When I read Varela and Maturana, I confess I didn't pick up one of the following implications. I got and affirm the idea of understanding cognition whole-organismally. I think that the Christian-Hebraic understanding of humans in a holistic way is not going to be upset by that but rather affirmed. What I missed was the thing about language:
In this new view, cognition involves the entire process of life - including perception, emotion, and behaviour - and does not necessarily require a brain and a nervous system. At the human level, however, cognition includes language, conceptual thought, and all the other attributes of human consciousness. The Santiago theory of cognition, in my view, is the first scientific theory that really overcomes the Cartesian division of mind and matter, and will thus have the most far-reaching implications. Mind and matter no longer appear to belong to two separate categories but are seen as representing two complementary aspects of the phenomenon of life - the process aspect and the structure aspect.
I think that seeing language in conjunction with conceptual thought etc as characteristics of human cognition is particularly interesting in the light of the way that my thinking on the basis of Adam's naming the animals passage in Genesis 2. Understanding the latter in terms of the former (to put it crudely, but I'll refine that at another point); it would put the naming of the animals as part of the creation of humanity by cuing humanity's cognitive dimension which flows into and out of the creation of humanity's social nature in the same passage (so I would also want to add that human cognition is social and not simply about a body with its emotion and behaviour.
No comments:
Post a Comment