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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
This review is from: Evolution and Consciousness: The Role of Speech in the Origin and Development of Human Nature (Hardcover)
This book is most certainly not a textbook and I very much doubt any undergraduate, no matter how advanced, could manage its depth & relative complexity. *Evolution and Consciousness* was written before the consciousness studies boom of the 90s (which continues in this decade) but it was a mistake for it to languish so ignored. Much of the confusion of more recent writings on consciousness could have been avoided if the lessons of this book had been given a wider reading. In my view, such wide reading never took place because of bad marketing and because, like all great philosophy, it is a damned demanding tome. This is a work of high philosophy indeed by one of our major intellects who sees clearly and unsparingly and truthfully. Leslie Dewart writes with such inexorable logic that I defy anyone to read this book without prejudgment (as much as possible) and find a way a to reasonably disagree with his primary theses. He demonstrates that what we mean by the term "consciousness" is what we know from our own experience to be consciousness. Dewart makes the case that such conscious experience is very, very different from experience in itself--without the quality of consciousness--undergone by infrahuman entities. Only with the assertion of ideas in actual speech is the door opened to what will become the discovery/creation of the self. Only then is conscious intentionality born; only then is memory consciously accessible and rearrangeable into imagination; only then is conscious cognition--inner speech--born. Speech and consciousness turn out to be two faces of the same entity. This is a powerful thesis written in exacting but beautiful prose. Anyone seriously interested in the origins and evolution of consciousness owes it to himself to the rich investment of reading Dewart.
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Showing 1-10 of 18 posts in this discussion
Initial post:
6 Jun 2012 18:55:11 BDT
W.T.S. Tarver says:
One could quibble with Nixon's technical summary locating "conscious cognition - inner speech" right at the end of the chain of derivation, as thought emerges earlier (along with conscious sense perception) in the context of pre-thematic speech, and it is full-blown understanding, inner *thematic* speech, which appears near the end along with self-definition. Also, it is not the assertion of "ideas" but of *experience* which kicks off the evolutionary and developmental process that leads to consciousness as we know it today. Still, I have yet to write such a terse summary which definitely captures the gist of it; my narrow critique is about as long as Nixon's entire summary! I am in perfect agreement with the wider points articulated.
In reply to an earlier post on
6 Jun 2012 19:16:45 BDT
Gregory Nixon says:
I stand fairly corrected on these points. In my enthusiasm of a few years ago, I rather fudged these emerging categories together. What Raymond Tallis calls "The Explicit Animal" did not fully emerge until he mastered thematic speech and thought, but it is the expression of experience much earlier - before self-identity is learned - that sets the chain of events rolling, according to Dewart. Since writing this, I have become convinced by Tallis's view that manipulation of the hand (made available through upright posture) was the first step toward objectivizing the world and learning free agency (for example, in gesture) that ultimately led much, much later to the symbolic breakthrough of actual speech.
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6 Jun 2012 20:44:32 BDT
Last edited by the author on 6 Jun 2012 20:45:48 BDT W.T.S. Tarver says:
I have not read Tallis, but I have always been impressed by the close relationship between speech and gesture; both in my own reflexive experience, and, for example, in how both have something to do with Broca's Area of the brain. Dewart does not go into this aspect in detail, but does make the point that speech is not necessarily constrained to vocalization. However interesting the precise derivation may be -- and, yes, it sure is interesting, and getting more so every year with better brain scans, etc! -- the larger point to keep in mind is the relativistic (emergent) causal perspective appropriate to the study of consciousness; or to put it negatively, to avoid the pitfalls of reductionism and determinism, ontic speakers as we are. I see the main value in Dewart's E&C not in the details of the pre-historical account it provides (which I read as essentially correct and subject to further fine-tuning, much like Darwin's original thesis), but in the overall picture it paints of how consciousness functions today, the critique of the semantic complex, the light it shines on absent-mindedness, and the vision it offers of responsibility borne of autonomy rather than obedience. Thanks again for your excellent initial review.
In reply to an earlier post on
6 Jun 2012 22:36:31 BDT
Gregory Nixon says:
Yes, yes, I agree, especially on the need to avoid the siren call of simplistic reductionism & determinism. This means that one needs to have a second look at the claims being for brain scans. We are in the midst of a sort of neuromania in which every subject thinkable is being prefaced by the word "neuro". Brain scans are open to interpretation (despite their colourful reproductions in the media) and rarely can distinguish whether the activity is conscious or not. Dewart and many others have pointed that with speech, language, and the use of other cultural symbol systems (like, say, music & mathematics) the individual brain has long exceeded itself and entered the community of minds we call culture. As famed linguist Wallace Chafe wrote, "When language is made overt, as in speaking and writing, it is able to provide a link between what would otherwise be independent nervous systems, acting as an imperfect substitute for the synapses that fail to bridge the gap from one mind to another." Cultural mind is like an extended brain and nothing could make that more obvious than the type of media through which we are communicating right here. Cultural creativity is probably more the cause of the expansion of individual animal "minds" into the human community of minds than is individual brain evolution. Don't you think?
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11 Jun 2012 14:41:22 BDT
W.T.S. Tarver says:
It often strikes me that Dewart published E&C in the spring of 1989, within a very short time of the proposal for the World Wide Web. Recalling the irreducibility of consciousness to neurology (while acknowledging that neurology is the cause of consciousness), the Web is clearly manifesting similar dynamics on a wider scale. The difficulty for understanding consciousness, however, stems from missing the assertiveness of consciousness and reducing it to experience. Whereas consciousness has an experiential base, it is not reducible to experience -- and that is all that brain scans, in humans or animals for that matter, can really track so far as I can tell. In the case of the Web, the proliferation of the automation of the manipulation of text (and other "media" -- don't forget that speech is a medium too!) obscures the assertiveness of the individual humans "behind" the Web, especially because most people the world over have not stopped to question the semantic complex -- everybody thinks they are "sending messages" to each other, almost nobody taking responsibility for their own assertiveness. As a society, therefore, we are institutionalizing, automating, and proliferating all of our unquestioned assumptions about the nature of communication and mind, including and especially our capacity for projection and denial. There is a great hue and cry -- and appropriately so -- over tampering with the genetics, for example, of our food supply. What many vaguely intuit but almost nobody clearly understands is what the effects may be on the evolution of consciousness of the automation, in effect, of speech. Consciousness is more ephemeral, more volatile, more responsive, more mutable than the organism on which it depends. Frankly, I am having a bit of trouble grappling with the meaning of responsibility in a relativistic causal framework.
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12 Jun 2012 15:03:02 BDT
Amazon Customer says:
This is a great conversation, though I am not sure that Amazon.com is the best venue to have it on. If I can add some more or less random observations, 1) The idea that consciousness is in a state of evolution is debatable. How can the "use of a function" can be said to "evolve"? Develop? Yes. Evolve? I am not so sure. 2) Speech is another way to refer to a language being asserted. If you can automate speech, you effect conscious experience. My guess is that you didn't really want to infer that at all. And I agree that the web proliferates assumptions, etc., though simply the speed at which this happens in the digital world is alarming enough. But what is going on in all this messaging online has been going on in culture since we absent-minded types started writing. 3) I was surprised at your concluding statement because if there is anything that Dewart's phenomenology taught me it is that conscious experience is fundamentally owned by the experiencing agent, and not just in the sense that it is "they" who are experiencing, which is true enough. The idea that someone can "just tell the facts" was absurd to Dewart, and for him conscious experience always has an ethical quality. The assertiveness of speech infers that the speaker owns what they say, as the assertiveness of consciousness infers that consciousness owns, not necessarily the contents of experience, but certainly of the the way that the contents are being organized. So I am not sure what you are saying when you refer to the "meaning of responsibility". And finally, I see that Amazon lists Mr. Tarver in Toronto, which is my home and native land (even though I now live in Ohio). And Greg is out there in the mountains of B.C. Assuming that W.T.S is Canadian, if not in fact certainly in form(?), then does it mean anything that only Canuks are engaging here?
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12 Jun 2012 19:30:03 BDT
W.T.S. Tarver says:
Yes, I do live in Toronto, as did Leslie Dewart himself, who taught at the U of T here. (In fact, I studied this material with him in grad school two decades ago.) I suppose there is a possibility that Dewart's take on the human condition only applies to Canadians, or that there is something about the Canadian identity that lends itself to being seen in a relativistic way; Dewart actually joked about this very point in a parenthetical aside to a summary of E&C that he wrote up, the "Conspectus" which I have posted on my blog.
I see your point about querying the use of the word "evolution" for a function, but that is not so unusual a usage. Any system can be said to evolve when the state of the system changes over time as successive generations (or iterations) preserve (usually randomized) novelty differentially as a result not of direction from without but of the interaction of the generative (i.e., reproductive) functions of the system and the functionality of the very novelties in question. For example, evolution has been modeled in software to create highly efficient algorithms, the final implementation (form) of which is radically unpredictable but the function of which conforms to the context set by the developers in the virtual "environment"; note that the hardware does not evolve one whit, whereas the software demonstrably does. ("Function" is a bit equivocal here because it is the specific implementation that is unpredictable; the point is that the whole exercise is about fine-tuning *functionality* in relation to a given artificially defined context.) I think Dewart demonstrates a perfect case of evolution in the case of consciousness, but only when one takes seriously his argument (E&C p. 212) that the socio-cultural *matrix* that propagates the ability to speak is quite literally womb-like, with respect to speech (and of course, derivatively, consciousness) as acquired skills, as opposed to genetically determined behaviours. Once it gets going, the evolution of consciousness proceeds in the context or "environment" of our interpreted world, as a result of the involution of speech and experience. Individuals certainly develop, but the system which generates them just as certainly evolves. Yes, you are quite right that I did not wish to imply that computers automate *speech*; only that we are increasingly subject to the experience of apparently being spoken to, by entities which are increasingly removed from the purview of those (humans) who set them in motion, such that our experience of the world is becoming almost Nouveau-Sumerian, with things literally (but only apparently) *talking* to us all the time... is this heaven, or is this hell? This phenomenon used to be restricted to clay tablets with cuneiform that apparently "spoke" overtly (at least for those who were trained to "hear", or rather read them), plus everything else being loaded with meaning, to which we were absent-mindedly commanded to attend. Nowadays, in the strangest of reversals, we are finally starting to understand that reality is in fact mute and that we are responsible for the meanings we attribute; and yet the world is increasingly stocked with things that beep and chirp and flash and communicate in all kinds of overt ways, including telling us out loud in plain English to "Please stand clear of the doors!" So my little reflection about responsibility (more of a musing than anything carefully thought through -- case in point) has to do with the tension I experience between the knowledge that I am responsible for what I say, the meaning that I attribute, and the effects that the wielding of my causal efficacy though acts of assertive communication may have on the world -- and most particularly on others -- on the one hand; and the countervailing knowledge that I can't possibly know or be sure *at all* really, how what I say will land or upon whom, especially when I do things like post essays on the Internet. I know that the best I can do is what I am doing: do my best. Still, it is a little daunting to realize the fuller implications of the idea that it is not enough to do what I am "supposed to do"; that it is necessary also to creatively determine what that may be, to make the choice, and only then step into it. And furthermore, this scales up all the way to "big life choices" and right down to the very meaning that I (nominally) "choose to" experience at the most atomic of moments of consciousness. The complexity of the relativistic causal system renders the ideal unattainable -- and yet, I remain responsible. Cosmic jest, or joke that I made up? Apropos having this conversation at a more suitable venue, I have started a blog to promote discussion of E&C, in particular along a few personal interests of mine, signally consciously optimizing self-definition through mindfulness practice, and thereby actively seeking to overcome absent-mindedness: http://tarverator.wordpress.com I am calling this "Mastering the Skill of Consciousness." Whether we call it development or evolution, I would like to do what I can to make use of Dewart's profound insights to relieve human suffering and seek ways to implement the "ulterior possibility" (as per E&C, p. 365) of steering our civilization towards more highly conscious self-definition. :)
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13 Jun 2012 06:30:34 BDT
Gregory Nixon says:
I cannot agree that neurology (the brain) is the *cause* of human conscious experience. I agree that it is necessary but it is not sufficient. The cause, to put it blandly, is other people: subjectivity is called forth by the intersubjectivity already present in the human community. I do agree that assertiveness is the first step in allowing experience to become conscious of itself. (Tallis calls it "agency" or "intentionality".) "Whereas consciousness has an experiential base, it is not reducible to experience" - nice, and you sound just like Leslie. Leslie never explored non-cs experience to my satisfaction. He read my paper "From Panexperientialism to Conscious Experience" in which I differentiate experience from conscious experience in my own way. He wanted a copy of my "Twenty-One Indicators of Non-Conscious Experience" (in the appendix) and I gave it to him, but in writing a critique he never got past my abstract in which I make several claims for unconscious or non-conscious experience that would explain our conscious perplexity about them. Leslie called my suggestions of panexperientialism or unconscious psi or unconscious radical constructivism both absent-minded and bad (speculative) philosophy. If he had read the entire content, he would have found himself mostly in agreement since much of my thinking originated with him. Yes, brain scans do not differentiate between experience and conscious experience and that is precisely why neuromania (neuro-everything) is a ridiculous and pernicious ailment. "Consciousness is more ephemeral, more volatile, more responsive, more mutable than the organism on which it depends" - of course it is (and nicely put), for it is based in human culture, the community of minds, that is always being swept this way and that. This does not deny the individuality that may emerge from culturally constructed selfhood. Think I'll check out your blog. You wrote a huge answer below. I believe Mr. Sawa also was a student of Professor Dewart at one time.
In reply to an earlier post on
13 Jun 2012 17:18:58 BDT
Last edited by the author on 14 Jun 2012 11:41:03 BDT Amazon Customer says:
Yes I was one of his students off and on over about a 4 year period from 1978 through 1984 while I was attending the Toronto School of Theology. If one were to scout around the St. Mike's library one might even be able to find their copy of a master's thesis titled 'The Concept of Truth in the "Theological Philosophy" of Leslie Dewart' written by a still religious and strikingly handsome :-) graduate student when E&C was still being formulated...
In reply to an earlier post on
13 Jun 2012 17:46:11 BDT
W.T.S. Tarver says:
--"Cause" is equivocal. Is it meant in a reductionistic or relativistic sense? Of course the brain is necessary but not sufficient for consciousness -- we are so on the same page there, and by the way it is delightful to be in conversation with you guys! (I was thinking of the definition of "causal explanation" on E&C pp. 56-57.)
--Non-cs experience was not emphasized by Dewart, as best I can tell, because he had his hands full accounting for the syntactic explanation of conscious experience, on the one hand, and because virtually everybody else in the field thinking they are investigating "consciousness" is in fact scrutinizing experience, on the other hand (which remains largely true today). Also, although Dewart goes to considerable lengths to describe the continuity between, say, animal communication and human speech, the continuities grow and grow as science finds more and more of them because that's where they are looking. I don't see this as a weakness of Dewart's thesis; more a fleshing out of the "experiential base of consciousness", the name of the very chapter within which is found the discussion of "cause" I referenced above. --Thanks for saying I sound just like Leslie. I take that as a compliment. :) I am attempting to "digest" his thesis so that I can metabolize it, as it were, and seek novel original ways of asserting "it"; not it, of course, as it won't be Dewart's any more; whatever I come up with will be my own, but informed by and ordered in light of E&C. I am taking very seriously Dewart's idea of the original assertion of experience, and with full awareness proceeding to attempt that. --Another area where Dewart never seems to have explored very deeply is the *use* of non-thematic speech by people today, in the service of "healing" or amending absent-mindedness. Dewart had a low opinion of pre-thematic speech as an instrumental stepping-stone, which was its (pre-)historical role. He only very approximately sketched out the difference between compound pre-thematic assertions and simple thematic ones: I don't like the example of "Look out!" as a pre-thematic assertion, for example. He seems to have thought that the matter was closed at that end, and the way to deal with absent-mindedness would be to clarify *understanding* using, say, the apparatus of philosophy. My observation, however, is that a lot of very powerful and personally transformative mindfulness practice depends upon the systematic exploitation of the immediate sensory-perceptual consciousness generating properties of pre-thematic speech. (I am thinking specifically of "noting" practice used in certain variants of vipassana.) In spite of the effectiveness and popularity of these techniques, most practitioners and masters of them have *no clue* about the operant mechanism (and why would they?) resorting instead to dizzyingly circuitous explanations ranging from New Age mystical to pseudo-scientific but invariably semantic-complex-centered accounts. Navigating without an adequate map, much effort is wasted. My sense of it is that absent-mindedness is a relatively easily cracked nut when pressed from both ends of the scale of speech -- and therefore consciousness. There is a substantial community of extremely dedicated, highly motivated, and thoroughly good-hearted people already committed to practices of "arduous reflexion" (E&C, p. 364) that should be quite sufficient to emerge from absent-mindedness. This goes *way* beyond what Dewart was concerned with, as he had very little use for mysticism -- and given the tone and content of the plurality of historical and contemporary mysticism, especially before the Internet enabled us to be as selective and discriminating as we can be today, I can completely empathize with his point of view. --Do you still have a copy of the paper that you shared with Leslie? Is it posted anywhere? I should like to have a look at it. |
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