Well Well Well. This Has Been Strange.

Well I'm back on the internet now. My computer is fixed and I am typing as rapidly as ever.

Going without a computer, however, was a bizarre experience that prompted a lot of insights.

First I would just like to say that in the week that I had no computer I was able to read two whole books and a bunch of articles. It was shocking (literally shocking) how quickly I could slam through a book if I wasn't distracted by the computer.

Often I find myself looking up every couple pages just to get check my e-mail or to look at nytimes or facebook or cnn or whatever.

But it felt fantastic to read books quickly and without distraction.

I finished Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities in a few days and found it incredibly impressive. I am most shocked by it because it feels, in many ways, remarkably similar to Foucault. Their similar emphasis on language, possibility, and radical transformation seems undeniable. Anderson, however, writes with much greater clarity than Foucault.

Anderson makes me really recognize how powerful historical and comparative method can be.

I am also reading Jon Sumida's book Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command: The Classic Works of Alfred Thayer Mahan Reconsidered. I know Sumida quite well from courses, and I am very familiar with his work on Clausewitz. The work on Mahan, however, is quite different and interesting to read about. Many of the themes are similar: the importance of both the science and art of command, the need for clear and decisive individuals, the importance of experience in developing judgment, the possibility that history can substitute for experience, and the relationship between history and theory. Good stuff.

Also, it is official. I need to become a historian. The theory of mind that I wish to elaborate can only be accomplished historically. It would be impossible to create a comprehensive theory of mind (or something close) without grappling with the historical determinants of thought. So, I am going to become a professional historian so I can advance my views on the philosophy of mind. I want to do something like the genealogy of the modern mind. Which is just pulling terms from Foucault and expanding the scope of the project. Lots of time to do this all in. It'll take lots of time indeed.

But now I'm back and I'm ready to start doing some serious writing again. The next essay I want to write is called "In Defense of Thinking A Lot." I have it outlined. I'm ready to do it. But this month is going to be very busy cause I need to get ready to move to Seattle. My plane leaves on August 7th. So, hopefully I can get some writing done in the next month. But, not surprisingly, philosophical writing may very well take a back seat to the pragmatics of moving across the country.

Anyways, I'm back online and it is a mixed blessing. I hope I can maintain my focus on my reading and continue to put out strong philosophical essays. Booya.

Broken Computer: An Ipod Touch Post

My keyboard broke. No CPU for now. Unfortunately my mind is eating me alive because I have been reading a lot. Finished Norman Doidge's book on neuroplasticity. The connections to Collingwood, Foucault, and mindfulness were leaping off every page. I would absolutely loveeeeee to be able to write quickly right now. But this is from an iPod touch and took about 5 minutes. More to come.

Social Progress and Personal Progress: Expanding the Unconscious Repertoire and Densifying of the Content of Actions

The structure of the discussion:

1. John Searle and the Content of Action: The Relationship Between Thinking and Doing

2. Collingwood's Reenactment as Accessing the Content of Action

3. Action as the Expression of the A Priori Imagination: Claxton on Action and Thought

4. The Content of Action as the Product of our Experience

5. Action as the Expression of Wisdom: Deliberately Densifying The Content of Our Intuitive Actions

6/15/10 - beginning notes- I thought of this post when I used my leg to help me close a door when my hands were occupied.

I experienced a really dense moment in which a few different types of thoughts unfolded very rapidly. I had a strange flash of hypothetical-future simulations of possible things mixed with reflections on the role of experience in learning to do things without thinking about them. I thought about what if I had a kid and in the future my kid saw me open and close a door with the help of my foot and asked me how I learned to do that. It would seem novel to them, the closing of a door with your foot. Then I imagined myself telling my kid about how you learn to do lots of things overtime without thinking about it. Experience just teaches you things. This was all incredibly compressed thought. This whole simulation of having a child who saw me do this and the explanation happened in an instance. But then I scribbled some stuff and now I am gonna write this post.

So generally I would say that this post is about pursuing some questions that were raised by my last post, which was 69 pages and took a huge toll on me. It just felt taxing. Like a large expression. The last 40 pages on Foucault I wrote in 3 days, and the whole thing just felt intense.

But in that last post I was trying to talk about the a priori imagination, how it underlies social interactions, and how we could hope to change it. In particular I spent a lot of time talking about Foucault's emphasis on transformation. Now I want to talk a little more about what these types of transformations would look like. What is the personal progress that I am trying to describe? This morning when I had my strange flash of thoughts I realized that there is a quotation that really helps describe what I am thinking about. Unfortunately, I cannot remember where I read this. Cursory googling is not turning up results, so I may just write this without giving credit to whoever said this idea. I'll search a bit more.

Ah okay I found it. Alfred North Whitehead said, "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."

I find this quotation provocative for a couple of reasons. First, I like how it jives with many lay understandings of social progress, which may use something like rationality and its general use as a metric for progress. I also think that progress is brought about by increasing the number of things we can do unconsciously. When I closed a door with my leg, for example, that was something I did unconsciously based on my experiences.

That is essentially what my post of 6/13 was all about. It is about figuring out how we think on an unconscious level, and then changing how we think and act on an unconscious level. This Whitehead quotation allows me to specify a little bit more clearly how increasing our unconscious store of thoughts and actions could be seen as a form of personal progress.

- 6/16 and on writing to completion -

Furthermore, this post provides me with a good chance to clarify two other ideas that contribute to my last post that I didn't focus on. 1. John Searle's idea that action always has a 'content,' which is basically the thoughts that are behind an action. 2. R.G. Collingwood's definition of history as the history of thought and the conclusion that understanding actions is always about reenacting the thoughts expressed in the action.

Collingwood and Searle's claims really line up in this instance, in that they both claim you cannot understand an action without understanding the thought that caused that action. More importantly, Searle says the content of an action and the explanation of an action must be the same thing. When we explain an action we in essence have to recreate the content of that action for ourselves. In other words, if we want to understand someone we have to recreate their thought for ourself. This aspect of the issue of action/content question lines up directly with Collingwood's notion of the 'reenactment of past thought.'

So, how does my idea of the modification of the a priori imagination line up with this idea of the content of thought? Well I think that changing the a priori imagination would come back to modifying the content of our pre-reflective actions.

In short, I am trying to increase the density of the content of our actions. I am trying to make it so that we can think more things without actually thinking about them. I am trying to make it so that our actions, even pre-reflective ones, express a depth of thought that has been instilled into our unconscious. I want to make it so that the a priori imagination, our unconscious thoughts and actions, are laden with thought, saturated with wisdom. Just as Whitehead said progress in society comes from increasing people's unconscious repertoire, what if personal progress comes from increasing the number of things we think about without actually thinking about them.

So anyways, now I'm gonna use a couple different people to explore this idea. First, I want to talk more in depth about John Searle and his idea that action can only be explained with the thought behind that action (i.e. action must be explained by its content and not its form). Then I want to spend some time on Collingwood's reenactment, how it is similar to Searle, and how it can ultimately bring us back to the modification of the a priori imagination. Somewhere along the line I also want to discuss Guy Claxton and his thoughts on the connection between action and thought.

John Searle and the Content of Action: The Relationship Between Thinking and Doing

So first I want to talk about some of John Searle's lectures that were published as a book called Minds, Brains And Science. In particular, I want to talk about his lecture on "The Structure of Action." Searle essentially provides a framework to help us conceptualize human action in general and, more importantly, how to conceptualize explanations of human action.

For me, the most relevant part is Searle's distinction between the content of an action and themode of an action. The content of an action is essentially the thought or intention that caused the action. The mode on the other hand is the form of physical action that was used to carry out the content. When I get up out of my chair and leave the room the content could be several things, I could want to eat food, I could need to use the bathroom, I could want to drive to New York. But in each one of those cases, while the content of my action differs, the mode was the same. I got up out of my chair and I left the room. The content of the action may differ, but they all had the same mode of expression.

Now this is helpful because it gives me terms to conceptualize the thought behind actions as distinct from the actions themselves. As I will discuss, this lends a lot of weight to Collingwood's idea of reenactment, and thus furthers me in much of my thinking in general. As usual, this writing is augmenting and complementing my biggest pieces of writing (4/30 and 6/13).

John Searle then discusses how this distinction between the content and the mode of action helps us explain human action. I am going to use two quotations from Searle. His thinking is remarkably similar to Collingwood's in that he believes the explanation of thought can only happen if we replicate the thoughts that a person had when they committed that action. Collingwood says that we can only understand history through this 'reenactment' of past thought. Further, Collingwood says that all knowledge of mind is historical, so this lines up with Searle quite well.

Anyways, Searle quotations: "The explanation of an action must have the same content as was in the person's head when he performed the action. If the explanation is really explanatory, the content that causes behavior by way of intentional causation must be identical with the content in the explanation of the behavior" (67, author's italics).

Clearly this quotation hints at Collingwood's notion of reenactment, and generally of simulation theory of mind, which Collingwood certainly comes close to in some ways.

In this next quotation Searle invokes the difference between explaining natural events and human events, which also sounds a lot like Collingwood's comparison of geology and history.

Searle says: "In this respect actions differ from other natural events in the world, and correspondingly, their explanations differ. When we explain an earthquake or a hurricane, the content in the explanation only has to represent what happened and why it happened. It doesn't actually have to cause the event itself. But in explaining human behavior, the cause and the explanation both have contents and the explanation only explains because it has the same content as the cause" (67).

In other words, explanations of behavior only make sense if they replicate, reenact, simulate, the thoughts that were originally expressed in that action.

Collingwood's Reenactment as Accessing the Content of Action

So I just want this section to be brief. I just want to establish that Collingwood's reenactment is essentially the same some of explanation of human action that Searle explicates.

Collingwood believed that the only way to understand history was to reenactment (ie replicate the content) the thoughts of past individuals. In order for this to happen past thought had to be expressed in some way. Thought can be expressed through writing, through the construction of buildings or anything else, or anyway. Anything that the historian can detect thought behind is historical evidence.

But let me run with the two best examples: writing and constructed objects.

When we encounter past writing (which includes an e-mail from a friend written yesterday), we Collingwood says we can only understand it by accurately recreating their thoughts for ourselves. When our friend writes and tells us he is upset because his dog died, we can only understand it if we imagine our friends experience and recreate those thoughts for ourselves. Same thing with an old piece of pottery or an old building. We can only understand the purpose of those buildings if we can imagine why someone thought to build it there. What were they thinking about? Why did they build it here and not there?

Collingwood's idea of reenactment, therefore, is essentially meant to access the content of actions. Writing and building can certainly be considered actions that express thought. Just like Searle, Collingwood believed that we can only understand action if we replicate its content for ourselves. Reenactment is Collingwood's way of talking about accessing and replicating the content of a person's actions.

Action as the Expression of the A Priori Imagination: Claxton on Action and Thought

So now that I have established the connection between Searle and Collingwood, I want to shift the discussion to Collingwood's notion of the a priori imagination, and how it relates to the idea of the content of action. In particular, I want to figure out two things. 1. If we can consider our actions as the expression of the a priori imagination. 2. If Claxton's phrase 'I act, therefore I think,' can help me with this issue.

So, the a priori imagination. I already hashed this idea out at some length in my post of 3/30 and 6/13. But for now I will briefly restate what it is all about.

The a priori imagination is a form of imagination that we all possess where our mind makes decisions and judgments about things and people by unconsciously filling in gaps in perceptual information. When we instantaneously attribute complex mental states to other people I suspect we are drawing on a priori imagined simulations of other people's thoughts.

I think that a priori imagination involves both low-level and high-level mind reading. Meaning that it would involve mirror neurons and direct empathy, as well as more abstract and complex imaginings of someone's mental states. The involvement of mirror neurons is fairly straight forward, but the high-level part I want to explain a bit more. But I think they are likely involved in a priori imaginings because most of our conceptions of other people go way beyond basic emotions line pain and anger. Rather, when we attribute mental states we are almost always considering more abstract social conceptions. When we think about men or women, adults or children, any perceived social group, we are drawing on socially constructed notions to attribute mental states to these people. Given that our mindreadings are permeated with these abstract social notions, it seems clear that it would involve a blend of low-level and high-level mindreading. We would be able to intuitively include those social abstractions without recourse to higher-level imaginings about minds.

Based on what I just said, it seems that I can conclude that the a priori imagination would guide many of our actions, and can therefore be considered as providing the content for our actions. In other words, because action often happens at an unconscious level, the content of our actions must therefore be formed at an unconscious level. The a priori imagination is probably the level at which the content of our unconscious actions would be formed. Action, therefore, may often be the expression of the a priori imagination. Basically, all of our actions reflect some sort of thought. Whether this thought it is imagined a priori, or it is deliberately thought out, all action reflects some level of thought.

This idea that all action expresses thought lines up well with Claxton's writing in The Wayward Mind. I only want to provide this brief quotation. Either way, I'm unable to find the page number, but it is a somewhat common sentiment on the internet it seems.

The idea is to modify Descartes' phrase 'I think, therefore I am,' and say instead 'I act, therefore I think.' All action reflects thought of some sort. Whether it is conscious or unconscious, action can only reflect some type of intelligence or thought. This applies to everything. Every action that we perform expresses some form of thought.

From here I am going to explore two related things. First, how the content of our action, especially when we act unconsciously (a priori), is a product of our experience. Our actions our loaded with thought that has been unconsciously instilled in us. Second, I am going to explore the ways that we could potentially modify our unconscious thought, and therefore our unconscious actions. I want to focus on how we can introduce a greater level of wisdom into our unconscious thought and actions. I want to make it so that all of our actions reflect a certain depth of unconscious thought, a certain wisdom.

The Content of Action as the Product of our Experience

So in this section I just want to establish that all of our pre-reflective, unconscious actions reflect a certain level of thought. Moreover, in most instances our unconscious actions reflect a large amount of socially constructed thought that we have internalized through experience. I am going to spend some time giving examples of how this is the case. Again, I want to show that most of our action reflects thought of some sort that has been acquired at unconscious level through experience. Once I have established this I will have two purposes: to illuminate the unconscious content of our actions, and to modify them so that they reflect greater wisdom.

Think of all the unconscious thought that is reflected in a lot of our actions. My examples will all be everyday interactions in which we would probably behave automatically. Driving, navigating people in grocery stores, conversations.

When we are driving we do a lot of things on an unconscious, pre-reflective level. Further, all of these actions express a large amount of socially constructed thought. We use our turn signals when we change lanes. This action alone reflects certain understands of the law, of consideration, of how other people will respond to our changing lanes without signaling, etc.. All kinds of thought is expressed in that action. Also think about waving to people while driving. Somebody lets us merge and we wave a thank you. We are expressing all kinds of knowledge about what it means to need to get over, that someone is being nice by letting you in, that you should thank them. It just seems like an incredibly large amount of thought and understanding is expressed in those unreflective actions. This is all socially constructed ideas that have permeated our minds.

Remember, I am going with the Whitehead quote in which progress is a result of increasing the number of things that people can do pre-reflectively. I suppose this stuff may be progress. We have trained entire generations of people to be able to use microwaves, drive cars, use credit cards, use the internet, most of it without any pre-reflective thought. We can all simply do these things now. Because we live in a world in which they constitute our basic experiences, these actions have become mostly unconscious. By unconsciously engaging in these complex actions we are expressing a certain level of thought. In other words, the content of our actions is modified by our experiences with society. The thoughts that are behind our actions are a result of our experience in the world.

The content of our actions, therefore, is made denser by our experiences. Perhaps this is a form of progress. People nowadays can do way more thinks without reflection then people used to be able to do (unless that isn't true). But we can engage with way more technology without reflection that people used to. Either way, in this section all I need to show is that our experience with the social world makes it so that our actions express more thought than they used to.

Now I want to turn to talk about ways that we could personally manipulate the content of our action. I want to talk about changing the underlying thoughts of our unconscious actions. I am talking about modifying the unconscious so that all of our actions express a certain amount of wisdom. This lines up with Whitehead in that I want to increase the number of thoughts that our everyday actions reflect. This all lines up with the a priori imagination in ways I don't want to (and can't) articulate here and now.

But onward to action as the expression of wisdom.

Action as the Expression of Wisdom: Deliberately Densifying The Content of Our Intuitive Actions

Now, let me say first of all, that action does not have to reflect wisdom. I just want to explore the possibility, the what if, all action could reflect a certain amount of wisdom. What if the content of all of our action was mindfulness and wisdom?

Well, I bet that could be a thing. People who are very mindful, who are very wise, their actions would express that level of discipline, concern, attention, and wisdom. Their actions would be saturated with those sorts of thought.

But what would that be like? And how could you cultivate that form of action/thought? Well, I feel like making recourse to two authors. First, to E.M. Cioran, and his thoughts on action and wisdom. And second, Foucault, and his thoughts on social observation and personal transformation.

First, a quotation from Mr. Cioran: "X insults me. I am about to hit him. Thinking it over, I refrain. Who am I? which is my real self: the self of the retort or that of the refraining? My first reaction is always energetic; the second one, flabby. What is known as 'wisdom' is ultimately only a perpetual 'thinking it over,' i.e., non-action as first impulse."

I take this quotation as commentary on a few things, 1. It is about relating to your thoughts in certain ways, 2. It is about the relationship between action and wisdom.

So, as for relating to your thoughts. This quotation has a hint of mindfulness, in that he relates to his thoughts as something separate from, rather than constitutive, of his sense of self. He has multiple reactions to an insult, and has a hard time discerning which of these reactions is his true nature. In reality none of them are, it is rather his awareness, his 'thinking it over' that is his self.

And for wisdom and action. It seems like Cioran is saying that wisdom manifests itself primarily through non-action. Which is great and lines up with the Taoist notion of wu-wei (i.e. non-action, letting things take their natural course).

But either way, I think this quotation gives me some good starting points to think about the relationship between action and wisdom. It is indeed possible to attain a frame of mind in which wisdom naturally expresses itself. Ciroan, however, seems to believe that wisdom manifests itself primarily through non-action, or mindfulness.

Basically I feel like that was just to help me conceptualize wisdom a little bit. I ought to read that book I have called Wisdom. But anyways, let me now talk about the role that Foucault could play in helping us cultivate a modern, western wisdom.

As I mentioned before, the content of our action is determined by experience, and in particular by our social experience that provides us with certain concepts and ideas about people and things. I think that Foucault's archeologies could give us the ability to transcend our current stock of social concepts. Foucault would strip away discursive prisons and allow our minds to explore people, things, and ourselves in ways that go beyond contemporary discourse.

In essence, Foucault is presenting us with a path towards mindfulness.

If we were to internalize his lessons, and learn to pay attention to the world in different ways, we could probably change the content of our pre-reflective actions. The idea is that if we payed enough attention to the way we thought and acted, we could change the way we think and therefore act. Our unconscious actions, therefore, would take on new contents. Our mind would be operating on a new set of unconscious principles, and our action would reflect it. Our actions would reflect richer content. Richer thought would inform our actions.

I need to read more on mindfulness, on wisdom, so I can understand exactly what type of mindset we are trying to cultivate and how we could do it. But for now I think I have shown that most of our actions expresses certain thoughts, that it would be possible to identify the content of our actions, and it would be possible to modify the content of our unconscious actions. In essence, we would be able to modify our unconscious modes of thought so that they were expressed in our actions. In particular, I want wisdom to be expressed by our actions. And I believe that mindfulness, paying attention, would be able to help us modify the content of our actions and make it so that our actions reflected wisdom.

This is the density of the content of our action. What are the things that we are unconsciously thinking when we act pre-reflectively? What if we could make it so that we were thinking more when we acted unconsciously? What if we could saturate our mind with wisdom so our actions reflected that wisdom. This would be what I call increasing the density of the content of our actions, and based on what Whitehead said, this would be a form of personal progress. We would be changing the amount of things that we thought about without thinking about them. Wisdom would permeate our actions.

Physical and Mental Recovery: In Preparation for More More More

So this week I have been taking it easy, physically and mentally. I was sick most of this week so I have been relaxing to try and get over that. First I was throwing up a bit, then it moved into my chest and I have been coughing a bit. Soar throat. But I feel like within the next few days I should be on the up and up.

I have also been taking it easily mentally a little bit. I started reading Foucault's Discipline & Punish about a month ago, and I finished it yesterday. So in the last month I have only read one book. It is a very challenging book, without a doubt. I suppose I have read parts of other books, or certain essays online or out of volumes I own. I also spent a good amount of time rereading parts of Collingwood and other things. So its not like I am not reading, just not plowing through lots of new stuff.

I also have been really occupied by my writing. It took up a large amount of time for the first two weeks of this month. Especially my essay of 6/13, The Everyday A Priori Imagination. That essay is about 70 pages and took a lot of time. Took a lot out of me. Was really satisfying. And has prompted tons of new questions.

Needless to say though, it was hard, and it prevented me from reading a ton, and kept me from writing other stuff. But that is fine. It was a very worthwhile thing to have done.

Right after posting that big one I wrote a few fast reflective posts. And then I managed to put out an 11 page essay that really augments and explains my previous thinking really well. It helps me articulate some things more clearly, helps me think more clearly about some things. The inhibition of the self as the enrichment of the self. It is the title, and it is what it helps me think about.

I was also nailed with a few heavy ideas immediately after finishing that post. One is about social progress and personal progress, and how we can conceptualize them with John Searle's notion of the 'content of action.' I have 5 pages of that written, and I plan on writing a bit more. That will probably be my next piece of writing that approaches 20 pages or so.

I also have to write my post on Discipline & Punish. In particular, I am going to be focusing on the notion of an 'implicit war' within society. Foucault spends a bit of time talking about the idea of the social contract, and whether there are other, or better, ways of conceptualizing society's relationship with disciplinary and punitive power. Why do we except the state's monopoly on violence? Is it the social contract? Or is it something else? Is it more coercive than that?

I think because of my background in military history I am very sensitive to the centrality of violence. But DnP is absolutely running along these lines. There is no denying that war, violence, battle, that those are the most important things in bringing about a 'disciplinary society,' as Foucault describes it. Foucault even said that after his work on sexuality he was going to explore the military aspects of society in greater depth. So, I think war and military should be pretty central to DnP. And I think he makes that clear in the text as well. I will show this in my post.

But this is not the time or place to hash these ideas out. I am simply writing to reflect on what has been happening to me this last week, and to prepare for what I am about to work on.

I'm not sure when I'll devote my time to these two pieces: progress and the content of action, and my analysis of Foucault's Discipline & Punish. I think I have some pretty heavy ideas in the works with both of them. On top of that I have about 8 other blogs that I could write. Which are def worthwhile ideas. Those two, however, feel most pressing in my mind. So be it. I will tackle them.

I am also reading a new set of essays that I find pretty exciting. The volume is The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction. Shaun Nichols is the editor, a philosopher of mind that I now from Alvin Goldman's work. Goldman actually contributes an article to this volume. It is from Oxford U press, published in 2006, and seems like it has some pretty strong contributors. So I am expecting it to offer me some pretty substantial insights into the imagination that will help me.

It feels so funny for me to be writing so much. Because I feel myself making substantial connections between things I know, things I think about, things I read. I feel like I'm not crazy, I think I am talking sense about some things (like the imagination, intuition, and simulation). But I still see how far I have to go. How much literature there is left for me to read.

At this point I wish I had the confidence to say that I could master this literature. I would love to say, 'oh yeah, I'm gonna read all those books and then I'm gonna tell everyone what I think.'

I'd like to think I am capable of blowing everyone's minds. Or at least of making a very significant contribution to an ongoing conversation. Hopefully one that could help some people.

But sure, I'm afraid I won't be able to. But so far I feel like I am doing a good job making hay out of the things I read. I can make sense of books. But it is hard and daunting to think about the future. All those books, all those people, all those minds, all those ideas.

Sift through them, sort them out in a new way, tell everyone that your way of sorting is supreme.

I'm hungry for so many other things though. Academics and all, good stuff. But I'm gonna have to start doing lots of other things too. Lots of other things. Lots of action. I can do it all. Lol, I can't. But I love hyperbole. I love exaggerating. I love saying extreme and insane things.

Despite all my writing I am so far from having a unified statement of what I am after.

This is most apparent to me in thinking about the similarities and differences between my post of 4/30 and my post of 6/13. Now I remember, I was in the shower and had an idea about how to articulate their connection more clearly, but now I can't remember. But I'll try to do it later.

That is it for now.

I'm Sick With My Illness: Ellicott City Reflections

Today I am watching my parent's dogs in Columbia/Ellicott City. I grew up on the border, so I am sorta in both? Ellicott City mailing address in a Columbia group mailbox.

Anyways, I am sick. My body is mad tired. I'm sitting on my parents bed with three tiny dogs next to me. The other two are hanging out somewhere guarding the house with their little barks.

There is nothing in particular I want to accomplish with this post.

My parents are moving out of this house within the next two or three months. Curious stuff.

I mean I grew up in this house for the most part. Since I was 7 or so? Yup.

Either way it is interesting sitting around hanging out with these little dogs. Noticing how furniture is now in places that it has never been in before. Imagining how this house is going to be shown and how it will look totally unfamiliar to the people thinking about buying it.

It is always fun to imagine familiar things as novel.

And being in my parent's soon to be sold house is a good opportunity to imagine the familiar as novel.

I am going to be moving somewhere myself soon. And my parent's house being sold means I sure as hell aint moving here. Which is all well and good, but it is funny.

Will I be a philosopher? Where am I going to live next? What am I going to do next? What is my deal? Moving, and especially not moving to this house, are the big things. Anyways, I don't want to write this post anymore.

The bottom line is that it is interesting to think about how my parents are selling their house. Interesting to think about living in a world in which I don't have a permanent home of sorts anymore. It is all well and good. But new. Interesting and new.

I'm gonna finish reading Discipline & Punish on the back deck now. Booya.

The Inhibition of the Self as the Enrichment of the Self: The Encapsulation and Diffusion of Other Minds

So in this post I want to discuss some nuanced points about the nature of simulation and synthetic experience. In particular, I want to explain how it is that the simulation process can provide synthetic experience. Further, I want to try to show that the inhibition of the self required for an accurate simulation will ultimately lead to an enrichment of the self. I will be exploring this primarily through the notions of 'encapsulation' and 'diffusion' of other minds. The former term is Collingwood's, the latter term is mine. I plan on drawing on Alvin Goldman's Simulating Minds, as well.

This post is in direct relation to my post of 4/30/10, which argues for the importance of simulation theory of mind, and its ability to improve intuitive judgment by providing synthetic experience. So if you aren't familiar with the notions of simulation, encapsulation, or synthetic experience, please refer to that post.

This idea was prompted mainly by a discussion I had with Ryan Gleason after he read my post of 4/30. I spent a lot of time talking about Collingwood's notion of 'encapsulation' of thought, and Goldman's notion of a 'quarantine' of thought. In both instances we have to inhibit our thoughts, our biases, in order to accurately reenact/simulate another person's thoughts. Mr. Gleason, however, seemed to think that encapsulation/quarantine involved the 'destruction of the self.'

This couldn't be further from my view of it, so I want to clarify. The process of simulation is ALWAYS meant to enhance the mind of the person engaging in simulations.

It does, however, involve the inhibition of the self. You have to suppress your own thoughts, your own biases, your own beliefs that interfere with your ability to understand other people. The notions of encapsulation and quarantine are meant to communicate this inhibition of the self.

This post, therefore, will be spent explicating these terms, and explaining their effects. I am going to describe the process of simulating another mind as the encapsulation of another mind followed by the diffusion of that mind into your own mind. With the notion of diffusion I am trying to explain how after encapsulating another person's thought/experience, we can transform it into synthetic experience that effects our own thought and behavior.

In short, this is all about explaining how synthetic experience, acquired from simulations of past thought, which requires a degree of inhibition of the self, can ultimately transform the self by diffusing the encapsulated synthetic experience throughout your mind.

Collingwood on Encapsulation as the Enrichment of the Self

Well Collingwood's uses the term encapsulation to explain the process of reenacting past thoughts. When we have successfully understood past thought we encapsulate it in our own minds, in our present context. I experience the word encapsulation in a very visual way. It is an image for me, in which the mind is a space filled with a sort of substance, filled with thought. And the process of encapsulation literally forms a circle around this special type of thought we are thinking. It encases past thought inside our own minds. We can only understand history by subjectively recreating past thought in our own minds. We are attempting to understand other people's minds, and Collingwood (and Godldman and Searle) say this can only be accomplished by rethinking their thoughts for ourselves.

Thus encapsulation involves a certain amount of inhibition of the self. We have to suppress our own biases and make it so that our minds can adopt a highly specific form of thought within the context of our own thought. Here is a quotation from Collingwood where he explains how we have to change ourselves into understand history.

He says "the mere fact that someone has expressed his thoughts in writing, and that we possess his works, does not enable us to understand his thoughts. In order that we may be able to do so, we must come to the reading of them prepared with an experience sufficiently like his own to make those thoughts organic to it" (300). We have to craft ourselves in order to understand the past. In order to understand other people.

I believe that the process of inhibiting yourself, and thus enabling to make yourself think differently, can have very positive benefits. The three most important ones I can think of are 1. self-knowledge, and 2. an ability to transform your own thought, 3. increased capacity for empathy 4. it can help us exercise more freedom by freeing us from historical limitations of thought. Indeed, I have found four Collingwood quotations in which he says that reenactment of past thought can both provide us with self-knowledge, give us a chance to transform ourselves, and can make us more empathic. Thus, inhibition of the self as enrichment of the self.

In this next quotation Collingwood says that reenacting past thoughts is ultimately a form of self-knowledge. He says that the subjective nature of reenactment means it has a positive effect on the reenactor, by providing him with self-knowledge.

"And because this act is subjectivity... or experience, it can be studied only in its own subjective being, that is, by the thinker whose activity or experience it is. This study is not mere experience or consciousness, not even mere self-consciousness: it is self-knowledge. Thus the act of thought in becoming subjective does not cease to be objective; it is the object of a self-knowledge which differs from mere consciousness in being self-consciousness or awareness, and differs from being mere self-consciousness in self self-knowledge: the critical study of one's own thought, not the mere awareness of that thought as one's own" (292).

The self-knowledge described by Collingwood can also be seen in this next quotation. He says that the self-knowledge comes about by discovering the abilities and limitations of our thought. He also says, however, that we may be able to transform ourselves and overcome the limitations of our thought: "It thus may be said that historical inquiry revels to the historian the powers of his own mind. Since all he can know historically is thoughts that he can re-think for himself, the fact of his coming to know them shows him that his mind is able (or by the very effort of studying them has become able) to think in these ways. And conversely, whenever he finds certain historical matters unintelligible, he has discovered a limitation of his own mind; he has discovered that there are certain ways in which he is not, or no longer, or not yet, able to think" (218)

All this inhibition of the self required by reenactment can also lead to a great capacity for empathy. When we truly understand the thought of another person their actions should become more intelligible. If we really understand someone's thought we should be able to forgive them. This is very important to me. "[I]f we re-enact the past in our own thought, the past thought which we re-enact is seen in re-thinking it as valid.... The more adequately we re-enact the past, the more valid we see it to be: hence the differential result. What we judge negatively as error or evil in history is what we fail to understand" (470n). As I said, this quotation shows Collingwood believed that to understand someone's thought was to regard it as legitimate. History and pain. Think of all the terrible things that have happened that we need to accurately reenact if we want to understand. Ouch. But empathy, and creative empathy, is very important, and it flows out of Collingwood.

Further, Collingwood believed that all of this effort in historical thinking could help us construct our own lives with more awareness. He believed it would enable a greater degree of freedom: "sensation as distinct from thoughts, feelings as distinct from thoughts,.... Their importance to us consists in the fact that they form the proximate environment in which our reason lives, as our psychological organism is the proximate environment in which they live. They are the basis of our rational life, though no part of it. Our reason discovers them, but in studying them it is not studying itself. By learning to know them, it founds out how it can help them to live in health, so that they can feed and support it while it pursues its own proper task, the self-conscious creation of its own historical life" (231). Rational thought is supposed to create its own historical life. It is supposed to recognize its emotional and historical place and work within it to construct itself. Collingwood wants us to build our lives in light of history.

In short, Collingwood's reenactment, which requires encapsulation, and thus the inhibition of the self, can enrich the self in four ways. First, it can provide us with self-knowledge. Second, it can help us transform our own ways of thinking. Third, it can give us a greater capacity for empathy. Fourth, it can help us act with more freedom within our historical moment.

I'd like to say that although I am not using the word synthetic experience very regularly in this post, it is incredibly relevant. In fact, it is probably the most important thing. The process of reenacting another person's thought, encapsulating past thought, always provides a synthetic experience. This is one of the major sources of enrichment in all four of the ways I mentioned. This is all about synthetic experience.

Collingwood's notion of reenactment, therefore, is a process in which the encapsulation of past thought requires and inhibition of the self leads to an enrichment of the self. Next I am going to talk about Alvin Goldman's work Simulating Minds, and in particular his notion of 'quarantine' which parallels well to Collingwood's idea of encapsulation. After that I will explain my idea of diffusion. With the idea of diffusion I'm trying to explain how the synthetic experience provided by encapsulating thought can permeate our unconscious layers of thought. But first Goldman.

Goldman on Quarantining the Self in Simulation

Goldman is also trying to explain how understanding another person's mind is a process of simulating their thoughts for ourselves. Collingwood's notion of reenactment is primarily historical in nature, but Collingwood also says it applies on a general level. I believe that Goldman's use of the term simulation is meant to communicate the same thing as Collingwood's reenactment is: that in order to understand someone's thoughts we have to internally simulate their thoughts in our own mind.

Goldman's term 'quarantine' sounds to me somewhat similar to the notion of encapsulation. Similar enough that I need to explore the connection somewhat, if only to articulate their differences more clearly.

But anyways, Goldman says that simulating another person's thoughts properly often involves an inhibition of our own thoughts and knowledge. He draws on some experiments with children who have not reached the age in which they can inhibit their own self-knowledge. Children are told a story in which a person does not know where an object has been hidden in a kitchen, say its a banana under a bowl. The children, however, are told that the banana is hidden under the bowl. When asked where the person will likely look for the banana, the children consistently say under the bowl. The conclusion being that these children have not yet developed the capacity to inhibit their own perspective in understanding another person. I think these were three year olds. By the age of six or so children have gained the ability to inhibit their own perspective, and an thus understand other people's mental states in a larger range of situations.

So the important thing being that understanding other people's mental states (if done properly) always involves a certain amount of inhibition of the self. We can't understand people unless our mind is able to recognize that people don't think the way we do. Goldman, however, does talk for quite a while about 'egocentric' simulations, and how common they are. Basically that people tend to take their thoughts and emotions as the most important thing and they fail to understand other people because they can't move beyond their perspective. I have written about this a lot in my posts on the a priori imagination.

When we have successfully inhibited our own perspective and properly simulated another person's thoughts, Goldman says we have achieved a 'quarantine' of our own views that interfere with the simulation. It would only be select things we would be inhibiting. We wouldn't need to inhibit our views on gravity, or heat, or love to understand someone, but we may have to inhibit our views on religion, or politics, or other things. Goldman uses a visual representation to explain this idea of a quarantine. It helps me because, as I said, I already experience the idea of encapsulation very visually, lots of mental imagery in my conception of encapsulation and quarantine. But anyways I don't feel like recreating his image. But just imagine that in your mind you separate and encase all of your views that may not apply to the person you are trying to understand. You quarantine your views that interfere with simulating another person's thoughts.

In short, I think Goldman's notion of quarantine communicates the same thing as Collingwood's encapsulation: they both explain how you have to inhibit your own perspective in order to properly simulate and understand another person's thoughts. Goldman is less explicit about the possible benefits of simulation, and I think I am not as familiar with his work as I need to be. But still, given everything Collingwood, and given the similarities of these ideas, I think I have said enough that I can move on to how the necessity of inhibiting the self can lead to an enrichment of the self.

The Diffusion of Other Minds Within Your Own

Now as I have been saying, I am now going to explain my idea of the 'diffusion of encapsulated minds.' So, when we have successfully inhibited our own perspective, and have therefore properly reenacted/simulated another person's thoughts, we have accomplished an 'encapsulation' or a 'quarantine' of that mind.

We have successfully encased another person's way of thinking within our own mind. But how could this inhibition of ourselves lead to an enrichment of the self? The notion of diffusion is meant to explain how it is that these encapsulated minds can enter our unconscious. How encapsulating another person's experience can permeate our general experience and change us for the better.

This revolves mainly around the idea of synthetic experience. When we encapsulate another person's thoughts we are encasing their thought and experience. We are making their experience part of our own general experience. In order to really synthesize someone else's experience we have to inhibit ourselves. Once this inhibition has been done, and we have successfully encapsulated this other mind, what happens when we cease to pay attention? What happens to this encapsulated mind once we stop thinking so clearly about it and we enter our normal unreflective mode of life?

This is what I am trying to talk about with diffusion. Once we have encapsulated a mind it is going to maintain its form in some sense even when we stop thinking about it so explicitly. As I said, I experience the notion of encapsulation as imagery. So let me use a little imagery to conceptualize the diffusion that would take place post-encapsulation.

Well an encapsulated mind is a solid object, as far as I am concerned. Books, etc. we turn them into solid objects by constructing them in our own minds. Encapsulation is a solid, round object. Most thought, however, I like describing in terms of fog. Thought that is fog like is vapid, it is elusive, it is inarticulate, it is daydreamy. I think most thought exists in this fog like form. We don't usually have solid words to rest on for our thought. For me, at least, I experience my thought as a swirl, as a tornado of sorts. My mind spins with new concepts and ideas, and every now and then I am able to create solid objects. These essays.

Dealing with other minds is very similar. Starting a new book, meeting a new person, it can be like stepping into a space of mental fog. It is unclear how this person thinks or what they are thinking. But once we have understood another mind, we have managed to transform that fog into an encapsulated object. We have made it 'firmer' in our minds. I love these metaphors of fog and solidity. Collingwood discussed fog.

So, once we have turned a foggy mind into a solid object, successfully understood and encapsulated someone's thought, how does it interact with our general foggy thought? Well what I am saying is that once we have encapsulated that mind it will begin to exist as fog. We will have that person's thought accessible to us on an unconscious level, as well as on a conscious level.

Diffusion of another mind is allowing a mind to become fog. It is allowing deliberately encapsulated experience to permeate our thought on an unconscious level. Once we encapsulate that mind it will undoubtedly still exist within our thoughts on some level even when we don't explicitly think of it.

I think this is how synthetic experience ultimately permeates our unconscious thinking. It is the post reenactment reflection (as described by Clausewitz) that allows us to assimilate encapsulated minds, synthetic experience, into our own thoughts and experiences.

I think that once you encapsulate a mind you can let it diffuse into your own general thoughts. Fog. You create a solid object, an encapsulated mind, then it interacts with the fog of your general thought. I find fog to be a great way to think of my own thinking. So encapsulation and diffusion seems good to me.

I could explore this at much greater length. I could draw on Clausewitz to talk about this. But this is enough for now.

I am just saying that the inhibition of the self required by simulation leads to an enrichment of the self. This is because once a mind has been encapsulated it will begin to exist in our mind as fog as well. Fog being the unconscious content of our thoughts, the inarticulate contents of our thought. We work hard, we inhibit ourselves, we encapsulate another mind, and then we reflect on that mind in a daydreamy fashion. We let our mind engage with that other mind in a foggy space. This is diffusion. Turning a solid, encapsulated mind, into a fog that mixes with the rest of our experience.

The inhibition of the self as the enrichment of the self.

Done.

Original notes that I wrote when I began this on 6/16/10-

Ryan thought that simulation, and in particular encapsulation/quarantine amounted to a destruction of the self. Quite the opposite, it is the inhibition of the self that leads to an enrichment of the self. We have to inhibit ourselves in order to understand another mind, but once we have succesfully encapsulated that mind we let its experience blend with ours. It is encapsualted so it can properly turn into fog.

Inverted Days: Getting Sick and Sleeping All Day

This is mainly a journalesque post that is on the fly.

Today I was at work and I had a bizarre migraine and sickness attack.

I woke up feeling strangely headachy. Just felt kinda ill. I figured it was from not sleeping enough. Or from being tired on a Monday. But then I went to work and I had a sip of coffee and said to someone 'oh that coffee is gonna make me throw up.'

They told me to have some tea so I drank some tea instead. Then I felt okay. But then I made an even worse decision and ate a chicken steak from pizza roma. Which is delicious but terrible for me.

But yeah I ate my delicious and terrible sandwich and threw it all up about 40 minutes later. It was rough.

Then I came home at 2 and slept until 8. It was weird. My head was bumpin for most of the time I was in bed. I kept hearing my roommates having their giggle fest, or playing music. It was odd. Very odd day indeed. Fortunately my manager and a co-worker were understanding and there wasn't too much animosity about me leaving early.

But yeah, it feels strange to be awake now. It is 8:40 pm now. I don't know how late I'll be up, or what I'll do tonight. Drink lemonade, probably. That may hurt my throat, but will also be good to get some liquids in me.

Also, I'm listening to Love King. So that is fun. Writing this sporadic post.

I got some serious posts to drop in the future. My reading is starting to jack me up. Well, I was just rereading parts of The Idea of History and I realized how much more I would be able to get from reading it now. I read it a year ago, I was younger, I had less experience. I am now much more familiar with Foucault, with Collingwood's ideas, their implications.

And let me tell you, reading it felt heavy. Cause some of these implications are enormous.

Collingwood says all knowledge of mind is historical knowledge. That historical reenactment allows us to understand past figures, but the same methods allow us to understand a letter from a friend, or our own actions. All knowledge of mind is achieved by interpreting the expression of thought in the present. All knowledge is mind is historical.

If all knowledge of mind is historical then simulation theory of mind needs to look out. Draw some serious implications about the centrality of historical study, the importance of thinking like a historian.

And I am now seriously considering history programs for my doctorate. My professor once reccomended that I could write a history of Collingwood and the British Admiralty in WWI. Collingwood's writing was abstolutely shaped by his experiences in WWI, but it hasn't been clearly explicated. What happened to Collingwood in WWI? It would be a way for me to earn my chops as a historian, a legit historian, and still let me lean towards the philosophical end of history. A history of Collingwood in WWI would undoubtedly involve an analysis of his writing. I look forward to it. I find Collingwood to be an incredibly compelling writer. I hope to spend lots more time with him.

But anyways, weird day. Being sick is weird. Now I don't know what to do. Anyways, be on the look out for a few posts: one on Fouault's Discipline & Punish titled "Society's Implicit War," look for one called "The Inhibition of the Self as the Enrichment of the self: The Encapsulation and Diffusion of Other Minds," another called "Social Progress and Personal Progress: Expanding the Unconscious Repertoire and the Density of the Content of our Action."

After my huge post of 6/13 there is no slowing down up in my brain. My fingers, however, don't have the time to write all these things right now. I also think my mind can't handle it. I have to let these ideas brew a bit longer. That is why I'm rereading Collingwood.

But hey, I'll do it, I wont be too sick this week hopefully.