You're not drawing the obvious conclusion. Ordinary people are using a more important and more basic form of reasoning.
Logic and maths are "rationalised" forms of reasoning.
They rationalised the world - a world of irregular bodies/forms behaving irregularly and somewhat unpredictably - and converted it by a giant feat of artificial imagination and absolutely not natural reasoning into artificial regular bodies [or more precisely symbols for bodies] behaving regularly and predictably. In logic: a world of units that behave in perfect chains of action and reaction, where q always follow p, and 1 + 1 always = 2 . Unlike the real world where 1 + 1 ice creams can soon equally one soggy mess.
What do we call this more basic form of reasoning? Realistics. Reasoning with real bodies. The world of vision and imaging/imagination (in the more general sense of "all forms of imaging"). Vision - visual reasoning - takes up something like 40% of the brain. Logic and maths were invented in part because they are vastly simpler computationally - but also more simplistic.
We have de facto passed from textual civilisation into multimedia civilisation - from book civilisation to multimedia screen - vision-based civilisation. The transcendence of logicomathematical (or symbolic) reasoning or "subscendence, by realistic-visual-real-body reasoning will be the result.
Brilliant! And this is exactly what Luria (and I!) are arguing. There are two types of reasoning. Luria called them Situational/Concrete-Graphic Reasoning (what you call "realistics") vs Abstract/Categorical reasoning.
And your point about the historical shift from textual to multimedia civilization suggests we might be moving toward cognitive systems that privilege embodied reasoning over formal logic. The ice cream example is perfect. Formal logic works in a world of perfect units, but we live in a messier world most of the time.
Thanks. No question about "might be moving". It's "are moving inevitably" because it follows from our multimedia screen of the world replacing our book of the world - even if philosophy is only beginning to catch up. I must do some more research. My impression is all theorising about visual reasoning or "situational etc" treats it as occasional, optional. Actually like conscious vision itself, it is continuous and the foundation of everything, even if often unconscious -as in "Catch this ball" - and you do catch it.. All the other forms of reasoning are built on top of it. 1+1=2 acan only be understood if you can add, and are adding one real body to another both in your mind's eye and in the real field you can see. Without the visual, real bodies in a field, foundation , 1+1=2 would be incoherent, because you wouldn't know where the 1's were or how to bring them together - they would be just symbolic bodies floating in space. If you wish to discuss further at any time, by all means email me. All this by the way is going to lead to the greatest revolution/leap forward in human intelligence ever because for the first time everyone will be able to see - and know that they mjust see - what they are talking about and reasoning about.
Yes it is only in vision that you have joined up bodies, truly joined up thinking, If you only have words or numbers or logical symbols or even geometric figures, you have pieces of the puzzle but no way to fit them together and "get the picture" - understand what you are on in whatever form about
Yes, this visual aspect you're emphasising reminds me of late Wittgenstein's views on 'pictures.' I think his early picture theory evolved to recognize that understanding often depends on seeing patterns and connections rather than just logical structure.
You might also be interested in this, from the Last Writings of Thomas Kuhn:
"Infants within the first hour after birth are regularly observed to track moving objects by moving their eyes and turning their heads, a process apparently mediated subcortically. How these neonates represent the object of their pursuit is unknown, but by their third and fourth months experiments begin to provide clues. In one typical experiment, designed to discover the role played by gestalt principles of well-formedness in the perception of objects, infants of about four months were exposed to the occluded triangle shown in figure 1a. The exposure was repeated until the infants were habituated to the display—until, that is, the interval during which they kept their eyes on it was reduced by some predetermined amount, often by one-half. Then half these infants were shown the display in figure 1b, the other half that in 1c, and the interval during which they gazed at the display was again monitored. Many experiments have shown that, under circumstances like these, young infants will look longer at displays that seem discordant with the one to which they have been habituated. They will, that is, show more interest in a display that is novel or surprising. In this experiment, no such preference was found. Unlike adults and older children, four-month-old infants have no inclination to complete the triangle."
This is fascinating. Kuhn is actually a central figure here. He realised that paradigms are central to vision/life and not just intellectual theorising.So the absolute foundation of cognition and the mind is a "field of vision" - your looking at this field/room/street in front of you. The world consists of fields and fields of vision are how the mind accesses and then builds a hierarchical picture of the whole world (of fields). This is to be sharply contrasted with the current almost universal delusion that cognition/intelligence are proposition-equation-sentence based - logicomathematical/verbal (textual). Vision in turn has two layers. There is actually the in practice basic layer that you/kuhn above are talking about - and that is saccadic vision, "pointer" vision. What actually happens with vision is that your eyes dart around to different points of a field and you never/rarely see the whole field/room/street at once. Propositions/sentences derive from this picking-out--points-in-a- field and unbeknownst to modern theorising presuppose and are based on fields of vision - integrated pictures of the whole field. The second in principle though not in practice basic layer of vision is your awareness of the whole field - your unconscious mind placing every point/isolated body you see within the whole field. In fact your field of vision as a whole unit is a paradigm - an imaginative construct not normally directly seeen but imposed on bits-and-pieces saccadic vision. As Ramachandran points out - everywhere you look in the brain you see maps (and not propositions/sentences). The brain's foundational practice is to map all the fields of the world (and also bodies within the field - like your own body) - place all the parts-bits-and-pieces sequences of shots which is what the stream of vision actually consists of - on maps - scenes- of the whole fields in which the parts exist. Only fields of vision and cognition can bring all the pieces together and show how they all fit and interact together. If I say : he had bushy eyebrows, bulbous lips a lantnern jaw and flaming red hair - now tell me or rather show me his whole face" you can't. Words- parts are useless without a field-of-vision of the whole field to which they belong. Modern AI thinks it can build a superintelligence from peopositional symbolic intelligence alone. Quite impossible. Evolution of intelligence is the story of species bjuilding ever more sophisticated fields-of-vision and thence worlds-of-fields hierarchy which is a mind blowingly complicated business
Thanks for this. I find Luria's transcripts so compelling.
You're not drawing the obvious conclusion. Ordinary people are using a more important and more basic form of reasoning.
Logic and maths are "rationalised" forms of reasoning.
They rationalised the world - a world of irregular bodies/forms behaving irregularly and somewhat unpredictably - and converted it by a giant feat of artificial imagination and absolutely not natural reasoning into artificial regular bodies [or more precisely symbols for bodies] behaving regularly and predictably. In logic: a world of units that behave in perfect chains of action and reaction, where q always follow p, and 1 + 1 always = 2 . Unlike the real world where 1 + 1 ice creams can soon equally one soggy mess.
What do we call this more basic form of reasoning? Realistics. Reasoning with real bodies. The world of vision and imaging/imagination (in the more general sense of "all forms of imaging"). Vision - visual reasoning - takes up something like 40% of the brain. Logic and maths were invented in part because they are vastly simpler computationally - but also more simplistic.
We have de facto passed from textual civilisation into multimedia civilisation - from book civilisation to multimedia screen - vision-based civilisation. The transcendence of logicomathematical (or symbolic) reasoning or "subscendence, by realistic-visual-real-body reasoning will be the result.
Brilliant! And this is exactly what Luria (and I!) are arguing. There are two types of reasoning. Luria called them Situational/Concrete-Graphic Reasoning (what you call "realistics") vs Abstract/Categorical reasoning.
And your point about the historical shift from textual to multimedia civilization suggests we might be moving toward cognitive systems that privilege embodied reasoning over formal logic. The ice cream example is perfect. Formal logic works in a world of perfect units, but we live in a messier world most of the time.
Thanks. No question about "might be moving". It's "are moving inevitably" because it follows from our multimedia screen of the world replacing our book of the world - even if philosophy is only beginning to catch up. I must do some more research. My impression is all theorising about visual reasoning or "situational etc" treats it as occasional, optional. Actually like conscious vision itself, it is continuous and the foundation of everything, even if often unconscious -as in "Catch this ball" - and you do catch it.. All the other forms of reasoning are built on top of it. 1+1=2 acan only be understood if you can add, and are adding one real body to another both in your mind's eye and in the real field you can see. Without the visual, real bodies in a field, foundation , 1+1=2 would be incoherent, because you wouldn't know where the 1's were or how to bring them together - they would be just symbolic bodies floating in space. If you wish to discuss further at any time, by all means email me. All this by the way is going to lead to the greatest revolution/leap forward in human intelligence ever because for the first time everyone will be able to see - and know that they mjust see - what they are talking about and reasoning about.
Yes it is only in vision that you have joined up bodies, truly joined up thinking, If you only have words or numbers or logical symbols or even geometric figures, you have pieces of the puzzle but no way to fit them together and "get the picture" - understand what you are on in whatever form about
Yes, this visual aspect you're emphasising reminds me of late Wittgenstein's views on 'pictures.' I think his early picture theory evolved to recognize that understanding often depends on seeing patterns and connections rather than just logical structure.
You might also be interested in this, from the Last Writings of Thomas Kuhn:
"Infants within the first hour after birth are regularly observed to track moving objects by moving their eyes and turning their heads, a process apparently mediated subcortically. How these neonates represent the object of their pursuit is unknown, but by their third and fourth months experiments begin to provide clues. In one typical experiment, designed to discover the role played by gestalt principles of well-formedness in the perception of objects, infants of about four months were exposed to the occluded triangle shown in figure 1a. The exposure was repeated until the infants were habituated to the display—until, that is, the interval during which they kept their eyes on it was reduced by some predetermined amount, often by one-half. Then half these infants were shown the display in figure 1b, the other half that in 1c, and the interval during which they gazed at the display was again monitored. Many experiments have shown that, under circumstances like these, young infants will look longer at displays that seem discordant with the one to which they have been habituated. They will, that is, show more interest in a display that is novel or surprising. In this experiment, no such preference was found. Unlike adults and older children, four-month-old infants have no inclination to complete the triangle."
This is fascinating. Kuhn is actually a central figure here. He realised that paradigms are central to vision/life and not just intellectual theorising.So the absolute foundation of cognition and the mind is a "field of vision" - your looking at this field/room/street in front of you. The world consists of fields and fields of vision are how the mind accesses and then builds a hierarchical picture of the whole world (of fields). This is to be sharply contrasted with the current almost universal delusion that cognition/intelligence are proposition-equation-sentence based - logicomathematical/verbal (textual). Vision in turn has two layers. There is actually the in practice basic layer that you/kuhn above are talking about - and that is saccadic vision, "pointer" vision. What actually happens with vision is that your eyes dart around to different points of a field and you never/rarely see the whole field/room/street at once. Propositions/sentences derive from this picking-out--points-in-a- field and unbeknownst to modern theorising presuppose and are based on fields of vision - integrated pictures of the whole field. The second in principle though not in practice basic layer of vision is your awareness of the whole field - your unconscious mind placing every point/isolated body you see within the whole field. In fact your field of vision as a whole unit is a paradigm - an imaginative construct not normally directly seeen but imposed on bits-and-pieces saccadic vision. As Ramachandran points out - everywhere you look in the brain you see maps (and not propositions/sentences). The brain's foundational practice is to map all the fields of the world (and also bodies within the field - like your own body) - place all the parts-bits-and-pieces sequences of shots which is what the stream of vision actually consists of - on maps - scenes- of the whole fields in which the parts exist. Only fields of vision and cognition can bring all the pieces together and show how they all fit and interact together. If I say : he had bushy eyebrows, bulbous lips a lantnern jaw and flaming red hair - now tell me or rather show me his whole face" you can't. Words- parts are useless without a field-of-vision of the whole field to which they belong. Modern AI thinks it can build a superintelligence from peopositional symbolic intelligence alone. Quite impossible. Evolution of intelligence is the story of species bjuilding ever more sophisticated fields-of-vision and thence worlds-of-fields hierarchy which is a mind blowingly complicated business