Heidegger

> Jud said,
> “My own theory is that the reification of abstraction has a
> biological
> basis in which cognitive and communicative word meanings and
> sentential
> structures are grounded in a pragmatic physical dynamics which is
> associated with and
> is an aspect of the human, species-specific process of natural
> selection.”
>
> So all of this grounding is merely by chance or natural selection.
>
> Fred
>
> Jud:
> My model of cognition is the connectionist one, in which activity
> patterns
> are generated holistically [the neuronal net] and not disparately as
> with the
> curious notions of folk psychology. Because connectionism gels so
> well with
> eliminativism - if the connectionist paradigms are found to
> faithfully reflect
> the processes of our cognition, that the abstract guff about
> Nietzschean-type *will* and * beliefs, desires, * snip

So, given your ‘dissertation’ (opp of brevity) what will take the place
of second degree notions, er, entities? A capricious ’selectional
system’ - unlike natural selection which is no different than the human
directed artificial selection system - a kind of jumbling of units at
every level of analysis imaginable? Are these connections ever more
than analogies of +/- judgments. Of course you aren’t in favor of
reificational tendencies even when the speed of your categorical
thought is faster than your meditative skill of combining the “real”
sensed elements with past ideas. The true reasons for historical
periods of totalitarianism may not be related to objects or perceptions
at all. Unless this is by accident, why does it happen or not happen as
the “case” may be? Fred

Posted on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 2:40 am
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