is a social construction. And needs to understood as such. Otherwise you are building your philosophical cities on foundations of sand. — apokrisis

The self has a social aspect (language centered around semantic-logical coherence norms) and a biological basis, a body guided by its own brain that can live alone for decades in the woods, writing poetry, because it carries its own version of the tribal software with it (including its use of 'I' and its performed self-referentially symbolic identity). 'Language speaks' and 'the subject is a function of language,' yes, but individual living brains are necessary for this social game. This isn't Descartes. It's just sanity.

An actual organism models the world, yes ? It seems to me that the idea of the model depends on the commonsense notion of animals in the world -- a world that is really there, but not (for me anyway) some obscure unknowable (Kantian) Reality -- instead just a 'lifeworld' (the world of a nonreductive holist) with depth and about which we can be wrong. A pure indirect realism falls apart because (for instance) it makes the sense organs their own product.