[Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 118, Issue 35
Louis Kauffman
loukau at gmail.com
Mon Jan 13 04:52:30 CET 2025
Dear Katherine
I do not yet take the step to “explain” how to go from percept to concept.
The point I inhabit is prior to that.
In every situation where you have percept you also have concept.
They arise together for you.
Possibly not with the good concept you are searching for.
For example, consider the way the perception of Saturn’s rings first appeared as lune-like patterns on the orb of the planet.
The better concept of rings took some time.
But every time there is a perception there is at the very least some concept, some description and it is from this place of percept/concept together that we proceed.
From there you may or may not conclude that there is no way to reduce percept to concept and there is no way to reduce concept to percept.
That is my position as a working position.
Experience provides evidence that there is much more to the concurrence. In typing I can accomplish the task without looking at the keys.
I have no training in this. I found that eventually I did it. I do not know how it works or why it is reliable. If you asked me which fingers make which letters, I could not answer.
The same goes for improvisation on my clarinet, but there I do keep conscious track of the key and some other contextual information. Then my “fingers” do the rest in feedback with ear and brain.
LeDoux has an important point and I would like to know how he links the Cognitive Computations with the Affective Computations. In music practice we do this very deliberately, but in performance
(also part of practice) we let it happen. Music seems to begin with the affective. Doing mathematics seems to often begin in the cognitive, but achieves new creation at the nexus of cognitive and affective levels.
This is why many people gravitate to geometry. And the Pythagoreans knew that music and geometry were one.
Steiner in his early work focused on the self-reference of "thought thinking thought” which I take to be at the nexus of concept and percept.
In logical and pre logical work it helps to use signs iconically.
Thus a circle such as O can stand for a distinction and we can “see” that the circle itself makes a distinction in the plane.
Thus the circle O is seen to refer to itself.
In this self-reference the Peircian Triangle
Interpretant
Signifier Signified
Collapses to.
Interpretant
O
The O does not have a separate meaning from its interpretant.
This leads George Spencer-Brown to declaim:
I suggest that this situation is imaged in the orthodox form of quantum measurement where the smooth and determinate evolution of the wave function is
Interrupted by the mark of observation. Without an observer there is no distinction and the world unseen evolves in potentia. With an observer comes
percept and concept and all the rest. When I was 16 I called the potentia the “guarded source of the discrete”. Can’t do any better yet.
Best,
Lou
> On Jan 12, 2025, at 5:21 PM, Katherine Peil <ktpeil at outlook.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks Pedro – great to hear from you. A quick comment on:
> …. I see a problem going from "percepts to concepts" as Lou claims
> below. Neuroscience has nowadays a rare consensus on not dissociating
> PERCEPTION and ACTION. The "Action Perception Cycle"…
> From the view of emotion science, this reflects a neurocentric problem wherein “cognition” (perceptual processing) confounds sensations that lead to actions – embodied emotional sensations that came on the evolutionary stage well before nerve nets or brains. It is emotion that is central to action, behavior and motivation.
>
> Neuroscientist Jospeh LeDoux made this key distinction:
> Cognitive computations: Reflective, conscious, goal-directed thought, often linked to areas of the brain involved in higher cognitive functions.
> Affective computations: Automatic, unconscious, emotional processing, often linked to areas of the brain involved in emotional regulation and survival mechanisms. They always concern “the self” and the lead to actions.
>
> I can paraphrase his example…” there is a huge experiential difference between the thought that a snake is a reptile, that its skin can be made into belts and shoes, and the thought that a snake is likely to be dangerous.”
>
> Recall my claim that emotion in its simplest binary form – akin to pleasure or pain - carries the foundational semantic information bit that undergirds all learning systems, but emerges from the dynamics and logic of genetic, epigenetic and immune regulation. The Perception-Action-Cycle relies on the emotional component, so IMHO Lou is still on safe and important new ground.
>
> Kate Kauffman
>
>
>
> On 1/12/25, 2:59 PM, "Fis" <fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es <mailto:fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es>> wrote: Katherine Peil Kauffman
>
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> 1. Re: LOF Friday (Pedro C. Mariju?n)
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> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2025 22:58:21 +0100
> From: Pedro C. Mariju?n <pedroc.marijuan at gmail.com <mailto:pedroc.marijuan at gmail.com>>
> To: fis at listas.unizar.es <mailto:fis at listas.unizar.es>
> Subject: Re: [Fis] LOF Friday
> Message-ID: <d93cbae2-038d-4733-8071-4f7b93a4f6d6 at gmail.com <mailto:d93cbae2-038d-4733-8071-4f7b93a4f6d6 at gmail.com>>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed"
>
> Dear List,
>
> Please, take care to post properly (as the server automatically
> demands), as otherwise I become rather overwhelmed wit all the different
> warning messages. Thanks Lou for the tip about that.
>
> Well, I see a problem going from "percepts to concepts" as Lou claims
> below. Neuroscience has nowadays a rare consensus on not dissociating
> PERCEPTION and ACTION. The "Action Perception Cycle" is the most common
> acceptation. The "concept" gets? not too far from either side, and
> usually it is incorporating elements of each kind, with different
> predominance. Joaqu?n Fuster (2008 and 2014 I think) coined the term
> "cognit" to refer to the intermediate stage, having both percept ears
> and action legs (so to speak). The union of cognits legs and ears (or
> legs and legs, ears and ears, etc.) would give birth to different kinds
> of concepts, and the union of concepts via shared cognits would give
> rise to conceptualizations, sentences, etc. Having entered action in the
> world scheme is not trivial at all. Our litmus test for reality is not
> that the percept agrees with the concept, but with the action. It is, as
> we consider in the world of science, the whole experimental part... the
> "fact". As Goethe's Faust aptly says: "In the beginning was the deed"!
>
> My other brief pill refers again to autopoiesis. A few cellular
> arguments not well tolerated (or only partially some of them) by
> autopoiesis:
>
> --The enormous cellular importance of protein degradation. The world of
> proteasomes (the cell "industry of destruction") is fascinating, even in
> the simplest cells.
> --The different classes of programmed cell death, essentially apoptosis,
> is also of enormous multicell--and even bacterial-- importance.
> --The absorption of external DNA is quite frequent, and even customary
> in some bacteria.
> --The horizontal gene transmission is of great evolutionary importance
> too (the world of phages, plasmids, transposons...)
> --A number of genes in E. coli are never expressed in a regular life
> cycle (close to 30 or 40%, depending on the happenstances)
> --The revolutionary role of 'external' viruses in the greatest evo
> transitions (Villarroel, Witzany).
>
> So, even if you consider these caveats fulfilled in larger and larger
> definitions of autopoiesis, there is another point that may be quite
> troubling: information flow and signaling disappear, and are substituted
> by the structural coupling with the environment and the observer
> conceptualization involvement. The big concern is that advancement of
> the life cycle, as the central hub to which signaling or external flows
> cohere, and to which biological meaning relates, does not occupy its
> explanatory essential role... while adaptively advancing the life cycle
> is the silver thread that connects all biological world, including our
> own societies.
>
> I understand that for a mathematician the AP idea is quite handy, and
> fruitful, but for those interested in the evolution of signals,
> sensibility, action, emotions, social emotions, etc. is perhaps a
> stumbling block to overcome. By the way, your previous post to Krassimir
> on information was quite valuable, a firm standpoint which I share. I
> was trying to comment on it, but my daily schedule is bizarre.
>
> Best--Pedro
>
>
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