I share a link to that channel.
The course occurred in many sessions over a period of three months. I recall that different kinds of objects, perceptual and conceptual, were elaborated upon. How we deal with the boundary of a chair is very different from how we deal with the boundary of justice or love. We have different kinds of boundaries for different kinds of objects and we get easily confused. I don’t know how to time stamp on Vimeo recordings so I can’t post where this happened but I do remember me, Lisa and Marco Morelli focusing attention on this very question. As you say, Marco Massi, this is a large research question in the philosophy of mind that remains unresolved in narrowly conceived, externally oriented, cognitive theories. I would invite other participants from that course to share their memories of where this topic could be located in the archive.
I think the capacity to move between recorded events and the actual memory system of really real people is of paramount importance for our next wave of collaborations. As of yet it appears to me that how we determine the frameworks for such collaborations takes a lot of practice as the coordination of tech and a “group mind” are far from easy to make obvious. It is more like “recalling a motif in music” than it is like " cutting up a pie and distributing it."
Yes, and this is what we were doing when we discussed the Necker cube and the gestalt switch that are somewhere in between mind and nature. The location is very important to our perceptual/somatic intelligence. And the gestalt can’t happen without a felt sense of a personal pronoun " I ".
That’s why I probed you about where is everywhere?
The analytical mode is literal. The holistic is all over the place. We need both but the holistic is much smarter than the analytical and uses metaphor to communicate rather than numbers. Qualities rather than quantities. And numbers to the pre-modern mind have qualities. Where is the One in relationship to Zero? This is a very deep problem. The ancients were aware of this. The Moderns seem to have gotten lost in the Zero. Nothing will come of nothing.
Concepts and virtual realities emerge out of the communications that occur at the perceptual level that give a size and shape to our concepts. The “bundles of sensations” Hume declares is all that there is is a very poor metaphor for this complexity. Information is within communications of vast scale and can’t be reduced and continue to maintain coherence. The analogue is much richer than the digital.
The capacity for each finger of the human hand to touch the thumb is a profoundly deep articulation of a complex organization that is much more than a bundle of raw sensations. This capacity is also non numerical.
Gregory Bateson raised his hand and asked his students," If I were a plant how many digits would I have on my hand?"
The class said," Five."
" Wrong," Bateson replied." A plant doesn’t count. A plant thinks relationally and about the spaces in between the digits."
This reply feels very Goethean, as we are trying to embody the self differencing that occurs between the intensive and the extensive dimensions like the difference between 1+1 and 1x1.