In May, 2005, I was among the more than 2,500 media reformers from across the country who attended the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis. The conference was sponsored by Freepress. The presenters included Amy Goodman, Phil Donahue, Bill Moyers, Robert W. McChesney and George Lakoff. It was…
Quite often, our use of language is puzzling, indeed. For instance, we often walk up to each other asking, “How are you doing?” or “what’s happening?” when we would be annoyed if the person we addressed tried to answer our question. We spend a lot of time talking about the weather when it really doesn’t affect most of us. We crave to talk with our friends and co-workers about entertainment such as the performance of professional sports teams, as though our lives and moods should depend upon such things. And we love to gossip.
What is language for? Most people consider language merely as a means of preserving and communicating ideas. In “Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation,” Andy Clark set forth six additional ways in which we use language, each of these uses serving to “re-shape the computational spaces which confront intelligent agents.”
Clark discusses Lev Vygotsky, the Soviet psychologist of the 1930’s who “pioneered the idea that the use of public language had profound effects on cognitive development.” Vygotsky focused on the role of private language and scaffolded action in guiding behavior by focusing attention and controlling action. For instance, he found that children who are working on their own internalize the verbal directions previously given to them by responsible adults in order to guide complex tasks.
Clark makes a strong case that his “supra-communicative” account of language can transform, re-shape and simplify computational tasks that confront our biological brains in six ways. According to Clark, we …
In a past post, Grumpypilgrim asked : “Why do the two parties divide the issues the way they do, and who decided that the issues should be divided the way they are?”
I’ve often wondered that too. After all, you would think that the “pro life” Republicans would also be against capital punishment. You might think that a “conservative” Republican would be in favor of conservation, not squandering, of either the treasury or the environment. You would think that those supporting smaller, weaker starve-the-beast government would resist laws that harass gays. Asked in another way (regarding Democrats), what do gun control, generous welfare benefits, pro-union and pro-choice positions have in common?
George Lakoff asked these questions too. Writing of conservatives, he wondered:
. . . What does being against gun control have to do with being for tort reform? What makes sense of the linkage? I could not figure it out. I said to myself, These are strange people. Their collection of positions makes no sense. But then an embarrassing thought occurred to me. I have exactly the opposite positon on every issue. What do my positions have to do with one another?
(p. 5) Lakoff proposed a solution to these questions in his bestseller Don’t think of an elephant!: Know your values and frame the debate (2004). He concluded that our two different ways of understanding the nation come from two different understandings of family.
The conservatives model government off of a “strict father” model, where the government’s …
This, from http://www.freepress.net/ : A bipartisan majority on the House Judiciary Committee yesterday passed the "Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act" -- a good bill that would use antitrust law to protect Network Neutrality. Special thanks to those of you who called the key members who cast the deciding votes. The question…
How often do you hear someone say that the brain is a computer? This statement is not literally true. The brain is certainly not like a desktop computer. Brains don’t look like computers; there’s no CPU in the head. Neurons aren’t all wired together to an executive control center. Human brains have a massively parallel architecture. Cognitive scientists who have carefully thought through this issue arrive at this same conclusion: the brain does not really resemble a computer, certainly not any sort of computer in general use today.
The brain as computer is a seductive metaphor. According to Edwin Hutchins, “The last 30 years of cognitive science can be seen as attempts to remake the person in the image of the computer.” See Cognition in the Wild (1996).
Metaphors are models, however, and models are imperfect versions of the reality they portray. Metaphors accentuate certain parts of reality while downplaying other parts.
Unfortunately, many people “reify” the brain-as-computer metaphor: they accept this metaphor as literal truth, leading to various misunderstandings about human cognition.
Here’s another big difference between brains and computers: human cognition is fault-tolerant and robust. In other words, our minds continue to function even when the information is incomplete (e.g., while we’re driving in the rain) or when our purposes or options are unclear (e.g., navigating a cocktail party). Computers, on the other hand, are always one line of code away from freezing up.
In Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (1992) Gerald M. …