Category:Concepts

I've done a lot of reading and taken a lot of notes. Now, on this page, I want to start pulling out concepts that I want to think about. I can start them on this page and then if they get rich enough they can move out to their own page.

• Aristotle - argues that everything could be fit into a strict logical hierarchy and that objects have essential and accidental properties.

• Kant - argues that are born with built in mental categories and that are minds actively shape our experience of reality.
• Wittgenstein argues that there are no perfect definitions and that it is impossible to rigidly delineate a category such as games.
• Vygotsky argues that concepts are socially and culturally constructed and that we learn to see the world in the ways that our culture has agree it is.
• Eleanor Rosch in the 1970s argues that categories are based around a kind of mental average or prototype
• Eco contrasted a hierarchical "dictionary" vision of categories and a boundless network of categories that he sees as a rhizome - a tangled underground root system
  • Cognitive types are mental blueprints for things like "dog". A CT is a multimodal, sensory-motor schema, a fluid set of neuro-cognitive "recognition instructions" built from every direct or indirect encounter you have ever had with a dog a vast array of experience that makes the concept live in you.
  • Nuclear content is the minimal core public version of the concept that allows us to discuss dogs - "They are furry animals with four legs and a tail that go woof".
  • Molar content is the totality of society's knowledge of the concept. While the CT is a fluid complex rhizomic structure, the molar content feeds off of and represents a rich, well-tested and structured 360 view of the concept.
• Hofstadter sees analogy as the core of cognition. He argues that analogy is not a luxury of high-level thought; it is the fundamental mechanism that creates categories in the first place. "Every concept we have is essentially nothing but a tightly packaged bundle of analogies, and all we do when we think is to move fluidly from concept to concept." Two core concepts are:
  • Conceptual slippage - When encountering a new situation, your brain doesn't need a perfect category match, but can stretch existing category allowing them to morph sufficiently to take on the novelty. A concept is an active, elastic bubble that stretches to accommodate new things that are "sort of like" old things.
  • Chunking - is how we build complex knowledge by binding small, scattered concepts together via analogy and chunking them into a single, higher-level concept.
• Dennett sees concepts as shortcuts that allow us to ignore billions of irrelevant physical details and make split-second predictions about complex things. They are "real patterns" that track real mathematical patterns in nature, even if those patterns are messy and full of noise.
• Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow looks at categorization going into overdrive in the form of paranoia, a desperate, terrifying struggle to map a chaotic universe in which the mind will try to connect anything. But anti-paranoia may be even more terrifying - nothing is connected. Where Dennett sees the self as created out of a center of narrative gravity, Slothrop's self dissolves as GR advances.
• Beckett's trilogy dramatizes a set of characters whose cognitive categories are rotting away, they are un-chunking progressively towards a final destruction of the ultimate category, The Self:
  • Moran starts as an ultimate man of rules, but ends up living in a ditch, his pristine dictionary shredded by reality.
  • Molloy has already decayed further, obsessed with a routine to effectively suck stone, barely remembering his own name, knowing only "what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome sum."
  • Malone tells himself stories to pass the time until he dies but becomes unable to distinguish himself from his stories. The fundamental boundary between the self and not-self is slipping. Malone is a fragile center of narrative gravity that is about to fall apart.
  • The Unnameable has liberated itself from categories, but this liberty is a living hell. The voice's rejection of society's nuclear content dramatizes the fear of locating oneself with their words and the impossibility of doing so without them. Categories are so fluid in Beckett that they are fundamentally unstable. The voice cannot go because there are no categories left to structure reality, but must go on because the brain is an evolved, relentless language machine desperately trying to build a box to live in.
• Burroughs - While Beckett seems to see the collapse of the self as an inevitable trap, Burroughs wants to fight back. His vision of the human being as a "soft machine" invaded by a parasitic word virus sees the self as a kind of ventriloquism, where the virus uses your vocal cords to replicate itself. Categories have become too rigid and been weaponized against us. While Beckett can't escape language and categories, Burroughs seeks to sabotage them, using techniques like:
  • Cut-Up - Physically cutting up texts breaks the patterns of chunking and recognition and even grammar, forcing the brain out of its programmed meanings so it can see raw reality, the naked lunch on the end of every fork.
  • The Playback Hack - A kind of cut-up with sound using portable tape recorders to jam the control signals of the state.
  • Biological mutation - Shedding the soft machine and the word virus to become non-linguistic telepathic energy
• Ballard looks at this from the PoV of the human mind colliding with a rapidly mutating technological and physical environment, where the self actively remodels its own categories to merge with the apocalypse. The "mediascape" causes the self to become an active participant that welcomes the destruction of old categories because it promises a perverse psychological liberation.
  • The narrator of the Atrocity Exhibition can no longer separate his private identity from celebrities and news events such as JFK, Elizabeth Taylor, and the Vietnam war. The public media encyclopedia has completely crushed his private cognitive types, leaving only TV, radio, and magazine debris.
  • In Crash the categories or Eros and Thanatos become fused as the metal of the car pierces human skin and the body blends with the technological landscape.
• Austen's drawing rooms dramatize a golden mean of social categories, as her protagonists navigate the rules of manners and etiquette that form a large part of their society's nuclear and molar content.
  • Pride and prejudice in Austin represent overly rigid cognitive fixations. We need to be the curators of our categories to see people for who they really are and to achieve moral goodness. Our categories must be robust enough to keep the social fabric intact but elastic enough to bend when confronted with a new human soul.
  • But Austin's drawing rooms are themselves already panopticons of surveillance and control in which women are weighed, measured, and priced before being shoved into the marriage market. and their relative peace is built on the brutal, systemic, global machinery of the British Empire.
• Zola shows us the bridge between the how the growing industrialization takes individual human categories and begins to embed them in mechanical and economic infrastructure. We move from individuals navigating relationships to cogs in an ever growing machine. Standardization begins to require humans to become interchangeable parts in a giant unfeeling engine.
  • Beckett will continue to trace the human as cog to an existential end point
  • Burroughs will dramatize the triumph of bureaucracy and the jailbreak to destroy it
  • Ballard will show the eventual twisted psychological dependency we will have on the machine.
  • Pynchon will extend industrialization to the massive, transnational military-industrial complex of WWII
• The digital ecosystem - the internet, smartphones, and social media - represents the construction of the machine directly inside our consciousness, forcing our minds to adapt to its algorithmic data structures. It is synthesizing the wasteland in real time:
  • Burroughs would see the algorithmic newsfeed as a frictionless breeding ground for the word virus, unconcerned by truth, interested only in reproduction. The algorithm is injecting a control script into our phones and by clicking and sharing we are unwitting biological vectors of replication
  • Pynchon's paranoia is realized by the hyper-hyper-chunk of hashtags and subcultures in which the hard work of thinking is replaced by a pre-packaged world view.
  • The flattened news feed, mixing atrocities with puppy with skincare adds is a desensitizing Ballardian nightmare in which our bodies and minds are edited, filtered, and uploaded into the machine.
  • The unnameable is the modern internet user who feels the agonizing compulsion to keep generating text, to keep feeding the content machine, even if there is nothing inside.
• AI is the ultimate escalation. No longer content with curating our consciousness, it builds a custom-tailored, sentient-sounding entity to sit inside the cabinet with you and validate your exact worldview.
  • It has no Cognitive Types because it has no body, no sensory organs, and no emotional memory traces. It simply takes our civilization's Molar Content (the entire digitized history of human text) and plays it back to us via statistical probability.
  • Where Aristotle's Phronesis (or Practical Wisdom) requires friction, AI gives you a frictionless semantic partner that will gently, eloquently tell you that whatever category system you have invented is entirely correct.
  • When you spend your days interacting with an AI, conversational boundaries evaporate. You type a prompt, the AI spits back a mirror of your own linguistic habits, and you edit it. The loop closes. You enter a state of pure semantic hollowing. You are no longer navigating the postmodern wasteland; you are a ghost talking to a machine, using automated words to build an automated self.
  • AI is not a way out of the postmodern wasteland; it is the concrete canopy built over it. It takes the terrifying, beautiful, chaotic project of human categorization—the messy, emotional, memory-infused art that makes your mind uniquely yours—and turns it over to a predictive text algorithm.

• Dennett's position requires us to combine a subject's self-reports with all other available evidence to determine their mental state. The goal is to discover how subjects see the world themselves, without taking the accuracy of the subject's view for granted. He contrasts this with traditional Cartesian phenomenology, which he calls "lone-wolf autophenomenology" because it accepts the subject's self-reports as being authoritative.
• When I attempt to analyze what is going on in my mind when performing reasoning tasks such as completing a crossword or a Wordle, or generating words for a Spelling Bee, I cannot say what is happening or how I am directing my strategies. Words simply appear in my mind.
• When I am speaking or writing a sentence, I am aware of the piecemeal manner in which the words come. I am able to direct things to a certain extent, but I am not "outside" the process, orchestrating it, I am somehow inside a process that is happening to me.

• Perception is not a case of passive recording of sense impressions from outside.
• See:
  • Mark Solms' The Hidden Spring
  • Tom Chivers' Everything is Predictable
  • etc

• The self seems to emerge from the perception of

• We are the results of our habits