[FRIAM] "analogies we live by"

[Santafe]

Thanks for this, Glen, and also the list from Claude a little later.  The latter feels like designing a symposium: who would you bring, and around what narrative would you explain why you have them in the same place at the same time.  Really quite an enjoyable activity in its early stages, before the slog hits of getting an actual meeting to work.  Alison Gopnik is the only other name in that list I know besides Andy Clark, so at least one other isn’t hallucinated.  

> On Jul 22, 2025, at 0:23, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

I wanted to reply to this days ago, in one tiny point, 

> • the brain as a sensory organ: current activity = streaming in through the senses
> • a resonance from current activity to a counterfactual active role

I would not have equated current activity with reception and response to sensory input streams.  Doing so would be a reversion to the very old “passive” conception of perception, which I think has now long been corrected with the notion that perception is active, interrogative, and constructive.  

The latter, mainly, argues for something that both to me and in common-language usage seems obvious, but that I suspect strict behaviorists would want to deny (if only to see if they could, lawyer-like, defend such a position): that mental activity has its own autonomous streams, whether ongoing synthesis and following of “inner narrative” (the thing the meditators want to shut off somehow), or just maintaining whatever internal sense of integration and identity-centeredness a current state of mind has.  That state is one of the other inputs, to the active engagement with sensory inputs that constitutes a lot of perception (e.g. building the visual field, or selecting voices to attend to in a conversation).  

Somebody, some years ago, gave me some explanatory book on Vedic categories of things related to cognition and consciousness, I think because he was annoyed at my constant complaining and hoped that this would quiet me down.  So I dutifully read it.  I was struck that it was sent to me, to show me that there was substance to this “truth that dispenses with all philosophy and concepts”, and I read it as a very elaborate philosophical system and conceptual typology.

Anyway, the reason I mention it (and I can’t remember the title of the book now, to link here), is that they say that system considers the internal mind-state or sequence to be just-another of the senses, peer to and parallel to the standard-five input streams (sight, sound, touch, taste/smell, proprioception).  Since, for each of the standard senses, they want to go on with an object/subject/interaction decomposition into terms, they try to build out a comparable decomposition when arguing that internal thought-states are just a version of senses.  (Matrices seem to be very important to system-building philosophers, across times and cultures.)

Don’t want to endorse or reject somebody’s particular description of some other group’s large philosophical system, for which I cannot speak from any knowledge of my own, but I did find that an interesting bit of evidence, that a system that had had to organically evolve and become accepted, had chosen this way to handle the autonomy of inner life from immediate-passive reaction to sense-delivered events.

Eric