La realidad, según se mire

 La realidad, según se mire: https://www.academia.edu/90060236/

'Lo mismo despiertos, que soñando': Hobbes sobre la virtualidad de lo real

 

_____. "'Lo mismo despiertos, que soñando': Hobbes sobre la virtualidad de lo real." Knowledge Commons Works 25 May 2026.*

https://doi.org/10.17613/w3sdg-beb92
https://works.hcommons.org/records/w3sdg-beb92

         2026

Iain McGilchrist: 'There is a war going on between the sexes'

  

Zwitser, Tom. "Iain McGilchrist: 'There Is a War Going On Between the Sexes'." Video, interview. YouTube (The Triad) 14 Dec. 2025.* (Soul, Mind, Brain, Intuition, Reason, Opposites, Integration, Gender, Bureaucracy, Covidianism, Nanoparticles, Collective madness, Toxoplasmosis, Cats, Schizophrenia)

         https://youtu.be/D_pGiAHq2ko        

         2025

¿Vivimos atrapados en la Matrix? ¿nuestra realidad es un Simulacro?

A Virtual Machine Made of Virtual Machines

 

 

(Or—a peek from the peak)

 

One of the passages in Daniel Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back in which he comes really really close to cracking the code of reality—or perhaps closer to blowing your mind away into smithermemes...  The passage in question is found in the chapter "Consciousness as an Evolved User-Illusion". 

Its title is unpromising,  

"How do human brains achieve 'global' comprehension using 'local' competences?" 

... but the going gets really good with the epigraphs—especially when the epigraphs get glossed and riffed in the text itself. The trip goes from a bon mot to a reflexive hall of mirrors in the funhouse of your brain, so...  brace your self for a dive ride into your own mind, and other minds as well:

 

 

Language was given to men so that they could conceal their thoughts. 

    —Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand

Language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with others.

    —Karl Marx

Consciousness generally has only been developed under the pressure of the necessity for communication.

    —Friedrich Nietzsche

There is no General Leslie Groves to organize and command the termites in a termite colony, and there is no General Leslie Groves to organize and command the even more clueless neurons in a human brain. How can human comprehension be composed of the activities of unncomprehending neurons? In addition to all the free-floating rationales that explain our many structures, habits, and other features, there are the anchored reasons we represent to ourselves and others. These reasons are themselves things for us, denizens of our manifest image alongside the trees and clouds and doors and cups and voices and words and promises that make up our ontology. We can do things with these reasons—challenge, reframe, abandon, endorse, disavow them—and these often covert behaviors would not be in our repertoires if we hadn't downloaded all the apps of language into our necktops. In short, we can think about these reasons, good and bad, and this permits them to influence our overt behaviors in ways unknown in other organisms.

The piping plover's distraction display or broken-wing dance gives the fox a reason to alter its course and approach her, but not by getting it to trust her. She may modulate her thrashing to hold the fox's attention, but the control of this modulation does not require her to have more than a rudimentary "appreciation" of the fox's mental state. The fox, meanwhile, need have no more comprehension of just why it embarks on its quest instead of continuing to reconnoiter the are. We, likewise, can perform many quite adroit and retrospectively justifiable actions with only a vague conception of what we are up to, a conception often swiftly sharpened in hindsight by the self- attribution of reasons. It's this last step that is ours alone.

Our habits of self-justification (self-appreciation, self-exoneration, self-consolation, self-glorification, etc.) are ways of behaving (ways of thinking) that we acquire in the course of filling our heads with culture-borne memes, including, importantly, the habits of self-reproach and self-criticism. Thus we learn to plan ahead, to use the practice of reason-venturing and reason-criticizing to presolve some of life's problems, by talking them over with others and with ourselves. And not just talking them over—imagining them, trying out variations in our minds, and looking for flaws. We are not just Popperian but Gregorian creatures (see chapter 5), using thinking tools to design our own future acts. No other animal does that.

Our ability to do this kind of thinking is not accomplished by any dedicated brain structure not found in other animals. There is no "explainer-nucleus" for instance. Our thinking is enabled by the installation of a virtual machine made of virtual machines made of virtual machines. The goal of delineating and explaning this stack of competences via bottom-up neuroscience alone (without the help of cognitive neuroscience) is as remote as the goal of delineating and explaining the collection of apps on your smartphone by a bottom-up deciphering of its hardware circuit design and the bit-strings in memory without taking a peek at the user interface. The user interface of an app exists in order to make the competence accessible to users—people—who can't know, and don't need to know, the intricate details of how it works. The user-illusions of all the apps stored in our brains exist for the same reason: they make our competences (somewhat) accessible to users—other people— who can't know, and don't need to know, the intricate details. And then we get to use them ourselves, under roughly the same conditions, as guests in our own brains.

There might be some other evolutionary path—genetic, not cultural—to a somewhat similar user-illusion in other animals, but I have not been able to conceive of one in convincing detail, and according to the arguments advanced by the ethologist and roboticist David McFarland (1989), "Communication is the only behavior that requires an organism to self-monitor its own control system." Organisms can very effectively control themselves by a collection of competing but "myopic" task controllers, each activated by a condition (hunger or some other need, sensed opportunity, built-in priority ranking, and so on). When a controller's condition outweighs the conditions of the currently active task controller, it interrupts it and takes charge temporarily. (The "pandemonium model" by Oliver Selfridge [1959] is the ancestor of many later models). Goals are represented only tacitly, in the feedback loops that guide each task controller, but without any global or higher level representation. Evolution will tend to optimize the interrupt dynamics of these modules, and nobody's the wiser. That is, there doesn't have to be anybody home to be wiser!

Communication, McFarland claims, is the behavioral innovation which changes all that. Communication requires a central clearing house of sorts in order to buffer the organism from revealing too much about its current state to competitive organisms. As Dawkins and Krebs (1978) showed, in order to understand the evolution of communication we need to see it as grounded in manipulation rather than as purely cooperative behavior. An organisms that has no poker face, that "communicates state" directly to all hearers, is a sitting duck, and will soon be extinct (von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944). What must evolve to prevent this exposure is a private, proprietary communication-control buffer that creates opportunities for guided deception—and, coincidentally, opportunities for self-deception (Trivers 1985)—by creating, for the first time in the evolution of nervous systems, explicit and more globally accessible representations of its current state, representations that are detachable from the tasks they represent, so that deceptive behaviours can be formulated and controlled without interfering with the control of other behaviors.

It is important to realize that by communication, McFarland does not mean specifically linguistic communication (which is ours alone) but strategic communication, which opens the crucial space between one's actual goals and intentions and the goals and intentions one attempts to communicate to an audience. There is no doubt that many species are genetically equipped with relatively simple communication behaviors (Hauser 1996), such as stotting, alarm calls, and territorial markings and defense. Stereotypical deception, such as bluffing in an aggressive encounter, is common, but a more productive and versatile talent for deception requires MaFarland's private workspace. For a century and more philosophers have stressed the "privacy" of our inner thoughts, but seldom have they bothered to ask which this is such a good design feature. (An occupational blindness of many philosophers: taking the manifest image as simply given and never asking what it might have been given to us for).

*I have silently corrected a typo, or spello, substituting "peek" for "peak". Perhaps I shoudn't have—topsight makes a new height here.

La proyección mental de la realidad

 Retropost, 2015:

 Va saliendo más investigación que juega a favor de mi teoría de la proyección mental de la realidad. Por ejemplo en este artículo sobre la construcción de la información visual publicado en Current Biology.

La sustancia (y ya lo dijo en cierto modo Berkeley) es que el objeto visual es construido por el cerebro, no "recibido" ya hecho desde el exterior. Yo lo llamo a veces la teoría de la  "proyección del objeto", porque el efecto viene a ser como si nuestro cerebro proyectase a la realidad el objeto que ha generado, con el resultado de que lo vemos allí afuera, cuando no está sino en nuestra cabeza. Quizá sea más apropiado llamarla, como lo hacen estos autores, la teoría de la "integración del objeto."

Integration Trumps Selection in Object Recognition

Toni P. Saarela &  Michael S. Landy

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.01.068

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2815%2900132-3

Highlights

• •Humans identified letter shapes defined by texture, color, and luminance cues
• •Humans integrate cues that define the same letter for improved shape recognition
• •They cannot filter out cues that define a conflicting letter, reducing performance
• •Mandatory cue integration results in a failure of attentional selection

Summary

Finding and recognizing objects is a fundamental task of vision. Objects can be defined by several “cues” (color, luminance, texture, etc.), and humans can integrate sensory cues to improve detection and recognition [ 1–3 ]. Cortical mechanisms fuse information from multiple cues [ 4 ], and shape-selective neural mechanisms can display cue invariance by responding to a given shape independent of the visual cue defining it [ 5–8 ]. Selective attention, in contrast, improves recognition by isolating a subset of the visual information [ 9 ]. Humans can select single features (red or vertical) within a perceptual dimension (color or orientation), giving faster and more accurate responses to items having the attended feature [ 10, 11 ]. Attention elevates neural responses and sharpens neural tuning to the attended feature, as shown by studies in psychophysics and modeling [ 11, 12 ], imaging [ 13–16 ], and single-cell and neural population recordings [ 17, 18 ]. Besides single features, attention can select whole objects [ 19–21 ]. Objects are among the suggested “units” of attention because attention to a single feature of an object causes the selection of all of its features [ 19–21 ]. Here, we pit integration against attentional selection in object recognition. We find, first, that humans can integrate information near optimally from several perceptual dimensions (color, texture, luminance) to improve recognition. They cannot, however, isolate a single dimension even when the other dimensions provide task-irrelevant, potentially conflicting information. For object recognition, it appears that there is mandatory integration of information from multiple dimensions of visual experience. The advantage afforded by this integration, however, comes at the expense of attentional selection.


 Este tipo de integración cognitiva en el cerebro resulta (claro está) de su complejidad de circuitos neuronales que procesan diversa información, parte proveniente del córtex, de la memoria, combinándola con "lo que se ve."  Resulta de la historia evolutiva del cerebro, y en parte de su "recableo" provocado por la ampliación del córtex y la integración de la información lingüística en la estructura del cerebro. Más al respecto hablan Deacon (ver La caverna del cerebro) y Benjamin Bergen en Louder than Words.  La estructura del cerebro, el desarrollo del lenguaje y la integración de nuestra cultura y experiencia con nuestra percepción generan así la realidad virtual o realidad aumentada  donde vivimos. Para otros seres con ojos no está ahí—pero nosotros la vemos; y es más, nos movemos por ella y vivimos en ella.

 

La noción de estroma propuesta por Gustavo Bueno viene a ser una manera de enfocar el mismo fenómeno, visto desde su teoría. El "estroma" es el objeto cultural, el meme mental podríamos decir, que tiene una naturaleza cognitiva e informacional pero a la vez es un objeto físico. Esto da lugar a una ontología de objetos materiales gestionados y organizados por la mente.

Hablaba yo de esta cuestión de la generación mental de la realidad,  a cuenta del libro de Weiskrantz Consciousness Lost and Found, de Gazzaniga, y de las neuronas espejo, y defendiendo la tesis de la "proyección" o de la "realidad proyectada", en ESPECULACIONES NEURONALES.

Esta cuestión de neurología, de lingüística y de psicología cognitiva también tiene implicaciones filosóficas, fenomenológicas y antropológicas, claro está. Así que por qué no añadir un ingrediente más al cocido de este artículo, relacionando esta noción de la realidad aumentada gestada en el cerebro, con la teoría de la mente y de la experiencia de George Herbert Mead, que veníamos discutiendo estos días por aquí también. Entre pragmatismo y fenomenología anda la cosa, pero más que rozando la metafísica, puesto que Mead pretende explicar la generación misma de la realidad, de la realidad espacio-temporal (esos irreductibles kantianos) a través del análisis de la experiencia de contacto, y explicando la genesis del tiempo mediante la auto-interacción. En fin, se lo lean en Mind, Self and Society o en La Filosofía del presente.  Mead se vio influido por muchos (Dilthey, Wundt, James, Dewey, Bergson, etc.) pero muy inmediatamente aquí por las reflexiones de Alfred North Whitehead en What Is Nature. (Oigan aquí un podcast sobre la teoría de la constitución mental de la realidad del propio Whitehead, que a su vez nos lleva más atrás—a Locke, etc.). Pero dejaremos para otra ocasión, quizá para la eternidad, la teoría de la Realidad como Realidad Virtual y la organización mental del mundo según Whitehead.

Aquí sólo traeré a colación un par de textos relevantes de Mind, Self, and Society de Mead, el primero en realidad de uno de los ensayos suplementarios llamado "El individuo biológico":

From the point of view of instinctive behavior in the lower animals, or of the immediate human response to a perceptual world (in other words, from the standpoint of the unfractured relation between the impulses and the objects which give them expression), past and future are not there; and yet they are represented in the situation. They are represented by facility of adjustment through the selection of certain elements both in the direct sensuous stimulation through the excitement of the end-organs, and in the imagery. What represents past and what represents future are not distinguishable as contents. The surrogate of the past is the actual adjustment of the impulse to the object as stimulus. The surrogate of the future is the control which the changing field of experience during the act maintains over its execution.

The flow of experience is not differentiated into a past and future over against an immediate now until reflection affects certain parts of the experience with these characters, with the perfection of adjustment on the one hand, and with the shifting control on the other. The biologic individual lives in an undifferentiated now; the social reflective individual takes this up into a flow of experience within which strands a fixed past and a more or less uncertain future. The now of experience is represented primarily by the body of impulses listed above, our inherited adjustment to a physical and social world, continuously reconstituted by social reflective processes; but this reconstitution takes place by analysis and selection in the field of stimulation, not by immediate direction and recombination of the impulses. The control exercised over the impulses is always through selection of stimulations conditioned by the sensitizing influence of various other impulses seeking expression. The immediacy of the now is never lost, and the biologic individual stands as the unquestioned reality in the minds of differently constructed pasts and projected futures. It has been the work of scientific reflection to isolate certain of these fixed adjustments (in terms of our balanced postures, our movements toward objects, our contacts with and manipulations of objects) as a physical world, answering to the biologic individual with its intricate nervous system. (350-51)

Y en la primera mitad de Mind, Self, and Society, habla de cómo la mente y la consciencia no están localizadas en ningún punto concreto del cerebro, sino que son el resultado emergente de la interacción de los circuitos cerebrales entre sí:

In the cortex, that organ which in some sense answers to human intelligence, we fail to find any exclusive and unvarying control, that is, any evidence of it in the structure of the form itself. In some way we can assume that the cortex acts as a whole, but we cannot come back to certain centers and say that this is where the mind is lodged in thinking and in action. There are an indefinite number of cells connected with each other, and their innervation in some sense leads to a unitary action, but what that unity is in terms of the central nervous system it is almost impossible to state. All the different parts of the cortex seem to be involved in everything that happens. All the stimuli that reach the brain are reflected into all parts of the brain, and yet we do get a unitary action. There remains, then, a problem which is by no means definitely solved: the unity of the action of the central nervous system. Wundt undertook to find certain centers which would be responsible for this sort of unity, but there is notheing in the structure of the brain itself which isolated any parts of the brain as those which direct conduct as a whole. The unity is a unity of integration, though just how this integration takes place in detail we cannot say. (24)

Now behavioristic psychology, instead of setting up these events in the central nervous system as a causal series which is at least conditional to the sensory experience, takes the entire response to the environment as that which answers to the colored object we see, in this case the light. It does not locate the experience at any point in the nervous system; it does not put it, in the terms of Mr. Russell, inside of a head. Russell makes the experience the effect of what happens at that point where a causal process takes place in the head. He points out that, from his own point of view, the head inside of which you can place this experience exists empirically only in the heads of other people. The physiologist explains to you where this excitement is taking place. He sees the head he is demonstrating to you and he sees what is inside of the head in imagination, but, on this account, that which he sees must be inside of his own head. The way in which Russell gets out of this mess is by saying that the head which he is referring to is not the head we see, but the head which is implied in physiological analysis. Well, instead of assuming that the experienced world as such is inside of a head, located at that point at which certain nervous disturbances are going on, what the behaviorist does is to relate the world of experience to the whole act of the organism. It is true, as we have just said, that this experienced world does not appear except when the various excitements reach certain points in the central nervous system; it is also true that if you cut off any of those channels you wipe out so much of that world. What the behaviorist does, or ought to do, is to take the complete act, the whole process of conduct, as the unit in his account. In doing that he has to take into account not simply the nervous system but also the rest of the organism, for the nervous system is only a specialized part of the entire organism. (111)

_____


Más sobre percepción, reconocimiento y constitución perceptual de los objetos en esta conferencia de Ned Block: Seeing-as, Concepts, and Non-conceptual Content



 

Estromas, marcos y virtualidad de lo real

—oOo—

La mirada invisible

La mirada invisible: Dos maneras de mirar por el rabillo del ojo: 

https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/dosmaneras.pdf

We Create Our Reality

Retropost, 2014: We Create Our Reality https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2014/08/we-create-our-reality.html

The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition

From the last chapter of Michael Tomasello's book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (1999):

We are, as Wittgenstein (1953) and Vygotsky (1978) saw so clearly, fish in the water of culture. As adults investigating and reflecting on human existence, we cannot take off our cultural glasses to view the world aculturally—and so compare it to the world as we perceive it culturally. Human beings live in a world of language, mathematics, money, government, education, science, and religion—cultural institutions composed of cultural conventions. The sound 'tree' stands for what it does because, and only because, we think it does; men and women are married because, and only because, we think they are; I can obtain a car in exchange for a piece of paper because, and only because, we think the paper is worth as much as the car (Searle, 1996). These kinds of social institutions and conventions are created and maintained by certain ways of interacting and thinking among groups of human beings. Other animal species simply do not interact and think in these ways.

But the human cultural world is not thereby free of the biological world, and indeed human culture is a very recent evolutionary product, having existed in all likelihood for only a few hundred thousand years. The fact that culture is a product of evolution does not mean that each one of its specific features has its own dedicated genetic underpinnings; there has not been enough time for that. A more plausible scenario is that all human cultural institutions rest on the biologically inherited social-cognitive ability of all human individuals to create and use social conventions and symbols. However, these social conventions and symbols do not wave a magic wand and turn nonhuman primate cognition into human cognition on the spot. Modern adult cognition of the human kind is the product not only of genetic events taking over many millions of years in evolutionary time but also of cultural events taking place over many tens of thousands of years in historical time and personal events taking place over many tens of thousands of hours in ontogenetic time. The desire to avoid the hard empirical work necessary to follow out these intermediate processes that occur between the human genotype and phenotype is a strong one, and it leaeds to the kinds of facile genetic determinism that pervade large parts of the social, behavioral, and cognitive sciences today. Genes are an essential part of the story of human cognitive evolution, perhaps even from some points of view the most important part of the story since they are what got the ball rolling. But they are not the whole story, and the ball has rolled a long way since it got started. In all, the tired old philosophical categories of nature versus nurture, innate versus learned, and even genes versus environment are jut not up to the task—they are too static and categorical—if our goal is a dynamic Darwinian account of human cognition in its evolutionary, historical, and ontogenetic dimensions.

 

—oOo—

El realismo como idolatría

 El realismo como idolatría https://www.academia.edu/28608299/

Impresión de realidad

 Impresión de realidad: La percepción intelectiva en la epistemología de Zubiri https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/impresionde.pdf

The Mirror Phase and Mirror Neurons

 

 


The ability to recognize oneself in a mirror, once considered a uniquely human attribute, is shared by great apes, dolphins, elephants and magpies. Diana Reiss (Hunter College, CUNY) discusses comparative studies of mirror self-recognition in dolphins and elephants, which show striking similarities to humans and great apes in regard to their behavior when exposed to a mirror. Recorded on 10/18/2013. Series: "CARTA: Mind Reading: Human Origins and Theory of Mind"

 

—oOo—

Symbolism and Role Reversal

 Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, p. 107:

Overall, then, acquiring the conventional use of intersubjectively understood linguistic symbols requires a child to:

- understand others as intentional agents;

- participate in joint attentional scenes that set the social-cognitive ground for acts of symbolic, including linguistic, communication;

- understand not just intentions but communicative intentions in which someone intends for her to attend to something in the joint attentional scene; and

- reverse roles with adults in the cultural learning process and thereby use toward them what they have used toward her—which actually creates the intersubjectively understood communicative convention or symbol.

 

Learning linguistic symbols this way puts young children in a position to begin taking advantage of all kinds of social sills and knowledge preexisting in their local communities and cultures as a whole. But it does more than that. What makes linguistic symbols truly unique from a cognitive point of view is the fact that each symbol embodies a particular perspective on some entity or event: this object is simultaneously a rose, a lower, and a gift. The perspectival nature of linguistic symbols multiplies indefinitely the specificity with which they may be used to manipulate the attention of others, and this fact has profound implications of the nature of cognitive representation, which we will explore later.

La realidad como expectativa autocumplida

 

 

Retropost, 2013: La realidad como expectativa autocumplida https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2013/10/la-realidad-como-expectativa.html

Plato: The Allegory of the Cave

 Or "the Myth of the Cavern". A famous passage from the Republic. I quote (and correct a bit) from Reading about the World vol. 1, which establishes an analogy between Plato's cave and contemporary film spectatorship:
Editors' comments:

Plato, the most creative and influential of Socrates' disciples, wrote dialogues, in which he frequently used the figure of Socrates to espouse his own (Plato's) full-fledged philosophy. In "The Republic," Plato sums up his views in an image of ignorant humanity, trapped in the depths and not even aware of its own limited perspective.

The rare individual escapes the limitations of that cave and, through a long, tortuous intellectual journey, discovers a higher realm, a true reality, with a final, almost mystical awareness of Goodness as the origin of everything that exists. Such a person is then the best equipped to govern in society, having a knowledge of what is ultimately most worthwhile in life and not just a knowledge of techniques; but that person will frequently be misunderstood by those ordinary folks back in the cave who haven't shared in the intellectual insight. If he were living today, Plato might replace his rather awkward cave metaphor with a movie theater, with the projector replacing the fire, the film replacing the objects which cast shadows, the shadows on the cave wall with the projected movie on the screen, and the echo with the loudspeakers behind the screen. The essential point is that the prisoners in the cave are not seeing reality, but only a shadowy representation of it. The importance of the allegory lies in Plato's belief that there are invisible truths lying under the apparent surface of things which only the most enlightened can grasp. Used to the world of illusion in the cave, the prisoners at first resist enlightenment, as students resist education. But those who can achieve enlightenment deserve to be the leaders and rulers of all the rest. At the end of the passage, Plato expresses another of his favorite ideas: that education is not a process of putting knowledge into empty minds, but of making people realize that which they already know. This notion that truth is somehow embedded in our minds was also powerfully influential for many centuries.

Judging by this passage, why do you think many people in the democracy of Athens might have been antagonistic to Plato's ideas? Is a resident of the cave (a prisoner, as it were) likely to want to make the ascent to the outer world? Why or why not? What does the sun symbolize in the allegory? 

—oOo—

From the Republic, Book VII:
And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened:--Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.

I see.

And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.

You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.

Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?

True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?

And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows?

Yes, he said.

And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?

Very true.

And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow?

No question, he replied.

To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.

That is certain.

And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,--what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them,--will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?

Far truer.

And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take refuge in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?

True, he said.

And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he is forced into the presence of the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities.

Not all in a moment, he said.

He will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun by day?

Certainly.

Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is.

Certainly.

He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold?

Clearly, he said, he would first see the sun and then reason about him.

And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity them?

Certainly, he would.

And if they were in the habit of conferring honors among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honors and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer,

Better to be the poor servant of a poor master, and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner? (1)

Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.

Imagine once more, I said, such a one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness?

To be sure, he said.

And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable), would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; (2)and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death. (3)

No question, he said.

This entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed--whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world (4), and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eye fixed.

I agree, he said, as far as I am able to understand you.

Moreover, I said, you must not wonder that those who attain to this beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their souls are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to dwell; which desire of theirs is very natural, if our allegory may be trusted.

Yes, very natural.

And is there anything surprising in one who passes from divine contemplations to the evil state of man, misbehaving himself in a ridiculous manner; if, while his eyes are blinking and before he has become accustomed to the surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight in courts of law, or in other places, about the images or the shadows of images of justice, and is endeavoring to meet the conception of those who have never yet seen absolute justice?

Anything but surprising, he replied.

Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den.

That, he said, is a very just distinction.
But then, if I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes.

They undoubtedly say this, he replied.

Whereas our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.

—oOo—

Translated by Benjamin Jowett

(1) This refers to a famous passage in Homer's Odyssey in which the ghost of the great hero Achilles, when asked if he is not proud of the fame his deeds has spread throughout the world, answers that he would rather be a slave on a worn-out farm than king over all of the famous dead. Interestingly, Plato quotes the same passage elsewhere as disapprovingly as depicting life after death in such a negative manner that it may undermine the willingness of soldiers to die in war.

(2) The comic playwright Aristophanes had mocked Socrates by portraying Plato's master, Socrates, as a foolish intellectual with his head in the clouds.

(3) Plato undoubtedly has in mind the fact that the Athenians had condemned to death his master Socrates, whom Plato considered supremely enlightened.

(4) Here Plato describes his notion of God in a way that was influence profoundly Christian theologians.

—oOo—

The dialogue takes place between "Socrates" and Plato's puppet Glaucon. Now that I mention puppets—note that there is a feedback here between the notions of reality and representation, one which pertains to the very notion of representation. (See a Shakespearean analogue here). The editors see an analogy between Plato's cavern and the film screen, "had Plato been living today", and indeed the myth may serve as a primal scene in film theory. Or dramatic theory, or theory of the spectacle, because (note well) the idea for the shadows on the wall already originates, as Socrates' analogy makes clear, in a theatrical spectacle—the cavern wall being like "the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets". One suspects that Socrates or Plato had been attending one of these spectacles at night, illuminated by a fire at the back the audience, and had somehow been more attentive to the shadows projected spontaneously by the audience, and the shadow play being shown on this proto-cinematic screen, than to the puppets above the screen. Or perhaps it is the unexpected and serendipitous conjunction of these two modes of representation, the theatrical one and the proto-cinematic images on the screen, and the wobble or fluctuation in reality and attention caused by their simultaneity and the interaction of several modes of reality and images of the same, which made the fire of an idea light up in the cavern of Plato's brain, and intuit the dialectical feedback or paradoxical Escher-like circulation existing between so-called reality and its representations.


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Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a documentary film on the Paleolithic paintings of the Chauvet cave, whose walls contain some of the oldest symbolic objects of mankind, three hundred centuries ago. The play of volumes and fire lights on the paintings creates a certain illusion of movement, "a kind of proto-cinema" according to Herzog, to which is added the dynamic positions of the animals and the multiple lines suggesting the movement of legs or the head in some figures.  Paleoanthropologists also suggest that the play of human shadows on the walls of caves must have been one of the earliest forms of theatrical spectacle—the shadowplay, actually a mixture of projection and physical presence, perhaps joined to shamanic rituals in which animals were impersonated. Thus we find at the origins of drama, that powerfully reflexive symbolic ritual, a situation strongly reminiscent of the one described by Plato in his allegory of the cave. The image of the cave seems particularly appropriate, at this inaugural allegory of the birth of philosophy, and resonates with an echo coming from that time of forgotten dreams in which the symbolic world of myths had to be created, long before it might be deconstructed by the philosopher.

La caverna del cerebro: El lenguaje como realidad virtual

 

 

—oOo—

 

"Lo mismo despiertos, que soñando": Hobbes sobre la virtualidad de lo real

Relacionamos la teoría del conocimiento de Thomas Hobbes, y su psicología, con perspectivas modernas que enfatizan la construcción mental del mundo real, procedentes tanto del campo del interaccionismo simbólico (G. H. Mead) como del cognitivismo evolucionista y ecológico (D. D. Hoffman). Señalamos una línea que conecta el construccionismo contemporáneo con el empirismo clásico, a partir de la psicología materialista de Hobbes, que propone derivar los fenómenos mentales de lo sensorial y material, y ofrece así un modelo de integración consiliente de las ciencias humanas y de las ciencias naturales.

'Lo mismo despiertos, que soñando': Hobbes sobre la virtualidad de lo real 

http://ssrn.com/abstract=2644166

 

'The Same Waking, that Dreaming': Hobbes on the Virtuality of the Real

English Abstract: The epistemology of Thomas Hobbes, and his psychology, are here related to modern perspectives which emphasize the mental construction of reality, perspectives coming both from the field of symbolic interactionism (G. H. Mead) and from evolutionary and ecological cognitivism (D. D. Hoffman). A connecting thread is traced from classical empiricism to contemporary constructivism, starting with Hobbes's materialist psychology, which in its aim to derive mental phenomena from sensory and material bases, offers a model for a consilient integration of the humanities and the natural sciences.

 

Number of Pages in PDF File: 7
Keywords: Consilience, Cognition, Epistemology, Objects, G. H. Mead, Thomas Hobbes, Ecology, D. D. Hoffman

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Externalized Complications

La organización social como externalización y teatralización de las funciones cerebrales, reproductivas y familiares —según la descripción de George Herbert Mead, en Mind, Self, and Society (241-42):

The human being is social in a distinguishing fashion. Physiologically he is social in relatively few responses. There are, of course, fundamental processes of propagation and of the care of the young which have been recognized as a part of the social development of human intelligence. Not only is there a physiological period of infancy, but it is so lengthened that it represents about one-third of the individual's expectation of life. Corresponding to that period, the parental relation to the individual has been increased far beyond the family; the development of schools, and of institutions, such as those involved in the church and the government, is an extension of the parental relation. That is an external illustration of the indefinite complication of simple physiological processes. We take care of an infant form and look at it from the standpoint of the mother; we see the care that is given to the mother before the birth of the child, the consideration that is given for providing proper food; we see the way in which the school is carried on so that the beginning of the education of the child starts with the first year of its life in the formation of habits which are of primary importance to it; we take into account education in the form of recreation, which comes one way or another into public control; in all these ways we can see what an elaboration there is of the immediate care which parents give to children under the most primitive conditions, and yet it is nothing but a continued complication of sets of processes which belong to the original care of the child.

This, I say, is an external picture of the sort of development that takes place in a central nervous system. There are groups of relatively simple reactions which can be made indefinitely complex by uniting them with each other in all sorts of orders, and by breaking up a complex reaction, reconstructing it in a different fashion, and uniting it with other processes. Consider the playing of musical instruments. There is an immediate tendency to rhythmic processes, to use the rhythm of the body and to emphasize certain sounds, movements which can be found among the gorillas. Then comes the possibility of picking to pieces the action of the whole body, the construction of elaborate dances, the relation of the dance to sound which appears in song, phenomena which get their expression in the great Greek dramas. These results are then externalized in musical instruments, which are in a way replicas of various organs of the body. All these external complications are nothing but an externalization in society of the sort of complication that exists in the higher levels of the central nervous system. We take the primitive reactions, analyze them, and reconstruct them under different conditions. That kind of reconstruction takes place through the development of the sort of intelligence which is identified with the appearance of the self. The insittutions of society, such as libraries, systems of transportation, the complex interrelationship of individuals in political organizations, are nothing but ways of throwing on the social screen, so to speak, in enlarged fashion the complexities existing inside the central nervous system, and they must, of course, express functionally the operation of this system.

 

How New Objects Are Created

Life on a Desktop Interface

From Donald Hoffman's The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes (xii-xiii):

The idea that our perceptions mislead us about objective reality, in hole or in part, has a long history. Democritus, around 400 BCE, famously claimed that our perceptions of hot, cold, sweet, bitter, and color are  conventions, not reality. A few decades later, Plato likened our perceptions and conceptions to flickering shadows cast on the walls of a caver by an unseen reality. Philosophers ever since have debated the relation between perception and reality. The theory of evolution injects new rigor into this debate.

How can our senses be useful—how can they kep us alive—if they don't tell us the truth about objective reality? A metaphor can help our intuitions. Suppose you're writing an email, and the icon for its file is blue, rectangular, and in the center of your desktop. Does this mean that the file itself is blue, rectangular, and in the center of your computer? Of course not. The color of the icon is not the color of the file. Files have no color. The shape and position of the icon are not the true shape and position of the file. In fact, the language of shape, position, and color cannot describe computer files.

The purpose of a desktop interface is not to show you the "truth" of the computer—where "truth," in this metaphor, refers to circuits, voltages, and layers of software. Rather, the purpose of an interace is to hide the "truth" and to show simple graphics that help you perform useful taks such as crafting emails and editing photos. If you had to toggle voltages to craft an email, your friends would never hear from you. 

That is what evolution has done. It has endowed us with senses that hide the truth and display the simple icons we need to survive long enought to raise offspring. Space, as you perceive it when you look around, is just your desktop—a 3D desktop. Apples, snakes, and other physical objects are simply icons in your 3D desktop. These icons are useful, in part, because they hide the complex truth about objective reality. Your senses have evolved to give you what you need. You may want truth, but you don't need truth. Perceiving truth wwould drive our species extinct. You need simple icons that show you how to act to stay alive. Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons

La proyección mental de la realidad